Cloudflare data leak Cloudbleed and what it means to you
Your website is most likely not affected We learned of the Cloudflare data leak (dubbed “Cloudbleed”) late last night, and have dug into the issue – long story short, I think it’s a non-issue for almost all sites at this point. Only every 1 in 3 million requests were affected, across a few thousand sites that run through Cloudflare, with network data being output on a few dozen sites that were indexed and cached by search engines. “With the help of Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others, we…
W3 Total Cache v0.9.5 Requires PHP v5.3+ and White-Screen Fix Options
We manage a ton of client sites at Press Wizards, and we’re seeing some serious issues W3 Total Cache’s latest update, v 0.9.5, recently released mainly because of a Cross-Site-Scripting exploit. They clearly didn’t do a ton of testing first, as it’s breaking thousands of websites, and I wanted to summarize the issues and how to fix them. Requires PHPv5.3+ Be aware that v0.9.5 currently now REQUIRES PHP v5.3 or greater. It will cause a white screen if your site is still using PHP v5.2 (or…
WordPress 4.5 New Features and Capabilities
WordPress 4.5 is being released very soon, and there are some interesting end-user and developer enhancements included. Get familiar with the changes and new features so you’re prepared and aware of what to look for in this latest released of WordPress. The information below comes from the WordPress.org field guide, edited for end-user summary review, meaning references to developer-focused specifics have been removed. JavaScript! and CSS! Multiple external libraries have been updated (with the two that could require attention being Backbone and Underscore). Term Edit Page!…
Boost website performance, eliminate server load, using Cloudflare’s Page Rules
Many website owners use the amazing and free Cloudflare CDN (content delivery network), which caches static files (images, javascript, CSS) in all 28 data centers around the world, while also providing a layer of security and traffic scanning/blocking. The result is faster load times for your web site, and lessened possibility of a hacked or attacked website. Most website owners also enable server-side caching, with WordPress sites usually using W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Hyper Cache, or other popular plugins. These plugins lessen the server load…
Benefits and warnings with using the new Universal Analytics in Google Analytics by Yoast v5.0
Google Analytics by Yoast v5 was a major rewrite, and had some issues that affected all sites, but was quickly patched throughout the day, ending with v5.0.5 being automatically pushed out to all sites that haven’t turned off automatic minor updates. Let’s review the updates in Google Analytics now that we’ve had a few days to play with it on a number of live sites that we manage for customers. Google Analytics by Yoast v5 Enhancements For Google Analytics by Yoast, the v5 update includes these new…
Welcome to Press Wizards
It’s been over 10 years since our last rebrand, and so it’s about time, and WordPress is what we’ve been developing with over the last few years, so it makes sense to promote a WordPress focus in our brand. We’ve been Web Wizards since 1997, we briefly added a WP to become WP Web Wizards, but that was a mouthful and we want a simple, powerful brand. So now, we’re Press Wizards, with a new matching .com domain (check out https://presswizards.com), to emphasize our WordPress focus. Nothing will change regarding…
Subtle enhancements to WordPress v4.0 they didn’t talk about
While WordPress v4.0 is just another update number after 3.9 and before 4.1, it has some new things that make it more polished than ever, with quite a few subtle enhancements they didn’t mention in their release post. It was named “Benny” in honor of jazz clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman. Let’s review everything below. WordPress 4.0 major improvements Here’s the major changes in WordPress 4.0: The Media Library was updated to display your uploaded files in a nice grid, with a new details preview making viewing…
Proactive update for Contact Form DB WordPress plugin to fix whitescreen issue
We noticed today that quite a few websites were coming up with white screens all of the sudden, due to an issue with the Contact Form DB WordPress plugin. It seems there was a version released that had a fatal error in it, and was installed if automatic updates for plugins was enabled by a plugin like Advanced Automatic Updates. We’ve updated the plugin files to the latest fixed version for any customer that had the plugin installed on their site(s). These types of issues…
Improved Outgoing Email Delivery
We’re happy to announce we’ve improved outgoing email delivery from all our servers for everyone. Prior to this weekend, our email servers would accept external email for your domains, or from your web site contact forms, and based on your email address settings, would do basic scans for spam and virus, then store it in your mailbox, or forward it to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or other outside email address you specified. The spam filtering is simple keyword scanning and score based (more spammy…
Web Wizards is not affected by #Heartbleed SSL Encryption Bug
I’m pleased to announce that Web Wizards and all our customer web sites are not affected by the Heartbleed SSL encryption bug, we never ran the affected version of the OpenSSL library that included the data leak bug. For more details on Heartbleed and what it is, read this article: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/04/critical-crypto-bug-in-openssl-opens-two-thirds-of-the-web-to-eavesdropping/ For a quick summary of how the Heartbleed bug works, view this xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/1354/