Welcome to the second installment of our Weekly WordPress Goodies for February.
This week we bring you an assortment of articles and plugins that will definitely help you build better, more secure and more usable WordPress Sites.
Let’s dive into it.
General WordPress News & Tips
Have you ever switched your Theme in WordPress and found your customizations, widgets or sidebars completely disappear or look aweful? WP Explorer teaches you how to not find yourself in that situation in this article.
Joost de Valk wrote a very interesting article about the importance of the rel=canonical header tag for your on-site SEO, the most common mistakes people make when setting this up, and how to avoid them.
The guys from CodeInWP.com published a nice infographic including some interesting and some shocking stats about WordPress:
Security
This week has been quieter on the vulnerability front. So, we'll take this chance to share three useful articles about WordPress security in general:
- Sucuri wrote a very interesting article about password strength. Remember, that having a weak password is akin to publishing a "please hack me" post in your homepage.
- "WordPress Jedi" wrote quite a short but useful post in WP Solver on how to reduce login page attacks, one of the most used attack vectors to hack WP sites.
- And WPMayor published a well-thought post on how to protect your WordPress site, beyond the traditional security plugins.
WordPress Plugins
If you are selling your own products or services online, you may find creating and sending invoices from within WP very useful. WP Explorer published a step-by-step tutorial on how to do it using a plugin.
Among the many WordPress plugins released this week, we'd highlight the following ones:
- Career builder job search plugin allows you to add a widget that grabs job offerings from the career buider site and displays them on your site. Very useful if you have a site in the job-seeking / career / CV niches.
- Scale it up! is a plugin that lets you scale images up in the media editor, something WP doesn't do on its own.
- If you are interested in supporting any cause through your website, Speak Out! email petitions can help you ask your user to sign any petition and send it to any e-mail address you so wish.
- I definitely will be installing and testing this one in our sites: Tooltip WP lets you add CSS3-styled responsive tooltips to your WP content. Very useful for displayng tips, hints or explanations to your users.
Design, themes & usability
Another take on a topic we talked about last week: Tesla Themes published an article about the top 10 Web Design Trends for 2015.
And Smashing Magazine published a quite in-depth analysis on designing following a human-centered process. It may seem applicable only to plugin / theme development, but most of the concepts are valid for a usable website design process. And we all want our sites to be as intuitive to use as possible, don't we?
Not specifically WordPress related, but useful or cool anyway
Spend a few minutes reading this article about how to engage and grow your audience using surveys, written by CopyBlogger.
And I found a very interesting site mentioned in a thread in WP Chat, a WP Related forum, where a user called Leland Fiegel shared a link to WP and Legal stuff, a website covering all legal aspects related (but not limited to) WordPress and its usage (like, for instace, the legal implications of continuing to mail users who have unsubscribed from your list).
We hope you liked our weekly digest. Please, let us know in the comments section below!
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