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Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Twitter Rolls Out Fleets Feature In India

On Tuesday, Twitter announced that it is rolling out the Fleets feature in India. Fleets are Twitter’s version of Stories to allow users to post ephemeral content to its micro-blogging platform. Twitter stated that the company is still testing the Fleets feature, and this feature is available...

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

How to Reset Your WordPress Site

Do you want to wipe the slate clean and start your WordPress website from scratch?

Maybe your site has seriously lost its way, and you’d prefer to delete all of your content rather than manually unpicking every single one of your mistakes. Perhaps you want to cut ties with your old site and relaunch it as something entirely new. Or, maybe you were using your account to experiment with various WordPress themes and plugins, and now you’re finally ready to get serious about building your website.

Why go to the effort of deleting WordPress and then reinstalling it from scratch, when you can just hit the reset button?

In this article, I’ll share two ways that you can roll back time and restore WordPress to its fresh-out-of-the-box state, without having to go to the trouble of deleting and reinstalling WordPress.

If you do want to install WordPress from scratch, you can learn how in our complete guide.

WordPress

How to Install WordPress

Rachel McCollin

Why Might I Need to Reset My WordPress Website?

When you reset your WordPress website, you restore all of its files and databases to their original state.

There’s countless reasons why you might want to reset WordPress, but some common ones include:

You’re repurposing your website. Are you craving a fresh start? Maybe you want to take your website in a radical new direction, or perhaps you have an old, abandoned website that you want to repurpose for an exciting new project. Whatever your reasons, restoring WordPress to its default settings is often easier than deleting all of your old content and settings manually.
You need to debug your themes and plugins. WordPress is generally a reliable, stable and secure platform, but no software is perfect. There's a chance you may encounter issues, particularly when using third party themes and plugins. If you’ve installed a large number of themes and plugins then you may struggle to identify which piece of software is causing you so many problems. To help you pinpoint the culprit, you may want to restore WordPress to its default settings and then reapply each of your themes and plugins individually, making sure to test your website after each change.
You’re cleaning up a test installation. Perhaps you’ve been experimenting with various themes, plugins and settings before starting work on your “real” website. If you’ve been treating WordPress as a testing ground, then your website may not currently be in a usable state! Rather than manually removing all of your experimental edits, simply hit the reset button and your account will be as good as new.

Do You Really Need to Reset WordPress?

Restoring WordPress to its default settings is a big step that should never be taken lightly.

Before factory resetting your site, you should consider whether there’s a less drastic solution that can deliver the results you want, without requiring you to delete all of your website’s content.

1. You Want to Move Your Website to a New Domain

When you created your WordPress account, you were asked to choose a domain name.

If you’re still using your original domain, then there’s a chance it may no longer accurately reflect your website. It’s also possible that your site has grown into something much bigger than originally anticipated, and you’re starting to worry that your light-hearted, jokey domain name is preventing people from taking you seriously.

While you could migrate all of your content to a new website and then reset your original site, this is a complex, multi-step process that will damage your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and performance.

Instead of migrating your content, you should register a new domain, then replace all instances of your old domain with the new domain name. Then, you just need to setup a few 301 redirects, and visitors will be automatically redirected to your shiny new domain.

Not only is this process far easier than a full-blown migration and WordPress reset, it also helps preserve your website’s SEO, ensuring that your site continues to rank high in Google’s all-important search results.

WordPress

How to Migrate a WordPress Site

Rachel McCollin

2. You Want to Delete All of Your Website’s Content

Sometimes, you may want to delete all of your website’s pages and posts, for example if you’re relaunching your blog. While resetting your WordPress will get rid of this content, it’ll also delete any other customizations you’ve made to your website, including any changes you’ve made to your WordPress settings.

Instead of resetting WordPress, you can delete all of your pages and/or posts, with just a few clicks:

In WordPress’ left-hand menu, select Posts > All Posts or “Pages > All Pages, depending on the content you want to remove.
Select the checkbox next to the Title list (circled in the following screenshot). All of your pages or posts should now be selected.

Open the Bulk Actions dropdown, and select Move to Trash.
Click Apply.

All of the selected content will now be deleted.

3. You Want to Redesign Your WordPress Site

Even if you want to completely overhaul every part of your website, you don’t necessarily have to delete everything and start from scratch! Often, you can completely change your website's look and feel by simply switching to a new theme.

If you want to test out various themes without giving your visitors whiplash, then the free Theme Switcha plugin lets you experiment with themes while displaying your current theme to anyone who's viewing your website.

Don’t Lose Your Content Forever!

So, you’ve considered the alternatives and decided to go ahead and reset your WordPress website, but before hitting that reset button it’s recommended that you create a backup.

Resetting your website may seem like the perfect solution now, but there’s always a chance you may need some of your old content further down the line. If you reset your website without creating a backup, then all of this content will be lost forever.

You can quickly and easily download a copy of all your posts, pages, comments, categories, and tags, using WordPress’ built-in Export tool. The Export tool generates an XML file that contains all of this content, plus references to your website’s image files. These references will only be functional if they link to an image that’s publicly available online, for example an image that’s hosted on another website. As a general rule you should expect to lose all of your images when you reset your website, so now’s the time to download any images that you want to hang onto.

Before exporting your content, it’s a good idea to spring-clean your website as this will help ensure a smooth, error-free import, if you ever need to restore your previous content. In particular, it’s recommended that you delete any comments that are marked as spam, and approve any pending comments, in order to ensure the exported XML file is as clean as possible.

When you’re ready to export your content:

Log into your WordPress account, if you haven’t already.
Navigate to Tools > Export.
To export all of your posts, pages, comments, categories, tags and references, select All content. Alternatively, you can specify which content you want to export.

WordPress has a built-in Export tool that you can use to backup all of your content

Select Download Export File.

All of your content will now be downloaded as an XML file.

If you want to restore this content at any point, then you just need to import the XML file into your WordPress website:

In WordPress’ left-hand menu, select Tools > Import.
Scroll to the WordPress section and click Run Importer.
Select Choose file followed by the XML file that you want to import.
Click Upload file and import.
When prompted, assign this content to an author. You can either create a new author, or assign the content to an existing author, but it’s recommended that you choose an active author, just in case you ever need to edit this content.
Click Submit.

WordPress will now reinstate all of your old content.

Reset Your Website Using This Free WordPress Plugin

The easiest way to reset your WordPress website is to use a plugin.

There are plenty of free plugins that provide reset functionality, but in this tutorial I’ll be using the Advanced WordPress Reset plugin, which restores your WordPress database to its original state, deleting all of your content and customizations in the process.

Advanced WordPress Reset will not delete any of your themes or plugins, but it will deactivate them, so you’ll still get that fresh-out-of-the-box experience. At the time of writing, Advanced WordPress Reset does not support Multisite.

Although installing a plugin simply to reset your WordPress website may seem like overkill, resetting WordPress manually is a multi-step process, so this plugin can save you a tonne of time—and potentially spare you a few headaches!

To reset your website using the Advanced WordPress Reset plugin:

Log into your WordPress website.
Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
Search for Advanced WordPress Reset and when the plugin appears, select Install Now > Activate.
In WordPress’ left-hand menu, select Tools > Advanced WP Reset.

You can quickly and easily reset your WordPress website using the Advanced MP Reset plugin

Read the onscreen warning. This plugin will reset your entire website—if you haven’t exported your website then this is your last chance to back out before losing this content forever. If you still want to proceed, then type reset into the text field.

To delete all of your website’s content and customizations, click Reset database.

Once the reset is complete, you’ll be prompted to log into your admin account, and your WordPress website will be ready to go!

How to Reset WordPress Without a Plugin

Most of the time, it makes sense to reset your website using a plugin—it’s quicker, easier and there’s less chance of things going horribly wrong! However, even if you do use a plugin, it can still be helpful to understand what that plugin is doing behind-the-scenes, just in case you encounter any issues when resetting your website.

The process of resetting WordPress manually will vary depending on your hosting provider, how your website is configured, and the tools you use to manage your site, but as a general rule you’ll need a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client, and a hosting admin tool such as phpMyAdmin or cPanel.

In this final section, I’ll outline the steps you’ll typically take, in order to reset your website manually.

Delete Your MySQL Database

First, you’ll need to delete your website’s MySQL database, which will permanently remove all of your site’s settings and content.

You can delete this database using your hosting admin tool, for example if you’re using cPanel then you’ll find all of your databases by navigating to Databases > MySQL Databases. Once you’ve identified your WordPress database, make a note of its name and then go ahead and hit Delete.

Create a New Database

Your WordPress website cannot load without a database, so once you’ve deleted your old database, you’ll need to create a new one.

If you’re using cPanel, then:

Select the MySQL Database Wizard icon, followed by Create a New Database.
Give this database the same name as the database you just deleted.
Select Create Database. This page should now refresh automatically.
In Add a User to a Database, open the User dropdown and select your username.
Open Database and select the database you just created.

If your username doesn’t appear in the User dropdown, then you can recreate your account in the Add a New User section. Wherever possible, you should re-use your previous database username and password.

If you cannot remember your login details, then you can retrieve your username and password using your favourite FTP client:

In the FTP application, navigate to your website’s public_html folder, which contains all of your website’s root files.
Control-click the wp-config.php file and then select View.
In the file’s MySQL Settings section, locate your username and password.

You can now use this information to create a new database user.

Spring Clean Your Site: Deleting Themes and Plugins

While we have our FTP client open, this is the perfect opportunity to delete any plugins or themes that you no longer use:

Switch over to your FTP client.
Navigate to public_httml > wp-content.

The wp-content folder should contain plugins and themes folders. You can open each of these folders and delete the items that you want to remove, or you can remove all plugins by deleting the plugins folder itself.

Run the WordPress Installation Script

At this point, your WordPress website is completely clean, but it isn’t quite ready to use.

To turn this blank slate into a functional website, you’ll need to run the WordPress installation script:

Type your website’s URL into the address bar, but don’t press the Enter key just yet.
Add the following to your URL: /wp-admin/install.php
Now you can press the Enter key.
On the subsequent screen, give your website a title and create a username.
When you’re happy with the information you’ve entered, click Install WordPress.

The installation script will now run, and your WordPress website will be ready for you to use!

Conclusion

In this article, I showed you how to turn back the clock and restore your WordPress website to its original state, using either a plugin or by deleting your WordPress database manually.

Now you’ve got a fresh copy of WordPress, you’re ready to start building your website! For advice on how to create an attention-grabbing, high-performing website that visitors will love, check out some of our other WordPress tutorials.

The Best WordPress Themes and Plugins on Envato Market

Explore thousands of the best WordPress themes ever created on ThemeForest and leading WordPress plugins on CodeCanyon. Purchase these high-quality WordPress themes and plugins and improve your website experience for you and your visitors.

Here are a few of the best-selling and up-and-coming WordPress themes and plugins available for 2020.

by Jessica Thornsby via Envato Tuts+ Code

Facebook is rolling out its News section for all users in the US with inclusions of local news tab

Last year in October, Facebook had announced to launch a News section as a limited test in the US. Now, Facebook News has been launched as a separately dedicated section for trending stories for all the users in the US. According to TechCrunch, Facebook has also included local news tab to its News...

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Microsoft Adds More Password Options To The Authenticator App For Android Users

Finally, Microsoft has rolled out an update for the Android version of the Authenticator application that lets people change their passwords within the Authenticator app. Microsoft originally announced this update for the iOS version of the Authenticator app earlier this year. Now, the feature is...

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

How to Install PHP in Ubuntu

Today, I’m going to show you how to install PHP in the Ubuntu OS. First, I'll show you how to install the default stable version of PHP and then I'll show you how you can install other versions of PHP.

PHP is a server-side scripting language which is mostly used to build web applications—these may range from a very simple blog website to a full-fledged eCommerce store. In fact, PHP is one of the most popular server-side scripting languages for web development.

Learn PHP for Free

If you want to learn PHP, check out our free online course on PHP fundamentals!

In this course, you'll learn the fundamentals of PHP programming. You'll start with the basics, learning how PHP works and writing simple PHP loops and functions. Then you'll build up to coding classes for simple object-oriented programming (OOP). Along the way, you'll learn all the most important skills for writing apps for the web: you'll get a chance to practice responding to GET and POST requests, parsing JSON, authenticating users, and using a MySQL database.

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PHP

PHP Fundamentals

Jeremy McPeak

In the next section, we’ll go through prerequisites that are required in order to install PHP in your Ubuntu installation.

Prerequisites

Before we go ahead and install PHP, let’s make sure of the following things in the first place.

It’s assumed that you know how to use the Linux terminal to run commands. In fact, basic knowledge of the Linux shell is enough, you don’t have to be an expert!

To install software packages, either you need to have root access or you need to have a user with sudo access. Throughout the course of this tutorial, I’m going to use the root user to install PHP and other necessary packages. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from using a user with sudo rights instead.

Generally speaking, the process of installing PHP remains the same in different versions of Ubuntu. Unless you specify, the install command will try to find the default stable version of PHP for your Ubuntu installation and install that. but, if you want to install a specific version of PHP, you may need to add related packages. In the latter half of the article, we’ll go through an example to demonstrate how you could install the PHP 7.4 version.

In the first half of the article, we’ll see how you could install the default stable version of PHP in Ubuntu. Next, we’ll discuss how to install the PHP 7.4 version in Ubuntu. In fact, PHP has several different versions and if you want to install some other version of PHP, drop me a line in the comments section and I’ll be happy to help.

With that out of our way, we’re ready to move on to the next section!

How to Install PHP 7 in Ubuntu

In this section, we’ll go through the necessary steps in order to install PHP. Specifically, we’ll install the latest stable version of PHP which is supported for the Ubuntu installation available on your system.

Update Ubuntu Packages

For *nix-based systems—Linux and Unix—it’s always preferred to update the list of available packages before we install or upgrade any software. It makes sure that we get the latest version of the software. So it’s recommended to run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade commands.

Thus, before we go ahead and install PHP, let’s run the following commands in your terminal.

$apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

The apt-get update command should update the list of available packages along with their versions. On the other hand, the apt-get upgrade command actually installs and updates necessary packages.

After running the above commands successfully, we’re ready to move on to the next section.

Let’s Install PHP

When it comes to installing PHP, it takes only a single command: apt-get install php. In fact, if you want to make sure which packages will be installed before actually installing it, you can add the --dry-run option along with the command.

Firstly, let’s do a dry run instead of actually installing anything.

$sudo apt-get install --dry-run php
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  php7.2
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  php php7.2
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 230 not upgraded.
Inst php7.2 (7.2.24-0ubuntu0.18.04.4 Ubuntu:18.04/bionic-updates, Ubuntu:18.04/bionic-security [all])
Inst php (1:7.2+60ubuntu1 Ubuntu:18.04/bionic [all])
Conf php7.2 (7.2.24-0ubuntu0.18.04.4 Ubuntu:18.04/bionic-updates, Ubuntu:18.04/bionic-security [all])
Conf php (1:7.2+60ubuntu1 Ubuntu:18.04/bionic [all])

As you can see, this displays a complete list of packages that will be installed, upgraded and removed. In fact, I recommend you to do a dry run before installing any software, as it provides useful information.

Finally, let’s go ahead and install PHP:

$sudo apt-get install php

And with that, apt-get should install PHP and other necessary packages in your system. Let’s quickly verify the PHP version which is just installed with the following command:

$php -v
PHP 7.2.24-0ubuntu0.18.04.3 (cli) (built: Feb 11 2020 15:55:52) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.2.24-0ubuntu0.18.04.3, Copyright (c) 1999-2018, by Zend Technologies

As you can see, this displays the PHP version along with other useful information. You should see similar output if PHP is installed successfully.

In the next section, I'll show you how to install PHP extensions.

How to Install PHP Extensions

In the previous section, we installed PHP, but you might also need to install PHP extensions separately.

You can use the following command to list out all the PHP extensions.

$apt-cache search --names-only ^php

And if you are looking for extensions that are specifically supported for the PHP 7.2 version, you can use the following command.

$apt-cache search --names-only ^php | grep "php7.2"

Once you’ve a list of PHP extensions that you want to install, you just need to use the apt-get install command to install them. For example, the following command installs the php7.2-odbc extension.

$apt-get install php7.2-odbc

This installs the php-odbc extension and upgrades any necessary packages along with it.

In the next section, we’ll discuss how you could install a specific version of PHP.

How to Install PHP 7.4 in Ubuntu

In this section, we’ll go through how you could install PHP 7.4 in Ubuntu, which is the latest stable version of PHP.

Update Ubuntu Packages

As we discussed in the previous section, let’s run the following commands to update and upgrade the list of available packages.

$apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Add the PHP PPA Repository

Next, we’ll need to add the ondrej/php repository, which is a PPA repository and it contains the latest build packages of PHP.

Go ahead and run the following commands that add the ppa:ondrej/php repository and update the list of available packages along with their versions.

$apt -y install software-properties-common
$add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
$apt-get update

And with that, we’re ready to install PHP 7.4.

Let’s Install PHP 7.4

Finally, let’s use the following command to install PHP 7.4.

$apt -y install php7.4

After running the above command successfully, you could check the PHP version with the php -v command.

How to Install PHP 7.4 Extensions

After installing PHP 7.4, if you want to install additional extensions, you could search it using the following command.

$apt-cache search --names-only ^php | grep "php7.4"

And finally, run the apt-get install command to install extensions that you want to install.

How to Handle Multiple PHP Versions?

Sometimes you need to manage multiple versions of PHP on the same Ubuntu server. For example, your old projects might still be running on PHP 5.x and they might not yet be upgradable to PHP 7.x. On the other hand, if you’re working on a new project you might want the latest stable version of PHP 7.x. In this scenario, you have to install two different versions of PHP on your server.

There are different ways you could use to configure the specific version of PHP to be used with Apache for Nginx web servers. Or you could also use the update-alternatives command to set the default version of PHP which will be used if you’ve multiple versions of PHP.

Let’s assume that you’ve installed two different versions of PHP: PHP 7.2 and PHP 7.4. If you want to set the PHP 7.4 version to be the default version, you could run the following command.

$update-alternatives --set php /usr/bin/php7.4

In this way, you can switch between different versions of PHP for development purposes.

Conclusion

In this article, we went through the necessary steps that are required to install PHP in the Ubuntu OS. Along with that, I also took an opportunity to show how to install the specific version of PHP as well.

The Best PHP Scripts on CodeCanyon

For complete applications that you can use and customize, take a look the professional PHP scripts on CodeCanyon.

Explore thousands of the best and most useful PHP scripts ever created on CodeCanyon.

Here are a few of the best-selling and up-and-coming PHP scripts available on CodeCanyon for 2020.

by Sajal Soni via Envato Tuts+ Code

TikTok is testing a new user interface for its Creator Marketplace

Matt Navarra, a social media consultant, and industry commentator has recently tweeted that TikTok is testing an enhanced interface for its Creator Marketplace. Previously, there was no convenient way to view campaigns, edit the Creator profile or View TikTok Creator Toolkit even. This new...

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

On The Footprints Of Google: Facebook Is Now Showing Wikipedia Snippets in Search Results

Facebook has been trying to update a wide variety of its features for quite some time now, and a big part of the reason why that is the case has to do with the fact that it is trying to remain competitive in a tech industry that has become increasingly cutthroat, so much so that it’s fair to say...

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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World