A curated list of WordPress news, bits and pieces that made it in the second week of February 2016.
Hold up! — The big news this week was the discovery that Ransomware hacks were specifically targeting WordPress sites lately. Here’s how it’s done. Should you abandon all hope and give up on WordPress? Or get your hands dirty and harden your site?
Hacked and Slashed — Here’s another guide to manually clean your hacked WordPress site. This one’s a bit more involved than the usual and requires access to the console, along with some sysadmin skills, so you’ve been warned. Then again, there’s a reason it’s called “hack” and not “prank.”
Podcast: David Bisset — A video podcast featuring David Bisset, WordPress developer and organizer of the WordCamp Miami this year.
Podcast: Tim Nash — Another video podcast featuring WordPress developer extraordinaire Tim Nash, For programmers, mainly.
Toys of the week — A list of tools, plugins and services that made their way to the WordPress market this week: 404, Mockups, Widget Options, AMP and more.
Hot Themes — Another day, another list. Here’s one of the best looking commercial WordPress themes of 2016, according to the people who sell them. Here’s us saving you a click: Waxon, Artmag, Omtimize, Flow and Edina.
Good Themes — If you don’t feel like paying for themes, then here’s a list of the “best” free theme for WordPress as of late.
Blogs & Grids — If you want to display your blog entries in a grid instead of in a list, here’s a guide to accomplish this modification.
Aye! Captain — An extensive review of Captain Form, yet another commercial contact form plugin. Note that “[t]he company has paid [the author] to provide an honest review of their plugin.” Nonetheless, as if to compensate for the risk of bias, the review itself is well written, funny and for all we know, well informed.
Need Stats Stat? — A list of WordPress plugins that will reveal statistics about everything you could think of, and even things you never suspected were statistically relevant.
You’re doing it wrong — Here are 15 things you may well be doing wrong with your WordPress site. There’s plenty of good insights in there: you should really read it. Or watch the video that accompanies it if you need a shortcut.
Bye-bye Burger — Trim down your interface and stop feeding the same plain hamburger to every user. This guide shows how to accomplish this without ending up looking like an outcast.
:q — With wasavi, you can turn a textarea field into a full-featured VI editor. You could try and use that as the default comment editor on your site. It’s one way to cut down on the spam, among other sources of comments.
That’s all for this week, folks. We’ll see you next week!
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