Recap of our September MWUG Meetup at Madlab

A quick recap of our September MWUG Meetup, WordPress announcements and everything else we covered at last month. Thanks to all the new faces that came along and to the regulars too. We’re lucky to have such a great community at Manchester WordPress User Group. If you need help with WordPress or simply want to network with WordPress users, developers and contributors then come along. Our next meetup will be October 19th

WordPress announcements

At the September MWUG meetup Mike explained some of the new features coming to WordPress in more detail. Starting with WordPress 4.7 to soon be allowing 255-character passwords for protected pages and posts. This update affects password protected posts and pages only.

He also gave us the update on Headway themes, a WordPress premium theme, layout builder. Headway recently ran into financial problems, causing their customers concern over the lack of communication. Read more about HeadWay themes here. The advice is to be aware of smaller players for this reason.

A quick mention… Congratulations to Gitlab! If you are unaware of who Gitlab are, they are a rival to Github and recently raised 20 million for Series B funding. This is a huge achievement considering it was only a year ago Gitlab raised 4 million for series A funding.

Mike also mentioned Google Chrome. How they have also announced the soon to be added security warning to HTTP sites beginning in 2017. With Chrome growing in popularity this is something to think about if you haven’t already.

Extras worth mentioning:

  • Jetpack 4.3 recent released. Featuring a brand new interface with faster management of your favourite features
  • GoDaddy acquired ManageWP. The reactions so far haven’t been as positive as expected however Mike advised to wait and find out this. It’s great to see employees being paid to contribute back to WordPress.
  • GoDaddy has also partnered with Beaver Builder
  • Dennis Cooper relaunches on WordPress and can be found at denniscooperblog.com This is great news for WordPress. WPTavern are quoted as saying “Cooper should still be in possession of his content without fear of it being erased.”

The advice to anyone in this situation is to make sure you own your own content where possible. To go for an Opensource website builder such as WordPress. Also to take your own backups

September MWUG talk

Thank you to Kayleigh Thorpe, WordPress Support Specialist at hosting company 34SP.com for her advice on how to stage your site. Kayleigh talked us through the cloning stages, creating a subdomain, using the Velvet Blues plugin and she also touched on how to migrate your site. Her talk was informative, easy to follow and brought up some questions. Feel free to contact Kayleigh via Twitter for her slides

If you try this at home and you find problems such as your database being too large, ask your host and they will import it for you. Also another attendee asked about the importance of staging. If you have the option to stage your site always do so. Avoid making changes to your live site wherever possible.

Graphic of a stethoscope

WordPress clinic

Our WordPress clinic is the section of the evening where you get to ask about anything you need help with and advice is volunteered by someone within the group. In September MWUG we got help for a diverse range of questions.

Among some of the questions were queries about how to add a PayPal cart to your WordPress website, best plugins for booking appointments, how to optimise a image heavy site and help with the Genesis framework. If you ever need advice on your site feel free to bring your laptop along and ask away. We are a very enthusiastic group and we are always happy to help.

Come and join us on the 19th of October at Madlab Manchester

Photograph of MadLab logo wall art

October Meeting: Wednesday 19th, 6.30-9pm, Madlab

October’s Manchester WordPress User Group, run by WordPress co-founder Mike Little, takes place at MadLab (https://madlab.org.uk) on Wednesday, the 19th from 6.30pm to 9pm.

Note: this month we are continuing with the successful clinic format to try to help more of you in the ways you’ve asked us.

Timings and Agenda:

  • 18:30 — Prompt start –  WordPress news –
  • 18:45 –Talk – Sue Fernandes – Setting up your eCommerce site using WordPress and WooCommerce
  • 19:00 — WP clinic – bring your laptop and get the hands on help you need
  • 20:15 — In Depth Talk – Rob Blake – An introduction to Roots: Sage, Bedrock, and Trellis
  • 21:00 — End
Anyone with any experience of WordPress is welcome, whether you’ve only heard about it and want to know more, you’re an experienced WordPress user or developer, or anything in between; you are welcome to our meetings.

If you fancy coming along, please let us know at our Meetup page.

Mike Little (https://mikelittle.org), co-founder of WordPress, runs MWUG so come along to discover how WordPress can benefit you or your organisation, and get specific advice on any WordPress questions you have.

See you at MWUG!

September Meeting: Wednesday 21st, 6.30-9pm, Madlab

September’s Manchester WordPress User Group, run by WordPress co-founder Mike Little, takes place at MadLab (https://madlab.org.uk) on Wednesday, the 21st from 6.30pm to 9pm.

Note: this month we are continuing with the successful clinic format to try to help more of you in the ways you’ve asked us.

Timings and Agenda:

  • 18:30 — Prompt start –  Kayleigh Thorpe  – Clone your WordPress site for development
  • 18:50 — Q&A – for topic covered and Mike’s WP update
  • 19:00 — WP clinic – bring your laptop and get the hands on help you need
  • 20:15 — In Depth Talk – TBD (Mike Little?)
  • 21:00 — End
Anyone with any experience of WordPress is welcome, whether you’ve only heard about it and want to know more, you’re an experienced WordPress user or developer, or anything in between; you are welcome to our meetings.

If you fancy coming along, please let us know at our Meetup page.

Mike Little (https://mikelittle.org), co-founder of WordPress, runs MWUG so come along to discover how WordPress can benefit you or your organisation, and get specific advice on any WordPress questions you have.

See you at MWUG!

Thank you for attending our MWUG August Meetup at Madlab

It was brilliant to have such a great turnout at this months Manchester WordPress User Group Meetup (MWUG), especially with it being the August holiday season! So thank you again to everyone who attended this Wednesday, to all the new faces and the usual ones too.

Also thank you to @GurbirSingh for our very first MWUG, streamed on Periscope. If you would like to see this stream Gurbir very kindly uploaded it to YouTube for us, click here to see MWUG stream

Latest update – WordPress 4.6 “Pepper”

This months meetup kicked off by the announcement of the WordPress 4.6 “Pepper” Update which Mike Little deemed to be a ‘relatively safe’ update. Some of the features of this update include:

  • Managing plugins and themes will now be much faster
  • Native font systems mean your site text (at least the admin screens) will be faster on a slow connection and render better on mobile phones
  • It now auto detects if a URL has the correct syntax
  • Disaster recovery mode is now improved, a copy of your post will be saved and it happens more often

A lot of the changes in WordPress 4.6 “Pepper” are under the hood this time to cater for the future of WordPress, we’re hoping for front end editors in future!

Photograph of Mike Little teaching
Mike Little MWUG August 16

Plugin announcements

This month we announced the new A11y plugin, which scans your site for accessibility features. Also the Customize Snapshots plugin allows you to save snapshots of where you are and gives you a scheduling to go live feature. WordPress.com have released browser notification features too. Lastly WPSiteSync is another great migration tool and you don’t need access to both databases to use it.

August MWUG Speakers

Thank you to Keith Hyde for kicking off the August talks with demonstration of how to use the popular BackUpWordPress Plugin by HumanMade. Our second talk of night welcomed back Tim Nash with his talk on security and TLS certificates.

Photograph of attendees at MWUG August 16
MWUG August 2016

WordCamp announcements

The next upcoming event WordCamp Belfast taking place on the 1st-2nd October. Shortly after will be our hometown WordCamp Manchester on the 22nd-23rd October followed by WordCamp Edinburgh in November.

WordPress Clinic

Every month we hold a WordPress clinic where you can bring your laptops in if you want and get help from fellow MWUG members. This month we saw many problems successfully resolved. Thank you to Tim Nash for his help on the WordPress Genesis Framework. Also to Tom J Nowell for his problem solving on custom post type navigation. To Kayleigh Thorpe for her help on WordPress security. The reports back from those helped were all positive. If you are involved in WordPress of any level of technical ability get yourself down to MWUG and join in with the community. We are always happy to meet new people, make connections and help out where we can!

Photograph of MWUG August Attendees
MWUG August Attendees

We’re here at Madlab every third Wednesday of the month. See you in September!

–@SiobhanLHancock

August Meeting: Wednesday 17th, 6.30-9pm, Madlab

August’s Manchester WordPress User Group, run by WordPress co-founder Mike Little, takes place at MadLab (https://madlab.org.uk) on Wednesday, the 17th from 6.30pm to 9pm.

Note: this month we are continuing with the successful clinic format to try to help more of you in the ways you’ve asked us.

Timings and Agenda:

  • 18:30 — Prompt start –  Talk – Keith Hyde – How to install and use a backup plugin
  • 18:45 — Q&A – for topic covered and Mike’s WP update
  • 19:00 — WP clinic – bring your laptop and get the hands on help you need
  • 20:15 — In Depth Talk – Tim Nash – Switching sites over to HTTPS and the pitfalls thereof.
  • 21:00 — End
Anyone with any experience of WordPress is welcome, whether you’ve only heard about it and want to know more, you’re an experienced WordPress user or developer, or anything in between; you are welcome to our meetings.

If you fancy coming along, please let us know at our Meetup page.

Mike Little (https://mikelittle.org), co-founder of WordPress, runs MWUG so come along to discover how WordPress can benefit you or your organisation, and get specific advice on any WordPress questions you have.

See you at MWUG!

July Meeting: Wednesday 20th, 6.30-9pm, Madlab

July’s Manchester WordPress User Group, run by WordPress co-founder Mike Little, takes place at MadLab (https://madlab.org.uk) on Wednesday, the 20th from 6.30pm to 9pm.

Note: this month we are continuing with the successful clinic format to try to help more of you in the ways you’ve asked us.

Timings and Agenda:

  • 18:30 — Prompt start –  Talk (TBD) – WordPress news
  • 18:45 — Q&A – for topic covered and Mike’s WP update
  • 19:00 — WP clinic – bring your laptop and get the hands on help you need
  • 20:15 — In Depth Talk – TBD (Mike Little)
  • 21:00 — End
Anyone with any experience of WordPress is welcome, whether you’ve only heard about it and want to know more, you’re an experienced WordPress user or developer, or anything in between; you are welcome to our meetings.

If you fancy coming along, please let us know at our Meetup page.

Mike Little (https://mikelittle.org), co-founder of WordPress, runs MWUG so come along to discover how WordPress can benefit you or your organisation, and get specific advice on any WordPress questions you have.

See you at MWUG!