Daily ArchivesSeptember 9, 2021

This July, Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko, published a controversial article entitled WordPress crusade against technical responsibility, in which he makes the claim that WordPress, in its efforts to democratize publishing, has created a dangerous situation where people with minimal technical knowledge pose a security risk to themselves and others.

Obviously, we disagree with the basic premise here. A user shouldn’t have to know the fundamentals of how a WordPress site works to be able to publish freely on a site they control. Self-hosting a website is not easy. In fact, it’s hugely complex — we know, we do it every day. The technology stack required to successfully host WordPress is deep, and understanding it requires a long technical education. But that’s our job, not the job of our clients.

The alternatives to self-hosting a WordPress site are not really alternatives at all — they reflect an entirely different way of seeing the world and thinking about the internet. As Medium’s Ev Williams puts it:

“The idea won’t be to start a website. That will be dead. The individual website won’t matter. The Internet is not going to be about billions of people going to millions of websites. It will be about getting it from centralized websites.”

The drawback is that centrally controlled publishing platforms offer publishers almost no control over their content. They are held hostage to the business model and policies of the platform and the interests of the platform’s investors. Content can be removed without notification or feedback. It can monetized by the platform owner with no benefit to the content creator. That’s not the democratization of publishing; it’s something else altogether.

It’s our job, as WordPress hosts, to manage the complexity so that publishing can be truly democratic. I’m not suggesting that it’s a good thing if WordPress users know nothing about their platform. The more they know, the more powerfully the platform can be molded to their needs. They certainly need to know the basics of securing and updating their site. Education is good. But most people won’t and can’t become deeply expert in the inner-workings of WordPress, and that’s OK, because we are experts.

Savchenko uses the example of WordPress still supporting PHP 5.2, an old version of PHP that isn’t really suitable for use on the modern web. It’s a good point, but users shouldn’t have to understand it to be able to use WordPress to publish content. That’s the job of a responsible WordPress hosting company.

Hostdedi WordPress installations use PHP 7, a secure, fast, and recent version of PHP. That’s great for our users, even if they don’t understand what it entails — and for those who do understand, it gives them another reason to choose Hostdedi as their hosting provider.

Savchenko is claiming that publishers need to choose two of the following three things: an easy-to-use publishing platform that doesn’t require extensive technical knowledge, a publishing platform owned and controlled by the publisher, and a publishing platform that is secure.

We know that’s not right, because providing all three is exactly what our WordPress hosting plans do.

A popular blog can make a big difference to your bottom line. It will increase traffic to your site, and, if the content is targeted properly, much of that traffic will make a purchase or promote your business.

But business blogging is not as easy as it might seem. If you aren’t careful, your business blog could prove more of a liability than a benefit.

It’s all too easy to do and say the wrong thing if running a website and writing content isn’t your forte. I’ve experienced hundreds of small business blogs in my capacity as a content marketer, and I’ve seen the same mistakes repeated over and over again.

Your Site Isn’t Accessible

Millions of consumers rely on keyboard navigation or a screen reader. If your website makes life difficult for people with accessibility issues, it excludes them from accessing your business’ services and content. That’s bad for users and for the reputation of your business.

Some accessibility problems are easy to fix. A typical example I often see is poor contrast between text and background. Poor contrast ratios — light grey on white seems popular for some reason — make reading unpleasant for some and impossible for others.

If you aren’t sure how to improve the accessibility of your site, the WP Tota11y plugin will analyze it and report any problems.

In an ideal world, WordPress themes would be designed with accessibility in mind, but many aren’t. The WP Accessibility plugin will fix some — but not all — of the accessibility problems caused by poor theme design.

What’s Copyright?

Many small business owners seem to think grabbing a random picture from Google Images to publish on their blog is a good idea. It isn’t. Infringing the copyright of a photographer, designer, or writer can be an expensive mistake.

There are questions business bloggers should ask themselves before using content from the web:

• Did I create the content?
• Did I pay the copyright owner to use the content?
• Does the content have a license — like several of the Creative Commons licenses — that allows me to use it?

If the answer is “yes” to one of these questions, you can use the content. In all other circumstances, exercise extreme caution. Don’t be tempted to Google for a nice image to put in your blog article: you didn’t create it, you haven’t paid for it, and you probably have no idea what the license is.

If you need free images for your blog, take a look at sites like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay.

But I Think That’s Hilarious!

If you think you’ve devised a brilliantly funny joke to publish on your blog, get a second opinion. Written humor is hard to get right, and there’s a risk of causing offense. Your readers don’t know you personally. They don’t make allowances for your risqué, sarcastic, challenging, satirical, political or otherwise-likely-to-be-misinterpreted wit.

Clickbait’s Great For BuzzFeed, But Not For Your Business

BuzzFeed has one goal: attract eyeballs to advertising. Clickbait’s great for that. Business blogs measure success differently: content has to instill trust and influence people to spend money. You probably could increase traffic with “I told a joke on my business blog … you won’t believe what happened next,” but that traffic is unlikely to be beneficial to the business.

There is a theory that any publicity is good publicity, but that’s a dangerous game to play. Headlines should be optimized for relevance and to grab attention, but if you step over the line, your business’ reputation will suffer.

People Will Wait For The Good Stuff

Finally, if you publish the most brilliant content on a website that takes half a minute to load a page, you won’t benefit from the investment. People simply won’t wait around while your content loads.

There a many reasons a website might be slow, but, in my experience, the number-one cause of slow business blogs is cheap shared hosting. If you want to offer users a positive experience, spring for a decent managed WordPress hosting package.

Think about how much has changed since 2011. How many website design trends and new technologies have fallen out of favor? How many new devices made their way onto the market? How many new trends surfaced and gained in popularity?

It is no surprise that WordPress has evolved with the web. The WordPress of today is a very different beast from the WordPress of five years ago, and borderline unrecognizable compared to the WordPress of 2003. But that’s a good thing.

After all, the only constant on the web is change. As a designer, you know that better than anyone – just as you know that it’s your job to stay on top of both what is changing and what will change in the future. Luckily, if you know where to look, that is not hard. Read More »

Allowing guest posts on your business blog is effective for building relationships, increasing the amount of content you publish, and attracting incoming links and increased social sharing. But, as any editor will tell you, accepting content submissions can be a lot of work, especially in light of the embrace of “guest posting” by spammers and content creators for whom quality isn’t a priority.

If you don’t want to spend too much time proofreading, editing, and arguing with writers, you should implement an editorial calendar, strict guest blogging guidelines, and a low-friction submission and editing workflow. You should also be sure you understand the difference between guest blogging and native advertising — they aren’t the same thing.

Rules And Standards

There are definite benefits to allowing third-party content creators to publish on your website, but it can involve a lot of work. If your blog is relatively popular within its niche, you’ll be bombarded with posts from the moment you announce your guest blogging program. In fact, you’ll probably be bombarded with email from SEO and inbound marketing companies even if you don’t allow guest posting. Guest blogging can be spammy, but if it’s done right: it’s effective and no different to what thousands of publishers do every day.

The challenge is to publish high-quality content in a world where quality is outweighed by quantity. In short, you’re going to be sent a lot of junk, so you shouldn’t be afraid of rejecting content without remorse. I advise sites that intend to accept guest blogs to create a number of “filters” that clearly express what will be accepted, and to quickly reject anything that doesn’t conform.

Editorial Calendars

Filter number one is an editorial calendar. Editorial calendars establish the topics that you’d like to publish over a particular period of time. With an editorial calendar, you can synchronize guest posts and in-house content. This doesn’t have to be complex or time-consuming: a simple list of topics that you’re interested in is all it takes. Everything that doesn’t conform to those topics can be rejected.

Guest Post Guidelines

Filter number two is guest post guidelines. These are permanent guidelines that specify exactly what you expect.

You might consider including:

• Rules about language, grammatical correctness, and style (although a style guide is great for this too).
• Word counts. What’s your minimum and maximum word count?
• Should posts submissions include images?
• How many links leading to the writer’s site can be included?
• Is nakedly promotional content is permissible?
• Should the content be unique and original, or are you prepared to repost content that has previously been published elsewhere?
• Do you prefer direct submissions of completed content, or to have summaries sent in advance that you can “commission?”

If a submitted guest post doesn’t conform to the rules, reject it or bounce it back to the submitter for editing.

Editing And Submission Workflows

If you accept guest posts, you’re going to be doing some editing, even if it is just deciding which posts to publish and making sure they’re in the right format for your content management system.

To make this process as smooth as possible, set clear submission criteria: for example, you will only accept posts written in Markdown, with correctly formatted headers and links, and you’d prefer the posts to be submitted to a dedicated email address.

Some site owners use a WordPress plugin like TT Guest Post Submit to accept guest posts, but the likelihood is that it will fill your WordPress database with huge amounts of spam. I prefer to deal with submissions via email, so I can set up rules and filters and manage submissions more efficiently.

Don’t be afraid to reject low-quality submissions. You don’t have to justify or explain why you are rejecting them. It’s your site and you can publish what you choose. However, you should keep an eye out for submissions from high-value guest bloggers that might be worth a bit more work. If they’re an influencer in a niche you care about, it’s often worth the time to work with them to get their post into shape.

Guest Blogging Is Not Native Advertising

Finally, be clear on the differences between guest blogging and native advertising. Guest blogging is the acceptance of third-party content to the mutual benefit of the creator and the publishing site. The purpose is promotional, but the content should not be a disguised advert.

Native advertising involves a content creator paying your company to publish promotional content “disguised” as editorial content. Both are useful marketing tools, but you can get in trouble with Google and the law if you aren’t honest about whether you’ve taken money to publish content.

Guest posting is an effective marketing and relationship building strategy, and if you follow the guidelines I’ve discussed here, you shouldn’t have too much trouble attracting high-quality content creators.

I’ve been a WordPress user for years and I’ve written many thousands of words in the WordPress editor. I’ve seen the editor develop from a barely usable and — at times — frustrating writing experience into a functional tool. Gradual iteration over more than a decade has created a polished interface for writing and creating blog posts.

But sometimes an iterative approach isn’t enough. Sometimes a complete re-imagining is called for. The core functionality of the editor, including shortcodes and embeds, was developed for a different time, and has become increasingly clunky compared to the best editing experiences available on the web.

While many of us have grown to know and love WordPress’ TinyMCE-based editor, it can be off-putting to new users used to writing and editing in word processors like Word or text editors like iA Writer.

An early prototype of a new vision for WordPress editing was recently released, and it promises to revolutionise the WordPress editing experience. Gutenberg is a block-based editor that leverages the best in modern web technology to provide an editing interface that will hopefully satisfy TinyMCE nostalgics and new WordPress users alike.

It should be noted that Gutenberg is a very early prototype. It demonstrates where the developers are hoping to go, but there’s a long road to travel before they get there. Most of the promised functionality isn’t yet working, and it’ll be some time before we see Gutenberg in WordPress Core.

A Gutenberg page is made up of blocks, and each block contains a particular type of content. Each paragraph or heading is a block, and so are images, lists, and galleries. As Gutenberg matures, new blocks will be added to extend the editor’s functionality. Each block offers tools appropriate to its contents in a pop-up menu: paragraph blocks provide text styling options and image blocks provide positioning and sizing options. Blocks can be moved around relative to each other to create custom page layouts quickly and intuitively.

Blocks are intended to take the place of shortcodes and other less-than-intuitive techniques for adding content to pages and posts.

Joen Asmussen, Design Wrangler at Automattic, expresses Gutenberg’s design goals in a recent blog post:

“At the core of the 2017 editor focus is the is idea of introducing blocks (or sections) which help “make easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or ‘mystery meat’ embed discovery”. How do we do that?”

Gutenberg is a product of the new focus-based development process announced by Matt Mullenweg at last year’s State of the Word address. Rather than focusing on fixed releases, during 2017, WordPress development will be focused around specific projects. The editor is one of those projects. A release-based schedule with fixed release dates is great for iterative improvement, but it’s not ideal for making deeper changes to software. Without the pressure of a release date and the ability to focus all their energy on single project, developers can make more revolutionary changes.

Varying Vagrant Vagrants, a tool for creating WordPress development environments, hit the big 2.0 recently, with the addition of a feature that many WordPress developers have been asking for: a YAML-based configuration system that makes it easier to tweak your development environment.
VVV solves a common problem in WordPress development and web development more generally: the creation of isolated and configurable development environments specific to individual projects. In the past, it was time consuming and complex to create a new WordPress installation, alongside all WordPress’ dependencies, for every new project. VVV makes creating custom WordPress development environments for plugin, theme, and WordPress Core development a matter of typing a couple of commands.
Read More »

After a long weekend of rest, it’s time to write a small recap of Magento Imagine 2017. Since I spent most of my time there at the Hostdedi booth, my recap will focus on the tradeshow side of the event, rather than the conference.
The Marketplace was open 3 hours on Monday, 10 hours on Tuesday, and 5 hours on Wednesday, for a total of 18 hours.
The stats are awesome: 15 Nexcessers x ~9 hours each = 135 hours of amazing talks with lots of old and new friends.
As always, the organization by the Magento team was amazing. Every detail was considered, and for us expositors, there is no better place for a booth than the Wynn. This year was by far the most attended one I can remember, with over 3500 curious wanderers looking for even more ways to grow their business with Magento 2.
Read More »

WooCommerce is far and away the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. For larger stores, you can’t beat a dedicated eCommerce application like Magento, but if you’re already familiar with WordPress and you don’t need the full might of Magento, WooCommerce is a great option.
By the time you read this, WooCommerce 3.0.0 will be available with a host of enhancements and updates. This is a major version bump and there are far too many changes to discuss in a single blog post, but I’d like to highlight some of the most important new features.
Read More »

For a second year in a row, Hostdedi will be Platinum sponsor of Meet Magento NL! Even better, several of our Magento hosting experts will also be speaking at the event and interacting with members of the eCommerce community.

One of our favorite parts of actively working with the Magento eCommerce community is meeting merchants, developers, and other Magento service providers. As one of the biggest and most vibrant community gatherings in Europe, Meet Magento Netherlands gives us the opportunity to hear about all the incredible projects being worked on across the continent.

On May 10, Meet Magento NL begins at a new venue in DeFabrique Industriële, in Utrecht. We’re excited for the new venue – Utrecht itself is a leading center of European commerce and will showcase how the industrial and digital worlds unite with the Magento community. We’re also planning to dive into the city’s long history and check its breathtaking landscape of canals and townhouses.

Meet Magento is about helping people connect and mine one another’s expertise. The conference includes talks on topics like eCommerce security, content marketing, development, and the app economy, among others.

Our own community developer Miguel Balparda will participate at this event for the first time. Miguel will present Making your life easier with the Magento 2 CLI, as well as field any and all questions from other Magento devotees. Returning for his second consecutive year, Jerry Eadeh, Vice-president of Channel Sales, will demonstrate some the latest Hostdedi Cloud technology.

As always, our team will be stoked to talk to MMNL attendees about how our performance-optimized Magento hosting platform can help eCommerce merchants build fast, secure stores.

Interested? We’re offering a 20% discount to Meet Magento Netherlands! Use coupon code NEXCESSMM17NL.

Until relatively recently, if you wanted to build a WordPress theme, you had to use PHP. With the introduction of the REST API, that’s no longer the case. It’s possible to build integrations with WordPress in any language. As Matt Mullenweg has pointed out on several occasions, a leading motivation for the introduction of the REST API was to tap into the JavaScript ecosystem.

JavaScript has long had an image problem, but developments in the Javascript ecosystem and the language itself means that creating Javascript front-ends, including powerful SPAs and other web applications, needn’t mean dealing directly with JavaScript at all.

Of course, Javascript is the only language that will run directly in the browser, but that only means code has to end up as Javascript: it doesn’t have to start life that way. Since the advent of CoffeeScript, a language that compiles to JavaScript, any number of languages that compile to Javascript have been created — and any of those can be used to build front-end applications that take advantage of the WordPress API.

Let’s have a look at three of those languages.

TypeScript

TypeScript is a superset of Javascript. That means it builds on top of Javascript to add extra features and paper over some of the less inspired design choices that make coding in Javascript tricky.

TypeScript, as the name suggests, is a strongly typed language that adds a comprehensive type system to Javascript. The type system helps avoid a lot of bugs that are bane of Javascript developer’s lives, in addition to making the code easier to read and reason about.

But that’s not all; TypeScript also extends Javascript’s object oriented features, fully supports ECMA6, and is accompanied by excellent tooling.

Elm

TypeScript is Javascript with some extras. Elm is not like Javascript at all. Elm is a functional programming language that was created specifically for building web applications.

It comes with all the trimmings of functional languages: immutable state, first class functions, pattern matching, and so on. Elm is also extremely fast: like React it uses a shadow DOM to render page changes, which makes it perfect for building complex interactive web applications.

The headline feature of Elm is the Elm Architecture: an intuitive method of building web application as views, models, and updates. Elm applications tend to be highly readable and maintainable.

Elm’s creators and Elm enthusiasts boast that there are no runtime exceptions for Elm applications: because of its type system, the Elm compiler can find most problems in code at compile time. If it compiles, it’ll almost certainly run without errors.

Elm doesn’t just output Javascript: it can output HTML and CSS too, which means it’s possible to develop web applications entirely within Elm, taking advantage of a powerful functional language for all aspects of the application.

PureScript

I want to end this look at Javascript alternatives with a glance at PureScript. Like Elm, PureScript is a functional language. Elm is designed to be easy to use and understand. The same can’t really be said of PureScript, especially if most of your experience is with JavaScript. PureScript takes many cues from Haskell, a language beloved by many, but not easy to grasp.

However, PureScript is a powerful strongly-typed language with a lightweight syntax that is extremely expressive once you get to grips with the PureScript way. It’s well worth looking into if you tried Elm and found it overly opinionated and restrictive.

My aim here hasn’t been an in-depth examination of Javascript alternatives, but an expression of why I and many developers are excited by the WordPress API — it massively increases WordPress’ flexibility and opens up new vistas that will have a huge impact on the WordPress ecosystem over the next few years.