WordPress sites have lots of good backup options. But if you’re looking to save money on file-storage (and you already have a Dropbox account) I can’t recommend UpdraftPlus much more highly. It is quick-to-configure and very reliable as a place to keep a backup of your WordPress site. In this Quick Guide we’ll cover the steps to connect UpdraftPlus to Dropbox. Let’s get to it!

If you find yourself working with a lot of images or other media files in WordPress, chances are good that at some point you’ll need to change a file’s content while still keeping links and image placement the same. The best way we’ve found to do this is with a free plugin called “Enable Media Replace”. In this Quick Guide, we’ll teach you how to install this plugin and use it to replace images that already exists or media files on your WordPress site.

Whether you’re writing about technical topics or something even more visually demanding like art, sometimes you just want to make a picture bigger in WordPress. That can mean a number of things, from how it appears on the page to what happens when you click it. We’ll shortly cover the first case, and then spend most of our time introducing using a “lightbox” from the Simple Lightbox plugin to make our images appear over our content in a large size when clicked.

In this week’s Quick Guide we’re covering how to improve your “post lists” screens in WordPress. That is, we’re taking control the look of your “posts”, “pages”, etc lists by changing what appears in those columns. We’ll do that using that Admin Columns plugin (which was called CodePress Admin Columns until fairly recently 😉).

“Author archives” are one of a number of names you might call the page where WordPress shows your (as opposed to other authors’) posts. And by default WordPress will put the /author/ URL segment into your slug. Personally I think that’s a good name for it. But not everyone agrees, and that’s where the Edit Author Slug plugin comes in. In this Quick Guide we’ll explain how you can change your author page URL from example.com/author/david to example.com/this-person-rocks/david. If you want, of course. The point is that the whole middle section can be anything writer, ninja, queen-of-the-world.

From time to time, you’ll need to change the post type of one or more of your WordPress posts. In this Quick Guide, we’ll explain how to change a WordPress post’s post type using a handy plugin called Post Type Switcher.

Internationalization makes WordPress accessible in other languages, and it’s a must-have for work intended for wide distribution.

One could (and perhaps I should) write a whole course on “how to debug in WordPress.” This (unfortunately) isn’t that post, but rather a quick summary of the best first step in debugging WordPress. It is almost the one step you MUST take if you’d going to debug just about anything in WordPress: make sure WordPress is showing the errors by settings WP_DEBUG to true. This isn’t super complicated, but just an invaluable thing to know.