Posts tagged “wordpress”

A new client request came in for annual maintenance on a WordPress website. No problem, we’ve been providing WordPress maintenance for years. Oh, did I mention that the website had been virtually untouched for about 10 years? This is going to be interesting…

I count myself among the crowd that resisted and rallied against the inclusion of The Block Editor (aka The Gutenberg Editor) as WordPress’ default editing experience. But after digging deeper into the weeds I have to admit I think I’m coming around. Sort of.

WordPress’ automatic updates were failing to update a plugin so we had to go in an investigate.

Well this was a very interesting problem to run into. We’d migrated a website to a new host and WP-CLI was throwing errors complaining about an issue with the FTP Connection. What, for real? What would WP-CLI want with an FTP Connection? It wasn’t all commands though; wp core version ran without issue but others like wp plugin list kept complaining. What’s more, running WP-CLI on another website on the exact same host proceeded without issue. What was going on?

While doing routine troubleshooting I noticed an error appearing multiple times in the server log (a truncated version is replicated below).

WordPress database error Unknown column 'actioned_text' in 'field list' for query SELECT ... FROM wc_admin_note_actions WHERE ...

Messages in the server log are not necessarily problematic but when the same one is logged multiple times that’s probably a sign to start investigating.

I consider myself a craftsman in that I dedicate myself to my work. I’m probably a few steps short of a perfectionist (though that term has been applied to me in the past) and while I may not know best any newfangled idea or technique must convince me of its value before I’ll give it a second look. I pride myself in creating the best work I am capable of.

But reality does not always give me the luxury of doing so. While a craftsman would prefer having ample time and resources to work on their projects, the real world cannot always accommodate this. In most cases it’s “now or preferably yesterday!”

Did you know you can disable Jetpack’s Downtime Monitoring module using the ever-so-useful WP-CLI? Perhaps you’re doing some routine Website Maintenance and don’t want to be barraged by emails alerting you to the planned website downtime (and if you’re the type to never do maintenance on your website, you really should think about starting).

As divisive as the Jetpack WordPress plugin is, the Downtime Monitoring module is an easy, free way to be alerted when your WordPress website goes down. The problem is that Jetpack has been very indecisive about how to allow users to disable the Downtime Monitoring module.

Currently you can toggle it from your WordPress Admin but previous versions redirected you to the linked WordPress.com account where, in my experience anyway, it failed more often than not. So if you’ve been having trouble disabling the Downtime Monitor and if you happen to have WP-CLI installed (why wouldn’t you?), you can use this nifty command:

wp jetpack module deactivate monitor

Simple, isn’t it? Just don’t forget to turn it back on when you’re done!

Sometimes all you need is a simple plugin to add custom CSS to WordPress websites. Heaven knows there’s no lack of them in the WordPress repository.

I prefer to keep all CSS in the theme’s folder but sometimes I need to add some custom CSS on-the-fly without having to go through the trouble of updating the actual theme code. Maybe the client has reported a visual anomaly or I spotted something off while browsing their website. Either way, it’s much easier to log into the WordPress admin and add the CSS code. Migrating it to the theme can be done at a properly scheduled time.

We were doing routine maintenance on a client’s WordPress website when we noticed that they’d installed a plugin. Installing plugins is something we don’t normally encourage (or even allow) our clients to do but there are of course exceptions to the rule. We wanted to learn more about the plugin so we could determine if it could safely be removed and to cut a long story short we ended up going through the code itself only to find the plugin displays, without permission, a hyperlink to an external website. This was ad injection.

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The Adminimize WordPress Plugin is one of those things I wish I had found sooner. To protect our clients from themselves, we remove and block access to certain WordPress Admin pages that we feel could accidentally allow them to mess up their website. We use to do this through a combination of WordPress Roles and custom code that had to be painstakingly collected and tested. Most, if not all, that code is now redundant thanks to Adminimize.

There are lots of things in the WordPress admin area that your users don’t need to see or use. [The Adminimize WordPress] plugin help [sic] you to hide unnecessary items from WordPress admin area.
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