WordPress 5.2.2 Maintenance Release Is Here!

June 24, 2019By 0 comment

WordPress 5.2.2 is now available! This maintenance release fixes 13 bugs and adds a little bit of polish to the Site Health feature that made its debut in 5.2.

For more info, browse the full list of changes on Trac or check out the Version 5.2.2 documentation page.

WordPress 5.2.2 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.3; check make.wordpress.org/core for details as they happen.

You can download WordPress 5.2.2 or visit Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now. Sites that support automatic background updates have already started to update automatically.

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WordPress 5.0 is Here: What to Expect and 4 New Features

December 26, 2018By 0 comment

WordPress is perhaps the most popular content management systems available to anyone who wants to give web page development a try. 30 percent of all websites are created using WordPress, and it’s not hard to imagine why.

WordPress 5.0 delivers a whole new experience to users whom of which do not use advanced editors like visual composer. However, if you are to update a theme, you may want to make sure you backup your files and as the new upgrade and features may break your existing website layout

New Block Editor

Prior to this update, it was possible to upload all types of media to your blog posts. Now, it’s still possible, but this update has made it easier than ever before.

The old way of plugging in content involved posting it into the visual section of the editor, moving it, bending it, and making it fit within the context of your content.

WordPress has streamlined this process with their block editor. Now, when you want to add something new to a blog post, you can select from a list of pre-made blocks that include text, quotes, audio, video, embedded clips, files, and more.

If you want to add something new, you can open a block in seconds and plug the content into the corresponding block. Instead of trying to make everything work, your content is streamlined and you can edit how everything looks in the context of each block.

This edition makes it easier for new blog owners to dive and make their own content with more than just text, even if they are unfamiliar with coding.

Developer Tools

Those who are coding experts may be worried that the simplified block editor may get in the way of their coding. We are here to tell you that the 5.0 update does not sacrifice the editing power of experienced coders.

If there’s a problem with the coding, the blocks allow you to pinpoint in what area the error resides, and you can go in, fix it in seconds, and get back to creating new original content. The block creation flows allow clients and content creators to work together to not just paint a picture, but execute plans easily by placing blocks and filling in the blanks.

Many people find that this method saves them time and allows them to get more done without backtracking and looking for errors.

New Theme

The theme is called Twenty Nineteen(https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/10/16/introducingtwenty-
nineteen/). It comes out of the box with an elegant text-based designed that makes full use of all of the new editor tools. You don’t have to plug the new editor into the theme, which makes it the fastest way to create a brand spanking new blog (https://www.wpbeginner.com/start-a-wordpress-blog/), e-commerce shop, or non-profit in minutes. Twenty Nineteen comes ready to go with appropriate system fonts to ensure that when your site goes
live, it will have a quick loading time and can be edited and tweaked in no time.

You can adjust the fonts, add new images, change the designs and color scheme, all while checking out the star of the WP 5.0 show, the block editor.

Don’t Like Change?

The developers at WordPress understand that change isn’t for everyone. They released a new plugin at the same time as the new update called the Classic Editor plugin. This plugin makes it so that if you don’t want to use any of the new features, you can keep everything exactly the way it was prior to the 5.0 update by simply installing the plugin.

This is a great addition for those developers who need to take some time to adjust their website for the new update, or those who are currently using a slew of high-quality plugins (https://optinmonster.com/best-wordpress-plugins-to-grow-your-business/) that haven’t been updated for the new Bebo update yet.

Better yet, the WordPress team announced that they would support this Classic Editor plugin until 2021. This gives you plenty of time to learn the new editor, write new code, or wait for plugins you’re
currently using to update.

As of now, there have been no severe bugs noted with this update. If you’re ready to move on to the next big thing and learn why more people are using WordPress every day, you can install the Bebe update in just a few minutes.

For help with the newest version of wordpress or to upgrade your website, contact us today!

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Drupal Migrating to GitLab

August 24, 2018By 0 comment

The Drupal Association announced this week that Drupal.org will be migrating its developer tools to GitLab. In selecting a partner for modernizing the project’s tooling, the association aimed to preserve the most valuable parts of Drupal’s workflow. They also wanted a partner that would keep evolving its code collaboration feature-set.

For the past six months Drupal has been working closely with Eliran Mesika, the Director of Partnerships at GitLab, in addition to CEO Sid Sijbrandij and members of GitLab’s engineering team. They’ve escalated the internal priority of issues that blocked our adoption of GitLab, offered technical and financial support for the migration, and made a commitment to ongoing support for the Drupal project.

“By adding merge requests, contributing to Drupal will become much more familiar to the broad audience of open source contributors who learned their skills in the post-patch era,” Lehnen said. “By adding inline editing and web-based code review, it will be much easier to make quick contributions. This not only lowers the barrier to contribution for people new to our community, it also saves significant effort for our existing community members, as they’ll no longer need to clone work locally and generate patches.”

This may be something that WordPress benefits from also.  “It’s definitely something on our minds,” Mullenweg said when asked if GitLab and WordPress might collaborate in the future. “Core WordPress is still Trac and Subversion, so I think that it’s not our top priority this year, but in the future it’s definitely on the radar.”

 

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Google’s Deadline for SSL Certificates Is Approaching

June 1, 2018By 0 comment

Over the course of the last two years, rumors have swirled over Google’s position concerning forcing the move to HTTPS encryption.  Last year, Google began officially warning website owners that non HTTPS sites would incur consumer messaging that identified the site as non-secure.

n February 8th, Google made clear its intentions to formally mark websites lacking SSL Certificates (the certificate which once installed on the website results in an HTTPS secure URL string) as insecure.

Google has confirmed a date of “early July 2018” as the start date. They have also disclosed how they will alert web surfers of the non-HTTPS status, or not secure.

Sites that remain on the HTTP non-secure protocol will be flagged with a warning in the URL bar of the surfer’s browser.

The non-secure flag will be built into the release of Chrome 68, which will be ready for download in early July.  It is possible that the flag could stand out by use of the color red.  However, that remains an unconfirmed aspect. Officially, the image above represents Google’s current likely change.

Google followed up this by stating that the web’s transition to HTTPS, which is also identified as “making the web safer,” by disclosing numbers supporting HTTPS growth and scale.

” Over 68% of Chrome traffic on both Android and Windows is now protected
” Over 78% of Chrome traffic on both Chrome OS and Mac is now protected
” 81 of the top 100 sites on the web use HTTPS by default

HTTPS encryption growth shows that most site owners are taking Google’s warnings seriously.

However, it remains that a large group of site owners has been less than motivated to make the change.

This adaptive lag is likely a result of confusion over what HTTPS encryption is, the annual cost associated with HTTPS encryption maintenance, and general laziness.

Google does not provide SSL certificates, but luckily, we do.   If you need assistance with setting up your SSL feel free to contact us today!

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30% Of Websites Worldwide Are Run On WordPress

May 18, 2018By 0 comment

The folks at San Francisco-based Automattic have a good reason to celebrate this Monday: its WordPress content management system (CMS) now powers 30 percent of all sites on the web.

That’s according to W3Techs, a service run by Austrian consulting firm Q-Success that surveys the top 10 million sites ranked on Alexa. Its numbers are updated daily, and today it sees WordPress accounting for 60 percent of the CMS market.

WordPress has been in the lead for a good while now, with rival systems like Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Shopify, Google’s Blogger, and Squarespace trailing by a huge margin (Joomla takes the #2 spot with 3 percent of sites). Of course, it’s worth noting that 50 percent of all sites are either built from scratch or utilize CMSes presently not monitored by W3Techs.

That’s good news for the community of developers who build plugins and themes for the open-source CMS, as well as for web hosts who offer WordPress packages, and designers who offer clients WordPress-based sites and shops.

It’s come a long way since it first came into existence back in 2003, having forked into two versions: a self-hosted one that’s available for free, and a hosted option at WordPress.com that bundles additional services and support into its offering for ease of use. Given its massive user base and the community that supports its open-source development, it doesn’t look like it’ll be giving up the keys to the CMS kingdom anytime soon.

Source:

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Three Common WordPress Vulnerabilities

March 2, 2018By 0 comment

WordPress is now one of the biggest blogging platforms and it’s important to keep your website safe. Respire Digital takes the security of your sites very seriously and make every effort to keep our clients aware of any potential security issues. Here are three common WordPress vulnerabilities & how to fix them.

1. Plugin Vulnerabilities

Plugins often have glitches that make your website vulnerable to hackers. To help prevent this, keep on top of updating your plugins.

If you’re a client of ours, we have processes in place to take care of this for you. If there’s ever a plugin with a possible threat in the update we automatically revert it to the old version until the update is patched. To check to see if any of the plugins you are using have any potential threats, click here.

2. Default Admin User Account/Default Passwords

Is your login to the website the default username and password that came with WordPress when you installed it? I would change it as soon as possible.

We purposely change the username to be more complex & we use a 13+ character password that is unique for each of our clients’ websites. When we give our clients access to the website, we also recommend that they change their passwords to a secure password after their first sign-in. If you struggle with remembering passwords, try using a secure password bank such as LastPass.

3. Vulnerable Hosting Servers

Since the server where your WordPress website resides is a target for attackers, using low-quality hosting services can make your site more vulnerable to being compromised. While all hosts take precautions to secure their servers, not all hosting providers are as vigilant or implement the latest security measures to protect websites on the server-level.

Respire Digital frequently run scans of our servers to ensure that our client sites are safe. If there’s a possible threat we are immediately alerted by the scan & take action to ensure that the sites are not affected.

Do you have any questions regarding your website’s safety? Contact Us Today!

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Penguin 2.0: Positive or Negative

August 28, 2013By

Since the Google’s Penguin 2.0 update how has it affected your website?

The rules of SEO was dramatically modified when Google did its Penguin 2.0 algorithmic rule modification.  If you are a freelance author who makes a specialty of providing this sort of content, following area unit 3 of the foremost vital belongings you have to be compelled to grasp.

1. Keywords are no longer the main focus :

As a result of once creating by removal through lots of information, Google’s analysis team found that obtaining a website to rank high based mostly only on targeting keywords is pretty simple to try and do. They conjointly found lots of several spammers use this method – developing a lot of garbage content quickly.

2. Anchor Text:

No legitimate business desires misspelled or grammatically incorrect copy on their web site. If you are , it is a red flag, and your website may sink in rankings.

3. Backlinks:

The total purpose of this latest Penguin 2.0 update, in line with Google’s SEO guru, Matt Cutts, was to punish sites that use banned SEO ways and reward those who provide real worth to internet surfers. Cutts continued  on, explaining that the last word goal was to chop back on link spamming and hacking, whereas giving webmasters the tools they required to repair hacked sites.

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It is becoming tougher to rank well in SERPs, that spells chance for internet writers who keep up to date with the changes in the programming improvement, the result of your experience are going to be a lot of desired than ever.

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Your Brand and Social Media

July 24, 2013By

Working in the web design industry for 11 years has allowed me to grow substantially. On my own I have come up with positive and creative strategies to help my client base establish their presence online. Nowadays, a keystone to an increase in client and brand confidence is through social media.

Not only is it crucial to develop client relationships but it is also important to develop the trust association with your brand. What position is your company in? How do people outside your company perceive you? Trust marketing is really about delivering trust, loyalty, integrity, while enhancing your customers experience.

Social trust marketing allows you the opportunity to reinforce your companies client and reader communication while showing them that you are a legitimate and serious entity. By utilizing social outlets regularly and effectively, you can establish positive interaction and a larger client return.

The overall essence of a solid marketing foundation is to benefit the users knowledge base and create the value that the brand delivers to its customers. Social outlets such as facebook, twitter and google plus, continuously communicate the important attributes associated with your services and quietly align your brand with those factors important to your audience.

If you consistently deliver value to your audience, address issues that are prevalent to your audience you are given the opportunity to reinforce what your brand stands for. Do not use your social outlets to sell your product, but continue to establish and reinforce your brand with the advice and information you provide. By doing so it will allow you to establish a more permanent client base, developing relationships that go beyond a one time transaction.

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