In a move that caught somepeople by surprise, WP Engine has announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Managed WordPress host, Flywheel.
While financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, Heather Brunner, WP Engine’s CEO confirmed to TechCrunch that the company needed to raise a small round of funding to finance the deal.
Dusty Davidson, Tony Noecker, and Rick Knudtson founded Flywheel in 2012 in Omaha, Nebraska. In 2012, there were already a handful of players in the Managed WordPress Hosting space but Flywheel was able to carve out a niche by focusing on Designers and Agencies.
In 2016, Flywheel became one of the few hosting companies added to the WordPress.org recommended hosting page. However, their listing was removed a few months later without an explanation.
Also in 2016, Flywheel acquired Pressmatic, a local WordPress development application for OS X from Clay Griffiths and rebranded it to Local by Flywheel. Representatives from both companies have stated that there are no plans to merge WP Engine Devkit with Local by Flywheel.
According to a frequently asked questions document, nothing much is changing in the foreseeable future for Flywheel customers.
Business will continue as usual! There will be no immediate changes to the Flywheel platform, plans, or experience. We’ll be spending the coming weeks and months on strategic innovation and integration planning, and are super excited to figure out how we can leverage all of our collective strengths, products, and brand assets in the best possible way.
Flywheel has generated a loyal following of happy customers over the years and some of them took to Twitter to express their concerns regarding Monday’s announcement.
Please, please, please don't have this be the beginning of the end! Flywheel rocks and I hope you continue to do so! I've been down this acquisition road before (remember when Host Gator got bought?) and it usually doesn't end well.
I’m sure you’ll are very excited and feel this is nothing but a positive thing but as someone who has found flywheel to be a saving grace in a sea of disappointment, I am very concerned to lose the only hosting service I ever loved.
Seeing these types of responses from customers is a testament to the level of service Flywheel provides. Many of them explained why they chose to host their clients with Flywheel over WP Engine.
Both companies have vowed to keep customers in the loop of any potential changes to plans, services, or products. While each company will operate independently as things are sorted out, it will be interesting to see how the two companies are integrated over time and how customers respond.
If you’re a Flywheel customer, please let us know what you think about the acquisition in the comments below.
To learn more about the deal, check out the following links.
Orderful, a provider of SaaS solutions for enterprise Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), announced a new API platform for EDI that allows users to trade supply chain data globally. This solution is designed to allow companies to integrate once, rather than building custom integrations for every partner.
Every day, the ProgrammableWeb team is busy, updating its three primary directories for APIs, clients (language-specific libraries or SDKs for consuming or providing APIs), and source code samples.
Google released version 1.2 of its official AMP plugin for WordPress ahead of WordCamp Europe in Berlin. This release introduces a new AMP Stories editor that is powered by Gutenberg.
AMP Stories are separate from the capabilities that enable AMP for the rest of the website, and they can be used together or independently. The Stories feature has its own post type that uses the block editor and comes with custom blocks that enable the following:
Multiple story pages can be added in a horizontal editing interface
Page reordering with drag and drop
Text block (the default instead of Paragraph) allows for text to automatically resize to fit the container
40 font families for styling the Text block
Blocks can be dragged and rotated anywhere on a page, with ability to move in front of or behind other blocks
Select from blank pages or pre-made page templates
Text block can have varying background color opacity
Blocks on a given page are listed in a persistent table of contents (with drag and drop)
Story pages can have background video or image (with focal point)
Pages can have a solid background color or gradient, including opacity for overlaying background image/video
The stories created in the editor can also be embedded in other posts and pages using the regular embed block or the Latest Stories block.
Stories are a mobile-focused format that have become increasingly popular with social networking apps like Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. Stories on these platforms are usually created as ephemeral bits of content that are not easy to embed without using a third-party application. Google is marketing AMP stories as “visual storytelling for the open web.”
“I like to position it as Web Stories,” Google Developer Relations Program Manager Thierry Muller said. “It is powered by AMP, but there are none of the challenges developers might face when making a website AMP compatible. With Web Stories, users are now able to create stories accessible via a simple URL, content that they own and can use open source tools such as the Story editor for WordPress to create stories.”
Muller said the target audience for AMP stories includes publishers, travel bloggers, food bloggers, and anyone who wants to create immersive content. Some well-known publishers, such as The Telegraph, Washington Post, and CNN, have partnered with Google as early adopters, using AMP stories to cover news and events. The Stories also show up in a carousel in mobile search results.
WordPress users who want to start using the AMP plugin’s Stories feature will need to have Gutenberg 5.8+ installed, because it requires some of the newer features in the block editor that haven’t yet be merged into core.
The addition of AMP Stories to the official AMP plugin may make it more appealing to those who have been hesitant to install it simply for the website capabilities. It gives the plugin another entry point with users who are more interested in the visual storytelling aspect.
In a recent post examining the web standards community’s confusion surrounding how Google Chrome seemed to be unilaterally implementing a new element called toast, Jeremy Keith made a good observation regarding developers’ skepticism about AMP.
“I certainly don’t think this is a good look for Google given the debacle of AMP’s ‘my way or the highway’ rollout,” Keith said. “I know that’s a completely different team, but the external perception of Google amongst developers has been damaged by the AMP project’s anti-competitive abuse of Google’s power in search.” Google Web Advocate Das Surma lent credibility to Keith’s take on the matter, saying it offered “a pretty accurate representation of our intentions, but also of the problems and mistakes we made.”
It’s not easy to quantitatively measure how developers’ anti-AMP sentiment has affected the adoption of Google’s official AMP plugin for WordPress, especially given the rocky start it had in the official plugin directory. XWP and Google engineers had a lot to overcome after taking over the plugin’s development from Automattic when users began to wonder if it had been abandoned.
The first version of the AMP plugin was released in October 2015 and initially had 400 active installs. Over the past four years, that number has grown to more than 400,000 active installs. The plugin has had a 33% increase in its user base from December 1, 2018 (300,000+) to today (400,00+). This is likely due to some of the more user-friendly improvements that have been introduced in the past six months. Google and XWP’s involvement seems to have successfully dug the plugin out of its previous trend towards negative ratings from users who couldn’t get any support.
Nevertheless, Google is still struggling with the challenge to convince WordPress users that the AMP plugin is a must-have addition to their sites. Convincing the wider WordPress ecosystem to build AMP-ready plugins and themes that provide the compatibility for functionality that users’ websites rely on in order to be anything more than a basic blog. Adding AMP stories to the plugin may help to get more WordPress users on board to further explore AMPing up their websites.
Approximately 410/500 issues and pull requests in version 1.2 were dedicated to the new AMP Stories feature. This release introduces the notion of “AMP experiences,” a fancy industry buzz word that divides the Stories and Website features into separate functionality. The website framework improvements include a renaming of the template modes: Native, Paired, and Classic are now Standard, Transitional, and Reader, a strategic and notably less clear way of identifying the modes that seems intended to drive users towards adopting the native AMP approach. The editor has also been updated to display a warning when a featured image is too small for Google Search’s requirements, as well as provide better block-level warnings and improvements to validation requests.
Check out the v1.2 changelog for a full list of everything that is new in this release.
With the number of online users increasing daily, most businesses now know that digital marketing is the most potent marketing scheme in the world today. Reports show that most business owners resort to search marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing to increase brand reach and sales. Out of digital marketing platforms, mobile marketing is [...]
Ping Identity has announced major enhancements to its identity as a Service offering: PingOne for Customers. First, the company has added a secure push notification option for mobile, passwordless multi-factor authentication sign in. Second, one-click login is now available for users with Facebook accounts. Finally, enterprises can now leverage a single sign-on portal for all applications across their ecosystem through new PingOne functionality.
What comes to mind when you think of visiting a web page? It might not work quite the way you assume. And in order to code, you’ve got to learn to think the way your browser does. Get to know...
I was trying to research the landscape of these the other day — And by research, I mean light Googling and asking on Twitter. Weirdly, very little comes to mind when thinking about spam detection APIs. I mean some kind of URL endpoint, paid or not, where you can hit it with a block of text and whatever metadata it wants and it'll tell you if it's spam or not. Seems like something an absolute buttload of the internet could use and something companies of any size could monetize or offer free to show off their smart computer machines.
It also has a generic API. There are libraries for Dart, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, etc, as well as plugins for other CMSs. So if you use a different CMS or have your custom app, you can still use Akismet for spam detection.
After you get an API key, you can POST to a URL endpoint with all the data it needs and it'll respond true if it's spam or false if it's not.
To get better results over time, you can also submit content telling it if it's spam or ham (ham is the opposite of spam... good content).
There is a lot to like here, like the fact that it's free and returns a JSON response like you might be used to in development. There is the fancy buzzword "Machine Learning" being used here, too. It makes me think that with lots of people using this, it'll get smarter and smarter as it goes. But there is no way to submit ham/spam, so I'm not sure that's really the case.
There is other stuff that makes me nervous. It's clearly on Heroku which is kinda expensive at scale, and so with no pricing model it seems like it could go away anytime. Sorta feels like a fun-but-abandoned side project. Last commit was two years ago, as I write.
OOPSpam
OOPSpam looks super similar to Plino, but has a pricing model, which is nice. They publish their latency, which is over two seconds. I haven't compared that to the others so I have no idea if they are all that slow. Two seconds seems like a lot for an API call to me, but maybe it's not that big of a deal since it's an async submit?
CleanTalk
CleanTalk has a clear pricing structure and appears to have plenty of customers, which is a plus to me. The website looks a little janky though, which makes me worry a little.
(Sorry if that's a little rude, but it's just mental math to me. Good design is one of the least expensive investments a company can make to increase trust, so companies that overlook it make me wonder.)
It looks like they have a variety of anti-spam solutions though, which is interesting. For example, you can ask an API to see if an IP, email, or domain is on a blacklist, which is a pretty raw way of blocking bad stuff, but useful for stuff like protecting against spam registrations (rather than just checking blocks of text). They also have a firewall solution, which is interesting for folks trying to block spam before it even touches their servers.
Email options...
There are a couple out there that seem rather specific to testing emails. As in, testing your own emails before you send them to make sure they aren't considered spam by email services. Here are a couple I cam across while looking around:
Here’s an interesting post by Rich Harris where he’s made a list of some of the problems he’s experienced in the past with web components and why he doesn’t use them today:
Given finite resources, time spent on one task means time not spent on another task. Considerable energy has been expended on web components despite a largely indifferent developer population. What could the web have achieved if that energy had been spent elsewhere?
The most convincing part of Rich’s argument for me is where he writes about progressive enhancement and the dependence on polyfills for using web components today. And I’m sure that a lot of folks disagree with many of Rich’s points here, and there’s an awful amount of snark in the comments beneath his post, but it’s certainly an interesting conversation worth digging into. For an opposing perspective, go read the very last paragraph in the last installment of our Web Components Guide, where author Caleb Williams suggests that there's no need to wait to use web components in projects:
These standards are ready to adopt into our projects today with the appropriate polyfills for legacy browsers and Edge. And while they may not replace your framework of choice, they can be used alongside them to augment you and your organization’s workflows.
But all of this is a good reminder that hey: web components are a thing that we should be able to freely criticize and talk about without being jerks. And I think Rich does that pretty well.
The Case For Brand Systems: Aligning Teams Around A Common Story
The Case For Brand Systems: Aligning Teams Around A Common Story
Laura Busche
There’s a disconnect. If you’ve been in business for enough time you’ve definitely felt it. Teams are pulling companies in different directions with internal processes and specialized frameworks for absolutely everything. They’re focused on building their “part” of the product, and doing it incredibly well. There’s just one problem: our internal divisions mean nothing to customers.
In customers’ eyes, it’s the same brand replying to their support tickets and explaining something in a modal; the same entity is behind the quality of the product they use and the ads that led them to that product in the first place. To them, there are no compartments, no org charts, no project managers. There is only one brand experience. At the end of the day, customers are not tasting individual ingredients, or grabbing a bite during each stage of preparation, they’re eating the entire meal. At once. In sit-downs that keep getting shorter.
Something is getting lost in the process. Somewhere between our obsession with specializing and our desire to excel at individual roles, we’ve lost perspective of the entire brand experience. We spend our days polishing individual touchpoints, but not enough time zooming out to understand how they come together to shape our customer’s journey. The time for shying away from the word “holistic” is up — it’s the only way customers will ever perceive you. And that is the ultimate inspiration behind Brand Systems, a tool we will explore throughout this article.
What Is A Brand System?
At its core, a Brand System is a shared library that helps define, preserve, and improve the customer’s experience with the brand.
Just like we can’t assume that the sum of quality ingredients will result in a great meal, our individual contributions won’t magically translate into a memorable brand experience for customers. Their brand experiences are blended, multifaceted, and owner-blind. It’s time for the product, design, engineering, marketing, support, and various other functions to establish a single source of truth about the brand that is accessible to, understood, and used by all. That source is a Brand System.
Why Is It Useful? The Benefits Of Building A Brand System
Your brand is the story that customers recall when they think about you. When you document that story, your team can align to live up to and protect those standards consistently. There are multiple benefits to building and maintaining a Brand System:
Cohesion It helps preserve a uniform presence for the brand.
Access It empowers teams to apply assets consistently. A common language facilitates collaboration across different functional areas.
Flexibility This system is in continuous iteration, providing an up-to-date source of truth for the team.
Speed When your building blocks are readily available, everything is easier to construct. Collaboration is also accelerated as individuals get a fundamental understanding of how others’ work contributes to the brand experience.
Ethos Documenting the brand’s ethos will motivate the team to preserve, protect, and extend it. That level of care is perceived and appreciated by users.
To accomplish the above most effectively, the Brand System must remain accessible, empowering, holistic, extensible, flexible, and iterative. Let’s take a closer look at each of these traits and some examples of how they can be put in practice.
Accessible
Open to all team members, regardless of their level of technical expertise or direct involvement with each element. Systems that perpetuate divisions within organizations can be visually mesmerizing, but end up fragmenting the brand experience.
Help Scout provides a visual example of what the concepts of illustration scale and grid mean for those who may not be familiar with them. (Large preview)
Empowering
Full of examples that encourage continuous application. Some aspects of the brand experience can be hard to grasp for those who don’t interact with them daily, but a Brand System should empower everyone to recognize what is fundamentally on and off-brand — regardless of the touchpoint involved. Does the company’s support team feel confident about how the brand is visually represented? Does the design team have a general idea of how the brand responds to customers’ requests?
Webflow provides clear examples and instructions to empower different team members to write for the product, even if they’re not used to it. (Large preview)
Holistic
No aspect of the brand’s execution is too foreign to include. Brand Systems surface the tools and frameworks various teams are using to clarify the bigger picture. Too often the customer’s experience appears disjointed because we’ve compartmentalized it. The brand experience “belongs” to marketing, or design, or some kind of executive-level team, so resources like UI components or support scripts are dealt with separately. As the unifying backbone of all business functions, the brand experience informs execution at every level.
For WeWork, physical spaces are a key part of the entire experience. Their brand system includes guidelines in this respect. (Large preview)
Extensible
Individual teams can develop specific subsections within the system to fit their needs. Regardless of how specialized these different areas get, the Brand System remains accessible to all. Team members decide how deeply they want to dive into each element, but the information is readily available.
Atlassian makes use of its Confluence platform to host guidelines related to different parts of the brand experience. Sections have varying levels of access and are regularly maintained by different teams. (Large preview)
Flexible
There can be alternative versions of the Brand System for external audiences, including media and partners. While we’d like the brand experience to unfold in owned channels, the reality is that sometimes customers interact with it through earned channels controlled by third parties. In those cases, a minimized version of the Brand System can help preserve the story, voice, and visual style.
Instagram, for example, offers a special set of guidelines for users broadcasting content about the brand. (Large preview)
Iterative
The Brand System should evolve and be continuously updated over time. To that end, host and serve the content in a way that makes it easy to access and edit as things change.
Salesforce surfaces ongoing updates to its Lightning system in a section called Release Notes. (Large preview)
What Does A Brand System Contain?
Brand Systems solve a fundamental disconnect in teams. Nobody outside of marketing feels empowered to market the product, nobody outside of design feels like they have a solid grasp of the brand’s style guidelines, nobody outside of support feels confident responding to a customer. Sounds familiar? That’s why it’s crucial to build a Brand System that is as all-encompassing and transparent as possible.
While Design Systems are the closest implementation of a resource like this, a Brand System is centered around the brand story, understanding symbols and strategy as necessary layers in its communication. It is informed by product and design teams, but also functional areas like support, marketing, and executive leadership that are key to shaping the entire brand experience. In Brand Systems, visual components are presented in the context of a business model, a company mission, positioning, and other strategic guidelines that must be equally internalized by the team.
A Brand Style Guide is another commonly used tool to align teams around a set of principles. While useful, these guides focus heavily on marketing and design specifications. Their main objective is to impart a shared visual language for the brand so that it is applied cohesively across the board. That resolves part of the problem but doesn’t reveal how other functional areas contribute to the overall brand experience. Therefore, these guidelines could be considered as part of the larger Brand System.
Brand Guidelines for the Wildlife Conservation Society (Designed by Pentagram) (Large preview)
That said, these are some of the sections and components you should consider including in your Brand System:
Story
If the brand experience is embroidery, the story is the thread weaving all the touchpoints together. It reveals what has been and will continue to be important, who the brand is trying to serve, and how it plans to do so most effectively. Start your Brand System by answering questions like:
What is this brand’s core value proposition?
What does its history look like? Include a timeline and key milestones.
How do you summarize both of the above in an “About Us” blurb?
What are the brand’s core values? What propels this team forward?
Who is the audience? Who are the main personas being addressed and what are these individuals trying to get done?
What does their journey with us look like? If known, what is their sentiment towards the brand?
What is the brand’s mission as it relates to its target customers? How about the team itself and society at large?
How does this business model work, in general terms? (Specifics will be included in the “Strategy” section).
Who are the brand’s direct competitors? What sets it apart from them?
How does this brand define product/service quality? Are there any values around that?
What is the brand’s ultimate vision?
Shopify summarizes the brand’s Product Experience Principles in their Polaris design system. (Large preview)
Symbols
You know what drives the brand and the narrative it brings to the table. This part of the Brand System is about actually representing that. Symbols are sensory: they define what the brand looks, sounds, and feels like. Because they help us convey the story across multiple touchpoints, it’s vital for the entire team to have a grasp of what they stand for and how they can be properly deployed.
Here are some examples of building blocks you’ll want to define in this section:
Main and alternative versions of the brand’s logo
Color palette
Typography scheme
Icons, photography, and illustration style
Patterns, lines, and textures
Layout and spacing
Slide deck styling
Stationery and merchandising applications
Motion & sound, including audiobranding
Packaging (if applicable)
Scent (if applicable).
For brands built around digital products:
User Interface components
Interaction patterns
Key user views & states
User Experience guidelines
Code standards
Tech stack overview.
IBM includes patterns for common actions like “Next” in its Carbon design system. (Large preview)
Bear in mind that the nature of your product will determine how you complete the section above. A tech-based company might list elements like interaction patterns, but a retail brand might look at aspects like store layout.
Strategy
Once you’ve clarified the brand’s story, and the symbols that will represent it, define how you go about growing it. This part of the Brand System addresses both messaging and method, narrative and tactics.
Just like customer support can feel alienated from the design function, these growth-related tenets are often not surfaced beyond marketing, acquisition, or executive conversations. However, those kinds of strategic ideas do impact customers at every touchpoint. A Brand System is a crash course that makes high-level perspective accessible to all, unlocking innovation across the entire team.
Here are some guiding questions and components to include:
How does this brand define success? What growth metric does the team focus on to track performance? (GMV, revenue, EBITDA, sales, etc).
What does the conversion funnel look like? How does this brand acquire, activate and retain customers?
What is the average Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)?
What is the retention rate?
What is the Customer’s Lifetime Value (LTV)?
Which channels drive the most revenue? Traffic?
Which products and categories drive the most revenue? Traffic?
Which of the buyer personas defined in the “Story” section bring the most revenue? Traffic?
What are the brand’s key objectives for this year (to be updated)? These are company-wide goals.
What initiatives or themes is the team focusing on to meet those objectives this year?
How is the team organized to meet those objectives?
What channels does this brand use to communicate with its target audience? Name them and specify how big they are in terms of reach and/or traffic.
Owned
Website, blog, or other web properties
Social channels
Email
Earned
Ongoing brand partnerships
Referrals
Paid
Specific ad platforms
Influencers
Affiliates
What is this brand’s personality like?
What defines the brand’s voice? How does it adopt different tones in specific situations?
How does the brand’s voice come to life in owned, earned, and paid channels?
Company website and landing pages
Social channels. Clarify if tone varies
Email
Ads
Sales collateral
Press releases
Careers page & job sites
How does the brand’s voice come to life in the customer’s experience with the product, before, during, and after purchase?
Call to action
Navigation
Promotion
Education
Success/error
Apology/regret
Reassurance/support
How does the brand’s voice come to life internally (within the team)?
Employee handbooks
Onboarding process.
What topics should this brand aim to be a thought leader at?
UC Berkeley defines the themes and key messages to highlight when speaking to different audiences. (Large preview)
Grammar and spelling-wise, does this brand adhere to a specific style manual?
What are some common words and expressions users can expect from this brand?
If you’re feeling ready to shape your own Brand System, here are some steps you can take to approach the challenge as a team:
1. Kickoff
Set up a company-wide planning session. If you can’t have everyone attend, make sure there’s someone representing product, design, marketing, support, and the executive team. Lead a conversation with two goals:
Brand audit How is the brand represented in various contexts? Is there brand debt to account for? Consider the brand’s story, symbols, and strategy.
Brand definition Discuss how this brand:
sounds,
looks,
speaks,
feels,
interacts,
introduces itself in a few words.
2. Production
After having that open discussion, delegate the various sections described above (Story, Symbols, Strategy) to the teams that interact most closely with each of them. Ask specific individuals to document the brand’s point of view regarding each system component (listed in point 2).
3. Publication
Upload the full Brand System to a central location where it is readily available and editable. Schedule a team-wide presentation to get everyone on the same page.
4. Summary
Condense the main guidelines in a one-page document called Brand-At-a-Glance. Here are some of the key points you could include:
Brand mission, vision, and values
Visual identity: color palette, main logo versions, type scheme, illustration style
About Us blurb.
5. Revision
Establish a periodic cross-functional meeting where the brand is protected and defined. Frequency is up to you and your team. This is also where the Brand System is formally updated, if needed. In my experience, unless this space is scheduled, the revisions simply won’t happen. Time will pass, customers’ needs will change, the brand experience will shift, and there won’t be a common space to document and discuss it all.
Brand Systems: Aligning Teams Around A Common Story
When customers interact with your brand, they’re not aware of what’s going on backstage. And there is no reason they should. All they perceive is the play you’re presenting, the story you’re sharing, and the solution it represents for them. When the individual actors go off script, as great as they might sound solo, the brand experience breaks.
Enter the Brand System: a shared library that defines the brand’s story, symbols, and strategy. In doing so, this tool aligns all actors around the multi-faceted experience customers truly perceive. Within teams, Brand Systems help avoid fragmentation, confusion, and exclusion. Externally, they’re a script to deliver the most compelling brand experience possible — at every touchpoint, every single time.
DevSecOps is the principle that all technology teams have accountability for cybersecurity in an organization—ownership is not solely at the door of the security professionals and teams. The idea that cybersecurity is everyone’s job has come about partly because cybersecurity skills are constrained—within the market as a whole and within an organization specifically. A recent report from (ISC)2 claims there is a global cybersecurity staffing shortage of three million and that this is increasing. This is certainly my own experience with the organizations I work with in Europe and the Middle East.
Suddenly, my AWS Lambda function stopped working. Upon invocation, not a single line of code was executing, and I was just getting this error from the console:
"Calling the invoke API action failed with this message: Lambda was not able to access EC2's API using the Lambda Execution Role to set up the Lambda function."
Do you want to display the total number of comments on your WordPress site?
Comments allow users to participate and engage with the content on your website. By showing off the total comment count, you can encourage more users to join the conversation.
In this article, we will show you how to easily display the total number of comments in WordPress, with or without a plugin.
Display WordPress Comment Count using a Plugin
This method is easier and it is recommended for all users. Instead of writing code, you’ll be using a plugin to display comment count in WordPress.
Upon activation, go to Settings » Simple Blog Stats page to configure plugin settings.
On this page, you’ll see all the shortcodes that you can use to show different stats like the total number of comments, registered users, number of posts, categories, page count, and more.
You need to copy the shortcode [sbs_approved] to display the total number of approved comments on your WordPress site.
If you want to display it in a post or page, then simply create a new post or edit an existing one.
On the post edit screen, you need to add the shortcode block in the WordPress content editor.
You can do this by clicking on the Add block (+) icon and then search for the shortcode block. Once you find it, you need to click on it to add the shortcode block to the editor.
Next, you need to paste the shortcode [sbs_approved] inside the block settings.
You can add any text you want to display before or after the shortcode.
Alternatively, you can also use the shortcode inside a paragraph block. Simply copy and paste the shortcode where you want to display the comment count.
Using the paragraph block will also allow you to use the text styling option available in the WordPress block editor.
Once you are done, click on the publish or update button to save your changes. You can now visit your website to see your changes in action.
Displaying total comment count in a sidebar widget
You can also use the same shortcode inside a WordPress widget and display it in your blog’s sidebar.
Simply head over to the Appearance » Widgets page and add a ‘Text’ widget to the sidebar.
Next, go ahead and paste your shortcode inside the ‘Text’ widget.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save’ button to store your widget settings.
You can now visit your website to see the widget in action.
Display WordPress Comment Count (without a plugin)
If you don’t want to use a plugin, then you can use display the total comment count manually.
Before you do anything, you should make a full backup of your website. This will help you to restore your site in case you break anything while editing the theme files.
function wpb_comment_count() {
$comments_count = wp_count_comments();
$message = 'There are <strong>'. $comments_count->approved . '</strong> comments posted by our users.';
return $message;
}
add_shortcode('wpb_total_comments','wpb_comment_count');
This code creates a function that outputs the total number of approved WordPress comments on your site. It also creates a shortcode to display it.
You can now use the shortcode [wpb_total_comments] in your posts, pages, or a text widget to display the total number of comments on your website.
This is how it looked on our demo site:
We hope this article helped you display the total number of comments on your WordPress site. You may also want to check out our guide on how to prevent comment spam in WordPress and the best WordPress plugins for every website.
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.
Once upon a time, all customers had to call support reps on the phone. That evolved into email, and now we’re looking at some of the best live chat software for rapid conversations online. Live chat is extremely convenient for consumers and clients, but how does it help your company?
This week at MongoDB World, Elliot Horowitz, CTO and Co-founder at MongoDB, announced many different new and exciting features in the MongoDB 4.2 release. Out of many new features, I am highlighting a few that will help the development community a lot.
Wildcard Indexes
MongoDB is known as a flexible database that contains different types of data models in one collection. This wildcard index will help a lot in applications where read-heavy operations are dependent on flexible document structures. With this index type, you can create an index on sub/embedded documents and make your reads fast.
Facebook announced recently that by 2020, they will roll out Libra — their blockchain-based cryptocurrency. It is, of course, major news, as it has the potential to disrupt the payment and banking sector. If you want to read all the surrounding newsworthy details, you can read the TechCrunch article. I will instead focus on a few observations and thoughts about Libra — from a few perspectives — technical, legal/compliance, and possibly financial.
First, replacing banks, bank transfers, credits cards, payment providers, and ATMs with just your smartphone sounds appealing. Why hasn’t anyone tried to do that so far — well, many have tried, but you can’t just have the technology and move towards gradual adoption. You can’t even do it if you are Facebook. You can, however, do it, if you are Facebook, backed by Visa, Mastercard, Uber, and many, many more big names on the market. So, Facebook got that right — they made a huge coalition that can drive such a drastic change forward.
