Simon Owen has again written some great notes from the June MWUG meeting, including links to the things I mentioned during the evening. Thanks Simon.
If anyone else has a writeup of this (or any other meetings), please let me know (via the contact form or the comments) and I’ll happily link to them from here.
Simon Owen has again written some notes from the May MWUG meeting, including links to the plugins I mentioned during the evening. Thanks Simon.
If anyone else has a writeup of this (or any other meetings), please let me know (via the contact form or the comments) and I’ll happily link to them from here.
Simon Owen wrote up some notes from the April MWUG meeting, including links to the code I demonstrated during the technical session. Thanks Simon.
If anyone else has a writeup of this (or any other meetings), please let me know (via he contact form or the comments); I’ll happily link to them from here.
For those interested, here are some brief notes from last night’s User session in the first half of the evening:
One subject raised was security. I mentioned the following plugins:
Limit Login Attempts
Limit rate of login attempts, including by way of cookies, for each IP. Fully customizable.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/limit-login-attempts/
WordPress Firewall 2
This WordPress plugin monitors web requests to identify and stop the most obvious attacks.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-firewall-2/
Update Notifier
Sends email notifications if a new version of WordPress available. Notifications about updates for plugins and themes can also be sent.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/update-notifier/
There are many more, some with more in-depth analysis and tools.
I also mentioned LastPass (https://lastpass.com) (whilst not directly WordPress related it’s great for creating and managing very strong passwords.
We talked a little about moving from a development environment to a production or live server. I mentioned the WordPress import tool (to use with a standard WordPress export):
WordPress Importer
Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and more from a WordPress export file.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-importer/
And mentioned the Interconnect it search and replace tool
http://interconnectit.com/124/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/
I also talked about using a backup and restore solution because the better ones seem to include a migrate option too. There are a good number out there, but almost all are commercial (note, unlike the security plugins I mention and recommend above, I haven’t used any of these):
Backup Buddy – http://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/
Blog Vault – http://blogvault.net/
and many more.
There are other free backup solutions in the WordPress plugin repository (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=backup) but most only backup your database or your files, but not both. You can of course always use two — but I didn’t see any that also include the option to migrate or restore to a new URL.
Update: I found this plugin: Duplicator – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/duplicator/ which says it can “Duplicate, clone, backup, move and transfer an entire site from one location to another in 3 easy steps.”
One other tool I mentioned was ManageWP (http://managewp.com/) which is a commercial WordPress site management tool that also includes functionality to update many sites remotely as well as backup and restore/deploy functionality.
When covering general WordPress news, I talked about the make.wordpress.org site (http://make.wordpress.org/) which is an umbrella site for several different streams of activity involved in making WordPress. It includes core WordPress, UI, Accessibility and more. It’s a great place to see what is happening in the WordPress world as well as to get involved.
If you have any questions, or I missed something out from the first half of the evening, please leave a comment below.
Richard Tape gave a talk on his personal WordPress workflow at May’s MWUG meetup. The slides are below.
You can also access them directly on slideshare. Or download a PDF of the slides: Richard Tape : Less ‘Oh Shit’ With Git (8MB)
I made an audio recording of the session and you can listen to it below.
If you want to download it, use this link Richard Tape: Less ‘Oh Shit’ With Git (36MB)
Last night’s meeting went pretty well I thought. And my talk “Just how far can you push Twenty Eleven without code” was well received. I said I would publish links to the plugins and resources I mentioned , so here goes:
In another part of the evening we mentioned backup plugins, and how to turn on debug in wp-config.php.
Another plugin that a few people expressed an interest in was CMS Tree Page View
We also mentioned StudioPress themes — http://www.studiopress.com/ which I wholeheartedly recommend (affiliate link).
Finally, someone asked about being able to remove the original full size image after WordPress has resized it to create the thumbnail and intermediate sizes. I thought I’d seen a plugin that did this, but couldn’t find it. I did, however find this snippet of code in answer to a question on WordPress Stack Exchange. That code could be turned into a plugin, but I would add a little extra code around it, including a check that the original size is actually bigger than your designated largest size.
If I forgot to mention something else we talked about, please leave a comment.
If you came to the meeting last night, let me know what you thought.