Connect to Dynamics 365 Sales Data as a Linked Server

You can use the SQL Gateway to configure a TDS (SQL Server) remoting service and set up a linked server for Dynamics 365 Sales data. After you have started the service, you can use the UI in SQL Server Management Studio or call stored procedures to create the linked server. You can then work with Dynamics 365 Sales data just as you would a linked SQL Server instance.

Connect to Dynamics 365 Sales as an ODBC Data Source

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Build Fault Tolerant Applications With Cassandra API for Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB is a resource governed system that allows you to execute a certain number of operations per second based on the provisioned throughput you have configured. If clients exceed that limit and consume more request units than what was provisioned, it leads to rate limiting of subsequent requests and exceptions being thrown — they are also referred to as 429 errors.

With the help of a practical example, I’ll demonstrate how to incorporate fault-tolerance in your Go applications by handling and retrying operations affected by these rate limiting errors. To help you follow along, the sample application code for this blog is available on GitHub — it uses the gocql driver for Apache Cassandra.

Authentication Using Server Side X.509 Certificates With N1QL

Authentication and authorization to the query service in Couchbase works in multiple ways - 

  1. Passing credentials through a rest request - curl http://localhost:8093/query/service?pretty=true -d "statement=select * from system:keyspaces" -u Admin:pwd
  2. Passing credentials using the creds named parameter and/or query parameter - curl http://localhost:8093/query/service?pretty=true -d "statement=select * from system:keyspaces&creds=[{user:“Administrator”,”password”:”pass”}]"
  3. Using basic auth in the request 
  4. Request from cbq (similar to 1,2) using the -u -p -creds options and \SET command. 
  5. X.509 Certificates for TLS
  6. Node to Node encryption

With the addition of RBAC, the creds query parameter was made redundant but is still supported for backward compatibility.

How I Improved My Legacy C++ Project With PVS-Studio

Since a few months, I've been refactoring my old C++/OpenGL project. Thus far, I used compilers (MSVC and Clang), my knowledge or free tools. At some point, I also got a chance to leverage a solid static analysis tool - PVS-Studio. The tool helped me with identifying 8 critical issues not to mention good code style and performance enhancements (in total 137 warnings)

Read on to see my report.

How to Set Up Users & Roles in The Hub for Your Team Members and Clients

With The Hub, you can give unlimited users multiple roles on any WordPress site you manage — even if they aren’t WPMU DEV members! Learn how to easily set all this up in minutes and give team members and clients as much or as little access as you’d like.

Plus, With The Hub Client, you can create your own fully branded Hub for your team members, clients, and collaborators … all in just a few clicks!

Oh, and did we mention it’s all free for your users and you’re able to be set up in minutes?

In this article, we’ll be going over how to:

  1. Set Up Team Members
  2. Set Up User Roles
  3. Add User Customization Settings
  4. Gain Quick Access to Sites
  5. Set Up The Hub Client (THC)
  6. Set Up Client Roles

This post’s features are accomplished from the Team tab in The Hub dashboard, except for The Hub Client, accessed by the Hub Client Plugin (which we’ll show you how to activate).

1. Set Up Team Members

The Hub allows you to collaborate with other users by assigning them roles and granting them access to specific areas of your WordPress site(s).

Creating new users in The Hub is the easiest way to allow access to users, all from one place.

From The Hub, click on Team

The Hub - Team
Click on Team to get started.

Before inviting people to join your team, make sure that your details are correct, as these will appear on the invitation emails that your new team members will receive and your client portal.

To check, click on the Settings tab. If you haven’t already set this up, enter your name, upload your logo, and click Save to update your settings.

Team Settings screens.
Add your name and logo before inviting team members.

Once this initial step is done, go to Team Members and click the Add First Team Member button to get started.

The Hub - Team screen with no members added yet.
Click the button to add your first team member.

This brings up the Invite new member form, where you’ll be able to fill in the following details:

  • Enter their email address and name.
  • Select all the sites listed on your Hub that you want to give your new user access to. These settings can be changed at any time.

Scroll to select a site or use the dropdown menu and quick-search feature

  • Select a user role (View & Edit, View Only, or a Custom role). This can also be changed at any time.
  • Add notes about the user (optional).
  • Select an add-on service for the user (e.g. access to Support). This is optional too.

After filling in the details, click on Invite.

The Hub - Invite New Member screen.
Fill in the details and click on Invite to add your new team.

This will send out a confirmation email to the new user.

The Hub - New team member confirmation email.
Your new team members will receive an email invitation to join your team.

Once the user gets the email and hits Confirm, they will be redirected to WPMU DEV to set up a free account with their email, name, and password.

Create a Free Account at WPMU DEV
Your new team members only need to complete this simple setup and click Join to have access to sites.

New team members don’t need to be members of WPMU DEV, and there’s no cost involved.

When they click Join, they will be added to your Team Hub account, where they will only have access to the sites and roles granted by the admin.

The Hub Team account screen.
New team members can only access what they have been given roles and permissions to do by the WPMU DEV member.

As the WPMU DEV member and Hub administrator, you can see the new user in the Team Members area.

If the user hasn’t confirmed yet, their account will show as Pending.

The Hub - Team - New user- Pending status.
This member hasn’t confirmed yet.

Once the member accepts the invite and creates their free account, their status will become active.

The Hub - New active user.
This team member is now active.

From the Team Members section, you can quickly and easily add as many users as you need by clicking on the New Team Member button and view the names, emails, roles, addons, and sites that your team members have access to, as well as managing and removing them from your account.

2. Set Up User Roles

Roles give your team members’ access capabilities to one or more sites in your Hub.

With almost two dozen configurable modules, The Hub allows you to provide your team members with access to all areas of your site(s) and/or customize roles to access only specific areas and module settings.

A list of all configurable Hub modules in the Custom Roles screen.
Use Custom roles to configure access to different Hub modules of your site(s) for team members.

When you create a new team member profile (see previous step), you can set the following roles:

  • View and Edit – All: Team members can view and edit the settings in this area. Note: This is a system role and cannot be modified (only custom roles can be modified).
  • View Only – All: Team members can view the data and settings in this area but cannot modify them. This limitation only applies to the area associated with the current toggle. This is another system role that cannot be modified.
  • Custom: Team members have access to an area but are limited to certain tasks or actions within that area.

To create a custom role, click on the Roles tab and then click on + Create New Role.

The Hub - Roles - New Custom Role
Let’s create a new custom role.

You can give the new role a unique name and customize it by configuring any of the available permissions and settings however you like.

Let’s take a closer look at how to customize a role.

3. Add User Customization Settings

Customizing access for a role can be determined by clicking on all the available options (e.g. sites, security settings, SEO, etc). Also, choose to have View & Edit or View Only for sites.

Create a custom role by enabling or hiding various Hub modules.

The Custom option lets you configure specific module settings and provides detailed task descriptions about each option.

For example, if you give a team member custom access to the Plugins module, you can allow them to View & Edit all settings in that module, View only, or select which settings you’d like them to have the capability to manage by clicking Custom.

The Hub - Roles - Custom Roles - Configuration Options.
Custom roles give you further options to configure enabled modules.

If you select Custom, a new screen will open giving you further customization options for the module.

Custom Roles - Plugins screen.
You can create a custom role that allows team members to activate or uninstall plugins, and more.

After specifying the options and settings your team members can access for all of the various available modules, click Save to update your custom role settings.

Team members assigned that specific custom role will now see only the modules, options, and settings made available for that role. Everything else will be hidden from view.

You can view all the roles you have assigned to team members under the Role column in the Team Members screen.

The Hub - Team - Team Members
The Team Members screen lists all the members you have added to your team and their assigned roles.

To customize which sites team members have access to or to change their roles, simply click on the team member, edit their settings, and resave.

Easily reassign the user roles and sites your team members can access.

For more information about creating custom roles, refer to our documentation.

4. Gain Quick Access to Sites

Click on the Sites tab to quickly and easily view which team members have access to specific sites being managed in The Hub.

The Users column displays how many team members are assigned to each site.

The Hub - Team - Sites screen.
See how many team members can access each site in the Users column.

Clicking the number in the Users column displays the team members assigned to that site.

The Hub - Team - Sites screen - Users
View active and pending members assigned to a specific site by clicking on the number of users.

Click on the plus sign by the site’s name to add or remove a user from that site.

The Hub - Team - Sites - Add/Remove user
Click the plus site to add or remove user access for specific team members.

You can check who has access and whether they’re active or not, uncheck the user to remove their access from the site, invite a new user, or resend an invitation to a pending user.

The Hub - Team - Sites - Manage Access screen.
Click on the checkmark to remove a team member’s access to the site.

Now that we have looked at the basics of setting up new team members, let’s look at how to personalize the area your team members will access information from to collaborate and help you manage your sites.

5. Set Up The Hub Client (THC)

Hub Client - Member screen
White label your Hub with The Hub Client plugin.

With The Hub Client, you can provide access to clients, collaborators, and users using your personalized white label Hub. It’s your own Hub, the way you and your organization want it, customized to your perfection.

Plus, you can use any host (including our own managed hosting), resell our services, and run it from your domain.

To use The Hub Client plugin, you have to be connected with The Hub to access its API. Learn how to install The Hub Client.

You can install the Hub Client plugin via the WPMU DEV Dashboard plugin installed on your domain.

The Hub Client installation screen.
Install The Hub Client via the WPMU DEV Dashboard plugin.

After installing and activating The Hub Client, the next step is to Configure it.

In your WordPress dashboard, click The Hub Client > Client Portal to access the main screen of the plugin.

The Hub Client screen.
Let’s configure The Hub Client…

Change the brand name in the Site profile section to replace WPMU DEV on your client portal with your business name and logo.

The Hub Client - Branding
Brand The Hub Client with your name and logo.

You can change the colors for the Navigation background, Navigation color, and Hover and active color in the Colors area. Do this by visually picking the colors or using hex codes (e.g. #FFFFFF for white).

Pick and choose colors to match your brand.

Next, head over to the Navigation tab to customize your client portal’s navigation menu.

To display links in your portal’s navigation bar, create a custom menu in Appearance > Menus, and then click Add and select the custom menu you’ve created.

Add a navigation menu to your client portal.

In addition to setting up the navigation menu for your portal’s users, you can select a page to be replaced with your client hub and specify a custom URL to be used for the back button on your login page.

The Hub Client creates a default page for your client hub (i.e. yourdomain.tld/hub) but you can select any of your site’s existing pages from the Client Page dropdown menu to replace your client hub instead.

Select where your team members and clients will log in to access site details.

After customizing these settings, users will be greeted with your branded login page.

Branded client portal login page.
Your branded client portal login page.

Remember to finish setting up your client portal by clicking on the other tabs and configuring their options.

Go to the Login & Signup tab and select your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy pages. You will need to create these pages first before they can appear in the dropdown menu selector.

The Hub Client: Login-Signup screen
Add your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy pages in the Login & Signup section.

Next, click the Client Support tab to add a Help button and offer live chat support to logged in users.

The Hub Client: Client Support
Set up links to your support resources in the Client Support screen.

The Client Hub lets you offer live chat support to users via integrated widgets from various solution providers (Livechat, tawk.to, and HubSpot).

The Hub Client: Live Chat Integration
Offer live chat support to users with live chat integration.

You can also set the default language for your client portal pages and widgets added to your site via the Translations area.

The Hub Client Translations
Set up your client portal using a different language via the Translations section.

Congratulations! Your team members and clients can now log in and use your very own customized Hub.

Now that we have looked at how to add new team members and assign them specific roles, let’s take a look at how to do the same for clients.

6. Set Up Client Roles

The Hub Client plugin allows you to create a customized Hub for your team members and a portal where your clients can log in and access information about their sites.

As we have seen, adding team members and assigning them roles is done via The Hub’s Team section.

Configuring roles for clients, on the other hand, is done via The Hub’s Clients & Billing module.

The Hub - Clients & Billing menu link
Use The Hub’s Clients & Billing section to configure client roles.

In the Clients & Billing section, click on the Clients tab and select Clients to add new clients and view details of your existing clients.

The Hub - Clients & Billing screen - Clients section.
View details of existing clients and add new clients in The Hub’s Clients & Billing section.

To manually add new clients and assign them a specific role, click on the + New Client button.

Add new clients and assign them roles.

Note that if you have installed multiple Client Hubs on various sites, you will need to specify the primary Hub to send out communications to clients (e.g. emails, invoices, etc.).

Clients & Billing - Add New Client - Primary Hub
All communication with clients are sent from the selected primary Hub.

The Hub’s Clients & Billing comes with preset system roles that you cannot edit. You can, however, create new custom roles and assign these to clients.

The Hub - Clients & Billing screen - Roles section.
View existing client roles and create new roles via the Clients & Billing Roles section.

To create a new custom role, click on the +Create New Role button, name it, and use the toggles and menus to configure the role’s permission settings.

Set up custom roles for clients.

For more details on configuring client roles, see our documentation.

There is No Sub for The Hub

You can add an unlimited amount of team members, clients, and collaborators and give them precise access to specific sites, modules, and support. All without leaving The Hub.

And with Reseller’s automated site creation & client billing, your white label Hub becomes your very own SaaS business, automatically adding new clients and assigning them roles and permissions!

There’s just no other substitute out there for an all-in-one platform when it comes to managing all your WordPress sites.

See our documentation section to learn all about our Team & Role Customization features.

Also, see this documentation section to learn more about using The Hub Client.

To keep tabs on what’s coming, be sure to follow our Roadmap. And for all Hub-related information, check out The Hub’s documentation and stay tuned to our blog.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated for accuracy and relevancy. [Originally Published: September 2020 / Revised: March 2024]

How to Simply Set Up Users & Roles in The Hub for You and Your Clients

With The Hub 2.0, you can give unlimited users multiple roles — even if they aren’t WPMU DEV members! All of this can be easily set up in a matter of minutes, allowing you the flexibility to give users access to as much or as little as you’d like on your WordPress site.

Plus, With The Hub Client, you can create your Hub for your clients and collaborators, using your branding.

Oh, and did we mention it’s all free for your users and you’re able to be set up in minutes?

In this article, we’ll be going over how to:

  1. Easily Set Up Users
  2. Set Up Roles in Just a Few Clicks
  3. Add User Customization Settings
  4. Gain Quick Access to Sites
  5. Set Up the Hub Client
  6. Include Users & Roles & The Hub Client

This post’s features are accomplished from the Users & Roles tab in The Hub dashboard, except for The Hub Client, accessed by the Hub Client Plugin (which I’ll show you how to activate).

1. Easily Set Up Users

You can create new users in The Hub, allowing them to access specific areas on your WordPress site. Creating new users in The Hub is the easiest way to allow access to users because everything is done from one place.

Click the Users tab and Add First User to get started.

Where you'll add your first user.
Creating new users is perfect for collaborations with other users.

From here, you’ll enter their email. Then, you can select sites that they’ll have access to (all the sites that you have with WPMU DEV are shown in the dropdown), and the user role to view, edit, or custom role (which can be modified and changed at any time).

Where you'll invite a new user.
Clicking on Invite will notify the new user with a confirmation email.

Once that user gets the email and hits Confirm, the user will be redirected to WPMU DEV to set up a free account with their email, name, and password.

They don’t even need to be a WPMU DEV member. And again, there’s no cost for the users. The only cost would be if the new user wants to upgrade to a WPMU DEV membership of their own.

Where a user creates a free account.
There are only three fields to fill out for a new user to get set up.

When they click Join – that’s it!

A new user is added and will have access to the sites and roles determined by the admin when invited.

From the admin point of view, they can then see their new user in the Users area. If the invited user accepts, it will show Active in the status. If the user hasn’t confirmed yet, it will show Pending.

All of the users and roles.
All your users are shown in one spot in The Hub.

It also displays the user’s email, role, sites that the user has access to, and status.

Add as many users as you’d like by clicking on the New User button.

Setting up a user can be done with the tap of a button.

As you can see, creating and organizing users takes no time at all.

2. Setting Up Roles in Just a Few Clicks

When you send a person an invite to be part of the team, you also add user roles. Roles are what determines which access capabilities users have.

The predetermined roles that are initially available are:

  • View & Edit
  • View Only

You can pick between these two or create your own.

Create your own role under Roles by clicking on New custom user role.

Where you'll create a new custom role.
All the available roles will be displayed here.

Name the new role anything you’d like and customize accordingly. Let’s check out how to customize it by…

3. Adding User Customization Settings

Customizing access for a role can be determined by clicking on all the available options (e.g. sites, security settings, SEO, etc). Also, choose to have View & Edit or View Only for sites.

You decide what to include in this new role.

The Custom option gives you detailed task descriptions about specific roles that each option can allow.

As an example, here are various tasks you can include for Plugins in this new role. Click on the options you want the user to have the capability to manage.

Plugin customization options
Allow this role to uninstall plugins, activate plugins, and more.

Once you have the new tasks determine, click Save, and you’re all set.

For more detailed information on each task description, you can see all of them listed here.

With roles determined, the ability to assign them is all in one place. Everything under Role shows what that user has access to.

Where it shows the roles.
As you can see, the current role is View & Edit – All.

Want to change roles? Customize what sites they have access to and switch roles accordingly by clicking on the roles and what sites you want the user to have access to.

Once updated, the user will have the roles that you applied to them.

And like all things in The Hub, you can edit anything whenever you want.

4. Gain Quick Access to Sites

You have instant access to view your sites and how many users each site has in the Sites tab. The Sites tab makes it quick and easy to view and edit roles for specific sites.

All the websites are displayed here with the number of users displayed next to the site’s name.

All of the sites under each user.
You can also click the arrow to sort by name or number.

Hover over the number to bring up all the users for that site.

Shows the user and role for site.
For this site, there’s one user and one role.

Click on the plus sign by the site’s name to manage the user’s access.

Editing a users access.
Clicking the plus site will lead you to edit a user’s access.

This shows who has access and whether they’re active or not. Uncheck the user to remove access and add a new user from here, too.

Who has access to a site and their roles.
Want to remove access for someone? Click on the green checkmark and that user won’t be able to access any longer.

You can also resend an invitation to a pending user from this section.

5. Set Up The Hub Client

The hub client image.
The Hub Client has arrived so that you can personalize The Hub the way you want it.

With The Hub Client, you can provide access to clients, collaborators, and users using your personalized white label Hub. It’s your own Hub, the way you and your organization want it, customized to your perfection.

Plus, you can use any host (including our own managed hosting), sell our services, and run at your domain.

To use The Hub Client plugin, you have to be connected with The Hub to access its API. You can see how to do that here.

When connected to The Hub, the Hub Client plugin can be downloaded from the White Label page and then clicking on Find out more about The Hub Client.

Download the hub client.
One-click on White Label, and you’re there.

Once downloaded and installed, you’ll get a welcome message.

The Hub client welcome screen.
Welcome to the Hub Client!

The welcome message can walk you through everything on getting started by, you guessed it – clicking Get Started.

Begin by changing your name to replace WPMU DEV by clicking on the title and entering whatever you’d like.

Where you change the brand name.
We’ll just call this one Dev Man.

Replace the WPMU DEV logo with your own by uploading an image in the Your Logo section (e.g. Dev Man).

Adding your logo.
A cartoon Dev Man will do for this example.

You can change the colors for the Navigation background, Navigation text, and Navigation text selected & hover in the Color scheme area. Do this by visually picking the colors or by color number (e.g. #FFFFFF for white).

Pick and choose appropriate colors that fit your branding.

Head over to the Configuration to select a pre-made menu to appear after Sites.

Where you configure the menu.
Configure the menu how you’d like.

And for the client page, you can set up any page you’d like to replace your client hub. All the pages you have in your WordPress site will appear in the dropdown menu.

Where you choose a page to replace the hub.
Choose a specific page to replace ‘hub.’

For example, I created a page called Client Login that I’m going to use for my clients to log in at.

A sample page used for the hub.
We’ll use this page as an example.

And now, when your users log in, they’ll be greeted with your branding, colors, and configurations.

Custom user log in area.
What the user login area now looks like.

That’s how you have your own completely white-labeled Hub Client organization (yippee!).

So, let’s set up…

6. Users & Roles & The Hub Client

Your colleagues, users, and clients can now log in and use your very own branded WordPress site and customized Hub with The Hub Client. The Hub Client includes controlling all user access levels and roles.

It has to be activated and running to do this, so be sure to read through the section in this article on setting up The Hub Client first.

Once The Hub Client is ready, adding, and setting up users & roles is all accessible in The Hub Client > Users & Roles.

The Hub client users and roles.
All of your users will be displayed instantly.

This section is precisely how Users & Roles are set up in The Hub, except the Setting tab.

The Hub has the Settings tab, and The Hub Client has a Terms of Service & Privacy tab, so you can edit and set your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

You can easily add a new client or user by clicking the New User box.

Where you add a new user in the hub client.
Add as many new users as you’d like.

Once clicking on that, you’ll fill out the new user’s email address, grant site access, and select the user’s role.

Adding a new user.
Three simple steps will get a new user set up.

The user will get an email invitation to join. Once confirmed, they’ll appear in your Users & Roles admin as active.

When you have your users in the system, you can manage their access to websites. All you do is click on the individual, and a pop-up will appear where you can select Access to Selected Websites or Access All Websites.

If you choose Access to Selected Websites, you can remove or add sites that the individual can access in one-click.

Where you can access websites for users.
The blue checkmark means the user can access it.

Create a new role in the Roles tab. Plus, see what User Roles are already set up. (For more on New Roles, please see the Add User Customization Settings).

create new role.
Have a new role you want to create? Get one set up in a minute or less.

To quickly view your websites, view users for each site, and add or remove users from your site, go to Sites.

The sites in users and roles.
Click on a number to view the users for a particular site.

With the Users & Roles in the Hub Client, you’ll have your clients up-and-running in your white-labeled Hub in minutes. All accessible right from the dashboard in your WordPress site.

You can add an unlimited amount of collaborators and users with access to WPMU DEV products, plugins, and support.

There is No Sub for The Hub

As you can see, adding users & roles and creating your Hub for you and your clients is doable in just a few clicks. There’s just no other substitute out there for an all-in-one CMS when it comes to managing your WordPress sites.

And if you think this is good, just wait. Coming soon, we’re including automated site creation & client billing, making your white label Hub your own SaaS business!

To keep tabs on what’s coming, be sure to follow our Roadmap. And for more, check out The Hub’s documentation and stay tuned to our blog.

What Is SaaS Business Model?

Software As A Service (SaaS) is commonly known as cloud-based software. Today, Software as a Service is widely used by individuals and organizations across the world. 

According to Gartner, Inc., SaaS solutions were estimated to raise $85 billion in 2019. In 2020, they are estimated to generate $105 billion - $20 billion more than the last year. 

Optimizing CSS for faster page loads

A straightforward post with some perf data from Tomas Pustelnik. It’s a good reminder that CSS is a crucial part of thinking web performance, and for a huge reason:

Any time [the browser] encounters any external resource (CSS, JS, images, etc.) it will assign it a download priority and initiate its download. Priorities are important because some resources are critical to render a page (eg. main stylesheet and JS files) while others may be less important (like images or stylesheets for other media types).

In the case of CSS, this priority is usually high because stylesheets are necessary to create CSSOM (CSS Object Model). To render a webpage browser has to construct both DOM and CSSOM.

That’s why CSS is often referred to as a “blocking” resource. That’s desirable to some degree: we wouldn’t want to see flash-of-unstyled-websites. But we get real perf gains when we make CSS smaller because it’s quicker to download, parse, and apply.

Aside from the techniques in the post, I’m sure advocates of atomic/all-utility CSS would love it pointed out that the stylesheets from those approaches are generally way smaller, and thus more performant. CSS-in-JS approaches will sometimes bundle styles into scripts so, to be fair, you get a little perf gain at the top by not loading the CSS there, but a perf loss from increasing the JavaScript bundle size in the process. (I haven’t seen a study with a fair comparison though, so I don’t know if it’s a wash or what.)

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How to Implement Oauth2 Security in Microservices

Purpose

I wanted a solution where we can easily captured Oauth2 and Oauth2 client for the secure communication with all of the microservices. Focusing, how to achieve oauth2 full flavor into microservices architecture. User can’t access API without token. The token will be available when user given basic and authentication details to generate token for access API.

All requests will consider one entry point API-Gateway but, service-to-service can communicate. The API-Gateway will dynamic routing using Zuul Netflix OSS component. Every request will check authorization when request will arrived into service and service will request authorization server to verify is either authenticate or not. The entire Meta configuration settled into the central configuration on github (You can manage on any repository).

GoDaddy Acquires SkyVerge, Creator of Over 60 WooCommerce Add-Ons

On September 14, GoDaddy announced it had acquired SkyVerge, a major WooCommerce-focused development company, for an undisclosed amount. At the moment, GoDaddy is playing it close to the vest in terms of its future plans. It has not publicly announced anything beyond a continued commitment to current customers.

The initial announcement makes note that SkyVerge’s free plugins on WordPress.org have been downloaded more than 3.1 million times. However, the company’s nine plugins in the directory currently have over 155,000 active installs. Nevertheless, SkyVerge’s real value is in its team and its impressive array of free and commercial add-on plugins available directly from its site.

WooCommerce is a cash cow for companies with the right products and marketing at the moment. GoDaddy seems to be going all-in on the back of WordPress’s most popular eCommerce solution. It launched a managed WooCommerce hosting plan in October 2019. The hosting company has now added over 60 WooCommerce extensions to its inventory in one swoop.

“As more small businesses and entrepreneurs go online, having a highly performant eCommerce experience is becoming more important than ever,” said Rich Tabor, Senior Product Manager of WordPress Experience at GoDaddy. “Late last year we launched a Managed WooCommerce offering, bundling many WooCommerce extensions in the Managed WordPress environment.”

SkyVerge has quietly become a massively successful WordPress and WooCommerce business. It was bringing in $350,000 per month at the end of 2019. There was no response on how well the business has performed thus far in 2020.

The entire SkyVerge team came along for the transition to GoDaddy. “We’re just beginning to deliver more capabilities and an even better setup and ongoing usage experience for our customers,” said Tabor. “The SkyVerge team will lead and accelerate those plans. They are an incredibly talented and innovative team that lives and breathes WooCommerce. Joining forces with them advances GoDaddy’s WordPress strategy and enhances our ability to deliver intuitive eCommerce experiences that help everyday entrepreneurs sell online.”

With so many extensions in place, the big question for average users is whether those extensions will become a part of GoDaddy’s eCommerce hosting bundle. Tabor either did not or could not let slip any plans in the works. “We’re just beginning to determine how to best deliver SkyVerge’s wonderful products to GoDaddy customers. SkyVerge brings a lot of great software. It’s reasonable to expect we’ll be delivering that to our customers who are selling online.”

It is doubtful that GoDaddy went into this acquisition without at least some short-term plans or visions for how its managed hosting service would use these extensions. For now, we will have to wait and see.

It seems that the immediate plan will be to maintain business as usual. Tabor said GoDaddy had no changes to announce related to SkyVerge’s products and website. “We are committed to continuing support of SkyVerge’s customers and investing in the SkyVerge software,” he said.

SkyVerge also created Jilt, which is an email marketing platform for eCommerce sites. The platform currently supports WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Shopify, and Shopify Plus. Tabor did not directly respond to what the future looked like for Jilt’s non-WooCommerce customers nor did he give any indication of whether there were plans to expand Jilt to other eCommerce systems.

He did say that GoDaddy would continue to invest in its priority eCommerce platforms, which are WooCommerce and GoDaddy Websites + Marketing.

Max Rice, co-founder of SkyVerge, did leave some indication of Jilt’s future in his announcement post. “We made a commitment to be there for your business with software you can depend on, and we’re sticking to it,” he said. “We’ll continue to support our existing WooCommerce plugins and Jilt. While we’ll be building something new at GoDaddy, everything we’ve already built is a big part of that.”

DZone Partners Agile + DevOps Virtual This November

DZone always strives to be a trusted resource for developers, engineers, and architects to turn to stay on top of trends. Now, we will bring some of our top articles and contributors straight to you, streaming live during the Agile + DevOps Virtual conference.  We have partnered exclusively with TechWell who produces one of the top Agile + DevOps conferences in the industry to bring you the Best of DZone track. So why not make the most of what's left of 2020 and focus on your career and skill growth? No matter your level of agile or DevOps adoption, there will be content that meets your experience and organizational needs. 

Take advantage of promo code DZONE10 exclusively for Dzone readers when you register to get 10% off your pass, when you join DZone and Agile + DevOps Virtual this fall!

Value Stream Management Essentials

Value Stream Management (VSM) is the lean practice of monitoring, evaluating, and continually improving an organization’s software delivery process. In this Refcard, explore everything VSM has to offer, including key concepts, fundamentals, and more.

MariaDB SQL Set Operators

Set operators are the SQL operators that deal with combining, in different ways, different result sets. Say you have two different SELECTs that you want to combine into a single result set, the set operators come into play. MariaDB has been supporting the UNION and UNION ALLset operators for a long time, and these are by far the most common set operators.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves here, let me first explain the set operators that we have and how they work. If you want to give this a try, you can use your existing deployment of MariaDB Server, or try this out in a MariaDB SkySQL cloud database.

UNION and UNION ALL

The UNION and UNION ALL set operators add the result of two or more result sets. Let's start with UNION ALL and UNION will then be a variation of UNION ALL.

GraalVM — Byte Code to Bit Code

Early adopters for Cloud-Native (microservices, serverless) are now moving to its next wave called v2.x., leveraging the maturity, learnings, and identified shortfalls to design next-level stuff.

Let's recap few purposes of going cloud-native that we will relate here:

Bringing Your (Encryption) Keys to Multi/Hybrid Clouds

Tools and Setup

Before we dive into the fun part of getting keys shared amongst cloud providers, there are a variety of tools required to get this tutorial working. First, you’ll need to download and install Vault, then get it up and running. You will also need to install cURL and OpenSSL — these usually comes pre-installed with most Linux OSs, and are available via most package managers (apt, yum, brew, choco/scoop, etc.). Our examples also use head and diff which are part of the coreutils and diffutils packages under Ubuntu; you can either find a similar package for your OS or find a manual workaround for those portions. Next, install the AWS command line tools (CLI) and make sure you configure the CLI to connect to your account. The last step is to install and configure the Heroku CLI.

One last note — the Heroku feature to utilize keys from AWS requires a private or shield database plan, so please ensure your account has been configured accordingly.