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Meeting Information Presentations WordPress: What's New?

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

What’s new in WordPress 4.3?

Here is the video of WordPress 4.3 “Billie”


 

Upcoming WordCamps

  • 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.

Sources:

Website Security even more important for small biz and nonprofits

WordPress and SecurityWe 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.

 

Categories
WordPress Community WordPress: What's New?

Five of the Best Podcasts

Over the last four weeks, I have screened some of the best podcasts via Stitcher. I found some excellent shows around WordPress, too.

I may not have found all WordPress-related podcasts, but let’s start with the five shown below which include links to apps. The podcasts cover different topics. They are created by WordPress enthusiasts who share their expertise, their insights and even offer free advice about freelance work.

You can download the apps to your mobile phones and download links to learn more on how to make podcasts.

WordPress Weekly by WPTavern

WordPress Weekly WordPress Weekly is hosted by Jeff Chandler, contributing writer to WP Tavern site, & Marcus Couch. Recorded on Wednesday nights, Chandler and Couch cover all news around WordPress and interview presenters of recent WordCamps. Nearly every podcast has a section about Plugins, where Couch shares newly discovered Plugins. The show features WordPress royalties like Matt Mullenweg, and last month covered WordPress’ 12-year anniversary.

During last week’s episode Chandler and Couch took a closer look at the upcoming WordPress 4.3 release. Right now, WordPress Core 4.3 is in Beta 3, and the final release is scheduled for August 18, 2015. They also discussed the community’s take on how to handle old content on WordPress TV, which has content dating back to 2007 when there was still a 2 in front of the WordPress version numbering.

Congratulations to Jeff Chandler, who will host WordPress weekly’s 200th episode this week!

WPElevation WordPress Business Podcast

WPElecation PodcastTroy Dean, owner of WPElevation.com, discusses how to create a business as WordPress freelancer or consultant. He talks about how specific tools and concepts can help make better WordPress Plugins or themes to better serve your clients. Dean built his own business providing specialized advice to Plugin developers, themes designers or website implementation consultants. His guests include business owners working within the field of WordPress. Dean brings you behind the scenes of their businesses, and lets you in on their failure, struggles and triumphs.

This week’s episode was a real treat – Dean featured Seth Godin who advised Kristina Romero, who has been struggling with the conundrum of having less and less time available to work but still needs to earn additional income.

I also enjoyed one of the previous episodes when Dean interviewed Kronda Adair, a fellow member of NTEN Community of Practice and a volunteer for Black Girls Code. You can learn more here.

Next show is already online:

WordPress Plugins from A to Z

WordPress Plugins AtoZWho is able to keep track of all the thousands of Plugins beyond the most popular 100?

It seems Jeff Overall and Marcus Couch can.

During their weekly podcast they review new Plugins and separate the wheat from the chaff. They cover all aspects of WordPress – ecommerce, multi-site, handling of graphics and BuddyPress, as well as maintenance, security and speed. I always appreciate their wit and wisdom, sorting through the vast amount of Plugins available on WordPress.org as well as around the universe of Premium plugins. Once in a while, I go on a binge listening session, mostly when I need to procrastinate. Listening to Overall and Couch always makes me want to improve the various WordPress sites in my portfolio.

Latest Show announcement:

Kitchen Sink WordPress

KitchenSinkWPAdam Silver, organizer of the South Bay WordPress Meetup and former stand-up comedian, hosts the weekly Kitchen Sink Podcast. The format of his show varies. Sometimes he creates an educational segment and other times he features guest interviews. But Silver always covers Upcoming events, WordPress News and includes a Tip of the Week. This week Silver interviews Kyle Maurer of Real Big Marketing. Maurer is a speaker at WordCamps and develops WordPress Plugins and themes. Silver also offers you, the listener, to leave him a voicemail–via SpeakPipe–asking him a WordPress question. Go check it out!

This week’s podcast, Episode 73, is online here

WPCast.fm

WPCast.fmDave Hehenberger and Doug Yuen host the WPCast.fm, a podcast for WordPress professionals by WordPress professionals.

Yuen runs a successful WordPress hosting and online service business, and Hehenberger runs a WordPress Plugin business. They don’t number their episodes, and their format varies from time to time, depending upon what’s going on in their own professional lives.

Hehenberger just returned from WordPress Europe. He gives a recap of his experiences and talks with Yuen about the progress on their business while giving shout-outs to other great WordPress professionals. It’ll be worth going back to some of their podcasts to “binge listen.”

How to listen to podcasts on your mobile phone?

 

Inspired to create your own podcast?

Photo by Patrick Breitenback on flickr

Categories
WordPress Community WordPress: What's New?

Help us find the right mix of topics for our WordPress Meetup SWFL

We are in the planning stages for the second half of this year and if possible even next year. In order to serve the community best, we collected a set of topics in this survey. We are also looking for additional ideas, as well as connect with possible presenters.

PS: We are still looking for a central venue for our meetings. If you know a sponsor or are able to host the meeting that would be wonderful. We are normally between 15 and 25 people need a white wall or screen and if possible a data projector. And central so people from Naples as well as Cape Coral are able to make the meeting. Close to the freeway would be beneficial, too.

 

 

Categories
WordPress: What's New?

WordPress 4.2 and Mobilegeddon – News around the Internet

To get us past possible WordPress Meetup withdrawals until our next meeting in June 25, 2015, I will be posting on this website in between.
Today, I have a few WordPress News articles that might be of interest to our WordPress Meetup members and beyond.

 Update to WordPress 4.1.2 immediately

WordPress 4.2

Mobilegeddon

Today – April 21 is the day Google is rolling out their changes of ranking regarding mobile-friendly ness, and the Internet is predicting an Armageddon for websites that have not seen the signs before, and will supposedly feel their ranking on Google drop considerably.

For the last few months we published on Relevanza quite a few articles and most meetup members are subscribers of our blog, so this is nothing new. Just in case you missed it and to keep others updated as well, here are a few suggested reading links:

Free Responsive Themes for WordPress

Just in case you haven’t yet acted on it for whatever reasons, put this article with a list of Themes based on Twitter’s open source Bootstrap framework for responsive layouts.

Even if you need a custom developer to tweak these, to your layout, your site, it’s certainly a great start when trying to find a new look for your website built on WordPress.

For our June 25th Meetup, which is the last meeting before our 1 year anniversary, we will create a topics survey so we not only can plan the next meeting but we can all work on planning future meetings as well.

Make sure you stay connected with this site via comments or connect with us un twitter @wpswfl – put the private messaging feature on twitter to good use.

 

 

Categories
WordPress: What's New?

Marketshare of WordPress among other Content Management Systems

For our business website, I took a closer look at the distribution of various CMS among the most popular website. We learned from the data that WordPress covers 60.1% of the Market as of today, July 1st, 2014. This market share is up from 51% in January 2010.

A more in-depth analysis is published here: Content Management Systems: an essential tool for online success