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Case Study: How FV Player keeps CreativeScreenWriting.com’s videos safe from pirates

Foliovision had the opportunity to work with the best magazine for screenwriters, CreativeScreenWriting.com. They are using FV Player in their video store section to stream their video tutorials to members.

Screen writing is a form of art. It's not easy transforming stories into a video format. How many times have you watched a movie and you liked the idea behind it, but the writing was so bad you had to give it up? It proves the fact that good screenwriters are as important as good actors and directors.

CreativeScreenWriting.com went live in 1994. During the 90s, it was a printed magazine, publishing about 25,000 copies six times a year. Now it's only available online, catering for screenwriters and anyone interested in screenwriting. We talked to John Davis, the magazine's editor, about the site:

In both Hollywood and the industry that covers it, there has always been a focus on directors and actors. But screenwriters are every bit as important!

Keep reading Case Study: How FV Player keeps CreativeScreenWriting.com's videos safe from pirates

WordPress 2017 Security Roundup: Shield, Sucuri, iThemes, WordFence

Paul Goodchild over in Belfast is an interesting chap who's done some great work in security and in WordPress site management. We're ManageWP customers and huge ManageWP fans (great new interface), due to the great development and enthusiastic support team. But if we were to look for an alternative, iControlWP would be at the top of the list. iControlWP's existence probably pushed ManageWP to accelerate their improvements and simplify their pricing. We did consider switching both before the release of Orion (older ManageWP wasn't nearly as pretty or reliable as the current Orion version: if you haven't had a look for awhile, you should give ManageWP another chance)  and then briefly again at the time of the ManageWP GoDaddy acquisition as our clients had nothing but grief with GoDaddy hosting over the years. Fortunately ManageWP seems to run just as well as it did before the acquisition and the same people are in place. We in fact upgraded to the top package with built-in SEO and site performance reports for clients. 

Keep reading WordPress 2017 Security Roundup: Shield, Sucuri, iThemes, WordFence

How to use WordPress with CDN

Some of the FV Player users recently experienced issues with the last version - their videos were not playing. The reason was that there were bigger changes in our code and their websites used poorly configured CDN.

While CDN speeds up your site you must understand how it works to avoid issues and too much optimization which you don't understand. Just make sure that you don't remove query string versions - read on!

Keep reading How to use WordPress with CDN

Foliovision at WCEU Paris 2017

We had a great time at WCEU 2017 in Paris last week! We learned so much from the people we've met, especially at the Contribution Day which was a big success, and then attended great talks by WordPress experts and just enjoyed the amazing atmosphere at Les Docks Paris. If you were one of the volunteers, thank you for a job well done!

Keep reading Foliovision at WCEU Paris 2017

Yoast SEO vs FV Simpler SEO review or How Joost de Valk undermines WordPress.org

One of our clients is deciding on whether he should renew Yoast SEO or move to our free FV Simpler SEO. Tommie asked me some good questions about the differences.

Our SEO workflow in Yoast is mostly to help writers. It tells gives Harriet and other writers suggestions and warnings on optimising the permalink, meta description, heading, etc. based on the keyword target/s. Is that what yours does too?

Keep reading Yoast SEO vs FV Simpler SEO review or How Joost de Valk undermines WordPress.org

Akismet Alternatives: CleanTalk

We hate spam at Foliovision. Enough to have written a very effective anti-spam plugin ourselves. Our FV Antispam is on use on more than 4000 websites right now. If you like or use Akismet, FV Antispam works great. It can radically reduce your Akismet costs by cutting down on the amount of requests you send to Automattic, making an agency license go much farther (monthly limit, 100K checks).

FV Antispam also can speed up your site and lower server load as it processes machine spam locally. We also make sure that machine spam goes directly to trash so you don't have to waste time checking it manually (too many comments in a spam folder makes it impossible to evaluate any of them properly).

Keep reading Akismet Alternatives: CleanTalk

LearnDash + FV Player + Vimeo – A Great Video Learning System Combination

The legendary storyteller Richard Stone of StoryWork approached us recently to help him integrate LearnDash LMS (Learning Management System) with FV Player Pro and Vimeo for his LivingStoriesTraining.net project focused on the healing journey. Many modern themes particularly from Envato come with a bundled page builder which doesn't respect core WordPress editor features. Often those themes even try to force their own buggy or not particularly capable video player on the user.

Keep reading LearnDash + FV Player + Vimeo - A Great Video Learning System Combination

Comment Caching Models to improve WordPress Core Performance

Many of our clients don't like the paged comments feature of WordPress as they like to have all the keywords occurring in the comments present on our article page and not spread across multiple pages. Keeping thousands of fresh comments on the page with every possible combination of keywords helps them rank at the top of Google for very competitive product categories.

Our front-end comment moderation plugin Thoughtful Comments includes comment caching feature, this article describes why that is important even if you are caching your site HTML: Improve your WordPress speed by Caching Comments.

However the downside is that it doesn't work for administrators and that the cache has to be purged and rebuilt when comments are added or removed. It's also usually slows down logged in users as we move more and more of our clients over to a membership or at least logged in user model.

Keep reading Comment Caching Models to improve WordPress Core Performance

Moderating a busy WordPress Site with Thoughtful Comments

It's been a commenting kind of last seven days since Disqus started adding ads or charging what are extortionate rates for continued ad-free existence ($99/month for sites with from 50K to 250K visitors!). First some lively conversation over at WP Tavern about Disqus, wpDisquz (also very expensive at $29/extension), Postmatic, Replyable and our own Thoughtful Comments. Thoughtful Comments at free with Replyable at $3/month turned out to offer the best value in the advanced commenting sweepstakes to replace Disqus.

And now today I had one of our long time clients write in with a new issue which they hadn't faced before: how to deal with overly prolific commenters who were spoiling the intelligent conversations about law on their website. 

Hello! I've been digging into the documentation for "Thoughtful Comments". Do you know if it's possible in the plugin settings or in some other settings to limit the number of comments a single person (commenter) can leave either a) on a given post or b) in a given day?

We have a slight troll problem and we're wondering if something like that could address it. Or, maybe there's something else we could do short of manually flagging and banning individuals? Appreciate it!

Right now their website is open to any commenters, you don't need an account. This is the most difficult situation as in this case you have no real history with your commenters. Anyone can write in an email address, anyone can spoof another commenter's identity if s/he knows or can guess the email address of the other person. Guessing an email is not at all difficult if people are including a URL with their identity and a name.

Keep reading Moderating a busy WordPress Site with Thoughtful Comments

Haut Vol

Louis de Caunes is a director and a photographer from Paris. Being a son of Antoine de Caunes, famous French television presenter, and actor, he grew up on film sets and always wanted to make movies.

Keep reading Haut Vol

Irocku.com & Chuck Leavell are changing the way music is taught

Give Twinkle, twinkle little star a rest. Learn Honky Tonk women instead.

If you want to learn how to do something, you want to learn from the best. And who better to learn how to play the piano from than the man himself - Chuck Leavell. Chuck doesn't need an introduction, but it would be a sin not to mention his rich music career.

There aren't that many musicians out there who can say that they've played with The Rolling Stones, The Allman Brothers, Eric Clapton, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, Train, John Mayer. And now you can have that musician teach you how to play rock piano.

Chuck Leavell joined the legendary Allman Brothers Band in the early 70's. In 1973 they released the ultimate classic Brothers and Sisters album featuring what's one of the rock instrumental masterpieces - Jessica. The solo on Jessica was what launched Chuck Leavell into rock'n'roll stardom.

Keep reading Irocku.com & Chuck Leavell are changing the way music is taught

What GitHub brings to open source development

Recently we struggled with a difficult issue in WordPress Multisite. We take care of a network of sports weblogs. Each is for a different sport and not all the domain names sound the same.

We have a master install at say worldrecords.org (sample name, not our client's site). Logins only are SSL and all take place at worldrecords.org. An account at any site gets you access to all the sites. Hence login and password takes place at the master domain. Most visitors are not even aware of the domain switch during login.

When people would lose their password, the password reset email would not come from skatinggolds.org or lugegolds.org but from worldrecords.org. Many people would not recognise the domain and would delete the email without clicking and finishing the password reset. Worse yet the email might be considered spam by spam filters.

Keep reading What GitHub brings to open source development

Building a better WordPress Post Editor

There's been a lot of talk and writing about radically revamping WordPress edit experience since the New Year. It's great that the conversation has been started and many strong ideas have been shared. Matt Mullenweg kicked off the discussion on 4 January with a Coleridgian description of a new editor. Like Kubla Khan's "stately pleasure-dome", the new editor should be a "miracle of rare device".

The editor will endeavour to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.

Any "post building experience" which aspires to make "writing rich posts effortless" has my full attention. What should this experience look like in practical terms?

Keep reading Building a better WordPress Post Editor

Improvements in WordPress 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7 for Business Publishers

At Foliovision, we like to stay behind a few versions on WordPress. This means our clients enjoy stable custom code for their complex membership and business sites. What it means in real terms is that a site usually stays on the major WordPress iteration on which it was released.

Staying on security updates enormously decreases a publisher's WordPress maintenance burden. We're really grateful to the core WordPress crew for continuing to post security updates for every WordPress release from 3.7 on. On the other hand, it's extremely rude of WordPress to constantly push small publishers to do major version updates without letting the publisher know security updates are available (1). Our BusinessPress plugin solves update anxiety. We lighten up the update notifications, give you more information about what version you are running and encourage you to install the latest security update. Most importantly, BusinessPress prevents clients from pushing through a major update accidentally and breaking their site. On the Christmas holidays for instance.

Keep reading Improvements in WordPress 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7 for Business Publishers

HHVM vs PHP7 for WordPress: One Year Later

A year ago PHP7 launched. Those already using HHVM ran a bunch of benchmarks and came away with the conclusion that HHVM is much faster and is indeed the secret sauce of their superior pricey hosting. While scouting for hosting for a very high traffic site, I heard this from WPE, from Pressidium and from Kinsta. Out of the three principal advocates of HHVM, Kinsta's offer was the only one which made any kind of financial sense.

Since then, we've been using HHVM for that project with no end of grief in surprise collapses in the middle of the night or the middle of the weekend. Are the instability and incompatibilities worth it? For a smaller web publisher, certainly not. For a middle-sized web publisher (think top 2000 website in the US), probably not. For a very large sized web publisher (think Facebook or another top 100 website in the US) quite possibly. Here's why.

Keep reading HHVM vs PHP7 for WordPress: One Year Later

Comparing Hootsuite and Buffer Free Versions

In the past few months I have been playing around with a couple of social media tools to get better the results of my promotion and to improve the way I work. These tools are non-other than Hootsuite and Buffer. Before deciding on the winner, I tried free versions of both apps. Comparing them in their raw, naked state turned out like this.

Keep reading Comparing Hootsuite and Buffer Free Versions

VAST Ads Now With ‘Silent Start’ Option

Our FV Player VAST add-on just got a small but useful update called Silent Start. This option allows you to have the ads served with your videos start muted by default and let the user to turn on the sound if he wants.

The main benefit is that not every user appreciates to be forced into listening to advertisements, but if one gets his attention enough, he can turn the sound on. The feature works great with the Autoplay function - the video will play automatically after page load and ad with it (if it's set to pre-roll), plus it's silent, so it won't bother anyone.

Keep reading VAST Ads Now With 'Silent Start' Option

How to convert bbPress 1 forums to bbPress 2

Moving from bbPress 1 to 2 is a pain in the neck. It's really like migrating from one forum software product to another. It's not an evolution but a revolution. In use, bbPress 2 is not much better than bbPress 1 but since John James Jacoby pushed version two out the door in 2011, it's long since time to migrate. The issue with bbPress 1 is not with the software itself (still simple and scaleable) but with plugins.

John James Jacoby forced all the bbPress v1 plugins underground (info and plugin repository were moved over to v2). Unlike almost anything else new in the WordPress world, bbPress 2 is neither crippleware (useless free version with pro version) or serviceware, so we are grateful for bbPress.

Keep reading How to convert bbPress 1 forums to bbPress 2

Playlist Styles

Our free video player for WordPress FV Flowplayer featured only a single playlist style for a long time. We made the required code improvements to open the huge potential of custom playlist styles.

Default playlist style

By default you get playlist thumbnails below the player.

Keep reading Playlist Styles

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