This evening I had an opportunity to attend a monthly WordPress OKC Meetup (@okcwpug) for the first time in many months, and as always I learned a bunch of new things. I archived my Tweets from the evening, shared mostly with the hashtag #WPOKC, in a Storify archive, which I’ll embed below. After many years, leadership of the WordPressOKC group has been transferred and the meeting location has also changed. Instead of meeting at Oklahoma Christian University (OC) in Edmond, the group is now meeting downtown in a conference room owned by The Oklahoman. I was glad to go into their building for the first time and see a new part of downtown, but the parking situation down there is more challenging than it was at OC. Overall, however, I’m very glad to see the group continue under new leadership. I’ve learned SO much from these meetups and tonight was no different in that respect.
Some of my best learning points from tonight’s WordPress meetup were:
- Linode is a much more cost-affordable web host than my current managed VPS provider (Site5) but has fewer security scripts and procedures in place to protect websites. It’s definitely a DIY, command-line style web host for developers. If you want more graphical tools to manage web hosting, it’s not a great choice.
- Local by GetFlyWheel is powerful, free software which dramatically streamlines the process of creating local WordPress sites to develop and tweak.
- “Commercially Supported GPL Themes” are vetted by the WordPress community so they are not only malware free, but also regularly updated. Their developers have committed to a core set of open principles which WordPress supports. Basically, they are excellent themes that should remain functional and secure.
- A variety of free WordPress user lessons and lesson plans (great for web design teachers and classes too) are available on the Make WordPress site.
- When you’re looking for tools to facilitate the deployment or backup of a WordPress site, check out All-in-One WP Migration, BackupBuddy and Migrate DB Pro.
- Cloudbleed Bug is a bad, recent security problem for WordPress sites connected to Cloudflare sites.
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On this day..
- Post an eBook from an iPad to Your Class Blog – 2012
- iPhone Video Edited with Splice – 2011
- Student Presentation on an iPad – 2011
- Brush Up on Modern Physics – Free – 2010
- Can you imagine this much global sharing? – 2010
- Geysers in Rotorua at Te Puia – 2009
- Metered, commercial WiFi common in New Zealand – 2009
- Mobile Phone Media Collection and VoiceThread – 2008
- The WOW2 skype/chat is now! – 2007
- Technology in the Schools: Policy, Privacy and Practical Issues for Teachers, IT and Others – 2007