It is relatively straightforward to use the visual editor of WordPress or BoldGrid to embed pictures and have text flow smoothly around the picture to either the right or the left:  Insert the picture using ‘Insert Media’ from the column tab, then select the picture in the visual editor, click the ‘edit’ icon, and then click on the icon for picture positioning on the right or left.  Centre puts the picture in the centre of the column, but text doesn’t otherwise flow around it.  It can be a little fiddly, but it mostly works.  You can then drag the image around to reposition it within a paragraph as well.

The problem is, you can’t do the same thing with an embedded video.  You can construct a dedicated row and column setup to contain the video but then it’s complicated to get the text to flow around that structure correctly, particularly across different viewing platforms.  I’ve done a lot of searching and getting text to wrap around an embedded video using only the visual editor is a “can’t get there from here” situation.

Continue reading “Wrap text around video in WordPress” →

The configurable menus in WordPress have a checkbox labelled “automatically add new top-level pages to this menu” where if checked every time you make a new page it gets added to the menu.  That might be good for drop-down menus but otherwise very rapidly clutters up the page.  By default themes come with a ‘Primary menu’ and you can configure that as you would like, HOWEVER the ‘automatically add new top-level pages to this menu’ button, although you can check and uncheck it, doesn’t do anything… new pages are always added to the primary menu regardless.  You can go into the ‘customize’ option for the theme and manually remove all these pages, but that gets to be a hassle.

To fix the problem, you have to actually create a new menu yourself, any menu at all, and use that.  Confusingly, ‘Primary menu’ is both the name of a menu, and the location of a menu.  After you’ve made your own menu (I called mine ‘main nav bar’) you can set that to be in the ‘Primary menu’ location and you’re then free to delete the ‘Primary menu’ menu and things work as expected.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

(the checkbox not working on the default setup is definitely a bug)

Sorting through BoldGrid

Continue reading “Using BoldGrid on WordPress” →