The Weekly round up of news, tips, and information to help you create the best possible WordPress website.
This is a weekly round up of WordPress news I have accumulated from across the web some old some new but always interesting. The new relates to WordPress and sometimes other areas of the web. It often has a focus on security and more.
We try to have news here that is not only important to help you with your website as well as new from the #wpdrama scene and more to share.
Some of the news here will be of interesting links to not only articles but training materials and other sources I can find online that will help you create a better WordPress website.
This week we have the following news for you.
Critical Vulnerability in PHPMailer. Affects WP Core.
A critical remote code execution vulnerability in PHPMailer has been discovered by Polish researcher Dawid Golunski. The vulnerability was announced on legalhackers.com yesterday but proof of concept exploit details were not included.
Unfortunately someone posted a proof of concept to exploit-db and to github a few hours ago demonstrating how the vulnerability can be exploited in the PHPMailer library, but not targeting any web application that is in use.
We are publishing this unscheduled update to give PHP developers and our community advance warning of this issue. We expect this story to continue to evolve rapidly as more developers and malicious actors look at this code. Read original article here…. wordfence.com
PHPMailer Exploit in WordPress Core
A new security issue has been found in the PHPMailer used to send emails from your WordPress site.
It will take a WordPress update to fix it and they are already working on that.
If you use a plugin for email from your site, (like one with SMTP and an outside service) it will not be affected by this exploit. Read original article here…. blogaid.net
35+ Best WordPress Gravity Forms Extension / Addons
Gravity forms is a very popular WordPress form plugin and over a half million WordPress users are already using Gravity Forms. But main package of Gravity Form doesn’t come with everything. For example, if you want to integrate Geo conditional fields, there is not option in the main package. But thanks to the WordPress developers that they have created many extensions / add-ons for Gravity Forms. Also check out Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins.
Following is a collection of 35+ Best WordPress Gravity Forms Extension / Addons. We’ll divide the collection as “Premium Gravity Forms Extensions / Addons” and “Free Gravity Forms Extensions / Addons“. Read original article here…. wpulti.org
The site structure of a growing blog • Yoast
It is never easy to set up a new blog. It can take quite some time to get picked up by the search engines. Nevertheless, as your blog starts to grow, you’ll probably face new SEO problems. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll discuss some of the difficulties you might encounter as your blog really starts to grow. How do you come up with new content? Should your keyword strategy be adapted as your blog gets bigger? How do you manage different authors? And how will you keep the structure of your blog in shape? In this post, I’ll discuss some techniques to improve the structure of a growing blog.
Learn how to structure your site well with our Site structure training! »
As your blog is growing, it could well be that you’re blogging about one thing far more than other things. That’s just the way blogging goes. You should therefore critically evaluate your categories every few months, asking yourself whether or not one category is growing much faster than another category. If some parts of your blog are growing much faster than other parts, you could divide such a category in two separate categories. Read original article here…. yoast.com
My Biggest Mistake as a WordPress Designer
I’ve been reading WPMU’s article 4 Ridiculously Obvious Mistakes I Made Building WordPress Sites for Clients. This has made me reflect on my own biggest mistakes as a WordPress designer.
I decided that my biggest mistake has been to show a new WordPress website to a client before it’s ready. I have done this a few times and it has never worked out well!
There are many reasons why a WordPress designer might be tempted to show a work-in-progress to a client:
All of this makes it very tempting to show the draft website to the client as soon as possible. It makes sense – after all, surely the client will understand that it’s not 100 polished yet and we still need to make the finishing touches? Read original article here…. barn2.co.uk
14 Advanced SEO Tactics That Your Competition Doesn’t Know About
Believe it or not, SEO is still an ultra-powerful tool in 2016.
In fact, SEO might be more powerful than ever, and for one simple reason: Most sites are neglecting their SEO.
To get you started on the path to SEO mastery, here’s a list of 14 advanced SEO tactics your competition doesn’t know about.
One way is to create as many social media profiles as possible for your brand. In short, you need to be actively involved on as many networks as possible. Read original article here…. quicksprout.com
10 WordPress Maintenance Tips For A Smooth Running Site (Infographic)
WordPress out of the box is great, it can load a webpage in less than half a second! However if you don’t take care of your website, it can become slow, cause random errors and be exploited by hackers looking to take advantage of your audience and resources. Like running a business, WordPress websites need maintaining and improving over time, however WordPress maintenance can be easy once you know how.
One of the most important steps you can take when looking to maintain a WordPress website is to setup regular backups to the cloud. However bear in mind that if your site were to be compromised, a backup can also be compromised, but at least you’ll have something you can work from and you wont have to start from scratch after losing your websites data where it’s hosted. Read original article here…. wpshrug.com
And now for something older in the past article collections.
How to Move a Single WordPress Site into a Multisite Network
One of the most frequent questions I’ve been asked by students completing the WordPress Multisite course in The Academy is this: how do you move an existing WordPress site into a Multisite network?
But if you’ve made a lot of customizations to your site using the Customizer, or you’ve spent a lot of time setting up your plugins, this method won’t migrate all of that. You can either take the time to manually tweak everything again (see the final part of this post) or you can manually migrate the site by copying the relevant database tables.
Migrating the database tables involves using phpMyAdmin to download database tables, editing the resulting sql file and re-uploading that using phpMyAdmin again. It saves you having to do any tidying up at the end but can be a bit daunting. I’ll cover that in a separate post – if you don’t feel up to that, by all means follow the instructions here. Read original article here…. premium.wpmudev.org
New Guide on How to Fix Hacked WordPress Sites
With more than 25% of the internet running WordPress, beginners are creating a web presence for the first time using the platform.
This type of popularity also invites the attention of hackers. Beginners and novices alike are often unprepared to fix a hacked WordPress site.
Because of this, our mission is now expanding. Thanks to a new initiative, we are happy to announce a new section of our website dedicated to providing concise and comprehensive guides to website security. Please enjoy our first one – How to Clean a Hacked WordPress Site.
This guide will offer an appropriate foundation for resolving a WordPress security incident.
It is coupled with an infographic that helps illustrate the cleaning process: Read original article here…. blog.sucuri.net
Everything You Need to Know about Headway Themes Support Issues and Financial Trouble
Headway Themes, a popular drag and drop WordPress layout builder is in financial trouble. Father-son duo Grant Griffiths and Clay Griffiths owns Headway Themes which works as a visual layout builder for WordPress based sites. Problems at Headway started appearing after 4.0 release in May 2016.
WP Tavern reported this concern and then lot of people from other theme community and businesses started talking about the wrongdoings of Headway Themes. Read original article here…. purposethemes.com
Headway Themes Confirms Financial Difficulties, Issues Apology to Customers
Headway Themes publicly apologized to its customers on the company’s blog this evening for a lack of communication, the decline in support, and the extensive issues with the most recent 4.0 release.
We’re writing today to communicate with you as best we can our mistakes, to apologize for those mistakes, and to tell you what we’re doing to remedy them for you.
First of all to our community of amazing users: We admit we’ve made mistakes in not communicating with you as we should have. This post should have gone out a long time ago. And we sincerely apologize for this lack of communication. Read original article here…. wptavern.com
Making your WordPress site slow
Please don’t follow any of these steps!
There are a few tricks to getting the slowest hosting but i am here to let you know them.
Firstly many people over look this one on a quest for cheap hosting but hosting location can play a big part, for example if you are building a website for a mainly United Kingdom (UK) audience then you are definitely going to want to look for hosting on another continent, the USA or even somewhere like Australia would be great, there is no point in looking for hosting in Europe it would deliver the fastest response times. Read original article here…. wpgeodirectory.com
A to Z of WordPress Terminology for Beginners to Advanced
A lot of posts on this blog attempt to explain WordPress concepts and terminology, or at least those that are relevant to the post. And the WordPress Codex does a great job of explaining the concepts used by WordPress.
But following lots of questions I’ve seen in comments on posts asking for definitions and explanations, I thought it would be useful to create a jargon buster for WordPress users and developers.
So in this post I’ll attempt to define and explain some of the key concepts in WordPress. Some of these are more relevant for users, others for developers, and some for both. Read original article here…. premium.wpmudev.org
Well that’s a wrap for this week more next week from WP Plugins A to Z.