Welcome to our second installment of the Weekly WordPress Goodies of 2015.
We have plenty of interesting content to share today, so let’s dive in!
General WordPress News & Tips
Sticky posts (posts that stay at the top of your blog's article list) are very useful if you want to highlight a particular content. But, if you want to highlight it only for a certain period of time, because it's about a temporary offer or event, for instance, you had to remember to "unsticky" it manually.
This tutorial in WP Beginner explains how you can do it automatically.
If you are a freelancer, solopreneur or professional blogger, these tools and plugins analyed by WP Explorer will come in very handy to organize your tasks, invoicing and work in general.
They also published a list of time saving tips & tricks for WordPress that, in conjunction with the previous tools, can make you much more productive.
Security
Even though this week has been relatively calm in the security front (meaning, just the usual massive ammount of hacking attempts etc. but no especially critical vulnerabilities), it's always best to play on the safe side and understand how to manage the risks.
This video explains exactly that, in a very comprehensive way:
If you want something simpler yet still actionable, check this 11 tips to boost WP secutiry, published by TorqueMag.
WordPress Plugins
I was glad to read a couple of articles about plugins that fit in very nicely with our No Sweat Mass Page Creator plugin.
The first one was published in tutsplus.com and explains how to use the shortoder plugin to create your own custom shortcodes without writing a single line of code. Excellent option to embed generic shortcodes in the templates for No Sweat Mass Page Creator and change the content later depending on your needs.
Something we all care about is site speed, and caching plugins play an important role on that. WP Mayor published an interesting comparison of several caching plugins, including a few I hadn't heard of.
Even though we use Digital Access Pass as our membership script and are extremely happy with it, we keep an eye on other options being released and gaining traction. This week, WinningWP wrote a detailed review of Pippin's Plugin's "Restrict Content Pro", which looks nice.
And finally, a nice little plugin published in the repository this week. Don't you find it slightly annoying to have to scroll up to hit the "publish" button after you've written a new post, filled in all the SEO details etc? Well, this new plugin just makes the publish button "float" and follow you at the bottom right corner so that it's always visible. It won't save your life, but it's definitely a convenient solution.
Design, themes & usability
This week everyone seems to have been writing about image handling in WordPress. Which is good because it's been proven that images improve engagement, so the better we handle them, the better our blogs will meet their goals.
BobWP wrote this interesting article about the image widget, that allows direct insertion of images.
WP Solver wrote an article on how to add GIF previews to WordPress.
And Yoast wrote an article about optimizing your images for SEO.
Finally, we published a case study on how we had increased our CTR to the banners in some of our sites by 100%.
Not specifically WordPress related, but useful or cool anyway
And finally, a very useful infographic / cheatsheet published in SetupABlogToday.com that summarizes the sizes of all the social media headers, profile pictures etc. A must-have if you're building your social media presence now:
We hope you liked our weekly digest. Please, let us know in the comments section below!
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