Posts in the category “WordPress”
Over the past few months I’ve been using a lot of what I call Page Builders, WordPress plugins that come with a set of modules which you drag-and-drop into a grid-based layout. I haven’t used, nor could I possibly use, all the available Page Builder plugins but here is what I have played around with:
- Themify Builder (as part of one of their themes.)
- Elegant Themes Page Builder plugin.
- Elegant Themes Divi Theme (note that the page builder included in Divi is different from their Page Builder plugin. Elegant Themes is investing development into the Divi builder.)
Of course, there are a lot more Page Builders than these. You also have Visual Composer., Startup Framework, Qards… the list goes on.
I am not going to be reviewing the Page Builders I have used. Rather I want to share my thoughts on them after having gained some experience using them.
BackupBuddy by iThemes is a wonderfully simple solution for WordPress backup and migration. That is, when it works. On a hunch I decided to check my website backups and discovered that while database backups were fine BackupBuddy was failing to create full website backups. Even worse, emails that were supposed to notify me of the errors were not being delivered.
Yeah, that’s not good.
Now before you jump the gun and completely write-off iThemes, the TL;DR of this post is that there was nothing wrong with BackupBuddy; Acunetix WP Security had added an unreadable file to prevent directory listing. After adjusting some settings I got everything to work again.
So I was doing routine maintenance on the Caveena Website today when a conflict between two WordPress plugins mucked up our Portfolio page. Being a service-based organization, yeah that’s a pretty big deal.
And this is why I always test website updates on a development server.
So what happened? The issue was between BestWebSoft’s Portfolio Plugin (which, as you probably guessed, we are using for our Portfolio page) and Jetpack. The v3.1 release of Jetpack comes with a new custom post type: Portfolios. I didn’t dig into any of the code but my guess is they used the same name for the Portfolio custom post type. When both were active the http://caveenasolutions.com/portfolio permalink would not work and none of our portfolio project pages would display.
The fix was simple enough:
- Disable the Custom Post Type module in Jetpack’s settings.
- Re-build the permalink structure.
If you happen to be using the Portfolio plugin along with the Custom Post Type module in Jetpack, I unfortunately have no answer for you.
iThemes recently held a free two-part webinar discussing WordPress Security. The first video takes an introductory level approach but I still grabbed a couple good tips from it.
The second video talks about the company’s iThemes Security Plugin and also hosts a Q&A session with Chris Wiegman, the developer of iThemes Security, as well as Tony Perez, CEO of Sucuri. Unfortunately the sound was non-existent during Chris’s portion so you might want to skip that section until it’s fixed.
I found Tony’s section particularly interesting as he talks about higher-level approaches to security. He also touches on the wide-spread belief that using a shared host is less secure because you run the risk of other websites on that host being infected or hacked. The tl;dr is this does not happen much today with reputable web hosts (Tony specifically mentions BlueHost, HostGator and GoDaddy as being OK).
Here’s that portion of the video:
Today I learned that there is a Malay translation of WordPress… version 2.9.2. Last updated on 24 November 2011.
Let’s just stick with the official releases, yeah?
I ran a test update on a client’s WordPress website using our test environment and was surprised to see that updating to WordPress 3.8.1 killed all permalinks. Not good. The website used WooCommerce and after some investigation I managed to find a work-around: completely delete WooCommerce and re-install it. This will require you to reconfigure WooCommerce in the back-end Administration. None of my products appeared to have been touched so that’s a plus.
As of writing, WooCommerce is officially compatible with WordPress up to 3.7.1 with 4 people saying the plugin is broken in 3.8.1. That ought to be sufficient warning but the support forum only has a couple complaints. One thread even identified the issue as a conflict with Yoast SEO.
I figure there must have been some conflict with the page routing because not only were WooCommerce pages throwing a 404 but ordinary WordPress pages were as well. When I fell back on WordPress’ default hyperlink structure, everything was hunky-dory. Since Yoast SEO also has options affecting permalink structure, I wouldn’t be surprised if this and plugins like it would further complicate the issue.
If your WordPress website is using permalinks and you find that updating to 3.8.1 causes pages to throw 404 errors, I hope this helps you.
When rolling out a News Section on a WordPress website, would it be better to use a Custom Post Type?
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