WordPress Archives

June 28, 2017 at 11:14 amJune 28, 2017 at 11:14 am

Keyy Two Factor Authentication: The Full Review

I still remember the excitement that I felt when I found out about Clef, the no-longer-available two factor authentication app that helped me get rid of the password that I use to login to News47ell’s admin dashboard. It was magical, but sadly, the excitement didn’t last for too long. Clef shut down and the team moved to join Twilio to work on Authy.

I was left with the same old, boring login method for my site.

Today, I get to be excited again thanks to the great people over at UpdraftPlus because they released their promised app they claim is going to be the heir of Clef.

Keyy two factor authentication, a brand new WordPress plugin, iOS & Android app by the developers of the popular WordPress backup plugin UpdraftPlus, is going to bring back the good old days of not having to enter that hard to remember password¹every time I want to login to my admin dashboard.

Let’s dive right into my Keyy two factor authentication Review

May 25, 2017 at 8:51 pm

UpdraftPlus Working on a Clef Alternative Called Keyy

by Ahmad Al Maaz

The people over at UpdraftPlus have been hard at work making a Clef alternative. For those of you who don’t know what Clef is, it was one of the best, coolest and most innovative two-factor authentication apps that I have ever seen in my life.

With its blue signature bar-code, Clef managed to become the favorite two-factor authentication app amongst many people in the WordPress community because of the following reasons:

Easy to pair your WordPress site with your Clef account using your phone’s camera.
Easy to log in using your camera by scanning their uniquely designed barcode.
Ability to hide login form, disable passwords and make Clef the only way to log in.
Set up timed sessions.
Sign out of your WordPress site from the app.

Now that it’s gone, people are looking for an alternative. There’s one company out there that dared to make a Clef alternative and that company is called UpdraftPlus.

So let’s take a look, who are they? What do they do? And how are they going to make a Clef alternative that is worth using?

December 11, 2016 at 7:54 pmDecember 27, 2016 at 7:54 pm

How to Create Site Specific WordPress Plugin

by Ahmad Al Maaz

I‘ve been silently doing a lot of minor and medium size changes to News47ell since the redesign. With those changes, I had to find a way to keep my code as organized as possible so that I can understand it when I go back to it later along the road. Because I use WordPress, I decided to convert all my code into Site Specific WordPress Plugin.

Each plugin does a specific thing on the site and it includes a PHP file, JS file & CSS file. They are all served from my server over at Lightning Base so I can reduce the number of HTTP requests required to render the page.

October 1, 2016 at 7:49 pmJune 18, 2017 at 7:49 pm

How to Implement Prism Syntax Highlighter into WordPress

by Ahmad Al Maaz

If you want to display code blocks on your WordPress site in a beautiful and unique way then you arrived at the right place because in this tutorial I will teach you how to implement Prism syntax highlighter into WordPress.

As a regular CSS-Tricks reader, I’ve always wondered how Chris display code blocks in his site in this unique way. A bit of research and I discovered that he uses PrismJS.

August 10, 2016 at 10:23 pmMay 23, 2017 at 10:23 pm

How to Add Custom CSS to WordPress

by Ahmad Al Maaz

Today I will tell you How to Add Custom CSS to WordPress. Something I had to learn while redesigning this site. And I will tell you where you need to add your shiny new customs CSS.

WordPress themes already come with style.css file which you can add extra CSS to and change the old one, but when the theme receive an update, all the changes will be lost. You can use a child theme’s style.css file and do @import but you shouldn’t, and you need to avoid it.

How to Add Custom CSS to WordPress

Jetpack have a Custom CSS module which comes with code revision, it’s simple and works well. And last but not least, there’s Tom Usborne’s Simple CSS Plugin that include CSS editor in the Customizer so you can live preview your changes and Metabox for page/post specific CSS.
But I wanted more, I was really thirsty for a plugin with more features.

So I put my backpack and started my journey trying to find the perfect plugin in the land of repo, a land so far away, with a population of 46,074 plugins.

After spending days in this land, trying plugin after another, I finally found the perfect one, it has the basic feature, a place for your Custom CSS code, and a ton of extra features that you never think you need until you see them and try them yourself.

Here’s my Simple Custom CSS and JS Review:

April 19, 2016 at 8:21 pmAugust 16, 2016 at 8:21 pm

How to move WordPress media library to new host

by Ahmad Al Maaz

I’ve recently talked about how I moved this site to Lightning Base. In the process of moving, I was worried about one thing only: How am I going to move WordPress media library to new host?

I’ve always been interested in trying the free migration offer from hosting companies but when I stop for a moment to think about the requirements, I quickly cancel the idea from my head because it involves giving my site credentials to a stranger so they can access my site.

One popular way to move WordPress media library to new host is by using the official WordPress Importer Plugin but it has a tiny issue for XML files with a lot of media files. It simply doesn’t work.
Taking a look at the reviews, you will see that many people get frustrated when they try to use the plugin to import their media files because when you try, the request gets timed out due to the amount of text that the server needs to go through, parse and process.

A lot of people suggest splitting the XML into multiple files, but even that didn’t work. I got duplicate media files and I had to start from the beginning.

I did a bit of research and came across a great WordPress plugin that does only one thing. It imports your media files.

May 23, 2015 at 8:00 pmMay 2, 2016 at 8:00 pm

Microsoft OneNote Publisher WordPress Plugin Review

by Ahmad Al Maaz

This might sound weird, but I’m writing this article in OneNote to test out the newly released Microsoft OneNote Publisher WordPress Plugin, which allow you to import your notes to WordPress and then publish them.

I want to see if my format will still look the same, and if it’s easy to use, and If it actually work.

Let’s see how it will go

April 16, 2015 at 10:19 amApril 4, 2017 at 10:19 am

Incapsula Review: Block Semalt and Protect WordPress Login Page

by Ahmad Al Maaz

I’ve been a CloudFlare user since 11/11/13, the reason why I chose them as my CDN provider was because of all the positive reviews that I kept reading about them.

What CloudFlare supposed to do is to protect your site from malicious attacks and make it faster by caching it’s content, but I honestly didn’t see any changes what so ever, but I kept it installed because they do have one great thing that I use which is their DNS management, it’s really easy to use and control, but other than that, CloudFlare felt like just a service that my traffic go through with no purpose.

March 30, 2015 at 5:45 pmMay 31, 2017 at 5:45 pm

Swiftype Review: WordPress Search Plugin

by Ahmad Al Maaz

A lot of people agree on one thing when it comes to the built-in search in WordPress, they all say that it sucks!.

Here’s what Yoast has to say about it:

WordPress default search kinda sucks. It sorts the results by date, newest first and interface wise. It doesn’t have any of the cool things we’re used to when we search in (for instance) Google.

I agree with him. Yoast goes on to talk about how to customize WordPress search by doing a bit of coding and installing a couple of plugins.

But, what if I told you that you can do everything is his article with one plugin?
Yes, only one plugin. One service. Endless options.

March 7, 2015 at 7:13 pmMay 2, 2016 at 7:13 pm

Authy Two Factor Authentication for WordPress Plugin Review

by Ahmad Al Maaz

Keeping your site secure is a very important thing to do because you don’t want anyone to just get an access to your site and mess things up for you that you’ve built over the years.

There’s many ways to do that, you can change the permalink to your login page, choose a strong password, delete the default “Admin” user, Password Protect wp-login.php and one of my favorite is to add Two Factor Authentication.