WordPress 3.5 “Elvin”: New features we love

December 12, 2012

The WordPress development team has been super hard at work and have released version 3.5 of the WordPress software, nicknamed Elvin. We have been playing with the preview versions for a while and think it’s a superb upgrade. Here are our favorite features.

New Media Manager

Uploading images, organize and re-ordering them, and adding images into your post has been streamlined in the brand new Media manager. It’s also much easier to add a gallery of images with the image picker.

The brand new Media Manager

The brand new Media Manager

The Media library is completely different and may take some getting used to, but it’s a welcome upgrade. Since it’s such a big change, you may want to watch our bite-sized knowledge base videos on Adding Photos and Images and Using the Media Library.

Our videos require a ClickWP account (sign up for free!) and have all been updated for WordPress 3.5.

Enhanced oEmbed support

We really love the photo sharing service Instagram, and WordPress 3.5 now adds automatic embed support for the service. Simply place the URL of your Instagram photo on a new line like this:

http://instagram.com/p/Q_jEgdkNjg/

And when you publish the post it magically turns into this:

Zack watching TV like a boss #instablog

(Follow me on Instagram for more pictures of my little kiddo)

Along with Instagram, WordPress 3.5 now supports automatic embeds for SlideShare.net and Soundcloud.

Plugin Favorites

A new feature was introduced to the WordPress plugin repository 1-2 months back: The ability to mark plugins as favorites. And in WordPress 3.5, you can view your favorite plugins directly from the Install Plugins screen!

View your favorite plugins directly from the Install Plugins screen

View your favorite plugins directly from the Install Plugins screen

This is such a useful and time-saving feature, especially since there are so many plugins now. *Fist bump* to the person who thought of this feature!

New look Admin screens

Finally, the admin screens have been updated and are sharper looking. The buttons are a different shape and those of you on high resolution devices like the iPad will see crisper icons. I’m really impressed at how WordPress keeps up with larger web trends in general and glad that they take the time to implement small touches like this.

Finally, the WordPress team made a 2-minute video overview to introduce WordPress 3.5 “Elvin”.

Upgrade today

Upgrading is easy! Login to your WordPress Admin → Dashboard → Updates and click the Update Now button. Updates are relatively bulletproof, but do take the time to backup your site just in case your server has a hiccup. We recommend BackupBuddy for 1-click WordPress backups.

Alternatively, our WordPress support plans will take care of backing up and upgrading your WordPress site. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more.

Enjoy the new features in WordPress 3.5!

Filed Under: Workflow 2 Comments

Plugin Recommendation:
Image Widget by Modern Tribe

November 12, 2012

The Image Widget by ModernTribe

The Image Widget by Modern Tribe is a simple yet versatile widget that has earned a place in our WordPress Plugin Toolkit. It’s primary function is to display an image in sidebars or widget areas but you can also use it to display banner ads, or as an ‘About me’ widget. With some out-of-the-box thinking you could probably even use it for more! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Creating with WordPress, WordPress Tips 9 Comments

Plugin Recommendation:
WordPress SEO by Yoast

October 26, 2012

ClickWP recommends WordPress SEO by Yoast because we think it is the best SEO plugin for WordPress

The best SEO plugin for WordPress is undoubtedly the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. It’s earned a firm place in our WordPress Plugin Toolkit and we wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.

How does this plugin earn such high praise among all the competition? We explain our reasons in this article.

WordPress SEO by Yoast features

Despite it’s name, the WordPress SEO plugin does much more than search engine optimization. It’s bread and butter is SEO, but you can also use this plugin to optimize for Facebook, Twitter and RSS too for an integrated approach to getting your site found.

WordPress SEO can do the following and more for you:

  • Control how your site’s pages appear in SERPs with page title and meta description templates for posts, pages, custom post types and taxonomies.
  • Control the title, description and image that appears on Facebook and Google+ when your content is shared on those sites.
  • Help search engines determine the structure of a site more easily with advanced control over internal links or breadcrumbs.
  • Ensures your content is fully indexed by listing them out in a XML sitemap. You can even include and exclude post types and taxonomies from your sitemap.
  • Control the canonical URL, 301 redirect and meta robots on your content.
  • Makes your content more findable by helping you improve your content with SEO page analysis tools.

Let’s take a closer look at that last bullet point. WordPress SEO will even help improve your content to make it more findable online. To explain how the plugin does this, we made a 5-minute video to show you how to use the page analysis tools in the plugin. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Optimization, WordPress Tips 6 Comments

Stop WordPress spam in 2 minutes on your WordPress blog

July 26, 2012

Credit: Randy Glasbergen

Unfortunately, spam is an inevitable part of life. We get it in our email every day, and as website administrators and bloggers, we get it in the form of spam comments. Comment spam is created by spambots who crawl the internet looking for forms that they can dump their spam payload and move on to the next.

Spam comments are easy to spot after a while.

1. They have a generic message that doesn’t make any reference to the content in your blog post or page.

2. Instead of names, these ‘commenters’ identify themselves with keywords like ‘online dating’, ‘cheap viagra’ or ‘louis vuitton handbags’.

3. The content of their comment contains links to shopping websites, pharmaceutical websites and other pages that are totally irrelevant to your blog post.

Click for full sized image

[Read more...]

Filed Under: WordPress Tips 2 Comments

Top 3 Most Useful Features in WordPress 3.4 You’ll Love

June 15, 2012

WordPress 3.4 was released yesterday and as usual there are a whole bunch of new features added to it. Many are developer features that you may not use directly, but there are some great new features for end users. Here are our favorite three.

Easy Twitter Embeds

Finally! An easy way to embed Tweets on your site. Just paste a tweet URL on its own line and WordPress will automatically embed it.

Pasting this on a line of its own…

http://twitter.com/ClickWP/status/213092284793749504

..automatically turns into this

The embedded tweet includes action links that allow readers to reply to, retweet, and favorite the tweet without leaving your site. Neat huh?

FYI you can use this technique to embed videos and images from popular websites too. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Workflow 1 Comment

Welcome to WordPress! Essential configuration and first steps after installing WordPress

April 3, 2012

Welcome to WordPress!

WordPress displays a helpful welcome message when you first login after installing a new WordPress site, but it’s a little too brief to be helpful to new users. We’re constantly teaching our friends about WordPress so we’ve put together a quickstart guide for new users with this article below!

Logging into WordPress

Let’s start right from the beginning – how do you login to WordPress? You can get to the Admin for any WordPress site by going to

sitename.com/wp-admin/

However, if WordPress isn’t installed in the root directory, you’ll need to adjust the path, e.g.

sitename.com/blog/wp-admin/

Tip: Bookmark the URL to save you from typing it every time you want to login to WordPress. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Optimization, WordPress Basics 2 Comments

PEMANDU Business Circles (ETP Blog) theme development

March 29, 2012

The Business Circle by the Economic Transformation Programme

The Official ETP Blog is one of the media hubs of the Economic Transformation Programme. The blog is constantly evolving and adapting to the needs of the ETP communications team. Because of this, the ETP chose ClickWP as a partner whom they could turn to for advice on all aspects of running and maintaining a WordPress website.

Recently the ETP rebranded their blog to ‘The Business Circle’ and launched a makeover too. The design was created by Ximnet, a Malaysian digital agency who built and manages their main website. ClickWP took the design and converted it into a Genesis child theme. We chose to build the site on the Genesis theme framework for two main reasons:

1. We could rapidly develop the child theme by taking advantage of the built-in features of Genesis like breadcrumbs, threaded comments, and functions to create the grid posts and new theme options. These may be small features but they add up to development time.

2. Being a high profile site, we wanted to ensure that the theme was as secure as possible.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Client Projects Leave a Comment

True story: How website clutter can get your site hacked

March 27, 2012

My personal blog got hacked last month. Ouch. Visitors who clicked a search result link to my site were getting redirected to some Russian site. Luckily I realized it pretty quickly and fixed it within 24 hours, but the damage had been done – I lost almost a day’s worth of traffic and some new visitors.

I did however, learn an important lesson from the experience – website clutter can get you hacked. [Read more...]

Filed Under: WordPress Tips 6 Comments

CC Food and Travel Blog theme customization

March 14, 2012

The new and improved CCFoodTravel.com with customized theme

CC Food Travel is a popular Malaysian blog by Mei (@agentcikay). The blog has gone through several incarnations and needed a makeover and loading time optimization. However like many bloggers, Mei didn’t have the budget for a full redesign, so she turned to ClickWP for advice.

We advised her to select a ready-made premium theme from StudioPress to save costs*. Compare her site with the customized theme and the original – Magazine Theme by StudioPress. We then customized the theme to add on the top featured posts section. ClickWP also optimized her database and threw out a number of redundant plugins to reduce her server load and improve the blog’s loading time. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Client Projects 1 Comment

ClickWP had a small part to play in the WordPress party at SXSW 2012

March 7, 2012

I’m proud to have played a small part in securing a venue for the WordPress party at SXSW 2012. Jane Wells tells the story on the WordPress blog:

Once upon a time, David Wang had a business called Buzzmedia in Malaysia, with the twitter username @buzzmedia. When David changed gears and started ClickWP, a WordPress support business, he stopped going by the Buzzmedia name. In the U.S., a company also called Buzzmedia wished it had that Twitter username, and asked if they could have it since David wasn’t going to use it anymore.

David, feeling the WordPress community love, said he would give them the name, and suggested they do something in return for the WordPress Foundation. So, everyone talked to everyone else and it worked out that Buzzmedia was willing to donate a fantastic venue for this year’s party as well as covering the bar.

In the end, the Foundation got a great SXSW party, Buzzmedia got their twitter username, and David got the warm glow of having used his power for the good of the WordPress community, and they all lived happily ever after.

I’m glad that everyone lived happily ever after, though I do wish I could attend the party and SXSW in person. If you’re traveling to SXSW and hanging out at this awesome party, could you send me a tshirt? Have fun guys!

Filed Under: Site News 5 Comments