WordPress

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

WordPress Comment Ratings Plugins Roundup: Zaki vs Ulike vs Comment Vote vs Voter vs Thumbs Rating vs GD Rating System

We are adding comment ratings to our FV Thoughtful Comments at the request of one of our clients. He likes Disqus features but doesn't like entrusting his user generated content to a third party service and doesn't like Disqus page load slowdowns. A very smart guy and successful publisher.

We've experimented with Epoch and wpDisquz and have even donated to the latter. Unfortunately wpDisquz is not fast enough either on a really busy site (measured in both page views and frequency of comments).

Keep reading WordPress Comment Ratings Plugins Roundup: Zaki vs Ulike vs Comment Vote vs Voter vs Thumbs Rating vs GD Rating System

Multilingual Video Subtitles

Multilingual subtitles are a great new feature of FV Flowplayer. This feature has been added in the Flowplayer 6 core, so finally we got around to create user interface for it.

Following video features a button in bottom right corner which allows you to pick the subtitles language.

Keep reading Multilingual Video Subtitles

How WordPress developers treat publishers like suckers and marks or why I’m now ashamed to be a WordPress developer

In a conversation at WP Tavern (a Matt Mullenweg official property) about the problems with maintaining recent WordPress versions (say anything post 3.7), a very lively debate took place about whether major new features in WordPress should come enabled by default with no option to disable them.

The feature in questions was oEmbed this time but it could just as easily have been emojis or XML-RPC (which recently took thousands of WordPress websites down in a major hack exploit).

Keep reading How WordPress developers treat publishers like suckers and marks or why I'm now ashamed to be a WordPress developer

Future of WordPress

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

Site specific VPN for OS X: sample case Pandora

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

Realtime WordPress Comments: Disqus vs wpDisquz vs Epoch

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:

pageloads are very slow
you lose the value of user generated content in most cases
you are giving away quite a bit of your visitors' privacy (important for political sites)

Keep reading Realtime WordPress Comments: Disqus vs wpDisquz vs Epoch

Let users loop your videos as they like

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:

User AB loop

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

YouTube Playlist Embedding

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

Supercharge your video embeds with FV Flowplayer

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

FV Flowplayer 6 Released!

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:

HLS support in the Flash engine - making the HLS playback possible in basically every browser.
Subtitles button with multilingual support - we need to do more testing on this one
Engine switching in playlists - making it possible to mix the video formats.
Better skin and other improvements
Faster than version 5
Improved YouTube playback

Keep reading FV Flowplayer 6 Released!

WordPress Copycat Coders: WPMUdev and iThemes review

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

Why the FV Player upgrade to Flowplayer 6 core is still only in beta

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

How to solve the comment notifications spam issues

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

FV Simpler SEO Improvements

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:

SEO Improvements