Key Design Principles and How to Implement Them!
At November’s MeetUp, I shared some of my design knowledge. Below are my slides and the key topics from the evening’s presentation. The ensuing discussion was fun and enlightening!
Categories
Category: Presentations
For the last two weeks, we ran a Topics Survey with 10 Topics to fill the next six slots for our monthly meetings at the Rocket Lounge.
Here are the results:
| Topic | Very interested | Interested | Not at all interested | Votes | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts | 11 | 13 | 2 | 26 | 33 |
| How to set-up an ecommerce site and evaluate features | 13 | 8 | 5 | 26 | 29 |
| Top 10 Plugins or which Plugins do you need for your site | 13 | 6 | 7 | 26 | 25 |
| Understanding WordPress Vulnerabilities (XSS, CSRF, WTF) | 11 | 9 | 6 | 26 | 25 |
| How to get backlinks for your site and how to disawow bad ones | 7 | 14 | 5 | 26 | 23 |
| Creating web apps with WordPress & Gravity Forms | 7 | 12 | 7 | 26 | 19 |
| 3rd Party Editors for WordPress | 6 | 12 | 8 | 26 | 16 |
| The Business of being a Web Developer | 7 | 9 | 10 | 26 | 13 |
| Make WP_CLI Work For You: Extending WP_CLI With Custom Commands | 8 | 6 | 12 | 26 | 10 |
| How to find and work with hosting companies? | 3 | 8 | 15 | 26 | -1 |
The Top 6 Topics will be scheduled.
We already have speakers for the following topics:
- How to set-up an e-commerce site and evaluate features – Chris Christoff
- Understanding WordPress Vulnerabilities (XSS, CSRF, WTF) – Chris Wiegman
- Creating web apps with WordPress & Gravity Forms – Colleen Brady
- Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts – Birgit Pauli-Haack on September 21, 2017
We are in the process of coordinating dates with the speakers. The meetings will be announced on Meetup. but you can already mark your calendars with the dates.
Save the Meeting Dates:
All 6 pm all at Rocket Lounge, Downtown, Fort Myers.
- September 21, 2017 – Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts
- October 19, 2017
- November 16, 2017
- December 21, 2017
- January 18, 2018, and
- February 15, 2018
Question: What topics do you find missing?
Answers:
- Dealing with online harassment; hiding identity online — (not a WordPress topic)
- WordPress 101
- How to prevent or avoid spam comments and messages, if that’s even possible (Should be covered in the Plugin Topic)
- Troubleshooting – where DIY’ers can find help for some nagging issues
- REST API
- Best practices for developers
We keep the suggestions related to WordPress for the next survey, which will be held in December.
Whether you’re starting a new business or launching a new website, you’re probably wondering how to develop a successful online strategy.
At this month’s WordPress Meetup SWFL three local businesses answered start-up strategy questions! They focused on branding, content ,marketing, and social media marketing strategies and finished off the evening with a lively Q & A.
Branding and Design: Elle and David Denning
Jumpanzee @Jumpanzee_team
Content Marketing Strategy: Tia Willin
THOH Creations Blog and Content Services @THOHCreations
Social Media Marketing Strategy: Mary Anne Cipressy
What’s Up Southwest Florida @WhatsUpSWFL
Huge Thank you to Elle & David, Tia, and Mary Anne for sharing their expertise so generously!
Thank you to Peter Ocsody of The RocketLoungs for hosting our meetup and providing the video recording!
⚡️ “WordPress Meetup SWFL Strategies For StartUps”https://t.co/fsONKfeaB3
— Birgit Pauli-Haack (@bph) October 23, 2016
Photos: Strategies for StartUps – #wpswfl https://t.co/04SfQ5jym0 w/ @Jumpanzee_Team @WhatsUpSWFL @THOHCreations at @RocketLOUNGEFla
— WordPress Meets SWFL (@wpswfl) October 21, 2016
"Facebook wants pictures with text" Mary Anne @WhatsUpSWFL #socialmediastrategy #wpswfl pic.twitter.com/kLUysv5dAZ
— WordPress Meets SWFL (@wpswfl) October 18, 2016
"Facebook wants pictures with text" Mary Anne @WhatsUpSWFL #socialmediastrategy #wpswfl pic.twitter.com/kLUysv5dAZ
— WordPress Meets SWFL (@wpswfl) October 18, 2016
What’s new in WordPress 4.3?
- Formatting Short Cuts, Quick link Toolbar, Site Icon,
- Quick Link Image toolbar – not new but still worth mentioning. …
- By default comments are turned off on pages for new installs. For theme developers: check out the new singular.php template.
- Customizer now includes creating menus, and is accessible via a separate menu link in the top navigation.
- WordCount now updated while writing + some better parsing.
- Explore the 4.3 Field Notes for more details on this release.
Here is the video of WordPress 4.3 “Billie”
Upcoming WordCamps
- WordCamp Tampa: September 25 – 27, 2015
- WordCamp Orlando: November 13 – 15, 2015 https://vimeo.com/137146108
- WordCamp US: Philadelphia, December 4 – 6, 2015. Tickets are on sale right now, including Livestream, for those of us rather stay in warm Florida
- Check out WordCamp Central for more WordCamps scheduled around the world.
Plugins for Photo handling on Site.
In our meeting in April, we looked at the WordPress Gallery as well as the options Jetpack adds to the media library handling. See the meeting notes with links to videos and other links
- Easy Watermark https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-watermark/
- The Simply Instagram plugin display your Instagram photos in three Endpoints that Instagram offers through shortcode for Post and Page or using Widget.
- Another richly featured plugin for you Instagram integration is
- Regenerate Thumbnails ++ https://wordpress.org/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails/
- NextGen Gallery – Very large set of features on the free version already.
- Save & Import Images from URL is one of the plugins, I wish, would go into Core WordPress. It’s a must have especially if you are producing content for multiple sites.
- ImageInject: Search Flickr via Keyword and import images to your site.
We didn’t get to talk about the next four plugins. They are on my list to test in the near future. Have you used any of them? Please let us know what you think in the comment section.
Sources:
- 17 Best WordPress Plugins for Photographers
- Twenty Free WordPress Plugins Every Photographer Needs to Know About
Website Security even more important for small biz and nonprofits
We had to work quite a bit on security / performance the past months. Performance sufferes with excessive login attempts and a lot ot spam comments lingering in the database, before they are deleted. We also had to fight off a so called SEO.spam.injection, a script rerouting traffic from your search engine result to some ecommerce site. And lastly we dealt with an intruder using our email server to send out massive amounts of spams.
If you are on shared hosting, you hope your hosting provider takes care of all the server maintenance and monitoring systems. Most of them do. If you are on a VPS (Virtual Private Serrver) you and your web developer are responsible to tighten up the security of the system.
We have multiple VPS accounts and maintain some of them for our clients. Security has become a considerable part of our ongoing server and maintenance tasks. , and some of you have already experienced that:
- We are using Sucuri subscription, and we were very pleased by the experience
- And we have been testing WordFence on a different site and had good experience as well.
- We also us WP-Spam Shield to keep the spam posts down, and performance high.
We are testing those to add them to our “Peace of Mind” hosting service for our web development clients, in addition to the monitoring of uptime, update service as well as database clean up of spam and other residues.
Additional Resources to learn more on Google Analytics
Google Analytics Academy – Improve your Analytics skills with free online courses from Google.
Google Analytics YouTube Channel – provides playlist for different use cases, like Google Analytics & Ecommerce or Google Analytics for Agencies or Google Analytics for Developers
50+ Google Analytics Resources by Kissmetrics – a brilliantly curated list of blog posts from various sites, categorized by topics.
Great discussions ensued about using plugins and how to choose them. We went over the plugins repository screens in details and also looked at 3rd party sites with plugin reviews and directories. You’ll find all the links discussed in the Google Slides embedded below.
WordPress Plugins from A to Z
If you like podcasts and learn more about WordPress Plugins I recommend you listen to episodes on the WordPress Plugins from A to Z podcast, hosted by John Overall and Marcus Couch
The WordPress Plugins A-Z Podcast can be found on iTunes, Stitcher Radio and also on WordPress Radio. I have found it very helpful. Both hosts come prepared to their shows and it’s fast paced. The selection is always well rounded and I learned about new plugins and use cases for plugins, I haven’t considered yet.
Links to find more
John Elcik shared these links via our online survey:
- http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/top-100-wordpress-plugins
- http://wpplugindirectory.org/
- http://www.bloggingwizard.com/must-have-wordpress-plugins/
- http://www.wphub.com/essential-wordpress-plugins-2014/
If you too, like to share some resources regarding WordPress Plugins, use the comments sections below.
The search is over. We have a new venue sponsor: Candels On Call.
Mark and Linda Candels generously let us use their state of the art training room at their offices for the rest of the year. Please thank them and give them a shout-out on the social webs:
- Like them on Facebook
- Follow Linda on Twitter
- Visit their website
- Recommend them to electricians you know.
How to Use the WordPress Image Gallery
Birgit Pauli-Haack walks you through the task to created an image gallery to be displayed in a post or a page and how to change some of the display options for Thumbnail Grid and Slideshow built into WordPress Core. You don’t need to install any plugins to make this basic functionality work beautifully on your site.
How Jetpack Modules improve WordPress Gallery
Once familiar with the WordPress Image Gallery built into WordPress Core, Jetpack gives you additional options and and features to augment the look of your gallery or to display various galleries in the side bar widgets.
For a quick peak at the display options available through Jetpack Tiled Galleries module you can also
These videos were brought to you by Relevanza, Inc., sponsor of WordPress Meetup Southwest Florida