Category: General

Photo Editing Made Easy with PicMonkey

While there are plenty of photo editing programs available that will allow you to re-size and add custom features to images, some of them come at a price and involve a steep learning curve. Adobe Photoshop is a great tool for those with design experience, but it can be overwhelming for the average WordPress user looking to include images and other multimedia on their posts. User will also have to pay for a subscription and unless you plan on regularly editing images, it might not be worth the money.

Photoshop

Paint

At the other end of the spectrum, WordPress users can always resort of Paint for simple touch-ups, but this program also comes with some serious drawbacks. In can be difficult to save changes and merge images without having to create several files and cut and paste in just the right order. Paint also a limited number of features and it can be easy to distort images during the re-sizing process.

Why Picmonkey is the Best Choice

Picmonkey is a free website that offers the best of photo editing features, all in one easy to use program. While the fact that Picmonkey won’t cost you a thing to use is definitely a plus, the absolute best aspect of the site is that it is super user friendly. If you have enough computer skills to operate WordPress, you will be able to figure out how to execute basic operations and functions in Picmonkey. The website design and available features mimic a lot of other popular publishing programs, so that any skills you have developed will easily translate to this website.

 Available Features

Picmonkey users can edit, touch up or design photos from scratch and put them all together in fun collages. Want to try it out? Simple visit the site and you can use some of their tests samples to try out the different tools. Remove wrinkles, brighten teeth, add text, crop, re-size and do just about anything else to improve your images and create quality images for your posts.

Best WordPress SEO plugins Yoast vs All in one SEO

The WordPress platform is the single most effective way of sharing content across the internet. With blogging and article writing being the most popular way to communicate with your consumer, you can count on WordPress to help you generate organic traffic to your site even with little to no experience. In this article we will outline some most used SEO plugins that will help enhance your site’s search.

If you’re searching for a way to drive traffic to your site, it is important to understand SEO and how to optimize your WordPress blog. There are hundreds of SEO plug ins to download right from within the dashboard that will help augment your website for maximum performance across all search engines.

Even though, WordPress out of the box offers basic SEO functionality, SEO plug ins are a great tool to help boost your rankings and conversion rates all as a result of each plug ins unique features and options.

Most SEO plug ins focus on identifying important keywords and sentence structures that will help effect the search engines algorithms to better match up your article with other relevant content across the internet.

By using the right SEO plug ins you can extend the functionality of your WordPress Site and its SEO to get a better return on your reader base.

When conducting SEO it is important to know some of these basic tips. When creating an article on WordPress remember that to get the best out of your WordPress site, you’re going to want to pay attention to the keywords you implement into your post.

You’re going to want to have a focus keyword that will appear at least 2-3 times throughout your article that relates back to your articles title. Also, it is important to have a description for your article that focuses on your keywords but is short and precise. To long of a description or title will effect the way your article is indexed and can give your article poor visibility.

Two of the most popular plug ins within the WordPress panel are All in One SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast. With millions of downloads between each plugin, it would be safe to say that these SEO plugins make a great addition to your WordPress experience.

All In One SEO pack plugin works best to boost your websites SERP. It has a 4.4 out of 5 stars with a positive rating and review section outlining the benefits of this effective SEO program. Its great for beginner and advanced users and starts working right out of the box after install. Here is a list of some the features you can expect from All In One SEO Pack:

All In One SEO Pack Features

  • All In One SEO pack offers XML sitemap support that submits your sites content to Google and Bing search engines helping improve your SEO
  • The only plug in that offers an extensive SEO integration specifically for WordPress sites that run ecommerce
  •  Generates meta tags automatically
  •  Identifies and highlights duplicate content within the body of your post
  • Supports Google Analytics and metrics

If you’re looking for a SEO plugin that helps boost your posts by magnifying your content then SEO by Yoast is the way to go. The Yoast plugin helps you to write better content with its built in content analysis functions.

It can easily pin point and identify errors within your post, identify focus keywords and recommend configuring better sentences for better reader visibility. With over 1 million downloads and a 4.5 out of 5 stars, the SEO by Yoast plugin is the best way to attract new readers.
SEO by Yoast Features

  • It has better seo optimized Social Integration options
  • Automatically generates XML sitemaps
  • Built in content analysis function
  • Provides Snippet Preview to see what your title would look like in Google
  • Robots.txt and .htaccess are editable within the plugin
  • Permalink clean up
  • Available in 26 languages

Yoast also offers several extensions which are worthy to have if you are an advanced WP user.

When using these  SEO plugins you will be able to soon see a significant difference in your sites traffic and word press performance. In order to take advantage of all the features of these SEO plugins, it is important to remember to follow each requirement of the plug ins built in fields. These SEO plugins will help you to not only have a better optimized site but it will also help you become a better blogger as well.

PC: All in SEO Pack plugin page

WordPress SEO By Yoast Vulnerability Puts Websites At High Risk

A perilous vulnerability has been found in the very popular plugin of the WordPress content management platform (CMS) putting about tens of Millions of websites at very high risks of hacking by the attackers.

The vulnerability is in almost all versions of a WordPress plugin which is called ‘WordPress SEO by Yoast’ As per Yoast Website, this plugin has more than fourteen million downloads which makes it one of the most famous plugins of WordPress to optimize websites for various search engines (Search engine optimization or SEO).

The person who discovered this vulnerability in WordPress SEO by Yoast is the developer of ‘WPScan’ (WordPress vulnerability scanner).

According to a published advisory the versions of WordPress SEO by Yoast before 1.7.3.3 are vulnerable to a web application flaw and this is known as ‘Blind SQL Injection’.

The SQLi (SQL injections) are known to be critical vulnerabilities they can lead to database breach and also to leakage of information that is confidential. Usually, in these attacks, a SQL query that is malformed is inserted into an application through client-side input.

How Does The Yoast Vulnerability Work?

However, in this case, the outside hacker cannot trigger the vulnerability itself because the flaw in actuality is located in a file that needs authorization for access and can be accessed only by Admin, Author or Editor and privileged users of WordPress. The file is ‘admin/class-bulk-editor-list-table.php‘

Thus, a trigger from authorized users is required for successful exploitation of this vulnerability. The attacker can make use of social engineering to trap the authorized users and make them click on a special URL that is payload exploitable.

As explained by Ryan to Graham Cluely (security blogger), if an authorized user of WordPress falls into the trap, the exploit will be allowed to carry execution of arbitrary SQL queries on the WordPress website of the victim.

A proof-of-concept payload was also released by Ryan for Blind SQLi vulnerability in the WordPress SEO by Yoast. This is as below:

http://victim-wordpress-website.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_bulk-editor&
type=title&orderby=post_date%2c(select%20*%20from%20(select(sleep(10)))a)&
order=asc

Patch for the Yoast SQL injection Vulnerability
If reports are to be believed, in the latest version 1.7.4 of WordPress SEO by Yoast, the vulnerability has been patched. The developers of WordPress plugin have done this and this is also mentioned in the changed log. It reads that latest version 1.7.4 has fixed “possible CSRF and blind SQL injection vulnerabilities in bulk editor.”

Normally, it is believed that your website is not seriously complete, if you don’t have the WordPress SEO by Yoast installed. The website owners aim at increasing the traffic of their website using this plugin and this vulnerability is really serious for them.

Thus, the administrators of WordPress that do not have an auto-update feature are highly recommended to upgrade their plugin (WordPress SEO by Yoast) manually as soon as possible. They should visit the WordPress plugin repository to manually download the latest version. If you have the WordPress version 3.7 or above, it is wise to enable the fully automated update of your plugins and themes. You can do this from the tab – Manage – Plugin and Themes – Auto Updates.

Exploring title_tag theme feature

It’s close to a month since WordPress 4.1 released , it’s packed with several new awesome features like

Here in this post we are going to explore the new theme feature “title_tag“.We can easily add support for title_tag using.

function spi_setup() {
 add_theme_support( 'title-tag' );
}
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'spi_setup' );

This theme feature is available since WordPress 4.1 . To enable support  in existing themes, use

if ( ! function_exists( '_wp_render_title_tag' ) ) :
 function spi_render_title() {
?>
<title><?php wp_title( '|', true, 'right' ); ?></title>
<?php
 }
 add_action( 'wp_head', 'spi_render_title' );
endif;

By adding support for tilte_tag , we are saying that our themes don’t add titles on their own and WordPress should not worry about duplication of titles, which means we being theme authors are not going to add  <title>….</title> in our document head.

Anyway you can still use wp_title filter to modify the output to meet your taste it’s your choice.You can ask what’s the using of this as  it is just adding title tag which we were doing earlier.

Well, the benefits of using something like this is basically standardization & reliability.This is the first step in adding a more robust means of generating and outputting the title tag.

Right now, the theme could be doing just about anything to create the document title. We have been trying, for a very long time, to enforce a simpler approach where themes should only include the results of a wp_title() call in the title. By adding a core supported approach for this, a theme can more easily ensure that they are using the same method to create the document title as everybody else.

This standard approach allows a plugin to then be able to reliably modify the document title and know that it will work in any theme using the same standard approach. The benefits are therefore long term, for compatibility all around. By taking it out of the hands of the theme, all the other code can more easily support the standard and allow for more compatible code.

Under the Hood :

Core trac : #18548

Files changed:

  • default-filters.php
  • general-template.php
  • theme.php

A new action (_wp_render_title_tag) is hooked to wp_head which runs first i.e, before wp_enqueue_scripts.

Peliyn – Restaurant/Cafe WordPress Theme

Responsive WordPress Theme

Peliyn is a beautiful and multipurpose template. It is ideal for your business: restaurant, salon, hotel. Quality execution and attention to detail, coupled with clean code and thoughtful design.

This theme integrates with Contact Form 7 and Mail Chimp for WordPress for booking and subscription forms.

It has nice animations & effects and comes with two custom post types Dishes and Testimonials where you can easily set different labels for menu items and give review (1-5 star) easily.

Live Preview

Admin Collapse Sub Pages is now translation ready

we know how much important to support our users all around the world whose native language is not English.

In WCSF-2014 , this was also a strong point mentioned by Matt , Co-Founder of WordPress.

So we now made our plugin Admin Collapse Sub Pages Translation ready.All you need to do just load your language.

We need you for translating the plugin, plugin now packed with US,UK English,Telugu,Serbian Language.You can help us by providing translation strings to the following words.

1) Expand All

2) Collapse All

Special Thanks:

We thank Borisa Djuraskovic for his contribution to translate this plugin in Serbian Language.

Grab the page content by ID

Want to grab page content by using id of the page,then the following code stuffs you.
function spi_get_content_by_id($id) {
$data = get_page($id);
if ($data) {
return apply_filters('the_content', $data->post_content);
}
else return false;
}

This line makes sure that automatic paragraphing and nice curls are returned just like the editor content.
return apply_filters('the_content', $data->post_content);

If you want raw content,use the following piece of code
return $data->post_content;

How to remove Protected and Private from post titles

If you have a blog/site  which is more personal and  have a lot of private and protected posts, you might have noticed that a prefix is added in the post titles like ,

  • Private: Post title
  • Protected: Post title

In this article we will find out how to change those formatted post  titles or entirely remove those prefixes.

Well how to do this, we use WordPress filters for these.

  • protected_title_format
  • private_title_format

[php]
function spi_remove_private_protected_from_titles( $format ) {
return ‘%s’;
}
add_filter( ‘protected_title_format’, ‘spi_remove_private_protected_from_titles’ );</pre>
add_filter( ‘private_title_format’, ‘spi_remove_private_protected_from_titles’  );

[/php]

Here we are returning just the post title ( %s ). If you want to show different string like locked for protected posts , you ned to return that string.

[php]
function spi_remove_private_protected_from_titles( $format ) {
return ‘ Locked: %s’;
}
add_filter( ‘protected_title_format’, ‘spi_remove_private_protected_from_titles’ );
[/php]

Getting rid of default grey image thumbnail in Gimliii theme

Well , many people asked me , how to get rid of default thumbnail image if we set the home page to show blog posts.

It’s simple , we create a child theme and change copy the whole home.php file from parent theme into child theme and go to lines 16-19 where it has:

[php]<div class="col-md-5">
<?php if ( has_post_thumbnail() && ! post_password_required() ){ ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
<?php the_post_thumbnail(‘thumb-medium’);
echo "</a>";
}else{
?>

<img src="<?php echo get_template_directory_uri(); ?>/img/default-thumb.jpg" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="img-responsive"/>
<?php
}?>

</div>
<div class="col-md-7">

[/php]

1) If you want to completely don’t want to use thumbnails , replace the above lines with the following:

[php]
<div class="col-md-12">
[/php]

This is the child theme for the above one.Download here.

2) If you want to use featured images for some posts and for others not.

Use the following child theme.Download here.

3) If you want to use another image , just replace the “default-thumb.jpg ” and “default-thumb-small.png” images in the images folder of your  theme .Don’t forget to use same image names and formats.

Gimliii V 1.0.6 theme is now translation ready

Update:

There were some missing strings in the version 1.0.8 and these strings are localized and new .pot file is generated , you can downloaded this updated theme here.

Gimliii

I thank Alexander for reporting missing translatable strings.

Soon it will be available on WordPress.org .If you are willing to translate to other languages and want to give me the .po files .you may head to the github or contact me.