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Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce Shipping, WordPress Comments, RSS Feeds

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

I’m building a WooCommerce site for a client right now and needed a way to set up shipping by weight ranges. There are commercial plugins that do this, but I found a great free one that works fine for my client’s needs. WooCommerce Weight-Based Shipping lets you add a series of rules for free shipping, subtotals, shipping destinations, all based on order weight.

Do you allow comments on your WordPress blog? Comments can be great – they can help build and tie a community of site fans together. But they can also have a dark side. If your blog comments are overrun with spam or trolls and you just want it to stop, learn how to disable comments completely, or conditionally as you see fit. This post also covers how to delete existing comments, shorten the available commenting period, and more.

If you have a blog, are you sharing that blog so people can read it elsewhere? Like an RSS reader. Here’s an interesting post about RSS feeds and whether they are ‘giving away content for free.’ I agree with the author… you want people to read your blog, right? Encouraging people to subscribe to your RSS feed is a way to help more people see your writing. And that’s a good thing.

As a followup, here’s a review of the best RSS readers and news aggregator services. If you’ve never used one, try signing up and subscribing to some feeds.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Disabling Comments, Stripe and WooCommerce, Blogging

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Should you disable comments on your blog? That can be a big question for some – consider whether comments provide value to your site and readers or not. Is it mostly spam? A plugin can fix that. There are measures you can take that don’t require you get rid of commenting completely. But sometimes, disabling may be the best course.

I’m a big fan of the payment processor Stripe. I use it with WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, and any other ecommerce-enabled plugin that supports it. If you’re not familiar with Stripe and are interested in trying it with your WooCommerce site, here’s a post that will interest you.

For those of you who regularly experience headaches when you think about the blogging you need to be doing for your business, here’s a short but valuable guide to crafting epic blog posts to engage your readers.

And finally, along those same lines, here’s a post that help you learn to snag readers’ eyes through better blog post formatting. Chunking content into bite-sized bits makes a difference!

 

New Security Vulnerability in the Latest WordPress Release

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WordPress 4.2, released last week, has a new zero-day security vulnerability. WordPress is now working on a patch but there is no ETA as yet.

More details from Sucuri here. The problem is:

“An attacker could leverage a bug in the way comments are stored in the site’s database to insert malicious scripts on your site, thus potentially allowing them to infect your visitors with malware, inject SEO spam or even insert backdoor in the site’s code if the code runs when in a logged-in administrator browser.”

In the meantime, if you use comments on your site you are at risk, unless you’re using Akismet which is already configured to block this attack.

Otherwise, they suggest that you disable comments on your site temporarily. To do this, login to the admin side and go to Settings > Discussion

  • Check the Automatically close comments on articles older than option and in the provided filed enter a ‘1’
  • Click the Save Settings on the bottom of the page

Once the new WordPress patch is released you can undo these changes.

WP Minder clients, this has been done for you already.