Are you looking for an easy way to contribute to the WordPress project? One of the easiest – and most helpful! – things you can do is test beta releases. WordPress 4.6 Beta 1 was just released, so this is a great opportunity to give beta testing a try!
You’ve probably seen blog posts or signs at WordCamps saying “Contribute to WordPress!” Most people think, “I can’t contribute to WordPress, I don’t know anything about code.” or “I don’t have time to contribute.” But there are a lot of ways to contribute to WordPress without knowing any code that only take a few minutes of your time. Beta testing is one of the easiest ways that people of any skill level can help out with the WordPress project. Continue reading →
When your WordPress site is broken or doesn’t work as expected, finding the source of the problem can be a big headache. There are lots of great tutorials out there about howtotroubleshootyourWordPress site, but if you read through them, you’ll notice a common theme: to find the problems on your site, you often have to break or cripple your site even more. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can use a staging site to troubleshoot problems on your WordPress site, with minimal impact on your live site. Continue reading →
Here’s a really common scenario: you have an e-commerce WordPress site, and one of the add-ons for your e-commerce plugin is misbehaving. You contact plugin support, and they say, “Oh, we can fix that – just let us log in to your site and we’ll take care of it!”
Or, there’s a new feature you want to add to your site, but you aren’t sure how to do it. You mention this at a meetup, and someone at the meetup says, “Hey, I can do that for you! Send me the login info for your site and I’ll do it!” Continue reading →
Just what is a staging site anyway? You might have seen WordPress web hosts offering staging sites, or might have heard WordPress developers talking about staging sites…. So what is a staging site, and why do you need one? Continue reading →
Sucuri, one of the largest and most-respected internet security firms, has released a report about website hacking trends, providing details about what kinds of sites get hacked and how the hackers gain access to the site. One thing is very clear from the report: out-of-date plugins are the most common way for hackers to infiltrate a WordPress site. Continue reading →
You can choose from tens of thousands of free and paid WordPress themes: the possibilities seem infinite. Themes have been getting more and more sophisticated over the years, with many features and settings that let you customize your site. This is wonderful, but it does create a problem: switching themes takes time. You can’t just enable a new theme and walk away: you need to customize the theme options to make it work for your site. This can be a time-consuming process (not to mention the amount of time it takes to choose a theme in the first place!). So what do you do to make sure your site visitors don’t see a weird work-in-progress when they visit your site during a theme transition? Continue reading →
A staging site is an exact copy of your live site, except for one crucial detail: the URL. When you’re working on a staging site, it is important to keep in mind that if you copy your changes from your staging site to your live site, you need to account for the change in URL.
I’m going to show you how to make sure that all of the links on your site will work, even if your site URL changes. This information is useful when you are working on a staging site, but you should actually follow these best practices on every WordPress site, so that all of your sites will still work even if you change domain names. Continue reading →
“Everything was working fine, so I didn’t want to update the site and risk breaking something!”
As the professional who comes in and fixes broken sites, I’ve heard that line way too often. In a way, it makes sense – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! But there can be huge costs to ignoring updates on WordPress websites. Continue reading →
One of the big news stories for the past few weeks has been the Panama Papers, the largest data leak in history which implicates dozens of people, including many world leaders, in offshore money laundering.
There is speculation that this leak might have been possible thanks to an outdated version of WordPress. The law firm who was hacked in this data leak, Mossack Fonseca, had a website that was running an old version of WordPress (as well as another site with an old version of Drupal), and even included outdated plugins with widely known security vulnerabilities. At this point, we don’t know how the hackers accessed the data, but outdated versions of WordPress and Revolution Slider are known to have vulnerabilities that are easy for hackers to exploit.
The WordPress Help Twins is our favorite WordPress podcast. Leslie and Kelli are not only very knowledgeable, experienced, and helpful, but also delightfully funny. So we were really excited when they asked us to join them on their podcast to talk about staging sites! We had a lot of fun recording it, and we hope you have fun listening to it and learn a lot!
Posted on by Morgan Kay 
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