On December 14th, we had our final WordPress workshop in Novi Sad. At least in 2019, that is. In 2020 and beyond, who knows what will happen 😉
How to make a career in WordPress
This was the main subject of the final workshop. After an opening talk about WordPress security best practices by Relja Novović, we had three speakers sharing their WordPress experience, how they started with WordPress, and what kind of WordPress career they have now. It was a truly fantastic experience to listen to three completely different stories that have one thing in common – you guessed it, WordPress 😎
Big kudos to Milana Cap, Sofija Altman, and Milan Milićev for taking the time to give us a glimpse of their WordPress careers and how they started!
In the end, I’d also like to thank Startit Center Novi Sad for providing us with the venue! And of course, thanks to all the attendees for their hard work and tenacity throughout the workshop. Thanks for bearing with me throughout these couple of months, it wasn’t easy! But I hope it was helpful.
Go through the whole purchase flow and activate a 50% discount coupon.
I created two videos which go through this task. The first one covers the steps from 1-8 and the second one covers from 9-12.
I’m speaking in Serbian but the whole interface is in English
I’m speaking in Serbian but the whole interface is in English
P.S. In the second video, one of the products wouldn’t show up in the grid of featured products. Only after the video did I realize I previously set the product visibility setting to Search Results only.
Final Workshop
The final workshop of this series will be held tomorrow. We’ll have 4 talks total – one will be about WordPress website security and the other three will be on the subject How to make a career in WordPress. Cheers 🙂
During the sixth WordPress workshop in Novi Sad, we first took a look at the solution of the task that I gave to the attendees at the previous workshop. We then covered creating membership sites – the WordPress built-in way and by using a plugin Ultimate Member.
If the post title is Hello World, the end result (instead of just the post title) should be Daki says: Hello World (if Daki is the name of the author of the post). And as a bonus task, the plugin should also add the author’s Gravatar image to the title with the dimensions of 15x15px.
This is a task I made up so there’s no copy/paste solution available online 🙂 However, for finding the right hooks and functions to use, Google is your best friend.
Here’s the function that needs to be added to the plugin in order to achieve the aforementioned result:
And now, the copy/paste solution is available online 🙂
Creating a Membership Site
There are two main ways for creating a membership site in WordPress. The first one is to use the built-in WordPress functionality and publish posts/pages as Private or Password protected. However, this is not a very flexible solution as you can’t really control user capabilities, there’s no members area, and you’d lack lots of really cool options that membership sites have.
Enter Ultimate Member. There are many WordPress membership plugins available online but Ultimate Member is the one I use the most and always recommend. It’s user-friendly and easy to set up. They have decent documentation available and there are quite a few free and premium extensions you can use.
Here’s a video walkthrough of creating a membership site by using the Ultimate Member plugin:
I’m speaking in Serbian but the whole interface is in English
During the video, I’m basically going through the tasks I gave the attendees in order to practice creating a membership site:
Create the default Ultimate Member pages and add them to the menu.
Create a new user role that will be the main registration role.
Allow this role to log into WP Admin and to publish and edit its own post.
Modify the existing registration form so that it applies only to the new role you created.
Modify the existing profile form so that it applies only to the new role and allow this user role to insert the following info – Country, Birth date, and YouTube video.
Add 2 new pages that will be accessible only to the logged in users.
Add these 2 pages to the menu.
Modify the menu so that the 2 newly created pages can only be displayed to the logged in users. Do the same for the Logout, Account, and User pages.
Modify the members directory so that it can be searchable. The searchable users should be only the users who are assigned the newly created role.
The search can be filtered by Country.
You can’t see the admin user in the members directory.
Register as a new user in the browser incognito mode and fill in your profile.
Create a new user via WP-CLI and set the new role to this user.
Log into the site as the second user you created (in a new browser) and fill in your profile.
Check the search functionality and whether it’s working properly.
With each user, publish one post and add one comment to the restricted pages you added before.
As for our WordPress workshops, next Saturday will be the last workshop this year. We’ll have three speakers joining us who will talk about their WordPress beginnings and how they made a career in WordPress. I hope this will further inspire the attendees to dive into WordPress deeply. In my humble opinion, it’s the perfect ending for the workshops 🙂
We went through Linux terminal basics and then we jumped into WP-CLI. We learned how to create, update, and delete users on the site, how to install, activate, deactivate, and delete plugins and themes, and how to perform a full backup of a WordPress website in a few seconds with WP-CLI and Linux commands:
wp db export – creates a database backup tar cfz backup.zip . – creates a backup of all files and folders in the WordPress installation
We also skimmed-through the other fantastic options WP-CLI offers like:
We touched the main concepts of SEO and what are the most important things to work on. I plan on writing a separate article on this subject at some point.
Next
Next Saturday, we’ll be creating a membership website and a webshop.
While maintaining a WordPress website, one of the things to regularly check is whether your site has any broken links. Broken links are not only a bad experience for the visitors but they can also have a negative impact on your site’s SEO. Luckily, there are a few tools you can use to quickly check and fix any broken links on your site.
Broken Link Checker
Broken links are essentially links that don’t work. If you click on them, they lead to a 404 page or to a page that doesn’t load at all.
Every couple of months, I perform a quick audit on my website to see if any broken links appeared. I use a free online tool called Broken Link Checker. You simply enter the URL of your website into the field and it will scan your site and check for broken links.
There are two main different types of broken links you’ll encounter:
When there’s a link on your site which leads to another site, that’s an outbound or external link. If that external site or that particular external page you linked to stops working at some point, your site is left with a broken link.
Example: While writing a post about chocolate, you linked to an article that provides a fantastic recipe for making homemade chocolate. After a couple of months, you check your site with Broken Link Checker and you find out that the homemade chocolate recipe link you added is broken. Their site doesn’t exist anymore. This is bad news for folks after that excellent recipe that’s not there anymore but it’s also bad news for your site because it now has a broken link.
When this happens, I suggest going into your article and manually fixing this. Try checking whether they changed their domain name and let the old one expire. Or maybe they just changed the slug of their article but forgot to add a redirection (we’ll touch this subject later in the article). There probably won’t be many cases like that one but if you linked to the same link (or domain) that’s now broken in quite a few articles, you can then use either a plugin or WP-CLI to fix this relatively quickly.
Fixing With a Plugin
If you opt for the plugin solution, I can suggest installing Velvet Blues, and once you activate it, navigate to Tools -> Update URLs inside your WP Admin area. You’ll see the following screen where you can update all references of the old URL to the new URL.
The part fixing-broken-links-wordpress-website would be the slug. You can change the slug of an individual article inside the Permalink box of the Edit screen of an article:
However, if you were to change the slug of your article, the old permalink containing the old slug would lead to a 404 page not found. And if the post was already indexed by Google or linked on another site, someone who clicks on the link would not be able to find that post.
This might be the very case of our aforementioned chocolate recipe example. They might have ended up with a broken inbound link which in turn caused your site to have a broken outbound link. No good!
Whenever you change a slug of any post or page on your site, I’d suggest always adding a 301 redirection. Until recently, I was using the Simple 301 Redirects plugin for this but when I started using the RankMath SEO plugin (h/t to Milan), I found that it can automatically import all redirections from Simple 301 Redirects and then have you manage them directly inside RankMath’s settings.
This is what the redirections screen looks like on my site now:
Whenever I changed a post’s slug in the past, I added a redirection to the new slug thus making sure there are no broken internal links. However, RankMath automatically adds a new redirection from the old permalink to the new one so I don’t even need to do this manually anymore. That’s absolutely amazing, RankMath!
I can now be sure that if someone linked to any of my posts with the old slug on their own site (or found the old link on Google), that link would no longer be broken and it would automatically redirect to the new link. Something that the homemade chocolate recipe author should have done as well!
Another case of broken inbound links happens after you perform a site migration and change your domain name. To remedy the broken links on your site, you would need to use the aforementioned Velvet Blues plugin or WP-CLI command.
Conclusion
Having broken links is something everyone should avoid. Performing a regular audit with Broken Link Checker and fixing broken links, improves the visitors’ experience and also makes the relationship between Google and your WordPress website just a bit better 😎
