New year, new habits!
One of my resolutions for this year was to start publishing a weekly digest with the most relevant and useful articles that have been published in the past 7 days in the authoritative blogs I follow.
So, here we go with the first installment…
General WordPress News & Tips
As is to be expected at this time of the year, everyone is publishing "year in review" posts.
Well, except for us, that are rather looking forward 🙂
If I had to choose one, why not pick the one published by WordPress.com themselves, with some staggering numbers about the growth in WP sites and posts?
BobWP published an interesting video on the first steps he always does after installing WordPress in a new site. It's basic information, but always good to keep in mind, especially for those new to WordPress:
Steps after installing WordPress
And one of the issues that is worrying many people that sell products on-line, like is our case, is how the new EU VAT rules will affect them.
It's a complicated subject, but TorqueMag offers a fairly comprehensive introduction here.
Security
Sucuri released several bulletins, the most alarming of which is this one concerning VBSEO, the SEO addon for the popular vBulletin forum system.
All the details are available here.
If you really want to know how to implement good security practices, we strongly advice you to check Chris Hitman's course on the topic here.
And finally, Torque Magazine published a post on the 7 laws of WordPress maintenance, which is also a broad article, but very interesting to keep in mind.
WordPress Plugins
Brian Krogsgard published an interesting article on Poststatus.com about the new integration of Google Analytics data into the WP dashboard included in the latest version of Google Analytics by Yoast.
You can read the details and his take on it here.
A very important aspect of any WordPress site from a user and possibly soon legal point of view is accessibility. WPTavern offers a detailed analysis of the Access Monitor plugin, that helps you improve your accessibility scores, in this article.
And finally, an analysis of the "Post Reactions" plugin, that helps you increase user engagement and also measure their opinion on your content, covered in this article in WPBeginner.
Design, themes & usability
The guys at TemplateMonster.com published a very interesting and, at the same time, visually appealing infographic on web design thrends throughout the years.
You can watch it here (highly recommended!).
Need to make your site multilingual?
Then watch this video where Steven Sorenson covers the ins-and-outs of it quite in depth.
Not specifically WordPress related, but useful or cool anyway
Pippin Williamson wrote an excellent post in his blog explaining how getting the help of other people instead of trying to do all by himself helped him grew faster.
I love this quote he cites in the post: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together".
That's the reason why I brought Inaki Ramirez on board this year, and I couldn't be happier about that decission.
Anyway, you can read Pippin's post here.
Do you like this kind of weekly digests? What kind of content would you like us to focus on?
Let us know in the comments section below!
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