Brian Coords

Recently, I had the privilege to co-author a blog post for The Guthy-Jackson Charitable Foundation. The subject of our profile piece was Lisa McDaniel, a mother who lost her son to a rare auto-immune disease. She now spends her time educating and advocating in his honor. Read the full article.

Honoring a Son by Educating Thousands

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This article is a follow up to this previous post, which explored a method for adding CMB2 meta to the WP REST API. As CMB2 author Jason Sternberg mentioned in a comment on that post, WP REST API support was in the process of being built in at that time.

Now that time has come.

Just in time for the announcement that content endpoints are making it into WordPress 4.7, CMB2 published an update on github and on the plugin announcing full support for the WP REST API.

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Encryption, the ability to protect data as it is transferred across the internet, has entered the public debate and it’s not going anywhere. In fact it’s becoming more and more clear that as we transfer so much of our lives online, we have to think about privacy and security in ways like never before.

This is doubly important for those of us that have websites, whether personal or business.

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When a website relaunch requires a migration, there’s one really iffy period that’s always given me the most trouble. You’ve drawn and designed, built mockups and prototypes, coded your site on a local server and even pushed it up to a demo subdomain on your own site. After all this, though, there’s still one more trigger that needs to be pulled: pointing DNS records at your new hosting.

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Reflecting on the state of American nonprofits in the current century, the stats are good. Even after a major dip with the recession a decade ago, overall giving is up across the board. One of the major forces for good has been the rise of technology and online giving, specifically for smaller nonprofits and faith-based nonprofits. Online giving has increased at a rate almost three times higher than giving as a whole, and the uncharted territory of online activism and social media-based outreach is just beginning to be understood.

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A new Chrome extension for accessibility is making the rounds and for good reason.

ChromeLens is an extension that lives inside of your Chrome Developer Tools and allows you to run diagnostic tests on any webpage from the point of view of being visually impaired.

How Accessibility Compares to Browsing Habits

Visual impairment affects more than 10% of Americans, with almost 4% of Americans suffering from some form of visual impairment that is not considered correctable.

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In the non-profit space, internet marketing and modern tooling can be a hard sell, especially with limited resources. Fortunately, Google has a great suite of free apps,grants, and Adwords for nonprofits, offering them a unique chance to take advantage of Google’s top-class services and advertising network.

For this article, we’re going to dive a little deeper into Ad Grants and Ad GrantsPro, but I encourage you to take a look at the full list of benefits available with Google for Nonprofits.

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There are a lot of myths and opinions about developers and their reliance on- or aversion to- software that has been built by others.

On one side of the spectrum, there’s the camp that believes that everything with your name on it should be build from scratch in HTML and vanilla CSS. These purists like to forgo any modern convenience, any framework or library that appears too easy or too user-friendly.

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This is part two of a series on customizing WordPress. Click here to start at the beginning.

The transition of WordPress from blogging platform to full-fledged CMS is an ongoing process, but it was around Version 3.0 that the ability to register our own custom post type really kicked it into high gear. Custom post types allow us to take advantage of a number of WordPress defaults- the admin UI, taxonomies, archives, thumbnails, revisions, page templates, and more- in order to handle our own types of repeatable data.

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Update: CMB2 has added support for the REST API. While this method is still valid, I encourage you to review my follow-up post as well as their documentation.

CMB2 opens a lot of doors with WordPress development, making it possible to store all sorts of meta, or extra, information about each post. Typically, meta information includes fields like Categories or Tags, but there’s really no limit to what sorts of meta information you can store.

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