Nexcess Blog

Twice a year, WordPress’s developers release a beta for the upcoming version of everyone’s favorite content management system. The most recent beta landed in early March, and is ready for testing by WordPress site owners who want to get a preview of the new features and test their plugins and themes before the final release, […]

A few years ago, I had all but given up on email newsletters. My inbox was full of junk newsletters stuffed with thin content and promotional garbage that didn’t provide a shred of value. I spent more time deleting newsletters than reading them. But over the last couple of years, email newsletters have become genuinely […]

Medium is a powerhouse publishing platform from the founder of Blogger and co-founder and former CEO of Twitter — Evan Williams. It offers push-button publishing, a beautiful reading experience, and a social graph that makes promoting content relatively straightforward. Williams has not been shy about his intentions for Medium: “The idea won’t be to start […]

A spate of articles from web security companies report that numerous WordPress sites have been the victim of an attack that leads to code being injected into the JavaScript of WordPress installations. The code is injected into all of a site’s legitimate JavaScript files, and includes various backdoors as well as redirects that send users […]

When you search Google for a topic with relevance to current affairs, you may notice a section on the results page called “In The News”. Unlike some of the other search page sections, the news section doesn’t come from Google’s main index, but from Google News — an algorithmic curation of new stories that have […]

WordPress started life as a blogging engine. Today’s WordPress retains many of the traits of its first years, even though it has long since shaken off its image as “just a blogging engine”. Now supporting a quarter of the top million sites on the web, WordPress is a uniquely powerful and flexible publishing tool. Nevertheless, […]

A brute force attack is the least sophisticated technique online criminals have to compromise WordPress sites. It doesn’t take advantage of obscure coding errors or advanced social engineering techniques. Rather, a brute force attacker simply tries lots of username and password combinations until they find one that works. The execution may be more or less […]

There are many reasons a WordPress user might want to create a WordPress installation on their local machine. Testing plugins and themes before deploying them on a live site Creating a dev site for theme development Running WordPress Betas to try new features Installing WordPress on your desktop or laptop can be a complicated procedure, […]

With the release of WordPress 4.3, WordPress’ developers have put an end to the problematic practice of emailing passwords to users when they request a new password. The default behavior is now to send a reset link to the user’s email account. In this article, I’d like to discuss why this change is a significant […]

If you’ve been in the WordPress world for a while, the question in the title of this piece might seem absurdly basic. After all, plugins are a key part of the success of WordPress and every WordPress site uses at least a few. But for someone new to blogging, online publishing, or creating a site […]