Category: BeeWUG Meetups

Summary of discussions

What’s Been Happening in the WordPress World Last Month

• Emails can be easily faked, never trust them. All secure information will be within your account on the relevant platform, always go directly to that website without clicking on any links. Email deliverability is also not great on many systems, a good analogy provided was that email is like writing a letter and throwing it out of the window and hoping it gets there. Sometimes it does, sometimes it get lots in the post. For business use, if you want things to work, use Microsoft Exchange or Google Business Emails and here’s why, https://www.contradodigital.com/really-simple-guide-business-email-addresses/, https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html
• Over 4 million websites using CloudFlare may have been compromised and may have revealed usernames and passwords for user accounts on those websites. A full list can be found here if interested, https://github.com/pirate/sites-using-cloudflare, most importantly, it’s good password practice to use a unique password for every service, use a long pass phrase (i.e. the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog on 01-02-2017!@20:20) – This password is crazy strong now and is virtually impossible to crack. Better yet, use a password manager and make sure your main password is super strong.
• Amazon Web Services had a bit outage recently which may have impacted you. AWS can be a great option to scale computing power as needed if you have the skills to set this up as needed, it’s rather challenging if you aren’t very technical, https://aws.amazon.com/
• To view the latest WordCamp schedules see here, https://central.wordcamp.org/schedule/
• Google Manufacturer Centre has opened to everyone to self sign up, https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-manufacturer-center-opens-self.html – It’s important to see where this is all heading with a technology/marketing aspect
• Something always worth reiterating is that whenever you are doing planned maintenance on your website, make sure your website is showing a 503 error to Google as this will avoid losing search rankings if Google indexes your website when it isn’t there. Full information can be found here, https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/02/closing-down-for-day.html
• Google is experimenting with using machine learning to include more swear words in online conversations to become more real, https://blog.google/topics/machine-learning/when-computers-learn-swear-using-machine-learning-better-online-conversations/
• WooCommerce now powers over 42% of ecommerce stores which is awesome, https://automattic.com/year-in-review-2016/
• WordPress has been ranked as the fastest growing Content Management System (CMS) in 2016, https://w3techs.com/blog/entry/web_technologies_of_the_year_2016
• Let’s Encrypt, the free certificate authority has passed 20 million installs, https://letsencrypt.org/2017/01/06/le-2016-in-review.html. If you aren’t using an SSL certificate, you need to be, see here for guides on how to set this up yourself, https://www.contradodigital.com/2016/09/01/claim-your-free-ssl-certificates-for-https/ and with more than 50% of website traffic now running over HTTPS, you can’t afford to wait around to migrate, https://twitter.com/letsencrypt/status/786977436109934592
• Using Accelerated Mobile Pages plugin for WordPress and the AMP Analytics plugin for WordPress are a super simple way to speed up your website and win some brownie points from Google, https://www.contradodigital.com/2016/05/09/wordpress-accelerated-mobile-pages-amp-speed-test/ and since Google has updated AMP to allow sharing of the Canonical URL this shows the importance of getting this set up, https://wptavern.com/google-updates-amp-to-allow-sharing-of-canonical-url
• WP Super Cache has patched multiple XSS vulnerabilities, https://wptavern.com/wp-super-cache-1-4-9-patches-multiple-xss-vulnerabilities, so as always, make sure you’re keeping all your WordPress Core files, Themes and Plugins up to date, https://wptavern.com/wp-super-cache-1-4-9-patches-multiple-xss-vulnerabilities. On a similar vein, NextGEN Gallery also patched a critical SQL Injection vulnerability which could allow attackers to delete the entire database, https://wptavern.com/nextgen-gallery-patches-critical-sql-injection-vulnerability
• Google Search Console (aka. Google Webmaster Tools) has started to inform website owners when their WordPress websites are out of date, https://www.contradodigital.com/2017/02/09/google-search-console-informing-webmasters-about-wordpress-security-updates/, it’s important to not rely on this though as there are many vulnerabilities that could be present that Google would not make you aware of.
• Over 200,000 websites have been impacted by the latest REST API vulnerability https://wptavern.com/wordpress-rest-api-vulnerability-exploits-continue, so update your WordPress core to the latest version to avoid your website being next
• Make sure to sign up to the BeeWUG newsletter on this page so you can keep up to date with what is happening.

Following on from the handy session to collate a list of recommended quality Themes and Plugins, here is the starting point of discussions, https://beewug.uk/resources/recommended-wordpress-plugins-themes/

The next meetup is on Wednesday 5th April, full details here, https://www.meetup.com/Blackburn-WordPress-Meetup/events/238093976/

Get involved and book here, https://www.meetup.com/Blackburn-WordPress-Meetup/events/237468371/

Be sure to subscribe to the mailing list on the right hand side to keep up to date with all future events and BeeWUG news.

BeeWUG is a community driven event, meaning that it is what people make of it. If you are interested in WordPress, use WordPress professionally or just want to know what WordPress is about, come along and find out more.

WordPress is awesome, get involved!

Event Format

• 18:00 — Arrivals
• 18:30 — Prompt start –  Talk – WordPress news
• 18:45 — Q&A – For topics covered and Michael’s WP update
• 19:00 — WP Clinic – Bring your laptop and get the hands on help you need from the WordPress community in the room
• 20:00 —Break & Networking
• 20:15 — In Depth Talk – API Driven Development by Michael Cropper from Contrado Digital
• 21:00 — End

 

Event Information

Be sure to review the details about BeeWUG and how to get here. If you’d like to speak at one of our future events or even sponsor a future event, let us know.

 

Get involved and book here, https://www.meetup.com/Blackburn-WordPress-Meetup/events/236100017/

Be sure to subscribe to the mailing list on the right hand side to keep up to date with all future events and BeeWUG news.

BeeWUG is a community driven event, meaning that it is what people make of it. If you are interested in WordPress, use WordPress professionally or just want to know what WordPress is about, come along and find out more.

WordPress is awesome, get involved!

Event Format

• 18:30 — Prompt start –  Talk – WordPress news
• 18:45 — Q&A – For topics covered and Michael’s WP update
• 19:00 — WP Clinic – Bring your laptop and get the hands on help you need from the WordPress community in the room
• 20:00 —Break & Networking
• 20:15 — In Depth Talk – API Driven Development by Michael Cropper from Contrado Digital
• 21:00 — End

Summary of discussions

What’s Been Happening in the WordPress World Last Month

• Make sure you’re using Google Analytics on your website – https://analytics.google.com – It’s free and awesome. Once you’ve set this up, install a Google Analytics plugin and configure the settings accordingly. Simple
• A handy plugin that may websites use is JetPack which comes with a bunch of features that many websites use – https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/ – Take a look, it’s not always right for every site as it can be overkill if you aren’t using most of the features
• Details mentioned about automating email marketing campaigns with content from blog posts – https://www.contradodigital.com/2016/09/22/automating-your-email-marketing-campaigns-with-wordpress-and-mailchimp/
• Live demo of how quickly you can build websites using front end editing technology – https://www.creopressto.com/websites/barbers-websites/
• Understanding different email technologies mentioned – https://www.contradodigital.com/really-simple-guide-business-email-addresses/
• How to debug email deliverability issues from your WordPress website – https://www.contradodigital.com/2016/04/04/debugging-email-deliverability-issues-cpanel-whm-imap-exchange/
• Handy tool to check how responsive your website is when people are accessing it from different devices – https://www.responsinator.com/
• Handy Membership plugins, https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/members/ and https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/membership/
• Good Appointments plugins, https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/appointments-plus/ and https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-bookings/
• A few good quality Themes and resources added to the list – https://beewug.uk/resources/
• WordPress Glossary added to Resources page above
• WordPress 4.7 has launched which is awesome – https://wordpress.org/news/2016/12/vaughan/
• WordPress to only recommend hosting companies who use SSL in 2017 – https://wptavern.com/wordpress-will-only-recommend-hosting-companies-offering-ssl-by-default-in-2017 so make sure you’re using an SSL certificate on your websites, lots of technical details at the bottom of this blog post – https://www.contradodigital.com/2016/09/01/claim-your-free-ssl-certificates-for-https/
• Take the WordPress 2016 survey to let people know how you use WordPress – https://wordpressdotorg.polldaddy.com/s/wordpress-2016-survey
• Make sure to sign up to the BeeWUG newsletter on this page so you can keep up to date with what is happening.

The next meetup is on Wednesday 4th Jan, full details here, https://www.meetup.com/Blackburn-WordPress-Meetup/events/236100017/

Have a good Xmas & New Year everyone!

 

Get involved and book here, https://www.meetup.com/Blackburn-WordPress-Meetup/events/235964272/

Be sure to subscribe to the mailing list on the right hand side to keep up to date with all future events and BeeWUG news.

BeeWUG is a community driven event, meaning that it is what people make of it. If you are interested in WordPress, use WordPress professionally or just want to know what WordPress is about, come along and find out more.

WordPress is awesome, get involved!

Event Format

• 18:30 — Prompt start –  Talk – WordPress news
• 18:45 — Q&A – For topics covered and Michael’s WP update
• 19:00 — WP Clinic – Bring your laptop and get the hands on help you need from the WordPress community in the room
• 20:00 —Break & Networking
• 20:15 — In Depth Talk – TBC
• 21:00 — End

Summary of discussions

What’s Been Happening in the WordPress World Last Month

• The internet broke with a massive DNS level attack on Dyn – http://thehackernews.com/2016/10/dyn-dns-ddos.html
• WordCamp Manchester took place – https://2016.manchester.wordcamp.org/
• BitBucket put their prices up – https://wptavern.com/bitbucket-pricing-hike-increases-cost-per-user-by-100
• There may be some interesting changes on the horizon to allow users to edit CSS within the WordPress Customiser instead of using a Child Theme style.css file – https://wptavern.com/the-days-of-creating-child-themes-for-simple-css-changes-may-soon-be-over
• The AMP plugin from Automattic now allows a bit of custom styling to better represent your brand – https://wptavern.com/wordpress-com-adds-customization-for-amp-pages-pushes-update-to-amp-plugin and if you aren’t familiar, you really need to be using Accelerated Mobile Pages as they are awesomely fast, https://www.contradodigital.com/2016/05/09/wordpress-accelerated-mobile-pages-amp-speed-test/ but make sure you don’t accidentally break your Google Analytics setup on your AMP pages, https://www.contradodigital.com/2016/09/30/make-sure-youre-using-amp-analytics-when-using-amp/
• WordPress 4.7 will allow developers to build custom Bulk Actions for Posts and Pages which is pretty cool – https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-7-will-allow-developers-to-register-custom-bulk-actions-in-admin-list-tables
• You can now use Twitter Moments to summarising content such as events and conferences, https://wptavern.com/twitter-moments-now-open-to-all-users-wordpress-4-5-supports-embedding which you can then embed into your WordPress website by simply copying and pasting the link which will then display like this, https://beewug.uk/2016/11/02/wordcamp-manchester-2016-review/, it’s a super simple way to create some quick content for your website
• Twenty Seventeen Theme has been merged into Core, so watch this space when WordPress 4.7 launches fully, https://wptavern.com/new-wordpress-default-theme-twenty-seventeen-merged-into-4-7
• WordPress API Content Endpoints have been officially merged into the 4.7 release which is amazing – https://wptavern.com/wp-rest-api-officially-approved-for-merge-into-wordpress-4-7. Up until now, this required a plugin to achieve the results which meant that many Plugin developers simply didn’t support the API as they weren’t sure if it was going to stay around. This is the first step that will give confidence to Plugin developers that the WordPress API is here to stay and hence we should see some exciting developments in this area over time. Here’s an interesting project we did recently which uses the WordPress API as a backbone to two mobile applications, https://www.contradodigital.com/case-studies-2/mend-muslim-engagement-development-case-study/
• Various discussions around cyber attacks and hacked data. Take a look at https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to see if your email address is included on any of the many large scale breaches over the last few years. If your email address is found, it’s probably a good idea to update your passwords.
• There has been a bit of a tiff between Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, and Wix about licensing of code under GPL, https://wptavern.com/mullenweg-takes-aim-at-wix-over-gpl-abuses-wix-response-fails-to-address-licensing-issue
• A rather uneventful tweak in WordPress 4.7 is that they are removing the underline and strike through options from the visual editor, https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-7-removes-the-underline-and-justify-buttons-from-the-editor which I find a little odd since this is not based on data, only what seems to be someones opinion that these aren’t used.
• Lots more exciting changes as part of WordPress 4.7 including PDF Previews in the Media Library and User Admin Languages which can be different from the language of the website, https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-7-beta-1-now-available-for-testing along with Custom Page Templates soon to be available for all Custom Post Types, https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-7-brings-custom-page-template-functionality-to-all-post-types
• Discussions around Page Builders and the variety of options available. A handy review from Pippins over at https://pippinsplugins.com/wordpress-page-builder-plugins-critical-review/ to help you get up to speed. Avoid anything that locks you in is the top tip all round and here’s a quick live preview of Divi in action, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUp0km3upI4.
• Various discussions around Security Plugins available including iThemes Security, https://ithemes.com/security/, All in One WordPress Security and Firewall, https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-wp-security-and-firewall/ and Wordfence, https://www.wordfence.com/ – all of which are great, although interestingly at a recent talk at WordCamp Manchester it was highlighted that security plugins often contain security vulnerabilities their self, so be aware and keep everything up to date, http://www.slideshare.net/ottokekalainen/wordpress-security-101-wordcamp-manchester-2016, slide 25. One of the most famous security breaches recently is with Mossack Fonseca, aka. the Panama Papers leak, https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/04/mossack-fonseca-breach-vulnerable-slider-revolution/ which is suspected to have been caused by an old and un-patched version of the Revolution Slider Plugin being exploited.
• When discussing between the self-hosted WordPress.org against WordPress.com, some interesting statistics about WordPress.com includes that there are over 409 million people accessing websites every month on WordPress.com which equates to over 23 billion page views which is unbelievable, https://wordpress.com/activity/

 

Guest Talk

The guest talk this month was from Michael Cropper of Contrado Digital who talked about WordPress Fundamentals – The Advanced Topic About Getting the Basics Right

• There are many ways to use WordPress
• But very few you should
• Make sure you have good web hosting in place, you really do get what you pay for. You’re generally paying for CPU, RAM, Hard Disk Space, Bandwidth and Priority. A whole managed service whether on a Shared Server, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Dedicated Server
• Take Web Server Security seriously and make sure you are covered at the Physical Firewall DNS Level, you have adequate Server Level Security Software configured and your Website Level Security is set up correctly too. Then make sure everything is fully automated and you are monitoring everything that is happening.
• WordPress Core, simple. Keep everything up to date
• WordPress Themes, When using a Theme from the WordPress Theme Directory, you can easily update this through the WordPress Admin area. Likewise, you can too with quality Premium Themes. On the other hand, when purchasing low quality Themes, often from Theme marketplaces, you have to manually update the Theme which most people simply do not do. So be aware of these issues.
• Some interesting Theme usage statistics about what is currently in use, https://www.contradodigital.com/2016/07/01/divi-preferred-choice-wordpress-theme/
• Always use Child Themes when customising your Theme
• Take a good look through the WordPress Template Hierarchy for the specific files you need to customise, https://beewug.uk/resources/
• When dealing with Plugins to enhance the functionality of your WordPress website, the same applies when reviewing Themes as discussed above. Don’t go adding poor quality Plugins to your Website and introducing security holes that can be exploited. There are now almost 50,000 Plugins within the WordPress Plugin Directory which have been used almost 1.5 billion times. Crazy numbers.
• When looking to customise your Plugins, never edit the PHP files directly. Instead, many leading Plugins can be customised by adding the files to the Child Theme such as with WooCommerce. Likewise many Plugins have a variety of Hooks available which you can then use Actions and Filters for within your Child Theme’s functions.php file to customise as needed.
• Backups. Make sure you have both Server Level and WordPress Level backups in place which are fully automated, are full backups which include both files and databases and they are stored in a remote location with multiple restore points. This is a minimum requirement.
• Some of the common mistakes people make include; Doing things on the cheap…; Purchasing low quality Themes and Plugins from marketplaces…; Cheap web hosting…; No backups…; No security updates to the Web Server, WordPress Core, Themes or Plugins…
• As mentioned, there are many ways to use WordPress, yet very few ways to use WordPress correctly.

We’re always looking for guest speakers for the events, so get in touch if you want to speak about something you’re working on at the moment or something you want to share with the community.

Make sure you sign up to the mailing list to keep up to date with what’s happening in the WordPress world and at BeeWUG.

The next event will be on Wednesday 7th December. Hope to see you there. Spread the word.

The first BeeWUG!

Get involved and book here, http://www.meetup.com/Blackburn-WordPress-Meetup/events/vlqgcmyvpbdb/

Be sure to subscribe to the mailing list on the right hand side to keep up to date with all future events and BeeWUG news.

BeeWUG is a community driven event, meaning that it is what people make of it. If you are interested in WordPress, use WordPress professionally or just want to know what WordPress is about, come along and find out more.

WordPress is awesome, get involved!

Event Format

• 18:30 — Prompt start –  Talk – WordPress news
• 18:45 — Q&A – For topics covered and Michael’s WP update
• 19:00 — WP Clinic – Bring your laptop and get the hands on help you need from the WordPress community in the room
• 20:00 —Break & Networking
• 20:15 — In Depth Talk – TBC
• 21:00 — End