Learning

It has been an interesting week in my little WordPress world. I have been learning a lot about working with WordPress. I found a couple of neat plugins and did a WordPress update the hard way (well, at least to me).

Manual Update

I have been needing (in a bad way) to update my work website to WordPress 4.0. My site runs on a Windows 2008 Server and I have been unable to do an update while logged into my site. For some reason, the folder permissions do not allow me to run an update of WordPress. I can update themes and plugins.

So, I did some research and thought that I could do a manual update while logged onto my server through Remote Desktop. I uploaded a version of WordPress 4.0 to my server and extracted the files into a folder. Then I copied all of the files, except for the wp-content folder, to the location of my website. Then I went to wp-admin/upgrade.php and reconnected the database.

I was able to login to the website and check all of the plugins and my theme. Everything worked great!

Post to Page

My work website has a static front page and I have a post page where I make announcements like road closures, upcoming bids, etc. I display the latest post on a sidebar but I wanted t have 2 or 3 of the latest post show on the home page.

I found the plugin Post to Page in the WordPress repository and it works great! It took a little bit of work to get it working correctly and displaying the way I wanted it to look. It is easy to modify the 25 to 30 settings with either a true or false statement.

Clef

I was checking out some ways to make logins more secure. There some interesting two factor authentication plugins available but I heard about a plugin called Clef.  It is easy to install and setup. An app needs to be installed on your smartphone. When Clef is setup and you go to login to your website, you will this on your screen.

You then start your app on your phone and you will see a screen that is very similar. Hold your phone as if you are going to take a picture of your computer monitor and your camera syncs the images and then you are logged into your website.

You can find information at getclef.com. If you do install the plugin and app, don’t be surprised if you are contacted by one of the owners of the company! I had used the plugin for a day and I received an email from Jesse Pollak asking if I had any problems during setup and how I liked it. I was impressed.

If you like to get some information before you do an install, Adam Silver of Kitchen Sink WP did an interview with Jess on October 6th. You can see the interview here.

So, like I stated in the beginning, it has been a busy week in my little WordPress world and I continue to learn!