Stephanie Leary

Writer and WordPress consultant

  • Books
    • Content Strategy for WordPress (2015)
    • WordPress for Web Developers (2013)
    • Beginning WordPress 3 (2010)
  • Blog
    • Fascism Watch (2016-17)
    • Content Modeling for WordPress series
    • WordPress Hidden Gems series
  • Work
    • Portfolio
    • Services
    • WordPress Plugins
    • WordPress Themes
    • Presentations and Interviews
    • on GitHub →
  • About
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    • Mailing List

Why “click here” is a terrible link, and what to write instead

May 7, 2015 Stephanie Leary 12 Comments

An astonishing percentage of what I do with my clients' web copy involves eradicating the phrase "click here" from their links. For more information, click here. You see it everywhere. Everyone's doing it, so it must be a best practice, right? Wrong. It's the worst possible … [Read more...]

Blogging, Web Design, Writing accessibility, click here, copywriting, writing for the web

Speaking at BEA Bloggers Conference, May 29

April 5, 2013 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

I'm delighted to be going to New York City in May to speak at the BookExpo America Bloggers Conference. I'll be on the Blogging Platforms panel, talking about how book bloggers can make the most of WordPress. Plus I'll be, you know, wandering around BEA for three days! I'm so … [Read more...]

Blogging, Events, for Authors, Publishing, WordPress bea

Saying goodbye to Textile

June 2, 2010 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

I came to WordPress after using TextPattern for a while, and when I switched, I didn't want to give up Textile formatting, so I found a plugin and kept using it. That was six years ago. These days I do a lot more code samples, and trying to get characters escaped properly is … [Read more...]

Blogging

moving the furniture

February 17, 2010 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

If you follow me on RSS or LiveJournal, you probably just saw a flood of new posts. Sorry about that! When I started wordpress-as-cms.com last summer, I meant it to be a place where I could write about all my geeky technical WordPress stuff without boring you all here. But, since … [Read more...]

Blogging, WordPress

New WordPress plugin: Import HTML Pages

July 31, 2009 Stephanie Leary 9 Comments

This plugin will import a directory of files as either pages or posts, according to configurable settings. You may specify the HTML tag containing the content you want to import (e.g. <body>, <div id="content"> or <td width="732">) or the name of a Dreamweaver … [Read more...]

Blogging, Web Design, WordPress

New WordPress plugin: Recent Posts with Excerpts widget

July 26, 2009 Stephanie Leary 1 Comment

I've written a widget that lists your most recent posts with excerpts, optionally limited to a category. The number of posts and excerpts is configurable; for example, you could show five posts but include the excerpt for only the most recent. Supports The Excerpt Reloaded and … [Read more...]

Blogging, Web Design, WordPress

New WordPress plugin; new WordPress site

July 5, 2009 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

My new Next Page plugin provides shortcodes and template tags for previous, next, and parent navigation in pages. It's a feature I've wanted for a while, and a post in the support forum finally made me figure out the code (and then rewrite it from scratch to make it work as a … [Read more...]

Blogging, Web Design, WordPress

When you can’t log in to wordpress.com stats from your Dashboard…

June 12, 2009 Stephanie Leary 1 Comment

…but you can log in at wordpress.com itself, and you're using Firefox… …you probably need to go to your cookie preferences and check "Accept third-party cookies," because the stats are loaded in an iframe, and Firefox is trying to protect you from yourself. … [Read more...]

Blogging, Techy Goodness, WordPress

Design tweaks

February 5, 2009 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

Couple of minor tweaks to the new design: I've put the search form back (it's in the footer), and I've added some feeds. If you'd like to subscribe to the main posts without the elsewheres, you can now do so. The feed links are in the footer and will also be shown in browsers … [Read more...]

Blogging, Web Design

New WordPress plugin: Mass Format Conversion

February 2, 2009 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

Mass Format Conversion applies all content filters to posts and comments and saves them back to the database. This is useful if you have been using Textile or Markdown (for example) and you want to switch to plain HTML. Use it with caution! … [Read more...]

Blogging, Web Design, WordPress

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Latest WordPress Book

Content Strategy for WordPress

A short book for content strategists and managers on implementing a complete content strategy in WordPress: evaluation, analysis, content modeling, editing and workflows, and long-term planning and maintenance.

Read the sample chapter

Kindle Nook iBooks Kobo Smashwords

WordPress for Web Developers

WordPress for Web Developers (9781430258667)

This is a book for professional web designers and developers who already know HTML and CSS, and want to learn to build sites with WordPress. The book begins with a detailed tour of the administration screens and settings, then digs into server-side topics like performance and security. The second half of the book is devoted to development: learning to build WordPress themes and plugins.

This is the second, much-revised and updated edition of Beginning WordPress 3, with a more accurate title. Everything’s been updated for WordPress 3.6.

WordPress for Web Developers is out now. See what's inside...

The best WordPress features you’ve never noticed

  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Screen Options
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Bulk Edit
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Private Status
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Dashboard Feed Readers
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Options.php

Content Modeling for WordPress series

  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 1: analyze content
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 2: functional and organizational requirements
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 3: a sample content model

This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress.My latest books are Content Strategy for WordPress (2015) and WordPress for Web Developers (2013). Sign up to be notified when I have a new book for you.

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