What damage can 75 mph winds do

As a content curator, one of the biggest and most embarrassing) mistakes I made in 2014 is to repeat the known mistakes when it came WordPress and blogging in general. Every New Year calls for new resolutions. Some (try to) lose weight – “I’m going to weigh 130 pounds by the end of this year”, some make adventurous plans – “I’m definitely going skydiving in March”, while some decide to finally tie the knot – “It’s time we eternalized it”! Not that we’re a month into this year, let us all add a resolution to the list – “WordPress mistakes never to repeat in 2015 (or the years to come)”. I’ve been contributing to WPExplorer for over a year now and I’d like to kick off this year with a brand new post series which deals with the most common WordPress mistakes. We start by looking at 5 crucial factors that deal with launching a WordPress site and move on to recommendations that will bear fruit in the long run. These well-known points can be easily classified under “been there, done … [Read more...] about 25+ Common WordPress Mistakes to Avoid

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Been hanging out with a few WordPress.org hackers — Scott, Nacin, and Otto — the last few days in a BBQ-fueled haze of hacking to make plugin directory better. There are over 19,000 plugins listed and they’re really the heart and soul of WordPress for many people, so they deserve a little tender loving care. Here’s a quick before and after snapshot you can zoom in on to see a visual overview of some of the changes: Our first focus was around improving the discussion and support around plugins. You’ll now notice that threads about a plugin are pulled directly into a “support” tab on the plugin page — each plugin has its own forum. We’ve made authors much more prominent and with bigger Gravatars and better placement, so you can get a sense of who made the plugin you’re using. And finally to show how active and well-supported a plugin is, you can see  “16 of 75 support threads in the last two weeks have been resolved.” Finally, if you’re logged in you get access to the new … [Read more...] about Plugin Directory Refreshed

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Mark your calendars: WordCamp San Francisco , the official annual WordPress conference, will be August 12-14, 2011. This year will mark the 5th anniversary of WordCamp, and as always will feature Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” address as well as a variety of amazing speakers that you’d normally only get to see at expensive industry conferences. This year the program will be expanded to three days, with programming for publishers, bloggers, and developers. There will also be related activities, like core team summits, workshops  for contributors, designers, and local organizers, and various professional and networking events. The planning is just beginning, so save the date on your calendar and keep an eye on the WordCamp SF 2011 site (and/or follow the @wordcampsf twitter account) for updates as details become available. *For people who attended WordCamp SF last year who thought the annual event this year would be called WordCon, with WordCamp SF becoming a more … [Read more...] about The Annual WordPress Conference: WordCamp SF 2011

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Merry Christmas! One of the things that was discussed at the core commit team meetup was release scope (and scope creep). Now that 2.9 is out and it’s time to start thinking about 3.0, we think it would be appropriate to stop and take a breath before diving in, and make a plan in advance. What winds up happening is that during each release cycle a few new features are selected for inclusion, but then right up until feature freeze (and/or beta cycle), people keep adding feature requests, patches for enhancements, and ongoing bug reports. This means each release winds up getting pushed out later than planned, and with so many things going in per release, it becomes harder to catch new bugs. The as-long-as-we’re-not-in-freeze-yet model isn’t working. People wind up waiting months longer for new features they want, like Trash and Image Editing, because we’re still adding other things and then we need to test them all. If we kept the releases smaller feature-wise, we could push out the … [Read more...] about Setting Scope

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A stitch in time saves nine. I couldn’t sew my way out of a bag, but it’s true advice for bloggers as well — a little bit of work on an upgrade now saves a lot of work fixing something later. Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts. The tactics are new, but the strategy is not. Where this particular worm messes up is in the “clean up” phase: it doesn’t hide itself well and the blogger notices that all his links are broken, which causes him to dig deeper and notice the extent of the damage. Where worms of old would do childish … [Read more...] about How to Keep WordPress Secure

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