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/
WordPress v3.9 in Beta, released soon
WordPress v3.9 is due to be released in April, and we’re bringing you a preview of the improvements and changes coming your way very soon. It includes a few major updates to the editor and media library, as well as the Customizer. Details on the improvements to the admin dashboard include: Adding an updated TinyMCE, the software powering the visual editor, to the latest version. Be on the lookout for cleaner markup. Also, new paste handling — if you paste in a block of text…
Security and Spam Announcements
We’ve been working hard on different service areas to improve security, prevent spam, upgrade our systems, and offer more value to our customers. Here’s a summary of all the recent efforts for you to review. Secure Control Panel Access To improve security, our hosting Control Panel now forces you to use encrypted SSL for all visits, at https://cp.yourserver.net/ and all bookmarks with the old unencrypted URL will redirect to the new encrypted URL. Spam Prevention Please update your scripts and WordPress installations (use http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smtp/) to use an…
Care to share the Press Wizards love?
We’ve always loved the testimonials received from customers via email. Now, we’re using a new platform that lets us receive video testimonials, using either a web site or an iPhone app, making it quick and easy, and the best part is, we get to see your smiling faces! We’d love to see and hear from our customers. Care to share your love? Follow the link below to post your testimonial and we’ll credit your account $10, and enter you in a giveaway for a year…
WordPress 3.7 adds auto-update capability
Maintaining the WordPress core updates just became a little easier, thanks to the latest version of WordPress, v3.7, released October 24th. It adds quite a bit of functionality under the hood, most you won’t notice, but one big feature is automatic minor updates. While that makes keeping the core platform up-to-date with the latest security and bug fix updates (i.e. going from 3.7 to 3.7.1), it also adds the option for auto-updating plugins and themes, which may make maintenance tons easier, as plugins and themes can…
Requesting Your Review
To our valued customers, We’re listed on quite a few web sites, but there’s one that does a good job of categorizing us well, and we’d like to ask you to give Web Wizards a review on the site to boost our exposure in the WordPress Hosting category… simply click this link, http://www.serchen.com/company/web-wizards/ and then click Review. You can log in using Facebook, or choose to remain anonymous. We’d appreciate your help in making us look good! For everyone that leaves a review, we’ll add a $5…
Announcing the WordPress Featured Images in RSS plugin
I’m excited to announce the new WordPress Featured Images In RSS plugin. It adds a site’s blog post featured images to the RSS feed of the site, with options for image size and positioning. I’ve seen lots of blog posts cover how to add this functionality to a theme by editing the theme’s functions file and manually adding the code (including one I wrote for Fandom Marketing), but 99% of the folks I talk to don’t understand how to do that. So, this plugin was born….