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1. Flywheel Wordpress Download
2. Flywheel Wordpress Download

This is the third entry in a four-part series examining how we use WordPress here at Flywheel Co. to provide our clients with efficient, secure, and scalable websites.

Connect to Flywheel Seamless development with your favorite host. We've built a workflow where you can push local sites to Flywheel in a few quick clicks, easily pull down live sites for offline editing, and sync up your tools for a simplified process! A landing page is a page on your website which has been created specifically for a certain marketing campaign. Landing pages are made with a clear call to action (CTA) goals in mind, and they often generate better conversion rates than regular blog posts or site pages. Flywheel is a managed WordPress hosting environment, created for designers and agencies so they can concentrate on the core business of creating sites and leave the technical management to someone else. Features include managed caching and performance, enhanced security, managed updates, and premium support. In this post, we want to present you with an alternative: Local, formerly known as Local by Flywheel. Like other solutions, the program enables you to run WordPress on your computer instead of a server. It’s also free and very easy to use, making it more beginner friendly than more technical solutions.

So far we've covered keeping the WordPress admin experience intuitive and consistent and security and stablity of your installation. In this entry to the series we'll be covering the process we use to serve WordPress websites as well as the deployment process we use to minimize downtime when applying updates to sites.

The hosting environment chosen and the methods used to deploy updates to the server don't have to be complex and time consuming. Today we'll focus on the steps we take to minimize the time it takes to deploy new websites and send out updates to existing ones. This article will cover the following aspects of that process:

• Simplifying the hosting environment
• WordPress core and plugin installation and upkeep
• Smoothly and consistently deploying updates

While there are many different ways to structure your hosting environment, these are the methods we've landed on after years of trial and error in setting up an efficient hosting ecosystem.

Simplifying the Hosting Environment

When working as an agency, or even going solo as a freelancer, developers will often find themselves managing a seemingly endless amount of web servers and related login credentials. This task alone can lead to hours of lost time and continued stress when trying to juggle everything on a day-to-day basis. A central point for managing these different environments is essential to keeping everything running smoothly so time isn't lost hunting down information and logging in to a variety of different control panels when creating and updating your servers.

Here at Flywheel Co., we use a great tool called Laravel Forge to manage our servers. Whether it be creating new server instances, deploying new websites to existing servers, generating certificates for securely serving a website over HTTPS, or updating the underlying software, Laravel Forge handles it all with grace and ease. Each one of these tasks can be achieved with a single click, removing the need for manually configuring the server through the command line and freeing up an unimaginable amount of time to focus on creating the products that help propel our clients to a better web presence.

In addition the time saving benefits of having a central hosting control panel encompassing all of your servers, it also will allow you to get a quick overview of vital aspects of your different servers. In the case of Laravel Forge, we are presented with all of our servers' connection status and PHP version any time we log in to the system. This allows us to quickly identify where updates may be needed to best support the latest WordPress release and ensures that we are making use of the most up-to-date technologies to server our WordPress websites as efficiently as possible.

WordPress Core and Plugin Installation and Upkeep

Another tool we've come to find essential for maintaining an easy and efficient hosting ecosystem is Composer. Composer is a PHP dependency manager that allows you to manage third-party software requirements via a simple JSON file. We made the decision to utilize Composer as much as possible in building and maintaining WordPress websites so that we can easily update WordPress and any plugins that may be required by utilizing automation scripts within Laravel Forge.

For the majority of our WordPress projects, we utilize the roots/wordpress package to obtain the WordPress core installation files. On top of the added benefit of being able to manage WordPress updates across all of our servers via our hosting control panel, using Composer to provide you with the core WordPress codebase eliminates the need to manually download and implement the source files with each project you create. The process is as simple as running composer require rootswordpress to add the library to your composer.json manifest and installing the codebase into your project:

As seen in the example composer.json file above, plugins can also be managed using Composer. This is thanks to WordPress Packagist which provides a Composer repository which mirrors all of the plugins available from WordPress.org. Simply add the WordPress Packagist repository to your manifest and any plugins you install using Composer will be automatically placed in your plugins directory.

Using Composer to handle these repeatitive tasks allows you to spend more time creating, and less time downloading the tools and packages you require to get your project off the ground and onto the web.

Smoothly and Consistently Deploying Updates

Now that you have a smooth hosting environment, and a quick and easy way to manage your dependencies, it's time to tackle what is likely your most frequent interaction with your web server: deploying updates to your project-specific codebase. Flywheel Co., like most developers building within a modern development workflow, keeps all of our code under version control using Git. If you've been using version control on your projects, you're aware that it can be utilized to easily revert changes when something isn't working quite how you expected, but a secondary and immeasurably valuable function is to automatically trigger deployments of changes to whatever hosting environment you're targeting.

With hosting ecosystem tools like Laravel Forge, you can setup your website to be updated whenever you push changes to a specific branch within your version control system. This means that instead of logging into your server and pulling in changes, you can automate that entire process using a deploy script:

The example deploy script above will navigate to your project's root directory, pull in the changes from Git, install or update any dependencies through Composer and npm, and lastly, build your project's assets. If your hosting ecosystem doesn't have built-in support for deploy scripts, you could alternatively set it up to be triggered by a webhook, or even easily implement a standalone system such as this example found using a quick Google search.

Combining these actions into a single deploy script takes the load of you, and compresses it down into a single task, freeing you up to spend more time creating.

Digging Deeper

The methods described above are just one approach to streamlining and boasting your development infrastructure and are by no means is the only ways to achieve your goals of a hassle-free hosting ecosystem. With a bit of reasearch, you can find the techniques that will best suit your development workflow and the products you use to keep your projects online and up-to-date.

Keep checking back for our final installment of our 'How We WordPress' series where we'll be talking about methods that we use to reuse common code between a variety of WordPress projects to further our goal of better and quicker WordPress development.

WordPress enables you to create a functional and compelling website with no technical knowledge. However, if you want to get the most out of your site, learning a little about coding can go a long way. One of the quickest ways that you can start to make meaningful changes to your site is by learning how to use CSS in WordPress.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is one of the most important languages in web design. Making CSS tweaks to your site lets you customize its appearance, layout, fonts, colors, and more. CSS offers more complete control over the way your site looks than your theme does – and it isn’t that hard to work with.

What CSS is (and how it works)

First, let’s back up a little and talk about Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This is the primary language used to create your WordPress website, and is descriptive in nature. HTML code tells web browsers about the various elements of your content. For example, it indicates which text is part of a header, and which is part of a body paragraph.

If you’ve ever checked out the Text tab in the WordPress editor, you’ll have seen HTML at work:

Flywheel Wordpress Download

You can also use HTML to dictate the style of your website’s in some ways. However, this is an unwieldy way to get the job done. For example, if you wanted to make all of your post titles purple, you would need to add HTML code containing the same instruction to every heading individually.

That’s where Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) comes to the rescue. This language is used to dictate how HTML elements appear – including their sizes, layouts, colors, fonts, and so on. For example, you can change the color of all the headings on your site using a few lines of code with CSS, without altering your content’s HTML.

Keeping structure and style separate this way gives you complete control over the appearance of your site and lets you easily make changes whenever you want. It also means that you can start using some basic CSS in WordPress without knowing any HTML (although understanding the basics of HTML does help speed up the process).

Where to add CSS in WordPress

While you can add CSS directly to your WordPress theme’s style sheet, we don’t recommend this method because it’s easy to make mistakes and any changes you make will get overwritten when you update your theme (unless you use a child theme).

Flywheel Wordpress Download

Fortunately, there’s an easier solution. To add CSS to WordPress, you just need to:

• Navigate to Appearance > Customize in your WordPress dashboard to open the WordPress Customizer
• Select the Additional CSS option from the menu on the left in the WordPress Customizer interface:

The (currently) empty editor in this area enables you to type in lines of CSS code, without having to sort through the existing style sheet. You can add as much CSS here as you want – just include each new snippet on its own line. Plus, you can see your changes take effect in the live preview. That way, you’ll know whether they look right before publishing them to your site.

Additionally, this editor will help you “validate” your CSS, which is a fancy way of saying that it will warn you if you make any obvious mistakes.

If you’re getting curious about what kinds of CSS tweaks you can make here, don’t worry. Stay on this page in your dashboard, and we’ll explore a few ways to start customizing your site’s appearance with CSS.

How to start customizing your WordPress site with CSS

As we mentioned earlier, you can change just about any aspect of your site’s appearance using CSS in WordPress. The sky truly is the limit here. For now, however, we’ll keep things simple, and look at some basic CSS tweaks you can make.

We already mentioned altering text color, so let’s start there. If you really want your WordPress posts to grab your visitors’ attention, you can experiment with changing the color for each post’s title. This is what a basic post looks like in the Twenty Seventeen WordPress theme:

Now, add this code to the Additional CSS box in the Customizer:

h1 {
color: purple;
}

As you can see, the post title’s color has changed from black to purple:

This same tweak will also be applied to every other post on your site. Instead of simply naming a color, you can also use hex codes to get the shade just right. Simply replace purple with #9C33FF (or whatever color you want to use). When you’re happy with the new hue, select Publish at the top of the screen to make your changes live.

Next, what if you want to make some alterations to the body text? Let’s edit its font family and size, by adding this code on a new line:

p {
font-family: Georgia;
font-size: 20px;
}

Again, you can see the results right away in the Customizer:

Finally, let’s make the sidebar stand out a little more, by adding a light blue background and a little padding. On a new line, paste in this CSS:

.widget {
background: #B9EBFA;
padding: 25px;
}

This places a simple background behind your sidebar:

Keep in mind that this code will affect all of your widget areas, including your footer. You can also make changes to specific widgets if you prefer. For example, you could add a background only to the search widget, by replacing .widget in the above code with .widget_search:

At this point, you might be starting to grasp how CSS works under the hood. The first line of a CSS snippet specifies which element you’re altering – such as post titles (h1), text contained in paragraphs (p), or your widget areas (widget). The following lines, enclosed in brackets, contain specific instructions about what should be changed.

Where to learn more about CSS

There are plenty of useful guides online that will help you learn more about CSS and the most common elements you can affect. Until then, if you’re struggling to figure out what code you need to make a particular change, a simple Google search will usually lead you to the answer. Resources like the MDN web docs from Mozilla usually rank highly in Google and do a great job explaining various aspects of CSS.

With a little practice, you’ll find yourself adding CSS with ease in no time.

Conclusion

Working with your website’s code can seem intimidating if you’re a beginner. However, many of the languages your site relies on are surprisingly user friendly when it comes to making basic tweaks. Learning to use CSS in WordPress effectively may take a little time, but it will provide you with an unprecedented level of control over your site’s look and layout.

Instead of making changes directly to your theme’s CSS style sheet, you should use the WordPress Customizer to add in CSS code quickly and safely. This process enables you to tweak the colors, sizes, fonts, and placements of various elements, without permanently affecting your active theme’s core code. What’s more, you’ll be able to see your changes live, so you know exactly what effect they’ll have.