Making the web work for you
There's a wonderfully open conversation going on about the future of WordPress over at WPtavern.
It's amazing but Rainmaker can charge $1500/year for usable and secure WordPress. - and the fee just for peace of mind seems reasonable. That's how far off track core developers have gone.
Keep reading Future of WordPress
If you've ever visited foliovision.com, you probably know I live in beautiful Bratislava/Hainburg region. Those who live here enjoy the Danube, great classical music, the lower Carpathians and are surrounded some of the most beautiful women in the world. I.e. it's a wonderful place to live. What we don't have since the sad demise of Last.fm's paid radio service, access to any high quality music discovery service. The last one standing is Pandora, which is US only.
Keep reading Site specific VPN for OS X: sample case Pandora
Update November 6th, 2015: wpDiscuz 3 has been released, check our review below.
WordPress's built-in commenting system is pretty weak. Comments have been left partly crippled as Automattic used to have a horse in the third party commenting race with its own Intense Debate technology. Our creative director doesn't like third party scripts for a few reasons:
Keep reading Realtime WordPress Comments: Disqus vs wpDisquz vs Epoch
Some of the FV Flowplayer users play guitar and teach these skills in online classes. They picked our plugin as an effective solution for their membership websites and quickly came up with an idea:
With this unique feature your users will be able to pick the part of the video which they like and loop it over and over again - perfect for practicing guitar "riffs" or "licks" or basically any tutorial website.
Keep reading Let users loop your videos as they like
New version of FV Player Pro (0.5.4; it's the Pro extension for our FV Flowplayer licensed users) gives you ability to embed playlists created on YouTube:
Keep reading YouTube Playlist Embedding
Licensed users of FV Flowplayer who benefit from powerful Vimeo and YouTube embedding often ask us to convert their old video embeds into the [fvplayer] shortcodes to be able to use the same player for all their old videos and also all of our features.
That's why the new version of FV Player Pro (0.5.2; it's the Pro extension for our licensed users) gives you just the tools to do this.
Keep reading Supercharge your video embeds with FV Flowplayer
After the initial difficulties with Flowplayer 6 the new FV WordPress Flowplayer is released!
FV Flowplayer 6 it out and it has some great new features:
Keep reading FV Flowplayer 6 Released!
We use a lot of software at Foliovision. What we like are stable reliable solutions which deliver what they promise. What we hate is hypeware which overpromises and underdelivers. Often hypeware is delivered by companies which look for successful niches, clone the existing software (easy enough thanks to Matt Mullenweg's and Automattic's insistence that all code must be GPL). Cloned code is generally vastly inferior to the original (most often coded by a passionate coder with a deep understanding of the problem he is trying to solve).
What those copycat coders then do is market the heck out of "their" new product, often making sales where better code is available free or outselling a less expensive and better solution.
Keep reading WordPress Copycat Coders: WPMUdev and iThemes review
The issues in Flowplayer 6.0.1 were fixed, thanks to Flowplayer team for quick fixes!
The new version of FV Flowplayer 6 is at WordPress.org and the pro version is released as well.
FV Player is the most feature rich and easiest to use WordPress video player. The core video engine we use is the excellent Flowplayer. As you may know, Flowplayer.org recently released a full version upgrade - Flowplayer 6. It has some great new features:
Keep reading Why the FV Player upgrade to Flowplayer 6 core is still only in beta
If your website has a lot of comments and uses a plugin like Subscribe to Comments Reloaded to let users subscribe to new comment notifications, you probably had an issue with your comment notification being marked as spam.
One great way of preventing that is to use SendGrid. With SendGrid, you never deliver unsolicited email again. As soon as the email fails to get delivered or is marked as spam, that email address won't see another email from you again.
Keep reading How to solve the comment notifications spam issues
This new version took us a while to release. It brings a lot of SEO and functional improvements. Some of the changes affect your site structure, so our upgrade note makes sure you are informed:
WordPress attachment URLs are redirected to file URLs - when cleaning up client websites, we often find a lof of URLs like
Keep reading FV Simpler SEO Improvements
FV Player Pro is the FV WordPress Flowplayer extension which is available to all of our licensed users. We just released version 0.3 which brings several improvements:
Keep reading Vimeo Player with Channel Support
Update for WordPress 4.2.2: The issue is still real. The fix described below still works. The new db_version is 31535.
When you upgrade to WordPress 4.2, it will automatically convert the tables to utf8mb4, if the following conditions are met:
Keep reading WordPress 4.2 Database Update Difficulties
Here is the deal with the WordPress cache plugins: even if you install such plugin, there is a fair amount of users who load your sites without speed benefits of cache. No matter if you use Hyper Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache.
WP cache plugins simply skip the cache altogether if the visitor left a comment on the website with his browser by checking for the comment cookie. That's quite ineffective if you have 10K posts on your blog and the user only left a comment on a single article. Now imagine that your blog has a lot of discussion where dozens of users actively participate - you will see your server load going up.
Keep reading Improve your WordPress speed by Caching Comments
Latest version of FV Flowplayer (2.3.13) brings detailed video stats into your Google Analytics account.
Basic Flowplayer version tracks number of seconds played for each users, which then gives you an average value in Google Analytics Events list. However this takes place when you stop the video or leave the page and it's not 100% reliable.
That's why FV Flowplayer now tracks the following events:
Keep reading Detailed Video Stats in Google Analytics
We've just done some testing on my brand new Blackberry Passport (a great QWERTY keyboard device but more on that in another review with our FV Player Pro.
Here's the device user agent is:
Mozilla/5.0 (BB10; Kbd) AppleWebKit/537.35+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.3.1.2576 Mobile Safari/537.35+
Here are some tests using my Blackberry Passport against FV Player, Flowplayer, JWplayer and video.js . Keep in mind that only the Blackberry Passport, Q10, Q5, Z10, Z30, Blackberry Classic, Blackberry Leap and P'9982 and P'9983 run Blackberry 10 OS. Any other Blackberries or RIM devices are running OS 7 or earlier and are not really capable of playing video at all.
Keep reading WordPress video player support for Blackberry 10 OS
We have been using Subscribe to Comments for years. Then the plugin became obsolete and we had to switch to Subscribe to Comments Reloaded (StCR). It's a nice plugin, but we often found that we had to put in our own fixes to be able to use it for our clients. Let's sum it up:
Advantages:
Keep reading Save your AdSense Account: how to stop Personally Identifiable Information warnings
Automattic and Akismet have a big drive on now to force people to upgrade their existing Akismet subscription. We've been paying Akismet for four years now and sometime even we are now seeing warnings like this one on our own websites. Our clients are seeing them as well (even when using their own key).
Of course, we don't mind paying Automattic/Akismet something but we don't really want to pay more than we are now.
Keep reading Akismet Error Code 10003: How to avoid forced upgrade
We recently found our users were having difficulty resetting their passwords. As many of our users are paid owners of our WordPress video player FV Player Pro, it is essential they are able to log in to manage their licenses. Log in issues were a very big deal for us and we had to stop the presses to get it working right. Much thanks to Klaus for helping us track down the bug.
Keep reading How to run WP Multisite 4.1 in a subdirectory
We love Satollo and loved Hyper Cache (we're longtime paid users and supporters of his Newsletter technology as well). Strangely, sometimes good developers do bad work. The latest version of Hyper Cache (version 3) is a prime example of what can go wrong with rewrite upgrades.
Since we were struggling with Hyper Cache we decided to take a look at WP Rocket who is the hot new caching kid on the WordPress block. Sadly WP Rocket is not a good replacement for us for now. We test and compare Hyper Cache and WP Rocket below.
Keep reading WordPress Caching Drag Race: Hyper Cache vs. WP Rocket
