EDITS.WS

Tag: News

  • Introducing Broken Link Checker – Never Have Dead Links On Your WordPress Site Again

    Are you tired of finding and fixing broken links on your WordPress site?

    Have you ever wished there was a foolproof method to periodically monitor all internal and external links easily WITHOUT the high costs?

    If you’re like me and most other smart website owners, then you have at least wished for this solution a couple of times in your WordPress journey.

    Today, I’m excited to announce my new product, Broken Link Checker, which works silently in the background on your site, giving you peace of mind.

    We built this tool to help you quickly check your site for broken links and easily fix them to improve search engine optimization (SEO).

    introducing broken link checker for wordpress by aioseo

    What is Broken Link Checker?

    Broken Link Checker is a powerful WordPress plugin that crawls your website periodically and checks every link to ensure it is not broken.

    It is built as a SaaS service, so it never puts load on your WordPress hosting server or slow your website down.

    The Broken Link Checker plugin was developed by the same team behind AIOSEO (All in One SEO), the best SEO plugin for WordPress.

    When broken links are found, the plugin makes it easy for you to fix them right from within the plugin without even having to visit individual pages where those links were added.

    Why Do You Need Broken Link Checker?

    Broken links can frustrate your website visitors and cause them to leave your site. They can even hurt your website’s SEO, conversions, and sales.

    On WordPress sites, broken links typically occur when moving a site to a new domain name, or when deleting a post or page without proper redirection.

    Sometimes broken links can also happen due to a typo, and they can go unnoticed for months if not years. But worse, if you ever link to an external website that’s not yours, and they change the page, delete it, or shut down the site, then your site will have broken links.

    This is why monitoring broken links on a regular basis is important for your WordPress website.

    While there are SaaS broken link checkers in the market, most are either crazy expensive or not built specifically with WordPress websites in mind.

    So I decided to work with my team to finally create a beginner-friendly broken link checker for WordPress.

    With Broken Link Checker, you can…

    • scan all links on your site every 3 days
    • detect valid links, broken links, and redirects
    • set which post types (posts, pages, or custom post types) and statuses (published, draft, and so on) to monitor
    • exclude certain URLs from being checked

    … and a whole lot more.

    If you’re serious about your website and want to grow your online business, then you know how important it is to offer a seamless website browsing experience to your visitors.

    The last thing you want your readers to see is a big 404 page not found error message serving as a dead end on your WordPress site.

    How to Use Broken Link Checker in WordPress

    The first thing you’ll need to do is install and activate Broken Link Checker on your site.

    aioseo broken link checker

    For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

    Next, you’ll need to connect the plugin to your Broken Link Checker account.

    Upon connecting the plugin with your account, you can turn the toggle on to stop search engines from following broken links. You can even set it not to update the modified date for a page/post when a link is updated via the plugin.

    link tweaks broken links tool

    When you click the Broken Links tab, you can see that the plugin has automatically scanned the entire site, and links are categorized into broken, redirects, and dismissed.

    The Broken Link Checker plugin lets you fix broken links quickly and easily right within your plugin. To replace a broken link, simply click Edit URL.

    Alternatively, if you want to remove the link, just click Unlink and the link will be removed from the page.  

    edit url in broken link checker

    After updating the link, you can recheck if the link is still broken by clicking the Recheck option. If you want, you can even dismiss the message from the plugin.

    Get More Details About Each Link

    Broken Link Checker gives you additional details for each link, like how long the link has been broken and response header information, HTTP Status code, and more.

    get status details for broken links

    Control Which Types of Pages are Scanned

    Another important aspect of Broken Link Checker is its advanced settings, which give you full control over which pages get scanned. Within the plugin, you can set which post types (posts, pages, or custom post types) and statuses (published, draft, and so on) to monitor.

    You can also exclude certain pages from being checked.

    advanced settings of broken link checker

    This helps you better manage the crawl budget, so you can ensure you’re not wasting the link scan credits.

    Scanning Your Site the Right Way

    Broken Link Checker scans both external (links from your website to others) and internal links (links from one page on your site to another page) on your site.

    Unlike other WordPress plugins, Broken Link Checker uses an external private server to scan (or, in other words, ping) for broken links on your site. That’s because repeatedly pinging external sites from your servers can make your site look suspicious to internet service providers, putting your sites at risk of being blacklisted.

    This is why most WordPress hosting companies put traditional broken link checker plugins in their block list.

    Since Broken Link Checker uses an external private server for pinging external links, you can rest assured that you’re in safe hands.

    What’s Coming Next?

    Broken Link Checker is a product by my AIOSEO team which is a leading WordPress SEO plugin with over 3 million installs.

    Our goal is to continue to build best-in-class SEO tool to ensure your website is always outranking your competitors.

    Broken Link Checker is just one of the new tools that we’ve launched.

    We have an exciting roadmap ahead of us to make this plugin even more powerful, and I am very proud of our team.

    If you have ideas on how we can make the Broken Link Checker platform or other SEO tools more helpful for you, then please send us your suggestions.

    As always, I want to thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner, and we look forward to continue serving you for years to come.

    Yours Truly,

    Syed Balkhi
    Founder of WPBeginner

    P.S. Want us to acquire or invest in your WordPress business? Learn more about the WPBeginner Growth Fund.

    The post Introducing Broken Link Checker – Never Have Dead Links On Your WordPress Site Again first appeared on WPBeginner.

  • WordPress Contributors Continue Exploring Migration of Public and Private Messages from Slack to Matrix

    In early 2023, WordPress and Matrix contributors proposed a new Meta team subproject to explore replacing Slack communication with Matrix, an open source federated chat system. After the team’s most recent meeting, Automattic-sponsored contributor Alex Kirk published an update on the status of recent experiments in migration.

    After researching more on migrating public messages, Kirk said the team is now evaluating whether the Apache-2.0 licensed Slack Matrix migration tool could work for this project.

    “It operates on Slack export files and requires a fresh Synapse server,” Kirk said.

    “We haven’t yet been able to confirm whether it actually can import the messages and hope to be able to share more on the next meeting.”

    On the subject of migrating private messages, Kirk said the team is leaning towards ensuring users have the tools to save their own external archives.

    “For migrating private messages in DMs or private groups we’ve concluded that we won’t want to attempt their migration but will look into providing tools for achieving that,” Kirk said.

    “Here we’ve found that browser extensions exist which allow you to download your own Slack direct messages inside your browser as a text file. Possibly it’ll be our recommendation to use those tools to export the messages for yourself.”

    Kirk also addressed some accessibility concerns that WordPress Accessibility Team contributor Alex Stine raised during a meeting at the end of March:

    Slack is well supported and accessible to a very wide audience. Something that is not up for argument, a lot of these open-source/decentralized concepts are not accessible to all or most.

    The decentralized media world walks a fine line between a great thing and a lot of hypocrisy. On one hand, claiming to give users a voice, on the other hand, knowingly excluding users of assistive tech.

    Years of GitHub issues do not lie. Matrix has not been around all that long but there are plenty of other examples that have been around long enough…The Slack accessibility team is best in its class. They are constantly responsive and very engaged with users.

    Kirk linked to an article published by Mozilla accessibility engineer Marco Zehe titled How to use Element and Matrix with a screen reader. Mozilla replaced IRC with Matrix in 2020, identifying Matrix as an “excellent open community collaboration tool, with robust support for accessibility and community safety.”

    Zehe’s post is essentially a guide to help those using assistive technology find their way around Element and the Matrix Eco system more easily. It also highlights a few things that do not yet work well, including keyboard navigation for the members list and messages.

    “I hope some of these issues are no longer problems,” Stine said in response to Kirk sharing the article. “If they still are, this would be no doubt a far worse experience than Slack was in some of its worst times. The fact that users have to switch their screen reader modes just to have basic functionality support is not cool. Here is the way I see it. If modern apps do not follow a similar pattern for your OS to the point where you have to look up docs to figure out how to use it, it is probably too complicated and/or not accessible by my definition.”

    The question of whether it would be beneficial for the WordPress project to replace Slack communication with Matrix is still yet unanswered, but the initial response to the idea was overwhelmingly positive. More research into the logistics of migration will be a necessary part of the decision.

    The Matrix contributors proposing this new exploration will meet again on Wednesday, April 19, for the regularly scheduled bi-weekly meeting and plan to discuss the research on migrating messages from Slack.

  • WCEU 2023 Announces Free Childcare and Workshop for Kids

    Preparations for WordCamp Europe (WCEU) 2023 in Athens are moving forward as the team will soon be contacting speakers selected for the event. Organizers have launched a Speaker Support Program aimed at encouraging more diversity on stage by connecting speakers with companies that are willing to financially support them.

    WCEU has also opened registration for Contributor Day, which will take place on June 8, kicking off the event. Those who are unable attend in person can join in the #contributor-day channel on Slack as well as the specific channels for the contributor teams.

    Alongside Contributor Day, WCEU has announced it will be hosting an interactive Workshop for Kids on June 8, to introduce future generations to WordPress. It will cover the basics of WordPress, how to create a website, choose a theme, and publish content. The workshop is open to kids aged 13-16 and all materials will be provided.

    WCEU will also have free childcare available during the Contributor Day and the main conference from June 8-10, to make the WordCamp more accessible for parents and guardians. Children aged 16 and younger are eligible to attend but must register by May 20, as there is limited availability for childcare.

    The call for volunteers is still open with a variety of roles available. Volunteers will receive one or two collectable volunteer t-shirt(s), a free ticket, and an invite to the Social, as well as the experience of contributing back to the WordPress community at one of its largest events.

  • BuddyPress to Host Virtual Contributor Day on April 20

    Representatives of the BuddyPress core team will be hosting a contributor day alongside the French WordPress Community Contributor Day in Paris on April 20, 2023. This in-person event has filled up its registration and posted its schedule already, but BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet is inviting people to join online to contribute to BuddyPress.

    “As we’re currently working on a very ambitious 12.0 release with the main goal of migrating from our Legacy URL parser to using the WordPress Rewrite API, there are many areas getting your contributions would really help us and make a huge difference,” Viet said.

    BuddyPress 12.0 is expected to be released May 31, 2023, and merging the BP Rewrites feature plugin into the core plugin will be a major change that impacts the entire BuddyPress ecosystem. The effort to migrate BuddyPress’ custom URI parser to use WordPress’ Rewrite API has been in the works for the past decade. Contributors will also be providing backwards compatibility via a new plugin called BP Classic that will contain BuddyPress’ legacy widgets. The virtual contributor day will organize code contributions towards these efforts.

    In addition to code, people can also contribute to documentation regarding how developers can prepare their themes and plugins to be ready for BP Rewrites, and documentation for end users on how the change will benefit their BuddyPress experience. Viet also intends to organize some common troubleshooting tips for the inevitable support forum requests that the major change will generate.

    The event will run from 08:15 UTC to 15:30 UTC. Although virtual attendees may miss out on the hot drinks and pastries, they can be equal participants by joining BuddyPress’ Slack channel and jumping in on one of the projects.

  • WooCommerce 7.6 Introduces Single Product Details Block and “Add to Cart” Form Block

    WooCommerce 7.6 was released today with two new blocks merged from the WooCommerce Blocks plugin. The Single Product Details block and the “Add to Cart” Form block are now available to store owners who want to use the Site Editor to design their own Single Product Templates.

    Along with the button, the “Add to Cart” form block will automatically display additional options, depending on if the product has a set available quantity or variations.

    image credit: WooCommerce 7.6 release post

    In templates where store owners are displaying multiple products, attributes filtering has been improved for the Products block. Inside the editor, there is now a collapsible menu for selecting attributes and filtering the display. It also shows a live preview of the products that will be included in this view.

    For those who are designing pages and templates with patterns, WooCommerce 7.6 makes it much easier to get a consistent design with improved, scalable margins for patterns using the Products block.

    This release also improves the Mini Cart block’s performance, with content preloaded, and an appearance that more closely matches the site’s active theme.

    WooCommerce 7.6 includes several important updates for developers, including the following:

    • Clearer, renamed event names in block-based Checkout
    • Reintroduced cache for orders (after it was reverted due to causing an infinite loop on activation) when custom tables are enabled
    • Added an encoding selector to the product importer
    • Add/Remove order coupon actions are now logged in notes
    • Products widget can now be sorted by menu_order

    For a more detailed look at the 673 commits in 7.6, check out the full changelog, which references each pull request included in the release.

    WooCommerce has also released its Contributor Day Guide today for the upcoming 24-hour virtual event on April 19, 2023. There are instructions for how to get your development environment set up for contributing and how to join the Woo Community Slack. The guide outlines specific topics and tickets that will be addressed, with dedicated Slack channels for each.

  • ACF Wins Plugin Madness 2023

    The court floor has been mopped, the gatorade coolers are empty, and the announcer has gone home. That can only mean one thing, Plugin Madness has officially come to a close!

    Congratulations to our 2023 Plugin Madness winner, Advanced Custom Fields! ACF was the very first Plugin Madness winner in 2016, and it has come back to take the crown again seven years later.

    ACF knocked out huge contenders such as Yoast, former Plugin Madness Champion Smush, and WooCommerce to come out on top.

    Wow! We are thrilled and grateful that ACF has won this year’s Plugin Madness. On behalf of the ACF team, thank you to all who voted for the plugin. It’s a testament to the team’s hard work, dedication, and our commitment to being good stewards of the plugin.

    Iain Poulson, Sr. Product Manager, ACF

    About ACF

    As the name indicates, ACF allows you to add fields to any page of your WordPress site. It’s incredibly easy to to use and customize. Whether you need to add a customer review to the bottom of your site or a product description, ACF can do that.

    The plugin is incredibly customizable and adaptable to any kind of site. ACF can make any kind of field you can think of.

    ACF has over 4.5 million active users and has been a pillar in the WordPress community. The plugin has maintained a commitment to finding powerful ways for WordPress developers to create sites. 

    The team just released an historical update that allows site developers to register custom post types and custom taxonomies from directly within the plugin. These are features users have been asking about for years and they are available on the free and PRO version.

    This update saves developers time by eliminating the need to switch between different plugins or command lines while building. You can create custom post types and taxonomies all from your ACF dashboard.

    Past Plugin Madness Winners

    Plugin Madness has been running for eight years and in that time, amazing winners have been crowned. Last year, first-time competitor The Plus Addons for Elementor had a slam dunk and brought home the prize.

    In 2021, FluentCRM, another first timer, rose to the top. With popular page builder, Elementor, taking the crown in 2020 and 2019. Smush Image Optimization held the title in both 2018 and 2017. 

    Thank you so much to everyone who nominated a plugin and came back every year to vote. This competition is a great way to say thank you to your favorite plugins, and highlight some that don’t get as much love as others.

    The post ACF Wins Plugin Madness 2023 appeared first on Torque.

  • Yoast SEO 20.5 Drops Support for PHP 5.6, 7.0, and 7.1

    Yoast SEO 20.5 was released this week with several security fixes and an improved Google SERP preview. The preview shows mobile and desktop snippets with Google’s current styling so users can see exactly how their snippets will look and tweak how they optimize them for Google Search results.

    Another highlight of this release is that Yoast SEO has dropped compatibility with PHP 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1. The plugin now requires PHP 7.2.5 or higher (along with WP 6.0). While this may seem extreme at first glance, approximately 89.9% of WordPress sites are running on PHP 7.2+. WordPress doesn’t cross-reference these stats with WP version numbers, but it’s possible sites running on much older versions of WordPress are also on unsupported versions of PHP.

    WordPress PHP Version Stats – 4/11/2023

    Getting WordPress sites to update to the latest versions of PHP is a slow-moving process, but historically Yoast SEO has been a force for change in pushing users to upgrade their PHP versions. In version 4.5, released in 2017, Yoast SEO threw the weight of its estimated 6.5 million user base behind the movement to push hosts to upgrade their customers to PHP 7. That version of the plugin introduced a large, non-dismissible notice urging site administrators to upgrade to PHP 7.

    “To move the web forward, we need to take a stand against old, slow, and unsafe software,” Yoast founder Joost de Valk said at that time. “Because web hosts are not upgrading PHP, we have decided to start pushing this from within plugins.” He contended that the WordPress ecosystem was losing good developers because the project was moving too slowly and also made the case for security and speed.

    Although the latest version 20.5 will be incompatible with approximately 10% of WordPress sites running unsupported versions of PHP, this move forward is necessary for maintaining a healthy and secure ecosystem.

  • WordPress Gears Up for 2nd Women and Nonbinary Release Squad

    WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy is coordinating a second women and nonbinary release squad for the 6.4 release, which is anticipated to land in November 2023. In 2020, WordPress 5.6 “Simone” was led by an all-women and non-binary identifying release squad, a first in WordPress’ history, and Haden Chomphosy is proposing the project go for it again.

    “Having a release squad comprised of folx we don’t typically see in technology also has a goal of increasing the number of underrepresented people who have experience maintaining, managing, and shipping software in an open source project,” Haden Chomphosy said. “All contributions to the release and release process are welcome.”

    WordPress 6.3, which is targeted for a mid-July release, will give prospective 6.4 squad members the opportunity to shadow more experienced contributors and gain new skills by working with mentors and assisting with the release. She is calling for mentors to join in preparing this new round of leaders. The process is a several-months long commitment that gives contributors a head start on understanding their roles in the squad, though it is not required for participation in the 6.4 release.

    Haden Chomphosy emphasized that anyone will be able to contribute to the release but the leaders in the 6.4 squad will be limited to this specific group.

    “I short-hand the release to ‘women and nonbinary’ for easy referencing in our day-to-day collaboration, but the release squad will be open to anyone who identifies as a woman, nonbinary, or gender-expansive,” she said. “All contributions are welcome as always, regardless of how you identify or what groups you feel part of.”

    WordPress has gained valuable new contributors and leaders from this initiative in the past, including 6.2 Core Tech Co-Leads Tonya Mork.

    “Before joining the 5.6 Release Squad, I had not contributed to the project,” Mork said. “I had no idea how the release cycle worked or where to start. Yup, I was a contributing noob. But with mentoring, I was well supported in my onboarding. And you will be too! The experience was and still is incredible!“

    Based on the response to Haden Chomphosy’s proposal, there should be no shortage of contributors and volunteers available to help with the women and nonbinary 6.4 release squad. She is requesting anyone who wants to be part of the squad or help as a mentor leading up to the release to leave a comment on the post.

  • Limit Login Attempts Plugin Patches Severe Unauthenticated Stored XSS Vulnerability

    Wordfence has published a security advisory about a severe unauthenticated stored Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability in the Limit Login Attempts plugin, which is active on more than 600,000 WordPress sites.

    The security issue was discovered by Wordfence security researcher Marco Wotschka in January 2023. It was submitted to the WordPress Plugin Security Team, which acknowledged receipt of the report nearly two months later on March 24, 2023.

    “This can be leveraged by unauthenticated attackers to facilitate a site takeover by injecting malicious JavaScript into the database of an affected site that may execute when a site administrator accesses the logging page,” Wotschka said.

    Version 1.7.2 of the plugin patches the vulnerability. It was released on April 4 with a note in the changelog that simply says “Security fixes.” Version 1.7.1 and previous versions remain vulnerable.

    In August 2021, the plugin had more than 900,000 active users, and more than 2 million in 2018, but seems to be dying a slow death and is no longer maintained, as it hasn’t been updated in years.

    Wordfence has more details in the advisory on how the plugin might be exploited and advises users update immediately.

  • TeamWP Launches Team Experience Index To Measure Employee Engagement and Satisfaction in the WordPress Ecosystem

    In February 2023, James Giroux founded TeamWP, a project that aims to advocate for open, people-first workplaces in the WordPress ecosystem. His first initiative was to launch the Team Experience Index, a benchmark employee engagement survey designed specifically for people working in the world of WordPress.

    “The distributed nature of WordPress companies means they often lack the resources and knowledge to create truly open, people-first workplaces,” Giroux said. “The Team Experience Index fills this gap by providing insights and benchmarks that help companies identify strengths and areas for improvement, fostering a more open, collaborative, and innovative work culture.”

    The comprehensive survey will be aggregated and anonymized. It takes approximately 4-7 minutes to complete and includes questions about employee experience, company culture, leadership, management and teamwork, career progression opportunities, professional development, compensation and recognition, and employees’ individual experiences.

    While responses are recorded anonymously, it’s important to note that the company name is required, along with the employee’s role and the number of employees. Respondents should be aware that they are collectively giving away a lot of private information and should only share if they believe the insights will have a positive impact on the wider ecosystem.

    Giroux plans to share the initial results of the Team Experience Index at WordCamp Europe in Athens in June 2023. Anyone working at a WordPress product or service company, agency, or hosting company is invited to complete the survey.