5 Free Podcast WordPress Themes

5 Free Podcast WordPress Themes

As the number of podcast listeners continues to grow in 2019, and ad revenues from podcasts increases, more entrepreneurs and businesses will see it as a profitable means to reach a wider audience. If you’re looking to setup a website for your own podcast, you may want to consider WordPress as a viable platform.

Do a quick search for the term “podcast” in the WordPress.org plugins directory and you’ll find a growing number of reliable and quality plugins to publish and manage your podcasts. However, you’ll also need an attractive theme for your new site which supports audio post formats.

To help you get started, here’s a list of 2018’s five best free WordPress themes for podcasts & internet radio shows. Each of these themes has been recently updated and has received a rating of at least three stars out of five. Most importantly, each theme supports audio post formats to publish your podcast.

Podcast

Podcast WordPress theme by ilovewpcom

Podcast is a free WordPress theme intended for podcasts, youtubers, streamers, radio hosts, comedians, influencers and bloggers. Podcast theme comes with 7 built-in color palettes: black, blue, green, orange, purple, red, teal. The theme let’s you put the sidebar on the left or on the right.


Challenger

Challenger WordPress theme by Ben Sibley

Challenger is a premium-quality theme for modern blogs, podcasts, and vloggers. As a fully responsive theme, your website will look awesome on laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. The design is simple and minimalist with special attention paid to the typography for maximum readability. The free Challenger theme includes a diverse feature set including 4 widget areas, 50+ social media icons, and a completely customizable header section for email list building. Use it for a business, niche news magazine, or professional blog. Challenger is also fully compatible with the new Gutenberg post editor.


Tracks

Tracks WordPress theme by Ben Sibley

A bold, beautiful, and responsive theme. Tracks is perfect for personal blogs, magazines, and photography websites. It includes a logo uploader, over 50+ social media icons, search bar, comment display controls, premium layouts, and more. Tracks has a dark, simple, and minimalist design that makes it great for publish both text and image based content. Use it for a travel blog, online newspaper, video site, podcast, or even an eCommerce store thanks to its WooCommerce compatibility. As a free theme, you can use Tracks for as many projects as you’d like. Now fully compatible with the new Gutenberg post editor.


Audioman

Audioman WordPress theme by Catch Themes

Audioman is a well-designed, modern and trendy music WordPress theme built for musicians and bands that focuses on promoting their music and events. Simple modules and features are available in Audioman so you can build a complete and custom website right away. The theme comes with an array of features — such as header media, featured slider, featured content, hero content, playlist, portfolio, testimonials, and more — to keep your music website on the forefront. Audioman is completely responsive, which means your website will look incredibly sleek and visually appealing on all the devices with different screen resolution. The theme is deeply engaging, and the features provided in it will assist you in gaining genuine followers in a short period of time. To top it all, the theme is translation ready.


My Music Band

My Music Band WordPress theme by Catch Themes

My Music Band is simple, clean, responsive and easy to use Music WordPress Theme which has been specially designed, prioritizing the musicians and music bands to promote their music. The theme is deeply engaging and attractive, powerful and unique, stylish and flexible; a perfect solution for music related websites. It mainly focuses on creating an elegant personal website for the musicians in only a matter of times. My Music Band, a music WordPress theme is fully responsive and resizes fittingly to all devices. Your visitors can access your website regardless of the device or screen sizes they prefer to use. This theme comes with an array of crucial features—such as featured slider, featured content, playlist, hero content, portfolio, color options, and more—to keep your music website on the forefront. With all the incredible features integrated into My Music Band, your website will surely provide a musical vibe to your audiences making it more engaging and visually aesthetic.

How to Fix “Site ahead contains harmful programs” Error in WordPress

How to Fix “Site ahead contains harmful programs” Error in WordPress

WordPress is one of the easiest, most straightforward website hosting and creation platforms around. But even WordPress isn’t impervious to those infamous “This site ahead contains harmful programs” errors.

These error messages can occur when there’s bad backend code, Google-flagged reports, and more. Suffice to say it’s imperative you, as the website owner, fix whatever the problem is ASAP, getting your site back up and visible to those who are searching for it.

Currently dealing with one of these errors or want to learn how to fix (and prevent) one in the future? Keep on reading to see how you can repair and safeguard your WordPress site from “this site ahead contains program” errors.

Scan Your Site for Malicious Code

One of the leading reasons why these messages pop-up is because there may (or may not) be lines of malicious, flagged code. These are particularly common when advertising with low quality, budget-based advertising networks.

Thankfully, this can be rectified. Use Google’s safe browsing analysis tool, which will comb through your website’s code and point out any malicious code.

Here’s the URL parameter to use the above-mentioned tool:

https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=YourDomain.com

Simply add your site’s domain in the URL space titled “YourDomain.com.”  Afterward, if you have malicious code, take note of those lines. You’ll need to know those later to successfully remove them from your site and, thus, fix this critical error message.

Create a Backup of Your Entire WordPress Website

Before you go about removing lines of code from your website, create a complete backup.

When you start digging in the backend of your WordPress site and start deleting code, it’s all too easy to remove the wrong line—which, in some cases, could leave your website inoperable. But by creating a backup, you can easily come back from any accidental mistakes.

Also, creating a website backup is important to safeguarding user and customer information, as well.  Programs and plug-ins like BackupBuddy, UpdraftPlus, and BackWPUp are all well-reviewed, safe third-party providers that make doing this a breeze.

Remove Suspicious or Malicious Code

Now that your websites backed up and save from permanent error, let’s get into the business of finding and deleting that malicious code.

Using the code generated by the Google Safe Browsing tool, open-up your site’s Web Editor. This will display all your sites code. To save yourself time and future headaches, use the “Control-Find” option and paste in the line of code you’re looking for, which will show you the highlighted code you’re looking to delete.

For your own use, below is an example of malicious and/or suspicious. code:

function v78 FAX($vJOJJ7T, vRJ8WGX){$vM74216 = ''; for($i=0; $i < strlen($vJOJJT); $i++){$v74216 .= isset(vRJ8WGX[$vJOJJ7T[$i]]) ? $vRJ8WGX[$vJOJJT[$i]] : $vJOJJ7T[$i];}
return base64_decode($vM74216);}

Word to the wise: Maclious code often contains “base64_decode” somewhere in it. Also, malicious code will often include code that “redirects” or turns off “error reporting.” Below is an example of just that:

str_rev(edoced_46esab('ZXJyb3JfcmVwb3J0aW5nKDApOw0KJHRydW09aGVh = error_reporting(0); or error_reporting(E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE); or ini_set('display_errors', "0");

Granted, all these lines of malicious code should appear when you run the Google Safe Browsing Tool. But, for future reference, it helps to know these to pinpoint chronic “This site ahead contains harmful programs” errors.

After you’re done removing the bad code, re-run your website through the Google tool. This will ensure there’s no more malicious code in your site, prior to doing the next step.

Have Google Remove Your Site From it’s Flagged Test

Once you’re 100 percent sure your site is free from malicious code, now you’ll need to have Google remove your site from its flagged list.

To do this, use Google’s Webmaster tools. After adding your page to the Webmaster Tool, check for any security issues associated with your website. And, again, once you’re absolutely sure you’ve recertified those issues, click on the “checkbox” and request your WordPress site be reviewed.

Upon review, should everything be squared away, your site will have the dreaded “This site ahead contains harmful programs” errors removed.

In Conclusion: Find the Malicious Code, Backup Your Site, Delete Said Code, and Ask for a Review

As you can tell by now, getting rid of these errors isn’t as straightforward as it might seem—but it can be done, nonetheless. Follow the above-mentioned steps in chronological order, and rest easy knowing your WordPress won’t throw any “This site ahead contains harmful programs” error messages, anymore.

Top 3 SEO WordPress Plugins Compared

Nothing is more frustrating than putting in the many hours of work that is required for a successful blog, only to have it fall flat on its face and not know why.

If you’ve been putting out high-quality content but the traffic is just not coming in, then it’s likely that you’re ignoring the key tool that’s necessary for any blogger’s success. Good SEO optimization.

So, in this article, we’ll be comparing the top SEO plugins for WordPress.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

Yoast offers an all-in-one solution for optimizing your site’s on-page SEO. In fact, one of the best features of Yoast is its content analysis feature, which outdoes nearly every other SEO plugin.

It’s also one of the most beginner friendly options available. It gives you clear directions to help you rank your pages higher in the SERPs even if you don’t know the first thing about SEO.

If you’re a beginner, this makes Yoast an invaluable addition to your plugin arsenal.

So, what’s the problem with Yoast SEO then? Some more experienced webmasters believe that this plugin goes overboard on optimization to the point of being annoying.

The free version of Yoast also tends to contain a ton of bloatware and ads. Developers, of course, need to make money like everyone else, but they are a little pushy in their approach.

All In One SEO Pack

All In One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin

All In One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin

One of the most attractive features of this plugin is that it allows you to purchase one premium subscription and use it on unlimited websites. Yoast does not let you do this, and if you have more than one blog it can get expensive quickly to go premium.

Premium plugins always have the best features and they allow you to go ad-free. However, this does come at a cost, because All In One SEO Pack doesn’t have as many features as Yoast does.

The page analysis tool which tells you where you’re lacking with optimization is missing in this plugin. However, if you already have a pretty firm grasp of what to do on this front, then you can get a lot of premium features for a lot less money with this option.

This allows you to do things like optimizing your videos for search with sitemap integrations. You can use this to get found in highly desired search snippets, which Google loves to put at the top of the page.

They also have a bulk update feature for search snippets on the all posts screen, allowing you to edit a ton of posts quickly. They also allow access to more in-depth on page technical optimizations like canonical URLs and no index and no follow options.

This plugin is a great choice for those who have multiple websites and want access to premium features without spending a fortune. However, If you don’t have a firm understanding of SEO yet then you may want to stick with Yoast.

The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework WordPress Plugin

The SEO Framework WordPress Plugin

Like the second plugin on our list, this one is intended for people who have at least a little SEO experience under their belt. Its best feature is that it’s very lightweight, making it a joy to use.

Plus, if you started out with Yoast as a beginner but you’d like to move on to something else, then SEO framework has another great feature. They allow you to migrate your SEO data to their plugin in about ten minutes, potentially saving you many hours of work.

While this plugin might be a tad intimidating if you’re a beginner, it does offer some great features. This includes an unobtrusive SEO optimization bar which will allow you to see how each post’s optimization is looking from the main post screen.

This setup makes it a little easier to see which posts need work at a glance. It’s particularly useful if you have a lot of content and you’re playing catch up on optimizing it all.

Unlike other free options which bombard you with advertisements, this plugin is actually ad-free as well, and the lack of bloatware is what makes it a top choice for many webmasters despite it missing a few features.

The most notable missing piece here being the keyword focused guidance present in Yoast. However, if you’re capable of completing normal SEO tasks without any hand-holding, then this plugin can offer you a streamlined, enjoyable and ad-free experience.

This plugin is a great choice if you’re at least semi-knowledgeable about SEO and you’re looking for a totally free plugin that won’t bombard you with ads or weigh down your WordPress installation.

10 Free Travel Blog WordPress Themes 2018

10 Free Travel Blog WordPress Themes & Templates

As you know, first impressions are important. Especially in the ever-crowded travel blogosphere, you need to make sure your site stands out in a way that appeals to your audience. With travel blogs, your theme needs to allow you to display the photographs, stories and travel tips that will bring in loyal readers, or at least keep Mom updated on your whereabouts.

To help you get started, here’s a list of 2018’s ten best free travel blog WordPress themes & templates. Each of these themes has been recently updated and has received a rating of at least three stars out of five. Most importantly, each theme has plenty of space for you to showcase all your wonderful travel photos and stories.

  1. Travel Lite

Travel lite is a super elegant and professional responsive theme. This theme is ideal for travel agencies, hotels, tour operators, airlines, photographic agencies, tourism promotion, photography and other purposes that may match with your thoughts.


  1. Ashe

This personal and multi-author theme is perfect for personal, lifestyle, food, travel, beauty, fashion, photography, news, quotes blog, small business website and any other kind of amazing blogs. Minimal, elegant and mobile friendly layout with WooCommerce shop support will wow and inspire your visitors. It is very fast, compatible with many popular plugins and coded with best SEO practices. You just need to write and be awesome!


  1. Blog Expert

Blog Expert is a clean, modern and perfect minimal WordPress theme specially for bloggers. The blog theme offers a stunning and awesome visual experience to showcase your content with responsive grid system layout optimized for mobile touch and swipe. Perfect for personal blog, fashion blog, lifestyle blog, travel blog, food blog, craft blog, tech blog, creative blog, photography and many more.


  1. Metro Magazine

Metro Magazine is a modern responsive magazine style WordPress theme suitable for news, newspaper, magazine, sports, technology, food, travel, blogs, publishing, business and any kind of sites. The theme is built on Customizer and it allows you to easily customize your website with live previews. Metro Magazine includes color scheme and color for categories, which you can use to change the look and feel of your website with a click.


  1. Hestia

Hestia is a modern WordPress theme for professionals. It fits creative businesses, small businesses, startups, corporate businesses, online agencies and firms, portfolios, personal sites, ecommerce and freelancers. It has a multipurpose one-page design, widgetised footer, blog, news page and a clean look. It is compatible with Flat Parallax Slider, Photo Gallery, Travel Map and Elementor Page Builder.


  1. Poet

Poet is designed for publishers who want readers. That’s why Poet is fast, responsive, accessibility-ready, and optimally designed for reading. The layout adapts fluidly to all screen sizes to enhance usability. As one of few accessibility-ready themes, it performs well for users with wide ranges of disabilities. The simple and minimalist design works great for gaming, business, fashion, music, food, travel, and photography niches.


  1. MH Magazine lite

MH Magazine lite is one of the most popular free responsive magazine, news, newspaper and blog WordPress themes for modern online magazines, dynamic news websites, professional blogs and other editorial websites. This free magazine theme is fast, secure, SEO friendly and perfectly suitable for topics like international news, politics, lifestyle, fashion, business, sports, gadgets, travel or anything else.


  1. Accelerate

Accelerate is multipurpose WordPress theme made for simplicity and ease of use. This theme is a piece of art that has this premium look and feel which will make your site stand out. Supports all post formats. Accelerate can be used for portfolio, business, blog, personal, travel, corporate, business services or any other kinds of sites.


  1. Besty

Besty is a great theme for an architectural blog, photography blog, design blog or any other creative niche because of its features and its modern look and feel. It uses masonry layout. As it is based on Twitter Bootstrap so it is mobile and tablets friendly. It is optimized for faster loading. It has W3C validate code and is SEO friendly as well. With many theme options, it’s easy to manage logo, social media links, footer text etc.


  1. Magazine Newspaper

Magazine Newspaper is a theme built for newspaper, media, magazine and travel blog related projects. This theme is a minimalist and fully responsive multipurpose theme with full WordPress Customizer integration, that enables you to customize your website with live preview. This theme is very lightweight and easy to use. The theme is SEO friendly and customizable according to your necessity and desire.

How to add CAPTCHA in WordPress to prevent spam

Spam registrations or comments can be a nightmare. However, you can stop them completely using CAPTCHA.

According to Wikipedia, CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not a user is human.

In this article, we’re going to cover how to add CAPTCHA to your WordPress site using the Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA) plugin.

Install the reCAPTCHA Plugin

To install the Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA) plugin, login to your WordPress Admin Dashboard and navigate to Plugins » Add New.

Use the search form to locate the plugin and click Install Now. Use the following search term: google captcha.

Install the reCAPTCHA Plugin

If you prefer you can download the plugin from the WordPress.org Plugins directory and install it manually by clicking Upload Plugin. Then, click or drag the plugin’s zip file to the Choose File box and hit Install Now.

Activate the Plugin

Once the plugin is installed you need to activate it.

To do this, go to Plugins » Installed Plugins and locate the Google Captcha plugin. Click Activate.

Add reCAPTCHA to WordPress

You can add CAPTCHA to any part of your WordPress site you think might be vulnerable to bots.

For example, as well as the registration or login page, it can also be added to contact and comment forms.

Adding CAPTCHA to these sections of your site couldn’t be easier with the reCAPTCHA plugin.

In your Admin Dashboard navigate to Google Captcha » Settings to configure the plugin.

Configure reCAPTCHA Plugin

Register With Google

In order to get the API keys to authorize reCAPTCHA on your site, you first need to register your website with Google.

Under the Authentication section, click Get the API Keys to be redirected to Google.

Register your website with Google

Sign in to your Google Account. If you don’t have an account, register one.

Once you’re logged in you’ll see a section entitled Register a new site.

Choose the type of reCAPTCHA

Now you need to choose the type of reCAPTCHA you want to use.

The Four Types of reCAPTCHA

  • reCAPTCHA v3 verifies whether or not an interaction is legitimate without any user interaction. It operates on an automatic score-based system.
  • reCAPTCHA v2 brings up the I’m not a robot checkbox when users visit the page. It is also the most simple option.
  • Invisible reCAPTCHA doesn’t need the visitor to click on anything. Only the more suspicious traffic will be given a CAPTCHA to solve.
  • reCAPTCHA Android provides APIs to integrate into your Android app.

Once you’ve decided on the type of CAPTCHA, add the domain(s) you want to add the reCAPTCHA to (your website or blog).

Accept the Terms of Service and then hit Register.

Note: You can also use the Label field if you’re using different reCAPTCHA settings on different pages, but it’s not obligatory.

Add reCAPTCHA to Your Site

Scroll down to the section entitled Adding reCAPTCHA to your site.

This is where your Google-generated API keys are, as well as the instructions on how to apply them to your site.

Google reCAPTCHA Site Key & Secret Key

Copy the Site key and paste it into the Site key box in Google Captcha » Settings of your WordPress Admin Dashboard.

Do the same with the Secret key and hit Save Changes.

Copy and paste the Site Key and Secret Key

Now it’s time to test it out.

Testing reCAPTCHA

As soon as you’ve copied your API keys in WordPress, Test reCAPTCHA will show up underneath them. To test it, just click the button.

Your chosen CAPTCHA type (eg. v2) will show up. Complete the test and a confirmation message will appear once it’s successful: The verification is successfully completed.

reCAPTCHA is now installed on your site.

Now you need to chose where you want reCAPTCHA to appear on your site.

Choose Where You Want CAPTCHA Enabled

In Google Captcha » Settings, under the General section you’ll see Enable reCAPTCHA for and then a list of checkboxes.

This is how you decide where the CAPTCHA forms will appear on your site.

Select where you want reCAPTCHA to appear

Check all the boxes and save your changes.

If you want to add a CAPTCHA to contact forms, you’ll need an external plugin, which is a premium feature. However, it’s quite affordable at $30 /year.

Now that you’ve successfully installed reCAPTCHA on your site, a CAPTCHA field will appear beneath each form and prompt users before completing the form submission.

WordPress reCAPTCHA field in forms

That’s it, now spam bots will be unable to bypass the CAPTCHA field of your site and won’t be able to flood your site with spam.

I hope you’ve found this tutorial useful, if you have any questions or comments please use the form below.

How to make your WordPress site GDPR compliant

In 2018 the General Data Protection Regulation – or GDPR – came into effect. While it’s a European law, the regulations require websites that have visitors from EU states to comply with the law.

The good news it it’s easy to make your site compliant. The dad news is it’s not very clear what you need to do.

So, we’ve written a tutorial to help you make your WordPress site GDPR compliant.

Update to the latest version of WordPress

In each update of WordPress since version 4.9.6, there’s several new pre-packaged privacy settings which will help you make your site GDPR compliant.

To find out which version of WordPress you’re running, log in to your Admin Dashboard.

The WordPress version is displayed in your Admin Dashboard

Scroll to the bottom of the page & on the right-hand side on the screen the version number will be displayed. As of November 2018, the current version of WordPress is 4.9.8, so if you’re running an earlier version, you should update immediately.

Comment Form Cookie Opt-In

WordPress stores cookies by default so users don’t have to re-type all of their details when leaving a comment.

There is usually an opt-in automatically included in the comment form which users can check.

You don’t have to do anything specific for this, although you may want to explore your customization options if you don’t like the way it looks.

Some theme authors use custom comment forms and may not include this opt-in, so you’ll need to add it yourself.

Export and delete personal data

Two options exist which allow you manage personal information.

Manage Personal Data

To find these settings, look in your Admin Dashboard in the left-hand menu. Under Tools, you will find Export personal data, and Erase personal data.

You can quickly and easily export a user’s information or completely erase it from your database at their request.

Privacy Policy

To be GDPR compliant you need to display a Privacy Policy. If you’ve never written a privacy policy before, WordPress has introduced a template to make it simple. When you installed WordPress or updated to the latest version, a page entitled Privacy Policy was automatically generated and is displayed in your Admin Dashboard under the Pages tab.

Navigate to the Settings > Privacy and select that page from the drop-down. If you don’t already have the Privacy Policy page, use the Create New Page button to generate a privacy policy page for your site.

WordPress Privacy Policy

The site generated privacy policy includes specific privacy and disclosure information related to WordPress in general.

It gives you a starting point for your privacy policy, but when it comes to making your website GDPR compliant, you’ll find that it’s not entirely complete.

Depending on the services and plugins you use on your website, you’ll need to ensure that your privacy policy is updated to include cookie and data collected on your site.

Here’s some common areas where cookies can be collected and you’ll need to include disclosure in your policy:

  • Google Analytics and other tracking services
  • Google Adwords, Bing, and other ad networks
  • Cloudflare and CDN services
  • Opt-ins or pop-ups
  • Push notifications
  • Video players
  • Heatmaps
  • Shopping carts

Contact Forms

Include a checkbox that allows users to opt in (or not) on your contact forms (if you have any). The good news is that a lot of the more popular plugins have been updated to make GDPR compliance easier.

Contact Form 7 Plugin: A simple line of code will add a checkbox to your forms.

[acceptance accept-this-1] I understand that by checking this box agrees that this website and company may store any information I provide. [/acceptance]

wpForms Plugin: If you’re looking for an easy way to add GDPR agreement modules, wpForms has a module you can add. In the wpForms settings enable GDPR Enhancements. This will allow you to edit your existing forms to make sure they match up.

Don’t forget that once you’ve added your data agreements to your contact forms, you will need to be sure to include information about the collected data to your privacy policy.

Newsletters

One of the important points of GDPR is that however you collect information; you need to work out a safe way to store it. So just like in your contact forms, you’ll have to ask users to consent to having their data stored. In most cases, this can be easily done by including a checkbox that users can select to opt-in, or by enabling double opt-in.

Once you’ve done this, be sure to update your privacy policy to include disclosure for your newsletter.

WooCommerce Data

If you have an online store, then you’re going to need to collect a lot of customer data, so it’s important you specify what you collect, for how long, and what you do with it.

WooCommerce has built-in privacy features to make this easier for you.

Start by making sure you have the most recent version of the plugin installed.

Then go to Settings > Accounts & Privacy and make sure you enable the option which allows you to retain personal information, erasure, and privacy policy links.

Then it’s time to update your privacy policy again! Essentially, GDPR is about filling in the gaps between people providing information and knowing what happens to it afterwards. Every change you make in how you collect data is going to need an updated privacy policy, and it pays to keep this up to date.

Add a Cookie Notice

If you’re using cookies, you need to let users know that you’re using them – and not just in your privacy policy. This is why you’ll have noticed an increase in the number of cookie notices on websites. GDPR specifies that the first page a user visits needs to have a cookie disclosure.

Obviously, this means that you do too!

Many popular themes have now updated themselves to make this an easy option to enable on your first page. However, if yours doesn’t, there are plugins which can help to make you compliant.

A search for GDPR cookie compliance plugins in WordPress will display a host of useful plugins, ranging from free use to paid options.

Make it Easy for Users to Request/Delete Their Info

WordPress has streamlined a lot of the process of data collection and storing, so that you can find what you need in one place. However, it is up to you to make sure that you provide the necessary information for a user to contact you should they want their data delated.

How you do that is going to depend on how many users you have on your site. If you’re dealing with a large number of clients, it may well be worth installing a contact form which specifically deals with data deletion requests. Then include a direct link from your privacy policy to the form.

However, if you’re running a simple blog or business website which doesn’t have a huge amount of people’s data, then you should be fine just including the necessary email address for deletion requests in your privacy policy.

Notify Users of Policy Updates or Data Breaches

Now if you’ve completed all the previous steps, your WordPress site should be GDPR compliant. But there’s one more area you need to look into – and that’s what happens when you change your privacy policy, or there is any kind of data breach.

It helps to get in the habit of notifying users when you make changes to your privacy policy so that they know how their data is being used. Many of the more advanced WordPress plugins will have a notification option, so the minute you update a section of your GDPR, you can send out an automatic notification.

You also need to have an email ready should you ever have a data breach. People are particularly data sensitive today, and it’s important you let them know when there’s a risk their data may have been compromised. There’s many templates you can find online for this.

Be aware that the information contained in this article was compiled from people who regularly build WordPress sites. If you’re uncertain about the GDPR regulations, it could be worthwhile to contact a lawyer, just to ensure that you’re getting the best information.

8 Free Real Estate WordPress Themes

In this weeks theme collection we’re looking at the real estate industry. Whether you’re a developer, agent, management company or investor, these beautiful themes can help you create an elegant and beautiful WordPress site for your business.

WP Real Estate

WP Real Estate is a Very Simple, Stylish and Fast Loading WordPress theme Designed for Real estate firms and agents. Although Designed keeping properties in mind, this theme is so flexible it can be used by Lawyers, Doctors, Artists and More!

Builderio

Builderio is a Clean and Simple WordPress Construction Theme built based on Bootstrap 4 framework. Construction zone fully customizable built on wordpress customizer that enable you to configure your website in live preview. This is our most flexible WordPress theme and it is completely free to use for private and commercial websites. It’s 100% responsive and device friendly. This theme is also SEO friendly which will help you you attain the highest rankings on Google and other search engines.

Hotel Center Lite

Hotel Center Lite is a simple, clean, easy to setup and user friendly free hotel booking WordPress theme. This theme is developed to create websites for hotel, restaurants, guest house, resort, cafe, lodge, food joint, spa, vacation, accommodation, holiday homes, bed and breakfast, rental services and all hotel related businesses. It can also be used for corporate, portfolio, creative agencies, tours & travel agencies, personal blog, photography, cuisines, recipes, bakery items and any other business websites. Hotel Center Lite theme is perfect for to create a professional and beautiful website for hotel business. This theme is responsive and looks great on any type of devices including smartphone, tablet, laptop and desktop PC. It is optimized for SEO to rank your website higher in search engine. Also, Hotel Center Lite is cross-browser compatible and supports popular browser like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and IE.

Real Estater

Real Estater is a fresh and clean, modern and functional, versatile and sophisticated, readily responsive WordPress real estate theme.Real Estater supports static front page with dynamic sections like slider section, featured header image, about us section, team section, testimonials etc.

Robolist Lite

Robolist Lite is modern, feature rich and free WordPress theme for listing and directory sites. It is integrated with the well built WP Job Manager Plugin, which enables you to add a list of any professions. Such as business agencies, corporate sites, hotels, real estate and so on. The core objective of this theme is to give the information to the visitors as much as it can. Robolist Lite is loaded with the all the necessary extension which means tons of possibilities. The complete out of the box BootStrap Framework has made Robolist Lite fully responsive theme. Its clean and pixel perfect design is powerful enough to grab the attention of the visitors. Launch your directory website with this awesome WordPress listing theme, Robolist Lite.

Realestate Base

Realestate Base is a clean and beautiful real estate WordPress theme. It is a flexible theme suitable for real estate agency, agents, builders, interior designers, architects, brokers and also useful for blog, business, corporate or portfolios website. It comes with powerful theme options and custom widgets which make customization easy and intuitive. In a matter of minutes, it helps your to set you up with sophisticated custom websites. Regardless of your previous development or coding experience, it delivers sharp, polished results. As this theme is responsive, it looks great on all size devices ranging from small phones to large monitors.

Real Estate Lite

A complete WordPress Real Estate Solution for real estate agents and real estate brokers. Real Estate WordPress theme can also be used for building WordPress sites for small businesses like accountants, consultants and others. It supports the following front page sections: Featured header image with intro and additional buttons, services section, about us, blog and a contact section. This WordPress real estate theme comes complete with customisation options that include, custom logo, custom header, colors, typography, front page sections (header,about us, services, contact us, blog). The PRO addon plugin adds the full real estate solution with actual properties and agents, property slider, property feature/amenities.

real estate agent

A modern WordPress Real Estate Solution for real estate agents and brokers. Real Estate Agent supports static front page with dynamic sections like featured header image, about us section, testimonials and teams (pro features), blog and a contact section. Real Estate Agent theme comes complete with customisation options that include,custom logo, custom header, colors, typography, front page sections (header,about us, services, contact us, blog).

How to fix WordPress Admin Login Error

Are you unable to log into your WordPress admin (/wp-admin) dashboard? Are you receiving an error message? Don’t worry, it’s a common error and there’s more than one solution. In this tutorial, we’re going to cover a few ways of solving this problem.

Reset admin user password

If you can’t log into your Admin Dashboard it could be that you have the incorrect password. But, there’s a quick solution; you can always reset it.

Here’s 3 few ways to reset your admin password.

Resetting admin password with email access

First you want to navigate to your WordPress Admin Login page.

This will be located at the following URL,

 http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/

Click on Lost your password? underneath the Username and Password fields.

When prompted, enter the username or email address of the admin account and click Get New Password.

Click on Lost your password? link

Enter your admin username or email address

A temporary password will be emailed to you. You can always choose to change it once you’ve successfully logged back into your site.

Resetting admin password in the WordPress database

If you no longer have access to your email, you can reset your password by editing the WordPress database using phpMyAdmin.

phpMyAdmin is an open source MYSQL database administration tool which is quite popular and is usually included with most web hosting accounts.

Start by logging into your hosting account / cPanel account.

Under the DATABASES section you’ll see a link for phpMyAdmin. Click on it.

phpMyAdmin located in cPanel hosting account

When phpMyAdmin opens, you’ll see a list of database names. Locate the one for your website and click on it.

If you’re unsure of the name of your database, look inside the wp-config.php file located in the root directory of your WordPress site.

Look for the following code:

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'your_db_name');

In phpMyAdmin, when you select your database name, a list of table rows will be displayed.

Locate the wp_users table row.

wp_users table row in phpMyAdmin

Click on wp_users.

The wp_users table will list all the user accounts on your site and their passwords. However, it’s the admin user that you’re interested in.

Click Edit next to the administrator username.

From the Functions dropdown, select MD5. In the value field, enter your new password.

Change admin user password in wp_users table

Then, save your changes and try to log into your Admin Dashboard with the new password.

Note: Using phpMyAdmin to edit your database may break your website. Make sure to download a backup of your database before you make changes.

Reseting admin password by editing functions.php file

If the previous two solutions didn’t work to reset your password you can always resort to editing the functions.php file.

The file is located in your themes directory and not in the WordPress root directory.

The path to your themes directory looks like this,

/public_html/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen

Connect to your site via FTP or access the File Manager from within your hosting account and navigate to the functions.php file for your active theme. For example:

public_html/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen/functions.php

Edit the file and add this code to it, right at the beginning, after the first <?php:

wp_set_password( 'password', 'admin' );

Put in your own new password for the main admin user. The “admin” is the administrator user ID in the wp_users table.

Note: In this instance, our username is ‘admin’ and our chosen password is ‘password’.

Then, save your changes and try to log into your Admin Dashboard.

If you can, visit My Profile to set a new password and save your changes.

The final step of this solution is important.

Once you’ve changed your password, you need to re-open functions.php and delete the code you just added.

If you don’t, WordPress will continue to reset your password.

Enable cookies and clear cache

Although you can disable cookies in your browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari & Edge), I don’t recommend it when working with WordPress.

WordPress requires cookies to function properly, and some errors can be cookie-related.

Check to ensure that your cookies are enabled in your browser. If they aren’t, enable them.

After enabling the cookies, you should then clear your cookies and cache.

You can also do this in Windows by hitting the ctrl+shift+del keys and on Mac with cmd+shift+del keys.

Once your cache has cleared, reload your page and try to log in again.

If it’s still not fixed, it could instead be a plugin issue.

Disable plugins

If none of the above steps have worked, it’s likely that you’re dealing with a faulty plugin. This is a common cause of many WordPress errors.

That said, there’s no way to tell which plugin is causing the problem.

So, you must deactivate all of them at once, then re-enable them one by one.

You can do this via FTP or with the File Manager within your hosting account.

Locate the plugins directory within your WordPress installation. The path is:

public_html/wp-content/plugins

To disable all your plugins at once, simply rename the folder to plugins_backup.

Now, try to log in to your site again.

If you’re able to log in then you know one of the plugins is the cause of the problem. However, you don’t know which one.

This is why you now need to change the plugins folder back to it’s original name and deactivate the plugins one-by-one by renaming them.

Once you’re able to log in again you will have found the problematic plugin.

Deactivate your currently active theme

Like plugins, themes can also cause their share of problems.

To see if your active theme is the cause of the problem, you can switch to another theme.

Follow the same steps you completed to disable the plugins but instead navigate to the themes directory.

public_html/wp-content/themes/

In that directory you’ll see a list of theme names.

Rename your current active theme folder and try to login again.

If deactivating your theme didn’t work either, let’s move on to the next fix.

Disable .htaccess file and create a new one

If you’re logging in and being redirected to a 404 error page, you can fix this a couple of ways. Disabling .htaccess is one of them.

To do this, go to your WordPress root directory and locate the .htaccess file.

WordPress htaccess file location

Re-name the file to .htaccess.old and try to log in.

If you’re able to log in, all you need to do now is to generate a new .htaccess file.

You can do this in your Admin Dashboard by going to Settings > Permalinks and clicking SAVE. Doing this will regenerate the .htaccess file.

Update your site URL

If creating a new .htaccess file didn’t work, you can try to update the URL of your site via FTP or with the File Manager within your hosting account.

To update your site URL, you have to edit the wp_config.php file. This file is also located in your WordPress root directory.

Edit the file and add the following code:

define('WP_HOME','http://www.yourdomain.com');

define('WP_SITEURL','http://www.yourdomain.com');

This will refresh the URL where your WordPress files are located and also the URL to your homepage.

If you’ve tried all of the above issues and still can’t log in, I suggest contacting your hosting provider for assistance.

Feel free to let us know in the comments below if any of these solutions worked for you.

How to set up error logs in WordPress to diagnose issues

How to set up error logs in WordPress to diagnose issues

Error logs can help you to diagnose issues affecting your site. This is achieved by configuring the wp-config file of your WordPress site.

The wp-config.php file is a WordPress configuration file that contains important settings. These settings tell your website how to connect to your WordPress database, which database table prefix to use, and generates authentication keys to make your WordPress site more secure.

But, it also works as a handy debugging tool, which allows you to find and debug errors.

In this tutorial, I’m going to cover the basics of setting up error logs in WordPress and what they mean.

Why do you need error logs?

Finding the root cause of errors in WordPress can sometimes be frustrating and time consuming.

Setting up error logs will help you find those issues quickly, and point you to the root cause of the errors.

Whether you fix the errors yourself or ask a professional, the error logs are an important piece of the puzzle.

Error logs are also useful in keeping track of bugs that might enter your system through plugin updates or bad code.

How error logs can help us diagnose issues

Depending on the type of error, a simple Google search can help you find a solution.

Each line that’s visible in the error log describes the error and displays the file URL which triggered the error.

However, it also uses PHP terminology. Here is how one line of the error log could look like,

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function verb_lite_entry_categories() in /home/ivgserve/public_html/simplex/wp-content/themes/simplex-lite/loop-templates/content-featured.php on line 23

For beginners who aren’t familiar with PHP code, this can be daunting. Don’t worry, further on in this tutorial I’ll explain how to use error logs to debug issues.

How to setup error logs in wp-config

Until you’ve enabled debug mode, WordPress won’t create or store your error logs. So, you have to enable the built-in debugging feature yourself.

Here’s how you do it.

Enabling the WordPress debug mode

To enable the debug mode, you need to edit the wp-config.php file.

Start by either logging into your hosting provider’s cPanel or access the site via FTP.

Go to your cPanel File Manager or public_html in your FTP and locate wp-config.php.

Open the file to edit it and find the line that says “That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging.”

Right before this line, insert the following code.

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );

define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );

define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );

The save your changes.

The WP_DEBUG line activates the WordPress debug mode. However, it only displays the errors and doesn’t store them in the log file. You’ll see the errors and warnings in your dashboard and on the front-end of your site.

It’s possible this line of code is already present in your wp-config file and will be set to false. In that case, simply change it to true.

The WP_DEBUG_LOG line is what stores the errors in the log.

Finally, the WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY line should be used in conjunction with the other definitions.  This one controls whether or not the debug messages are inside the pages’ HTML or not.

Note: If any of the above lines of code are already in the wp-config file, replace them with the code mentioned previously.

Once you reload your site, it will generate an error_log file which will be located in your WordPress root directory.

Error_Log file located in WordPress root directory

Reviewing the error logs

In order for you to be able to review the logs, you’ll need to trigger them so the system can log them in the error_logs file. You can do this by visiting the pages which where triggering errors. Each page you visit will trigger the errors and the system to record them in the error_logs file.

Then, open the error_logs file and review the logs. It will look something like this,

[21-Oct-2016 16:49:38 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function verb_lite_entry_categories() in /home/ivgserve/public_html/simplex/wp-content/themes/simplex-lite/loop-templates/content-featured.php on line 23
[21-Oct-2016 16:50:51 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function verb_lite_entry_categories() in /home/ivgserve/public_html/simplex/wp-content/themes/simplex-lite/loop-templates/content-featured.php on line 21
[21-Oct-2016 16:54:41 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function verb_lite_entry_categories() in /home/ivgserve/public_html/simplex/wp-content/themes/simplex-lite/loop-templates/content-featured.php on line 22

Error logs usually have the following structure,

  • Date
  • Error type
  • Error description
  • File path & line number

This will point you to the files and specific lines of code which are triggering errors.

You can then go line-by-line and find solutions to each error.

This tutorial doesn’t cover how to solve individual WordPress errors, just how to set up the error logs.

But there is a quick & simple way to find solutions for errors.

Use Google to find solutions

Copy and paste each line of the error log into Google but remove any code specific to your site.

Take this line for example,

[21-Oct-2016 16:49:38 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function verb_lite_entry_categories() in /home/ivgserve/public_html/simplex/wp-content/themes/simplex-lite/loop-templates/content-featured.php on line 23

Remove the date and URL specific to your site but include the file name.

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function verb_lite_entry_categories() content-featured.php on line 23

Then enter this in a Google search.

You’ll most likely find results for WordPress Support forums or Stack Overflow from users who’ve had similar issues.

If you search through the results, or directly in the WordPress & Stack Overflow forums, you’ll most likely find a solution.

I hope you found this useful, if you have any comments or questions, use the comment form below.

 

10 Free Education WordPress Themes

Last year we wrote a similar post but we thought we’d do one for 2018 as it was a popular topic for many of our readers. We’ve rounded up 10 visually appealing themes released in 2018 we think you’ll like. They that can be used to build websites for educators, teachers, high schools, colleges, campuses, universities, coaching centers & e-learning portals.

Creativ Education

Creativ Education is perfect to create an education website for any learning business related to education, teaching and learning. This theme comes with a creative design layout which is suitable for education sites, university, school, primary school, business and similar websites.

Education Booster

Education Booster is a powerful WordPress theme that specializes in education. Education Booster is a robust and reliable, colorful and youthful, clean and pristine, easy to use and readily responsive WordPress creative website theme for professionals, colleges, schools, universities or private educational institutions. Education Booster has a streamlined, practical design that is sure to attract many readers.

Education LMS

Education LMS is a simple, clean, responsive and user-friendly education WordPress theme specially designed for university, school, college or other educational institutions. The Education LMS theme has powerful theme customization options such as custom header media, logo, custom menu, social icons, featured slider, courses, title bar, news, and more. It makes your website more engaging and informative. Especially, the Education LMS theme works excellent with Elementor and LearnPress plugins, help you easily create flexible content and sell the course online.

Education Master

Education Master, an Education theme by ThemeEgg, is a responsive WordPress theme for university, school, college or other educational institutions. Along with educational institutions, Education Master is flexible and loaded with several features to also cater to the needs of design agencies, corporate websites and small businesses.

Kids Education

Kids Education is an educational theme developed by Theme Palace. Kids Education is a multipurpose WordPress Educational Theme suitable for Kindergartens, daycare, Primary Schools, Secondary Schools and High Schools. Kids Education Theme is also suitable for any educational activities and, with the colorful design, it is ideal for toys stores, activities related to children too. Kids Education can be adapted to any kind of industry – not only educational but also babysitting and summer camps. All pages are optimized in order to perform, in a simple and fast way. It comes with a wide variety of options so you can modify Styling, Featured Slider, Menus, Breadcrumb, Widgets and much more, directly from theme customizer. This theme is Woocommerce compatible and translation ready.

Creativ Kids Education

Creativ Kids Education is a colorful and cheerful WordPress theme created for the kindergarten, daycare, preschool, arts & crafts classes, college, university & all educational institutions. This theme includes a fascinating homepage, vibrant colors, attractive icons and much more.

Uni Education

Uni Education is a elegantly crafted educational theme. It is blazingly fast, extremely light-weight, search engine friendly and very easy to use. Uni Education theme is suitable for college, School, university, LMS, Training Center, Academy, Primary School, High School and Kindergarten and various educational websites. Uni Education theme has wide list of customizable features including front page customizable sections with customizer api and widgets, wide and boxed layout and many more options. It comes with cross-browser compatibility, mobile friendly design and responsive features.

Higher Education

Higher Education is a simple, clean and user-friendly Education WordPress theme especially designed for Schools, Universities and Academic Institutions. The responsive layout and beautiful design make your website look welcoming. The theme provides your visitors an easy access to any area they like. The Higher Education WordPress theme has powerful theme customization options as well. It has a large roster of versatile features such as custom header media, logo, custom menu, social icons, featured slider, hero content, featured slider, promotion headline, portfolio, logo slider, courses, professors, testimonials, events, news, and more. With an array of crucial features filled in it, Higher Education is perfect for schools, universities, language classes, professional courses, and all the academic institutions. Make your website more engaging and informative with Higher Education. The theme gives the perfect niche that is dynamic, multi-functional and upfront. This theme is translation ready.

Campus Education

Campus Education is a visually appealing, engaging and informative education WordPress theme for high schools, colleges, campuses, universities, coaching centres, e-learning portals, teaching academies, secondary schools and other LMS. With profound customization, you can change the look of the site to make it the best fit for kindergartens, preschools, day care centres and primary schools. The theme is responsive, translation ready and cross-browser compatible. Banners and sliders can be used to make it more impacting. This education WordPress theme has proper placement of call to action buttons to invoke visitors to take actions in your favour. Social media icons can help you link to maximum people in just a few clicks. Standard design pattern is followed to make it SEO ready. Built on Bootstrap framework, it encourages easy usage of the theme. Customization is its powerful tool that can change the look and feel of the website.

Free Education

Free Education is a simple, clean, responsive and user-friendly education WordPress theme specially designed for university, school, college or other educational institutions. The Free Education theme has powerful theme customization options such as custom header settings, logo, custom menu, social icons, featured slider, courses and more. It makes your website more engaging and informative. Especially, the Free Education theme works excellent with Free Education Helper and learpress plugins, help you easily create flexible content and sell the course online.

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