The post Plugins discontinued appeared first on a-idea studio.

The reason behind this decision is that we simply don’t have the time for it. We had extensive number of client projects in the past 1 year and expect to have even more of them in the next few years.

So plugin development has become a very low priority for a-idea studio. Actually I have been oscillationg over whether to really cancel the development of these plugins or only put them on hold for a while…

Well, they have been put on hold for more than 6 months now and I still didn’t have the time to add a line of code to them. So decided to shut down our plugin-dev projects.

I am actively using it, what kind of fate awaits me then?

Well, you can use them as long as you’d like to and as long as they are compatible with your WordPress version.

The documentations for all 3 plugins will be available on this site for a while into the future. But once I realize there is no-one using them, I’ll just remove them as that content won’t be relevant any longer.

Hey, I am a developer and love your plugins, can I take over the development?

Absolutely. And I would be more than happy if someone continued the journey. It would mean that all the hard work I’ve put into them won’t be just trashed.

In this case please drop me a message using our contact page.

For all the existing users of the plugins – thank you for your support so far. It is a bit sad day for me too, but I have some more important things to do at the moment, so had to make this hard decision.

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The post News: site update and plugin updates appeared first on a-idea studio.

Bye, bye, Adriatica!

After a long idle period we decided to dump our non-released theme, Adriatica. It was a simple business decision. It would have needed too much efforts to make it good enough while the competition on the market is tough and our time is very limited.

At least, we’ll have more time to focus on our plugins from now.

Site update

We have rebuilt the a-idea site from the basics. While the changes are small in the front end, there had been lot of changes in the back end. The change was necessary as the old version was running on Adriatica, so we had no choice but to move away from our discontinued theme.

However, we made the new site’s look very similar to the old one – with some fine-tuning. So the branding and the look&feel is the same here as before…

Plugin updates

All our plugins got a new update today. For a-folio and a-staff plugins this was a backend update only: we have updated the only TPL Framework that works behind these plugins.

WP Slide-up box goes a-boxes

For our oldest plugin, WP Slide-up box it was a big change. First of all, the plugin’s name was changed to a-boxes to better fit into our plugin branding line. However, we will use the old and the new names beside each other for a while to make the transition easier.

The Shortcode Generator has got a preview mode. So now you can see the changes right inside the Shortcode Generator screen, without leaving wp-admin.

The new Shortcode Generator with the visual Preview

Another bigger improvement is that now you can use default values for the shortcodes, making it easier to create similar sliding boxes using a-boxes 1.0. For the full list of new features and bugfixes, please have a look at the plugin’s changelog.

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The post We are on Codeable! appeared first on a-idea studio.

Website Update

One big thing that we’ve completed in the past few weeks was a major update to our website. While in the front end the changes may look small, we’ve completely rebuilt its backend, creating a single site from our previous multisite installation…

However, we kept all the URLs the same where it was possible, so if you linked to our site before, it probably still works.

I became a Codeable Expert last month

My Codeable WordPress Expert Certificate

It’s a very huge step forward in the life of our studio, because from now on we’ll have the chance to work with some very good clients in the future.

What is Codeable?

Codeable is a network of individual WordPress Developers and clients (website owners, agencies, etc.) who need a WordPress job done in the best possible quality. You may say it’s just another outsourcing network, but I can tell you, it’s different.

While on other outsourcing networks developers are bidding for projects they don’t even understand correctly, leading to reckless price-wars, Codeable uses a completely different approach. Let’s see why it is different:

• Only 2-3% of the applicants are granted the Codeable Expert status. Yes, I had to go through their rigorous entry exams, and it wasn’t an easy ride. But I am now inside, you can find my profile on the Codeable.io site.
• Clients and Developers can discuss the project before it starts. For example, on Upwork the biggest disadvantage was that I wasn’t able to talk to the client before the project started, which is nonsense. How would I know how much I had to estimate when the brief is not crystal-clear? On Codeable we have plenty of possibilities to discuss the project before we apply for it. Furthermore, we are not allowed to apply for anything we are not 100% sure we can do.
• One of the best customer supports I’ve ever met.
• Codeable.io is exclusively for WordPress projects. Better focus and everybody is speaking the same language.
• Almost 99% of the projects are rated 5/5. Maybe this number is the result of the strict pre-selection of WordPress Experts.
• Communication, communication and communication: these are 3 fields every expert on Codeable is required to be professional in

Can I hire you there for your next project?

Of course, you can! I advise you to have a look around the Codeable.io site first and decide if it’s for you. You can post a project directly for me on Codeable if you’d like to – using this link: Hire Ervin on Codeable. I am happy to help you.

In case of any questions, please ask me in a comment below.

UPDATE!

Here is a new, more comprehensive article on what Codeable is, who it is for and how to use it.

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The post How we made the switch to HTTPS on a WordPress Multisite appeared first on a-idea studio.

In this article I will unveil the truth about 3 things:

1. What HTTPS/SSL exactly is
2. Why HTTPS/SSL became suddenly so important
3. What steps you have to do in order to switch from HTTP to HTTPS

1. What is HTTPS and why should you care about it?

I won’t start here explaining how the different transfer protocols work over the internet, there are articles like this that explain it with good details.

What you need to know: if your website’s URL address starts with http://, like http://www.example.com, all the data sent from the website to your computer and back, goes through an unsecure channel. It means that some tricky bad guys – hackers, cyber pirates – can steal your personal data: your name, email address, your passwords, and the worst of all: your bank card details.

While if a website’s address starts with https://, like https://www.example.com, then the data is sent via the HTTPS (HTTP Secure or HTTP over SSL) protocol. It means that all the data sent over the internet is encrypted, and you are a lot more protected to send sensitive data (like passwords or bank details) by using online forms.

OK, but I’ve seen so many websites are using the simple HTTP protocol, why would I need HTTPS now?

2. Why HTTPS/SSL became suddenly so important

Up till 2016, we could split the world of websites into 2 big groups:

• Websites that deal with money and sensitive personal data: like banks, social networks, different APIs, online shops, etc. If these sites wanted to be trusted by the users and wanted to avoid lawsuits filed by their users who became victims of phishing, then it was inevitable for them to use HTTPS
• All other websites: blogs, personal sites, static websites, portfolio websites, etc. that simply don’t deal with sensitive data: up till now they were just fine with simple HTTP

How did the things change recently?

1. Google has recently modified its search algorithm in a way that it adds some boost in their search rankings to sites with the HTTPS protocol. While it is a very small boost, if there are two websites with the same value: one of them using HTTP and the other one using HTTPS, then the HTTPS site is likely to get the better position.
2. Google has announced that in future versions of its Chrome browser there will be a notification if the user is on an unsecure (non-HTTPS) website. While in the beginning it will only warn users if they have to enter data like bank account details on an unencrypted site, later it can widen the range of the warnings to a broader group of non-HTTPS sites.
3. Automattic (the company behind WordPress) has announced that future versions of WordPress will contain some functionalities that will require HTTPS.

Until now you could say: “OK, ok, HTTPS is more secure than HTTP, but it doesn’t affect my business significantly”. Now being on HTTPS has real marketing benefits. I think the scariest thing of the 3 above is point 2.: just imagine that a visitor comes to your home page and Chrome tells him/her that your site is not secure any more.

Would you buy anything from someone who is said to be not secure? I probably wouldn’t.

3. What steps you have to do in order to switch from HTTP to HTTPS

I will tell you our story. First of all, it didn’t cost us a penny. While lot of website owners don’t switch to HTTPS because they think it’s expensive, since Let’s Encrypt is available, you can have a HTTPS site for free.

Secondly, we did it on our website, which is a WordPress Multisite network with subfolder installation. It doesn’t mean that the steps below won’t work on single WP sites. The contrary, usually it’s always easier to perform something on a single site.

First Step: setting up the Certificate

WARNING: from now on, this article will be a bit techy. So if you are not comfortable with dealing with web hosting control panels, wp-admin and databases, you’d better ask for an expert's help!

UPDATE (26 Oct 2017): change to the Migrate DB part: now it’s even easier!

As we are on a shared hosting plan at SiteGround, and SiteGround is among the hosting providers who support Let’s Encrypt out of the box, setting up the SSL Certificate was extremely easy.

All I had to do was to log in to cPanel, click on the Let’s Encrypt icon in the Security box and… I realized that the site’s certificate was already set up. What? I didn’t even asked for it and SiteGround did it for us automatically (or do I just have issues with my memory? :)). Anyway, it was a nice surprise – as I had to do one step less.

In case it’s not set up yet in your cPanel, you can easily create a certificate for your domain, all you have to do is to select your domain name and enter your email address, click on Install – and that’s it!

Setting up Let’s Encrypt in cPanel

Now you can test the HTTPS connection by entering your URL starting with https:// into the browser’s address bar. E.g. https://yourdomain.com.

Probably this step has the same difficulty level on all hosts that support Let’s Encrypt. For other hosts, VPSs and dedicated servers this step may be different / more difficult. In this case ask your hosting provider for help.

Step 2: Backup

As we are going to change most of the URLs on the site, it’s highly recommended to create a backup of your whole website and save it to a secure location on your local machine.

On SiteGround I did it using Softaculous:

1. Clicked on Autoinstallers > WordPress in cPanel
2. In the icon menu clicked on the All Installations (crate) icon
3. Clicked the Backup icon of the site I needed the backup for
4. After the backup process was ready, I navigated to the backups tab using the Backups and Restore (zip) icon
5. From the list clicked on the Download icon of the latest backup, and saved the ZIP file to my computer

Step 3: Changing the permalinks

Before I finally did the change with this method I’ve read carefully the tutorials on WPBeginner and CSS-Tricks. So first I tried it the easy way: by installing the Really Simple SSL plugin. Unfortunately I realized that this method had 2 issues:

• It didn’t change all the links on the multisite’s sub-sites (while it worked fine on the main site).
• Then I tried to figure out why it happened and found out that the links in the posts / pages were not changed at all: they are changed on the fly to HTTPS when the page is displayed in the front end.

Unfortunately the Really Simple SSL method didn’t change the links in the database. While it can be a simple method for non-techies to turn a single site to HTTPS easily, this doesn’t seem to be the way to go with multisite. My two biggest concerns about this method were:

• It makes the site slightly slower if the plugin has to change the links from HTTP to HTTPS every time I load a page
• What happens if I deactivate the plugin? Yes, I tried it and everything went back to HTTP, and some conflicts also appeared when I tried to log in to wp-admin

I knew that I didn’t wanted to turn back to HTTP in the future, so I wanted a solution where all the links in the database are changed to HTTPS.

Step 3/A: Forcing the admin to use HTTPS.

As I read Cris Coyier’s article on CSS-Tricks, I did exactly what he recommends in his point 2: adding this line to wp-config.php:

define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);

I logged in to wp-admin with this new setting and was really forced to use https:// there. Cool.

Step 3/B: Changing the URLs throughout your site

Here we had to be really careful, because we only wanted to change the internal links. So we didn’t change anything that went outside our side, because we didn’t know if they already had an HTTPS version or not.

So, let’s do it by following these steps:

1. Install the WP Migrate DB plugin
2. Go to Tools » Migrate DB in wp-admin
3. Select Find & Replace
4. Add the following settings:
   1. Find: your website’s current URL, starting with http://, without the trailing slash
   2. Replace: your new URL, starting with https://

WP Migrate DB settings for multisite transition to HTTPS

5. Click on Find & Replace button

Step 4: Check if you have the green lock in the browser’s address bar

Is the green lock present in the address bar?

If not, it usually means that a CSS or a JavaScript file is loaded from an unencrypted location. This is the phenomenon of mixed content. Some hints how to fix this issue:

• Check the page’s source code for “http://”: if there is any, you’ll have to change these links. It usually needs tweaking with the theme or some plugin settings. The easiest way is to change hard-coded http:// links to protocol-relative links (e.g. from http://example.com to //example.com). However, unless you are an expert it’s not recommended to alter theme files. Anyway, if the theme author doesn’t change these links in the next version, the next theme update can break it again. So it can be a better idea to…
• Tell your theme’s author to change the resource links from http:// to //. If they actively support the theme they can update it in the next version and you’ll be okay
• Or – if you are really desperate – can try enabling the Really Simple SSL plugin again. That will hopefully change these resource links for you – however, at the cost of some redundance.

What you should pay extra attention to are web fonts and icon fonts. On our site they didn’t work right after switching to HTTPS. And that happened because they were called from a CSS file with a http:// link.

Step 5: redirecting HTTP to HTTPS

Now your HTTPS site is probably working fine. The only problem is that your old HTTP site is also accessible, making it appear as a duplicate of your primary site. So let’s get rid of the old address with some 301 redirection.

You’ll have to place this code into your .htaccess file, somewhere near the beginning, but after the RewriteEngine is turned On:

# Force HTTPS
 RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
 RewriteRule .* https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Now try again entering the old HTTP address to the browser’s search bar. If it’s redirected to HTTPS, you’re fine.

Step 6: tell Google Analytics that you are using HTTPS now.

Log in to Google Analytics, select the site you’d like to edit. Then in the ADMIN tab click on the Property Settings and in the Default URL line select HTTPS instead of HTTP.

Adjust the new URL in Google Analytics

Step 7: other little cleanups

Now we are literally ready, however, you may consider changing the links on different places that have links to your site, e.g.:

• Google Search Console / Webmaster Tools
• Your site’s Facebook page
• Your site’s Twitter account
• etc.

Good luck with the switch! Hope this article was helpful for you.

If you’ve got stuck with setting up HTTPS on your site, you can hire me for the task on Codeable:

Make my site HTTPS

Learn more about what Codeable is and how to use it.

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The post New website and new domain appeared first on a-idea studio.

Change of name

With the new domain, we’ve finally changed our name from Arachnoidea Studio to a-idea studio. The main reason behind this change was that the original name – however well it represents the web and the good ideas we’re working on – has obvious downsides:

• hard to spell, hard to pronounce
• resembles too much on arachnophobia, which is not a positive word at all
• contains the words “no idea” – which is not a good omen

So, the long and short of it is that we’ve changed our name, from today we are officially a-idea!

Change of appearance

As you might discovered it already, we have a new logo, new colors and shapes – thanks, to our designer, Hermina.

New service: WordPress Development

We offer a new service now: WordPress development and positioned this service mainly at the tourism industry. This is an area that needs special care as travel / catering companies and organizations have some special needs:

• beautifully presented websites
• event calendars
• galleries
• booking systems
• etc

We do our best to solve these requirements with special plugins and well-crafted themes. So, if you need a site in this field, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Roles at our team

Bence, who joined us this February has promoted from Junior Developer to Front-end Developer role.

New structure for the website

All our digital products now have their own subsite inside our website:

• Themple Framework
• WP Slide-up box
• a-staff

So it’s now easier than before to browse their documentations. You won’t even need to visit the main a-idea site in the future if you’d like to read about the specific products.

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