WordPress Tips

May 24, 2016

How to Enqueue FontAwesome to Use the Latest Version

I’m currently creating a custom theme for a client who is also on Rainmaker. Since it’s a closed system and we can’t willy-nilly go in and edit the theme after submission, I wanted to always use the latest version of FontAwesome. What a shame to use outdated social icons in a few months. The icons for Instagram and Google + have both recently changed since I started some of my longer-running projects, so here is the URL to enqueue:

//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/latest/css/font-awesome.min.css

You’re welcome.

June 18, 2015

A Response to the WordPress Customizer Expansion: Removal

With the proposal and subsequent announcement of plans to bring the menu system into the WordPress Customizer in core starting in version 4.3, the community responded swiftly and in overwhelming majority numbers against this trajectory. Between the WP Tavern article and the make.wordpress.org post, I’ve never seen such a swift response, despite the long history of WP drama when major moves have been proposed.

I don’t know if Twitter was just on point that day or what, but putting the menu in Customizer set people off.

The trend of Customizer is an answer to the user interfaces of services like Squarespace. WordPress is definitely losing some current users to Squarespace over usability for inexperienced publishers like shop owners who just want a site, so Customizer allows for previewing changes before setting anything in stone. This we don’t have any problem with because there is the way we’ve always done it and Customizer, so old school users don’t need to use Customizer, but they can if they want to.

what the plan is

The current track for the Customizer menu plugin is to merge with core in 4.3, which means it has to meet all of WordPress’s own standards for accessibility, internationalization, mobile, and a slew of other things that are now being rushed. What else is being rushed? Anything that affects businesses that offer training for WordPress or products that tap into Customizer and possibly the menu. Links to the menu in the admin toolbar will now direct to Customizer instead of the menu page, but the menu page and link under Appearance does not (yet) have a timetable to go away.

the problem we have now

The first point people made is that menus aren’t design. They are content. Look in the database, menus are found in the posts tables. As such, they aren’t subject to the same design edits as other items in Customizer, such as the background or custom header image/logo. Those items, I 100% support a Customizer or similar interface to preview changes.

I don’t personally use anything in Customizer because I develop locally and push only working items live, but 99.5% of people with sites don’t. I use the Appearance menu items directly. The only thing I’ve used Customizer for are the parallax background images in some Genesis framework themes.

the training point

Let’s think about medium to enterprise businesses for a second. Also consider businesses like WP101 who make a living off of training people to use WordPress. I used to work for a company with over 5,000 employees. More often than not, manuals were printed, as well as PDF, and if the item was important enough, each department would get 1-8 hours of training in a conference room with refreshments and some level of representation from senior management. Let’s say this company runs WordPress for all internal planning, communication (other than email), and their outward-facing public website assembly is WordPress that takes over 100 people to maintain.

Now the both the links to menus and widgets in the admin toolbar go to Customizer. If they stumbled across this because the edit widgets, they were advised by the help desk to go to the Appearance menu. Now a new set of people who create or modify content that affects menus are introduced to Customizer. Management decides to re-train everyone. How much does this cost? How many tickets to help desk did this create? Things to consider when you change entire areas of the dashboard, not just adding features people may or may not take advantage of.

the plugin point

Another point is to use a plugin to test these items until ready for mass consumption, the way we developers all loved MP6. I’m still logging into old client sites who call with recent issues who still have MP6 active. Very few developers interacting in comments even knew there was a Customizer menu plugin. Regardless of whether we feel that menus should be in Customizer, it has not reached any sort of adoption among users. It has about 3,000 downloads (though the sidebar shows 5000+ active installs, so there’s that discrepancy) and has 2 5-star reviews and 1 3-star review. Compared to the stats for MP6, it’s pretty sparse with over 141,000 downloads and 93 5-star reviews. This for a plugin that went into core in 3.8 with much applause.

Why are they not waiting for more people to test? Where is the democracy happening when core adopts items with such a small portion of the influential base even aware of it? I guarantee if this will drop in 4.3, over 80% of end users will have no idea about it and it’s not just a cosmetic change like MP6 was. Where is the democracy when they ask the community about it and almost all of the reactions are either 100% negative based on the above principles or because it’s being rushed and they do it anyway?

taking matters into our own hands

My Twitter friend and fellow theme developer, Andy Wilkerson, was really getting into the conversation after the comments on those items linked first started forming a theme. We immediately came to the same conclusion: unhook Customizer with a plugin. I read some convoluted series of functions to use a couple of days earlier, but it was wonky, so we set out to do it efficiently.

What we came up with is Customizer Remove All Parts (WP repo — github). Simply put, it removes all traces of Customizer ever being in the admin. It’s gone from the Appearance menu, the Themes page, the admin toolbar, everywhere. Anything that was having its link hijacked to go to Customizer has had that filter removed. This is the nuclear option, as there are no settings whatsoever. Use it if you don’t want your clients or team to have any access or knowledge of Customizer.

We are currently in development of a fork that allows you to selectively remove everything based on user role and more detailed settings. This is how we feel Customizer should work in core. There should be some way to turn it off in the dashboard, no different than your ability to turn off the admin toolbar. Maybe this will get rolled into core in 4.5…

May 17, 2013

WordCamp Austin 2013 – SEO Still Matters

I’ll be co-presenting SEO Still Matters with Robert Neu of FAT Media on May 18th at WordCamp Austin in Austin, TX. We will be hitting the key points on what to plan on for your next post regarding the SEO fields, keywords, and also planning your site around a content marketing mindset that works with SEO rather than being single-minded in crazed SEO efforts that cost a fortune.

SEO is a natural effort by which traffic is a by-product. If it’s not a natural part of your next post’s planning or something you can easily visit doing a page audit on your site, then it’s too complex and you’re overshooting your optimum effort-to-reward target.

If you have any questions or topics you’d like addressed after the slides are posted, along with my speaking notes, then post them in the comments and we’ll start a discussion.

Here is a link to the presentation below: SEO Still Matters

April 30, 2013

Things to do With Stealth Login Page – Rickroll Hackers

Since launching my Stealth Login Page plugin on April Fool’s Day (I know, I should have waited until Tuesday), I’ve been Rickrollling would-be hackers. Because you can enter any URL you want into the redirect field, you can send them Rick Astley’s way when they don’t enter your login string correctly.

I’ve been Rickrolled myself a number of times and it’s annoying as heck when my headphones are jacked to the max… on MY OWN site!

Here’s how:

Download Stealth Login Page from the repository or directly in your dashboard.
Activate the plugin.
Click the Settings link to set up the Rickroll.
Once on the settings page, enter http://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?t=2m6s as the URL for the redirect.
Enter your answer and question phrases.
Be sure to e-mail yourself the new login URL so you can always get back in without getting Rickrolled.
Click the Save Settings button.

Now go Rickroll some bad dudes.

April 30, 2013

Case Study: Scribe SEO Quickly Increases Search Rank

More and more, people are wanting great SEO from their WordPress site without paying an arm and a leg for an “SEO Expert” because it’s become increasingly difficult to know who actually is an expert. Enter Scribe SEO and what it can do for the layman, even the geeky developer who’d rather code than think about SEO.

I was contacted by a Chicago businessman who had some bad press back in 2011. He said that those affected had apparently made it a hobby to keep the press at the top of Google results for his vanity namesake search. It certainly appeared to be true, because I knew about the bad press before our appointed consultation call because it was front and center right below his LinkedIn profile.

I’m by far, unequivocally not so, an SEO expert. I only know the basics – probably enough to be dangerous, but I’ve had pretty good success in past years and project using Scribe SEO, so I told him that it would take some time, effort, and consistent blog posts and multiple social network profiles to push that down below his actual intellectual property and profiles.

Boy was I wrong!

It didn’t take much time and barely any effort. Scribe SEO makes it what I call “stupid easy” to fill in the SEO fields (especially in Genesis themes) and maximize the SEO impact to the writing you already produce. It’s not too difficult to come up with a plan to focus on what you want traffic for and follow Scribe’s suggestions to get there.

The site was still behind a request to block Google bots until it was live on his domain on April 26th. Production had started just that Monday on the 22nd. On April 27th, the robots.txt message was gone from search results and it went from 5th to 3rd in the search results.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t do a little happy dance over such a quick result for my efforts to serve my client well. Happy happy happy. That’s a good old win-win-win right there, baby!

But wait! There’s more!

I had a moment to pause and think about things – just a moment or two – and I decided to do another vanity search for him. Today, April 30th, the site is now the 2nd site in the SERP (search engine results page) and I will be sure to update this when it overtakes his LinkedIn profile in the results.

I can’t stress enough that I’m not an expert and I don’t even mention SEO on my Services page at all – because I don’t necessarily want that kind of project. Scribe SEO makes it that easy to get these kinds of results.

This was a result from a brand new site that didn’t exist before the 19th and didn’t have Scribe SEO installed until the 22nd. I couldn’t be more pleased with such immediate results.

If you are scared to death to spend $1200 on an expert who doesn’t help your rankings and would like to learn the basics and do enough to see results, then you really should try it out, at least for a month while you learn. Don’t blame me if you like it so much you don’t ever want to publish another post without it.

March 25, 2013

Lock Down Your WordPress Login Screen

Hat tip to @norcross for this login page security code. I can’t claim any credit for this, but it deserves to be shared. I’ve recommended using a login monitoring plugin before. On WP Engine, Limit Login Attempts is a mandatory plugin. I’ve had a client having problems recently where someone on their IP address is attempting and failing to log in. This is creating a lockout for her valid attempts.

The natural solution is to block the login screen. Unfortunately, in this case, blocking the IP address in the .htaccess file won’t help any because that is my client’s IP address. Like usual, I posed the situation to my Twitter crowd and got an elegant solution in minutes from @norcross – seriously, if you’re not following Andrew Norcross, you are missing out.

Place the following code in your theme’s (or child theme’s) functions.php file and find/replace each “question” and each “answer” with your own words. It’s safe to assume that this will block 99.999999999% of attempts to access your login page since bots don’t look for such addresses and it adds an additional wall to break through. If you’ve got excellent hosting with proper permissions and firewalls, this locks your dashboard down – hard. To read more about the various types of hosting, check out my page on hosting.

/*
* Check the URL of the WordPress login
* page for a specific query string
*
* assumes login string is
* http://www.your-site.com/wp-login.php?question=answer
*/
add_action( 'login_init', 'login_stringcheck' );
function login_stringcheck() {

     // set the location a failed attempt goes to
     $redirect = 'http://www.google.com/';

     // missing query string all together
     if (!isset ($_GET['question']) )
          wp_redirect( esc_url_raw ($redirect), 302 );

     // incorrect value for query string
     if ($_GET['question'] !== 'answer' )
          wp_redirect( esc_url_raw ($redirect), 302 );

}

December 31, 2012

4 Tips to Speed up Your WordPress Site

Speed is crucial in those precious first seconds someone visits your site. If you can’t satisfy someone’s basic desire to get content quickly, they won’t care how good your content is and won’t stick around to find out if it was worth the wait.

There should be no wait.

People are an impatient breed. In separate studies, Amazon showed a 1% decrease in purchases for every 1/10th of a second of delay they intentionally added to their servers and Google experienced decreased searches when tripling results by taking 0.5 seconds longer. Page load speed directly influences how long people will stay on your site. Google ranks slower sites lower than sites with a faster load, all other things equal. The numbers any way you look at it tell you to speed things up.

I’ve been a constant tweaker of code, plugins, servers, hosting plans, and all of that stuff isn’t for everyone, so here is the quick version of all that work to find speed success.

Use a FAST host

If your hosting company/plan can’t serve up content quickly, it won’t matter what you do on the server, no one will be able to see content faster. You’re at the mercy (or benefit) of your host first and foremost.

I use WP Engine – a managed WordPress host – after a steady progression from bad shared hosting to good shared hosting to VPS to managed hosting. I have about 10 solid reasons why its $29/mo is the best money you’ll spend on your WordPress site and more than 25 of my clients have migrated their business sites to WP Engine, with more making the move soon.

Use an optimized theme

I’ve seen lots of free and “premium” themes do things that would make Hannibal Lecter cringe – things that ought not to be. Ever. Some slow a site down by multiple seconds because they were poorly written to load all of the “features” on every pageview and in the header rather than the footer (more on that later).

The best advice is to go with a reputable developer with a proven track record of quality and support. For me, that’s landed me with the Genesis framework by StudioPress since 2010. There are others, but I’ve been down “the path of many roads” and it led me to sticking to one and I’ve not yet regretted my choice in over the past 18 months.

Cache your content as much as possible

Some really good hosts offer automatic caching and CDNs while others just require you to use a caching plugin or a good 3rd party CDN to vastly improve the load times of content that’s already been processed and quickly fetched from the cache. CloudFlare is a great option for simple CDN setup and many hosts offer it as a simple option to enable it.

Be conservative in your use of plugins

Plugins can slow a site down just as much as any or all of the previous points. Sometimes, they’re five times worse than all of the other downfalls put together, taking 20-30 seconds to load a page. Not every new benefit or feature you want to add to a site requires a plugin. Often, there is a simple line or snippet of code that you can easily add using any one of hundreds of tutorials to avoid a plugin.

Simple, eh?

That’s not too much for the average semi-proficient WordPress user, at least not to receive the core benefits of these steps. You might have a more cookie-cutter site unless you happen to be able to do all of the changes (and modify the theme to suit your design style, if you change to a framework), but your site will instantly be a hit with Google and readers who aren’t so caught up in fancy design.

If you want/need any help, I’m always available via the comments or my contact page.

December 7, 2012

How to Write an Epic About Page in WordPress

Your About page is arguably the most important page in any WordPress site. It is a window into who is writing, selling, or producing whatever the visitor is reading or about to purchase. Think about it, don’t you click About pages any time you’re interested in what you just read?

My stats on several of my site show the About page to be one of the two pages visitors click after coming to the site to read a post. They either read another informational page or the About page. On this site, visitors either click About or Services, depending on whether they’re in the market for WordPress services. Coole note: as I was writing this, it happened:

What should be included

There are a lot of tips out there on what is absolutely necessary. I reviewed the 4 most-trusted posts on the subject and, in the specifics, they vary a lot. In the whole, they say pretty much the same thing, so here’s my advice, which includes some of theirs because some are universal. – I’ve linked others’ advice at the end if you’d like to review them, too.

A photo of you or your team. Make it a current photo! When you go to conferences or meetings or a Skype video call, you don’t want someone’s first reaction to be a shocked double-take. #awkward
Names are important, both for the visitor and for SEO. If you just say “I” or “we” all over the page, you haven’t properly introduced yourself. I wrote mine in the 3rd person, but I am considering a 1st person re-write in a couple of weeks after monitoring this iteration.
Either/both a little of how you got where you are or what you do now. I prefer both because how you got somewhere has a lot of influence on the present. It is difficult to know how much history to give, so a link to an aptly-named post or page (not in the navigation, especially no drop-downs) is a good way to write more about your journey. If someone is going to spend thousands of dollars, they often want to know.
Make it easy to contact you. Put your social links and a link to your contact page to make things easy for your visitor.

Those are my suggestions that apply to 99% of sites. Certain things should be added for niches of one type or another, but it’s not a good idea to cut any of these four items out of your About page.

Here are those other good tips on writing your About page: Copyblogger, Six Revisions, ProBlogger (who has apparently taken his out of his menu), and DIY Themes.

Your About page

Is it time to re-visit your About page? I’m going to review mine monthly now.

Proud of your About page? Show it off in the comments – let’s go take a look and learn from each other.

December 5, 2012

How to Use the WordPress 3.5 Media Manager

The new WordPress 3.5 Media Manager is arguably the biggest improvement to the WordPress core since 3.0 added custom menus, custom post-types, and the header/background customizations in 2010. That was a huge release and stands as the update that added the most functionality at once.

WordPress 3.5 is a milestone because it’s an exercise in efficiency — options and functions being removed — and improvements to existing functions. Fluff has been removed and what remains has been improved drastically.

Media Manager

You’ll notice as soon as you’re ready to insert your first image of WP 3.5 that the buttons above the post/page toolbar has changed. Gone are the words “Upload/Insert” with the icon of a camera and musical note. It’s also sporting a cleaner toolbar without shading or button outlines.

Once you click the Add Media button, you’re introduced to the new image experience: a full-screen drag-and-drop zone. Everything within the browser viewport is a drop zone now.

That’s just the start, though. Once you navigate to or drag in images, the new uploader shows itself. I’m putting so many images in this article, I wish I’d upgraded this install to 3.5 RC3, because it’s that much better than 3.4.2. Anyway, you’ll see all of the media in the Media Library after it’s done crunching the new images. There is a drop-down menu for various media, and you’ll most likely want to stay in the current post image, but a nice addition is being able to add a gallery using any image in the library. Prior to 3.5, only images attached to a post/page could be used in a gallery unless you edited the shortcode.

New to 3.5, you can now include/exclude images attached to the post (or just in the library) without editing any shortcode, which was one of the biggest pains of using galleries up until now. Pick and choose and sort the order. Man, I wish I was using 3.5 right now… because this sucks in 3.4.2 — I’m editing shortcode now to get 3 images above and a few below, which requires finding the image ID number. Trust me, it’s awful if you’ve ever tried.

Wrap-up

That’s it for an overview of the changes to the Media Manager in WordPress 3.5 for now. Hit me in the comments if you want a tutorial on something specific once you update and start using it. I’m here to help. I’ll be posting some more info on 3.5 in the following weeks highlighting the other changes.

Response to comments

I have a comment below that you can’t NOT link to anything and that the insert from URL is missing. Here are screenshots that say otherwise… although both of these images are already shown in the images above if clicked to see the entire windows of the Media Manager – these are just small areas of the larger shots above.

December 3, 2012

5 WordPress Plugins You Need

Plugins are a double-edged sword. They can add huge amounts of features to a WordPress site that no one in their right mind would want their developer to create from scratch. On the other hand, they can bring your site crashing down with a vulnerability or by becoming outdated, which can cause an error so wild that a visitor only sees a white page when they visit your site.

Before I dive into my list, some seasoned users will notice a few they probably use as missing. Those are explained in my previous article on when to use a plugin.

Akismet

If you’re not using Akismet, you’ll know it before long. You will soon be getting spam comments out the ying-yang and then send your developer an e-mail, nearly in tears. Akismet is the centralized anti-spam plugin made and maintained by the creators of WordPress, Automattic. It realistically catches 99% of spam now and I’ve seen numbers as high as 250,000 blocked spam comments on one of my clients’ sites.

Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps

Every site should have a sitemap for SEO purposes – it’s the file(s) search engine bots seek out to index a site. The most popular sitemap plugin, Google XML Sitemap Generator, puts quite a strain on the database of larger sites, but BWP works differently in the backend.

As far as I’m concerned, those two plugins are a requirement for every site and everything else is debatable with varying degrees of usefulness.

Limit Login Attempts

Limit Login Attempts is one of two major plugins used to stop brute force attacks on one username. After a customizable number of attempts, it locks out an IP address for a customizable time. After that, an even longer time. The other (Login Lockdown) also has a setting to hide the message that the username is not found (which tells them, by reverse application, when they are trying a valid username), but I’ve had clients locked out when using a correct login, causing me to reset lockouts. It also hasn’t been updated in over 2 years.

Hotfix

Hotfix is a plugin to push critical bug fixes to your WordPress install before they release an official update. It doesn’t happen very often, but when a bug is affecting your site, it really makes things better. It’s so small and isn’t a security risk, it’s a good plugin to have installed on all of your sites.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

I don’t like only promoting premium plugins when most people can do fine with a free plugin. WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of them, which I recommend as a free alternative to the premium Scribe SEO plugin. It’s definitely not lacking in features and (when used properly) will get you the SEO results you want. Be sure you enter both SEO values for the site/homepage and your pages and posts. It takes everything working together to make a complete SEO package.

Unless you’re using a theme like the Genesis framework that includes SEO fields on every page and post, you need to have an SEO plugin. No excuses. No exceptions. Don’t reason that 2, 3, or 4 SEO plugins are better than having one, either. Stop that.

W3 Total Cache

Any site on shared hosting, VPS, or dedicated host needs to have caching (managed WordPress hosts handle caching for you). Caching plugins have unique options, and shared options among them, so they’re all a bit different. I prefer W3 Total Cache because I’m the sort that likes all of the options (there are good articles on the options available just a Google away). It does a really good job and has an easy option to setup a CDN and other technical things.

Coming soon

In the near future, I’ll continue discussions about plugins with my favorite Genesis-specific plugins and my favorite premium plugins. If you don’t want to wait for the latter, just take a gander at my sidebar. I use them all and either install them on every personal and client site or the vast majority of sites.

Oh, and enjoy that 6th plugin – I like titles that begin with “5” more than “6” in the majority of situations. That’s how I roll.