The majority of WordPress sites use either WordPress’ built-in comment system or Disqus, a cloud comment service that can be embedded into WordPress and comes with a number of useful social features. But these are far from the only options. In fact, it’s not at all clear that the traditional WordPress comment model is the […]

Customer support is one of the biggest expenses of any sales or service oriented business. It’s also one of the most important, especially in an era when negative customer experiences will quickly find their way onto social media. Companies should offer an easy way for customers to contact support staff, and support staff should have […]

SEO can be a confusing topic for site owners, not least because of the mixed messages they hear. There are the SEO optimists who say all you need is great content and a Twitter account. Then there are the SEO professionals who make it seems as if you need degrees in statistics and marketing to […]

As content management systems go, WordPress is fairly low maintenance. Even the least technically inclined person can look after a WordPress site and expect that it will suffer no serious degradation — particularly if it’s not a site with huge amounts of content. But, like all complex systems, WordPress can gather cruft that will slow […]

Here’s the dream scenario. You have a hobby about which you are enthusiastic and knowledgeable. You suspect there’s an audience of like minded hobbyists interested in what you have to say on the subject. You start a blog. Hosting is inexpensive, social media promotion offers enormous reach. You write and publish a couple of dozen […]

WordPress is a relatively secure content management system. As we’ve discussed before, there is no such thing as completely secure software, but the WordPress development team do an excellent job of keeping WordPress users safe by introducing as few vulnerabilities as possible and fixing them when they arise. That said, WordPress is enormously popular, which […]

Reactor from AppPresser is a new tool that can create a native application for iOS and Android from your existing WordPress site. As a platform for building mobile-friendly websites, WordPress is well ahead of the curve. Theme marketplaces are full of responsive themes that make it straightforward to build sites that play well with devices […]

The developers of WordPress have to strike a careful balance between performance and feature-set or complexity. WordPress is so easy to use because it’s a dynamic site generator: it builds pages on the fly from PHP scripts and MySQL database entries. That’s not an inherently slow process, but it’s slower than serving static HTML, CSS, […]

Accessibility is not often at the front of our minds when we are choosing or designing a WordPress theme. We’re more concerned with aesthetics, functionality, and conversion potential. But ignoring accessibility excludes a huge proportion of our potential users. Worldwide there are 285 million people with visual impairments, 39 million of whom are legally blind. […]

With PHP 7 around the corner, we wanted to create a dev environment to test some apps and prepare for its arrival. PHP 7 installation for CentOS is not difficult and can be found here. With the precompiled builds, we created a VM with the appropriate software to start testing WordPress: Apache2, MariaDB and PHP […]