Category Archives: WordPress

Local Fonts

Local fonts means the the web-font is on the server that hosts the website. A web font is recognisable from the .wof and .wof2 file type.

JenT posted a helpful post on the consequences of a court case where the claimant was successful in arguing that the owner of the web site had breached GDPR regulations by loading Google fonts because Google fonts trace the IP address of the person visiting the web site.

As Hacker News points out, Google Fonts is a font embedding service library from Google, allowing developers to add fonts to their Android apps and websites simply by referencing a stylesheet. As of January 2022, Google Fonts is a repository for 1,358 font families and is used by over 50.1 million websites.

For self-hosted sites, which our e-commerce site at FLYING TWIGS is, then the process of swapping over to local fonts is doable. We use GeneratePress and this an Adding Local Fonts page in the documentation on how to pull down Google fonts and host them locally using this tool – google-webfonts-helper that identifies the files for Google fonts.

I have already done this on Flying Twigs and I am working my way through my other self-hosted sites. That said, in WP 6.2 it looks as though WP will incorporate some method of doing this without having to add custom CSS and without having to temporarily add php code to the functions file to allow uploading .woff and .woff2 files.

The code one needs to add (and then remove once one has uploaded the .woff files) to the functions file is to allow uploading .woff files, which to protect against malicious code being injected, are normally not allowed.

WP Tavern has articles on local fonts, and suggests Bunny Fonts as a plugin as an easier way to replace Google fonts. I read the documentation for Bunny Fonts and it seemed just as straightforward to use the GeneratePress method. And there is every reason to think that the same GeneratePress method would work on any theme, not that I have tried it. And it would work with any web font that one might buy and download.

All this said, none of this applies to WP.com that operates above the site owner’s head so to speak,

But for an overview of all of this – I recommend WPCOMMAVEN’s article on Google fonts and GDPR.

I thought I read somewhere that Google claimed that the IP addresses were obfuscated so that no GDPR rules were broken, but I may be imagining that. Maybe Google will take the initiative and put the fonts somewhere that is air-gapped form the rest of Google so that nothing is fed back to Google. It seems easier than getting a reputation from fifty million disgruntled web site owners who may or may not know how to cure such problem as there is

PostScript

Wouldn’t you know it – the helper tool is down at the moment.

Learning Full Site Editing Part Two

This is the second in the series. You can get to the first article, entitled simply Learning Full Site Editing, by clicking the link.

If you are using a full site editing theme and you are getting yourself tied in knots in the back end, take a look at this annotated diagram with the numbers and arrows on it. I also showed it in the last post and explained what the arrows were referring to.

This time, look at the small word ‘Index’ at the top, above where it says Flying Twigs. This little word is what tells you which template or template part you are in.

Last week, before I learned this stuff, I couldn’t find the query loop that I had seen previously. The reason was that I had gone into the page of templates and template parts and switched from ‘Index’ to ‘page’ without realising it.

So that little ‘index’ at the top, or whatever other words appears there, is an important signpost.

Recommendation to WP: Highlight the word in the middle of the top of the page in neon lights with flashing arrows pointing to it. Or something like that.

Here is what is looks like if you are in ‘page’ and you click the little disclosure arrow.

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If you click ‘Browse all templates’, it takes you to a page with templates and template parts. As far as I can see, you have to figure out for yourself which are full templates and which are template parts.

It’s not so hard – the header and footer are template parts. You would edit a template part when you want the edit to appear throughout the site.

If you just want to change a complete page,then would edit that page template and the changes would only affect that page.

Here is a list of the templates and template parts that you see when you click on ‘Browse all templates’.

  • Index: Displays posts.
  • Search: Displays search results.
  • Header and Footer Only
  • 404: Displays when no content is found.
  • Single: The default template for displaying any single post or attachment.
  • Page: Displays a single page.
  • Footer Only
  • Blank
  • Archive: Displays post categories, tags, and other archives.

I am not sure which of the WordPress.com themes are full site editing themes, but as I showed in the last post, you can easily tell whether the theme you are currently using is a full site editing theme. When you click on ‘Appearance’ with a full site editing theme, you see ‘Editor’ (and the word Beta in a little flattened elipse shape) and below that you see ‘Customise’. Look at my last article for a little picture showing what it looks like.

Who To Read About Full Site Editing

Read JenT for stuff about full site editing. I think she may have posted a list of the FSE themes. Actually, read the WPCOMMAVEN blog by JenT for good,,authoritative stuff about WP on WordPress.com generally.

Will There Be A Part Three?

That’s it for part two of this series and, this article may already be the last in the series, depending on what else I find out.