Today, Pagely was lucky enough to interview 10up’s WordPress big hitter, Chris Wiegman. Chris is probably best known as a WordPress security pioneer, as the developer of the fantastic iThemes Security plugin. He is also a valued member of the WordPress community as a whole, with heavy involvement in a variety of WordPress events. As well as iThemes Security — or Better WP Security, as it was originally known — Chris has developed a number of high quality, free plugins which are available from the WordPress repository. If you want to see more of Chris’ work, head over to the 10up website for a look at some of the great things he and the team are doing. You can also learn more about what makes Chris tick by checking out his personal blog, ChrisWiegman.com, or by following him on Twitter, @ChrisWiegman. In today’s interview, Chris will be discussing all things WordPress, so let’s get on with it, shall we? A huge thank you to Chris for his time, here is what he had to say. For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? I am currently a Senior Web Engineer for 10up working on various projects for enterprise-level WordPress clients. Before this I built the iThemes Security (Better WP Security) plugin. I have worked as a WordPress developer in various roles from Higher Education to agencies, I’ve been a technical editor for books on WordPress and other development topics and I have taught computer science at the University level. Believe it or not my whole tech career is only actually 8 years old though, before which I was a captain for a small airline in Hawaii. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? I was working on Drupal sites for Southern Illinois University and needed a somewhat turn-key solution for supplementary sites such as those for faculty and student groups and WordPress fit the role perfectly. The more I worked on that system the more I saw value in the WordPress community, particularly as a product developer so I started writing plugins including Better WP Security and the rest is history. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? In addition to being a developer I’ve also been a co-organizer of the Austin WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Austin and I am a current organizer of the Sarasota WordPress group. I’ve spoken at WordCamps and Meetups from Main to San Diego and have served on the WordPress Meta team as a moderator for http://jobs.wordpress.net. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? The community. In no other eco-system have I seen people from such diverse backgrounds work together at such enormous scale. If it wasn’t for the community and the people in it I would sure be working in something else today. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? It has surely matured however, as they say, the more things change the more they stay the same. This has particularly rang true with the most important ingredients in WordPress: momentum and the drive to make it better. Everything else is just part of the natural evolution of any project. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? Get involved and build something. Put out small plugins, get involved with the community, etc. There is so much support available to those working in WordPress and all you have to do is accept it. If I was to do this again I don’t think my path would be much different however I would surely have avoided some of the mistakes I’ve made (most likely in favor of entirely new mistakes). What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? Undervaluing their sites. So many think that because WordPress is free so should the rest be. This attitude can be detrimental on so many levels and is something that needs to be addressed at some point by the community itself. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? Like all products it will continue to evolve. As the code base grows and becomes more complex I hope we’ll see it taken more seriously for the capabilities it does have as well as for the really smart people who make the project what it has become and what it will be. Final Thoughts A big, big thanks to Chris Wiegman for providing us some excellent answers. It’s great to see so another perspective on the WordPress community as a whole, as well as an insight into the journey a well-respected community member has taken in his career so far. As always, we’ll end the article with those all-important links just in case you’ve missed them. Be sure to check out Chris and the other team’s work over at 10up, head over to his personal blog, ChrisWiegman.com, or get in touch with him on Twitter, @ChrisWiegman. Thanks for reading, we’ll be back with another interview with a major WordPress player next week.
Menus are an important component of any successful website. For a start, they add to a website’s aesthetics, but most importantly, they help visitors to navigate your website. That’s why you’ll see most WordPress websites employing a menu at the top of the website, in the header bar. This includes here at Pagely. Regardless of the page a visitor lands on, they are no more than one click away from contacting us, reading our blog posts, or learning more about our plans — they can find what they’re looking for with ease. This is why most WordPress themes support at least one menu. Today, I want to help you get started with WordPress, by showing you how to build a WordPress menu. Getting Started From the WordPress dashboard, head over to Appearance and then click Menus. To create a new menu, click on create a new menu — WordPress makes it as easy as possible for you to find your bearings! Be sure to give your new menu a name. Now, by default, WordPress will give you three options for menu items: Pages: you can add WordPress pages to your menu Links: you can link to external or internal URLs Categories: you can link to posts saved under a specific category The glaring omission from this list is WordPress posts. (Sure, you could link to individual posts using the links option and adding the URL manually, but thankfully there’s an easier way.) At the top right of the Menus screen you’ll see a box called Screen Options. Click this and a menu will drop down. On this menu, you will see a number of checkboxes, with Pages, Links, and Categories already checked. If you want to add posts to your menu, check the Post checkbox now — you can also add tags this way. Creating the Menu You can now begin to populate your menu with posts, pages, and categories by selecting relevant items and hitting Add to Menu. As you do this, you’ll see the menu items being added to your Menu Structure. Using the drag-and-drop interface, you can re-order items simply by dragging them up and down. You can also use the drag-and-drop interface to create menu sub-items, which sit directly below the top-level items. To see a sub-item in action, take a look at the Pagely menu at the top of the screen. Hover over the Plans menu item and you’ll see four options drop down: Personal / Business, VPS, Enterprise, and Custom Plans. These four items are the sub-items. To convert a menu item into a sub-item, simply drag it out to the right using the drag-and-drop interface. When you’re done, it will look something like this: WordPress will confirm you’ve done this right by displaying the sub-item tag, as seen in the screenshot above. By default, WordPress will add the post, page, or category title to the menu, but you can change how each item appears. To do this, simply click on the downwards arrow to the right of each item, and edit the Navigation Label to set how you want it to appear. When you’re happy with your menu, click Save Menu. It’s time to add the menu you’ve just built to your website. To do this, simply head over to the Manage Locations tab. From here, WordPress will tell you how many menus your theme supports — in this example scenario, just one — and will let you assign a menu by selecting from a drop-down list. Select your new menu, then hit Save Changes. And voila, you’re done! Menu Widget If your theme doesn’t support a menu, that doesn’t mean you can’t build menus to improve your website’s navigation. However, instead of using a dedicated menu area, you’ll have to use a widget. By default, WordPress supports a custom menu widget, so there’s no need to install a plugin. Simple head over to Appearance then Widgets, select the Custom Menu widget on the left, and drag it into the widget area you want. From here, choose your new menu from the drop-down list, then hit Save. All done! Final Thoughts That’s all there is to it: a simple guide to building menus for WordPress users. My tip is to keep your menus as clean as possible — only use a few top-level items to keep it clutter-free, and to avoid running out of space. If you want to add more items to a menu, you can use sub-items to add more complexity, and further improve navigation. Do you have any questions about setting up menus in WordPress? Ask away in the comments section below!
We have another WordPress big hitter with us today, with Syed Balkhi kindly taking time out from his busy schedule to talk to Pagely. Syed is best known as the founder of the fantastic WPBeginner website — one of the many WordPress resources online, which has helped thousands of new WordPress users find their feet, myself included. He has also launched and been involved with a number of the top WordPress plugins, and he recently launched his own personal blog, syedbalkhi.com, where he regularly posts insightful content on growing an online business. Not enough Syed for you? You can also follow him on Twitter at @syedbalkhi. As always, a big thanks to Syed for taking part. It’s great to have such a well-respected member of the WordPress community sharing his insights with us. Without further ado, let’s get on with the interview, shall we? For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? Absolutely. I am an entrepreneur. I started my first business at age 7, and my first online business at age 12. I have spent more than half of my life immersed in different aspects of building and running an online business. I first started using WordPress in 2006 when I needed to create a blog. Shortly after I fell in love with the platform and started using it to develop all of my websites. In 2009, I launched WPBeginner to help fill a huge educational void in the WordPress space. Now it is the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners. Over the years, I have also launched and acquired several WordPress plugins and businesses such as OptinMonster, SoliloquyWP, Envira Gallery, ThemeLab, Floating Social Bar, Insert Headers and Footers, and many more. I like to describe myself as an entrepreneur with a passion of marketing and just enough development knowledge to be dangerous. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? I had been a user of WordPress for a few years before I became involved with the community. For the most part, I stayed under the radar until I launched WPBeginner. At the time, most WordPress resources were by developers for developers. So I built a resource for users which due to the need grew real fast. This led me to attend several WordCamps and get more involved with the community. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? I have been in the organizing committee of WordCamp Miami for the past 3 years. I have also spoken at dozens of WordCamps across the United States. I was invited to the first WordPress community summit where I helped the documentation team. On a day to day basis, we have helped hundreds of thousands of users get started and improve their WordPress sites through WPBeginner. I have also been an advisor to several WordPress companies in their early stages. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? I think the best thing about working with WordPress is how welcoming and helpful the community is. I think I am fortunate to call so many of these brilliant people my friends. The platform has evolved significantly from when I first started which has allowed for huge growth in terms of adaption and popularity of WordPress. This is great for anyone doing business in the WordPress ecosystem. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? The main change that I have seen in the community is size. It’s gotten a lot bigger. There is a WordCamp happening just about every week somewhere in the world. There are private events focused just towards WordPress such as PressNomics, LoopConf, PrestigeConf, etc. We are also seeing several Slack chats, Facebook groups, diverse meetup groups and other membership forums all around the WordPress community which is pretty exciting. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? My biggest advice would be to use the resources around you rather than reinventing the wheel. Embrace the culture of helping others, and you will go far in this space. If I was starting all over again, I would focus on offering solutions rather than services. Instead of building and offering everything on my own, I would form strategic alliances that’s mutually beneficial. Whether that is for products or services, the end goal should be to give the customer what they need and want. It works every time 🙂 What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? Not building a segmented email list. It’s surprising how little attention most business owners pay to building and nurturing their email list which is often the biggest asset your company can have (a list of targeted customers). Email is by far the most reliable way of communication, and if you are not leveraging it, then you are making a big mistake. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? WordPress has gained a giant market share, and its increase in popularity is carrying the growth forward. We need to continue to make decisions that benefit 98% of the users without alienating the 2% vocal minority. For the community to flourish, there needs to be open communication, transparency around the processes, and clear rules / guidelines for others to follow. There is a lot of competition with different website builders gaining traction, and it poses a serious threat (not short-term but over a long-run). I would like to see specialized hosted solutions powered by WordPress catered for specific industries. Rainmaker by Copyblogger and HappyTables is just a start. Instead of building mega plugins with a suite of features, in my opinion niche hosted solutions are the way to go because it adds more value to the end-users. The challenge is to keep these hosted solutions open rather than being closed. In other words, allow third-party developers and WordPress plugins to extend the platform. I think the involvement of hosting and particularly managed WordPress hosting companies would be crucial in this. WordPress being used as the core to power these hosted platforms would truly make it an operation system for the web and that’d be an awesome achievement. Final Thoughts One more thank you to Syed for providing us with some great answers today. With such a huge amount of industry knowledge, it’s well worth taking his words on board. As Syed pointed out, an email list provides you with the solid foundations for building a successful online business — if you aren’t growing a list already, you really should start. With so many different projects, it’s also great to see the entrepreneurial spirit burning strong in Syed, and it will be interesting to see what he comes up with next. For those that missed the links so far, be sure to check out WPBeginner, Syed’s personal blog syedbalkhi.com, and follow Syed on Twitter @syedbalkhi. Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back next week with another interview!
Today I was fortunate enough to interview another well-respected member of the WordPress community, Ben Fox. Ben is a serial WordPress entrepreneur, co-founding FlowPress, WP University, and SIDEKICK.pro. If you’re looking to forge a career in WordPress for yourself, you should listen to what he has to say carefully. In this interview, Ben will talk us through how he got involved with WordPress, the different areas he’s been involved with, and a few tips for any readers looking to get started. If you want to hear more from Ben, I highly recommend following him on Twitter — @benjaminefox. A huge thanks to Ben for agreeing to take part, and this is what he had to say. For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? Sure. I live in Toronto with my wife Dara who is also an entrepreneur. She owns and runs a fashion and art studio called Designher Co. Before I got into WordPress I did Event Marketing for ten years, working with brands like Best Buy and Live Nation, interspersed with a few other entrepreneurial ventures such as clothes jobbing, window washing and on-site tech support. I’ve been involved with WordPress for just over three years now. Starting with my own freelance shop and then joining with Bart Dabek to form FlowPress in February of 2013. I have little to no technical skill and was recently banned from accessing any code, at all, after bringing down our platform for 30 minutes during an attempt to “help” with a DNS switchover. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? This is actually my favorite story because it’s really the preamble to where SIDEKICK began. I had just lost my job a few weeks earlier and walked into a tech meet-up hoping to make some contacts. I overheard a few people talking about building a new website and how they were going to outsource it overseas. Being me, I stepped in and politely suggested that I could build them a site for the same amount, THEN asked what they were going to spend (classic mistake which I quickly learned not to repeat). After about twenty minutes of back and forth I had a cheque in my hand for $300.00 and headed home to build them a website. The only problem was, I had never built a site before. Two minutes on Google brought me to wpbeginner.com and the rest is history. I had a new career path, I just had to figure out how to scale up. 18 months later when Bart and I formed FlowPress (For the Love of WordPress), we set one of our priorities to give back to the community that had given us our start. That’s how SIDEKICK was born and why we continue to maintain it along with 20+ WordPress Basics Walkthroughs for SIDEKICK, for free. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? As far as direct involvement goes, I’ve had the privilege to be part of the WordCamp Toronto organizing committee. I’ve also spoken at four WordCamps now (WCSD ’15 will be five) and Prestige Conf. I’ve also attended 9 WordCamps in the past 18 months. On a day to day basis Bart and I have a few advisors in the community that we look to for guidance and we also provide advice to other WordPress business. My favorite part of the community though is the day to day interaction I can have with my fellow WordPress Geeks. I belong to WP Eagles, the Advanced WordPress Group and WordPress Mastermind group. I’m also on a couple of Slack channels. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? I could easily say that it’s an easy to use CMS or that the business market is ripe, but it’s more than that. I could build a product for any number of markets but WordPress feels like home. If you’ve met me then you know that I’m a schmoozer. I love being part of a community that’s invested heavily in its own. So for me, working with WordPress isn’t just about the tech, it’s an opportunity to work and interact with a diverse group of brilliant and fun people from around the world. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? The first things that come to mind are size and diversity. Bart and I joined the AWP Facebook Group two years ago when it had less than 1,500 members, almost all from the United States. Now it’s over 12,000 (including Matt Mullenweg) from all over the world and that’s just one example. You don’t have to look much further than the WordPress Slack Channel and its hyper growth and activity levels to see another. Thanks to that scale, we’re seeing niche groups form within our community so much so that WordPress meet-up groups now hold many different types of meetings to appeal to their diverse membership. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? Well, I wouldn’t charge $300 for a website, that’s for sure! I think I would take the same direction, starting with agency services to get my foot in the door and then moving towards product. Beginning that way gave me a solid foundation in WordPress and opened my eyes to the opportunities and challenges the WordPress market presents. Services are also a faster path to income then Products. My advice to anyone starting out with their first WordPress site is to first, have a plan. It’s a big plugin repository out there and if you don’t know where you want to go, you will spin your wheels trying out everything. Second, content trumps design and functionality. If you want to be better than the next person, just hit the Publish button more often. I promise, you’ll see results. If you’re just getting started in the WordPress business space, remember that a WordPress business is still a business — as comfortable and as cozy as it can feel working in WordPress. Remember that you are selling a solution, NOT WordPress. Not everyone knows or cares as much as we do. What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? Not publishing enough relevant content on a regular basis. Myself included. WordPress is about democratizing publishing. So Publish! Oh and Google likes it when you do that too. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? I think the future is bright. The community is growing and like anything, is experiencing some growing pains. In the near term we’re going to see more passionate debates like the recent Yoast auto-update action taken by the Core team. These situations are inevitable given the volume and diversity of WordPress uses and users and I think that’s a good thing. We are a very involved constituency that wants the best for ourselves and I think most of us recognize that means doing what’s best for the CMS that empowers us. That said, I don’t envy the Core team leaders over the next twelve months and I encourage everyone to be respectful in the commentary about those that work incredibly hard to keep WordPress sailing along. As far as what I’d like to see; I’d like to see the shared and managed hosting companies step it up another notch. There’s been some talk lately about how WordPress is going to fend off the likes of Wix and Squarespace. I believe that a successful defence is going to require a strong offence and that starts with the hosts. Specifically, I think WordPress is at a place now where there are awesome products in the ecosystem plus a wealth of diversity in the customer base. Hosts can be the catalyst that brings those products together with their hosting packages in a way that helps new users setup the site they need quickly at the same time, supporting the businesses that build the products (plugins/ themes) that make WordPress so attractive to use in the first place. Final Thoughts Another big thanks to Ben Fox for taking time out of his busy schedule to provide some excellent answers to our questions! Personally, I find it incredibly inspiring to hear Ben’s story, especially considering Ben openly admits to having “little to no technical skill”. Even if you’re brand new to the community and have no idea how to code, there’s still a place for you. If you want to see Ben’s latest project in action, be sure to head over to SIDEKICK.pro. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone looking to learn WordPress, and you can try out the service for free, too. You can also follow Ben on Twitter if you want to hear more from him. I hope you enjoyed Ben’s interview and his incredibly thorough answers! We’ll be back with more interview insights soon!
Today we launch a new feature for the Pagely blog, with a series of interviews with some of the top members of the WordPress community. Our first interview is with top WordPress blogger, Kevin Muldoon. With a decade and a half’s experience in Internet marketing, Kevin certainly fits the bill. He’s ran many successful websites over the years, and now makes a living writing about WordPress for some of the industry’s top blogs. This interview will tell you how Kevin got started with WordPress, how his WordPress-career has developed, and what direction he thinks the WordPress platform is heading. If you want to read more of Kevin’s insights, I highly recommend checking out his personal website at KevinMuldoon.com or signing up at Rise Forums. You can also follow him on Twitter at @KevinMuldoon. One big thanks to Kevin for agreeing to answer our questions. Let’s get started with the interview, shall we? For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? My name is Kevin Muldoon. I have been building and running websites since 2000. Over the years I have created many types of websites, including forums, directories, review websites, small content websites, and blogs. I have also run some small eCommerce stores. I suppose the best term to use to describe me is “Internet Marketer” as I have been involved of all aspects of internet marketing, including SEO, social media, content marketing, affiliate marketing etc. I have also tried my hands at other things such as podcasting and video blogging. However, I believe most people refer to me as a blogger or as an experienced WordPress user. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? I built all of my first websites using the Notepad app that can be found in Windows. It was not the most practical way to build websites as any small change in the design required me to update hundreds of pages. Though the skills I learned from creating websites in that way has served me well for many years. Around 2001, I started using content management systems such as PostNuke and PHPNuke. Over the next five years I tried dozens of different PHP and Perl based scripts to help me build websites. In 2006, I created a travel blog for my friends and family using Serendipity, which was a nice little blogging script. On my previous travels, I had updated family and friends individually via email, which took a huge amount of time. The blog allowed me to update everyone at once. I also installed a gallery script to share photographs of my travels (this was, after all, before Facebook had arrived). I tried a lot of blogging platforms that year. Some good, some not so good. I soon began using blogging platforms to build content websites. I also launched a blog for the poker discussion forum I owned. One of the blogging platforms I tried during that time was WordPress. I would by lying if I said it was miles ahead of the competition at the time, because it wasn’t. However, it did have extensive plugin and theme options that most rivals did not. Before long, WordPress was not only my favorite blogging platform, it was also the platform that I was using to build every new website I was creating. In early 2007 I launched BloggingTips.com. Within the first few months I published many guides about WordPress and released a couple of WordPress themes on WordPress.org. Later, in 2010, I launched my own dedicated WordPress blog entitled WPMods.com. Around the same time I started writing about freelancing for many top design blogs and WordPress companies too. I continue to write about WordPress to this day. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? I have released several WordPress themes to the WordPress community free of charge. I also ran a premium WordPress theme store around 2008/2009 (something which most people are unaware of). However, my main involvement with WordPress has been providing support. I have published thousands of tutorials about WordPress over the last nine years. I have also provided support to thousands of WordPress users over my time; via email, via the support forums that were launched with my blogs, and through consultation on Skype. Today, I offer support on WordPress related issues through my community Rise Forums. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? I have met a lot of great people through my work with WordPress. And I know that I will meet many more like minded individuals over the next few years who share my enthusiasm for the WordPress platform. From a working mindset, WordPress has simplified my life in many ways. It allows me to build websites quickly. It allows me to customize websites quickly. It has allowed me to administrate my websites quickly. You could, of course, argue that I am able to build and maintain websites quicker because I have so much experience using WordPress. And I would agree with that. If I had spent all my time building websites with Drupal or Joomla, I am sure I would become efficient at working with them too. For me, what sets WordPress apart is the vast amount of themes and plugins that are available for the platform. It helps me add functionality that I could not add with alternative content management solutions. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? WordPress has become more popular every year since I started using it, however the biggest change has been the growth of the premium WordPress market. When I first started using WordPress, there was very few premium WordPress products available. I am struggling to think of any from when I first started using WordPress. Nearly all themes and plugins were available free of charge, with developers relying mostly on donations as a way of profiting from their work. It did not take long for developers to see the potential from charging for WordPress related products and services. In my opinion, it is what helped WordPress go mainstream. The premium themes and plugins that were being released were generally higher in quality than their free alternatives. They were also supported actively by the developer. This potential for making money has attracted many fantastic developers and designers to WordPress who would have otherwise focused their career on other platforms. This has helped WordPress grow from a simple blogging platform to the feature packed content management system it is today. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? My advice to anyone who is getting started with WordPress is to create a test environment locally on your computer, online using an unused domain name you own, or online in a sub directory of another website you own. You should use this test installation to get to know WordPress better. Start off by following tutorials online about how to use WordPress. Once you have a basic understanding of the platform, you should start trying out many themes and plugins. Play around with everything and do not be afraid to make mistakes as it is one of the best ways to learn. Remember, you have nothing to worry about on a test website as you can simply reinstall WordPress if things go wrong. Go through every page of the admin area so that you understand every WordPress setting. Then try and learn some CSS and HTML and try your hand at making customizations yourself. The point of all of this is to help you become more experienced with WordPress. If you turn to your hosting company every time something goes wrong, you will never improve your knowledge of WordPress. You need to be proactive and attempt to figure things out for yourself (which is not very difficult since there are hundreds of thousands of WordPress tutorials online). I am not a developer, so perhaps I was always destined to go down the route I did. I suppose I could have spent all my time focusing on developing more great WordPress products. Or I could have published more tutorials in video format rather than in text. What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? Most new WordPress users do not think about backups and security until it is too late. You soon realise the importance of backing up after someone has hacked your website and you are unable to revert back to a working version of your website. So my advice to all new WordPress users is to ensure you backup your websites to an external location as soon as possible (I personally use VaultPress). Do not rely on the backups your hosting company provides as they can be lost. Remember, all it takes is a credit card to expire for a hosting company to inform you that they have deleted your hosting account. With regards to security, I recommend all new WordPress users to read some guides about protecting WordPress. This will help you understand best practices and should highlight great WordPress security plugins that are available (such as iThemes Security, WordFence Security etc). What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? I would like to see WordPress have more serious competition. In many ways, WordPress is a victim of its own success. Over the last two years, we have seen WordPress refine what was already a great product. However, I believe that competition in the marketplace would encourage more innovation and the addition of brand new features to WordPress. Another thing I think would be great would be a minimalist version of WordPress created specifically for bloggers. A new version of WordPress would not have to be released as a separate product. Perhaps an option could be clicked that enabled “Blogging Mode” and removed unnecessary options. For example, features such as pingbacks and trackbacks were effectively killed by spammers (a change of blogging and reading habits affected the use of them too). The minimalist writing mode that WordPress features is a step in the right direction, though a quick look at new blogging solutions, such as Ghost, show that WordPress looks a little dated and bloated in comparison. I find the simplicity of blogging solutions like Ghost attractive. As a blogger, you do not want to spend a lot of your time worrying about updating plugins and dealing with security issues. You just want to write. I do recognise that the popularity of WordPress means that they cannot simple drastically change the look and feel of the platform, as millions of people use it every day. But as much as I love WordPress, and I do, I feel that the platform needs more competitors so that it does not become irrelevant. Final Thoughts Once again, a huge, huge thanks to Kevin for agreeing to be interviewed and providing some incredibly insightful answers! For those of you that missed them, here are the all important links for hearing more of what Kevin has to say on WordPress: KevinMuldoon.com, and his Rise Forums. I hope you enjoyed this interview with one of the most well-respected members of the WordPress community. We’ll be back soon with more interviews and more insights!
After first installing WordPress, it can be easy to get carried away with adding plugins and writing content. If you want to give yourself the best possible foundations for building a successful website, these things can wait. Before all that, you need to get your website properly configured. One of the first things I like to configure on any WordPress install is my permalink structure. If you’re new to WordPress, a permalink is the fixed web address of a specific post or page. Want an example? https://pagely.com/blog/2015/02/marathon-sprint-winning-customer-service/ That is the permalink for our post on winning at customer service. If that’s a permalink, what is a permalink structure then? Using WordPress, your permalinks are automatically published in a specified format. For example, at Pagely, our permalinks always include the year of publication, followed by the month, followed by the post title. The moment I hit publish, the permalink will take that form — that is, unless I change the permalink structure. This short tutorial will help you set up your permalinks, as well as showing you how to choose the best permalink structure for your WordPress website. Configuring WordPress Permalinks Ready to set up your permalinks? It should only take a few seconds. From your WordPress dashboard, click through to the Settings section, then hit Permalinks. From here, you’ll see six permalink settings: Default: displays the automatically assigned post/page ID Day and name: displays year, month, and date the post was published, as well as post title Month and name: displays year and month the post was published, as well as post title Numeric: displays a number Name: displays the post title Custom structure: set up your own format (more advanced, so we’ll ignore this one) Click the one you want, then hit Save Changes — and that’s all there is to it! Which Permalink Structure is Best? The bigger question is: which of the six permalink structures is best? Well, actually there are several right answers, and it all comes down to personal preference. Let’s get the wrong answers out of the way first, though. Personally, I would never use the default or numeric options. Why? Well, there’s no post title in the permalink. The post title in the URL tells your readers what the post is about, but more importantly, it tells the search engines, too. This is one of many factors influencing your SEO performance, which affects your position in the SERPs. With no post title in the permalink, you’re missing out on these SEO benefits. That means you should be looking to go with one of these permalink structures: Name Day and name Month and name Name is probably the most commonly used permalink structure, as it keeps the links short while offering the SEO benefits I’ve just discussed. Others prefer the Day and name or the Month and name options — at Pagely, we use Month and name. Although these permalinks are a little longer, they improve organization — just by looking at the permalink the visitor (and search engines) can immediately spot when the post was published and how relevant it is. They have the post title in there, too, which still gives you the SEO benefit. If you post regularly — I’m talking several times a day — I’d definitely be leaning towards a “dated” permalink structure. If you post less frequently, it’s all down to which one feels right to you. Stick with Your Permalink Structure My one tip is to get the permalink structure right in the first place. Whichever option you choose, stick with it. Why? Because all the links to your content (internal and external) point to a fixed URL. When you change your permalink structure, you change your URLs. This will break all those links. Internally, this is fixable, but a nuisance — you’ll have to go through your posts, adjusting each one manually. For external links this is more difficult, and it will require you to contact the site owners linking to you. If they won’t co-operate, the link will remain broken. So just pick one and stick with it. There are far more important things to worry about than your permalink structure! Final Thoughts So there you have it: a simple guide to choosing the best permalink structure for WordPress users. As long as you include the post title in your permalink, you’ll be fine. Don’t worry about them too much: just set them how you want, then forget about them and get on with producing content! Do you have any questions about permalinks? Ask away in the comments section below!
If you’re looking to start selling things via a WordPress website, WooCommerce is the obvious solution. Brought to you by the developers behind WooThemes, the core WooCommerce plugin is completely free and lets you add complete eCommerce functionality to your website. That means stylish product pages with prices and pictures, a working basket/checkout procedure, and, by integrating WooCommerce with one of the many payment processors, a way to handle payments. This has resulted in an impressive 6.1 million downloads to date. Because of WooCommerce’s popularity, there are a huge number of WooCommerce “add-on” plugins in development, which you can install to extend the core functionality. If you want to get the most from your eCommerce store, here are six useful WooCommerce extensions. WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts ($25) The Internet has made it incredibly easy for customers to shop around to find the best deals, and this has resulted in a generation of hard-core bargain hunters. To keep your prices competitive, the WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts plugin lets you configure sophisticated conditional pricing rules for your products. You can link products, reduce prices, and offer bulk order discounts to keep prices down and customers happy. If you want your eCommerce store to thrive during the Christmas and Black Friday promotional periods, this plugin is a must! WooChimp — WooCommerce MailChimp Integration ($25) For eCommerce stores, attracting new customers is often far more costly then encouraging your existing customers to buy from you again. WooChimp is the ideal solution for WooCommerce users to grow their mailing list. It integrates seamlessly with MailChimp, and gives customers the opportunity to subscribe during the checkout process. Viral Coupon ($17) By now, we’re all well aware that social media is a great source of traffic for a website. If you want to attract more social traffic, the Viral Coupon WooCommerce add-on is an effective way to incentivize visitors to share your link via Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. In return, you can reward them with an exclusive coupon offering money off their basket during checkout, or other perks including free shipping. Table Rate Shipping ($21) For eCommerce stores, it’s all too easy for shipping costs to eat into already tight margins. The Table Rate Shipping for WooCommerce add-on lets you charge a variable shipping rate to protect those margins. You can set a variety of conditional rules based on customer location, basket weight, and order value, to name just a few — these rules are fully stackable, too. WooCommerce Customer Relationship Manager ($38) Outstanding customer service is a fundamental component of any successful business. If you want a convenient way to manage your customer service activities, look no further than the WooCommerce Customer Relationship Manager plugin. The plugin creates a new WordPress user role for your website: customer. This allows you to make customer notes, view order history, log phone calls, and record email correspondence with customers directly from within the WordPress dashboard. Loyalty Rewards for WooCommerce ($22) If you want to extract the maximum lifetime value from each customer, you need to find ways to keep people coming back to your store over your competitors. One of the most effective solutions is to set up a loyalty scheme, which can be done using the Loyalty Rewards for WooCommerce plugin. The plugin lets you offer reward points based on order value, products, coupons, and subscriptions, which can be exchanged for money during the checkout. You can also offer loyalty points as an incentive for buyers to leave product reviews. Final Thoughts All the WooCommerce extensions featured in today’s article will add value to your eCommerce website by retaining customers, running effective promotions, managing customer service, and increasing visibility via the social channels. The core WooCommerce is still a really great plugin, but with so many cost effective solutions to extend its functionality, you’d be crazy not to! Do you know any other great WooCommerce extensions? Let us know in the comment space below!
<p align="justify">This article covers our public notifications related to major security issues our clients and the WordPress community should know about. We are always focused on <a href="https://pagely.com/solutions/secure-wordpress-hosting/">prevention and the mitigation of risk to our clients</a>, and keeping you updated here is part of that process.<!--more--></p> <h3 align="justify">List of Vulnerable Plugins During This Month</h3> <p style="text-align: center"><style type="text/css" name="visualizer-custom-css" id="customcss-visualizer-21824"></style><div id="visualizer-21824-1451434954"class="visualizer-front visualizer-front-21824"></div><!-- Not showing structured data for chart 21824 because title is empty --></p> <h3>Plugins Closed by WordPress Security</h3> <p style="text-align: center"><style type="text/css" name="visualizer-custom-css" id="customcss-visualizer-21828"></style><div id="visualizer-21828-1348531355"class="visualizer-front visualizer-front-21828"></div><!-- Not showing structured data for chart 21828 because title is empty --></p> <p align="justify">WordPress security team decides to close a plugin when a security issue is found and the developer doesn’t release a patch in a timely manner. You can read more about this <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/alerts-and-warnings/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>.</p> <h3 align="justify">Relevant Vulnerabilities</h3> <p align="justify"><a href="https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/10478" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">secure-file-manager</a>:<br /> <b>Authenticated File Upload</b></p> <p align="justify"><a href="https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/10471" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ait-csv-import-export</a>:<br /> <b>Unauthenticated File Upload</b></p> <p align="justify"><a href="https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/10457" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">augmented-reality</a>:<br /> <b>Unauthenticated File Upload</b></p> <p align="justify">These plugins have critical vulnerabilities that when exploited would give an attacker complete control over your website. All of them are closed, which means no new installs are allowed but old installs will work without any issues, thus, please check if you have any of them installed <i>(</i><b><i>even if it’s not activated</i></b>) and remove them from your plugins folder.</p> <p align="justify"><a href="https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/10479" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">woocommerce-anti-fraud</a>:<br /> <b>Unauthenticated Order Status Manipulation</b></p> <p align="justify">Versions < 3.3 of this plugin have a bug that when exploited could cause unnecessary damage to your online store. An unauthenticated attacker would be able to change the status of all the orders making it difficult to handle them since the data will not be reliable. On <strong>November 23</strong> the developer released a <a href="https://dzv365zjfbd8v.cloudfront.net/changelogs/woocommerce-anti-fraud/changelog.txt" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">new version</a>.</p>
