WP Builds

Today we have a chat with Brian Jackson from Kinsta. Kinsta are a managed WordPress hosting company who have grow rapidly since their inception in 2013. When they started managed WordPress hosting was not the giant business that it was today. In those days we were still opting for shared hosting and VPS hosting. But with the advent of cloud platforms such as Amazon's AWS and Google Cloud, there came an opportunity for people with the skills to leverage those platforms and repurpose them as WordPress specific hosting solutions. Find out how Kinsta works and see if they are a good fit for your next WordPress project.

Today we have a chat with Brian Jackson from Kinsta. Kinsta are a managed WordPress hosting company who have grow rapidly since their inception in 2013. When they started managed WordPress hosting was not the giant business that it was today. In those days we were still opting for shared hosting and VPS hosting. But with the advent of cloud platforms such as Amazon's AWS and Google Cloud, there came an opportunity for people with the skills to leverage those platforms and repurpose them as WordPress specific hosting solutions. Find out how Kinsta works and see if they are a good fit for your next WordPress project.

This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 7th October 2019

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 7th October 2019:

WordPress Core

WordPress 5.3 Beta 3

WordPress 5.3 Improves Large Image Handling

WordPress.org Bumps PHP Maximum for Plugin Directory to Version 7.2

Community

MachoThemes, Modula Parent Company, Acquires Three Gallery Plugins

U.S. Supreme Court Denies Domino’s Appeal to Determine Whether Websites Must Be Accessible

Plugins / Themes

Brizy Design Kit 2.0

Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder – Design User Registration Form like Never Before!

Ultimate Addons for Elementor – Build User Registration Forms Easily

Astra 2.1 is Out with Cleaner HTML and Faster Load Time

Visual Composer Website Builder in the WP repo

Deals from this week

WP Project Manager Pro – lifetime for $49

weForms – lifetime for $49

WP User Frontend Pro – lifetime for $49

Security

Website Malware Removal Guarantee – Why Insure Your Websites?

Clever New DDoS Attack Gets a Lot of Bang for a Hacker’s Buck

Important iThemes Sync Vulnerability Patched

WP Builds

Marketing funnels don’t exist!

25% off mintWP from Chris Hughes – code WPBUILDS

Jobs

None again, perhaps I’ll just abandon this after all!?!

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

AI-Powered Web Accessibility Automatic. Simple. Affordable.

Mars Curiosity Rover finds evidence of an ancient oasis on Mars

Few convinced by Apple’s case for Hong Kong app removal

ExpressionEngine Under New Ownership, Will Remain Open Source for Now

New Better Proposals Templates

Google Chrome Announces Rollout Plan for Blocking Mixed Content Beginning January 2020

This discussion is about marketing, and it has a very click-bait title! It’s probably safe to say that we are not experts in marketing and certainly not marketing funnels. Nevertheless we thought we would chat about this and why we might need to get better a digital marketing for ourselves and clients and where WordPress could help with that. What's different about this discussion is that really is an introduction to a series of discussions we will have based on a book called Watertight Marketing by Bryony Thomas. Listen to this episode to find out more...

This discussion is about marketing, and it has a very click-bait title! It’s probably safe to say that we are not experts in marketing and certainly not marketing funnels. Nevertheless we thought we would chat about this and why we might need to get better a digital marketing for ourselves and clients and where WordPress could help with that. What's different about this discussion is that really is an introduction to a series of discussions we will have based on a book called Watertight Marketing by Bryony Thomas. Listen to this episode to find out more...

This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 30th September 2019

This weeks WordPress news – Covering The Week Commencing 30th September 2019:

WordPress Core

WordPress 5.3 Beta 2

Preparing Themes For WordPress 5.3

Date/Time component improvements in WordPress 5.3

Community

WordCamp US tickets on sale

Brian Gardner Steps Down From StudioPress and here

WordPress Theme Review Team Brings Back Review Shindigs

First Look at PHP 7.4 for WordPress Developers

Matt Mullenweg and David Heinemeier Hansson Discuss WordPress Market Share, Monopolies, and Power in Open Source Communities

Kinsta – Automatic MySQL Database Optimizations, Self-Healing PHP, GCP Firewall and More Disk Space (SSD Storage) on All Plans

Gutenberg Tips

Plugins / Themes

Here Comes Hummingbird 2.1 With Compressed Caching & Cookies

BuddyPress 5.0 Introduces BP REST API, Paving the Way for Blocks

Automattic Has Discontinued Active Development on Edit Flow Plugin

SmartSlider3 – New template – Portfolio Categories

Deals from this week

Piotnet Addons For Elementor

Yay Images – $59 for 1,000 images

Security

WordPress “Theme Editor” Plugin: Multiple Vulnerabilities

WordPress Vulnerability Roundup: September 2019, Part 2

A New Wave of Buggy WordPress Infections

WP Builds

Spinning up a WordPress optimised server in minutes with Spinup WP

LIVE – UX and UI audit with Piccia Neri WP

Jobs

Nothing this week, but please let me know if you have a vacancy!

Not WordPress, but useful anyway…

Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.

Spotify now lets you add podcasts to playlists

Google Announces New Ways to Hide Personal Activity, Including Incognito Mode in Maps

This is a little bit different. Today we talk to Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains about Spinup WP their new service which aims to make it trivially simple to get your WordPress website up and running on a cloud hosting provider - in fact just about anywhere. You login to their platform, fill out a few form fields and then go and grab a coffee. By the time that you're done your WordPress optimised server will be ready and just waiting to get WordPress installed on it. This all sounds so simple, but there is a very large amount of heavy lifting going on in the background, heavy lifting that you'd have to learn and do your self. If you've ever wanted to install WordPress on a cloud provider, then check this podcast out...

Interview – Spinning up a WordPress optimised server in minutes with Spinup WP

Today we chat with Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains. Delicious Brains are a team of eight full timers who do nothing but WordPress. They have a bunch of products that I’m sure you’ve heard of, such as WP Migrate DB Pro, WP Offload Media and WP Offload SES, but we’re not here today to talk about those, even though we really could have done a podcast on each product!

Today we’re talking most of the time about Spinup WP, a new way of hosting your website.

When we recorded this podcast, which was a little ago now, this product was in beta, but it seems that this label has now been dropped. It might be that some of the other fine details have changed a bit too, but I doubt it as what we talk about is a very high level discussion about the platform, and it’s unlikely that any of that will have altered significantly.

Spinup WP allows you to quickly spin up a server. This is a WordPress specific server with a bespoke server admin panel. You get great performance because of full page caching, and a while raft of other features, and the while process only takes about ten minutes!

There are so many hosting options available to WordPress professionals that I sometimes think that it’s hard to keep up. Pity those who are just looking to launch their own website and have zero interest or background in WordPress hosting! There’s shared hosting, VPS, dedicated, managed WordPress hosting and all of the cloud service that have popped up lately.

Each of these options have a range of benefits and drawbacks. Usually this revolves around a trade off of money v’s customisation. I think that it is also true to say that it’s quite possible to be somewhat mislead. Things like… unlimited disk space, 100% uptime. We all know that this is simply not possible and yet sometimes the price is just so tempting!

More recently we’ve seen a whole range of companies start to leverage the enormous infrastructure that companies like Amazon, Google and Digital Ocean have. They build their service on top of these other highly available platforms and build their own applications so that you don’t have to learn the incredibly complex ins and outs they they can require.

Spinup WP enables you to hook up to any service that offers you some hard disk space and has SSH available. It’s completely platform agnostic and will connect to pretty much any modern cloud hosting platform and take you through the pain of setting up a WordPress optimised server.

As of the recording of this podcast Spinup WP has a special relationship with Digital Ocean. You can sign up with Spinup WP and they will automate all-the-things if you choose to go the Digital Ocean route. You won’t need to configure anything at all. All other providers will require you to sign up with their platform first, then copy / paste the SSH keys over to Spinup WP. Hardly a big deal, but a tiny bit more work. Brad does say that they have plans to roll the ‘easy’ version of their platform to other cloud providers in due course, so you might want to go and check out what’s what on their website.

Brad is pretty clear that if you have literally zero background in working with technology (and no interest in learning) then Spinup WP might not be for you. But… fear not… if you’re a willing learner and have played with code a bit in past and like problem solving, then this is not going to be out of bounds for you! Phew! They have plenty of guidance within the app as well as a bunch of WordPress hosting blog posts which will help you if you are worried about your technical capabilities.

So the idea is that you can get a server and WordPress site up and running in the time that it takes to make and (not quite) finish a coffee. Most of that time is literally spent waiting! Brad says that the w