Updates & Resources: What’s New 4.3, Plugins for Photos, Security and more

What’s new in WordPress 4.3?

• Formatting Short Cuts, Quick link Toolbar, Site Icon,
• Quick Link Image toolbar  – not new but still worth mentioning. …
• By default comments are turned off on pages for new installs. For theme developers: check out the new singular.php template.
• Customizer now includes creating menus, and is accessible via a separate menu link in the top navigation.
• WordCount now updated while writing + some better parsing.
• Explore the 4.3 Field Notes for more details on this release.

Here is the video of WordPress 4.3 “Billie”

 

Upcoming WordCamps

• WordCamp Tampa: September 25 – 27, 2015
• WordCamp Orlando: November 13 – 15, 2015 https://vimeo.com/137146108
• WordCamp US: Philadelphia, December 4 – 6, 2015. Tickets are on sale right now, including Livestream, for those of us rather stay in warm Florida

• Check out WordCamp Central for more WordCamps scheduled around the world.

Get Involved and Contribute to WordPress (Download PDF)

Take the WordPress Survey 2015 

Plugins for Photo handling on Site.

In our meeting in April, we looked at the WordPress Gallery as well as the options Jetpack adds to the media library handling. See the meeting notes with links to videos and other links

1. Easy Watermark https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-watermark/
2. Instagram
3. The Simply Instagram plugin display your Instagram photos in three Endpoints that Instagram offers through shortcode for Post and Page or using Widget.
4. Another richly featured plugin for you Instagram integration is
5. Regenerate Thumbnails ++ https://wordpress.org/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails/
6. NextGen Gallery – Very large set of features on the free version already.
7. Save & Import Images from URL is one of the plugins, I wish, would go into Core WordPress. It’s a must have especially if you are producing content for multiple sites.
8. ImageInject: Search Flickr via Keyword and import images to your site.

We didn’t get to talk about the next four plugins. They are on my list to test in the near future. Have you used any of them? Please let us know what you think in the comment section.

• Thumbnail Editor
• OmniGallery 
• Meta Slider
• SEO for Images

Sources:

• 17 Best WordPress Plugins for Photographers
• Twenty Free WordPress Plugins Every Photographer Needs to Know About

Website Security even more important for small biz and nonprofits

We had to work quite a bit on security / performance the past months. Performance sufferes with excessive login attempts and a lot ot spam comments lingering in the database, before they are deleted.  We also had to fight off a so called SEO.spam.injection, a script rerouting traffic from your search engine result to some ecommerce site. And lastly we dealt with an intruder using our email server to send out massive amounts of spams.

If you are on shared hosting, you hope your hosting provider takes care of all the server maintenance and monitoring systems. Most of them do. If you are on a VPS (Virtual Private Serrver) you and your web developer are responsible to tighten up the security of the system.

We have multiple VPS accounts and maintain some of them for our clients. Security has become a considerable part of our ongoing server and maintenance tasks. , and some of you have already experienced that:

• We are using Sucuri subscription, and we were very pleased by the experience
• And we have been testing WordFence on a different site and had good experience as well.
• We also us WP-Spam Shield to keep the spam posts down, and performance high.

We are testing those to add them to our “Peace of Mind” hosting service for our web development clients, in addition to the monitoring of uptime, update service as well as database clean up of spam and other residues.