All of the recent headlines about large-scale data breaches make it easy to forget about the importance of our own internal website security. Luckily, WordPress comes with five default user roles that help you control how individual users interact with every aspect of your website.
Once you understand the capabilities of these five WordPress user roles, you can instantly assign or modify roles through the User screen on the WordPress dashboard.
If you’re new to working with WordPress themes, learning how to edit WordPress theme HTML can be intimidating. Here’s how it usually unfolds: You get really excited to make a change to your website and open up a template file to make some edits. Immediately, you see a bunch of PHP code and start running for the hills. Slow down! It’s important to remember WordPress themes create fully functioning HTML pages. They just do it using PHP, which can be confusing at first. Once you understand the basics of how a WordPress theme actually works, the mystery starts to unravel.
WordPress has a less than stellar security reputation. You may have even heard some horror stories from friends or colleagues who’ve had their site hacked. So, is WordPress actually secure?
Yes. Very secure. To understand why, consider the popularity of WordPress. It now powers around 20% of the internet. It’s extremely popular. WordPress is also open source software. This means the underlying code can be reviewed by anyone. WordPress security issues can be uncovered and reported by any of the thousands of developers that use the software, so they tend to be discovered and fixed quickly. If you’re the president, would you rather have fifty secret service agents looking out for you, or just one? More eyeballs and more scrutiny equal better security.
The popularity of WordPress is also a weakness. Imagine those millions of WordPress websites as a roaming herd of buffalo. Now imagine some hungry wolves (malicious hackers) hunting for a meal. The thundering herd is obviously going to attract some attention. But, what buffalo will they target? The stragglers of course. The old, the young, and the weak. Your goal is to not be one of those stragglers. Let’s review some basic WordPress security practices that will help you keep up with the herd.
If you customize WordPress themes, you should understand the basic concept of a WordPress child theme. Unfortunately, child themes can be confusing if you don’t have much experience with them. It’s important you understand what a child theme is and how it works alongside a normal WordPress theme. Why is it so important? Not using a child theme for customizations could really come back to haunt you later.
We did briefly introduce the WordPress child theme concept while learning how to customize a WordPress theme, but we didn’t fully explore it. In this post we’ll do just that, and then we’ll show you how to use a child theme.
What are child themes?
Imagine you have a painting on your wall. You really love the painting, but there is one thing that you just can’t stand. The moon is orange. The moon should be white, right? Every time you look at it, it drives you crazy.
You decide you’re going to fix the painting. You get out your brushes, buy the best white paint, and sit down to do your work. As you stare at the painting, you can’t help but think “I hope I don’t screw this up”.
Finding a theme can be intimidating. With so many choices, how do you uncover the best WordPress themes?
We’ve been working with WordPress themes since 2008 here at The Theme Foundry, so we’ve got some relevant industry knowledge and plenty of experience. Let’s talk about where to look for WordPress themes, and how to find the best themes when you get there.
You found a new WordPress theme. It looks perfect for your blog, but you’re really nervous about changing your theme. What if something breaks? Will you lose any content? I’ll walk you through what you should be nervous about, and what you shouldn’t.
You’ve got WordPress set up, you’ve installed your favorite theme, and now you want more. You want to learn how to customize a WordPress theme so it looks just right. Where do you get started? How hard is it?
You might think the hardest part of the process is learning WordPress or doing something fancy with code. In fact, it’s learning a few basic concepts and applying them when you want to customize your theme. There are even some fantastic free tools and WordPress plugins available to make this process enjoyable.
Here at The Theme Foundry we sell WordPress templates and host quite a few tutorial videos over in the Help Center. We use the excellent SublimeVideo player to power the videos. Unlike YouTube or Vimeo, SublimeVideo lets us host and serve our own video files and keep them white-label. You add the player via one line of JavaScript and you can write native HTML5 video syntax. SublimeVideo provides a clean and flexible player that automatically picks up the video and also handles playing it via Flash when a browser doesn’t support HTML5.
HTML5 video is great, but to support all the modern browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE9/10), you need to serve two versions of your video files. For Chrome, IE9/10, and Safari, you need MP4 video files, and for Firefox and Opera, you need WebM files.
Most video applications can export videos in the MP4 format, but they usually can’t export in the WebM format. You need a tool to convert those MP4 files to WebM.
Your WordPress website is ready to go, but you really need that special piece of extra functionality your theme isn’t providing. You need to search for a plugin. WordPress plugins add extra functionality and features to your WordPress website.
In search of a plugin, you visit the WordPress plugin repository or try some search terms from your WordPress dashboard. You find results, but how do you know when you’ve found the perfect plugin? Are you even looking in the right place?
When I first decided to convert a static HTML design to WordPress I did some searching for a tutorial to help me get started with the basics. Surprisingly, I didn’t find anything that was very complete or easy to follow. So, I decided to write a very basic tutorial on how to convert a static HTML template into a WordPress theme. If you are an absolute beginner at developing WordPress themes then this should help you get started.
This tutorial assumes you already have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. It also assumes you have a website built in HTML and CSS and have it ready for conversion to WordPress. For those who need a basic introduction, refer to this helpful introduction to WordPress themes. If you already have something in WordPress (maybe you bought one of our WordPress templates), you might be interested in learning how to customize a WordPress theme and the WordPress child theme basics.
