Category: wordpress

Latest WordPress Plugins For Stronger Your Project

We can’t deny that WordPress is the biggest open source content management system. It empowers a number of newly developed websites. Today there are billions of users that take their business online with the help of WordPress websites. To keep growing with this pace, WordPress keep launching new techniques that the developers need to learn. One of the launches of WordPress Plugins that plays an important role in customization.

Why WordPress Plugins need attention?

From the quick upload of a website to boosting the server’s performance and securing the website to tracking the performance, Plugins help to optimize your website. Some plugins can help you save time in complex coding while some help you to back up your site now and then to avoid any malfunctioning.

Plugins are as important as an internet connection to a website. Recently, WordPress has launched the following plugins that can help you to create the epitome of a website:

1) OpenId Connect Single Sign On(SSO) By Gluu: This Plugin helps you to authenticate users against any OpenID connect. Once the user has login to the server, the module starts a chain that visits the Single Sign On script of each website. The plugin then sends notification via cookie to the parent site so that if the user visit the site again, the cookie gets notified by the real site and user shall be automatically logged out.

2) MMWD Custom Login Error: It is mainly for the hackers. Whenever a user logs in with the incorrect information, the error doesn’t display whether it was password or the user-name that went wrong.

3) Taxonomy Admin Filter: It really gets hectic to scroll down the tags and look for the desired information. With Taxonomy filter, it gets easier to select, choose and search the tags.

4) WP Suite: Worker: With this plugin, one can check the events and actions on the website with an ease, increases security of the website and create a backup. Also, it helps in Instancing, Automation, Updation, Benchmarking and logging the events.

5) User Menus by Jungle Plugins: This particular plugin shows the username, first name, last name, and email in a menu item to enable you to adress your customers with pleasantries.

6) MWP Viral Sign-up: This plugin lets you to create an easy sign-up process with limited spaces filled by the customers. It enables the viral sharing through referrals and with a promise of an incentive.

7) Stomp: This plugin prevents the gap between bottom of a visible page and the footer element. It fixes the footer to the base of page.

8) Login Watchdog: It records every time a user fails to attempt the login and after severalz of attempts, Login Watchdog blocks the IP address of that particular system.

9) Chat2: Allows you to add a chat option in your website to interact with customers on real-time basis.

10) Darwin Backup: Finally a plugin that relieves you from the tensions of data loss or any severity. You no more need the special team of developers to fix the loss. Just click on Darwin Backup and the information is restored. Currently, it’s unsupportive of timely backups but still extremely useful.

11) Twitter feeds and Pins, Insta, Facebook Widget: These widgets lets you add the fun of social networking on your website. Every time you post anything about your product or blog, it gets notified by your followers and you will also receive notifications you are following to.

12) Windsor Strava: Helps to showcase information like your profile, followers, statistics and many more with a simple shortcode.

13) SerwerSMS.pl: This plugin allows you to store the contact number in its database so that you can send information via messages when needed.

How To Install These Plugins!

Adding these plugins into your website is like plain sailing. Some of the plugins are already stored with WordPress. You just need to go to the dashboard, click on plugin, search for the plugin you need and install it. You are ready with your new plugin. Other few plugins you need to upload in your plugin directory and then install it.

Every day, or sometimes in every hour, one or more than one plugin is developed. Just keep a track if you are a WordPress user and need your website to out-compete the rest of website in your niche!

Author Bio :

Sophia is a renowned WordPress developer by profession and likes to share here experience through blogging. She can be a great resource for those who are looking to WordPress Developer for hire in USA , then you can get in touch with her.

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5 PHP MUST WANTED CODE SNIPPETS FOR EVERY WEB DEVELOPERS NEED

Every web developer should keep useful code snippets in a personal library for future reference.In this post we will show you some useful code snippets of PHP which will help you for your future projects.

TOP 5 PHP MUST WANTED CODE SNIPPETS FOR EVERY WEB DEVELOPERS NEED

Show Number Of People Who Liked Your Facebook Page

function fb_fan_count($facebook_name)
{
    $data = json_decode(file_get_contents("https://graph.facebook.com/".$facebook_name));
    $likes = $data->likes;
    return $likes;
}

SyntaX

<?php
$page = "smartwebcare";
$count = fb_fan_count($page);
echo $count;
?>

Sending an Email With MANDRILL

For the below function you would have to put a file “Mandrill.php” in the same folder as the PHP file you would be using to send emails.

function send_email($to_email,$subject,$message1)
{
	require_once 'Mandrill.php';
$apikey = 'XXXXXXXXXX'; //specify your api key here
$mandrill = new Mandrill($apikey);
 
$message = new stdClass();
$message->html = $message1;
$message->text = $message1;
$message->subject = $subject;
$message->from_email = "blog@smartwebcare.com";//Sender Email
$message->from_name  = "Smart Web Care";//Sender Name
$message->to = array(array("email" => $to_email));
$message->track_opens = true;
 
$response = $mandrill->messages->send($message);
}

In the above code you would have to specify your own api key that you get from your Mandrill account.

Syntax

<?php
$to = "abc@smartwebcare.com";
$subject = "This is a test email";
$message = "Hello World!";
send_email($to,$subject,$message);
?>

Zipping a File

function create_zip($files = array(),$destination = '',$overwrite = false) {  
    //if the zip file already exists and overwrite is false, return false  
    if(file_exists($destination) && !$overwrite) { return false; }  
    //vars  
    $valid_files = array();  
    //if files were passed in...  
    if(is_array($files)) {  
        //cycle through each file  
        foreach($files as $file) {  
            //make sure the file exists  
            if(file_exists($file)) {  
                $valid_files[] = $file;  
            }  
        }  
    }  
    //if we have good files...  
    if(count($valid_files)) {  
        //create the archive  
        $zip = new ZipArchive();  
        if($zip->open($destination,$overwrite ? ZIPARCHIVE::OVERWRITE : ZIPARCHIVE::CREATE) !== true) {  
            return false;  
        }  
        //add the files  
        foreach($valid_files as $file) {  
            $zip->addFile($file,$file);  
        }  
        //debug  
        //echo 'The zip archive contains ',$zip->numFiles,' files with a status of ',$zip->status;  
          
        //close the zip -- done!  
        $zip->close();  
          
        //check to make sure the file exists  
        return file_exists($destination);  
    }  
    else  
    {  
        return false;  
    }  
}

Syntax

<?php
$files=array('file1.jpg', 'file2.jpg', 'file3.gif');  
create_zip($files, 'myzipfile.zip', true); 
?>

PHP Snippets For Directory Listing

Using the below PHP code snippet you would be able to list all files and folders in a directory.

function list_files($dir)
{
    if(is_dir($dir))
    {
        if($handle = opendir($dir))
        {
            while(($file = readdir($handle)) !== false)
            {
                if($file != "." &amp;&amp; $file != ".." &amp;&amp; $file != "Thumbs.db"/*pesky windows, images..*/)
                {
                    echo '<a target="_blank" href="'.$dir.$file.'">'.$file.'</a><br>'."n";
                }
            }
            closedir($handle);
        }
    }
}

Syntax

<?php
    list_files("images/"); //This will list all files of images folder
?>

Creating  A CSV File From PHP ARRAY

function generateCsv($data, $delimiter = ',', $enclosure = '"') {
   $handle = fopen('php://temp', 'r+');
   foreach ($data as $line) {
		   fputcsv($handle, $line, $delimiter, $enclosure);
   }
   rewind($handle);
   while (!feof($handle)) {
		   $contents .= fread($handle, 8192);
   }
   fclose($handle);
   return $contents;
}

Syntax

<?php
$data[0] = "apple";
$data[1] = "oranges";
generateCsv($data, $delimiter = ',', $enclosure = '"');
?>

 

Optimize WordPress – Seven Ways to Optimization your WordPress Site for Speedup

Having a website is no laughing matter. It requires knowledge, hard work, efforts and of course, patience. In order to convert your website into an online business, you need to improve your website’s visitor count. However, the ever-growing competition in the market makes it quite hard for websites to keep up with the latest trend of the web industry and soon fall out.

There are various things that play an important role in optimizing your website for search engine and thus, drive traffic to your website including on-page SEO, easy user navigation, SEO-friendly URLs and much more. However, speed is one of the most important things that determine the success of your online business. As a matter of fact, a web user tends to navigate away from a website if it does not load in less than 5 seconds.

Being a webmaster, you usually install many plugins and widgets in order to make your WordPress website stand out. Although you often forget that these plugins are quite heavy and take a lot of space on your hosting server while making your website slow.

Website speed is a crucial point and thus, should be well taken care of.

Therefore, we have compiled a list of 7 most effective ways to optimize your WordPress website for speed.

WordPress Optimization

1. Use a caching plugin

There is no denying in the fact that WordPress plugins are extremely beneficial. However, the best plugins by far are certainly caching ones. These plugins automatically improve the speed of your website by 90%.

One of the best caching plugins is W3 Total Cache. Simply install and activate and you are all set to run a fast loading website.

2. Optimize images

As a matter of fact, images are quite heavy and they apparently make your website slow. In addition, using more than 3 images per blog posts makes your website heavy to load. Therefore, it becomes all the more important to compress your images to improve the speed of the site. However, compressing each image is definitely one heck of a job, and significantly time-consuming. Fortunately, WordPress offers one free plugin to optimize your images automatically – WP-SmushIt.

3. Optimize your homepage

The homepage is one of the most important pages of any website. This is the first page that a user usually sees. In fact, for a majority of websites, the homepage is usually their landing page which drives a large number of visitors to the website. Therefore, it is important to put all of your efforts in improvising the speed of your homepage. There are a lot of things that you can do to optimize the speed of your homepage including reducing the number of posts on the homepage, showing excerpts instead of full posts, removing unnecessary widgets and uninstalling inactive plugins. The bottom line is that you should keep your homepage as focused and clean as possible.

4. Adding Expires header

The whole concept of expires header is introduced to reduce server load and consequently increase page load time. These headers notify the browser whether they must ask a specific file from the server or they should just load it from the browser’s cache. This also reduces the number of HTTP requests from the server.

The best way to make it work is to copy and paste this below mentioned lines of code in your .htaccess file.

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000

ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

The above code sets the expires header for a month which can be changed according to your preferences and needs.

5. Turn off Trackbacks and Pingbacks:

Trackbacks and pingbacks are a great way to know that a blog or website is linked to your site. Whenever a blog mentions you, it automatically indicates you about the activity with the help of trackback. Since it informs about every backlink related activity, it saves the data on the server which increases a lot of work for your website. Turning trackbacks and pingbacks off reduces the workload and thus improving the load speed of the site.

Note: Turning this off does not devastate your back-linking. It only reduces your website’s workload.

6. Minify JavaScript, CSS and HTML

Minification is basically a process of removing all the unnecessary characters and spaces from the code without making any modification in the functionality. Though tabs and whitespaces usually make code understandable and readable for servers and humans, it increases the page load time. Therefore, minifying your JavaScript, CSS and HTML files can improve the load time significantly. Instead of scanning your files one by one, you can make use of various useful plugins such as W3 Total Cache and WP Minify to make the process of minification easier and convenient.

7. Make use of CloudFlare

CloudFlare is one of the best and free ways to improve the security of your website. It is basically a content delivery network that sits between your hosting server and visitors. You can not only protect your site from unwanted visitors but also improves the speed of your site. The combination of CloudFlare and W3 Total Cache works wonders to a website performance.

Wrapping up:

These are some of the tested and proven ways to effectively speed up your website. If you have any other way to improve WordPress website’s speed, don’t forget to share with us.

Top 8 Help Desk Software 2016

Help Desk Software is very essential for any office or team works.It helps your employees an easy way to ask for help and your agents a fast way to resolve incidents.So here in this post we put together a list of best 6 Help Desk Software which help you to speed up your work.

LiveChat

Live Chat and Help Desk Software for business. LiveChat turns support teams into customer service rockstars. Customers love answers to their questions coming within seconds. Win hearts of customers with amazing customer service using LiveChat.

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JIRA Service Desk

JIRA Service Desk is recognized as a leader in service desk software by G2Crowd, ahead of legacy vendors like BMC and ServiceNow.JIRA Service Desk is fast to implement, simple to use, and has everything you need out of the box.JIRA Service Desk includes ITIL ready templates out of the box for incident, change, problem and service requests.

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ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

ServiceDesk Plus is ITIL-ready help desk software with integrated Asset and Project Management capabilities. With advanced ITSM functionality and easy-to-use capability, ServiceDesk Plus helps IT support teams deliver world-class service to end users with reduced costs and complexity. It comes in three editions and is available in 29 different languages.

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IT Help Desk from Spiceworks

Spiceworks is a free software with no admin limits and no ticket limits.It has so many features like..

  • Team Management
  • Users Self Service
  • IT Asset Management
  • 150+ Add-ons
  • Multi Site Support
  • Ticket Collaboration
  • Active Directory

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Zoho Support

Zoho Support is web-based customer service software designed to help you focus more on creating customer happiness everyday.Provide a great customer support experience with Zoho Support. Prioritize, manage and close an ever-increasing volume of requests that reach your organization through a variety of channels.

Their Features are..

  • Many Channel,One Place
  • Measure Optimize
  • Customer Information
  • Ticket Management
  • CRM Integration

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Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a easy to use,multi channel supported help desk software with 50000+ customers.Freshdesk is the customer support software that gives you everything you need to delight your customers.

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LiveAgent

LiveAgent is help desk software that fits all kinds of businesses, no matter how small or big they are.Live chat is one of the fastest way to connect with your customers and reach potential clients in real time.It supports your customers even when you are offline with your knowledge base and reduce your customer support costs and workload.

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Kayako

It’s a simple and scalable customer service software that scales with your business. Kayako makes it easy to deliver an unrivalled customer support experience.

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