98% Off: Get the Project Management Certification Bundle for Only $49

They say great leaders are born, not made. While there is some truth to that, it isn’t always the case. An effective project manager is a good decision maker, has effective communication skills and strong leadership skills. All of these skills can be learned and harnessed over time. The Project Management Certification Bundle offers some […]

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Use Java EE and OpenID Connect to Secure Your Java API

In the early 2000s, Java developers used servlets and EJBs to develop their server applications. Hibernate and Spring came along in 2002 and 2004. Both technologies had a huge impact on Java developers everywhere, showing them it was possible to write distributed, robust applications without EJBs.

Fast forward to 2018, and Java EE certainly doesn’t look like it used to! Now, it’s mostly POJOs and annotations and far simpler to use.

In-Sprint Test Automation at Agile and DevOps Speed Using Testsigma

Introduction

A few years back, when software development strategies such as the Waterfall model were prominent, the testing phase used to start after the whole development phase is complete and later came the release. We have come a long way since then after the adoption of Agile and DevOps practices. However, UI automation typically still lags behind the sprint.

The reason is that Agile and DevOps approach doesn't allow a lot of time for comprehensive test creation between code completion and release. You may need to depend heavily on manual testing practices in order to guarantee minimum coverage. One of the ways to avoid this is to start the testing process very early in the sprint.

5 editing and writing services to refine your WordPress content

It is no secret that filling the site with quality content is one of the “pillars” of successful marketing. It is useful, readable texts that keep clients on the site, encourage them to commit the necessary actions. In the field of writing content for websites, there have long been requirements that help to prepare a text, following these criteria. Compliance with these parameters helps to read your text quickly and interestingly.

In such situations, custom essay writing service and other writing and editing services come to help. They assist errors, correct typography. They are recommended for writers, copywriters, journalists, students and anyone working with. Our list includes five editing and writing services to refine your WordPress content.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a service that shows grammatical errors and options for correcting them. The service offers essential functions for WordPress Content, namely:

  • Installed in the browser;
  • Finds and emphasizes errors in all messages typed in the browser;
  • Prompts options, more correct spelling;
  • Recognizes more than 250 types of errors.

Grammarly can search for plagiarism in the text, and also helps to adapt your lines to a specific writing style: academic, business, conversational or artistic. According to the authors, which include professional linguists, their tool uses 4 million people of various professions. Grammarly is available, including as an add-in for Word and Outlook, starting with the 2007 version.

The service offers two versions, the base version is free, with limited functionality, or a premium version with a monthly subscription fee.

Handmade writing

The service is useful if you don’t have time to write high-quality content for the site or you have the goal to write my essay today. The facility has a large team of content marketing professionals. Your article will be printed with all the rules and requirements of Google for better SEO.

You can also order editing your WordPress Content. Just send the source text, and the service experts adapt it for WordPress.

Handmade writing experts will provide you with specially prepared text concerning the requirements of search engines, containing advanced keywords and to be added to the site.

Hemingway App

Hemingway application improves WordPress Content. App gives essential and straightforward tips and subtleties that adapt your text to the format of the website. You insert the text, and the application highlights the most common errors in it. When you hover over selected text, the application displays a tip. For example, if a sentence is long, Hemingway highlights it with yellow. If a document is highlighted in red, you need to simplify dense sentences. Difficult and incomprehensible words application highlights purple.

Adverbs and weak phrases are highlighted in blue, and it is better to replace them with stronger words. Passive voice is replaced by active if the proposal is highlighted in green.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is an online editor that improves WordPress Content and enhances your writing skills. The application analyzes WordPress Content, identifying grammatical and spelling errors, plagiarism of content and contextual errors. ProWritingAid corrects incorrect or vague content, offering many options for improvement.

Errors such as repeatability, ambiguous wording, too long sentences, the use of a passive voice, etc. are enemies of WordPress Content. ProWritingAid allows you to lose them. Using built-in tracking and reporting tools, ProWritingAid helps you identify common errors to improve your WordPress Content writing skills.

Readable

Readable is a free tool to quickly and easily verify the readability of your text. Just enter the address of a website or copy the text directly in the field of the tool.

The readability tool simplifies the process of writing and creating WordPress Content.
Readability is very important if you want to create content that will attract interest and response from your target audience.

Evaluating the readability of your WordPress Content and publishing content that is understandable to your audience will attract attention and turn readers into customers.

This is an article by Josh Carlyle.

GraphQL: Core Features, Architecture, Pros, and Cons

When you talk about API design, the first thing that probably comes to mind is Representational State Transfer (REST). A standard for data retrieval from the server, it’s based on accessing data by URLs.

In 2000, when REST was developed, client applications were relatively simple, development pace wasn’t nearly where it is today, and, as a result, REST was a good fit for many applications. REST gave us important concepts for API design – stateless servers and structured access to resources. However, since that time APIs have gotten more complex and data-driven affected by the following factors:

Truster Vs. Trustless (Part 1): The Role of Trust in the Means of Exchange Operation

Trustless has become a rallying cry for Bitcoin evangelists, focusing public attention on the fact that Bitcoin enables P2P transactions without the participation of a trusted third party acting as an intermediary.

Bitcoin makes it possible to conduct money transfers without intermediaries — intermediaries who could, otherwise, gain control over funds in a transaction, censor transactions, or act as points of failure. Does this give grounds to assert that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a form of money that does not require trust? Is it possible to completely eliminate trust from monetary relations, and is there even a need to? This article is devoted to the study of the role of trust in monetary transactions, including cryptocurrencies, and its main conclusion is that this role is hard to overestimate.

How to Monitor 1,000 Network Devices Using Sensu Go and Ansible (in Under 10 Minutes)

Network monitoring, at scale, is an age-old problem in IT. In this post, I’ll discuss a brief history of network monitoring tools — including the pain points of legacy technology when it came to monitoring thousands of devices — and share my modern-day solution using Sensu Go and Ansible.

Then: Nagios and Multiple Network Monitoring Tools

I’ve spent the last ten years as a consultant for open-source monitoring architectures. During this time, I’ve seen many companies, of every size, based all over the world, with very different approaches to implementing and migrating monitoring environments and tools. Especially in small and medium-sized businesses, the demand for a one-fits-all solution is high. While big companies often use more than one monitoring solution — the “best of breed” approach — this option is often untenable for smaller businesses due to financial constraints. And sometimes having multiple monitoring tools makes no sense at all — the more tools you have, the more things you have to keep track of. Many IT organizations feel the best approach is to use one solution to monitor their entire infrastructure. This monolithic approach, with one tool that offers many functionalities, like monitoring, root cause analysis, visualization, reporting, etc., is not wrong as such, but when there are requirements like the need to scale, true interoperability in big environments, and reducing the dependency on one tool and vendor, it’s better to separate these requirements and run a single interconnected solution following the microservices approach.

11 Easy Tips A Beginner Should Know When Creating An Online Portfolio

Needless to say, comparing to other online projects, creating a portfolio is a fast process. However, it doesn’t mean that you can do it hastily and carelessly! The modern audience always feels such things. When working on your online portfolio, keep in mind that any detail matters. All in all, a properly designed online portfolio Read More →

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Introduction To Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is a recent continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) service provided by Microsoft. It works with any managed Git provider and can deploy to most major cloud services, which allow for Azure services. Azure DevOps provides pipelines to configure and automate builds and releases to different environments. These pipelines can be in YAML or as visual models in the Azure DevOps webpages. Azure DevOps is a fast way to automate build (CI) and deploy (CD) projects and make them available to users.

Pre-requisites:

  • Azure subscription, a free account can be created using this URL.
  • Github account (or) Azure Repos (or) TFS

Create Azure DevOps Organization

  • The first step is to navigate to https://dev.Azure.com and sign in to Azure DevOps. If never done before, a new organization needs to be created.

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The Smart Fabric That Can Regulate Heat Automatically

While wearable technology has allowed us to monitor our activity in a variety of interesting new ways, perhaps the most interesting angle is in developments in actual fabric itself. The latest example comes via the University of Maryland, whose researchers have developed a fabric that can automatically regulate the amount of heat that passes through it.

The work, which was documented in a recently published paper, saw the construction of a smart fabric from specially engineered yarn that had been coated with a conductive metal. This changes how the fabric interacts with infrared radiation, which in turn transmits or blocks heat.

Leveraging The New AWS Well-Architected Tool

Review and refinement are integral components of cloud computing best practices. In order to ensure a reliable and efficient cloud environment, regular reviews need to be performed at certain intervals. The goal is simple: making workloads more robust and protected while maintaining cost efficiency.

We have covered the AWS Well-Architected Framework—a complete framework for building solutions for a wide range of industries—extensively in the past. ICYMI, don’t forget to check out our blog series on the Five Pillars that help create secure and reliable cloud architecture which is optimized for operational excellence, performance efficiency, and cost. To make following these best practices easier, AWS has recently released the AWS Well-Architected Tool, making assessing your cloud infrastructure that much easier for administrators.

How Should IT Consulting Firms Rethink Themselves?

A Dated Legacy 

IT consulting is a form of historical of strategic consulting based on its model. In strategic consulting, you have a very high operational requirement, both in terms of content and form, because your interlocutors are CEOs who pay a very high price for very structured advice for the company's future. So you have a certain cult of performance in these companies, with the corollaries that come with it. In this kind of context, nothing must be criticizable, and the best way not to be is either to be perfect, or to have a strong intuition. In other words, strong personalities stifle the silent majority, whether intentionally or unconscious. You can say goodbye to creativity, to audacity, and even to courage. Conservative opinions will be those that are validated, and the credo, "We build you the solutions that are adapted to you" evaporates.

In the end, you have an internal organization very close to and inspired by military organizations, and you realize that the creative visionary has no place.

Reviewing Sled: Part II

The first part is here. As a reminder, Sled is an embedded database engine written in Rust. It takes a very different approach for how to store data, which I’m really excited to see. And with that, let’s begin. I stopped in my last post when getting to the flusher, which simply sleeps and calls flush on the iobufs.

The next file is iobuf.rs.

21 Best WordPress Themes for Nonprofit Organizations

Are you looking for the best WordPress themes for nonprofits?

Charity and nonprofit websites require an appealing presentation with the right tools to achieve their donation goals. It can be possible with the use of a professional WordPress theme.

In this article, we will show you some of the best WordPress themes for nonprofit organizations that will help you get maximum donations.

Best WordPress themes for non-profit organizations and charities

Making a Website for a Nonprofit Organization

WordPress is the most popular website builder among nonprofits around the world. It is free and open source which gives you the freedom and flexibility you need for a solid online presence.

Just to be clear, there are two versions of WordPress. WordPress.com which is a hosted solution, and WordPress.org also known as self-hosted WordPress. See our comparison of WordPress.com vs WordPress.org for more details.

We recommend using self-hosted WordPress.org. It gives you access to all the features of WordPress right out of the box (without any restrictions).

You’ll need a domain name and WordPress hosting account to start your self hosted WordPress website.

It’s recommended to use Bluehost. They are one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress hosting provider.

They have agreed to offer WPBeginner users discount on hosting plus free domain and SSL Certificate. You’ll need SSL to collect donations in WordPress using third-party services like Stripe.

→ Click here to claim this exclusive Bluehost Offer ←

Once you have purchased hosting, you can move on to installing WordPress. See our guide on how to make a website for step by step instructions.

That being said, let’s take a look at the best WordPress themes for nonprofits and charities that you can use on your website.

1. Astra

Astra charity theme

Astra is a lightweight and super flexible WordPress theme. It comes with multiple website layouts including a template for nonprofit and charity organizations. This theme can be integrated with popular page builders to design the pages of your website instantly.

It has layout settings, header options, unlimited colors, beautiful crisp typography, and easy customization. Astra can perform faster than other regular WordPress themes.

2. OceanWP

OceanWP charity

OceanWP is a powerful and free WordPress theme with multiple website templates. It can be used to create a nonprofits website with all the basic features. OceanWP is a fully responsive theme and has the fastest page load time.

It allows you to add a donate now button in the header alongside the navigation menu. You can also add a custom logo, social icons, image slider, and more. The theme is easy to set up and offers useful extensions to add more features to your website.

3. Outreach Pro

Outreach Pro

Outreach Pro is a beautifully designed WordPress theme for nonprofits, charities, and religious organizations. It is built on top of Genesis framework, which ensures rock solid WordPress speed and performance.

It includes page templates for archives, blog section, and a landing page template. Other features include customizable headers, theme options panel, and multiple widget-ready areas to just drag and drop items to your website.

StudioPress is now a part of WP Engine, the most popular managed WordPress hosting company. You can get this theme and all 35+ other StudioPress themes if you sign up for WP Engine hosting to build your website.

Bonus: WPBeginner users also get additional 20% off. Get started with WP Engine.

4. GiveWP

GiveWP

GiveWP is a popular WordPress donation plugin for charity and nonprofit websites. It works great with all the standard WordPress themes and makes it easier for you to collect donations. It comes with useful addons for recurring donations, tributes, fee recovery, and more.

It integrates with popular payment solutions to help you in achieving your donation goals. GiveWP has flexible options and enhancements that makes the customization easier. You can also set up donation forms on different landing pages of your website.

5. Ultra

Ultra

Ultra is an all-purpose WordPress mega theme suitable for all kind of websites including nonprofits. It ships with 9 pre-made websites, 1-click demo content installer, and visual page editor to help you create engaging websites in minutes.

It includes animated counters, progress bars, contact form, Google Maps, pricing tables, and more. It is eCommerce ready and beginner friendly.

6. Zeko

Zeko

Zeko is a wonderfully designed WordPress theme for charities and nonprofits. It features a clean and professional design with flexible options. All theme options can be easily set up using theme customizer with a live preview of your website.

Notable features include 5 page templates, blog with multi-column grid and flexible sidebars, unlimited colors, WooCommerce, BuddyPress, and bbPress support.

7. Grassroots

Grassroots

Grassroots is another excellent WordPress theme for nonprofits and fundraising websites. It features fullscreen video backgrounds on the homepage allowing you to create highly engaging landing pages.

For fundraising and donations, the theme supports WooCommerce, contact form, and donation plugins. Other than that, it includes featured content, staff and sponsors sections, custom logo upload, and multiple colors.

8. Divi

Divi

Divi is a powerful WordPress theme that can be used to build any kind of website easily. It comes with multiple pre-built website layouts and demos. You can simply use a demo website and make changes with the Divi builder to create your nonprofit website.

It includes hundreds of elements and modules to add amazing features on your site. The drag and drop builder makes it super simple for you to use these elements anywhere on the layout.

Divi theme offers real-time design, responsive editing, click and type feature, and more. It allows you to customize everything and organize your content to fit properly in the rows and columns. It’s quite flexible and easy to set up.

9. Maisha

Maisha

Maisha is a clean and modern WordPress nonprofit theme for NGOs, welfare, and charities. It features a modern homepage with multiple slider styles, headers, and layout settings. It also includes 15 page templates, blog section, and powerful options with live theme customizer.

It supports WooCommerce, WPML, and it is fully translation-ready. It ships with a slider plugin to create a responsive WordPress slider.

10. Foundation

Foundation

Foundation is another excellent WordPress nonprofit theme. Designed to raise funds and engage audiences, it features a prominent welcome message followed by two call to actions both located above the fold on the homepage.

It includes social media integration, custom logo upload, sponsors section, and easy templates to integrate with your donations form. It offers a simple and quick setup with easy customization options.

11. Maranatha

Maranatha

Maranatha is a gorgeous WordPress theme for religious, spiritual, and nonprofit organizations. It comes with built-in sermons management area where you can upload audio, video, PDF, and text files. You can also organize your library in a series by topics and books.

Its modern homepage displays a full screen image or video header followed by parallax effect as users scroll down the homepage. It also comes with sections for different locations, events calendar, and news or blog page.

12. Benevolent

Benevolent

If you are looking for a free WordPress theme for nonprofits, then take a look at Benevolent. This versatile theme features a modern homepage with a beautiful slider, custom menu, and call to action button.

It has four footer areas, a right sidebar, and includes four custom widgets for the recent posts, popular posts, social media and the featured post. It is translation ready and optimized for faster page loads.

13. Nayma

Nayma

Nayma is a thoughtfully designed multipurpose WordPress theme with several ready-made websites included in one package. It includes a 1-click demo installer to set up a complete website with demo content.

It uses a modular approach to design and comes with several modules that you can just drag and drop to create your own page layouts. It is WooCommerce ready and can also be used to create multilingual websites.

14. Exodus

Exodus

Exodus is a beautiful WordPress theme for religious and spiritual organizations. It features a professional homepage with engaging slider and call to action. It also includes a sermon management section with full multimedia support.

It also has sections to add ministries, staff and volunteer profiles, events, locations, etc. It is designed to be easily used even by non-technical users with simple and flexible customization settings.

15. Faith

Faith

Faith is an excellent free WordPress nonprofit theme for NGOs, church websites, and charitable organizations. With professional clean design and flexible options, it offers an engaging user experience out of the box.

Notable features include custom menu, social media integration, featured posts block, featured content slider, testimonial sections, welcome message, and more. It has multiple page layouts for different sections. All theme options are neatly organized under live theme customizer, which makes it quite simple to use.

16. Saved

Saved

Saved offers a very modern looking WordPress theme for religious and nonprofit organizations. It includes a drag and drop homepage layout, video background, slider, and contact details widget with Google maps.

Church websites can use the Theme’s companion church content plugin, which adds sermons and multimedia library support to your website. It also includes sticky navigation menu, custom colors, custom widgets, typography, and custom logo support.

17. Charitize

Charitize

Charitize is a simple and free WordPress theme for nonprofit organizations, charitable foundations, churches, and nonprofit associations. It has homepage sections for the custom slideshow, featured posts with thumbnails, donate now button, navigation menus, sticky posts, and contact forms.

It comes with tons of customization options including colors, background, post formats, right sidebar, and more. You can use the theme customizer to make changes with live preview.

18. Resurrect

Resurrect

Resurrect is a modern WordPress theme for church websites, nonprofit organizations, and other charity-based sites. It’s an urban-inspired theme with an appealing design to attract donors. It allows you to add videos, create events, upload photos, and display inspirational quotes.

Other than that, it offers a section to add your location map and address. If you have multiple offices, this theme has a column block to display all your addresses easily. It’s easy to use and offers custom background, fonts, colors, etc.

19. Landing

Landing

Landing is a popular multipurpose WordPress theme to design any type of website. It can be used to create beautiful landing pages and get more donations. You can use the powerful Themify drag and drop builder to create your website pages instantly. It has built-in tools and elements that reduces the effort of manually editing pages.

It features 25+ pre-built layouts, header design options, custom post types, and more. You can also integrate email marketing services like MailChimp to connect with your visitors. Landing theme supports WooCommerce and translation ready to let you create a website in your own language.

20. Forward

Forward

Forward is a simple and elegant WordPress theme designed specifically for nonprofits. It allows you to easily add your own logo, colors, fonts, and more. It includes all the options you’ll need to build an engaging website.

Other features include WooCommerce support, email signup form, staff profiles, sponsors, and live theme customizer. It is easy and quick to set up even for absolute beginners.

21. Narcos

Narcos

Narcos is a modern WordPress multipurpose theme designed with tons of features to create any kind of website or blog. It can be used to create a website for your nonprofit organization or charitable foundation. It has a beautiful and clean layout with custom options. It’s packed with Visual Composer to design pages with the drag and drop functionality.

Moreover, this theme comes with homepage sections to display your event photos, featured posts, sponsors’ logos, and information about your organization. The parallax scrolling feature makes it easier for your visitors to check out all sections. It’s fully responsive and performs faster than many other regular WordPress themes.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress theme for nonprofits. You may also want to see our step by step WordPress SEO guide for beginners and a list of must have WordPress plugins.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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A Guide to Rules Engines for IoT: CEP Engines

What Are CEP Engines?

Although part (and predecessors) of stream processing engines, Complex Event Processing engines deal with events in a slightly different (and better) way than their bigger and younger siblings.

We see CEP engines being deployed in edge computing nowadays, where locality, low latency, and low hardware footprint are important. CEPs are a good fit whenever a low footprint is required but don’t scale well since all event processing happens in-memory.

The 10 Must-Have Project Management Skills of 2019

Project management is a thick-skinned job. In fact, it consists of various not-so-easy jobs all combined to do one job. The job starts with initiating the project, then planning the strategies, executing them, and finally, controlling and closing the project. The project gets more challenging when the timeline is short and budget is limited.

To deliver the project successfully, a project manager needs a set of various skills. These skills include technical knowledge, people management, and developing sustainable processes for the business.

A Data Wave in the Cloud: Reconsidering Cloud Security

When organizations originally started to move data to the cloud in a meaningful way, the security conversation usually centered around one tactic – access. After all, if you could ensure that only the right people had access to a particular cloud, your data would be safe, right? Not quite.

As we continue to see an increase in data breaches impacting data stored in the cloud, it’s clear that access, in and of itself, isn’t the silver bullet solution. If bad actors want to get your data, they will find a way — they study each new access control technology until they find its vulnerability. Continuing to simply apply another control that hackers will again unlock is a never-ending, no-win prospect — and not cost-effective. In fact, though organizations pour more money into data security, breaches continue to increase.