6+ Cool Features in WordPress 3.9 That Make Life Easier If you run the bleeding edge nightly installs of WordPress, you would have updated to version 3.9 Beta 1 this week. If you don’t run the nightlies, you’re missing out on some fantastic new features. Post editor updates, live widget previews and the ability to drag and drop images directly into the visual editor are just some of the neat new features in this release, which is due out next month. Updated Post Editor TinyMCE, the software that powers the visual editor, has been updated to the latest version so the interface looks cleaner and less cluttered. The “Paste from Word” button is now gone because it’s no longer needed. Galleries can be previewed from within the editor. Core developer Andrew Nacin has warned that any plugins that add buttons to the visual editor may no longer work, so users are encouraged to open a thread in the WordPress Support Forums is they come across any issues. Drag-and-Drop Images Now this is really cool. This is my favorite feature in 3.9. Live Widget Previews
How to Safely Move Your WordPress Site (Without Losing Anything!) Moving WordPress can seem like a challenging task and one easily placed in the too-hard basket. The WordPress Codex offers a detailed guide, though it’s confusing at best and doesn’t offer an easy guide. Whether you’re tired of your current web host and want to move to a new one, or you want to just move your site to the root directory of your domain, migrations doesn’t have to be a headache – and you don’t have to fear making a mistake and blowing up your site. In this step-by-step guide I’ll cover two common scenarios: Moving a website from a subdirectory of a domain to the root directory.Moving a website from one web host to another. Moving a WordPress Site from a Subdirectory to the Root This is a straightforward method that will allow you to keep your WordPress install in a subdirectory and use your root domain’s URL. 1. It’s a good idea to have a backup, just in case anything goes wrong. You can use any back up tool you feel most comfortable with. 2. 3. 4. 5. Open index.php. require ('.
6 Best Dropbox Plugins for WordPress When you’re on the go, having access to your important files on multiple devices is crucial. Dropbox makes storing and sharing your files easy. No wonder more than 50 million people use it. According to Dropbox, more than 1 million files are saved every three minutes and 500 million files are saved daily. Dropbox has become an essential tool in many people’s workflow and there are a lot of WordPress plugins available to help make the most of this fantastic service. The list below brings together many of the top plugins available for integrating WordPress with Dropbox. WordPress Backup to Dropbox The WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin will backup your site’s files and a SQL dump of its databased and send it to your Dropbox account. You can also set where you want your backup saved within you Dropbox account and you can choose to exclude certain files or directory from the backup. This up-to-date plugin is popular with more than 752,417 downloads from the WordPress Plugin Repository.
How To Build A Premium Content Site Using WordPress From magazines and newspapers to bloggers, virtually every publisher aspires to make money from their content. Creating a premium content site using WordPress is actually relatively straight-forward but there’s a lot to consider before you start building your site. In this article we’ll look at how to approach creating and maintaining a premium content site and look at several potential technical implementations. Before you can select the most appropriate solution for your premium content site you need to determine your requirements. That means putting together at least a basic checklist that you can use to assess potential solutions. Subscription or Membership? This might seem a little like splitting hairs but is the first fork in the road when it comes to selecting a solution because subscriptions and memberships are not the same thing. A subscription is paying in advance for a service or product. With a membership, the expectation is different. Take this site for example. First Click Free
13 Free Medium Inspired WordPress Themes — If You Dare! Medium is a blog publishing platform that has grown by leaps and bounds over the last year or so. Its design is simple yet attractive, making sure to put a great deal of the focus on the site’s content. Both of these things have led some in the WordPress community to pay attention. And as is often the case, when something new arises and becomes popular in the web publishing space, many WordPressers look to either integrate it or take inspiration from it. If You Dare And that leads us to the “If You Dare” part of our title. Back in October, we did a roundup of Medium inspired themes. In the comments of that post, Brad Williams from BragThemes.com reported that Medium contacted them and asked them to take their Medium-inspired theme down. You can read the full comment here. Now, I obviously don’t know the full story here. As always, we’ll see. Should Medium push back on that one, there may be a little push back in return. Or maybe not. Anyway, on with the themes. Lucky 13
How to Add Google Analytics to WordPress in Under 60 Seconds There’s no doubt Google Analytics sets the standard when it comes to gathering information on your site’s visitors. Analytics can show where they landed on your site, what they read, how long they stayed, what they were searching, the browser they were using, where they live, their age and even their interests. Adding Google Analytics to your site is easy. So simple, in fact, that it takes less than a minute! For today’s Weekend WordPress Project, I’ll show you how to add Google Analytics to WordPress with very little time and effort. Featured Plugin - WordPress Pop-Up Chat Plugin No javascript required, no third part chat engine, just fully featured chat right in your own database on your own WP sites - couldn't be easier. Find out more 1. This tutorial assumes you’ve already signed up for Google Analytics. After you’ve signed up, you’ll be given a piece of Javascript code to add to your site. 2. Copy the tracking code. 3. Go back to your Google Analytics account. Or… Just Use a Plugin
5 Free WordPress Pricing Table Plugins Pricing tables play an important role in helping your visitors quickly visualize and compare the different features your pricing plans offer. The problem is, they can be a challenge from both a design and usability standpoint – they must be simple, but at the same time clearly differentiate between features and prices of different products and services. If users can’t immediately see the value in your product or service right away, you can rest assured their cash will remain firmly in their wallet. So in today’s post we’re going to take a look at the best plugins available to help you get the pricing right on your site. DetailsQuanticaLabs’ CSS3 Responsive Pricing Table Plugin is a premium WordPress pricing table solution that offers a responsive layout. DetailsPOWr Price Table by POWr is no ordinary, free pricing table plugin – it’s a cloud-based plugin which means that you can edit your website when it’s live. Pricing Table Plugins Compared Choosing the Best Pricing Plugin
8+ Awesome Plugins for Safely Moving WordPress There’s a lot of love for this free plugin, which allows you to duplicate, clone, backup, move and transfer an entire site from one place to another. Duplicator has racked up more than 480,000 downloads and has received an average rating of 4.9 stars on the WordPress Plugin Repository. That’s a lot of happy people. This plugin is made by developers for developers. It’s a great tool for pulling a production site down onto a local machine for testing, as well as the reverse – developing locally and pushing a site to a production server. Duplicator is currently in beta and comes with the disclaimer that while it’s been heavily tested, it does require “above average” technical knowledge. Duplicator gets a lot of love from me, too.
Creating A Disaster Recovery Plan For Your WordPress Site Do you have a Disaster Recovery Plan for your WordPress site? If you answered no then you’ll probably in good company because not many sites do. Yet how well you’ve planned for disaster will determine how well and how quickly you recover from it. Putting together a Disaster Recovery Plan is quick and relatively easy. And if disaster strikes it’ll save you so much time and angst that you’ll wonder why you ever thought you could live without one. What Is A Disaster Recovery Plan? A Disaster Recovery Plan describes not only how to recover from a range of disasters but also steps to mitigate the risk of disaster. The best Plans balance detail with simplicity. A basic Plan will include: an investigation checklist (do we even have a disaster?) Why Have A Disaster Recover Plan? If disaster does strike, be it your site gets hacked, there’s a hardware failure or, even worse, your hosting provider goes offline, then your stress levels are going to rapidly rise. What Goes In A Disaster Recovery Plan?
How to Reset Your WordPress Site Have you ever had one of those days when you just want to hit the reset button and start again? Resetting your WordPress site can be useful if you are testing out a bunch of plugins and themes and want to reset your test environment to clear out the options table along with everything else. In today’s Weekend WordPress Project, I’ll show you how to quickly nuke your site, leaving you with a blank slate. WordPress Reset lets you return your database back to its defaults. It deletes all customizations and content, leaving your site like WordPress was freshly installed. You can also edit your wp-config.php file so the plugin automatically reactivates with each reset. After installing and activating WordPress Reset, a new menu item will appear in the admin sidebar on the left, Tools > Reset. All you need to do is type “reset” into the text field and click “Reset”. If you want to keep your plugins rather than purge them, you might like to try WordPress Database Reset.
WP Smush.it The #1 Image Optimization Plugin for WordPress Smush is the leading image optimization plugin – optimize, resize, and compress images, as well as convert images to WebP or AVIF format for faster loading web pages. Brought to you by the WPMU DEV team – founded in 2007 and trusted by web professionals from freelancer to agency worldwide ever since. Whether you spell it ‘optimise’ or ‘optimize’ – with Smush’s image optimizer you can compress images and serve images in next-gen formats (convert to WebP or AVIF), all without introducing a visible drop in quality. Enjoy uninterrupted bulk image optimization with Smush Pro. Level up immediately with exclusive Pro benefits like uninterrupted image optimization, 5x more image compression, and 119-point global image CDN. Award-Winning Image Optimizer Smush has been benchmarked and tested number one for speed and quality. Why Use Smush To Optimize Images (The Smush Difference) Learn More With These Hands-On Image Optimization & Performance Tutorials
iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) iThemes Security is the #1 WordPress Security Plugin iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day. WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software. Most WordPress admins don't know they're vulnerable, but iThemes Security works to lock down WordPress, fix common holes, stop automated attacks and strengthen user credentials. Maintained and Supported by iThemes iThemes has been building and supporting WordPress tools since 2008 like BackupBuddy, our WordPress backup plugin. Get Plugin Support and Pro Features Get added peace of mind with professional support from our expert team and pro features to take your site's security to the next level with iThemes Security Pro. Pro Features: iThemes Sync Integration Manage more than one WordPress site? iThemes Brute Force Attack Protection Network Protect Detect
NextGEN Gallery Optimizer NextGEN Gallery Optimizer Improves your site's page load speed by ensuring NextGEN Gallery's scripts and styles ONLY load on posts with the [nggallery id=x] shortcode. It also includes and automatically-integrates the fantastic Fancybox lightbox script, so now you can have gorgeous galleries AND a speedy site! *Requires NextGEN Gallery 1.6.2 and up. Please note: The basic version currently only supports the popular [nggallery id=x] shortcode and thus, will not load the extra scripts required for slideshows to function. NextGEN Gallery Optimizer *Premium* Builds on the basic version and adds support for ALL TEN of NextGen's shortcodes including [nggallery id=x], [slideshow id=x], [album id=x], [thumb id=x], [singlepic id=x], [imagebrowser id=x], [nggtags gallery|album=mytag], [random max=x], [recent max=x] and [tagcloud]. This Premium version is available from the plugin settings page, or can be downloaded here. Key features: Improves your WordPress page load speed! NEW in Version 1.1.2:
Image Elevator for Wordpress Latest update: 27 Jan 2014. Version: 1.8.8. Platform: for Wordpress. Save tons of time when adding images into your posts! Have you wondered how many steps you need to do for adding an image into a wordpress post? We bet you could add images more often and make your content more attractive if it didn’t take so many time! Image Elevator for Wordpress allows you to paste images into the post editor directly from clipboard (or by dragging & dropping files)! How to use Please view the demo video below to learn how the plugin can make your posting more easy. Key Features The plugin let you to paste images from clipboard directly into the post editor or drag & drop local images from your computer. Renames images on the fly. Converts images on the fly. Works in Visual mode and HTML mode. Saves images in your Media Library. Supports the large number of programs and formats. Compatible Browsers What People Say I bought the plugin, and it has already saved me HOURs of time. Stay In Touch Change Log