Themes & plugins Practical
The form works, so why does no mail arrive?
The form is rarely the problem. The mail is being blocked at sending or filed as spam — and once you understand the structure, this is a solvable…
Technote
Themes & plugins
Choosing themes and plugins, vetting them, finding alternatives, and understanding their performance cost — what a wrong choice charges you later.
49 articles· Themes & plugins
Themes & plugins Intro
Free or paid theme: what the money actually buys
What a paid theme actually buys is a year of updates and support — which is why the decision comes back around every twelve months.
Themes & plugins Practical
Reduced motion: the content has to survive it
The reduced-motion setting comes from symptoms, not preference. And the bug where the page turns up blank for those users appears most often in code that was trying…
Themes & plugins Practical
Tap targets — minimum size and spacing for fingers
A cursor is one pixel; a fingertip is not. How to grow the hit area without growing the visuals — and why hover-only affordances simply do not exist…
Themes & plugins Practical
Taking the colour picker away from editors
Leave the picker open and in six months the site carries colours a shade off the brand. That is not the editor's fault — the system asked.
Themes & plugins Practical
Plugin count is a budget, not a feature list
The plugin ecosystem is WordPress's greatest strength. But each one you enable adds an item to check every month, and that budget is finite.
Themes & plugins Practical
Labels and errors: a placeholder is not a label
Text that vanishes the moment you type cannot be a label. Forms that hide labels and forms that signal errors with colour alone lose people in much the…
Themes & plugins Practical
Hunting horizontal overflow — the number will not find it
scrollWidth matches the viewport and yet the screen is visibly clipped. An ancestor absorbed the overflow — so measure element rectangles instead.
Themes & plugins Practical
What theme.json does: handing your palette to the block editor
theme.json is not a stylesheet, it is a channel. It hands your palette to the editing screen so editors choose from your system instead of a free colour…
Themes & plugins Practical
Beating theme styles without !important
You wrote the rule and nothing changed. The cause is usually order rather than specificity — and order is fixable without !important.
Themes & plugins Practical
Walking the site by keyboard: where the order breaks
Take your hand off the mouse and Tab through a page once; five minutes exposes most of it. Nearly always, the culprit is CSS having reordered the screen.
Themes & plugins Practical
When a grid track swells to fit its content — minmax(0, 1fr)
repeat(3, 1fr) does not promise three equal columns. One code block or unbroken string inside pushes its track wider, and the whole layout leaves the screen.