WordPress Telemetry Proposal Addresses Long-Standing Privacy Concerns as GDPR Compliance Deadline Looms

At the end of October 2016, Morten Rand-Hendriksen created a proposal on WordPress trac for adding telemetry to core, an opt-in feature that would collect anonymized data on how people are using the software. He proposed that the new feature be displayed on first install or update, disabled by default in the admin with a control available under Settings->General. One option he suggests is shipping it as a plugin that auto-installs on opt-in and auto-uninstalls on opt-out. He also identified a few examples of core data that could be tracked, including number of themes and plugins installed, frequency of use of specific views (Settings, Customizer, etc), current version, update status, locale, and language. “WordPress prides itself on being an application built by the user for the user,” Rand-Hendriksen said. “The problem is with the popularity and reach of WordPress today, the distance between the WordPress 1% (or even .1%) and the average user is becoming so vast we (the people who contribute to WordPress core) know almost nothing about the actual people who use WordPress or how they use the application.”
During the WordPress 4.7 development cycle, Rand-Hendriksen
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/14309/wordpress-telemetry-proposal-addresses-long-standing-privacy-concerns-as-gdpr-compliance-deadline-looms

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/wordpress-telemetry-proposal-addresses-long-standing-privacy-concerns-as-gdpr-compliance-deadline-looms/

StudioPress Sites – WordPress on Autopilot. Powered by Genesis.

Are you a “let me tinker” person or a “just make it work” person? See, I think there are two core types of WordPress users…
The people who actually like tinkering with their WordPress site. They enjoy trying different themes. Testing out that cool new plugin. Adding little code snippets to get that perfect functionality.
The people who just want their WordPress site to work so that they can focus on creating content and attracting visitors. There’s no “joy” in WordPress. It’s just a tool to help reach an audience.
If you count yourself in the latter group, StudioPress is about to drop a service that is going to make your dreams come true.
It’s called StudioPress Sites. It’s an all-in-one WordPress solution based on the Genesis framework. All-in-one means it covers everything from hosting, to security, to one-click installs of OptinMonster, Beaver Builder Lite, and more.
Think of it as a middle ground between hosting/tinkering with your own WordPress site and using a completely managed system like Rainmaker.
Basically, StudioPress Sites aims to remove the technology barrier to WordPress, leaving you free to focus on creating
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/14308/studiopress-sites-wordpress-on-autopilot-powered-by-genesis

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/studiopress-sites-wordpress-on-autopilot-powered-by-genesis/

Creating a Donation Landing Page with Divi and Give

If you are a nonprofit organization and depend on online donations for your income, then most likely you’ve thought a lot about your donation page. This article will help you understand what makes for a great donation landing page and how to make it happen with the Divi Theme (or Extra Theme or Divi Builder plugin) and the Give Donation plugin. Why Create a Landing Page for Donations?
Contrary to e-commerce and products, it’s not highly likely that you’ll have visitors that just find you on Google and suddenly donate. Consumers don’t need a strong relationship with the merchant in order to feel comfortable to purchase a product from them. But donors are not the same. Donors want to know your organization well. They want to know that you’ll use their money wisely and prudently. Most likely they are going to read all around your site for months before they finally click on that “Donate” button in your menu.
If that’s the case, why create a landing page at all? Why not just put a form anywhere and wait? The answer is simple: because your relationship with your donors matters.
In all likelihood, 90% of the effort of getting a donor to actually
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/14307/creating-a-donation-landing-page-with-divi-and-give

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/creating-a-donation-landing-page-with-divi-and-give/

How to Become an Evil WordPress Developer

A few weeks ago we were at WordCamp Barcelona, where we talked to some of our colleagues and friends. As you may recall, we had the chance to share our experience in WordPress through 3 different talks. For those of you who couldn’t come to Barcelona during those days, I thought it’d be interesting to reproduce the contents of our talks. Today I’ll reproduce mine (which, spoiler alert, happens to be the best ) here, but stay tuned for Ruth’s and Toni’s, which they’ll publish during the next few days! How to Become an Evil WordPress Developer – Sinopsis
Most of the talks you can attend teach you how to be better—better developer, better blogger, better entrepreneur, better professional. But, who cares? Do we really want to be “better”? If your dream is to become evil, this is your talk. Here you’ll learn some of the most useful tips and tricks that’ll make your plugin the best while, at the same time, break your competitors’ and make them look ugly. Focus only on delivering the best user experience to your customers (who, by the way, are the ones who pay your salary), and don’t even think about being
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/14306/how-to-become-an-evil-wordpress-developer

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/how-to-become-an-evil-wordpress-developer/

How to Display WordPress Photos in Columns and Rows

Do you want to display WordPress photos in columns and rows? By default WordPress adds images in a vertical column on top of each other. However if you are adding multiple photos to a blog post, then this doesn’t look very clean and requires a lot of scrolling for your users. In this article, we will show you how to easily display WordPress photos in columns and rows.

Why You Need WordPress Photos in Columns and Rows

By default, when you add multiple images to a WordPress post, they would appear right next to each other or on top of each other.

This doesn’t look very good, and your users will have to scroll a lot to view multiple images and photos.

You can easily solve this problem by displaying photos in rows and columns using a grid-based layout. This way images will appear in a compact layout and improve user experience on your website.

Having said that, let’s take a look at how to display WordPress photos in columns and rows.

1. Display Photos in Columns and Rows without Plugins

This method does not require you to install any new plugin on your website. If you don’t add multiple photos too often, then this would work just fine for you.

First, you need to create a new post or edit an existing one where you want to display your photos. On the post edit screen, click on the ‘Add Media’ button to launch the WordPress media uploader popup.

Next, you need to upload all the photos you want to display in rows and columns. After the upload, you will see your photos in the media library.

The images you just uploaded will already be selected. If you want to include any previously uploaded photos, then you can select them as well by just clicking on them in media library.

After that you need to click on ‘Create Gallery’ link from the left column and then click on ‘Create a new gallery’ button.

The popup window will now change to show gallery settings options.

You can select number of columns, where each image should link to, what size of image to show, and randomize display order.

After that you need to click on the insert gallery button and WordPress will insert the gallery in your blog post.

If you want to change the number of columns or other settings, then you just need to click on the photos in post editor.

WordPress will select your gallery and you can then click on the pencil icon to edit your gallery settings.

That’s all, you can continue writing your post or save your changes. You can preview the post now to see your photos in rows and columns.

This method would work for most beginners. However, if you run a photography blog or often share photos on your website, then this method lacks several important features.

For example, the appearance of photos relies on your WordPress theme and you are limited to that one particular layout and style.

Your images will not open in a lightbox popup and users will have to load them as a new page and then hit the back button to return to the original page.

For a more professional and beautiful user experience you should try the plugin method.

2. Display Photos in Columns and Rows Using Plugin

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Envira Gallery plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Envira Gallery is one of our premium WordPress plugins and pricing starts from $19 for a single site license.

Upon activation, you need to visit Envira Gallery » Settings page to enter your license key. You can get this key from your account on Envira Gallery website.

Now you are ready to create beautiful image galleries.

Head over to Envira Gallery » Add New page to create your first gallery.

You can select and upload files from your computer, or you can select from WordPress media library.

After uploading your photos, they will appear in the gallery settings box below.

Next, you need to click on the config tab to customize how you want to display your photos.

Under ‘Number of Gallery Columns’, you can select the number of columns for your photos.

You can also specify the exact size of thumbnails you want to display, and the how much spacing you want between images in columns.

After that you can click on the publish button to make your photo gallery ready to be added into your WordPress site.

Now you need to edit a post or create a new one. You will notice the new ‘Add Gallery’ button on top of post editor.

Clicking on it will bring up a popup where you need to select the gallery you just created and click on the insert button.

The plugin will now add the gallery shortcode into post editor.

You can save your post and preview it to see your photos in columns and rows in a beautiful mobile-responsive photo gallery.

Now when your users click on a photo thumbnail it will open up in a beautiful popup. They will also be able to browse images without leaving the page.

We hope this article helped you learn how to display WordPress photos in columns and rows. You may also want to see our guide on how to fix common image issues in WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Display WordPress Photos in Columns and Rows appeared first on WPBeginner.

source http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-display-wordpress-photos-in-columns-and-rows/

Episode 21: Liam Dempsey & WordPress Meetups – How I Built It

In this episode, Liam and I discuss what goes into making a good meetup. As the organizer of one of the most popular (and active) WordPress meetups in the Northeast, and a 2 time WordCamp US organizer, he shares lots of wisdom about what works, what doesn’t group, and ultimately that secret sauce for a successful meetup. Show Notes
Sponsored by:
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/14305/episode-21-liam-dempsey-wordpress-meetups-how-i-built-it

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/episode-21-liam-dempsey-wordpress-meetups-how-i-built-it/

WP-AppKit Tutorial: create a custom homescreen

You want your app’s homepage to be more than a simple page or post list? Here’s how to create a fully customized home screen for your app. Along with building a custom homepage, this tutorial is also a good occasion to put into practice some of the key notions of WP-AppKit theme customization:
Starting Point
Let’s build our homepage on the following basis:
We have 2 categories for our WordPress posts: “Blog” and “Tutorials“, and we’d like to display the 3 last posts of each of those categories on the app’s homepage: first the 3 last “Blog” posts, then the 3 last “Tutorials” posts.
The 2 categories will also have their own “post list” screen in the app, displaying all posts from respectively “Blog” and “Tutorials” categories, with the corresponding “Blog” and “Tutorials” entries in app navigation.
So we consider that we have 2 components (type “Post List”, taxonomy Category) added to our app in WordPress Back Office: first component labelled “Blog” with component slug “blog”, and second named “Tutorials”
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/14304/wp-appkit-tutorial-create-a-custom-homescreen

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/wp-appkit-tutorial-create-a-custom-homescreen/

All you need to master your site speed without getting overwhelmed

Poor website performance is one of the most widespread problems for business websites, yet it’s the most essential one hurting your business on many levels, from lost customers to bad reputation.

These easy-to-use tools will help you solve the problem.

Despite what some people may think, site speed is not a purely technical issue. Marketers have been talking about the necessity to speed up your page load for ages. Not only does poor page load time hurt your site usability, but it also hinders your rankings (by screwing your page engagement metrics), conversions, social media marketing campaign performance and so on.

Fixing the page load time issue is not that easy though. It does take come development budget and good diagnostics tools. Luckily, I can help you with the latter:

Page Speed Insights

Google’s Page Speed Insights measures your page speed and provides PageSpeed suggestions to make your web site faster.

The PageSpeed Score ranges from 0 to 100 points. A score of 85 or above means your page speed is optimal. The tool distinguishes two main criteria: How fast your page above-the-fold loads and how fast the whole page loads. Each page is tested for mobile and desktop experience separately.

Each PageSpeed suggestion is rated based on how important it is.

Pingdom

Pingdom monitors your site and reports if your site seems slow or down. It operates a network of over 60 servers to test your website from all over the world, which is very important for a global business website because your server location effects in which parts of the world your site reports well.

Pingdom also has a free tool you can test here. While Pingdom is mostly known as Uptime monitoring solution (you can read about Uptime here), it also does performance monitoring.

Because I monitor a lot of metrics for many websites, I use Cyfe to integrate Pingdom stats into my website monitoring dashboard:

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache turns your dynamic WordPress blog pages into static HTML files for the majority of your users. This way your web server serves static files instead of processing the heavier WordPress PHP scripts.

This plugin will help your server cope with traffic spikes. It makes the pages faster to load, and stops those traffic overloads from happening in the case of a viral hit.

If you operate a huge database-driven website, a better solution for you would be setting up a content delivery network.

Incapsula

Speaking of your website being slow in remote parts of the world, Incapsula is a premium tools helping you to solve that problem. The platform offers a reliable Content Delivery Network, i.e. a network of servers all over the world allowing your site visitors to load files from the server located closer to them.

This means your site is fast wherever your future customers choose to load it from.

If you want to know more about how CDN works, here’s a very good resource to read and bookmark.

Compressor.io

Compressor.io is a handy tool to optimize your image size to allow for faster page load. As most of web pages have images these days, this is a must-bookmark and use tool.

Compressor.io reduces the size of your images while maintaining a high quality. You’ll be surprised to find no difference in your images before and after compression.

The tool supports the following image formats: .jpg, .png, .gif, .svg. I have found it invaluable to animated GIF compression because all the tools I use produce really huge images.

The tool is absolutely free and there’s no need to register to use it. Your files will be stored on the servers for 6 hours and then deleted, so don’t forget to download your optimized images!

Have I missed any essential tool or resource? Please add a comment below!

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/01/31/all-you-need-to-master-your-site-speed-without-getting-overwhelmed/

WordHat

I’m pleased to announce WordHat. WordHat is an integration layer between Behat, Mink, and WordPress, providing WordPress-specific functionality for common testing scenarios specific to WordPress sites. Behat is a behaviour-driven development framework for PHP, but it can also be used for automated, in-browser testing. This article on ThinkShout’s site gives a good introduction to Behat and Mink:
Behat tests are written in plain English phrases which are then combined into human-readable scenarios. This was inspired by Ruby’s Cucumber project and Gherkin syntax. This is probably the most appealing aspect of Behat. Most tests are understandable by anyone, whether you’re a developer, project manager, or business owner.
Behat is the core framework used for running tests. It is capable of testing several types of systems: terminal commands, REST APIs, etc. To enable Behat to test web pages, you need to add Mink and a browser emulator to the mix. Mink functions as the connector between Behat and browser emulators, and provides a consistent testing API.
So when you hear people talking about Behat, they’re usually talking about all three components: Behat, Mink,
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/14302/wordhat

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/wordhat/

Matt Medeiros on Marketing and the WordPress industry ‘dip’Matt Medeiros on Marketing and the WordPress industry ‘dip’

Had a great conversation with Matt Medeiros. We talked about what it was like to move from small clients to larger clients and then maybe to a spot that he doesn’t want to be with even larger clients. Matt also talks about the ‘dip’ he sees in the WordPress world and what you may do to make sure that your business survives.
Show links
podcast.win
mattreport.com
youtube.com/plugintut
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/14303/matt-medeiros-on-marketing-and-the-wordpress-industry-dip-matt-medeiros-on-marketing-and-the-wordpress-industry-dip

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/matt-medeiros-on-marketing-and-the-wordpress-industry-dipmatt-medeiros-on-marketing-and-the-wordpress-industry-dip/

Doc Pop’s News Drop: 1st Annual Domain Name Swap

No Description
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/14301/doc-pop-s-news-drop-1st-annual-domain-name-swap

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/doc-pops-news-drop-1st-annual-domain-name-swap/

WordPress Directory Plugin Guideline Change

With the advent of the new directory being on the horizon, which allows us to easily hard-limit the number of plugin tags displayed, we have taken the time to change the guidelines. While minor updates to the guidelines (with regard to spelling, grammar, etc) are common, major changes are rare and we are striving to be more transparent about them. Hence this post
Guideline 12 (readme links) clarified to cover spam and tags.
The guideline now reads as follows:
12. Public facing pages on WordPress.org (readmes) may not spam.
Public facing pages, including readmes and translation files, may not be used to spam. Spammy behavior includes (but is not limited to) unnecessary affiliate links, tags to competitors plugins, use of over 12 tags total, blackhat SEO, and keyword stuffing.
Links to directly required products, such as themes or other plugins required for the plugin’s use, are permitted within moderation. Similarly, related products may be used in tags but not competitors. If a plugin is a WooCommerce extension, it may use the tag ‘woocommerce.’ However if the plugin is an alternative to Akismet, it may not use that term as a tag. Repetitive use of a tag or specific
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/14300/wordpress-directory-plugin-guideline-change

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/wordpress-directory-plugin-guideline-change/