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Author Profile: Jeff Starr

How to Prevent Changes to Plugins, Themes, and WordPress Core Files

How to Prevent Changes to Plugins, Themes, and WordPress Core Files

This is a common question I get from folks in the WordPress community. How can I “lock things down” and prevent any changes to plugins, themes, and WordPress core files. For example, how to prevent any themes and/or plugins from being updated or deleted, and how to prevent any new plugins from being installed. This is useful for certain projects where it’s necessary to lock a website to a static version. Fortunately, WordPress makes this super easy with a couple of PHP constants. Let’s take a quick look..

Round Up: 18 Free Plugins to Help Troubleshoot and Debug WordPress

Round Up: 18 Free Plugins to Help Troubleshoot and Debug WordPress

I’ve written numerous tutorials explaining how to troubleshoot WordPress, plugins, email, and more. When investigating issues, diagnosing problems, and hunting bugs, troubleshooting is a critical core skill for any web developer. To help readers level up their tool belt, here’s a quick round-up of free plugins to help troubleshoot any of your WordPress projects.

Spring Sale!

🌻 Save 30% on our WordPress books with coupon code SPRING2023. Combine discount with any COMBO deals and save up to 50% on books. Shop books »

🌻 Bonus! Code SPRING2023 also good for 25% off all pro WordPress plugins, including BBQ Pro, Blackhole Pro, USP Pro, SAC Pro, and more. Shop plugins »

Discount code expires June 26th, 2023

The Difference Between Taxonomies, Categories, and Tags (Oh My!)

The Difference Between Taxonomies, Categories, and Tags (Oh My!)

A common question for new WordPress users is, “what’s the difference between categories and tags?” Like everyone knows what a “category” is, but the idea of “tags” can seem very similar. And then you throw in related WordPress concepts like “taxonomy”, and things can get confusing very quickly. But no worries, it’s really not that complicated. Let’s break it down..

Stay Logged in to WordPress

Stay Logged in to WordPress

I work from home so can afford to leave tabs open for each of my WordPress sites. That way I can jump on anytime and update or add new content very quickly. The problem I kept running into is that WordPress automatically logs out users after 48 hours. Which means I have to log back in every day even when it’s not necessary. So I needed a way to stay logged in to WordPress indefinitely. Fortunately WordPress is very flexible and easy to customize, and the login duration can be changed via several different methods.

Subscribers: Update Your Feed URLs

To our feed subscribers. In case you haven’t heard. Feedburner is dead man walking. As a result, we changed our RSS and Atom feed URLs to host them directly at DigWP.com. So if you want to continue getting our awesome WP-related content delivered to your feed reader, take a moment to update your feed URLs. Our new (and permanent) feed URLs:

Visit the DigWP Archives for more feed options.

How to Disable Embeds for Any Specific URLs

How to Disable Embeds for Any Specific URLs

Quick tip: how to disable embeds for any URL(s). The other day I was adding URLs to a draft post in WordPress. Some of the URLs were for Twitter tweets. Checking a preview of the post on the front end, I was surprised that WordPress had automatically embedded the actual tweet in place of the URL. After a few minutes searching for a way to disable the automatic embedded tweet, I remembered about WordPress oEmbed (now referred to as Embeds), which I’ve actually written about in several tutorials. Turns out the solution is dead simple.

How to Add Custom Code to WordPress

How to Add Custom Code to WordPress

There are many books and tutorials that share useful code snippets for WordPress. For example, you can find hundreds of custom functions right here at DigWP.com. You can also find them in my WordPress books, tutorials, and code snippets. For many code snippets and custom functions, the usage instructions will say something like:

Migrating Book Accounts

Heads up! We’re migrating all book accounts to the new bookstore at Perishable Press Books. This will make it easier to manage everything under one roof. To transfer your account to the new site, send a quick email and let us know 1) the site/URL where you purchased the book (e.g., DigWP.com), and 2) your registered username or email address. Thank you!

New Plugin: Simple Download Counter

Super pumped to announce two new plugins: Simple Download Counter and Simple Login Notification. The first is a lightweight yet powerful way to manage and count downloads. The second is a tiny plugin (only 20 KB!) that sends an email alert whenever an admin-level user logs in. Both of these plugins are lightweight, fast, 100% FREE and open source :)

New Plugin! Simple Ajax Chat Pro 😎

Launching my latest WordPress plugin: SAC Pro! Unlimited chat forms with tons of great features and no 3rd-party service required (most/all other chat plugins require 3rd-party service). Read the official launch post and get SAC Pro »

Database Tip: Clean Up User-Agent Data

Database Tip: Clean Up User-Agent Data

I just finished up my latest book, Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress. And it’s packed with over 300 time-saving code snippets for managing and optimizing your WordPress database. For example, one of the recipes from the book shows how to delete unwanted user-agent data from the WP comments table. This is an easy optimization step that can help to free up some precious disk space.

WPCodeBox – Code Snippets Done Right

Discovered an awesome code snippets plugin called WPCodeBox. There are plenty of code-snippet plugins out there, but this one goes above and beyond with features like cloud-based storage, a growing snippets repository, and a condition builder to control the location and timing of any code snippets. Check it out!

New Book! Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress

Excited to launch my new book: Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress. Optimize and manage your WordPress database. Complete chapter on optimizing performance. Over 300 time-saving recipes. Level up your database skills!

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