Kaveri, Author at AlienWP

We have split this post up into sections which you can navigate, we have sections for : portraits, landscapes, weddings, vintage, newborn, food, matte, monochrome and other. That’s 250 lightroom presets you can download for free and start using today.

Take a look below and start building your collection!

Free Portrait Presets

These free lightroom presets are perfect for your portrait shots. Whether its enhancing the facial details, adjusting highlights or making your eyes look vibrant, this presets can turn your portrait images into amazing shots.

Free Food Lightroom Preset

Introducing our meticulously designed Cinematic LUTs, created to elevate your visual storytelling across all camera platforms. These versatile LUTs have been expertly crafted to perform seamlessly with every major camera, ensuring consistent and stunning results in both Rec709 color space and Log format. Experience the transformative power of our Cinematic LUTs, tailored to accentuate the visual impact of your footage, and achieve a professional, cinematic aesthetic with ease.

Free Food Lightroom Preset

Free Landscape Lightroom Preset

This preset has been expertly crafted to elevate the color, tone, and lighting of your landscape images, effortlessly transforming them into visually stunning and professionally polished masterpieces with a single click. Experience the transformative power of our meticulously designed preset, tailored to accentuate the beauty of your landscape photographs.

Free Landscape Lightroom Preset

Free Portrait Lightroom Preset

This preset has been meticulously crafted to amplify the color, tone, and lighting of your portrait images, seamlessly transforming them into professionally polished and visually striking masterpieces that will captivate even the most discerning clients. Experience the transformative power of our expertly designed preset, tailored to accentuate the beauty and depth of your portrait photographs.

Free Portrait Lightroom Preset

Free Matte Lightroom Preset

Our Matte preset has been expertly crafted to bestow your photos with a sophisticated look, characterized by a matte finish that imparts a contemporary and stylish ambiance. Experience the transformative power of our meticulously designed preset, tailored to elevate the visual appeal of your images with an elegant and modern touch.

Free Matte Lightroom Preset

Portrait Pro

Another preset for giving your portrait that professional studio look, by muting your colors, adding grains and other effects. A perfect preset for printing your photos on paper or canvas to a frame.

Free Soft & Light

Take your image enhancement capabilities to another level using this Light and Desaturated preset.

Warm Retro

Give your portrait a warm and a retro look using the Warm Retro Lightroom preset by Forrest Lane.

Faded Portrait

Yet another freely available preset, to give your photos a beautiful faded look.

Free Fashion Vintage Presets

A collection of 10 presets for Portrait photographers. This preset gives your portraits a faded, old film style look of the past with just a single click.

Legacy Pro 1600

Black and White photography can give your photos that striking, timeless B&W look if done perfectly.

Free Color Pop

This preset is perfect to make your dull photos look vibrant and more lifelike. Make colors pop in your photos with this preset.

Free Cross Processing

This preset will give your photos a cross processed look with just a single click.

Green Filter for Portraits

Add a soft, but bright haze effect to your photos using this free preset at just a single click.

Workflow Presets for Portraits

With just a few clicks, this preset is able to fine-tune colors, boost saturation, sharpen portraits, soften skin tone and correct lens distortions.

Free Lightroom Polaroid Film Presets

This free presets for Lightroom 4,5 are able to replicate the faded color and contrast effect seen in instant photos with a single click. It offers 4 basic presets – Classic Polaroid, Fluorescent, Fluorescent Washed and Incandescent.

Autumn

Want to give your photos that touch of Autumn? Use the Autumn Lightroom preset and give your photos a sepia tone effect inspired by Autumn.

Free Landscape Presets

Unleash the full potential from your landscape images by using Lightroom landscape presets. These presets are able to accentuate the mood and tonal qualities of each season, lighting and weather condition with a single click.

Free Landscape

This is an amazing preset especially created for Landscape photographers which will add a nice realistic tone to your images while enhancing the colors and really making it pop.

Free Cinematic HDR

This preset can give your landscape photos an awesome cinema-inspired HDR effect.

Black and White HDR

Give your colored landscape photos an awesome black and white HDR conversion, while maintaining its deep, beautiful blacks.

Vibrant Landscape

Landscape photos may tend to appear dull or lacking a bit of life. In such a case, this preset can be used to give your photos a pop of vibrant colors.

Autumn Landscape

This Lightroom preset can make your fall photos pop, by giving it a boost of autumn colors. Works with Lightroom 4,5,6, and CC.

Vacation Memory

This preset can enhance the color, mood of your landscape photos. A great, warm preset for all your scenic photographs.

Iceberg

If you love taking shots of cold, icy landscapes this preset is a must for you. This preset has a low clarity setting making bright objects glow a bit while enhancing the blues.

Winter Wonderland

This pack offers presets for black & white, desaturated, sky enhancers, vintage retro and various others to give your photos the perfect winter appearance.

Free Mediterranean Scenes Preset

A free Lightroom preset that works best for Mediterranean scenes near beaches or oceans in sunlight.

Vintage Film

Inspired by vintage films this preset can give your photos an elegant vintage look. It adds a beautiful sepia tone effect to your photos.

August Sunset Preset

This preset gives your images a mid-fall August season effect.

Free Old Polaroid Lightroom Preset

Give your photos that old Polaroid look using this free Light room preset.

Free Sharp Color Pop Preset

A great preset for enhancing the colors of your nature photographs. This preset can be used to add some vibrance as well as sharpening to your dull, desaturated photos.

Trey’s Lightroom presets

It is a set of Lightroom presets well suited for landscape photography. Give your photos a stunning effect with this preset.

Free Wedding Presets

Make your wedding photographs look professional and give them a classy and refined look using Wedding Lightroom presets. Below we have provided a list of freely available wedding Lightroom presets

Free Wedding Photography Lightroom preset

Specially designed for wedding photos, this preset will improve the look of your photos at a single click.

Free Wedding Day Preset

Automatically adjust the vibrance and saturation of your wedding photos and make them look amazing.

Weddings Look Preset

This preset increases the exposure, adds warmth, contrast, vibrance and sharpening, all at a single click. Make underexposed photos, standout using this preset.

Free SoftWash Film Lead

This preset softens the background to make the image pop out as well as gives your photos a beautiful film-inspired effect.

Mad Dash Lightroom Preset

This preset provides a contrast-rich and desaturated look to your image.

PH The Weddings

It is a collection of 8 presets, each one capable of providing stunning effects to your wedding photos at a few mouse clicks.

Vintage Wedding Lightroom Preset

This preset increases the contrast, brightness and vibrance, giving your wedding clicks that vintage look.

Color Pop

Give your dull photos that vibrant and alive look with this preset and Make colors pop out of your images.

Sunny Days

A great preset for adding a warm glow to your wedding photos as well as a softer blue in the shadows.

Five Free Wedding Presets

A collection of 5 presets that wedding photographers can use to give their photos that extra edge and make them standout.

Elegant Wedding

This preset will brighten, enhance and apply a cool down effect to your photos making them a perfect wedding day capture.

Wedding Smiles

Use this preset to significantly increase the quality and look of your wedding photos with a single click.

Wedding Photo:Lighting

Make your wedding photos clear and vivid by applying this preset. Highlight the hidden part of your photo by removing the black or too much shadow area.

Info & Download

Sharpening & Noise Reduction

Make your wedding images clear, sharp, elegant and remove any unwanted noise by a single click of this preset.

Dramatic Look

This preset can be used to provide a gorgeous, dramatic effect on your wedding images, increasing their beauty to a large extent.

Free Vintage Presets

This presets are highly useful for giving your photos an old Vintage look, making them appear as if they were shot on film and has aged. Here we have provided a list of free Vintage Presets. Give them a try

Free Vintage Film Preset

This preset can be applied to give your images that authentic, aged vintage feel that you are gonna always love.

Vintage Touch

Make colors pop out of your photos and make them vibrant at a single click of this preset.

Free Vintage Mono Preset

Give your images an awesome monochromatic conversion with a nice vintage touch and an aged black and white effect using this preset.

Free Vintage Film Preset

Use this preset to apply a nice vintage effect to your photos, that is inspired by vintage films.

Vintage Fade

This preset will make your photos pop by fading the colors and then applying a slight vintage effect.

Vintage Vixen

Use this preset to give your images a vintage, retro-inspired look.

Autumn Vintage

This free Lightroom preset adds some autumn vintage flair to your photos.

Rich Mono

Add a touch of Monochrome vintage look to your images using this preset.

Vintage Garden

Yet another preset to give that old film look to your photos.

Vintage City

This preset is well suited to give a subtle, vintage look to your city scape photos.

Warm Vintage

Another free Lightroom preset that adds some custom warm vintage flair to your photos with a single click.

Rustic Vintage

This is another brilliant preset that you need to check out.

Playful Vintage

A free Lightroom preset that can be used to add some classic, vintage feel to your photographs.

Vintage Scape

Add a beautiful vintage look to your photos. A perfect preset for outdoor landscape photos.

VintageWash

With this preset, applying stunning vintage effects to your photos takes just a simple click.

Free Baby Presets

Enhance the photos of your babies and family members, make them look clear, light and soft using these free baby Lightroom presets.Ultra

Ultra Color

It is a collection of 18 presets that simulates different color print film emulations, creating stunning images.

Silky Smooth Skin

This preset reduces the shadows in the skin, adding a soft touch to your baby’s photo.

MCP Mini Enlighten

It is a pack of 15 Lightroom presets suitable for a wide variety of shooting situations. From toning your image to fixing dark images, this preset has got it all.

DeSaturate Me

Used with the appropriate picture, this preset can give some pretty dramatic effects to it.

Matt Kloskowski’s Spotlight

This preset pack is used to add spotlight to a specific area and uses the Radial filter effect in Lightroom.

Sun Flare

This preset adds some sunlight in your photos and gives a dramatic warm look to it.

Silver Lining

Yet another preset that is able to add silver linings effect to your photos, making it look amazing.

Rockwell Warm

Give your photos an amazing, edgy urban surreal look at the single click of this preset.

Coffee Shop Sweet Baby

This free preset is useful in removing redness from skin, brightening the image and also softening skin.

Sweet Baby Dreams B&W preset

A perfect preset for baby portraits, giving it a soft, bright, B&W effect. This preset automatically applies a fade effect on the edges.

Soft newborn

Enhance the quality and look of your baby with this free, amazing newborn preset.

Coffee Shop Beauty Preset

Make your baby photo look stunning, by a single click of this preset.

10 Born Baby Lightroom Preset

This pack includes 10 lightroom 475 presets, perfect for newborn photography.

Free Lightroom presets for Children

A set of presets for transforming your child’s photo into a clear, vivid and bright image.

Free Preset pack 2017

This pack offers a set of 12 presets, for tweaking your photos in any way desired.

Free Food Presets

This presets are designed to enhance your food images. Perfect for recipe websites, food bloggers that want to share images of food.

Free Food Preset

Make your food items look vivid and pop out their colors using this preset.

Sweet Tea

Another preset for food photography, that works great with food photos.

Food And Still Life

Make your food look more saturated and delicious with a single click of this preset.

Free Preset for Food Photography

It allows to maximize the clarity, lower the highlights and lighten shadows of your photos.

Foodie

A set of 3 presets, helping food photographers make their shots more yummy and vibrant.

Orange Splash

This preset adds a retro-grunge look to photos, ideal for food photography.

Lomo Preset

This preset recreates the old Lomo style with vignette effect, over saturation and light leaks.

Old Film in Latin America

This preset can be used to add a bright, clear effect to your food photos and make their colors pop out.

Deeper Than Deep

Quickly turn your flat and dull food photos into deep,eye catching pictures with a simple click.

Nashville

This preset simulates the Nashville preset of Instagram.

Green Aperture

This preset is ideal when your food photos contains greeny vegetables. It will give your photos a strong green with a bit black, and a touch of vignette.

Archived Grain

Give your food photos an overexposed lomo feel to it with this Lightroom preset.

FREE REAL ESTATE PRESETS

Here we provide a list of presets that can be applied to real Estate photos.

Grain & Film

This preset pack can be used to add grain and retro film feel to their images.

Fuji Velvia

This preset gives an extensive saturated effect to make your images look sharp and amazing.

Bold Colors

Transform your dull photos into life by using bold colors. This preset is used to pop out details from your photos.

The look of Beijing

It is a set of 2 Lightroom presets, designed for monuments and buildings. It adds a movie and happy sunset effect to your photos.

ON1 Signature Collection Vol. 1

Enhance the look of your photos by applying 60 different presets included in this pack.

Analogue Love 1

This preset has effects like grainy and split toned that adds a warm vintage look to your photos.

Christian Wolf’s Action

It is a set of 28 free presets that enables you to transform your dull, flat photos into something stunning.

Another world

This preset enhances your photos with its HDR effects. Make your photos clear and bright with this preset.

Nocturnus

This preset is suitable for photos taken in low light conditions, especially at night.

Sharp Black & White

Transform your colored photos into black & white, with a strong sharp look with this free Lightroom preset.

Black and White OX

Yet another preset for converting your photos into black & white and giving it a classy appearance.

HDR Exterior Real Estate Lightroom Presets

This package includes 35 presets that gives your real estate photography a great sharp, bright, eye catching look.

Real Estate Color Correct Presets

This package of 50 presets is designed to give your real estate photography a bright, gradient, focused and color correct look.

Enfuse for Real-estate photography

Another preset for making your real-estate photos appear more bright, saturated and clear, at a single mouse click.

Free Matte Presets

Here we provide a list of presets that can be applied to real Estate photos.

Free Matte Lightroom Preset

This preset slightly washes out the colors of your photos, giving them a matte effect look.

Matte Preset by ShutterPulse

Easily add a beautiful matte effect to your photos using this awesome preset by Shutter Pulse.

Basic matte

This preset adds an amazing subtle, matte effect to your photos at a single click. Try it for free.

Deep Matte

This preset is similar to basic matte but it uses a stronger matte effect.

20 Free Matte Effect Presets

This set of 20 matte effect presets is ideal to give your images a printed matte effect.

Grainy Matte

Give your images that grainy look with a tinge of matte effect.

Soft Matte

This versatile preset will work on a variety of images, creating an awesome matte look and feel.

Aged Matte B&W

This preset will add a vintage matte effect at a single click.

Chocolate Matte

Another amazing preset to add to your photos that chocolaty effect.

Detailed Matte

A wonderful preset to add a touch of softness to your image.

Nicolesy’s Matte

Give your photos a vintage, faded with time, matte effect with softened blacks.

Matte Color Cream

Yet another amazing matte effect preset for Adobe Lightroom.

B&W Portraits Detailed Matte

This preset is able to create a dramatic, detailed, B&W matte film look for your photos.

Deeply Matte Color CreamWash

Give your photos that dramatically matte, warm look with this preset.

LSL B&W Matte

This preset adds a touch a matte effect along with B&W conversion.

Free Monochrome Presets

Give your photos that look of a single color with these freely available Monochrome presets.

Free monochrome Lightroom Preset

This preset transforms your photos into black and white, giving it a monochrome effect.

Monochromatic

This free preset will add a nice monochromatic look to your photographs.

Monochrome B/W

Transform your photos into monochromatic B&W using this preset.

Sharp B&W

This free Lightroom presets for street and urban photography will add a grungy, high contrast look to your images.

Monochromatic Vol.2

This set of 20 presets is perfect to make your photos in dreaming and stunning B&W.

Mono Fade

Another amazing monochrome preset By Forrest Lane.

Eric Kim Monochrome 1600

Make your photos look like film photos with this high contrast Black & White preset.

Shuttersweets – Monochromatic

This set of 20 presets has a variety of presets suitable for a wide range of photos.

Cool B&W

This free preset can give your photos that black and white look with a touch of blue.

Free High Contrast B&W

With this beautiful preset you can give your photos an amazing high contrast black and white conversion.

Info & Download

Single Color Split Toning Preset

This is an amazing preset to give your images that single color, monochrome effect.

Aperture Preset

This preset provides various effects like B&W, classic as well as mono color.

Monochrome Log Lady

This preset transforms your photos into a monochromatic version with a slight sepia tone added.

Old Old Old

Give your photos an monochromatic gray, washed, vintage effect with this preset.

Nostalgic

This is another fantastic lightroom preset that warms your pictures dramatically, while adding a little sunlight to it, giving it a monochrome look and feel.

Lightroom Preset – Danville No.2

An amazing preset to convert your photos into a polished, dramatic B&W look without losing the highlight details.

Other Free Lightroom Presets

Give your photos that look of a single color with these freely available monochromes presets. Each of these presets comes with brilliant modern and advanced features.

Black Mamba

Check out this amazing preset to make your picture stand out.

Skyfall

This is another super amazing preset that will give a stunning look to all your pictures.

LUC BESSON

LUC Besson is a nice preset to boost your picture quality instantly.

GuavaJelly

GuavaJelly is a great option for outdoor photography. Make sure you don’t miss it out!

Silver Surfer

If you are too much into the B&W filter, then this is the perfect one for you.

Cinnamon Girl

This preset will help you filter your picture in a matter of seconds. You just need to make some clicks.

Blood Brothers

Create some of the most amazing pictures of your own with this ultimate preset.

Wood Neck

This is a brilliant option for those who are into still photography.

High Tide

This preset will help you convert your otherwise ordinary picture into an eye catching one.

Cold Fact

Another beautiful preset that you can not afford to miss out on.

How to Install Lightroom Presets

It’s pretty simple to install your presets, you have to copy the preset file or folder of presets into your lightroom’s installation “Develop Presets” folder. You can find the location of this by doing the following steps:

Open Your copy of Lightroom
In the top menu visit : “Edit” > “Preferences” > “Presets”
Click on the small box which says : “Show Lightroom Presets Folder”
Double Click the” Lightroom” folder
Double Click the “Develop Presets” folder
Now copy you presets in here.
When you restart lightroom you will see they have been added when you go to “Develop”

10 Best WordPress Membership Plugins 2020: In-Depth Guide to Free & Paid Options

Kaveri — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 05:47:41 +0000

Creating a membership site is one of the most effective sources of monetizing websites and earning a reliable amount of money each month without having to work for those extra hours, by putting a membership system in place you can create a product once and then earn recurring income from it.

A membership site is one in which your visitors have to subscribe to your site by paying a small amount of money to unlock your content. When you have a membership site, you (as the admin) can have full control over what part of your content can be accessed by your visitors. For example, you have set up a site with various online courses. Each of these courses will have distinctly different materials for your visitors, depending upon their needs or interests. But these materials will not be accessible for all. Anyone who wants to read them will have to pay you a specific amount.

You obviously can always keep it exciting for your members, by providing incentives and other added benefits as well. There are different kinds of membership sites. Some sites charge a one-time payment, while others may charge a monthly, quarterly or yearly payment to unlock their content, products or services.

WordPress Membership Plugins

You will find various plugins available in the market, which can help you monetize your site or blog by paid membership programs. These plugins make it absolutely easy for you to build an effective member based website, with no shortage of options, for your users.

However, membership sites are known to be resource hungry. This makes it extremely important for you to choose the right provider that enhances performance and reliability. There are tons of affordable WordPress hosting providers that will definitely make your life much easier.

The WordPress market is flooded with tons of Membership Plugins. But only a few are good enough to be considered for your website. Keeping that in mind, we have brought to you a list of 10 Best WordPress Membership Plugins that you might like to know about before making a purchase. Each of these plugins comes loaded with amazing features and are extremely user-friendly. The best thing is that besides being highly advanced and super flexible all the products listed here comes with a very affordable pricing. So, let’s get started.

S2 Member

S2 Member is one of the oldest and most well respected member plugins around, the plugin now has over a million downloads since it was created. If you are looking for a plugin which has lots of features this is the one – It integrates with many different payment processors and has a huge feature list. It’s available in a few different version – a Free framework which contains the basics you need to create a very simple site with PayPal buttons, a Pro version which costs $89 one-time for lots more features and Pro unlimited version which costs $189 and allows you to use it on as many websites as you like.

Amember

Amember Pro is another member system which has been around and continuously developed for many years now. It’s available as a standalone system which you can install on your hosting or you can integrate it with a number of platforms including WordPress via the use of their own plugin. It has all the main features would expect from a membership plugin and has a very nice and easy to use dashboard. Amember is very popular among WordPress vendors and a lot of the top WordPress plugin and theme shops use it to run their own sites.

WP-Emember

WP eMember is a very well regarded plugin which has been in development for many years again, it costs just $59 for the full plugin and is one of the easiest ways to create a membership site with WordPress – either with a brand new site or by adding a new section to your existing website. It’s packed full of features that you will need to easily build your members area with no bloated features you will never need. You can use it to protect posts or pages on your site and mark them as members only, display partial content as a teaser, you can create unlimited membership levels and so on.

MemberPress

MemberPress is a highly advanced and professionally designed membership plugin, that comes with the latest web trending features. With this plugin, you have the ability to control access to the content on your site, opening it up only to your team members.

The plugin automatically grants and revokes access when a member joins or unsubscribes to your website. It also adds to the powerful features of online marketing by selling and accepting payments with PayPal express checkout and Stripe. You can easily install this plugin on your website and start charging instantly for access.

Using this robust plugin also ensures that your digital products are sold off securely. So now you have a plugin that is not only versatile but immensely powerful too. The users of this plugin have highly acclaimed it for its functions and simple user interface. Another good thing about it is the support team. You can reach out to them at all times and they will help you sort out all your problems within minutes.

This plugin is an amazing one if you want to create, manage and track membership subscriptions with confidence and ease. This fantastic plugin beautifully integrates with your already existing WordPress site. The plugin works wonderfully and its features are truly the cherries on the top.

It comes under different pricing plans, so you can choose the one that best fits your requirements. If yours is a new membership site, then its best that you select the Business Edition. It is available at just $119 per year. If you are an advanced membership site builder than the Developer Edition which is available at $239 per year can be your best choice.

Magic Members

This plugin is exceptionally useful for educational membership websites. The Magic Member plugin is known for its exceptional content dripping abilities. It also includes multiple payment gateways and amazing integration with e-mail newsletters such as Aweber and Mail Chimp.

The plugin has got a download manager included to manage all the digital downloads. A great feature is also the pay per view access to specific video contents. If you are selling a course, the feature of sequential course delivery will be right up your alley. The single licenses version of this product is available at just $97. This includes a quick support guide, free updates for a year and of course instant access.

Wishlist Member

If you want to have your membership site withing minutes, without any programing then WishList is the plugin you need to have. This is a premium membership plugin that is renowned for giving you immense control over your content and methods of delivery of the same to your members. A number of Standard functions are included in the plugin that works flawlessly, with unlimited membership levels and control.

There is also a great feature of sequential content delivery which allows you to release your content according to order or time. Membership levels are also auto upgraded according to your specifications. Being the admin you are powered to view your members, their registration status, membership level and more.

The plugin can be directly integrated with your WordPress site that you have been using. This makes it easyy for you to manage it as you are not forced to enter into a new realm that needs a new understanding. You can create a free, trial or paid membership level or combine all the three together for your users.

The plugin also has the option to create a multi-level access for your members. Another brilliant feature is Subscription Length Control option.With this feature, you can control the length of the duration through which your members can access the content. You can also make the subscription auto-expire within the time that you may want to specify.

The Custom Error option will automatically direct your visitors to the error page if they try to access content or products that they are denied access. With the Partial Content Display option you can display a part of your content to non-members. If they want to gain full access to the entire content they will obviously have to be a member of your site. Displaying some gripping content is a great way to tempt visitors to be a paid member.

The plugin also integrates very easily with PayPal and ClickBank. You can also allow secure RSS feeds to be displayed. Another feature is the free preview with protection to entice more subscribers to become members.

On top of all this, you will get great technical support as well as detailed documentation on how to use the plugin and get the best out of it.

This plugin is available at $197 for a single site and at $297 for multiple sites.

Restrict Content Pro

Restrict Content Pro is a fully featured powerful membership solution for WordPress users. The plugin is very intricately designed and it seamlessly integrates itself with the backend of your site. There are limitless possibilities with this plugin. It gives you complete control over how your content can be accessed.

You can create unlimited subscription package levels and provide level specific access to your content. It also gives you the option to sell digital products and accept payments through some of the major payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal Standard, and Express etc.

With Restrict Content Pro you can generate a CSV to all your active members. The settings can be changed to members of a particular subscription as well. You can even create an unlimited number of discount codes and offer percentages for your visitors. The Reports feature will show you how well your site is performing. And this does not need any extra work. The developers have taken care of it.

The Email Members help you send an automated email to your new member welcoming them to your site. It will also remind them about the date of expiry and the send them a payment receipt. This feature will make you appear more professional.

The plugin even offers a Premium support and regular updates to all its users. Moreover, they have lucrative deals for almost any budget with some great pricing options available vis-a-vis: Personal, Plus, Professional and Ultimate. The plugin also comes extensively documented so even if you have a problem setting it up, you surely can go through the walk-through that is available on the web.

The plugin is available under different pricing plans ranging from $99 to $499. So depending on the requirement of your site you can pick the one that you think will suit you best.

MemberMouse

Membermouse is another powerful and scalable membership plugin in the market. It is known for being very user-friendly in spite of having some of the most advanced features. The basic working is the same as it allows you to restrict access to any content like posts, pages etc controlled via a grant access button.

You will even be able to specify which membership level can access what content, in a very simplified manner that can be mastered within minutes. The drip-feed feature allows you to release your content automatically upon a specified time. The reporting suites of Member Mouse are some of the most accurate and detailed information.

The key metrics can help you target important areas through which you can increase profits etc. The key feature is the split test pricing which lets you optimize your pricing strategy to maximize subscribers and revenue. It is one plugin that will help you maximize your revenue without any programming.

With its Customer Management feature, you can not only grow your email list but also easily register new members and accept orders with your flexible checkout pages. You can also have an overview of the engagement statistic from your dashboard.

The plugin offers excellent support automation allowing your customers to serve themselves in easy steps. So they can update their profile, cancel subscriptions, and do a lot more. You can set it up like installing any other WordPress plugin, directly on your site. It is easy, fast and reliable.

You can try out this plugin for 14 days free of cost before you finally hit the purchase button. See if you like the way it works and if you are satisfied with its features and services this beautiful product is definitely worth buying.

Rainmaker Platform

This platform has gone a step further and turned itself into a membership site-in-a-box. All your hosting, e-mail, site builders etc are included in one neat package providing an all-in-one solution. The Platform is immensely powerful with some of the most practical and useful features bundled in together.

It can also integrate affiliate programs to your site and add or restrict access to forums for your members to interact. It lets you create an unlimited number and level of memberships too.

There are also options through which you can sell any number of digital items and accept payments from a large number of vendors. Rainmaker is incredibly powerful with amazing functions for your business.

Select from the number of subscription packages available for this plugin. The prices for this range from $145 to $165.

WP-Members

This is an amazing free plugin for memberships on WordPress sites. Again, the basic working is the same. It has an auto-generated excerpt feature which is very useful for generating excerpts for restricted content with SEO optimized excerpts.

Though there are limitations of this plugin, it is free and the features included are more than enough for basic functionality. It has already bagged a 4.9-star rating and has more than 70,ooo active installs. The plugin is fully customizable and you can use over all the 100 action and filter hooks to do that. In case you want more features in your plugin, you can easily extend them by using the premium add-on modules from its support site rocketgeek.com

The biggest limitation, however, is that you can’t charge for memberships, for which, however, you can upgrade to the premium version which comes at a decent cost.

You can block your posts and contents individually or both as well if you want. You ( as the admin) also need to approve a member before he/she joins the others in the group. The admin is automatically notified about each new registration.

WooCommerce Memberships

WooCommerce is an excellent e-commerce solution which is very popular in the digital world. WooCommerce Membership is an add-on which allows you to create awesome, scalable membership websites. Restricting your content with this plugin is going to get easier than ever.

You can not only restrict your content to your members but can also drip specific content and schedule a time for members to have access.

The functionalities are immense. They have lots of payment gateways integrated as such increasing your versatility as well. It is dedicated to membership requirements with standard functionalities and tons of add-on features.

You can create member only discount codes and also offer physical products exclusively to members by combining your website to that of any e-commerce store. The plugin will also hide your content or products from non-members. If you want, you can make the product view public. But make it purchase-able only by the site members.

Not only this. You can even include a membership with product purchase or manually assign memberships too. You can also export members to a CSV file to make member data out of WooCommerce available for them.

The plugin has also simplified the process of communicating with your members by adding the Membership Note option that you can share with your members via email. The Basic Reporting feature of the plugin will help you find out your stats. With this system, you can find out how your site is doing and what revenue it is earning.

The plugin also has the option to let you add a membership discount per plan or per subscription. You can also send an auto-generated single or multiple reminders to your members before a specific event. Add another coat of security to your already secured site, by adding a re-captcha verification for your paid member subscription.

This amazing plugin is available from $149 through $249 per year. So try out this plugin now and enjoy its brilliant features and services.

https://alienwp.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Export-import-gutenberg-block.webm

Conclusion

We have very carefully selected the Best Membership plugins out there, specifically to help you out in your search. It should, however, be noted that your requirements could be different from others. And as such you are advised to look into the products and use their trial versions to see whether or not they work for you.

The products listed here are popular and immensely successful in the digital world. They are very effective and are also used by some of the giants of the industry. You too definitely deserve to know about them before you make your purchase.

I hope you have liked our collection. Do let us know through your comments, which plugin did you like the best. Do you also know about any better plugin that we missed? We are eager to hear from you.

WPForms Review: A Complete WordPress Form Plugin?

Kaveri — Sun, 09 Feb 2020 14:13:28 +0000

The WordPress market is flooded with so many Contact Form and Form Builder plugins. The only problem is knowing which one to choose which will suit your requirements.

In our opinion, the best option you can have is WPForms a popular plugin that has been used by millions of users. It’s available as a free plugin with the option to upgrade to a paid plan for even more features.

In today’s post, we are going to review the WP Form plugin. This article, is going to take you through everything you need to know about the plugin. So keep reading because, by the end of it, this plugin might just be the form builder you are looking for, for your business.

Visit WPForms

WPForms Plugin Introduction

WPForms has been in the market for a quite some time now and this plugin has garnered a lot of praise over time. With a brilliant 4.9 out of 5-star ratings and 3248 reviews (and counting) for the Free Version, WP forms has a lot to offer to its users.

The WP Forms is a drag and drop form builder plugin and working with it is really very easy. The power punch that this plug is allows you to create multiple, creative forms for contact, subscription, payment etc in a matter of minutes. And its super fast, light-weight, highly advanced and compatible with tons of other plugins as well.

At the time of creating the plugin, the team always considered user-experience as its foremost priority. Therefore to make it beginner-friendly, the team added dozens of pre-built form templates to help you easily get up and running.

The plugin is responsive for devices and screen sizes of all types. It has been very well optimized for performance and receives regular updates too. Overall, it’s a great option for anyone who wants to integrate a Contact Form in their website.

But before we reach any conclusions, let’s explore it a little more, starting with the features.

WPForms Features

As already mentioned, this form builder plugin is extremely flexible and user-friendly. Compatible to screen sizes ranging from phones to computer screens. Most of the themes with their drag and drop features have become the talk of the WordPress community.

Thus, WordPress form builder offers the same level of flexibility and smoothness which allows you to build a form in a matter of minutes. The fields can be arranged for a better visual appeal and functionality with just one click.

The most important thing here is, no coding knowledge needed! You can just install the plugin and get on your way to build the most illustrative user interaction form for your business.

The plugin has been extensively documented so it’s easy to set your hands on it, if you ever face a problem handling it.

Pre-built Templates

Keeping the vastness of the industry category in mind, WordPress has designed this plugin to cater to multiple industries. Some the form option which are frequently used are:

Contact Form
Newsletter subscription Form
Email opt-in Form
Survey and poll Form
Donation Form
Billing and Order Form
Suggestion Forms
Feedback Form
Request a Quote Form

While a few of these templates are available in the basic package, you will have to shell out $49 to $199 to get a host of addons and endless benefits.

If you are from a unique industry and you are wondering if this plugin is the right one for you. Yes, it is. Install the Form Templates Pack addon, and then a tailored form for your business or industry is just a few clicks away.

Payment Collection via Form

Now if you are in the ecommerce business, or exploring the idea of establishing one, then there is a definite need for online payment option for your customers. Or if yours is a non-profit for which you accept online donations, then the good news is, WP form plugin comes integrated with PayPal and Stripe. It has made payments so much easier.

Field Categorization

The fields are categorized primarily into 3 separate sections –

Standard – Includes name, email, single line and paragraph text, dropdown, multiple choice, etc.
Fancy – Includes phone, file upload, website / URL, page break, captcha, etc.
Payment – Includes credit card payment, single / multiple item payment, etc.

Apart from the above, the form is optimized for web and server performance ensuring maximum speed.

The fields are the most important thing to be used in a form. So let me share a brief on how to make your own form in the WP Form builder.

First, select the kind of form that you want to build based on your business needs. Then, Click on the ‘Fields’ option on the left corner of the screen. It will open a pop-up with the most commonly used field options such as name, contact number, email id, address, date and time, etc.

However, intricate fields such as website URL, file upload, payments, etc. are also available when it comes collection of extensive data. Now to create a form of your own, all you have to do is select the required field, drag and drop it in the form on a place of your choosing. Voila, you are done making your form for you website.

Easy to Add a Form

With the arrival for WP forms, embedding your form into the website is just few clicks away. Now, no coding or copy-pasting the short code manually. All you have to do is,

Click on ‘Add Form’ button located above the text editor.

Chose the relevant form from the pop-up.

Select the right form and click on the ‘Add Form’ button.

Smart Conditional Logic

Despite the world slowly going digital, filling an online form is tedious at best. For that matter, filling any form is a pain. For a new user, this is a task he/she will definitely not look up to.

But if you are giving a form to an existing user, then why not give them the fields based on their last form? Wondering if this is possible. Well, let’s just swipe the clouds of doubt from your head right away.

With the WP form builder and its smart conditional logic, you can show only the required fields of the form based on the user’s last form submission.

This way, your user does not have to see the fields which he does not want to fill thus making a form submission less time consuming for him and this whole process also ensures high completion and submission rates.

P.S. – If you wish to recover abandoned forms, WP Form has an addon for that.

Zapier and Email Marketing Addon + Gutenberg Support

Now with all that subscriptions, registrations, requests, quotes, etc. you would not want your mailbox to be choked. For subscription requests, manually collating the email ids and then copy-pasting the data is the last thing you would want to do.

Wp Forms have got a solution for you. It’s auto- integration capabilities to Email Marketing Platforms such as Mailchimp, Drip, GetResponse, Aweber and Campaign Monitor.

Zapier is the most intelligent way to automate inter-app data movement. So if you want to connect your WPForm to your favorite app, which you can choose from the 1300 plus web apps which are already supported.

Zapier allows you to move data from your WP Form to Salesforce, Freshbooks, Hubspot, Twilio for creating lead, invoices, contacts or send text messages respectively. This is just the tip of the iceberg of possibilities that Zapier offers you.

Despite getting some flak since inception, Gutenberg has built a name and carved a niche for itself and is here to stay. WP Forms has added support for the Gutenberg WordPress Editor as well. It’s very own Gutenberg block makes adding WP Forms to Gutenberg managed content a cakewalk.

What typs of Form Can you Create?

Here are some of the forms that you can create with the plugin.

Survey/Poll Form

This form template allows you to conduct surveys and polls on your website. Now, when this form is combined with conditional logic, the survey questions can be personalized based on user responses.

Another feature of WPForms arms you with a feature to share the poll results on your website or your followers in social media. That’s a really nice way to create awareness and reach the masses with just one form.

Login and Registration Form

Now if you are into the ecommerce business, social media platform, video/audio uploading, community centric platforms, or a website that intends to cater specially to its members, you will definitely need your customers to sign in and register.

WPForms answers your call again. Create a form with just dragging and dropping the required fields and yes, such a contact form can be embedded anywhere in the website. Thus not forcing your users to go to the sign in page every time and portraying professionalism by caring about their time.

Payment Collection through the Form

Online shopping platform or a non-profit organization, the option to accept online payments via cards and virtual wallets is always a boon for the user and the service provider.

WPForms is integrated with PayPal and Stripe to facilitate payment. In case of selling merchandise, products or services online, the order page can be designed to make the customer see the their purchases and a classic way to gain their trust and loyalty to your brand.

Post/Comment Submission Form

If your website caters to like-minded people using the internet to speak about common concerns, events, places, activities, etc., then the ‘Post Submission Addon’ fills the shoes for this specific purpose. With this addon, you can accept articles, contents, reviews, testimonials, feedback from your user.

All of the above without having to provide backend access to each and every user. The content will be kept as pending in your post editor and after reviewing the post, you can publish the same.

More Features Available In the Upgraded Version

With the best WP Form plugin, comes the best of features.

Custom captcha – This option is a good way to fight spam. You can put random math questions or your own questions. That way you can rest assured that your website if a complete spam-free zone.
Geolocation– It helps you to store location data of your users and visitors along with their form entry.
Signature – This is yet another brilliant feature that you the plugin offers. It allows you facilitate your users to sign their initiates via the mouse or touchpad. Now that’s a lovely way to personalize user experience.
Instant notifications – You also get to trace and respond to all the leads that come your way. This sets the impression that you are actively engaged and involved with your business.
Smart Form Confirmation – With this one you can display a custom message or take your users to a custom thank you page of your website. That is really sweet because these little gestures means a lot when you are doing business.
Form Locker – This helps you manage form access rules, permissions and controls via password protection, date/time limit to form expiry, limit access to specific users and more. In other words it is kind of a protection layer for your form to avoid spammers and hackers.
Form Abandonment – It is a sleek feature to capture the data from all the incomplete forms.
Offline Forms – This feature comes in handy in cases when the internet connectivity is intermittent as it allows the users to submit their forms when the internet is restored.
SEO – This is now a part and parcel for every website that comes up in the web. I mean, who would create a website and not want it to be found? So even the WPForms is SEO Optimized to gradually reach the masses in a healthy way.

How to Install WPForms In WordPress

Now that I have taken you through the exciting features that this plugin has to offer, let me give you a tutorial on how to install this plugin and get started building your forms.

If you have been using WordPress for a while I am assuming that you are already familiar with the process of installing a plugin. The process is exactly the same in this case too. Here’s how you do it.

Go to the Admin Panel of your website and click on plugins>Add New and type “wpforms” in the search box.

Click on Install and then activate button for the plugin to start working.

Once the installation is done, with the installation you will see a screen with an introductory greeting.

There is a path to a very extensive guide which you can use to know the plugin inside out.

Creating your First Form With WPForms

To the left of your admin panel, you will see different options that lets you create your first form. Click on the Add New option as in the image below.

The basic plugin (WPForms Lite) is free which gives you 3 inbuilt templates ie. Simple Contact From, Newsletter Signup Form, Suggestion Form and the option to create a blank form.

To start with, click on the ‘Simple Contact Form’ template. Adding and removing fields from the form is just drag and drop till you find the look of the form that matches your taste.

You can follow the Gif below to understand how you can build your form.

When you are done creating the form click on the ‘Save’ option to save your first creation. Now on your left hand side, you will see several options like Setup, Fields, Marketing etc. go back to your admin panel and click on Settings>Notifications.

Add your website or brand email in the ‘From Email’ section and ensure that the website is configured to an authorized service provider to send email from the mentioned email address.

The concluding step is to embed the form in the website or WordPress Pages. Click on the ‘’Embed” button and copy the shortcode and paste the shortcode in your desired page’s text editor.

That was not at all difficult, was it?

Displaying Your First Form On your Website

Now that you are all ready with your first form created with the WPForms, its time you display it on your website. So let’s get started.

To be truthful, there are several ways to show your form on your website. So the method you want to choose depends on where on your site do you want your form to reflect. Let’s check out the different ways of doing it.

Displaying your Form On A WordPress Page

To make your form appear on one of your page, start by creating a New Page. Now click on the Add Form button above the page editor to add a form onto your page.

A new popup will now show up under the name Insert Form. Click on the drop down menu and select the form that you have already created.

As soon as you select the form, you will notice a shortcode appear on your editor. If you publish the page, your Form will automatically go live on your website. Here is an example of the live form.

Displaying Your Form In The Widget Of your WordPress Site

If you ever think of adding the form to your widget for example to the footer or the sidebar of your website, then you will have to follow this process.

Start by going to your admin panel. Now on the left side of your panel click on Appearance>Widget. Now scroll down to find the WPForms widget.

In the next step, you will have to drag and drop the WPForms widget to a widget location of your choice. This can be any place where you want your form to show up. When that is done, you are ready to click on the WPForms widget to select your form. Finally, click on the Save option not to loose your settings.

Here’s an exampe of the live form in your widget.

Yay! Your first form has been successfully created and displayed in your website. That was easy right!

Customizing the Submit Button Text

WPForms also offers you with the choice to style your submit button.Here’s exactly how you can do it.

To change the text in your submit button, you will first have to go to the Form Builder>Settings>General.

Here you will see two different fields.

Submit Button Text: This is the text displayed on the button when it hasn’t been clicked yet

Submit Button Processing Text: It is the text shown after the user clicks this button, but before the confirmation is shown to the user

Just go ahead and make the necessary changes that you want in your buttons. Do not forget to save your changes.

Importing Forms from Other Plugins

Sometimes you might not want to redesign a new Contact Form because you are too fond of the one you were using before installing this plugin. So what do you do if you want the exact same one on your website.

Well, the answer is simple. If you are using a different form such as Contact Form 7 or Ninja Forms,WP Forms has a feature using which you can import your forms from the above mentioned plugins to WPForms.

And this step is not a complicated one. You can easily do it within a few minutes. Let see how to do it. To import your pre-built form you will have to first start by visiting your admin panel.

Now under WPForms click on the Tools option. The following page will show up on your screen.

Now click on the drop down arrow under the Import From Other Form Plugins option. Now select the form plugin that you have used previously to design your favourite contact Form. Once done Click on the Import button.

And that’s it. Your form is ready to be used.

Securing Your Form With A Captcha

WPForms lets you protect your form and save them from all sorts of spammers and hackers. To use this facility you will first have to install and activate the install and activate the Custom Captcha addon.

Once that is done, go to the form builder. Here you will find the Captcha option added to the builder.

Now to create this field in your form you will have to drag and drop it in the preview panel of your form builder. This field will pop up everytime your user shows up, just so that the site receives the maximum protection.

You can click on the field in the form preview panel to open up its Field Options, if you want to edit the field. Under this you will have the options to change your fields.

Under the Type field, you will have two different options. One is the Math captcha and the other is the Question and Answer captcha. You can choose either one that you want to show up to your users or visitors.

The Math captcha will generate random math questions for your users. This can be anything – addition, subtraction, and multiplication questions for your user to answer. These are not any complicated questions just simple ones to ensure its a human and not any spam bots.

The Question and Answer type on the other hand will pose a question for the user to answer. These are simple questions and generally every normal and literate human being can answer them.

Once you choose Question and Answer under the Type field, add your question in the first field and the preferred answer below that. Something simple like this.

If you’d like, you can add additional pairs of question and answers. The Custom Captcha field will display a random question from these sets of question and answer pairs every time your page is loaded or refreshed.

This is to doubly ensure that your site is safe from all unwanted threats.

WPForms Pricing

WPforms have a range of pricing options if you decide to upgrade from the free “Lite” version, take a look below and select the version which contains the features you need.

Basic Package – At $39 a year, you get license to a single site, spam protection, advanced fields, unlimited forms and entries, multipage forms, conditional logic and one year each for downloads, support and updates. The features here are impressive and specifically designed for those venturing into the website making business or making their own website for the first time.
Plus Package – At $99 per year, you get everything that basic has to offer such as unlimited forms and entries, spam protection, conditional logic, one year each for updates, support and downloads. Now let’s look at the additional offerings. This package integrates the plugin to MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse and Campaign Monitor. Along with this you get license to 3 sites. It does look like an amazing deal for people looking for specific data and thus need a purely business driven user interaction form.
Pro Package – The best package claimed by a vast majority of users worldwide. Looking at what it has to offer, I barely doubt them. So you shell you $199 for one year and you get the entire combination of Basic and Plus. Added to that, you also get PayPal and Stripe integration, user registration, survey and poll templates, zapier integration, license to 20 sites. 20 sites! Wow! Oh I have more to mention here. Exclusive features such as Form locker, form abandonment, offline forms, priority support and bonus form templates, signature, post submission and geolocation. For the money asked, I really don’t find it to be a bad deal. This is the big brother of WP forms packages and you wish to dedicate yourself towards the constant growth of your website and generate fantastic user feedback, reviews, testimonials, support and queries, your search stops here.
Elite Package – This is designed primarily for thorough professional developers and agencies. Priced at $299 for one year, it has everything that Pro has to offer. But since this package is for a different category of WordPress theme users, it comes with Client management, Premium WordPress Multisite support and unlimited site license. You heard that right, unlimited sites. I am not shocked to hear this because this package is not for one website guy like me. This is for the big players and it is the big daddy of all the packages.

Conclusion

WPForms has been created by one of the best teams in the WordPress space so you can rest assured that it has been coded well and will have amazing support behind it should you run into any problems. WPForms is powerful and but also very easy to use, even for complete beginners.

It’s good that there is a range of different payment plans so you can choose the one you need without overpaying for the features that you would never use. The lite version is also great if you just need a simple contact form solution for your personal site.

WPForms hasn’t been around as long as other contact form plugins like Gravity Forms and Ninja Forms but it certainly holds up against them and should be able to accomplish most of your needs out of the box,

I hope this review has been insightful to the readers and everyone out there searching for a form builder that is as smooth as butter.

Visit WPForms

How to Import / Export Your WordPress Gutenberg Blocks

Kaveri — Sun, 09 Feb 2020 11:26:24 +0000

If you are reading this then it is very likely that you are already aware of the Gutenberg Editor and how it has revolutionized the ‘behind the scenes’ editing process of every WordPress websites.

The reason I am here today is to tell you about a rather neat feature of Gutenberg. The blocks of content created in a website using Gutenberg can be imported from and exported to another website which is must also be built on the WordPress platform. Analyzing the possibilities of this functionality, I can tell that it is a brilliant feature that can improve productivity between sites.

Any developer or individual, if involved with more than just managing their WordPress websites, this feature is going to make your life a lot easier. Because with this feature you can move your content blocks across multiple WordPress websites in just a few very simple steps. This will save a huge chunk of your time because now you don’t need to create new blocks for every website.

So, let’s dive in and show you how easy it is to import and export Gutenberg blocks across WordPress websites.

Gutenberg Editor 101

As you already know, Gutenberg is a pure block based WordPress Editor. Gutenberg launched with the fifth update of WordPress and it changed the way content is created in WordPress websites.

With Gutenberg, each and every content can be inserted in a separate block. Images, videos, banners, paragraphs, gallery, button, list, HTML, etc. are brought to life via a completely new block. These blocks can be adjusted across the webpage according to the liking of the creator or client. And by adjusting, I do not mean just its placement and alignment. With its amazing customization options, you can have full control over its looks as well.

These renewable blocks are an excellent time saver when it comes to making multiple blocks for a specific type of content. Imagine that all the pages of your website require a header which is made through Gutenberg means you have to create a header block multiple times. Gutenberg saves the frequently used block for you so that accessibility becomes easy for the developer.

With such diverse extent of editing and flexibility, each website made using Gutenberg can be potentially unique, robust, rich in content, strategically designed to connect with the users and thus a long term money maker.

If you want to know more, read our complete guide located here.

How to Export/Import Gutenberg Blocks

Gutenberg’s feature list is superiorly exclusive and constantly evolving. For the current set of developers, spending few hours understanding the movement within Gutenberg will do them wonders in the future. However, for the old set of developers who are more accustomed to the Classic Editor, Gutenberg will not be a very pleasing experience at first.

Editing blocks are not restricted to the theme which it is using for the overall feel of the site. They can be moved among other WordPress themes and remodeled to the suit the new website. So let’s go through the steps to import/export your WordPress Gutenberg Blocks.

Step 1: Making a Reusable Block

Gutenberg amongst all its features offers you with this brilliant time-saving feature with which you can create a block and save it to be used later. You can either use this block as it is or with a few edits to make slight or major changes to meet your requirements. All of it is possible directly from your editor. Here is how you can create this block.

First of all, just create a new block using the ‘+’ sign on your left. Now select the block, add a name to it and save it.

After that, you can customize the block. Once the customization is completed, just click on the 3 dots on the toolbar and click on ‘Add to Reusable Blocks’ from the dropdown. This will automatically add your block to the reusable blocks group. You can pick it up at any time and use it on any new or old post that you create. Here’s showing you how to do it.

Click on the 3 dots on the top right corner of the Toolbar. Select ‘Manage All Reusable Blocks’ from the dropdown menu.

Where To Find The Saved Blocks

When you create a block that can be reused, it automatically gets saved to your list of the reusable blocks. To find them just click on the ‘+’ sign that you use to add a new block. Now You can either select the reusable block by scrolling down the small popup or use the search field to locate it.

Here are the two ways of doing it.

https://alienwp.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/using-reusable-blocks-in-gutenberg.webm

To edit a reusable block, you can click on the edit button on the top of the block and customize it as per your needs. However, these changes will not be shown in the block you created earlier. You can save the new block again with another name if you want it to be added to the reusable block list.

Step 2: Export your Gutenberg Blocks

The option to export your Gutenberg blocks will be visible to you under the Reusable blocks. Just go to the block management page. Here’s a screenshot to show you where to find it.

By clicking on the Manage All Reusable Blocks link, you will be redirected to the page shown in the screenshot below with the following options – Edit, Trash, and Export as JSON.

Now click on the Export as JSON option. This will download a JSON file of your block into your computer or laptop. Save the file properly. You can use this on any other WordPress website that you manage.

Step 3: Import your Gutenberg Block

Go to the target WordPress website where you want to import the Gutenberg blocks which are downloaded in your laptop/desktop. For that go to the ‘block administration display’. You will see a button ‘Import from JSON’ at the top of the block administration display page.

Click on the import button which will give you a pop-up box with the ‘Choose File’ button requesting you to upload the relevant file. Upload the JSON file that you downloaded from the previous website earlier. Once the upload procedure is complete, you will see an ‘Import’ button at the bottom right corner of the pop-up dialog box. Click on the Import option to proceed further.

Now, WordPress will automatically upload the file for the new website. To verify the same, refresh the page after the upload procedure is complete. Then you will be able to see the name of the block which you uploaded (The very name that you used the save the block in the first website).

Step 4: Access the Block in a New Website

In the new website when you have to add blocks for editing, first you have to select ‘Add Block’, go to ‘Reusables’ and there you can find the block that you just imported from the previous website.

To know what these blocks look like, all you have to do is hover the cursor over the block name to and look at the preview.

Important Note:

The block Import/Export feature will give fruitful results only if the blocks belong to the original Gutenberg Editor.

If blocks are made using a plugin on the parent site then for a successful import/export procedure, the target sites will also require the same set of plugins that were used to design the block. Then again, the blocks design may vary from theme to theme depending on the primary location from where the CSS is applied.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. A full blown walk through the import/export feature of Gutenberg blocks. Well, I can never stop admiring the developers involved in the creation of the Gutenberg editor.

Navigating through the editor makes me encounter a new feature which I did not know was there before. And these features are a time saver for the developers as well as the end user clients.

For those who are not happy with this new way of editing, all I can say is, Gutenberg ain’t going nowhere. Though WordPress still gives an option to switch to the Classic Editor, that might not be for long. So it is a better move if everybody starts getting to know Gutenberg up, close and personal.

Features such as the Import/Export of blocks lay hidden inside the many options of Gutenberg. So before you dive into the rabbit hole, have a quick read of this page so that your journey is smoother.

Hope you enjoyed the post and found it helpful. If yes, then let us know your thoughts. We would be glad to hear from you.

Beginner’s Guide to The WordPress Gutenberg Editor: Complete Review

Kaveri — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 14:13:06 +0000

WordPress was launched way back in 2003 and ever since then, it has been playing a significant role in the way people built and manages websites. Owning websites and growing small and big businesses became so much easier with WordPress. Especially because of its extremely user-friendly interface. This became the reason for its rapid growth over the last decade.

Today WordPress is used by more than 60 million websites. What makes it even better, is its regular updates. And each update seamlessly enhancing the customer experience in a more positive and enriching way.

However, things are not the same now, as it was back in 2003. Today, WordPress finds itself in the midst of tough competition from platforms such as Ghost, Joomla and recently Medium and Wix.

In a bid to make WordPress a go-to site for anything – from personal blogging to a small business websites, the new Gutenberg Editor was launched. The editor was first introduced by Matt Mullenweg at the World Camp Europe in 2017. It was named after Johannes Gutenberg, the person who designed the mechanical printing press.

This launch of Gutenberg Editor on the 6th of December 2018 created a lot of excitement and fuss among its users. So what exactly is the Gutenberg Editor? Let’s have a quick look.

What Is The Gutenberg Editor?

Gutenberg is a block-based editor that allows users to create complex posts/pages effortlessly and without coding a single line. It is aimed to make blogging easier for the newbies who have no professional knowledge of web designing.

In the old Classic Editor, we had to use a lot of shortcodes and HTML in order to make things work. This will not be the case anymore as Gutenberg Editor uses blocks to add more advanced layout options. These blocks can be a paragraph, images, buttons, tables, list, columns etc.

You can easily rearrange blocks from one part of the post to another. And as each block is not linked to the rest of the content, you can customize a particular block while all the other blocks remain the same.

Also, all the WordPress themes are now compatible with Gutenberg Editor as it is the default editor. Having said that, if you select a theme specially meant for Gutenberg Editor, it will offer some real benefits.

In short, these blocks give you more options to express your creativity and make your post stand out. The Gutenberg editor is perfect for websites meant to appeal people with its looks and media content. You can use it to create the most advanced look for your site by choosing to place and adjust your content strategically to appeal to your visitors.

How to install Gutenberg?

If you have a WordPress website, you should have got a pop up telling you about a new editor. You just had to click on that pop-up and start using the Gutenberg Editor for creating your posts You can even give them a great layout now.

Till the release of the WordPress 5.0, it was available as a plugin. However, Gutenberg Editor is now the default editor. But you always have the option to disable Gutenberg Editor and continue with the classic editor via use of a free plugin.

As of writing this, Gutenberg Editor had more than 2 lakh active installations and is active in 45 languages. If we check the ratings, we see that the opinions of the vast majority of users are divided and so far it is not great.

A lot of people are still not being able to welcome the huge change that the Gutenberg editor has brought in. Unlike the Classic Editor, Gutenberg is a lot more complex, with having to add all the blocks and elements separately for each new paragraph. So there is a learning curve that comes in with this editor. And that’s okay because with every new invention there is something new to be learned. Gutenberg is no exception.

Now that we are familiar about Gutenberg Editor, let us see how to use it on your website.

Getting Started With Gutenberg

If you are using the WordPress version 5.0, then Gutenberg is surely your default editor. Unless, of course, if you have installed the old classic editor plugin. So let’s check out how easy it is to use this editor.

So this is how your editor will look like.

In the above editor, the ‘+’ sign lets you add new blocks to your page or post.

Adding New Blocks

To add a new block to your draft, you just need to click on the ‘+’ sign on the left top corner of your document. You will then have a small screen pop up asking you to choose your content type. Select the paragraph option, if you want to type your text. If not, choose the block type according to your requirement.

Now if you want to style your text, you can use the basic styling options that will automatically appear above your block everytime you hover over it. So you have the bold, italics, underline, alignment and insert link option here.

But if you want more advanced styling options, you can access them on the right-hand side of your screen under the Block tab. Just click on the block you want to make the changes and continue making the edits. You can change the font size and color, add a different background and more.

Adding a Non-Text Block

Adding a non-text block is as easy as adding a text block. Just click on the ‘+’ sign on the top left corner and select the image option to insert an image.

https://alienwp.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Uploading-images-gif.webm

You will then have the option to upload the image from your computer. This is similar to uploading an image in your classic editor. The image will be stored in your media library and you can then have it in your post.

Here’s how it will appear on your editor.

To the right side of your screen, you can see the options to insert your tags, alter your image size etc.

Uploading an audio file, a gallery of images, a cover needs you to follow the same process. Just select the type of content and upload the file from your computer.

Let’s now check how to insert a quote. Just click on the ‘+’ sign again and select the Quote option. Type in your quote for it to reflect on your page or post. To delete the quote block keep clicking on the backspace button until you have it removed.

https://alienwp.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Quotes.webm

Adding Columns

To add columns to your draft, just click on the ‘+’ sign to add a new block. Now go to Layout elements.

You will have the following options to select from. Select the Columns option to add it to your draft.

Your columns will reflect like this on your screen.

You can also select the buttons, page breaks, separators, read more option, that are all available under the Layout Elements.

Rearranging Individual Blocks

Sometime after creating your draft, you may feel that a certain block should have been below or above another. So what are the options to rearrange them?

Gutenberg allows you to do that too. You just have to hover over the block you want to rearrange. You will see 2 Up and Down arrows appear on the left side of your block. Use them to place your block in the required position.

You can also use the drag and drop option by clicking on the six dots that will appear between the Up and Down arrows.

Using The Gutenberg Shortcuts

Now unlike the Classic Editor, Gutenberg comes with a long list of shortcuts that can be used for quick results. These are the additional shortcuts that you will get to use other than the standard formatting ones.

You can open the shortcuts list by clicking on Alt+shift+H. You will have the following pop up on your screen.

Creating Reusable Blocks

So with Gutenberg, you can also create a bunch of reusable blocks that can be used later for any other post or page that you create. These blocks can be named separately to easily identify them at the time of using them later.

To create them, you will first have to select the block you want to include. Now click on the 3 dots icon. You will see several options pop up. Select the ‘Add to Reusable Blocks’ option.

In the beginning, Gutenberg may seem like a bit too much, especially if you have loved the classic editor. With all the block creation and design options, you may find it a bit confusing. But once you get used to it, you will surely love it with all its flexibilities.

Adding Buttons With Gutenberg

Adding buttons has never previously been so easy on WordPress. In the classic editor you had to use shortcodes or CSS to add buttons to your draft, but here things are completely different.

To add a button to your post, you simply click on the ‘+’ just where you want your button to be. Now go-to Layout Elements>Buttons

Your button will appear on your screen now. You can add the link to which your visitors should be directed on clicking on the button.

https://alienwp.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Buttons.webm

The default button appears to be oval in shape and black in color. You, however, can change the button style and color to complement your website design. To make these changes, you will see the option on the right side of your screen. Here you can select the button shape which comes in 3 different styles.

Rounded
Outlined
Squared

You can choose whichever you want. You can also change the background color of your buttons. You have a whole lot of bright and fancy colors to choose from. The font texts can also be customized.

Can You Deactivate Gutenberg?

Although Gutenberg is a great option for content and media-rich websites, you may or may not be too fond of it in the beginning. So what if you don’t like the new editor experience?

Well, you simply go back and install the old editor. Since Gutenberg is currently the default editor, if you want to remove it, you will have to install the old classic editor which is available in the form of a plugin. The plugin already has more than 2 million downloads.

Uninstalling Gutenberg & Activating The Classic Editor

To go back to your old Classic Editor, go to your Dashboard>Plugins>Add New. Now, look up for the Classic Editor Plugin. Once you find it just go ahead and click on the install and Activate button.

I already have the plugin installed on my site. Since it is currently deactivated it appears with the Update button. But if you have not installed it before the Update Now button will appear as Install Now at your end.

Once your plugin is activated, you can get back to the old editor and start working just like you used to before Gutenberg popped up. Here is a screenshot of how your editor will now appear.

Conclusion

The Gutenberg Editor, without a doubt, the new face of WordPress. Although currently, it does have many cons, the developers are doing a great work resolving some of the queries users were facing. Soon you may be able to use this editor without any problem. Only time will tell whether the Gutenberg Editor has fulfilled all that it was supposed to do.

How To Translate A WordPress Plugin In Your Language

Kaveri — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 12:32:56 +0000

WordPress is one of the most versatile platforms that has revolutionized the concept of web building altogether. The thousands of plugins and themes available in the WordPress market has immensely contributed to making things better and easier.

However, the only problem is that, by default, all of these resources are available in the English language. Because of the vast popularity of WordPress, and its widespread use by webmasters, entrepreneurs, bloggers, and individual professionals alike, it is not unlikely to expect people to want to access it in other major languages as well.

What if you are not an English speaker and you still want to use WordPress and its resources, that too in your own language? Although that sounds like a difficult task, WordPress allows you to do so. You can easily localize any theme or plugin and even WordPress as a whole to your language and enjoy its brilliant features.

You can contribute to plugin translations for your own use or for the benefit of others. It will not only help you use the plugin in the language you best understand but will also let others use it in the future.

In today’s post, we will focus on how to translate a WordPress Plugin in any other language.

How To Translate a Plugin That You Use On Your Site

You might be using various WordPress plugins on your website to enhance your functionality and services. You will notice that most of these plugins are available in English which is considered to be the universally accepted language.

But not everyone speaks or understands English. You might be one of them. That, however, doesn’t stop you from using this plugin. You can easily have your plugin in your own language. There are hundreds of people who contribute their plugin or theme translations to the WordPress community so that others can use it for their benefit.

You can be one of them too. To start contributing to translations you will have to first register for an account on wordpress.org. Now visit the page of the plugin that you want to translate.

You might find a line that says “The plugin is also available in X language. Help improve its translation”. By clicking on this line you will see all the languages that WordPress supports. You will also see the progress of translations next to each language.

If you click on those percentages you will see the list of strings that have either been accepted for translations or are awaiting approval.

You can contribute a translation for those strings without a translation available. For that just click on one of those strings, make your own contributions using the basic editor. Once done your translations will be checked by the WordPress Polyglot Team. When the team will approve your translations, you will see the translation strings increase. So everytime someone makes a translation, these strings will keep increasing.

You may not want to be a regular contributor, but there might be a specific plugin that you want to translate into a different language. For that, you will first have to install a plugin that will help you in the localization process. This is the Loco Translate plugin which is a free product available in the WordPress directory.

About Loco Translate

Loco Translate is an amazing plugin that lets you translate your themes and plugins to any other language you want. With more than 600,000 installations, Loco Translate has been considered to be one of the most popular translation plugins in the market.

This plugin simplifies the process of translating your plugins and themes and lets you do so without writing a single line of code. Once the plugin is installed on your WordPress site, it becomes easier for you to create and update language files directly into your WordPress theme or plugin.

It also allows you to use the built-in WordPress locale codes, extract translate-able strings from your source code, protect your language directory for saving custom translations and much more.

This plugin is compatible with the latest versions of WordPress and works beautifully with tons of other plugins that you might have installed on your site. The PO file editor also supports various shortcuts to make your translation process faster. Here are some of the shortcuts that it supports –

Done and Next: Ctrl ↵
Next string: Ctrl ↓
Previous string: Ctrl ↑
Next untranslated: Shift Ctrl ↓

These are just a few. There are many other shortcuts that you can use with this plugin.

Let us now look at how this plugin works.

Translating Your Plugins With Loco Translate Plugin

Once Loco Translate is successfully installed and activated on your site, you can start localizing your plugins directly from your dashboard. This can be either a specific plugin or the entire set of plugins that you are using on your site. To begin the process, start by going to your dashboard and then to Loco Translate>Plugins page.

The list of activated plugins on your site will be reflected on your screen. Now you can choose the plugin that you want to translate. Suppose we want to translate the WP Forms Lite plugin that is currently active on the site. For that, we will have to click on the plugin name which will show us the following page.

You will see various languages on your screen along with the translation process stats, file info, last modified date along with other information. WP Forms Lite currently allows you to translate it into three different languages. Russian, French, and German.

If your preferred language is one of the languages on the list, then it becomes even more simple for you to localize your site. Suppose you want it to be translated to the German language, just click on German and you are done. Your site will be automatically translated into German.

Selecting a New Language

If your language is not one of those listed on the plugin, then you can click on the New Language option at the top just below the plugin name.

You will now be redirected to the following page.

On this page, you are supposed to choose the language in which you want your plugin to be translated. For that, you will get two options. One is WordPress language. If you set this language to the WordPress admin area, then the site will automatically start using this language.

The second option is a custom language. Here we will choose a new language with the first option. In the next step, you will have to select the location where these translation files are to be stored. Generally, the Loco Translate plugin recommends you to save all of these files in its own folder. But if you want you can change the location.

When you are done with the settings, click on the ‘start translating’ button for the process to begin.

Loco Translate comes with a built-in editor. With the help of this editor, Loco Translate will reflect the list of strings that it will compile for the plugin that is to be translated.

You will see the source text and below that the translation field will also be reflected you.

Now you can enter the translations to the source string and select the Next string to start translating. To the right-hand side, you will see a small comment box popping up. This box can be used to save all your little notes that come up while you are translating your plugin.

It can also be used by any other user who is working with you on the translation. The plugin also lets you check your translation progress. It will show you the number of strings that were translated and the ones that are remaining.

Managing Your Translations

It’s easy to manage your translations with Loco Translate. You will see various buttons and labels on the top of your editor that lets you manage your work.

You can also trace the progress of your translations in terms of your advancing percentage and the number of strings that have been translated or are yet to be translated.

Below that you will find a few more options like Save, Sync, Revert and Fuzzy. I am sure you know what these buttons will do for you. The last one called the Fuzzy button lets you save you mark your strings if you are not very sure of it. You can then work on it for as many numbers of times as you want before you finally save it.

You can even leave the fuzzy lines to be worked upon later and exclude them from being included in the translation files. These can also be translated by someone else in the future.

You can also search for a specific string and edit them if you want. Just type the line in the search box and press enter to locate it. These lines can then be translated easily.

You can also download the PO, MO or POT files of your translations. The download icons appear towards the right end of this row.

Activating Your Translations

Once your translations are complete its time for you to activate them on your site. You won’t find any specific buttons to activate these translations. You will instead have to switch the language of your WordPress site. For that, you will have to go to – Settings > General. On this tab find the “Site Language” option. Now switch the language to the one you translated the plugin to. You can save your changes for the results.

Once that is done you can open the plugin’s settings to see the translation in action.

Conclusion

There are other ways through which you can translate your plugins. But Loco Translate is one of the most featured plugins that can help you translate your themes or plugins easily.

Although it might be a little time-consuming to have it in a language that is not very popular among WordPress users, it is still a very good way to have your plugins in a language you can best understand. By contributing your translations strings you also help many others use the language for themselves too. It also makes it easier for other contributors to work on it for good.

As the translation system improves, you will find more strings on your plugin which we hope will only improve your experience translating themes and plugin. We hope this guide was useful to you. Let us know if you have any queries. We would love to hear from you.

How To Submit Your WordPress Plugin or Theme to the Official Directory

Kaveri — Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:29:40 +0000

Since its launch in 2003, WordPress has grown to be the most popular and user-friendly Content Management System(CMS) in the world. The official plugin directory was created to meet the needs of having a common set of tools and a common working area for all the WordPress plugin and theme developers.

Its plugin repository, loaded with thousands of plugins is one of the primary reasons why WordPress has emerged as an amazing platform to work with. All of the plugins in WordPress repository is free to use and distribute.

This is what WordPress has to say about their plugin repository – “The goal of the WordPress Plugin Directory is to provide a safe place for all WordPress users – from the non-technical to the developer – to download plugins that are consistent with the goals of the WordPress project.”

In this article we will describe how you can submit your plugins and theme’s to the official directories along with the benefits that it offers.

Why Submit your plugin to the repository?

Now if you are wandering why you might need to host your plugin at the WP Directory, here are a few reasons to do so –

Maintain Statistics – By uploading your plugin, you can keep track of how many times your plugin has been downloaded and when.
Builds Credibility –Having your plugin at the official repository builds your credibility as a developer. Also, WordPress users tends to have more trust on plugins that are a part of the repository.
Feedback and Reviews – The WP Repository provides a centralized location where users who have downloaded and used your plugin, can rate your plugin, provide feedbacks, comments, bug reports and suggestions on improving your plugin.
Exposure –When you submit your plugin to the repository, you are making it available to the entire WordPress community. This gives your plugin a good exposure, which in turn may lead to client acquisition and even PayPal donations.
Easily Upgradable –With SVN, releasing plugin upgrades and notification to users is all very easy to do.

Along with the above mentioned, developers also enjoy the benefits of hosting their plugin for free, managing their code using SVN Client, track bugs and provide extensive documentation.

How to Submit a WordPress Plugin

Before adding your plugin, please check the official guidelines to follow before starting the submission process as follows:

The plugin must comply with the GPL, GPL2 or a GPL-Compatible license.
The developers have to take sole responsibility of the contents and actions of their plugins
A stable version of the plugin must be hosted in the repository
No trialware is permitted and all functionalities must be made available without any payment or upgrade.
Plugins should not track user’s activity without their prior consent

Create an Account

Needless to say, if you want to submit a plugin, first you need to register yourself at WordPress.org and create an account. This is fairly simple to do.

Go to wordpress.org, then click on the plugins tab and then on register at the top right corner. Fill in the details and click on Create Account

Have your plugin ready along with its ReadMe.txt file

Aside from having your plugin built and ready for installation, you are also required to create a Readme.txt file which will contain detailed description about your plugin.

WordPress has a pre-defined standard for ReadMe.txt and we recommend sticking to it. Typically, the ReadMe.txt file should contain the following –

=== Plugin Name ===
Contributors: (this should be a list of wordpress.org userid's)
Donate link: http://example.com/
Tags: comments, spam
Requires at least: 3.0.1
Tested up to: 3.4
Requires PHP: 5.2.4
Stable tag: 4.3
License: GPLv2 or later
License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

Here is a short description of the plugin. This should be no more than 150 characters. No markup here.

Once you have completed the ReadMe.txt file, run it through the official validator to get it approved.

Submitting Your Plugin

Now it’s time to submit your plugin for manual review. Login to your WordPress account and click on Plugins tab. Head over to WordPress Developer Center -> Add Your Plugin. You will be presented with the following page

Add a unique plugin name for your plugin and make sure it’s final since you can’t change the name once you are granted access to the repository.

Give an overall description for your plugin. You can skip much of the details here since everything is already included in the ReadMe.txt file

In the Plugin URL section, specify the location of where your plugin is uploaded. You may upload you compressed plugin file to your website. In case you don’t have a website, there are several other third party websites like Dropbox.com, mediafire.com or Google Drive where you can upload your plugin and then paste the link here.

Once you are done filling up the information, click on Send Post and then wait for the approval. The waiting period may be of several hours so just be patient.

If everything looks good, your plugin will be approved. Eventuallyyou will receive an email with all the credentials you need to access the subversion repository.

Setting up the Subversion repository

Subversion, basically is an open-source software that acts like a version control tool and keeps track of all the changes made to the plugin, along with listing all of the previous versions of your plugin.

The subversion repository is where you will upload and store your plugin. The WordPress system will use the files stored in the subversion repository to generate the web-page for your plugin. You can either use the command line or other GUI subversion clients such as SVN Tortoise.

For this tutorial we will be using the TortoiseSVN. So go ahead,Download and install the software. Installation is pretty simple, similar to the installation of other Windows Applications.

Once the installation is complete, follow the below mentioned steps-

Head over to the directory on your PC where you want your SVN repository to live in.

Right Click on the directory and click on SVN Checkout, which should present you with the following menu

In the “URL of Repository” field, enter the URL that you had received from the WordPress team on your plugin approval email.

In the “Checkout Directory”, enter the location of your local directory. This is where all your downloaded plugin files will be stored locally.

For the rest of the options, you may keep it the way it is.

Finally, click on the OK button.

All the files and the directories that exists in the WordPress SVN repository will now be downloaded to your computer in the specified directory.

Once the operation is completed, you will notice a few new directories are being created inside your local directory with the same name as in the SVN directory.

About the Directory Structure

Screenshots, icons and headers go into the /assets/ directory
The/trunk/ is the working directory, where you do all your main development. All the main files are placed inside this directory
Any Major Updates to your plugin are stored in the /branches/
The revisions of your plugin are stored in the /tags/ This is where the backups for each version of your plugin are stored.

To summarize, place all your main files in the /trunk/ directory and for the future versions of your plugin, store the major updates in the /branches/ directory and minor updates in the /tags/ directory.

The primary use of subversion is that, any changes made to your local files are automatically copied to the SVN repository on the WordPress server.

Committing Changes

Now that we are done with setting up the repository, we can now work on uploading our plugin to the repository.

First we need to add all our files to the source control. To do that, open the trunk folder select all the plugin files and folders including your readme.txt file. Then Right click and select Add

This will instruct subversion to track all these files.

Again right click and click on SVN Commit

You will now be presented with the following screenshot

In the top box, you can specify a simple message indicating the version of your plugin.

Below, you will see a list of files. Select those files that you want to be tracked in the repository.

Note: if you find a file thumbs.db, you can unselect it since it is a windows file and has nothing to do with the plugin.

Click on

Next you will be prompted with a login page. Enter your WordPress username and password and click on

The files should now upload to the SVN repository from your computer. An update log will appear on your screen, showing the uploaded files and a bold Completed message once it’s done.

Finally click on OK and your plugin is now publically available from the WordPress Plugins directory.

Adding Revision to tags directory

We have to tag our plugin to have it actually published. The steps are –

Navigate inside your trunk directory in your local computer. Right click on blank space and select TortoiseSVN -> Branch/tag

Next, in the “To path” field, edit the location from /trunk/ to /tags/. Most subversion clients by default sets this field with the trunk So make sure to change it as mentioned above.

Check “Specific revision in repository”, located in the middle section of the window.

Click OK

Enter your WordPress username and password in the following login page and click on

You will now be presented with a window indicating that the task is complete. Click OK

Finally go to the tags directory, right-click and choose SVN Update. This will download all the revision to your computer from the SVN repository.

That all there is to uploading your plugin and making it available in the plugin repository.

How to Submit a WordPress Theme

The WordPress theme directory is where the WP themes live. It is the perfect place to find safe and elegant themes for your WP website. These themes are submitted by developers around the globe. However, enlisting your theme in their repository is no piece of cake, as there are several conditions and requirement to it, aside from a long waiting period.

Here we will discuss about how to upload a theme to WordPress.org theme repository along with the various criteria needed to get your theme approved by the WordPress Community.

WordPress Themes Guidelines

WordPress is quite strict when it comes to uploading themes or plugins. They have a pre-defined set of guidelines that one has to follow during the development process, deviating from which may lead to rejection of your theme. WordPress makes sure that only high-quality and secure themes becomes a part of their repository.

It is highly advised to go through their official Theme Requirements page before you start your development process.

Some of the coding guidelines that you need to meet are –

It should be free of any PHP or JavaScript errors.
All input data should be validated and sanitized prior to entering into the database along with proper escaping of output data, since it is critical to developing a secure and safe theme
It should have a valid DOCTYPE declaration and include language_attributes
All PHP functions and classes are required to be prefixed.
Non-presentational hooks should not be removed or modified
JavaScript and CSS should not be included in headers and should be linked as an external file.
Provision for an extensive and offline documentation

Apart from the above mentioned coding rules, there are several other guidelines that a developer needs to follow –

The theme must be GPL, GPL2 or GPL-compatible licensed
All theme text strings are to be translatable
The words – WordPress, Theme should not be used as part of the theme’s name
WordPress should be spelt in that exact way, with an upper case W and P, in any public facing text
Themes cannot include plugins and can recommend only those plugins which are available in the WP plugin repository

These list of theme guidelines goes on with several other requirements.

Setting Up Your Development Environment

After you have familiarized yourself with the various guidelines, it’s time to develop and test your theme. To run and test your theme, you need to setup a WordPress development environment on your local machine, which in a nutshell is a collection of tools to safely test your project before they go live. The steps are mentioned below –

Download a web server application

Since WordPress is PHP based, you will need a webserver software locally installed on your system. Download and install a local server stack such as XAMPP, WAMP or MAMP on your local computer.

In addition, you will also require a text editor to write your code. You can choose any text editor you want like SublimeText, Notepad, etc.

Enable Debugging

Before you start coding, it is important to enable WordPress’s debugging function. This function enables WordPress to display any errors generated by your code.

Open your WordPress installation’s wp-config.php file.

Change	define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, false );
To	define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, true );

Import Theme Unit Test data

Next you need to import the Theme Unit Test Data, which will fill your local WordPress installation with dummy test data, giving a real feel of how your theme will look and perform with different content and layouts.

Installing Plugins

Additionally, you can install the following plugins to further enhance your development environment

Debug bar – this add an admin bar, providing a central debugging location
Query Monitor–for debugging your database queries
Developer –to optimize the environment and ensuring code quality
Theme Check–This plugin checks if your theme is in compliance with the latest WordPress standards and practices.

Check your Theme

By this time, you are almost ready with your theme. But before publishing your theme, you need to do the following –

Check your theme’s compatibility with different browsers. Also install the theme across various devices and screen sizes to check its layout.
Use the Theme Check Plugin to review your theme’s code
Double check your HTML,CSS and JavaScript to make sure it does not throw any errors.
Go through the guidelines and recommendations once again, for the last time

If everything is fine, you can go ahead with uploading your theme.

Uploading your theme

To upload your theme, login to your WordPress account
Navigate to https://wordpress.org/themes/upload/and then upload your theme’s .zip archive
During the uploading process, your theme may run against a series of pre-set checks to test your theme. Be Patient!

Theme Review

Once your theme has been submitted, it will be reviewed by a group of WordPress volunteers, whose sole responsibility is to review the submitted themes and approve or disapprove it. This approval process may take months to complete and so being patient about it is perhaps the only thing you can do.

During the review process, you may receive an email if there are any issues with your theme. Fix the issues and resubmit the theme.

When all the issues are resolved and your theme has met all the requirement, it will be approved by the reviewer.

Theme Approval

If you are expecting your theme to go live after approval, then sadly you are mistaken. After your theme has passed the initial review, next it is appended to another queue, where it will be thoroughly reviewed by an admin team member or a key reviewer.

This process again is time consuming and you might need to wait for another month or so, depending on where your theme is placed in the admin review queue.

You can also check the current theme approval queue using this link

https://themes.trac.wordpress.org.

Only when all the issues generated at this phase are resolved, your theme will get the final approval and ultimately go live. You will also receive an email from the WordPress team indicating the same.

Conclusion

If you are a developer, then consider making this effort to publish your plugins or themes in the WordPress repository. Not only will you be making a big contribution to the online community, you will also be building your own credibility as a proficient developer.

And even though, the entire process may extend up to several months, it’s worth spending that time to get your theme published.

How To Display Your Instagram Pictures On Your WordPress Blog

Kaveri — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 10:45:36 +0000

It has been proved that beautiful photographs have great potential to attract huge traffic to your website. And what can be a better idea than displaying your Instagram pictures on your WordPress blog.

Instagram currently has more than 280 million active users. With that big a number, we don’t think there is any need to tell you how you can benefit by integrating your Instagram account into your WordPress website.

Showing your Instagram pictures on your WP blog has many advantages for bloggers and entrepreneurs. Firstly, it helps you gain traffic to your site, which consequently can help your business grow faster.

Secondly, if you have a good skill at capturing beautiful moments through your photography, you can quickly increase your followers through those pictures on your blog. You can then continue to keep them engaged with the brand that you have created so far.

Many entrepreneurs are taking full advantage of Instagram to build a relationship with your followers by engaging them with their stunning posts. This also encourages their followers to share the content with others which ultimately is only increasing your outreach.

Not just this. Your pictures can also help you increase brand awareness by sharing information through visual effects that appeals to people much faster than your written content would. Afterall, only a glance is enough to do its bit. There is so much you can do with pictures and videos.

In today’s post, we will tell you how to automatically post your Instagram pictures on your WordPress blog. But before that let’s see how to keep your personal stuff private and still connect your Instagram posts to your WordPress blog.

How To Keep Personal Stuff Private While Posting On Your Blog

Not everyone Instagram user likes keeping their accounts open to the public. If you are a new user and is one of them then you might be wondering how to keep your personal stuff private if your posts automatically get shared on your blog.

Well, that is not a very tough thing to do. You just need to create another account which is meant only for those pictures that you want to be shared on your blog.

You can keep this account open to the public so that your feeds get displayed to other users and you get discovered by them. The key to gain more followers on your Instagram account is to be very creative with whatever you post on your account. so try bringing out the most artistic side of you and see how your insta account gets flooded with thousands of followers.

That being said, let us now move on to see how you can display your new Insta posts on your WordPress blog.

How To Post Your Instagram Pictures On Your WordPress Blog?

There are two methods by which you can post your Instagram pictures on your WordPress blog. Let’s see each one of them in detail.

1. Manual Selecting Which Post To Display On Your Blog

With the release of the WordPress version 3.5, you have the possibility of embedding your Instagram pictures directly on your website. To do that the first step obviously is to open an account through which you want your pictures to be shared.

Once your account is active, you can start sharing your pictures and follow people of the same interest group. As mentioned earlier, you should keep your account settings open to the public if you want more followers to follow your posts.

By doing so your pictures gets reflected on other users feed and people can even follow you for more updates. Now if you want your pictures to be shown on your blog or website, every time you upload a new picture, you will have to find out the embed link of the picture that you want in your blog.

Image Source: WPWarfare

You will find this link just next to the comment box.click on the three dots and you will find three options being displayed. Click on the embed option and click on the copy embed code option. A message on your computer screen will confirm that your link has been copied once that is done.

Image Source: WPWarfare

In the next step, you will have to paste the embed code that you have just copied. To do that open your WordPress website dashboard and go to the page where you want your picture to be shown. Now paste the embed code on your WordPress Text Editor.

Image Source: WPWarfare

And there you are. Your Instagram picture will now be reflected on your WordPress site too. Another way to do it is by simply copying the image URL and pasting it on the text editor of your site.

The images that you will see on your site is generally of 612 px width. If that is the size you want for your images, you can directly paste the code on your site’s text editor. But if you want a smaller or bigger size of the image, you will have to use the following code to alter its size.

instagram url = “https://www.your image’s url” width = “550”

The image that you will now see on your blog will have a width of 550 px. You can set the image size as per your need.

Sharing your instagram posts on you blog or website by this method is one of the simplest ways and it needs no coding or other professional knowledge of web design. This method works beautifully on almost all types of websites and can be done on sites that are powered by WordPress too.

2. Reflecting Instagram Photos Automatically On Your Website

Sometimes you might want to dedicate one a full blog post to display the images that you just uploaded on your Instagram account. In this step we will tell you how to do it.

For that, you will first have to open an account on IFTTT. For those of you who doesnot know what IFTTT is, it is a platform through which you can bring all your apps together and each of them can interact with the other and help you stay even more connected with your friends and followers.

IFTT is a free online tool and there are no charges for using it. Once your account is created and you are logged into your account, you will need to find the MyApplets option.

When you click on this option you will see another option which says NewApplet. You will now have to click on this option to get started.

In the next step you will have to connect your Instagram account by locating Instagram on IFTTT. For doing that you will see an option saying ‘+this’. You can click on this option and locate Instagram to activate your account.

Now that your Instagram account is activated, you will be asked to login to your account and authorize IFTTT to access your account.

Following this, you will be asked to choose a trigger.

This will take you to an option which says, ‘If this then +that’. Click on the +that statement. This step will help you select what exactly you want to do with your pictures.

In the third step you will have to locate WordPress as your action service.

You will now be asked to connect WordPress to IFTTT. A popup box will appear with the connect option. Click on the Connect button after entering the URL of your WordPress site, the admin username and your password.

Now you will have to select the action that you want to take. This can be done either by creating a blog post with new Instagram photos or create an entire post for photographs.

Suppose you select the option to create a photo post. For either of the options, you will have to map your Instagram fields to your WordPress site. For this you can fill up all the fields that you think is important for you. For example, you can add alt tags, custom caption etc.

The last thing for you now is to save your settings by clicking on the finish button. And that’s it. You are ready to share all your Instagram pictures on your WordPress blog.Just go ahead and upload a beautiful picture on your Instagram account and check for the same picture up on your blog.

3. Displaying Your Latest Instagram Uploads on Your Site Using a Plugin

Our third method to make your Instagram pictures appear on hyour WordPress blog is by using a plugin. We will use the plugin called Instagram Feed by Smash Balloon which is a free plugin that can be downloaded directly on your WordPress site’s dashboard.

By using this plugin you can skip all the repititive work of embeding the code or writing a code each time you want your pictures on your blog.

After the plugin s installed on your site, you will see the plugin name appear on the left side of your admin panel.

You will have to authorize the plugin first before you start using its features. To get your plugin authorized, log in to your Instagram account. Now click on the ‘Log in and get my Access Token and User ID’ that will appear under the
Configure option of the plugin settings.

By doing this you will allow the plugin to access your photos on Instagram. The plugin will then bring you back to the plugin page in WordPress with your access token and user ID which will be already generated.

Copy the Access token and User ID and paste them in the boxes as shown below.

Save the changes that you have just made and move on to the Customise tab. In this section you can size of your feed. This part also allows you to set the background color of your feed. You can even set how many pictures you want to display in each columns.

For the image resolution option, although by default the plugin recommends the auto-detect option, you can set your own image resolution if you want.

You also have the liberty to change the padding and the spacing between the pictures. When you are satisfied with the changes that you have made, go ahead and save your settings.

In the next tab, you will see the Display your feed option.

In this tab, you will see a shortcode for your feed. With this shortcode, you can make your pictures visible on any part of your website. You just need to copy this code and paste it into the text editor or the widget text element.

If you want your photos to appear differently on your website, you have an option for that too. However, you will have to upgrade your plugin to the Pro version to enjoy services like displaying hashtag instead of the pictures and so on.

You can also display different users in a single feed. Here is an example :

[instagram-feed id=”ANOTHER_USER_ID, YET_ANOTHER_USER_ID” num=4 cols=4 showfollow=false]

Other Plugins To Integrate Instagram With WordPress Site

Apart from the one mentioned above, you can try out the following plugins to make your Instagram pictures visible on your WordPress blog.

Instagram Journal

This is an amazing WordPress plugin that will help you display your Instagram posts directly on your blog. This is one of the most elegant, responsive and flexible plugins that is compatible across different browsers. It comes with tons of amazing features.

From specifying your picture location, adding multiple hashtags, pulling in popular posts from Instagram feed and more, this plugin allows you to do so much flexibility that you are definitely gonna love it.

WP Instagram Widget

The WP Instagram Widget is a free WordPress plugin that has more than 200,000 active installations. Using this plugin is probably one of the easiest ways to integrate your Instagram account with your WordPress site.

The plugin has been designed with the motto of keeping the user interface as simple as possible. It gives you all the freedom to come up with the most elegant and stylish design that suits your needs and interest.

Feed Them Social

This is another free plugin that you might want to consider for all the amazing features that it offers. This plugin responds beautifully to devices of all sizes and looks equally stunning on desktops, laptops and mobile devices.

This plugin not only works on Instagram, but also works on other social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

This plugin is a brilliant option to display content from various social media platforms in your blog. Moreover, you donot necessarily have to share content from your accounts only. You can share content from others feed as well. This can either be a photograph or even be a video.

This plugin already has 60,000 plus active users and has been rated as a good choice by most of them.

Conclusion

Displaying your Instagram pictures on your WordPress blog can definitely help you handle your social media accounts more effectively. It not only gets your more traffic to your website but also makes your WordPress blog appear visually appealing.

Many entrepreneurs have tried this method and found that the results are amazing. Have you tries sharing your Instagram pictures on your WordPress blog yet?

Which method did you try ? Did it help you boost your website traffic? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

How To Add Infinite Scroll To Your WordPress Site

Kaveri — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 10:14:06 +0000

Adding infinite scroll to your WordPress site is a great way to make your visitors stick around for longer. By adding Infinite Scroll to your site, you make sure that your page automatically loads new content every time your visitors reaches the end of the page.

So unlike the old trend where you would have to click on the Next button to go to the following page for more content, infinite scrolling will automatically load more content for the visitors.

Many authority sites have been using the Infinite Scrolling feature to create a seamless user experience by making things effortless and distraction free. What made this feature more popular is the extreme success it achieved when social media giants like Facebook and Twitter used it as a strategy to keep its visitors glued to it.

Infinite Scroll, Image by The End Result.

In this tutorial, we will tell you how to add infinite scroll to your WordPress site easily and efficiently. But first let’s answer a few other things you need to know before you add this feature to your site.

Is Your Site Suited To Use Infinite Scroll?

Before using the Infinite Scroll feature on your website, it is good to find out whether this feature is a good fit for your website. Not every website is meant to use this feature. For example, websites that want its visitors to perform a particular task like searching for a specific product or looking up for a specific content, should not be using this feature.

This is because this feature might make your visitors overwhelmed with the amount of information they can see. Besides they might just get distracted and get diverted from what they were looking for. This in return can affect your site’s goal.

This feature is a big no-no for e-commerce sites. It, however, works great with sites that contain a lot of content that is regularly posted and updated. You should also definitely use this feature on blogs and websites that publish posts of equal importance and more or less of the similar length.

Does This Feature Have Any Negative Impact

One of the major flaws that I came across is that the footer links never show up on the Home page of your blog where you generally display your latest posts. This is not a great thing that you would want to happen on your site.

Another drawback about these plugins is that it might sometimes overwhelm the readers with the amount of content that is displayed all at once. Many visitors also do not like this feature because they fail to relocate the content they read seconds ago. And instead of making things easier, they get stuck locating the content that was just lost.

What Are the Positive Effects Of This Feature

Even though the Infinite Scroll feature has a few drawbacks, it comes with its own set of advantages too. And people who have used this feature on their site have loved it for this reason.

Using the Infinite Scroll feature is one of the best ways to keep your readers and visitors stick around for longer. By using this feature you can easily keep your readers engaged on your posts by continuosuly producing interesting content for them. This would subsequently result in making them stay on your site for longer. This is a great way to decrease the bounce rate of your site.

That’s not the end. This feature also simplifies the process of navigating to other pages of your site. By doing that you enhance the user experience of your site. And readers love visiting sites that are easy to navigate.

Let us now look at how this feature can be added to your WordPress site.

How To Add Infinite scroll To Your WordPress Site?

Adding the Infinite Scrolling feature to your WordPress site is not a very complex task, provided you have a theme that is coded well enough to support such a feature. However, this doesn’t at all mean that you would not be able to add this feature to your site if your theme does not support it.

In today’s post, we will tell you 2 different ways of adding this feature to your website.

Manually Method By Coding
Through Plugins

1. Adding Infinite Scroll Manually By Coding

Freelance Web Developer Tyler Longren offers some amazing solutions for adding this feature to sites with themes that do not support the feature.

For that let us first activate Infinite Scroll. This can be easily done by adding the following code to your theme’s function .php file.
function mytheme_infinite_scroll_init() { add_theme_support( ‘infinite-scroll’, array( ‘container’ => ‘content’, ‘render’ => ‘mytheme_infinite_scroll_render’, ‘footer’ => ‘wrapper’, ) ); } add_action( ‘init’, ‘mytheme_infinite_scroll_init’ );
In the next step, you will have to setup function for the Render Parameter. Render Parameter is the function in the code that is responsible for loading new posts for endless scrolling.

In this case, it is the mytheme_infinite_scroll_init. Now add the following snippet to the function .php file. This is a basic implementation that can be used with the Jetpack Plugin, which is a free plugin that can be easily activated at the backend of your site.

function mytheme_infinite_scroll_render() { get_template_part( ‘loop’ ); }

And that’s it. Your infinite scroll should start working as soon as this is done. But wait. Is it still not working? Well in that case, we would suggest you to consider changing your theme altogether. Because like most modern themes, yours is not probably built to support the function.

Let us now move on to the second method.

2. Adding Infinite Scroll Feature By Using A Plugin

You can add this feature to your site by simply installing a theme that supports the function.
Let us consider the Infinite Scroll Plugin in this case which is a free plugin and can be downloaded directly from your website.

You just need to activate this plugin and start using it to get the feature running. It is a completely customizable plugin that quickly adapts to your site and theme. This plugin is compatible with RSS readers, browsers with Javascript and mobile devices. The best thing about this plugin is that it maintains a local database of various theme presets.

Let us now check out how this theme can be installed and activated on your website. You should, however, know that this plugin works only on the home page and not on the categories or tag/archive pages.

Once you install and activate this plugin, you will see a new menu under your settings tab. This will be reflected in the Infinite Scroll Menu.

Generally, you can start using it, without having to do any changes in the settings. But if your site is a customized one, you might have to change your settings slightly in order to make the plugin work smoothly without any interruption.

For this, you will have to go to the plugins settings page and select the ‘Selectors’ tab.

Under this tab, you will see that the fields are already filled to meet the standards of your theme. Your content is wrapped on the main page with the help of the content selector that is marked as div.

In our case it was #content. This is generally the standard content selector for most of the sites and might be the same for you too. So you can keep this part as it is. It was by default shown as #content div.post in our case.

But many bloggers want to wrap their post with an extra div called .post-container. This has two reasons.

First, when you use this separator, your content and the thumbnail gets split into two different grids. And secondly, it helps load your thumbnails easily.

You can use the plugin with its general settings too. But sometimes it may not load your thumbnail. This might negatively affect your SEO.

If you want to customize how your texts end or loads and how the image loads, you can do all of it under the General Options tab.

Top 5 Plugins To Add Infinite Scroll To Your Blog

Infinite Scroll is not the only plugin that you can use to add the Infinite scroll feature to your blog. There are many other great plugins too, which can be used to make this feature work on your website. Here are the top 5 plugins that you can use for the purpose.

JetPack Plugin

If you are not new to WordPress then JetPack must be a very familiar name to you. It is a free, all in one plugin that is loaded with tons of amazing features. Infinite Scroll is just one of them. However, this feature works only with themes that support it.

If your theme does not support it, you will have to add a very simple code to make it work for you. Here is the code that you need to use.

add_theme_support( 'infinite-scroll' , array ( 'container' => 'content' , 'footer' => 'page' , ) );

This should get your work done. But for those sites that use a theme that supports the feature can download the plugin and activate it directly from the dashboard.

Once that is done you need to activate the Jetpack Infinite Scroll module. This option is available in the Theme Enhancement section under the Settings menu. Here you just need to check the box which says ‘Load more posts as reader scrolls down’. Do not forget to Save your settings.

There you are. Infinite Scrolling feature is activated and ready to be used on your site.

2. DMD Infinite Scroll

DMD Infinite Scroll is a free WordPress plugin that comes with amazing features. You can use this plugin for Ajax loading too if you use WooCommerce on your site. It also paginates up to 10 posts in the same template.

The plugin automatically loads more content as soon as the user reaches the end of the page. It also has a fancy Load More Button which can be used to make people click on it for more content to load. So you can choose from either of the options – whichever suits you the best.

If your site has the e-commerce facility it will make your clients reach the top of the page every-time a product is being replaced. This plugin has multiple sets of settings and can be easily set up on your site.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, you have to go to the DMD Infinite Scroll option in the admin area. There you can select the theme you are using from the presets that will appear in the drop-down arrow.

If your theme is not listed on it, you will have to add the correct selectors.

3. YITH Infinite Scrolling

This is another brilliant WordPress Plugin that can be used to instantly add the Infinite Scroll feature to your site. This plugin comes with the easiest interface for users and has a simple and direct navigation. With more than 8000 active installations this plugin has been one of the most loved plugins for the Infinite Scroll feature.

This is an open source plugin, so if you think an idea can make it even better you can contribute to enhancing its features for the users. With this plugin, you can show more of your content at one go. This plugin comes with a direct and simple navigation so your users are gonna love it.

It is also compatible with mobile devices, so your users will get the same user experience on their mobile devices too. This plugin also offers a smooth transition effect.

To start using this plugin, you just have to install and activate it on your WordPress site. Once that is done, you can activate it right from your dashboard and start enjoying its features.

4. Auto Load Next Post

Just as the name suggests the Auto Load Next Post plugin helps you increase your page views by automatically loading the next post for your readers.

The JavaScript used to design the plugin loads the net post by inserting the content via a special template that matches the theme structure for a single post and places the content underneath the parent post within the main post container.

The JavaScript automatically detects whenever the reader is reading the next post and changes the URL to the one of the current posts. The process is repeated until there is no more post to be loaded. If you have not yet tried this plugin, it’s time you try it.

Sometimes after installing the plugin, you might be asked to integrate the plugin with your theme. This can be easily done by adding a single line of code below your functions.php file and then save it. Here is the code –

add_theme_support(‘auto-load-next-post’);

However, if you want to use this plugin, you should know one thing. It works on sites that are hosted on WordPress. So you will have to shift from WordPress.com to WordPress.org to be able to use this plugin.

5. Ajax Load More

This is another beautiful plugin that for lazy loading posts, single posts, pages, comments and more with Ajax powered queries. So when you use this plugin, it will load a certain amount of the content first and then slowly load the other section as and when you scroll down.

This plugin also lets you build some complex custom WordPress queries and generate shortcodes to your page through the content editor or directly into the template file.

You can also include multiple instances of Ajax Load more on a single page, post or template. The plugin also has the option to let you manage the repeater template across all sites in the network.

6. Ajax Pagination and Infinite Scroll