WP Builds

So... you build WordPress websites and you love it. You know what you don't love? Policies. Admit it, you don't do you? The last thing that you want to be spending your time on is ensuring that you've got all your websites, and those of your clients, up-to-date with the latest policies. The reason for this is pretty obvious. You're the website building expert, but you're not a legal expert... well...

It was going to be V for Virus, but we have probably had enough of the word right now, and vulnerabilities perhaps better describes what we are really talking about here - WordPress security. This is where we are different and roles are reversed. Nathan listens to podcasts on IT security and sees the worst that can happen. David remains relatively clueless and feel invincible! He's fixed about 7 h...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 4th October 2021

So you have a WordPress website and it's all built and handed over to the client. You're done! Hurrah! Wait a minute, you're not done are you? Chances are that you've used some simple tools for uptime monitoring. You know what I mean. The kind of tools that periodically ping your website and report back if the site is still alive. You might even have gone a step further and employed a tool that of...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 27th September 2021

This is about common WordPress mistakes and how to get out of a pickle if things go wrong. With all the plugins, themes and community work in WordPress, it's often surprising that any of it hangs together, and that WordPress websites even work at all... (even more so since the Gutenberg Project says David!). Yet, despite that, neither of us have really had any issues over the years. How can this b...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 20th September 2021

So on the podcast today we have Joshua Vandercar from Gravity Hopper which is a plug that allows you to have a central dashboard for all your Gravity Forms. Joshua is employed by Rocket Genius, the developers of Gravity Forms, so he knows a thing or two about how it all works! The idea is that you create a standalone install of WordPress is put the Gravity Hopper plugin on there and from that mome...

WordPress themes are crucial, you have to have one, but will they continue to be so in an era of Full Site Editing? We talk on the podcast today about the WordPress themes that we've used over the years. Starting out by being beguiled by themes which could do all-the-things, then moving towards theme frameworks and minimal themes which allowed some basic styling, but then got out of the way of our...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 6th September 2021

So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love... You get the idea! If you're anything like me you have at times questioned how much time you've spent trawling through social media. You may even be worried about how much data they've been gathering about you, or perhaps thinking about whether or not we're even able to escape from it all. On the podcast...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 30th August 2021

So today on the podcast David and Nathan talk about SEO. David certainly knows more about this than Nathan does, but neither of us claim to be experts! It's a hard subject to ever feel happy about as there's never an end to it all. Google keeps changing what you need to do and you're always under a barrage of new information from all over the internet. So in this episode, we just say it as we see...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 23rd August 2021

There are so many tools that you open up each day to do your job as a WordPress website builder or developer. In fact, I'd go as far as say that if you actually counted up the tools that you use each month, it's going to be way more that you think. There's graphics to create, template to conjure up, themes and plugins to discover and implement, emails to send, ways of getting client content... Hon...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 16th August 2021

If I got you to list out all of the things that you'd like your WordPress websites to be, I'm pretty sure that the word "fast" would be pretty close to the top of that list. It's super important for your website to be fast. Good hosting is crucial to your website's speed and today on the podcast we've got Remkus de Vries from Servebolt to explain why they think that they're fast, like really fast!...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 9th August 2021

It’s another A-Z of WordPress. The series where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintaining sites with WordPress. Today is for Q for Quibble, which is a slight objection or criticism about a trivial matter and here we are looking at those objections and criticism from both outside the WordPress community and from within. There's so many little things that we wish we could...

WordPress website maintenance and care plans might be something that you like to do, but they also might get in the way of the actual building of your websites. FixRunner are here to help you with that. They will handle all of the dull management tasks for you so that you can focus upon your clients and their website build needs. They offer all the expected things like updates, fixes, backups, but...

WordPress plugins... there are so many to choose from, but it's perhaps the fact that they exist that makes WordPress the huge success that it is. So what's the point of a plugin and how do they differ from themes. Will blocks be a replacement in the future? We get into the subject of what are the 'essential' plugins that we think every WordPress site needs and which ones we have earmarked as our...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 19th July 2021

So you might not have heard about the WordPress security company Patchstack before, but you will likely know about them! You see, until recently, they were called WebARX, but they decided that this was a somewhat confusing, and hard to pronounce name, and so changed it to Patchstack. We talk today to founder Oliver Sild, and get to the bottom of why and how the re-branding went as well as what new...

This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 12th July 2021

If something is free then it's likely not very good. That's the generally accepted wisdom is most aspects of life, but not with WordPress! WordPress like many other software platforms is free to use and free to modify. It's yours to use as you see fit, and you don't have to pay a penny for it. This is great, and it's all underpinned by a the 'philosophy' of the Open Source. Today in the podcast we...