My Wordpress Blog
Some context
I had decided to create a personal blog with Wordpress. Although I was a experienced Javascript developer, my background did not include PHP nor Wordpress at all, so basically, I would learn everything from scratch.
Some of the plugins were pre-installed by IONOS, and the plugins I installed were either free plugins or free versions of commercial plugins.
Themes
After trying several themes, It was hard to find a theme suitable for IT articles. In the end, I went for LikeAWiki theme, a very simple theme with the bars layout I was looking for.
I had also to do some changes, in order to change the look of site header and search buttom:
1#tool-bar .toolbar {display: none;}
2.site-header figure.logo img {width: 100%;}
3.site-header .hgroup, .site-header .hgroup a {color: white;}
4.site-header .hgroup
5{
6 position: absolute;
7 width: 100%;
8 margin: 0 auto;
9}
10.search-field {font-size: 18px;}
11.search-submit {font-size: 20px;}
The final look of the website was not the best, but I wanted to focus on content.
Plugins
Plugins preinstalled by IONOS
Purpose | Plugin | Description |
---|---|---|
Contact forms | 1&1 IONOS Address Book | It integrates contact forms with IONOS Address book |
Contact form | WP Subscribe | It adds subscription forms to your blog, generating and it integrates with Mailchimp, Aweber and FeedBurner. |
Performance | a3 Lazy Load | It speeds up the loading of your site with lazy loading of resources in mobile devices |
Maintenance | Broken Link Checker | It monitors the blog for broken links |
Maintenance | Regenerate Thumbnails Advanced | Plugin that generates thumbnails and delete those which are not used anymore |
Monitoring | Statify | It shows statistics about your blog and pages |
Reviews | WP Review | It allows users to add reviews to your pages |
Styling | WP Shortcode by MyThemeShop | With this plugin, you can use short codes to style elements in your blog. |
Styling | WP Tab Widget |
With this plugin, you can add tabs, which lazy load its content. |
Additional free plugins installed
Purpose | Plugin | Description |
---|---|---|
Compliance | Shariff Wrapper | Plugin for adding GDPR compliant share buttons. It also shows ranks for know the most popular pages. |
Compliance | Italy Cookie Choices (for EU Cookie Law) | Very good plugin for complying with EU laws by displaying a cookie message first time user accesses to the blog. |
Compliance | The GDPR Framework | It helps your blog to meet GDPR laws. |
Security | AntySpam Bee | It avoids spam in comments. |
Security | One Click SSL | It allows you to redirect users from HTTP to HTTPS, to enforce secured connections. |
SEO | Rank Math SEO | SEO plugin. After testing Yoast SEO, I decided to replace it by this plugin. |
Usability | TinyMCE Advanced | Gutenberg, the block editor, can be a bit too complicated some times. This plugin helps you to make simpler edition without losing the power of all features of Gutenberg. |
Styling | Enlighter - Customizable Syntax Highlighter | Great plugin for displaying your development code in your blog. |