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Weekly Links Roundup – WP Guide, Collapsing Categories, Tags, Installing Plugins

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Happy Holidays!

This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Easy WP Guide, an online/downloadable handbook for using your WordPress site’s tools, has just come out with a fresh new updated version. Get it here.

Collapsing Categories is a useful plugin if you have a lot of blog categories and subcategories. It will expand and contract as needed and works great as a sidebar widget. You can see it in use here.

If you’re new to blogging in WordPress, you may not realize how handy using categories and tags can be. They can help with site navigation and general browsing.  They’re also useful for helping search engines crawl more of your website. Check out the 10 best practices of using tags and categories.

And if you’re brand new to WordPress, you may not be aware that you can add any of thousands of plugins to add new functionality to your site (that’s if you’re using self-hosted wordpress.org, not wordpress.com!). Learn about plugins and how to install them.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Hacked Sites, Easy WP Guide, Event Calender Plugins, PHP Versions

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

If your WordPress site had been hacked, how would you know? Check out this infographic from iThemes showing 7 key signs that your site has been the target of a hack. Prevention is much easier than recovery – if you need help keeping your site secure, check out our WordPress maintenance plans. We include an upfront (and then annual) security audit of your site in all our plans.

Easy WP Guide has just released their new guide for WordPress 5.1 – get a PDF here. But don’t bother to print it, it gets updated frequently and is quite large!

Looking for an event calendar for your site? Here’s a roundup of 5 event calendar plugins for WordPress. This list is unusual in that it doesn’t include some of the big players in the category – these are all commercial plugins available at Code Canyon. Check out this post for some top free event calendar plugins – lots of high-quality choices listed here.

A common problem I see with new WP Minder clients is old PHP versions. Why is this so important? WordPress now recommends a minimum of PHP 7.3. But over 77% of WordPress users are on unsupported (read: no security updates ever) versions of PHP – that’s PHP 7.0 and older! Most users don’t know or care about this, but here’s why you should.

You can check the PHP version with this plugin.

WP Minder’s maintenance plans include fast Managed WordPress Hosting on modern, up-to-date servers. Besides the security benefits our clients also get the performance boost that PHP 7.1+ provides.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Bitcoin, Easy WP Guide, Usernames, Testimonials

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

If you’re involved in the roller coaster ride that is Bitcoin, this might interest you – learn how to accept Bitcoin payments on your WordPress ecommerce site. This article covers simple donations, WooCommerce and more.

The venerable Easy WP Guide for WordPress 4.9 is now available. Use it online, or save a PDF for your computer (just don’t print it! It’s huge and gets updated often). Easy WP Guide is the straightforward user manual for WordPress.

As an aside: WordPress now powers 54 of the top 100 Inc 5000 company websites. Read more about it.

Ever needed to change your username in WordPress? This happened to one of my clients in the last few weeks. The easiest way to do it is create a new admin user with the new info, then login as that new user and delete the old user account, making sure to attribute all content to your new user account when you see that option. But there are a few other ways to change a username too, read more here.

Finally… Do you use testimonials on your business website? If not, you should be doing this – it’s a great way to increase your credibility for prospective clients by adding social proof. This post outlines the process of gathering and publishing testimonials with one of my favorite plugins, Strong Testimonials.

 

Easy WP Guide 3.1 Released

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Easy WP Guide 3.1 by Anthony HortinI used to give my WordPress clients a book when we met for training. But as you’re aware, WordPress changes so often that a book just gets outdated right after it’s published!

So a few months ago I started giving my clients the link to Easy WP Guide. It’s a great resource on how to use WordPress, and author Anthony Hortin does a great job of keeping it fresh and up-to-date with new major WordPress releases. It’s free and comes as a PDF you can save on your desktop or laptop for easy reference (don’t print it though – it’s big).

Get your copy of Easy WP Guide 3.1 here. Or, learn more about what’s changed in the latest version of WordPress.