I have a law that I abide by. I call it Monti’s First Law of Temporal Proximity to Christmas. Said law dictates that no Christmas decorations shall be put up and no Christmas music shall be played before Thanksgiving dinner. It’s purpose is to help ensure that the festivity and (desirable) accoutrements of the season are savored rather than ridden into the ground like a tired old mule (as the commercial powers that be in our world are wont to do). But for you, dear friends and Divi enthusiasts the world over, I am breaking my law. I’m going to show you 3 simple ways to decorate your Divi website for the holidays with some animated falling snow. Watch the Video Tutorial https://youtu.be/vg4N65edfCk Written Instructions Method #1: Set it and forget it with the Snow Storm plugin. The Tribulant Snow Storm plugin makes it about as easy as it could possibly be to add animated snowfall to your site. Simply install the plugin, activate it, and you’ve got snow. The one drawback with this plugin is that when the body of your site loses focus, the snow simply stops in place. So if you click away from the browser window, you’ll get a bunch of dots all over your screen rather than a smooth falling snow animation. In my experience with the myholidayecards.com sample site, this behavior also occurs when the user clicks on iframe content, like embedded YouTube videos. These behaviors might not be an issue for you, in which case the Snow Storm plugin may be a great fit. Although I love the Snow Storm plugin and...
I have to admit, I felt a little like Khan on this one: https://youtu.be/N4pcIuo6Kbw Google is NOT my friend. Not today, at least — nor, apparently, anybody else’s. Searches in multiple Divi user groups made it clear that I wasn’t the only one looking for the means to change the animation speed on the Divi Toggle and Accordion modules. It was also clear that the interwebz sort of shrugged its shoulders in answer to my queries. As far as I can tell, there’s no “clean” way to achieve this. The animation speed is hard coded in a JS file inside the Divi theme core. We all know that editing core theme files is a level of hackery unbecoming of a self-respecting WordPress designer/developer, so I came up with the cleanest methodology I could that’s based in a child theme: A little klugey, perhaps, but functional. And still, I maintain, WAY better than editing core parent theme files. Feedback welcome. If you’ve got a better solution, I definitely want to hear about...
Since I started Monti Design eight years ago, I’ve been hired several times to perform project “rescues.” In a nutshell, these are engagements where I am asked to step in and get a stalled web project over the finish line after the original designer or developer flaked out and left a client hanging (and usually a little poorer). As a result, I’ve witnessed some appalling behavior from a small number of competitors — but for the most part, that sort of thing has been a rarity. However, in early April, I had back-to-back appointments with two prospective clients, and both had horror stories. One was reaching out to me for help and advice because their unscrupulous web designer was holding their domain name and website hostage without cause. The other recognized that he needed my services, but had been burned so many times that he was almost irremediably suspicious of me. “You need to realize that there are a lot of charlatans in your field,” he said. “Put yourself in my shoes. I may not know what I don’t know about what you do. That makes me vulnerable, and I’ve already been taken advantage of as a result.” Wow. Point well taken. Upstanding web professionals would do well to anticipate and alleviate such concerns when interacting with a prospect or pitching a solution. Beyond that, we ought to be willing to do our best to educate fellow business owners so they’re 1) equipped to find and hire reliable, competent web designers and developers, and 2) empowered to avoid getting ripped off. So, on behalf of all the hard-working, professional,...
This is my Happy Divi Library story. I needed to add a breadcrumb to an interior page template on a web site I was working on. I started to add the Yoast breadcrumb to page.php in my child theme (a la this tutorial from Elegant Themes: http://bit.ly/1Hbtz8e) and realized it wasn’t going to afford me the flexibility I needed. Enter the PHP Code for Posts plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/php-code-for-posts/), which converts snippets of PHP code into re-usable shortcodes. That was the missing puzzle piece. Once the PHP Code for Posts plugin was installed, adapting the breadcrumb code for Divi was simple: Created a PHP shortcode using the Yoast breadcrumb snippet. On my page, I added a row with a text module in it. Dropped the breadcrumb shortcode into the text module. Saved the entire row to the library. Created an interior page layout that includes the new breadcrumb row. BAM! Life...
Howdy again, friends. If you haven’t read them already, you might want to read/watch parts 1 and 2 before this one, although in some ways this tutorial stands on its own — you don’t have to have a video background to benefit from this technique. At the end of the Part 2 tutorial video, I mentioned that I had added a class to the section containing the hero banner content to create a hook for some custom CSS: Now, I’ll make my standard disclaimer and say that this part of the technique can be replicated entirely via the Divi builder. That’s nice, but unless you’re building a one-page site, it’s messy. Better to use a child theme and its stylesheet to create and control the styles we’ll be building and discussing herein. Give it up for child themes WordPress child themes are lovely things, and there are oodles of plugins nowadays to help you create child themes if you’re not comfortable using a code editor and FTP to do it. In the past, I’ve used the Child Them Configurator plugin, but these days I prefer the Divi Children plugin specifically for Divi-based sites. The former works with any theme. So what’s so great about child themes? If you’re a relative newcomer to WordPress and you haven’t been through the parent theme/child theme spiel, here it is: If you purchase a theme, the developer is going to be releasing regular updates for that theme because the WordPress core is evolving all the time. If you’ve been naughty and have edited that theme directly (whether you’ve changed the functions.php file or the style sheet) you run a very great...
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