WordPress Training Courses & Workshops - Brisbane, Australia

Managing Your WordPress Website

WordPress is by far the most popular platform for creating a website for a whole lot of reasons… It is easy to use, it is flexible and extensible (with plugins), it is Search Engine Friendly, it is easy to change the look and feel (with themes) to name just a few.

But as well as adding and updating content on your WordPress website, it is also important that you undertake regular maintenance activies such as :

  • Backups – you should not rely on restoring from a backup that your host provider may or may not have done… much better for you to create and manage your own (offiste) backups
  • WordPress core updates – WordPress has a major update about every 3 months or so, it is important (for security if nothing else) that these updates are applied regularly
  • Plugin Updates – plugins also update fairly regularly, with security patches, bug fixes and function enhancements
  • Analytics / Search Console monitoring – keeping an eye on how your website visitors find and interact with your site is important

We recommend checking and applying updates to your WordPress Website on at least a monthly basis, and if you want to do well on Google it is a good idea to add or update content regularly as well.

If you are not comfortable doing these types of updates, we can provide you with the website training you need to kae thios a lot easeir, or you could consider using a third party Website Management Service.

WordPress 3.4 Released

Today saw the release of WordPress 3.4.  This was a fairly significant release with a swag of new features and functionality as outlined below :

WordPress Theme Customisation

The biggest change in WP 3.4 for users is the theme customizer.  This new features (found in Appearence >> Themes and then clicking on the customise link) allows WP administrators to play around with various looks and settings for either the currently active theme (or a theme you are considering switching to) without publishing the changes to the live site.  The options available for this feature are theme dependent.

It’s al;so now easier to browse thorugh the themes you have installed.

WordPress Customised Headers

If you are using a theme that supports custom headers, it is now possible to select images from the WP media library to modify your header images, and it is now easy (without hacking code) to choose the height and width of your header images.

WordPressTwitter Embedding

WordPress support for twitter embeds has also been given a big boost: simply paste  a Twitter permalink on its own line in the editor and and WordPress 3.4 automatically it into a fabulous embedded Tweet.

See the Official WordPress 3.4 Release video below with a summary of the new features :

WordPress 3.4 due in May 2012

WordPress 3.4 was released for beta testing early in April, and is expected to be available for general release during May.

Here’s some of the new features which are expected:

  • Theme Customizer with Previewer
  • Flexible Custom Header Sizes
  • Selecting Custom Header and Background Images from Media Library
  • Better experience searching for and choosing a theme

WordPress 3.3.2 Released

WordPress 3.3.2 (a securityy update) ws releasd on 20th April 2012.

Three external libraries included in WordPress received security updates:

  •  Plupload (version 1.5.4), which WordPress uses for uploading media.
  • SWFUpload, which WordPress previously used for uploading media, and may still be in use by plugins.
  • SWFObject, which WordPress previously used to embed Flash content, and may still be in use by plugins and themes.

WordPress 3.3.2 also addresses:

  •  Limited privilege escalation where a site administrator could deactivate network-wide plugins when running a WordPress network under particular circumstances
  • Cross-site scripting vulnerability when making URLs clickable
  • Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in redirects after posting comments in older browsers, and when filtering URLs