Creating a WordPress podcast website is a great way to reach a wider audience, solidify your branding, and access more monetization opportunities. Doing so may be challenging if you have no prior website-building knowledge. However, with the many tools available today, anyone can set up a website for their podcast quickly and easily without coding. […]
The post How to Create a WordPress Podcast Website + Best Podcast Plugins to Consider appeared first on Hostinger Tutorials.
WordPress contributor and developer Nick Diego has released version 3.0.0 of his Block Visibility plugin, which allows users to conditionally display blocks based on specific user roles, logged in/out, specific users, screen sizes, query strings, ACF fields, and more.
The biggest change in this update is that Diego has decided to merge the Pro version with the free plugin so users no longer have to purchase a commercial add-on to get extra features. Diego launched the pro version in 2021 to help support his efforts developing the free plugin but said this is no longer necessary.
“Originally I had planned on developing a plugin business,” he said. “But I found my love for building, contributing, and educating surpassed my desire to be an entrepreneur in the plugin space. This way, I can focus on my passion and also support the community.”
Version 3.0.0 includes previously pro features such as browser and device control that allows for displaying custom content based on the browser and/or device of the current user. It also adds Location control, which isn’t what it sounds like. It allows users to show or hide content based on where the block is located on the website and attributes of its location. Blocks can be conditionally displayed based on post taxonomy, post type, and other rules that offer more control over block visibility than one might ever have imagined possible.
This update brings in controls for Cookies, Metadata, Referral Source, and URL Path. It expands the Date & Time control to include Day of Week and Time of Day.
Visibility Presets is another mind-blowing new feature in this release, the kind that makes you wonder how this could be a free plugin. It allows users to create a collection of visibility conditions that can be applied to other blocks with a single click. Blocks can have multiple presets applied, and Diego said this is just the first iteration of this feature.
This release includes everything except the WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads controls, which include conditional block logic for shopping cart contents, product details, customer metrics, and more. Diego plans to add those later in April with the next version (3.1.0), so he can make a few further changes to them before including them in the free version. Users who rely on the WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads controls will need to wait until the next release to deactivate the Pro add-on.
The Block Visibility plugin’s documentation is already extensive, with videos, screenshots, and tutorials for nearly every feature. Diego said he will be investing more time into documenting how developers can create their own Block Visibility extensions. The plugin currently has more than 9,000 active users and will likely see more growth now that the pro features are getting rolled into the free version.
The world is learning new ways of moving faster with the help of AI, as the increased availability of the technology is poised to transform the way humans work. Generitive AI is decades old but recent advances and new tools like DALL-E (launched in January 2021) have made AI more accessible to the public.
When ChatGPT arrived in November 2022, it sparked an explosion of tools built to extend its capabilities to nearly every aspect of work. Conversational AI tools can now handle a myriad of mundane tasks like updating your resume, reading and summarizing PDFs, and creating slides for presentations. Yesterday Google announced it is testing Bard, its AI chatbot rival to ChatGPT and Bing AI. In the fast-moving world of companies innovating with AI, GitHub also announced Copilot X, which is powered by GPT-4 and adds Copilot to pull requests, docs, and the command line and introduces chat and voice features for Copilot.
WordPress plugin developers are adopting AI-powered tech and building it into their products, such as RankMath’s AI-generated suggestions for creating SEO-friendly content, WordPress.com’s experimental blocks for AI-generated images and content, and a Setary’s plugin that uses AI to write and bulk edit WooCommerce product descriptions. The wpfrontpage site is tracking these plugins but WordPress.org also lists dozens of plugins with AI, many of them created to write content or generate images.
In addition to adding AI to plugins, developers have attempted to have ChatGPT build plugins for them, with varying degrees of success:
So far developers report having more success with ChatGPT than Bard. In some cases the creation process is incomplete and requires some expertise to ensure the plugin will work, but it’s also opening up the world of plugin development to those who would not be able to create one without hiring a developer.
WordPress developers who want to share their AI-assisted creations with the community have also started submitting them to WordPress.org.
After receiving a string of violations, WordPress’ Plugin Team is warning developers that code submitted to the official directory must be GPL compatible.
“There is no guideline AGAINST using generated code,” Plugin Review Team rep Mika Epstein said.
“You’re welcome to use whatever tool you want to build plugins. That said, you are 100% responsible for that code if you chose to host it here…
“But the important bit here is that it means if ChatGPT, for example, built your plugin, you have to verify that all the code used is GPL compatible. Just like you are expected to validate licenses on libraries and code-snippets, everything in your plugin has to be GPL compatible. Should we determine that your code is a copy of someone else’s or includes code from non-GPL plugins, your submission will be rejected and any live plugins will be closed.”
Epstein cited an example where a developer built a “scroll to top” plugin with code that was copied from another, existing plugin hosted on WordPress.org. It was submitted five times and rejected every time.
“Yes it’s fine to fork code,” Epstein said. “You have to credit them, however, and that’s something those AIs have been pretty bad at doing.”Â
Commenters noted that autocomplete in modern IDEs workin in a similar way, as well as snippets. These types of tools can enhance productivity but prospective plugin developers who may not be as informed about software licensing, should stay away from wholesale copying another’s work without crediting them. This may require doing some extra research on the code that AI spits out.
In this new era of AI-assisted creation, we have essentially hitched our wagon to a star, as Ralph Waldo Emerson described in his essay on Civilization in 1870:
Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star,’ and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day and cost us nothing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Civilization
That decade brought humanity inventions like the phonograph, telephone, and the incandescent light bulb, followed by the automobile in the next decade. Emerson’s essay explores man’s relationship to technology where principles—”justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility”— are the guiding light and accelerant of technology’s impact.
The GPL is one of those principles for the WordPress community, which has enabled its uncommon growth and its wildly successful ecosystem. There are still a lot of grey areas when it comes to licensing and the code generated by AI. Developers would do well to use AI-generated code for inspiration and give credit where they can.
Web developer Mark Praschan created his first plugin for WordPress.org using ChatGPT. He used the free version, gave it a few prompts describing what he wanted it to do, and ChatGPT produced a functional plugin.
NorthStar allows users to display a message in the WordPress admin bar with settings to customize it along with the text and background colors.
“The first version worked great,” Praschan said. “I made a few small aesthetic improvements to the settings page and the display of the message, but we were already 95% of the way there!”
Praschan also had ChatGPT design an ASCII Art logo for the plugin. It required a few back-and-forth prompts but took just a few minutes before it was ready to be copied and pasted into Photoshop.
The plugin did not pass the code review on the first try for two reasons that Praschan shared on Twitter:
“How did I fix it? I made ChatGPT do it, of course,” Praschan said. “I copy/pasted the problems and a few snippets of my code and it spat out the fixed code.”
There are more of these plugins coming – where a person need only dream up the idea and prompt their chosen AI tool for the code. These will more than likely be simple plugins for the time being, but it’s not too early to establish some best practices for using code generators. WordPress is navigating new territory where anyone can create a plugin with a dash of creative prompts and very little code experience.
The Admin Menu Tree Page View plugin, which adds a tree-view layout of content in the WordPress admin, has been refactored to support more content types. The plugin is an admin utility similar to Hierarchy or the commercial OrganizeWP plugin that reworks the CMS to show content in one place, but it offers a simpler set of features for free with no ads or upsells. These types of plugins are valuable tools on larger, CMS-heavy WordPress sites.
Previously, the Admin Menu Tree Page View plugin focused on pages, allowing users to better visualize the page hierarchy/tree structure, add pages directly after or inside another post, and easily reorder pages via drag and drop.
Version 2.8 adds support for all public post types – posts, pages, and custom post types, which was a long requested feature. The plugin’s author, WordPress developer Ciprian Popescu, said adding more post types made the dashboard menu unmanageable and the backend slow, requiring him to update the plugin to us a top-level menu page.
“The solution here was to move the pages to a top level menu page,” Popescu said. “This increased the ‘one click away’ feature to ‘two clicks away,’ which is not a bad trade-off in my opinion, especially when all public post types are now available in a hierarchical tree layout. Having a separate page now removed the need for collapsing the child <ul> elements, as the purpose of this plugin is to quickly see all your pages in a bird’s eye view manner.”
Version 2.8 also removes some redundant features, cookies, and JavaScript resources, as the expand/collapse functionality is no longer necessary. Next on the roadmap for future releases Popescu is working on adding caching for post types, removing the jQuery and jQueryUI dependency, and improving dragging and dropping to work inside child elements.
This is the first in a series, Member Success Stories, where we ask WPMU DEV-ers who are killing it in the WordPress web dev business to share key contributors of their success with us – and you.
Today we welcome Phil, the owner of Capital Web Design, a Canadian web services agency based in Ottawa.
WPMU DEV: Congrats on your professional success, Phil. Please tell us straight away, how did you grow your business so fast?
Phil: I wouldn’t say the business itself grew that fast. I’ve been building websites in some way or another since the early 2000s. Either static sites coded by hand (HTML + CSS + Javascript), using frameworks (VueJS), or with WordPress.
I started my freelance web design company in 2014, after being approached to do a replacement build for what was a costly, difficult to maintain website – and that became my first client. From there I found small and medium businesses in my hometown that had old, unsupported and unmaintained websites, or who had no website at all.
As I continued my efforts, my business ethos emerged: help companies, nonprofits and individuals in my city build a web presence they can be proud of. I focused on creating bespoke WordPress web design based on well-supported multipurpose themes, WPMU DEV and other dependable plugins, and fully managed white-glove web hosting.
Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of working with 20+ clients, and have built 60 websites targeting a multitude of industries and commercial sectors.
WPMU DEV: That’s awesome. Did you know about WPMU DEV at that time?
Phil: I had known about WPMU DEV since around 2016-18, back when you offered dozens of plugins for all sorts of functionality. I couldn’t justify the cost of a membership then, but I popped in every so often to check and see what progress was being made.
In 2019, Hosting was added as a WPMU DEV service – and this really caught my attention. During the Black Friday promotion that November (lifetime reduced membership cost!), I joined as a member, and I can’t see myself ever leaving.
It was a perfect storm: high-quality plugins + managed hosting + 24/7 support + highly reduced cost.
WPMU DEV: So as you were building your clientele, you were putting together your professional tool box. Can you give us a peek inside?
Phil: The tools and services from WPMU DEV have been invaluable to me.
Plugins have provided me with consistency and reliability for all of the most important aspects of WordPress websites.
Knowing that I can count on Hummingbird and Smush for performance optimization allowed me to stop using other freemium plugins such as W3 Total Cache, Autoptimize, WP Super Cache and EWWW Image Optimization. I found these plugins were all good at some things, but had a lot of paywalled features that Hummingbird and Smush offered out of the box, for free.
Defender has been a great peace-of-mind addition to my repertoire, as the one-click recommended fixes are super straightforward and quite effective.
Forminator forms may be difficult at times to style with CSS, but that’s more than made up for in functionality. The drag-and-drop UI makes it much easier to build forms compared to Contact Form 7, and the amount of extras that are baked in (calculation, email routing, etc) blow other (often paid) form builders out of the water.
WPMU DEV: Aside from plugins, you mentioned our services have made a huge impact as well. Can you expand on that?
Phil: When it comes to services, it’s hard to put into words just how much The Hub and the associated Hosting have helped me throughout the last few years.
I have worked with hosting providers like 1and1, DreamHost, Media Temple, Digital Ocean VPS, and Bluehost. Each had their advantages, but in the end it always became a chore to use their services. It was clear that the quality of their offerings reflected the low cost they positioned themselves at. They were in a perpetual fight to undercut their competitors on price, at the cost of quality of service and support.
WPMU DEV Hosting came in late in the game, but out of the gate addressed two of the major concerns I experienced at other hosts: lack of support, and lack of trust in the infrastructure.
By having dedicated resources (versus shared), the web servers were consistently fast, reliable, and offered premium features such as staging, backups and WAF.
WPMU DEV: Walk us through a typical work day; what you reach for the most, and your usual workflow.
Phil: I keep The Hub open in a tab at all times, refreshing it every once in a while to keep track of ongoing community discussions, website maintenance statuses, and plugin updates.
I subscribe to key email notifications to receive alerts of technical issues on my managed sites, as well as member discussions in the WPMU DEV member forums, blogs and newsletter.
When a technical issue occurs, I’m able to troubleshoot it quickly. If I’m unable to resolve it on my own, the LiveChat support is always there to help me right away.
WPMU DEV has allowed me to optimize my workflows across the board, in areas like:
WPMU DEV: Outside of your own talent and determination, what would you say has contributed most significantly to your growth?
Phil: WPMU DEV has reduced my server build-out time from 30 minutes to 3 minutes (90% reduction). Over the past few years I’ve stood up well over 75 servers, so this has saved me many hours of effort.
At the time of joining, The Hub allowed me to manage about a dozen sites from a central location as opposed to manually logging in to each separate site. This was a reduction of biweekly maintenance effort from approximately 60 minutes to 2 minutes.
Client billing and streamlined invoice creation allowed me to save approximately 20-30 minutes per invoice creation, which throughout the past few years I estimate has saved me over 30 hours of work.
All of these time and effort savings have allowed me to comfortably take on more projects and clients.
Since joining WPMU DEV, my completed projects count has grown approximately 416% – with each project being more efficient to produce than the last.
WPMU DEV: As a self-proclaimed diehard fan, you know we’re constantly upping our game and adding new features and services to our offerings. What’s a newer release that you’re really getting into?
Phil: Reseller focus. I look forward to adding WPMU DEV automated site provisioning via the reseller offerings, as well as domains and email reselling.
WPMU DEV: One last question; let’s close it out with a fun one. If you could talk to yourself at the start of your career, what would you say?
Phil: At the start of my career, I often looked up to senior staff who seemed wise beyond their years. I was afraid of making mistakes or breaking something, for fear that those-who-never-broke-anything would look down on me.
I would try to explain to a younger me that wisdom comes with experience, and experience comes from doing things, failing, and working through the failure.
The more things you work on, the more you get exposed to what works and what doesn’t. Failing or breaking something isn’t strictly negative, because every failure is a learning opportunity: troubleshoot what went wrong, understand how to fix it, and implement a solution.
Do this cycle enough times and you start to pre-emptively detect patterns, plan for success, and you get faster at fixing problems. Don’t be afraid of failure because the more you fail, the more you learn and the wiser you will become.
That wraps up this premiere episode of our Member Success Stories. Thanks to Phil for his candid, insightful answers in our interview.
Phil is one of WPMU DEV’s Agency Partners, and uses
his 20 years of web design experience to achieve one goal: give back to his hometown by building modern websites for businesses and nonprofits in the Canadian capital.
You can reach Phil via his agency partner listing or visit Capital Web Design.
Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility products and consulting company, has received an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from Emilia Capital, the investment company owned by Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt. The investment will be used to accelerate the growth of Equalize Digital’s Accessibility Checker plugin, a tool for auditing websites for WCAG, ADA, and Section 508 accessibility errors.
Emilia Capital now owns part of the company, although its owners were not given seats on the board. Equalize Digital founder and CEO Amber Hinds said they will be serving as advisors and playing a role in strategic planning, especially around marketing and plugin development.
The Accessibility Checker plugin currently has approximately 2,000 active installs, according to WordPress.org stats, and the commercial upgrades make up a small percentage of Equalize Digital’s current revenue.
“We built the initial MVP in 2020 with an SBA loan and since then the plugin has been bootstrapped by profits from the service side of our business,” Hinds said. “My partner Steve and I have been splitting our time between client work and working on the plugin.
“We decided to bring on an investor because our ultimate goal is for the product to make up a significant portion of our revenue. It’s challenging to rapidly grow a product that isn’t yet self-sustaining, hence seeking investors. The funds will allow us to have full-time team members building new features, and also further invest in marketing, education, and sales than was possible while we were bootstrapping.”
Hinds said the features her team is targeting are aimed at making the plugin a more competitive accessibility auditing tool when compared with other existing SaaS solutions.
“Our focus right now is making our reports easier to understand by less technical users,” Hinds said. “The next major release with be a feature that allows people to click a button and highlight elements on the front end of the website, which will make it easier to find the element flagging the issue without having to interpret a code snippet.
“Other features that we have on the road map include scanning and reporting on archive pages for posts and taxonomies, improved scanning of non-English sites, and the ability for accessibility testers to log issues found during manual accessibility audits.”
Hinds said she was encouraged by the findings in the recent Admin Bar survey of WordPress professionals, which showed that 76.9% report they are striving for best practices when it comes to website accessibility, a significant increase from the previous year. With the new investment, Equalize Digital will be able to do more marketing to increase awareness and adoption of its tools.
“Ultimately I would like to see accessibility being considered during website builds in the same way that SEO is, and we’re hoping that our plugin will central to that,” Hinds said. “It’s why the free version of our plugin is much more full-featured than similar plugins. Other accessibility tools are prohibitively expensive for small businesses and bloggers. We’re aiming to build a tool that makes accessibility testing available to everyone.”
Automattic has acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from German developer Matthias Pfefferle, who will be joining the company to continue improving support for federated platforms. Pfefferle, who is also the author of the Webmention plugin, said his new role is to see how Automattic’s products can benefit from open protocols like ActivityPub.
In 2021, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg indicated that he would be interested in having Tumblr support the ActivityPub protocol for a greater level of interoperability across networks like Mastodon and others using the same protocol. That is still in the works, but WordPress sites already have this capability through the plugin.
“ActivityPub and a lot of other Open Web Plugins (like the Webmention plugin) were spare time projects, so I was not looking for an acquisition,” Pfefferle said.
“When Matt announced that Tumblr wants to implement ActivityPub on Twitter, I asked why not WordPress, so I came in contact with Automattic and they offered me the opportunity to work full time on the plugin and other Open Web projects.”
The ActivityPub plugin makes it possible for readers to follow a WordPress site in the fediverse using the ActivityPub protocol. This includes Mastodon, one of the most popular platforms using the protocol, and other platforms like Pleroma, Friendica, HubZilla, Pixelfed, SocialHome, and Misskey. For those using Mastodon, this plugin will automatically send posts to the network and replies to it will become comments on the post.
Last March, the ActivityPub plugin had just 700 users. Today it has grown to more than 2,000 active installs. Although it is not yet widely used, it has gotten more exposure since Elon Musk bought Twitter.
“Thanks to Elon Musk, the number of downloads from my ActivityPub (WordPress) plugin and my followers on Mastodon have increased at least tenfold!” Pfefferle said in a post on his blog in January 2023. “This inspired me to work more actively on the plugin again and some great changes came about.”
Most recently, Pfefferle added a new onboarding screen with recommended plugins, added the published date to author profiles, and added outgoing mentions, among other features.
Pfefferle said he thinks the idea of the acquisition is not to have the protocol merged into core, but to “guarantee that it will stay open source and to maybe make it a canonical plugin.”
As more social networks unite on open protocols, it won’t matter where you choose to create your home on the web. Interoperability between apps allows people to post from whatever network they enjoy, creating a richer, more diverse web. Automattic’s support of the ActivityPub plugin ensures WordPress’ place in the fediverse, where blogs will not isolated islands but rather interconnected as many were in the early days of blogging. Pfefferle’s work embodies these ideals.
“I think my drive was always to build an alternative to the big walled gardens of Facebook & co,” Pfefferle said.
“I fell in love with the idea of blogging and the spirit of the Web 2.0 movement and tried to keep the idea alive. I worked on several WordPress plugins and participated in several movements (DiSo, DataPortability and others) starting in 2007.
“It is so exciting to finally see such a big interest in Open and Federated technologies!”
Compliance on websites isn’t a fringe component. It’s a serious, legal matter, which can seriously affect your business.
Legal fees can be expensive, and add up quickly. Also, law is complicated, and can vary based on where you live and do business from. How does one accomplish compliance without getting their own law degree? (Or having a best friend who passed the bar exam?)
There is a way you can dot your I’s and cross your T’s, get all your ducks in a row, check all the boxes, cover your bases (this IS a post about full compliance, so one expression didn’t seem like enough 
) – without draining your bank account, or losing your sanity.
Because WordPress is far and above the leading CMS, there are a good number of options when it comes to compliance regulation companion products.
We looked into the pool of offerings, picked the ones we thought were smart, solid, and sound, and are presenting them to you here.
Keep reading, or jump ahead to any section:
First up, let’s examine…
Privacy is a major factor in today’s world, and personal information is protected by a fast-growing assortment of legal rights.
Throughout the first three-quarters of the 20th century, collected data was relatively minimal, there were few ways to store it, and demand for its collective use wasn’t really a thing.
However, from the ’70s through today, as the inherent value of data grew – along with improved methods to collect, store, use, and profit from it – so has the need for legislation to protect it.
Living in the era of Big Data, where the sheer volume of data has increased to previously unimaginable amounts, a true premium has been put on an individual’s rights to protect it.
Non-compliance with the legal safeguards comes with steep fines and other serious penalties.
While data protections may have started slowly, they will continue to pick up speed as the by-product of ethical examination and pivotal litigations surrounding privacy.
Let’s take a peek at the landmark protections in the history of privacy legislation.
The Privacy Act of 1974 established the Code of Fair Information Practice on the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of personally identifiable information from US federal agencies.
The Data Protection Directive was adopted by The European Union in 1995. The principles set forth were aimed at the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms in the processing of personal data. This was superseded by the GDPR in 2018.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was established in 1996 to protect Personally Identifiable Information maintained by the healthcare and health insurance industries from theft and fraud, safeguarding people’s medical information from being used without their consent.
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was enacted by Congress in 1998 and requires the Federal Trade Commission to issue and enforce regulations concerning children’s online privacy. The amended Rule became effective on July 1, 2013.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for data protection and privacy became law in 2018 in the European Union (EU).
The GDPR applies to the transfer of personal data outside of the EU and EEA (the European Economic Area is the countries of Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein), and replaced the Data Protection Directive from 1995.
Shortly thereafter, State Privacy Legislations in the US started…
While the US does not have a single, comprehensive, internet privacy law, one is currently being proposed by federal privacy legislation: the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA). If passed into law, it will supersede all state privacy laws. Until then, it’s up to individual states to pass legislation that protects customer data.
At this point you may be wondering, with so many already existing and soon-to-be-effective legal stipulations on data, which ones are you required to adhere to as a website or app owner?
That’s what we’ll lay out now in…
To best meet overall compliance, websites should minimally have:
… and …
Let’s put a pin in Consent for a bit, and come back to it after we look at the policies.
A Privacy Policy addresses all the different ways your website or app might collect, process, and store data from users, both online and off.
A Cookie Policy specifically addresses how you use cookies and third-party services.
Because of the overlap, websites sometimes include a cookie policy in their privacy policy, as part of the overall data collection.
However, cookie policies need to be regularly updated (as cookies are dynamic and often change upon successive visits), whereas policy policies tend to be static.
More importantly, if you fall under the scope of the GDPR, your Cookie Policy must be separate from your Privacy Policy.
You can still incorporate a short Cookie Clause in your Privacy Policy, or cross-reference the agreements (for example, link your Cookie Policy to your Privacy Policy), but you shouldn’t combine the agreements into one.
Even if you don’t fall under the scope of GDPR, it’s safer and smarter to create a separate Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy, instead of merging them into one.
Let’s dive a little deeper into both of these important policies.
Privacy Policies
Most laws around the world require a privacy policy.
Privacy policies are legally required agreements when collecting any personal data from users (e.g. payment details, address and phone number, cookie data), regardless of the platform used (e.g. website, mobile app, desktop app, etc).
You may need a privacy policy to use third-party APIs and services (e.g. Instagram, Google Analytics, or Google Adsense), or to list your app in a commercial marketplace such as the Apple App or Google Play stores.
Without a privacy policy, you risk your business getting hit with hefty fines and/or having your website taken down, especially if you’re found to be in breach of privacy laws.
Key privacy policies or agencies, by country of origin are:
Lesser-known privacy laws exist around the world as well; the above is not to be considered an exhaustive list.
While privacy policies are generally referred to by location of origin, they can extend to any region that does business with them. Meaning, don’t assume that if you reside outside of Europe that the GDPR doesn’t apply to you.
The EU’s GDPR and US state laws (#1 and #2) are the most broadly reaching and widely followed privacy policies. But that’s not to say that the others don’t matter; it’s important to research any that might apply to your business.
Cookie Policies
Cookie policies are legally binding documents that inform website or app users how a company engages in data tracking and online privacy.
Cookie identifiers are considered to be personal data by the GDPR, so its rules apply to cookie usage as well. Also, any personal data collected by cookies falls under the GDPR’s jurisdiction.
The ePrivacy Directive (ePD) of the EU – nicknamed the “Cookie Law†– requires security measures be put in place to protect personal data. This regulates cookie usage, email marketing, data minimization, and other aspects of data privacy, and is largely responsible for the cookie consent forms that you encounter on most websites today. (Sidebar: This doesn’t replace the Cookie Law I grew up with; “Don’t ever serve chocolate chippers without milk.”)
The ePrivacy Regulation (ePR), the details of which are currently being hammered out by legislators, will replace the ePD once it’s passed into law.
Consent / Record of Consent
Taking out that pin that we placed earlier, it’s time to look at Consent.
The important distinction between Policy and Consent is this: Policy discloses details regarding the use of cookies, while Consent informs and records the allowances from users regarding usage.
Make sure you incorporate consent into your Privacy/Cookie policies. Full GDPR compliance means storing proof of Consent, and being able to demonstrate or retrieve details should they be requested.
I can’t stress this enough: having Privacy/Cookie policies without consent could cause major problems for you.
While protecting user data is of paramount importance, privacy isn’t the only concern for someone managing websites.
There are other important, legal considerations when it comes to engaging the public online.
We’ll take a look at them now.
Terms & Conditions
Unlike Privacy Policies, there are no laws that require you to have a Terms & Conditions agreement, though it is highly suggested to have one.
Without a T&C, it’s much more difficult to enforce your rules and community guidelines, copyright protection, or other issues that could arise from the misuse of your website/app content.
The majority of the public will act courteously, but that’s not who you’re protecting yourself from. It’s the small percentage of outliers who can sometimes do the most damage. Having explicitly stated Terms & Conditions can offer basic protections for you and your business, limiting your liability and declaring your rights over the content you create, in case anyone engages in abuse, intellectual property theft, or unlawful behavior.
The most common reasons for Terms & Conditions are to:
If you’ve ever seen a clause in a T&C stating where (geographic region) any dispute resolution must take place, that falls under governing law, and is quite useful if you don’t want to litigate legal matters in a country outside of your own.
Disclaimers
Disclaimers can be used to offset liability from a business to a client in ambiguous or gray legal areas, or where they are required by law.
Without them, you are opening yourself up to legal liability or the possible endangerment of others, especially on sites that share advice, DIYs, or promote/sell products (most of which come with claims).
Websites and eCommerce stores benefit from disclaimers in that they:
Some of the most common disclaimer types are:
While we’re on the subject, here’s an example in actual use:
Disclaimer: WPMU DEV is not a legal entity, nor does it claim to be an authority on the laws of any region, country, or the internet. While this post contains well-researched content from respected sources, it is for informational purposes only and not intended as a substitute for professional legal advice. As such, we cannot be held liable for any omissions or errors contained within.
That said, let’s get to the tools and services of the compliance trade, with…
Some of these are actual WordPress plugins, while others are content generated directly in the company’s website.
Regardless of how you access them, all offer plenty of bang for the buck, and value for the venue (I’m coining this phrase to mean free products and their providers 
).
WebToffee has a sisterhood of plugins, with versions available on two separate websites: CookieYes and WebToffee, plus the free version on the WordPress repository.
CookieYes is one of the most used WordPress GDPR cookie compliance plugins, with 1 million+ active installations and 5 out of 5 stars.
Starting with the free WP.org plugin version, you get a goodly amount of features, including:
The free version also includes a connection (also free) with the CookieYes web app to access advanced features (cookie scan, consent log, etc) and manage all settings from the web app account. Note: You can still use most of the features from within the WP dashboard, without connecting to the web app.
One of the advantages here is the dashboard, which includes a Consent section. You can view or access details on user consent should you ever be audited and need to show this information. It even allows you to download this consent data in CSV format.
From the WP plugin dashboard, there’s a lot you can do:
Add the user guide provided for setup, along with a video walkthrough, and you can see why this plugin is so well loved.
If you want to go for a CookieYes paid plan, you have three tier options, payable per domain, monthly or annually. Each tier adds more pages per scan (600, 4K, 8K) and pageviews (100K, 300K, unlimited), plus a couple of additional features – like custom branding, and geo-targeted cookie banners.
As a third option here, we have the paid, premium version of GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin (CCPA Ready) – available from WebToffee’s website.
The final offering in the WebToffee family of compliance options, GDPR Cookie Consent remains in the territory of fastest-growing WP consent plugins, verifiable by a mass of happy users.
As far as features, most are available and common to both the GDPR Cookie Consent and the CookieYes paid plans. However, the GDPR Cookie Consent plans do not have:
GDPR Cookie Consent pricing has three tiers, based on the number of sites (1, 5, 25) you want to use it on. Each includes one year of updates and support, and a 30-day, money-back guarantee.
The primary difference between The GDPR Cookie Consent and CookieYes paid plans is the technology they rely on. The CookieYes web app is a SaaS that requires huge cloud computing, storage, and security facilities. (This is also why the CookieYes paid plans are based on scans and pageviews.)
Bonus points for their support: I reached out as a free user to clarify a few points in this section and got a detailed response in less than half a day. (High five to Mark!)
Iubenda has been quickly rising in the ranks of compliance with their all-in-one solution, currently sitting at 100K+ active installs and a 5/5 star rating on WP.
If you’re looking for that extra layer of comfort, iubenda has it, with attorney-level compliance solutions, all of which are fully WCAG Level AAA Compliant.
The free version of iubenda compliance solutions support the GDPR, LGPD, and US State Laws (CCPA/CPRA and VCDPA).
Content is auto-updated when laws change, so it’s always up-to-date. (Their built-in site scanner runs periodic scans on your site and alerts you if it detects something that should be added to your compliance documents.)
The free version comes with the following features:
You can get the free version of iubenda from the WordPress plugin repository.
The majority of iubenda’s standout features are found in their paid/pro versions, trusted by over 90,000 clients in more than 100 countries. These allow for multiple policies, sites, and languages, as well as Privacy Control & Cookie Solutions, a Terms & Conditions generator, a Consent Database, and more.
Privacy Control & Cookie Solutions helps you meet complex legal requirements at the click of a button, as well as create a fully customizable cookie banner.
Terms & Conditions offers powerful features like plug-and-go integrations for popular platforms and legislation monitoring. It’s customizable from hundreds of combinations, available in 10 languages, and capable of handling even the most complex, individual scenarios. Optimized for eCommerce, marketplace, SaaS, apps and more.
The Consent Database activates with one click to track, store, and manage consent and privacy preferences for each of your users all in one place, allowing you to easily upload proofs of consent and legal notices in PDF format.
They also offer an Internal Privacy Management, which documents all the data processing activity within your organization. To comply with privacy laws (particularly the GDPR), companies must record how they store and use the data they collect from their users.
Additional features in the paid plans are:
Pricing is offered as bundles with 3 tiers, based on number of license slots, with paid add-ons – Terms & Conditions, and Consent Database – available as extras.
Or, you can go with their Custom plans, with 3 tiers, broken out by options for Privacy & Cookie Policy, Privacy Controls & Cookie Solution, and Terms & Conditions.
Head over to iubenda’s website for a more in-depth read about their compliance offerings, or to purchase one of their plans.
TermsFeed doesn’t have a plugin; everything is generated directly from their website. But in no way does that detract from their fantastic functions.
The TermsFeed website has an abundance of compliance offerings, most of which they charge nothing for.
Since 2012, TermsFeed’s all-in-one compliance software has helped businesses get (and stay) compliant with the law, and the multitude of glowing, five-star reviews corroborates that.
Popular free features include:
They also offer these additional, not-as-common free tools:
All of the generators operate in the same, simple three-step: 1) Create a free account. 2) Choose what you need. 3) Download and integrate.
You answer a few quick questions, and your custom policy is ready in minutes, available to download in multiple file formats – which you can link to, edit, or update.
Or, download their handy privacy policy template (available in a variety of formats: HTML, DOCX, Google Docs), and write your own.
And the output isn’t limited to just websites; you can use it to create for mobile apps, eCommerce stores, third-party tools, SaaS, and even a Facebook page.
The TermsFeed website is well organized and chock full of helpful information, making an easy task out of finding what you need.
The majority of compliance agreements and policies on the TermsFeed website are essentially free. However, they do offer some optional, premium agreements with additional clauses to protect your business interests.
Paid items are available in two ways:
Both payment structures come with a 7-day refund policy, and 100% money-back guarantee.
As far as videos, walk-through processes, and documentation go, out of all the sites I reviewed in this article, they had the most. On YouTube alone, I counted close to 200 explainer videos (on their content specifically, and policy terminology in general), plus dozens of tutorials for using on a myriad of website types (Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Webflow, Shopify, etc) in addition to WordPress.
My final thoughts: the TermsFeed website is an embarrassment of riches, with compliance offerings galore, and little to no limitations on their use. Even the premium, paid-for options won’t break the bank.
Visit the TermsFeed website for tools, tips, and custom provisions, or their YouTube channel for a ton of valuable, well-produced info.
Complianz is another widely used compliance plugin, available for free on the WP repository: Cookie Consent – aka the Privacy Suite for WP. (They offer an additional one for Terms & Conditions as well.)
Active installations are at 600K (and climbing), and rated 5/5 stars.
Complianz is a GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent plugin that supports GDPR, ePrivacy, and more, with a conditional Cookie Notice and customized Cookie Policy, based on the results of their built-in Cookie Scan.
Free features include:
Complianz is one of the few WordPress native solutions, integrated with a wide variety of plugins and services. Once configured through the wizard, Complianz will work with most of your plugins and embedded content – right out of the box. Including our very own Forminator, Beehive, and the WPMU DEV Dashboard plugin (where you can integrate Complianz to allow site visitors to reject dashboard analytics statistics cookies).
Like iubenda, their policies are drafted by an IT Law Firm, and are WCAG Level AA and ADA Compliant. They closely follow the latest developments in ePrivacy regulation, the proposed Cookie Law for the EU, and other legislation worldwide, so you can be sure the content is spot-on, legally speaking.
Complianz also has premium, paid offerings for compliance, available from their own website.
Their website has documentation, and as a premium user, you get dedicated support from privacy professionals and developers who (and I quote) “don’t quit until a solution is reachedâ€.
Easily install the free Complianz Privacy Suite plugin from your WordPress dashboard. For the premium version, you’ll need to download from your account on Complianz.io, or use the link in your purchase confirmation, along with your license key.
In addition to the free version, paid plans are offered as 3 tiers, priced per number of sites (25, 5, 1). All include the full shebang of required legal documents, compliant in multiple regions, along with records of consent, data request processing, A/B testing and statistics, and detailed cookie descriptions.
While Termly does have a plugin on the WP.org repository, it’s outdated, and I don’t recommend using it. But that doesn’t make their compliance options any less capable or appealing.
Instead of the WP repo, head over to Termly’s website, where everything you need is easily accessible and kept fully up to date.
The Termly website comes with a host of features, ranging from a single policy to a full suite of compliance solutions.
Here’s a breakdown of Termly’s top features:
Termly’s free plan provides you with one legal policy, four edits, and 10K/month banner visitors, as well as their basic compliance tools, which are:
In addition to their free/basic plan, Termly offers 3 paid tiers, priced per website. The first two go by number of policies, policy edits, and banner visits, and are payable per month or annually. The third tier is a custom “contact us†option.
With 4.5 out of 5 star rating on Trustpilot, Termly is trusted and revered by thousands.
As you can see, responsible data management is not only good business practice, it’s also the law.
In today’s landscape where massive amounts of data, along with infinitely more ways to store and use it are the norm, diligence is required in its care and handling, especially if you operate an online business (your own, or as an Agency for clients).
Regardless of what kind of business it is, where it is located, or where your visitors reside, you are bound by certain legalities.
Ignorance is not a defense, so compliance can be the difference between being successfully safe or professionally sunk.
Beyond research and recommendations for meeting compliance requirements, WPMU DEV works hard to keep your websites and web development business operating at peak efficiency.
That includes our free products and services, and our premium membership offerings – a suite of pro plugins (protection, optimization, form creation, SEO, and more), five-star always-on support, and sleek all-in-one site management tool. Plus our fast, dedicated, best-value-in-the-biz Hosting.
If you’re not a member yet, you can start your 7-day, no obligation free trial today, and instantly catch up on what you’ve been missing.
Jetpack 11.9 was released this week with support for sharing posts to Mastodon. The new button allows readers to click an icon to launch a sharing window that will ask the user to enter the full URL of the Mastodon instance where they want to share the post.
Adding the URL will update the window to automatically insert the link for the post and share from your account.
Mastodon makes its usage numbers publicly accessible. As of March 8, 2023, the total user count is at 6,487,821, with 1,293,309 considered active users. Many WordPress community members who have moved over to Mastodon report having more quality interactions and higher engagement than on other social media platforms. This new sharing button gives your posts more opportunities to reach that audience. It can be enabled at Jetpack > Settings > Sharing in the admin.
The Jetpack team is also looking at adding Mastodon support to Publicize so users can have their posts automatically shared when they are published. Many people have requested this feature on GitHub and it may land in the plugin sometime in the future.
Jetpack 11.9 also updates the design of the Stats dashboard. In place of the dusty blue bar graphs and sections with referrers and top pages and posts, the updated design is now more in line with Jetpack’s green branding. It features 7-day highlights at the top and the trends shown are in comparison to the previous seven days. The UI is more modern than the previous version and provides a more mobile-friendly experience. It is enabled by default but can be disabled in the Settings for those who prefer the traditional Stats design.
Also included in version 11.9 is a new “Sync Fields” style option in the Forms block that allows users to ensure fields maintain the same style as the blocks are edited.
This release includes more than a dozen bug fixes and compatibility updates. Check out the changelog for all the details on the Development tab on the plugin’s WordPress.org page.
WP Engine is beta testing its new Pattern Manager plugin for creating and maintaining patterns. The plugin is intended for WordPress professionals – developers, agencies, and freelancers, who could benefit from having an interface and system for pattern management.
“There are some plugins out there that provide an interface for creating patterns on a production site, but this is not built for that,” WP Engine Principal Engineer Mike McAlister said. “This is meant to slide into a dev workflow where you’re creating, editing, managing patterns for a client, for release in a theme, etc.”
Plugins like Build & Control Block Patterns (2k active installs) and MyWP Block Pattern (200 active installs) allow users to build block patterns from the admin instead of writing code for them. They offer features like saving page content made with blocks into a pattern, unregistering block patterns, creating custom pattern categories, and more.
After taking WP Engine’s Pattern Manager for a test run, it’s clear that the emphasis in this plugin is going to be more on pattern organization than on the builder aspect. After activating the plugin, clicking on the Patterns screen takes you to a catalogue of all the existing patterns, based on the site’s active theme. They are organized by category and are also searchable.
I installed the plugin alongside a theme with more than 30 block patterns included to get a better feel for how it works. From the main pattern management screen users can edit, duplicate, and delete existing patterns. Clicking through to edit a pattern lets users add their own pattern categories, keywords, extended description, designate which post types the pattern shows up in, and optionally hide the pattern from the inserter.
Pattern creation happens on its own dedicated screen, which works just like the block editor but with the pattern-specific settings in the sidebar. Once a pattern is saved, it will appear with the others on the pattern management screen. The pattern is attached to the theme, so users should understand that they will not have access to their custom patterns if they activate a different theme.
Users might be curious about creating patterns directly in the block editor. After putting some blocks together in an artful arrangement, it might be convenient to be able to save them as a new pattern for the theme. McAlister said this is not currently possible but it is under consideration.
“Right now, pattern creation is limited to the Pattern Manager UI, where we can do some interesting and powerful things under the hood,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t one day be able to do it inline, but in terms of exploring this concept as a workflow enhancement, we’ve limited it to a specific screen.”
After launching the beta, web designer Wolfgang Stefani asked on Twitter if it is possible to update patterns globally using the plugin.
“No, not yet,” McAlister responded. “It’s not a shortcoming of the plugin, rather how WP treats patterns right now. However, this will be possible with patterns soon, probably sometime this year.”
Although there are many additional feature requests that might benefit developers and designers’ workflows, the plugin’s creators are launching the beta to test the waters and see how users fare with this initial set of features.
“Certainly parts of this workflow are opinionated, based on how we’re building patterns, but we’re doing this beta to understand how other folks are building,” McAlister said. “We’re open to any and all feedback to improve the overall workflow.”
In a recent post titled “Patterns are gonna be a game changer for WordPress,” McAlister outlined his vision for how pattern functionality could be expanded in WordPress.
What if, for starters, patterns were a treated more like intelligent components? What if instead of being treated as just a collection of blocks, patterns were an entity that WordPress could use as a conduit to do more advanced site building?
McAlister explored a few ideas, such as making patterns more like template parts, globally synced and editable, adding pattern locking, and adding the ability to build style variations for patterns. The future is wide open for patterns to become far more useful than they currently are today, and third-party developers are exploring how they can extend this feature that has become so indispensable to building pages with WordPress.
WP Engine’s Pattern Manager fits in nicely into the admin interface, almost like a natural part of core, but the top-level menu for Patterns seems too prominent and should be relocated under Appearance. After testing the plugin, I can see how it could become a valuable tool for managing pattern visibility for clients and speeding up page building by offering a more organized system for patterns. The CMS use case is strong here. Agencies that build the same kinds of sites over and over again could benefit from using this tool to quickly add and duplicate custom block patterns and restrict those that don’t make sense in certain parts of a client-managed site.
During the live product demo for WordPress 6.2, a viewer asked if core will be adding more robust pattern management capabilities in the future à la WP Engine’s Pattern Manager plugin. The response was that this is a possibility for the future but is not currently a strong priority.
In the meantime, WP Engine plans to release the plugin for free on WordPress.org after testing with users and updating it based on feedback.
“We have no plans of monetizing,” McAlister said. “Right now, we’re more interested in digging into the developer workflow and finding unique solutions we can offer to folks who are digging into these modern WordPress tools.”
If you want to get in on the beta program, you can sign up to get access to a zip file of the plugin. Your feedback may be incorporated into future versions of the plugin that will eventually land on WordPress.org.
