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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:

  1. pageloads are very slow
  2. you lose the value of user generated content in most cases
  3. 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

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

  1. 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

Vimeo Player with Channel Support

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:

  1. Vimeo loading improvements - big help for mobile users or long playlist
  2. Vimeo channel support - you can now embed your entire Vimeo channel as a big playlist
  3. Custom video ads - added display of remaining ad time and a skip button
  4. Beta: custom AB loop - just add ab="true" to your shortcode - more on this later
  5. Other smaller fixes

    6. Keep reading Vimeo Player with Channel Support

WordPress 4.2 Database Update Difficulties

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:

  • You’re currently using the utf8 character set.
  • Your MySQL server is version 5.5.3 or higher (including all 10.x versions of MariaDB).
  • Your MySQL client libraries are version 5.5.3 or higher. If you’re using mysqlnd, 5.0.9 or higher.

    • Keep reading WordPress 4.2 Database Update Difficulties

Improve your WordPress speed by Caching Comments

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

Detailed Video Stats in Google Analytics

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

WordPress video player support for Blackberry 10 OS

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

Save your AdSense Account: how to stop Personally Identifiable Information warnings

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:

Akismet Error Code 10003: How to avoid forced upgrade

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).


Akismet usage warning

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

How to run WP Multisite 4.1 in a subdirectory

History of article updates

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

WordPress Caching Drag Race: Hyper Cache vs. WP Rocket

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

How to make WordPress 4.0 play nice with original bbPress

We still use bbPress version 1 on some of our websites. It's powerful and integrates well with WordPress. Alas the recently released upgrade to WordPress 4.0 breaks the integration and here are the steps for all of you who need to resolve this issue right now. In case you are wondering, for simple customisable forums, bbPress 1 absolutely rocks.

If you wonder why we still use bbPress version 1:

Keep reading How to make WordPress 4.0 play nice with original bbPress

Why WPEngine caching doesn’t work with eCommerce sites

... and what can be done about it

Many successful WordPress site owners have moved their sites over to WPEngine for their high performance and high speed even under very heavy traffic.

WP Engine is able to provide this kind of speed thanks to their "hand-built a WordPress-specific EverCache system" and "a fully-managed CDN service" (for more info see WP Engine's articles on speed and infrastructure).

Keep reading Why WPEngine caching doesn't work with eCommerce sites

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