Once in awhile a WordPress site gets left to the wolves and becomes overrun by spam comments. Perhaps you set up an installation and forgot to install Akismet or some other spam-blocking plugin. If you neglected your site for a significant length of time, it’s likely that you’ll return to hundreds, if not thousands, of…
The customizer is a powerful tool that allows users to make changes to WordPress themes and preview them live. Because it is native to WordPress, many theme authors are starting to employ the customizer exclusively, instead of creating their own option panels. Although the customizer is a frontend tool, it slides into view with a…
WordPress is excellent for writing posts privately by yourself and can be extended to allow collaborative writing with other registered authors. But what if you could open up your posts and revisions to even more contributors without requiring them to register to your site or even use WordPress? WordPress GitHub Sync is a new plugin…
The popular All In One SEO Plugin for WordPress has released an update addressing two security issues discovered by Sucuri during a security audit. According to Sucuri, one of the vulnerabilities can be used to escalate privileges while the other deals with Cross Site Scripting attacks. A logged-in user who doesn’t have administrative capabilities is…
Query Recorder is a new tool that allows developers to record queries while working in the WordPress admin. The plugin was created by Brad Touesnard, author of the popular WP Migrate DB plugin. Touesnard introduced Query Recorder earlier this month at WordCamp Miami during his presentation on database deployment strategy. Once installed, the plugin allows…
While WordPress 3.8 and 3.9 substantially improved the theme experience within WordPress, the plugins page hasn’t had the same treatment. In fact, the page hasn’t changed much since 2.7. However, that may change as Alex Shiels has proposed a detailed outline explaining the improvements and changes he’d like to see. According to Shiels, the goal…
WP-CFM is a new free tool for WordPress created by Matt Gibbs, author of the popular Custom Field Suite plugin. It provides configuration management for WordPress database changes, similar to Drupal’s Features module. WP-CFM lets you create and store bundles, which are essentially a group of one or more configuration options. The first step after…
From time to time, a WordPress site has the requirement of keeping users’ media uploads separated. It helps keep things a little more streamlined on multi-author sites where many authors are publishing and regularly adding files to the media library. WP Users Media is a new plugin that disables the ability for all users to…
Have you ever requested support for WordPress only to have someone request information related to your webhosting server configuration? Typically, you’d have to create a php.info file and send them a link to it. Depending on the person’s skill set, this can be a difficult task, let alone interpreting the information the file provides. The…
Soon after the release of Jetpack 3.0, users reported problems with the spell check module which utilizes the After The Deadline service. In Jetpack 3.0, when users proofread a post, they are greeted with a General 500 error. The error also shows up if you’ve configured it to automatically proofread a post before publishing. The…
The FCC isn’t making a lot of friends these days in large part due to its position with Net Neutrality. If you want to get back at the FCC, consider using the FCC Slow Lane plugin. The plugin allows users to protest the FCC by slowing down their websites to a crawl when an IP…
Jetpack 3.0 was released today with a couple of brand new features and an updated interface for managing modules and settings. The new administrative user interface allows for bulk activation and deactivation of modules in the same way you might manage plugins. The redesigned Jetpack admin greeting page now features its 33 modules and allows…
Today marks the one year anniversary of the devastating EF5 tornado that ripped through Moore, OK. The twister killed 24 people, seven of which were students when they took cover in The Plaza Towers elementary school. The Norman Transcript, a news publication that serves the Moore, OK, area has published a special website to remember…
Schema.org provides a standard way of marking up structured data so that it can be easily found by search engines and properly structured for other forms of data communication, i.e. JSON. Search engines such as Bing, Google, Yahoo! and others make use of this “shared markup vocabulary” to correctly identify the content on web pages.…
If you’re new to WordPress, the sudden onslaught of spam that you receive upon opening registration can take you by surprise. Unless you have a solid plugin in place, open registration comes with the wearisome task of wading through new signups to put the axe to spammers who got through. One of the common ways…