Where Did Our Tech Support Content Go?

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, Reich Web Consulting was just Reich Consulting.  I came from a background in IT and continued to take IT and support clients for several years.  Since then, we’ve narrowed our focus to web development and web marketing.  We’re no longer in the tech support business.

With that in mind, we want our website to reflect the services we offer today.  We’ll be moving all of our tech support content out to Medium, so those articles that are still helpful remain available to those who need them.

Our site at reich-consulting.net will focus on the topics in which we specialize, specifically web developer and web marketing.

Your WordPress Hosting Is Upgrading to PHP 7.2

Are you a Reich Web Consulting WordPress Hosting customer?

We don’t want to bore you with technical details, but we want you to know that some changes are coming to your web hosting platform that may affect your website.

Your site runs on WordPress. WordPress is written in a language called PHP, which has gone through many versions. Your site currently runs on PHP 5.6.  This version will reach its end of life on January 1, 2019.  This means that it is no longer supported software, and will become a security problem if not upgraded.

Don’t worry! You chose to host with Reich Web Consulting because we’ve got your back. We still do. If you trust Reich Web Consulting to do right by you, well, there’s no need to keep reading. Go enjoy this beautiful summer day! If you’d like to learn more, continue on.

The Benefits

There’s a reason we’re not asking if you want this upgrade, and that reason is SECURITY. Not performing the upgrade would eventually leave your website open to attack.  Every web host that supports WordPress and PHP must make this transition within the next 5 months, or willfully choose to leave their customers vulnerable to hackers.

As an added benefit, PHP 7.2 is significantly faster than PHP 5. Some benchmarks indicate that PHP 7.2 can run a WordPress page request over 2x faster than PHP 5! Faster page loads mean more users will stay on your site longer, and may even help search engine ranking.

Our Upgrade Plan

We’re upgrading to the latest version of PHP, which is 7.2. Most sites will work without any modifications, but some may require additional work.

In order to upgrade our sites without causing service interruptions, we’ll go through the following process.

  1. Run a Compatibility Tool Against Your Site to Determine if the PHP 7.2 upgrade is safe.
  2. If it’s not we’ll determine what components are incompatible.
  3. If those components are free and won’t affect your site performance to upgrade them, we’ll go ahead and update those components.
  4. If making your site compatible with PHP 7.2 will include any costs, we’ll contact you before we do anything. This could be due to premium plugin upgrades, or significant labor involved in more complex scenarios.

Only after all the sites we host are tested and confirmed to work with PHP 7.2 will be “flip the switch.

Our Upgrade Timeline

We plan to begin testing immediately.  We plan to complete the process and finalize the upgrade to PHP 7.2 at the end of August.

A picture of a WordPress post in the dashboard.

WordPress Posts Defined

WordPress content comes in two basic flavors:  posts and pages. This article is the first in a series of three that define WordPress posts, pages, and discuss the differences between the two.

What’s a WordPress Post?

A picture of a WordPress post in the dashboard.

You can use posts to publish news, product reviews, or pictures of your cat.

Posts have their roots in the annals of blogging history.  Early bloggers kept online journals that they updated daily, weekly, or when they photographed their cat. Though blogging has grown from its humble roots it hasn’t forgotten where it came from.  Individual, time-sensitive posts (and cat pictures) are still the fundamental currency of the blogging world.

Authors use WordPress Posts to make regular entries to your site. They can contain all sorts of information like current news, site updates, videos, and images. The date and time in which the author submits a post often provides some context to the post’s content.

WordPress Posts are:

  • Created often. Posts are written regularly and are the primary unit of content on your blog. As your blog matures your site will accumulate many, many posts.
  • Rarely changed As a general guideline the date and time in which a post was published provides some context to the post’s content. If your site publishes technology news you would not change your entry about the iPhone 4 just because the iPhone 5 is released. However if you post content that is found to be inaccurate, there’s nothing wrong with editing to correct it.
  • Categorized. As your site matures it will accumulate a huge number of posts.  Categorizing your WordPress posts benefits the author as well as the reader to find the content they desire.
  • Time-sensitive. This is more of a guideline than a rule, but WordPress posts are often related to the date they were published.

Some examples of content that you might include in WordPress posts:

  • News articles
  • Online diary entries
  • Product reviews
  • Photos and videos
  • How-to articles

 

Disable Breadcrumbs in Woocommerce

I’m amazed that this isn’t an option within the plugin’s configuration, but you can disable breadcrumbs in Woocommerce by adding the following line to your theme’s functions.php: