Monthly Archives: August 2021

Emoji Toolbar Plugin Brings an Emoji Picker Back to the WordPress Editor – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Earlier today, theme.es released its Emoji Toolbar project to the plugin directory. It is a simple picker that integrates with the WordPress Rich Text toolbar, allowing users to insert emoji directly from the editor interface. After Nick Hamze pulled his Emoji Conbini plugin from WordPress.org last year, there has been an emoji-sized hole in my editor toolbox. The plugin was the perfect implementation for quickly plopping a quick smiley face or any of the other thousands of characters available. Unfortunately, his departure from the WordPress space meant losing one of my favorite block-related plugins — and several others that I enjoyed. It was also on par with 10up’s Insert Special Characters plugin, a solution for users missing a similar picker from the classic editor era. Emoji Toolbar is filling that void and is a solid alternative for those who need a solution. The difference between the two implementations is the location. Emoji Conbini added the picker button directly to the toolbar, and Emoji Toolbar adds it to the “more” dropdown. Clicking the Emoji button in the Rich Text toolbar. Placing the picker button inside of the dropdown makes it a little harder to find. It also requires an additional mouse click to insert emoji. What matters is that the implementation works, but I would love to see it as a top-level toolbar item. Using the plugin is a simple matter. When in a Rich Text field, which includes blocks like Paragraph, Heading, List, and more, the Emoji Toolbar appears in the block toolbar. After clicking it, the plugin creates a popup of the emoji picker. Emoji Toolbar popup picker. From that point, users merely need to click the emoji they want to insert into the post. The plugin bundles the Emoji Mart library, which has quickly become almost a standard for emoji pickers. The component is a Slack-like box that categorizes each of the characters, and it provides a field for searching for that perfect emoji. There is still at least one emoji inserter alternative. Instead of adding a picker to the block toolbar, Emoji Autocomplete Gutenberg allows users to type : and use keywords for inserting characters. For those who prefer to work from the keyboard, it is a quicker method. Emoji Toolbar shines over Emoji Autocomplete Gutenberg and the now-retired Emoji Conbini based on how it formats its output. It inserts the actual characters into the content, but the other plugins insert an <img> tag instead. That method results in output that is not forward-compatible with any changes in the future or alternative libraries. Users who also prefer to disable image output on the front end cannot do so. This is a non-issue with Emoji Toolbar — it plays well with other solutions. On the whole, the plugin is solid. It has well-written code and provides an easy-to-use picker for inserting emoji. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Automattic Invests $30M in Titan, a Business Email Startup – WP Tavern

[ad_1] source: Titan.email Automattic has invested $30 million in Titan, a professional email suite aimed at businesses and companies offering white-labeled email solutions for customers. At WordCamp India 2021, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the company had just made “a pretty large investment” in the India-based startup and stated that it “will be a big part of how WordPress.com offers email going forward.” The Series A investment in Titan is Automattic’s largest to date and values the company at $300 million. Although Automattic has gained notoriety for its “no offices or email” approach to business, most of the working world has not yet transitioned away from relying heavily on email. “I think email is definitely on its way out, between things like P2 and Slack, which is a work place chat tool,” Mullenweg said on Glenn Leibowitz’s podcast in 2015. “Email just has so many things wrong with it. I’ve never heard anyone who’ve said they love email, they want more of it–have you?” Six years later, email is still a reliable source of misery for most working people, but Titan aims to transform it into a more meaningful communication channel for businesses with help of Automattic’s investment. It includes features like scheduled send, follow-up reminders, smart filters and custom folders, email templates, and white labeling with deep integration for various platforms. WordPress.com’s marketing has increasingly been aimed at small businesses over the past few years with a strong push for users to make money by selling things through their websites. It’s easy to see how Titan makes sense as a supporting product that legitimizes any business with a custom branded email address. Customers who have registered, transferred, or mapped a custom domain through WordPress.com are offered a three-month free trial of Titan-powered email services. Setting up custom branded email addresses separately would be a much more inconvenient process and most customers with custom domains are likely better off rolling email services into their existing WordPress.com setup. This strategically enables WordPress.com to be more of a one-stop shop for business needs. People are often reluctant to change their email providers so Titan has the effect of making WordPress.com’s products a more sticky subscription that would require some effort to reproduce elsewhere. “We need an alternative to Google and Microsoft, which have started to monopolize email,” Mullenweg told Bloomberg. “Of about 6 billion email accounts in the world, only a fraction are small business email accounts and they need a product that’s focused on their needs,” he said. After just two years, Titan has more than 100,000 small business customers. In addition to its relationships with WordPress.com, HostGator, NameSilo, and other web providers, Titan aims to grow its customer base by partnering with popular hosting companies, domain registrars, and site builders. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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Is WordPress Development Really All That Hard To Get Into Today? – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Oh, how easily we forget the WordPress of 10, 15 years ago. We are spoiled. We are spoiled by the gluttony of documentation and tutorials, a wealth of knowledge created over more than a decade. We are spoiled by our own expertise, built-in our more vigorous youth, now sitting on our haunches as we have aged along with our beloved platform. We have grown to become the proverbial grumpy old men. “Back in my day, we didn’t need all these fancy tools to help us write code. We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and built everything from scratch.” I kid. Sort of. I count myself among the old-school developers who helped build the WordPress that so many are still nostalgic about — I think I have earned the right to joke about myself. They were “simpler” times but not really. Having been in the community as long as I have, I can remember the backlash each time a new feature landed. I recall the days when there really was non-existent documentation for pretty much everything. Lately, there has been a growing conversation around the difficulty of overcoming WordPress’s current barrier to entry for developers. This has been an ongoing discussion for a few years now, but the latest flare-up comes on the heels of a tweet by Chris Wiegman: The deeper I get with modern WP dev the more I understand why newer devs don’t like to work on it. This is not the same project as it was in the past. The learning curve is now extremely high regardless of past experience. I built my first block plugin in a few hours about a month ago. When writing on the experience, I said the barrier to entry was much higher than when I had built my first plugin in 2007. Having had the time to sit back and think about that, I am not sure it was a fair statement. We tend to view the past through rose-colored glasses while forgetting the real struggle. What I had wanted was to build the plugin in 30 minutes. Had everything been in PHP, that would have been an easy feat for me. Objectively, I am an expert (or close enough) in the language. However, my JavaScript knowledge is 10 years behind. It had been a while since I had been challenged in that way. That was a distressing experience for someone who had become comfortable in his own skills. I griped about the docs. But, let’s be honest. WordPress has never had the sort of deep documentation that could teach a budding developer everything. I know this because I have written at least a couple hundred tutorials in my career. Nearly every time, I dug into the project’s source code to make sense of it, which allowed me to teach other developers how to work with various features. And many other developers in the space did the same. In time, WordPress.org added more robust developer documentation, but this was not built overnight. It is a constantly evolving project. I also built my first block type with vanilla JavaScript. No build tools. No React docs open. Just plain ol’ JS code in my editor. I needed to crawl before I could walk, and getting that first iteration of the code into a workable state was necessary before I jumped into anything more complex. In the days after, I re-coded it all to use more modern JavaScript and compiled it with webpack. A week after that, I built a second block plugin with more advanced features. Was it hard? Definitely. Was the barrier to entry higher than when I first developed plugins? Probably. Truthfully, I did not struggle as much, but I am also at a different point in my life. At 37, I no longer have quite as much drive and likely less capacity for picking up new skills as quickly as in my late teens and early 20s. However, I have a strong foundation and enough experience to overcome some of the hurdles I encountered. Would a 20-year-old me struggle with this JavaScript landscape more than a strictly PHP-based WordPress? I doubt it. Both had huge learning curves for someone new. Someone’s first introduction to Subversion or Composer can be just as scary as their initial dive into webpack and npm. For a fresh mind, an open canvas that has yet to be painted with over a decade of doing things the “WordPress way,” I am unsure if the barrier to entry is so much higher. For us old-schoolers, our world has been flipped upside down. There is no denying that. The Gutenberg project, which is at the core of nearly every new WordPress feature, moves so fast that it is next to impossible to keep up with while also upping your skills. It is easy to get overwhelmed. When this happens to me, I usually take a step back and return when I have had a chance to rest my mind. Contributing to the WordPress ecosystem has always had one barrier or another. Whether it be the privilege of time, knowledge of PHP, or some other skill, the project has left some people out. That is changing in some ways. Some parts are now available to users that were never accessible before. This is easiest to see from the theming side of things. “I wish people would see that theme development is heading the opposite way,” tweeted Carolina Nymark. “The entry barrier for designers and new developers will be lower. When people get stuck saying, ‘But I can’t use my hooks in a block theme,’ it is because they are looking at what exists today, not ahead.” Having spent more time on the theming side of the block editor than plugin development, I agree wholeheartedly. Theme authors have been given a clean slate, or at least by the time block-based themes are supported in core WordPress, this will be true. While I could write ad nauseum on

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4 Quality ClickFunnels Alternatives to Help You Build Better Sales Funnels

[ad_1] While running a website doesn’t require too much need for complex growth strategies, ‘sales funnels’ are something you should investigate. ClickFunnels is a market leader for creating targeted pages to drive users through your funnel. However, it’s not the only solution. There are a number of ClickFunnels alternatives available that are worth considering. Of course, different solutions have specific focuses, although all generally let you create targeted landing pages. They let you push your site’s visitors through the sales funnel without affecting your ‘bounce rate’. In this post, we’ll look at the concept of sales funnels, then introduce you to ClickFunnels. Finally, we’ll look at a number of ClickFunnels alternatives and discuss what makes them viable. A Primer on Sales Funnels For the unaware, sales funnels are where your website’s visitors go through a number of steps before becoming a paying customer. Usually, you’ll find three or four steps consisting of Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA). While a sales funnel is usually part of a defined conversion strategy, practically every business that sells products and services will use one. For example, take the following: Awareness. You put out a social media ad, which some users click through. Interest. Once they get to the page you specified in the ad, they check out the product. Desire. The copy on that page causes them to add the product to their cart. Action. The visitor becomes a paying customer once they checkout. Here, you have distinct phases. The ‘top’ of the funnel is where potential customers enter, based on their reaction to your ads, content marketing, and other promotional tactics. At this point, they’re ‘qualified’. In other words, they’ve expressed at least some interest in buying your wares. Once they’re on the site, you funnel them through one or more pages designed to pitch your product and convince them to sell. The ‘bottom’ of the funnel is where a paying customer exits after checking out. However, the goal of a good sales funnel is to prevent ‘leaks’. In other words, each part of the funnel needs to keep users within it. There have been numerous products to help you with this. Introducing ClickFunnels ClickFunnels uses the term “marketing funnel”, but it’s essentially the same thing as a sales funnel. The goal is still to take the unqualified masses, filter them into qualified leads, and push them through the funnel to become paying customers. The product is essentially an all-in-one solution for creating a website and sales funnel. There are also elements of aftercare, called ‘Follow-Up Funnels’. Overall, the process is simple. Create a website based around landing pages using the built-in drag-and-drop editor; Connect payment gateways so that customers can buy your products and services; Use Follow-Up Funnels to capture any users who leak from the funnel. However, while this seems solid on paper (and it is – ClickFunnels has a lot of happy users), it’s not the whole story. Why You’d Want a ClickFunnels Alternative ClickFunnels has definitely found a market that’s lucrative. However, there’s room for competition, and it’s not a perfect offering. For starters, ClickFunnels often comes across like stock photography, in that you know when you’re in a funnel: Huge font sizes, mammoth copy, and myriad success stories on every page are the order of the day. This can be tiring to wade through, although we admit that it’s a successful approach. While you don’t have to use this approach, much of the ClickFunnels methodology is based around it. What’s more, the price is astronomical. The entry tier is $97 per month, which is nearly $1,200 per year. This doesn’t give you access to Follow-Up Funnels either. For that, you have to opt for the $297 per month Platinum plan. High-rolling businesses can stump up $2,497 per month for the top-tier Two Comma Club plan. If we’re judging this, we’d wonder what business has up to $30,000 a year spare to spend, yet still needs help capturing customers. Finally, you’re going to be locked into the ClickFunnels ecosystem, which is going to sting if you ever want to change your approach. Coupled with the pricing and methodology, there are other avenues for you to consider. What You Should Look for In a ClickFunnels Alternative Fortunately, we’ve already distilled the elements required to build a sales or marketing funnel. These are essentially the same elements you need to look for in a ClickFunnels alternative: The ability to build a website to host your funnel. A way to create landing pages, add payment gateways, and capture forms. Drag-and-drop editing that’s flexible and powerful enough to cater to non-coders and web designers. Functionality to reconnect with users who have leaked from the funnel. In addition to this, you’re going to want competitive pricing. Being honest, most solutions are going to be closer to your budget compared to ClickFunnels. Still, your chosen alternative has to be cost-effective. There are plenty of solutions available that could tick all of these boxes. Let’s discuss them next. 4 Quality ClickFunnels Alternatives to Help You Build Better Sales Funnels Below, we’re going to look at four alternatives to ClickFunnels. Let’s quickly show you what we’re going to feature: Systeme. This is a direct ClickFunnels alternative, with a competitive price and comparable functionality. Elementor. WordPress’ most popular page builder plugin has enough grunt to help you build stellar sales funnels on the platform. OptimizePress. This is a dedicated WordPress landing page plugin with strong functionality and great pricing. CartFlows. A WordPress-based solution that combined with tools such as Elementor, can give you immense power and flexibility. However, there are many more solutions too. We could have featured Unbounce, Thrive Architect, Leadpages, and umpteen other ClickFunnels alternatives. Even so, these four cover a lot of ground. Let’s take a look, starting with a direct competitor to ClickFunnels. 1. Systeme First up, Systeme is a solution we’ve talked about before on the blog. It bills itself as a ClickFunnels alternative, although we believe its user base is

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Resources, Week of 1 August 2021

[ad_1] This week, I finally started using a combination of Bio and Hey World to start pulling together all of the content that I share online. This blog is obviously primarily devoted to software development and although I considered broadening the scope of it (for longer than you may think), it just seemed easier to use another place and have a single landing page for all the feeds, socials, and so on. Anyway, that’s the personal stuff I have to share for this week. In the mean time, here are the resources that I found interesting. Week of 1 August 2021 Resources Articles Resources PHP WordPress My Own Posts It’s late where I am but the Internet is on all the time everywhere so it’s mid-day somewhere 🙂. [ad_2] Source link

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Automattic Releases Quadrat, a Block-Based Podcasting WordPress Theme – WP Tavern

[ad_1] A few weeks ago, Automattic released Quadrat on the WordPress.org theme directory. It is now the company’s fourth block theme. Like its predecessors, it is a child of Blockbase, a project that serves as a foundation for the work of Automattic’s Theme Team. After spending a couple of months diving deep into the world of block themes, I was beginning to feel a little burned out. When I wasn’t sleeping, eating, or doing yard work in my off-duty time, I was building or exploring one project or another. Soon, it all had become a blur. I knew I needed to take a small break, and I have not touched themes for a couple of weeks since, at least not outside of work. However, Quadrat appealed to the theme developer within me. I am not sure if it was the soothing color scheme or just seeing the work the professional designers had put into it, but it offered a pathway for easing myself back into the block theme world. Outside of the work by Anariel Design with Naledi and Clove, most block themes have felt more like proof of concepts or starting points. Quadrat can now be added to the list of those with some personality. It does not push any particular boundaries, but it is a well-designed blogging and podcasting theme. Mostly, I am just a fan of the color scheme — sometimes you just need something other than black, white, and gray to get yourself out of a funk. One of the other reasons I have been following the work of the Quadrat theme was because it was the first showcase of header patterns I had seen. Kjell Reigstad shared what this system would look like in June. The goal is to include the patterns shown in the video in core WordPress, so they are not currently included in the theme. However, there is still an open ticket for header patterns in Quadrat. The only real trouble I ran into with the theme is with fully aligned blocks in the content. There is an overflow issue in version 1.1.1 that creates a horizontal scrollbar. Horizontal scrollbar appears with full-width Cover block. Quadrat includes nine custom patterns. The focus for most is on podcasting, but some are general-purpose enough for other use cases, such as “Media and text with button”: Media and text with button pattern. The development team missed a prime opportunity with its podcast-related patterns. Instead of integrating with a podcasting solution, they are simple, static blocks from core WordPress. For example, the Latest Episodes pattern is a two-column layout that features Image, Heading, and Paragraph blocks. That is acceptable as a base pattern for users without a podcasting plugin. However, it may be practically useless for those with one enabled. Or, it creates unnecessary work because users must manually update their page content anytime they publish a new episode. Latest Episodes block pattern Given Automattic’s recent bet on Castos as part of a $756K pre-seed fundraising round, it would make sense to integrate with the podcasting company’s plugin, Seriously Simple Podcasting (SSP). If the development team wanted to take the Latest Episodes pattern to the next level, they would create it with the Query Loop block and display the latest podcast episodes from the plugin. For users without SSP installed, simply fall back to the current pattern. Or, offer both. Right now, it is little more than eye candy and not nearly as useful as it could be for real-world use cases. I often talk about the need for theme authors to elevate their game. Not only would such integration be beneficial to podcasters, but it would also showcase the power and flexibility of the block system. All of this is to say: If you are going to build a podcasting theme, build a podcasting theme. Quadrat appears to be one. However, when you peek behind the curtain, it is just a well-designed blogging theme. It has the potential to be so much more. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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WordPress.com Growth Summit Set for August 17

[ad_1] Hey, WordPress fans. We are checking in with your latest dose of weekly WordPress news. This week, WordPress.com announced the schedule for the second annual Growth Summit. The virtual conference will be held on August 17 in the Americas and EMEA and on August 18 in the Asia Pacific. Beyond that, a new version of WooCommerce Blocks has been released with several enhancements and bug fixes. We also have a lot of news and tutorials for you.   Let’s get to all of this week’s WordPress news… WORDPRESS NEWS AND ARTICLES TUTORIALS AND HOW-TOS RESOURCES [ad_2] Source link

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9 Best WordPress Hosting Options Compared (2021)

[ad_1] There are plenty of web hosts around to choose from, and new ones appear all the time. And although greater competition results in better services at lower prices, this abundance of choice compounds the problem of choosing the right host to fit your specific needs. The challenge is even greater for WordPress users, who need a provider that understands their particular requirements. To tackle this issue, we rounded up nine of the best-known WordPress hosts and took an in-depth look at each. These hosts offer something that most don’t: WordPress-specific hosting and everything that entails. Before we get into the reviews, we’ll first take a moment to discuss exactly why you should choose a web host with WordPress-specific experience. Then, we’ll dissect each host, with the main focus on support and security features, performance, and pricing. Best WordPress Hosting in 2021: Quick Summary We’re going to go much more in-depth in this post with our hands-on tests and experience-backed opinions. However, if you’re in a rush, we want to start things off by giving you a quick summary of our top picks. So – you can either use this simple summary table as a jumping-off point. Or, you can keep reading to learn exactly why we’ve chosen these hosts and see the test data. Rank Host Price from /mo. Highlights 1st 🥇 HostGator $5.95 ✔️ Affordable prices✔️ Fast load times for low-traffic✔️ Helpful support 2nd 🥈 Flywheel $15 ✔️ Useful managed features✔️ Fast load times for high-traffic✔️ Special tools for agencies 3rd 🥉 WP Engine $30 ✔️ Useful managed features✔️ Fast load times for high-traffic✔️ Expert WordPress support WordPress Hosting vs. Shared Hosting – The Key Differences You may have noticed that many web hosts offer general shared hosting plans and WordPress hosting plans. These are two very different things. To illustrate why, let’s walk through their differences one by one: When you get shared hosting, you’re paying for a set amount of space within a server. You have the freedom to install any content management system (CMS) you want, but performance will never be as good as say a dedicated server (i.e. one that is reserved for your use only). With WordPress-specific hosting, you’re usually paying for space within less crowded servers. Each of these servers is optimized to provide you with a better WordPress experience right out of the box. WordPress-specific hosting often includes security measures tailored for the CMS. WordPress-friendly hosts are more knowledgeable when it comes to the CMS, so they offer better support. Web hosts optimized for WordPress often offer better loading speeds. For example, their servers are tuned for WordPress and they often include optimizations such as server-level page caching for WordPress. Often, WordPress hosts also take care of backups for you, which is a huge load off your shoulders These days, there’s arguably no good reason for a WordPress user to opt for generic shared hosting. WordPress hosting plans usually start at competitive prices, so they’re the best choice – even if you’re on a tight budget. Our Methods for Choosing and Evaluating the Best WordPress Hosts Each of the web hosts we’ve chosen for this roundup are very well-known in the WordPress hosting industry, but we didn’t want to base our comparison on reputation alone. To be as thorough as possible, we went through the following process with all nine of them: We set up paid WordPress hosting accounts for each company. Some of these web hosts come with WordPress pre-installed, but for those that didn’t, we did it ourselves and used the host’s default configuration. We tested each website’s speed using WebPageTest for one-off tests and Load Focus for load testing. Load Focus enables us to test how fast a site loads under heavy stress by simulating multiple visitors within a period of time. Basically, how fast will your site load in a real-world situation where you have multiple visitors at the same time? Finally, we took a look at each of their plans to gauge if they represent good value for money. Knowing this, we can give you specific recommendations about which plans to pick for each web host. When we report the performance data, we’ll share five different metrics: TTFB – short for time to first byte, a general measure of hosting responsiveness. LCP – short for Largest Contentful Paint, part of Google’s new Core Web Vitals metrics and Page Experience update. Fully loaded time – the full loading time. Load Focus average response – the average response time in the Load Focus test. Load Focus 90th percentile – the 90th percentile time. That is, 90% of visits were faster than this time. Let’s check out how each WordPress host performed through our tests. The Nine Best WordPress Hosts for 2021 Ranked After concluding our testing, something became very clear – some providers performed considerably better than others. With that in mind, we decided to rank them below from best to worst, to help you make an informed decision. It’s worth mentioning, however, that our rankings are certainly not just based on raw performance – we also need to factor in price and features. In some situations, you might be better off choosing a host with slightly slower performance if you’re on a tight budget. For example, WP Engine is one of the top hosts on this list in terms of features and performance, but we only ranked it third because its pricing puts it out of reach for a lot of casual WordPress users, especially beginners. We’ll be sure to note these variables in our analysis – for example, HostGator can be a good option for low-traffic sites, but we don’t recommend it for high-traffic sites. With that in mind, let’s start with top nine hosting providers and work our way down! 1. HostGator HostGator is one of the best-known names when it comes to web hosting, but not one of the most highly regarded. In the past, the hosting service has experienced issues with site speed, but it has recently

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The Best WordPress SEO Plugin in 2021?

[ad_1] Trying to choose between Rank Math vs Yoast SEO as your WordPress site’s SEO plugin? In 2021, these are the two most popular SEO plugins and both are great tools that can help you set your site up for success in Google’s rankings. However, there are some notable differences between Yoast SEO and Rank Math, so you’ll want to understand what those are so that you can pick the best tool for your situation. In our hands-on Rank Math vs Yoast SEO comparison, we’ll dig into the important differences to help you decide. Quick Introductions – Popularity and Ratings To kick things off, let’s turn to the wisdom of the crowds and see how Rank Math and Yoast SEO compare when it comes to popularity and user reviews. This isn’t especially hands-on, but it does provide some useful context for why I said that both of these plugins can be excellent choices in their own rights. Yoast SEO is the big name in WordPress SEO. It’s been around forever (since 2010) and it’s become synonymous with “WordPress SEO” in a lot of people’s minds. It’s by far the most popular SEO plugin and it’s also just flat out one of the most popular WordPress plugins ever. Launched a few years ago in 2018, Rank Math is the comparative newcomer in the WordPress SEO space. However, it does come from a well-established WordPress company in MyThemeShop (our review), so the Rank Math team has plenty of experience to bring to bear. Since its launch, it’s quickly risen to become the second-most popular WordPress SEO plugin*. Here’s a table comparing the two plugins as of June 18, 2021: Metric Rank Math Yoast SEO Active sites 800,000+ 5,000,000+ Review Rating 4.9 4.8 Review Count 3,177+ 27,353+ Last 7 days download 349,847 2,333,715 *All In One SEO technically has more active sites than Rank Math, but Rank Math’s new download count is ~3X All In One SEO’s new download count (~349k vs ~111k), which is why I say Rank Math is more popular. Features With the introductions out of the way, let’s compare Rank Math vs Yoast SEO in terms of the features that they offer. To make this easier to scan, I’ll do this in table format. Here’s what the icons in the table mean: ✔️ – this feature is available in the free version of the plugin at WordPress.org. ✔️💰 – this feature is available, but only if you pay for the premium version (more on pricing later). ✔️✔️ – this feature is available in both plugins but one plugin does it notably better. E.g. both plugins support schema markup for rich snippets, but Rank Math’s feature is more advanced, so I would mark Rank Math with the double checkmark. ❌ – the feature doesn’t exist in either the free or premium versions. This is not a complete list of every single feature in each plugin – I just tried to pull out the features that most people will care about.  Feature Rank Math Yoast SEO Set SEO title ✔️ ✔️ Set SEO meta description ✔️ ✔️ SEO title/description templates ✔️ ✔️ Focus keyword analysis ✔️ ✔️ Multiple focus keywords ✔️ ✔️💰 Focus keyword suggestions ✔️ ✔️💰 Social media graph control ✔️ ✔️ Readability suggestions ✔️ ✔️ Sitewide schema markup ✔️ ✔️ Per-content schema markup ✔️✔️ ✔️ XML sitemaps ✔️ ✔️ Link counter ✔️ ✔️ Google Search Console integration ✔️ ✔️ Google Analytics integration ✔️ ❌ Basic WooCommerce SEO ✔️ ✔️ Advanced WooCommerce SEO ✔️💰 ✔️💰 Single-location local SEO ✔️ ✔️💰 Multi-location local SEO ✔️💰 ✔️💰 Internal link suggestions ✔️ ✔️💰 Redirect manager ✔️ ✔️💰 404 monitor ✔️ ❌ Advanced Video SEO ✔️💰 ✔️💰 Advanced Image SEO ✔️💰 ✔️💰 Keyword rank tracking ✔️💰 ❌ Breadcrumbs ✔️ ✔️ Role manager for SEO access ✔️ ✔️ SEO reports (white label) ✔️💰 ❌ Full Elementor integration ✔️ ✔️💰 As you can see, Rank Math is the pretty clear winner both in terms of the number of features that it offers and the number of features that it offers for free. In fact, in terms of features, I think the free version of Rank Math might even have more features than the core paid version of Yoast SEO. Of course, having more features doesn’t automatically mean a plugin is better – it depends on whether you actually find those features useful.  For example, if you just want a plugin to set SEO titles and meta descriptions and make some basic on-page optimizations, both are pretty much equal in that respect. Additionally, both plugins offer a modular approach to their features, which means you can disable any features that you don’t want to use. This helps you keep your site lightweight and simplify the interfaces. Speaking of interfaces, let’s talk about that next. Ease of Use/Interface Both Rank Math and Yoast SEO are pretty easy to use and beginner-friendly. If I had to pick, I would say that I slightly prefer the Rank Math interface because it’s a little more modern and provides slightly more useful suggestions, but I don’t think you’ll have issues with either. Both plugins work with both the classic TinyMCE editor and the newer default WordPress block editor. However, because the block editor is the default editor in 2021, that’s what I’ll focus on for this comparison. Let’s go through them… Rank Math Rank Math puts its settings in a sidebar panel that’s accessible from the top-right corner. The icon to open the settings also gives you a nice summary of your content’s optimization: Clicking that will expand the sidebar, divided into tabs. In the first tab, you can set the focus keyword(s) for your content and view the analysis. You can also get suggestions for keywords just by typing in the box: Rank Math’s analysis is a score out of 100, which gives you a detailed look at optimization. As I mentioned above, I also find its suggestions a little more useful and detailed than Yoast SEO, especially when it

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Gutenberg 11.2 Expands Color Support for Search and Pullquote Blocks, Introduces Experimental Flex Layout for Group Block – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Gutenberg 11.2.0 was released today with expanded color support for the Search and Pullquote blocks. Historically, customizing these elements has been out of reach for most users if their themes didn’t include them as options. This release introduces color support and border color support for the search button. Pullquotes are getting a similar treatment with border and color support, enabling some creative design options for those who enjoy taking the reins on customization. It’s these kinds of minute style changes that web developers would have been paid to perform back in the earlier days of theme customization gigs. Now the block editor enables anyone to jump in and do it themselves. These color support additions are part of a larger effort to improve the editor’s design tools to provide consistent application across blocks. “Another important goal of design tools is ensuring a wide range of exquisitely crafted patterns are possible; that best practices are not only possible but encouraged; and that customizing blocks is a consistent and natural experience,” Gutenberg Lead Architect Matias Ventura said in the ticket tracking design tool tasks. Gutenberg 11.2 also introduces support for a new experimental flex layout. The need for additional layouts was described by Rick Banister in a ticket submitted a year ago, requesting a “display horizontal” option for the Group block: When building patterns or trying to achieve a layout with multiple elements arranged horizontally it would help to have a parent block that would automatically arrange its children on a single line. Columns can be used to arrange things side-by-side, but they add quite a lot of extra nesting if you only need to arrange one set of blocks. We could leverage the Group block and add a ‘display horizontally’ or ‘act as a row’ option to it. It would wrap its children and act as a ‘flex container’ (display:flex; flex-direction:row;). Further flex parameters could be optional to align and distribute objects. A flex layout option has the potential to remove some of the complexity in nesting blocks. This early prototype shows a rough, unfinished UI for a layout switcher. It shows the difference between a flex layout and the default “flow” layout, which displays children one after the other vertically without any specific styles. The PR included in Gutenberg 11.2 makes it possible for blocks to support multiple layouts. Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella said the plan is to introduce more layouts, such as “grid” and “absolute positioning container.” Adding “flex” layout support for the group block is the first step towards proving how multi-layout options can work in the block editor. “In the previous WordPress release, we introduced the layout config and the __experimentalLayout prop for inner blocks,” Benguella said. “The initial reason for these was to make alignments and content widths more declarative for themes. While this was an ambitious goal on its own and a hard one to achieve for the default layout, the goal has always been to absorb and support more kinds of layouts in the editor than the regular vertical list of blocks.” This experimental flex layout support can be useful for theme developers and makes sense in certain use cases with the Cover block, headers, social icons, columns, and other applications. The layout switcher UI is hidden in this release while the Gutenberg team works on a better design and wording for the feature. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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