Posts Tagged with “WordPress”

Organizing WordCamp Kuala Lumpur 2018

Last weekend, me and my friends from the Kuala Lumpur WordPress Meetup group put on WordCamp Kuala Lumpur 2018. The camp was held at the Royale Chulan Bukit Bintang, same venue as last year. 

Rindy Portfolio was Lead Organizer while Sam Suresh, Andy Saw and I were co-organizers. 

Read More »

Happy 15th birthday WordPress! #WP15

Happy Birthday WordPress!

The Kuala Lumpur WordPress Meetup Group (WPKL) threw a birthday party for WordPress’ 15th anniversary. Sam, Rindy and I put a lot of effort into planning and organizing the party, and I’m just so happy that it turned out great 😊

In the beginning, we bounced around ideas of making the party a paid event to ensure attendance. Our previous meetups always only had 40-50% attendance rate. But a fee would have been a turn off, so we needed a better plan…

I was definitely going to sponsor, and I posted our tentative plans to our Facebook group. I also asked if anyone else would be willing to sponsor. Amazingly, 3 other members immediately pledged to sponsor.

We were still short of the amount budgeted, but luckily I had an idea and reached out to some old contacts. Amanz Media agreed to chip in as well, and Mindblow agreed to donate their old review units to be given away as lucky draw prizes.

Finally, we decided to print some t-shirts for the event. Sales of the t-shirts would also go towards funding the party, and would qualify buyers for the lucky draw.

Now we had a party! Thanks to the generous sponsorships, we could make it a free event. And because we had some awesome prizes to give away, we could ensure a pretty good attendance. Thanks also to Exabytes who offered to host the party without hesitation at their awesome Easy Space.

Thank you sponsors ❤️

&
LiewCF
Chan MKong a.k.a. MK
Suraya Zainuddin
Suzaidee a.k.a. Dee

Read More »

WordCamp Kuala Lumpur 2017

WordCamp KL took place this past 25 November at Royale Chulan Bukit Bintang. It was a long 7 year wait for the official WordCamp to return to Malaysia, so I was eagerly anticipating the event.

Between the first WordCamp and this one, anyone could have organized another WordCamp. Unfortunately our local WordPress community appears to be very scattered and isn’t actively meeting up. I regret not taking a more active role too.

So you might expect that this WordCamp be a rather small and muted affair. In fact, this WordCamp was pretty big. 16 speakers, 14 talks and almost 200 delegates from 10 countries around the region. Hats off to the organizers, especially Sam Suresh for making it all happen in the first place.

We filled up the grand ballroom

Read More »

Convert a WordPress website to a static website with the Simply Static plugin

A static website is an ideal format to archive a WordPress site because it is a plain HTML copy of the website. It doesn’t require PHP and MySQL, so the website is hack-proof and very fast. Here are step-by-step instructions on how to convert a WordPress website into a plain HTML, static website with the Simply Static plugin.

Step 1: Prepare your website

Since the static website will not have PHP, it won’t be able to process dynamic actions like form submissions. Disable or replace comments and contact forms with hosted alternatives (e.g. Disqus and Wufoo respectively).

Infinite scroll and dynamic “Load more” post functionality will be unavailable too, so convert your pagination to plain next/previous or numeric links.

Update the content to be an evergreen version of the website. Maybe you want to remove the dates from your posts. Remember, the website is going to stay like this forever (or for a very long time at least).

Deactivate all unnecessary plugins. You won’t need security and utility plugins any more.

Finally, backup your website. You never know when you may want to revive it.

Read More »

I’m speaking at WordCamp KL

WordCamp returns to Malaysia with the 1st ever WordCamp Kuala Lumpur, happening this 25 November 2017 at the Royale Chulan Bukit Bintang. I’m proud to be a speaker at this inaugural event, 7 years after WordCamp Malaysia.

Unfortunately I don’t have much time to prepare an original talk, so I’ll be presenting something you may have heard before: Why your WordPress website is slow and how to fix it.

There are a whole lot more interesting topics scheduled including some from international speakers, so please make sure to get your tickets while they are still available. WordCamp KL is a great way to get involved in the larger WordPress community here in Malaysia and beyond.

I want to also appreciate the efforts of Sam Suresh of mu dot my who was the driving force that applied for and volunteered to be the lead organizer for this event. I think I’m not wrong to say that WordCamp Kuala Lumpur would not happen if not for Sam. Big thanks also to Nazrin, Rindy and Liew CF from the organizing committee who are putting in the hard work to bring it all together.

See you at WordCamp Kuala Lumpur 2017!

One of the most common questions I get at ClickWP is how to get the right image to appear in the Facebook link preview. The answer, surprisingly, is the Yoast SEO plugin. Here’s the plain English, Yoast SEO tutorial I wrote that covers the essentials for search and social media optimization.

Best related posts plugins to replace nRelate

On 1 December 2014, nRelate announced that it would be switching off its related posts recommendation service. Their Related Posts plugin and service for WordPress was an extremely popular plugin because of its ease of use and many options. So now that they are shutting their doors, many WordPress site owners are looking around for a replacement. Here is what I am recommending to my WordPress tech support customers at ClickWP.

IMPORTANT: Choosing the wrong related posts plugin can severely slow your site down. This is because calculating the related-ness of posts is a resource intensive process. For sites with more than 200 posts, I recommend off-loading the computational work to an external service.

The best plugin to replace nRelate is… it depends.

tl;dr Summary

If you use Jetpack and don’t care about customization, use the Jetpack Related Posts module.

If you don’t want to signup for other accounts & services, Contextual Related Posts is a good option for sites with less than 200 posts. Another to consider is Related Posts for WordPress which claims to be able to handle a lot more posts.

If you don’t mind or need an external service to compute your related posts, Shareaholic and AddThis are the best options. One thing to note is that AddThis settings are controlled outside of WordPress, so you must signup for an AddThis account to use this option.

If you’re a publisher who’s willing to pay to increase your audience engagement with your content, Contextly seems very promising.

Want more options? Read this post by Followistic: The 10 Best Related Posts Plugins for WordPress

My thoughts on each of the above options: Read More »

New ClickWP.com

logo-clickwp

I finally launched the new ClickWP website, after almost a year of planning, designing, and 4 weeks of furious coding. Along with it is an all new branding by Reese Spykerman as well.

Read More »

Useful SQL queries for migrating a WordPress database

First, if at all possible, use the WP Migrate DB Pro or BackupBuddy plugins to migrate your WordPress database. The money spent will save yourself a lot of frustration and hair pulling, and hours if not days of cleanup and massaging of the WordPress database.

But if that’s not possible, welcome to my world for the past week. I’ve had to migrate a WordPress database without my favorite migration tools. After scouring the web for tutorials and tips, I’m compiling them here for easy reference.

Gather Your Tools

First thing you need is to get your hands on the following:

1. Database name, prefix, user and password.

You can find these defined in the wp-config.php file. In the following examples, be sure to swap out the database name wordpress and prefix wp_ with the correct values from your situation.

2. Access to phpMyAdmin so that you can interact with the database.

We’ll be running the commands below through the SQL tab in phpMyAdmin.

Running SQL queries on your database with phpMyAdmin

You could also connect directly to MySQL through the terminal / shell prompt. Good luck if you don’t have phpMyAdmin.

3. Backup, Backup, Backup

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Export your untouched database and lock it up. If all goes wrong, restore to this backup.

Change the Site URL

The first thing you would want to do is to change the site URL. You can browse the wp_options table for the siteurl and home options values directly, or you can use this SQL command:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://www.oldsiteurl.com', 'http://www.newsiteurl.com') WHERE option_name = 'siteurl' OR option_name = 'home';

Next, you’ll want to replace all instances of oldsiteurl.com in your post’s contents and GUID.

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content, '//www.oldsiteurl.com', '//www.newsiteurl.com');
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE (guid, '//www.oldsiteurl.com', '//www.newsiteurl.com');

Read More »

Sweden With Love

Happy day! We are finally live! A brand new online experience. #swedenwithlove. Beautifully designed by @thedarlingtree. xo

Sweden With Love was a ClickWP project for Ulrica Wihlborg. It features a custom WordPress theme built on the Genesis Framework. Jo Klima from The Darling Tree created the design while I was responsible for coding the theme and site implementation.

Read More »