Saturday, 2 April 2016

What's In A Store Of WordPress 4.5 Version?




WordPress 4.5, is the next upcoming version of WordPress that is already in development phase and is targeted  to release in the month of April 2016 that is already been set by WordPress team. According to the update, in the month of February 24, 2016, WordPress version 4.5 Beta 1 has been released in the market  and is now accessible to users to download for the purpose of testing.  We just got to see the latest release of WordPress 4.4 with its latest security as well as maintenance version of WordPress 4.4.1 that was released earlier. Working with WordPress alteration process needs an immoderate hard work to make it function in proper ways

Coming to the core development team that has published a brief project agenda referencing the release of WordPress version 4.5 in the month of April 2016; but, according to the WordPress team, the current target release date version 4.5 of WordPress is April 12, 2016. The beta version 1 of WordPress 4.5 is currently scheduled to release by the end of February 2017, and it is great news to know that its three more beta versions are in sync in the releasing process.



Below here is given a planned chart that defines the project schedule for WordPress version 4.5.








Mike Schroder, who is known for WordPress core developer is handling  the release lead for the WordPress version 4.5 and will be well helped by two other release assistants: Mel Choyce and Adam Silverstein. The project schedule that is presented above clearly defines that all new enhancements as well as feature requests  of WordPress version 4.5 definitely needs to be added by the release of Beta 1 version.

All the latest WordPress features are initially prepared as a plug-in and are efficiently managed to be merged properly in the core over the course of alteration stage. There are surely ample of WordPress 4.5 features, but there are few features that are worth mentioning that are implemented to be worked on and surely has made it to discussions in the opening meeting that comprises the following list:
  • Betterments with the theme customizer section that includes features such as customize pane resizer tool and customize device preview panel.
  • Enhancement of Post Editing process and Publishing activity
  • Fixing up of image compression process in the core sector
  • Enhancement of HTTPs to fix integrated content sections

Well, apart from above improvement plans of WordPress, I feel that there are various other updated features that are currently taken forward as plug-ins and already offers am exciting look to users. They are:

Two-Factor Authentication mode
 
Background Image Cropper – Enables easy cropping of all types of background images in the Customizer section that are quite similar to header images.

Next we proceed to discuss about Shiny update features that help WordPress users to – remove every ugly scraps of updating plug-ins as well as themes. 





WP Toolbar Experiments are defined as essential UX adjustment properties to the WordPress toolbar. 

WordPress REST API version 2 is defined as one of the complete version of WordPress REST API section.

There are more to happen that touches various reinforced image compressions, HTTPs enhancements and the Two-Factor Authentication system for WordPress.

I hope this latest article about the release of WordPress version 4.5, will fetch you with enough idea that will discuss about all new and latest features of WordPress that will be added to this version. So, what kind of features are you expecting in WordPress 4.5 version?  Please share your comments here.

Monday, 18 January 2016

WordPress 4.5 is expected to release in April 2016

WordPress, the world's most popular blogging software is supposed to give a great surprise this new year. According to, WordPress-ism a new version 4.5 of WordPress will be released in mid of April 2016. Mike Schroder, the WordPress core developer, will be the release lead along with Mel Choyce and Adam Silverstein.

Bloggers, Writers, and WordPress Developers must have already checked the latest security and maintenance version WordPress 4.4.1 which was announced officially via WordPress blog on 6th January 2016. Now let's wait for the next surprise!

You can experience the beta-1 version of WordPress 4.5 in February itself, and  three more beta versions are expected to be released before the final release candidate. 

Check out the chart showing the project schedule for WordPress version 4.5.



The few essential features that are expected shall be: 

1. Improvements with customizer that shall include customize pane resizer and customize device preview.
2. Improvements in post edit and publishing process.
3. Improvements in core compression of images.
4. HTTPs improvements to fix mixed content.

According to the project schedule for 4.5 version, new enhancements and feature requests will need to be added by the release of Beta 1 version. All the new features will be first worked on as plugins and will be decided to merge in the core over the course of development.

The call for feature plugins is beginning early, this time, around and a Feature
Plugin chat is scheduled for Tuesday, January 12, 2016, 3:00 PM CST. The main
purpose of the early chat is for plugins that believe they are ready for merge, and to start up new ones for future releases. Those who have ideas and plugins to put forward will have an opportunity to get feedback from other contributors.

Additionally, some new features, which are currently used as Plugins are: 

- Two-Factor Authentication for WordPress
- Background Image Cropper– It will enable cropping of background images in the Customizer, similar to the header images.
 - Shiny Updates – It removes the ugly bits of updating plugins and themes.
- WP Toolbar Experiments– some potential UX changes to the WordPress toolbar.
- WordPress REST API (Version 2)

Now let's see what how will the team maintain momentum and how 4.5 version will be executed according to the project scheduled.

Tuesday, 5 January 2016

WordPrax – Your Trusted HTML to WordPress Conversion Service Provider



WordPrax Ltd. is a highly recognized name in the web industry known for offering quality HTML to WordPress conversion services. With more than 10 years of experience and backed by adroit and technically proficient professionals, WordPrax strives to provide WordPress development and customization services that ensures your business growth and betterment. So far, the company has successfully completed over 50,000 projects and continue to deliver cutting-edge development solutions in-vogue demands. WordPress experts ensures to deliver quality-driven and out-of-the-box solutions that help our clients achieve a strong online identity and market presence.

The company provides various services such as:


PSD to WordPress Conversion: Converting PSD to WordPress theme has become the standard way to develop unique looking WP sites with enhanced functionalities. That's because, it gives the ability to create a website theme that is tailored to suit your specific needs.
WordPress Theme Customization: If you have selected a pre-built theme or simply want to customize your already existing WordPress theme, hiring our WordPress Theme Customization will help address your website needs in the most efficient manner possible. 
WordPress Plugin Development Services: The number of plugins that WordPress offers is one of the biggest reasons that makes it so popular among people. But, what if any available WP plugin (whether free or premium plugin) can't meet your particular needs? In that case, it is recommended that you must consider developing a custom plugin using WordPrax Plugin development services.
WordPress Custom Development: No matter whatever your customization needs may be, WordPrax – WordPress Custom Development can help meet your expectations with efficiency. Using this service, you can customize your current theme or develop a new one as you deem perfect.

You can hire dedicated WordPress developers at WordPrax for for affordable price of $18 per hour.

To know more about the company, you can visit their website wordprax.com or send your queries at  sales@wordprax.com.

Thursday, 24 December 2015

Why Should You Hire a WordPress Developer and How?


Running your WordPress site in today's highly competitive virtual world is not an easy task, and requires you to put in a lot of efforts and time in coming up with a solution that can facilitate you a competitive advantage. So, despite having little knowledge about WordPress, there is a greater likelihood that you might fail to create a rock-solid web presence.

Especially if you are a non-tech savvy user, you cannot expect to make it big online merely by making a pre-built WP theme up and running. There are several other aspects that need your due consideration, during WP website development. But, what if you don't have the time or skills needed to get the job done? In that case, choosing to hire WordPress developer can help address your project needs efficiently. 

Below are a few crucial tips to help you understand how you can hire a credible and trusted WP developer:




1. Check out Developer's Proficiency in WordPress

Analyzing your developer's proficiency in WordPress is crucial in getting a result-driven solution. Remember that not all the developers have the same skill set. While a few may excel in some areas of WordPress development, but might fail in other areas (that match your project requirements).

So, be clear whether the developer you are about to hire can provide the exact services based on your preferences or not. Getting familiar with the basics of WordPress can help you in analyzing your service provider skills in a better manner.

2. Experience in WordPress Development/Customization

Ask how many years of experience your developer possesses in offering WordPress development or customization services. That is not to say that you shouldn't consider hiring a developer with less experience in WordPress projects, but selecting a highly experienced professional (with at least five years of experience), you can get assured outcome.

Also, make certain that your service provider has worked on the latest technologies essential for performing WordPress development.

3. Match Your Project Requirements With Developer's Portfolio


Today, almost every professional WordPress developer or a web development firm include a portfolio page to help users get an idea of what sort of work they can deliver to them. Check out your developer's portfolio as well, so as to make out if he/she has worked on any project that matches your project requirements.

4. Ask For Development Cost and Delivery Time


Your development budget can be an obstacle in hiring a service professional – that can deliver the quality of work you're expecting. But, you can still get first-class development services by choosing to outsource your project to an offshore web development company. But, be wise to select a company having a good reputation in the market.

Also, make sure that the company holds a good track record of delivering projects within discussed timelines.

Conclusion


Taking up an experienced WordPress developer services can help you address all your specific project requirements in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Reading the points above will further help you in finding a reliable development partner for your project.


Friday, 30 October 2015

10 Reasons Why You Should Use WordPress for Your Website



Unarguably one of the best CMS platforms in the world; WordPress is the ideal platform for business websites. Many people ask why businesses should use WordPress, isn't it a blog platform for bloggers? Yes, WordPress is used by hundreds of thousands of bloggers across the world but it's also the most advanced and well-equipped Content Management System that powers million of regular websites. Nearly 50% of the world's website that use any sort of CMS use WordPress as their CMS system. 
 
 
 
If you're having second thoughts about whether to choose WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Adobe CQ; here are the 10 reason why you should be using WordPress:

#1. It's Easy to Use


It wasn't long before when you needed to add something to the website you had to call your web designer to do it. If you needed to add something or edit some content you, would have to go to your web designers and pay them to make the change. Today, staying up to dated means whether you stay in business or not, so websites are constantly updating pictures, adding more content, writing blogs to reach as many as possible and more importantly you save money on making changes to the website. This is where WordPress has the advantage over its rivals, the ease of use. Really, anyone can do it. But I prefer to hire a WP developer in the initial stage as they make theme more user friendly for the users.

#2. It's Free



Whether you've started blogging or started your business website; WordPress is absolutely free and you get 3 GB of storage in the free package, you can upgrade to Premium or Business depending on your need for $99 and $299 per year respectively. In business package you get unlimited storage, custom domain, advance customization, 50+ premium themes to choose from, live chat support, and Google analytics.

#3. Flexibility



It's an all-rounder for sure, and that's what you get with WordPress. Apart from the flexibility of adding different functionality, it can be used for adding portfolio site, or run ecommerce website, it works for almost everything with the ability to schedule the post.

#4. SEO Friendly


Google loves WordPress, so do we. In fact in the year 2009 Google's Engineer Matt Cutt endorsed WordPress in 2009 during Wordcamp and his own blog is also powered by WordPress. Not only that, it optimizes the content fast, title tags and headings, permalinks, and so many more features make it more SEO friendly.

#5. WordPress is constantly evolving



Yes, WordPress started out as a blog engine, but it has become so much more. With each new release new possibilities are added. And since it is "Open Source" there are thousands of developers writing plugins to extend its functionality.

#6.Customizable


What you get with WordPress is a huge array of free themes to choose from and you can pay $20 to choose from their premium themes. Because of the thousands of themes and plugins, you can make your website according to your need and preference, and plugins certainly are the best part about WordPress. The best part is most of them are free and easy to download and install. WordPress theme customization isn't a difficult task but will require some time to understand basic principle of web designing.

#7. Mobile Friendly



Well, that's one thing off your list to be worried about. Google has already made it clear about the important of websites being mobile-friendly, if not, it can affect their ranking on mobile search engines. WordPress is already a responsive platform and its themes support mobile optimization also.

#8. Multi-user Capability


There's a very good chance that there are a number of people working on your business website to keep the site updated and running. WordPress understands that and has made it easier by assigning different roles to different individuals, here's that:

  •     Super Admin – somebody with access to the site network administration features and all other features.
  •     Administrator – somebody who has access to all the administration features within a single site.
  •     Editor – somebody who can publish and manage posts including the posts of other users.
  •     Author – somebody who can publish and manage their own posts.
  •     Contributor – somebody who can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them.
  •     Subscriber – somebody who can only manage their profile.

#9.Saves Money


Apart from being free to download and install, it's an open source CMS which means you don't need to hire a professional to look after bugs and issues. WordPress does that already.

#10.Support


That's one more thing you get with WordPress is a lot of support, If you find yourself stuck somewhere, visit the WordPress forum and you can post your question there.

Wrap Up

Well, there are definately more than 10 reason why would use WordPress for your website. But it's ease of use and adding functionality to it with ease, makes life so much easier for non-technical people.

Thursday, 1 October 2015

Things to Consider When Making a Responsive WordPress Site

At present, the majority of users' own devices with an Internet connection. In fact, people today access the web using mobile devices (like tablets and Smartphones) more compared to desktop computers. With time, the need for these smart-devices is only going to increase, because of the ability they render to browse the web and perform virtually almost any task using lightweight devices that can be used on the fly.

While it's true that Smartphones make it easy for us to access the web content without having to stick to a computer desk, but one problem that you might encounter is that the text may be too small to read on small displays. One great way to make your site adjust and adapt to almost any device screen size and resolution is to create a responsive layout. Perhaps, you may choose to install and activate a WordPress responsive theme to achieve such an objective.

But, using a pre-built theme will enable you to present yourself as a unique brand. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the theme will be truly responsive. And thus, a more viable alternative is to opt for PSD to responsive WordPress conversion service. There are many great web development companies that help turn your design files to a responsive WordPress theme format.

The best thing about opting for PSD to a responsive WP theme is that it will not only help in making your site responsive, but will also help you establish a unique online identity. Of course, converting your own design into a theme will give you the benefit of offering a different online experience to users compared to your competitors. The biggest advantage of the conversion is that, you will get better control over your converted site. This means, you can easily make the changes to the design elements to make them perfectly suit your requirements.


In order to come up with a successful responsive WP site make sure to take into considerations below listed key points:

Know Your Target Audience Preferences

Designing a responsive layout for some of the major devices and platforms that your audience uses will help you provide better user experience. But, to accomplish such a need, you will first need to know the preferences (i.e. the mobile device) of your users. One excellent way to know exactly about the devices that your audience use to access your site is to install the Google Analytics tool.

Communicate Your Exact Needs to Your Service Provider


It is imperative to communicate what all you expect from your converted WP theme to your service provider. This will help them better understand your requirements and accordingly develop a solution that match up to your expectations.

Test Your Design on Real Devices

Once your service provider had finished converting your design files into a WP theme, make sure to test it on real devices to get assured that it will scale or contract depending on your users' device. This will save you from spending huge chunks of money – that you might otherwise have to spend in case you find out that your design is not truly responsive at a later stage.

Conclusion

Hope that this article will help you understand some of the key considerations that can help you in creating a winning responsive WordPress site.




Thursday, 17 September 2015

How to Create a Strong Verification for your Maintainable WP Meta boxes?

In order to give strength to its hook system, WordPress leverages event-driven pattern for designs. Though, we know that the design patterns are certainly dependent on each other , thus it is highly unlikely to recognize a design pattern. This is what which makes WordPress flexible.

Apart from achieving exclusiveness, other thing which WordPress developers look for is to create a code which is easily maintainable. As with the advancement of technology and enhancement in the features the codebase of any web app tends to grow more complex. Thus, with passing time it becomes difficult to preserve the clarity and maintainability of the code.

This is equally applicable on WordPress, be it a plugin, an extension, themes or any other project type. The thing which is important is to write a maintainable code.

That's it!
No! certainly not!

This is where developers go wrong, as they make sure that they have followed all the steps to a write maintainable code. Let's for instance they apply meta box, apply options and also apply tabbed navigation in the WordPress dashboard, but they forget to check whether the code they have written works for real or not.

In this blog we will go to the server side in order to apply code which can verify that whether the user has the authority to save the meta data or not .


How to verify that the permissions are granted?

You need to incorporate a security check during the serialization process so as to check whether the user has the ability to save post meta data and to publish. To do this we can use nounce value so as to implement this. This is a number which is used once in order to protect URLs from the scope malicious users.

1. How to add a Nounce?

To add a nounce in the meta boxes, you need to implement the functionality in the markup which will render the post template. For this you need to load admin/views/authors-quick-tab.php and then after you need to update the template so that it contains wp_nounce _field.


<div id="authors-quick-tab">

<h2 class="nav-tab-wrapper current">
<a class="nav-tab nav-tab-active" href="javascript:;">Tab 1</a>
<a class="nav-tab" href="javascript:;">Tab 2</a>
<a class="nav-tab" href="javascript:;">Tab 3</a>
</h2>

<?php
// add tabbed content
include_once( 'tabs/tab1.php' );
include_once( 'tabs/tab2.php' );
include_once( 'tabs/tab3.php' );
// Add a nonce field
wp_nonce_field( 'authors_quick_tabs_save', 'authors_quick_tabs_nonce' );
?>

</div>



The code written above has introduced a nonce which has the functionality for saving the authors quick tabs (which we've named authors_quick_tabs_nonce) . This was also linked with a value which is figured out by authors_quick_tabs. This won't load on the very first go when you will load your web app on browser, as these values are displayed in a hidden field.

Those people who are intrigued can launch a suitable bowser's development tool in order to check the meta box, and you would get something like this and of course with a different value of nonce.

<input type="hidden" id="authors_quick_tabs_nonce" name="authors_quick_tabs_nonce" value="q4df212f34">

2. Check the Nonce

To make sure that the permissions of saving the post assigned to the user is implemented properly or not, you need to check the following three things:

  • User must save the data on the 'post' post type
  • Users must actually have save permission
  • Post must be not automatically saved by WordPress

In order to incorporate the first two we can write a helper function and for checking the third one you can go for an intrinsic function. Primarily, you need to establish the hook as well as the functions that can make use of the helper functions and then you need to save your meta data. Now you need to add some piece of code in the Authors_Quick_Meta_Box which is given below.


<?php add_action( 'save_post', array( $this, 'save_post' ) ); ?>

The next step is to define the function. You can make use of the following code in which we have called two functions.

<?php
public function save_post( $post_id ) {

if ( ! $this->is_valid_fnc() || ! $this->user_save( $post_id, 'authors_quick_tabs_nonce', 'authors_quick_tabs_save' ) ) {
return;
}

}
?>



In the given code, it is written to run the save_post function when we call a save_post action. The function is written to verify that the saved post is not of the 'post' post type, and if the user do not has the authority to save then function should exit.

Definition of the function is must so as to make the logic work. Then we need to write the is_valid_fnc function as this function checks the $_POST array to ensure that the saved post type is a 'post'.


<?php
private function is_valid_fnc() {
/**
* check valid post type or not
*/
return ! empty( $_POST['post_type'] ) && 'post' == $_POST['post_type'];
}
?>


After this we need to add the user_save function, to make sure that the whether the saved post is automatically due to the WordPress or not. Further , if the user is saving the function so there should be a proper nounce value for that particular post.


<?php
private function user_save( $post_id, $nonce_action, $nonce_id ) {

$is_var_save = wp_is_post_autosave( $post_id );
$is_var_revision = wp_is_post_revision( $post_id );
$is_var_valid_nonce = ( isset( $_POST[ $nonce_action ] ) && wp_verify_nonce( $_POST[ $nonce_action ], $nonce_id ) );
// Return true or false.
return ! ( $is_var_save || $is_var_revision ) && $is_var_valid_nonce;

}
?>

Notice here that we're passing in the nonce_action and the nonce_id that we defined in the template in the very first step. We're also using wp_verify_nonce in conjunction with said information. This is how we can verify that the post that's being saved is done so by a user that has the proper access and permissions.
One thing you should note is that we are passing nonce_id and the nonce_action which were defined at the very beginning. Moreover, we will also use wp_verify_nonce conjunction in order to make sure that user who has proper authorities only can save the post.


Maintainable code is certainly an indispensable need of the modern development world. Thus, verifying it becomes a crucial task.
Feel free to share your queries!