5 handy WordPress plugins for your blog

Yoast

Yoast put together a useful list of not-that-well-known WordPress plugins, including:

• Auto Post Thumb Pro

A plugin that takes care of post thumbnails, especially when not all of your posts have that thumbnail. Looks interesting, especially for older platforms.

• Easy Custom Auto Excerpt

This is something that takes care of automating the <!– more –>tag in your posts. Useful!

• Responsive Lightbox

According to Yoast, it’s the best solution for displaying photos in a lightbox.

• Simple Custom CSS

Especially useful for developers, it allows them to add some lines of CSS code without the need for creating a separate child theme.

• Yoast Comment Hacks

Yoast wouldn’t be Yoast without a bit of self-promotion, and that’s why they also included something of their own. This will come in useful for blogs with lots of traffic and an engaged community. For more details, read the original blog post.

including one of their own – Yoast Comment Hacks.

WordPress 4.7.2 released

WordPress

This is nothing more than a security release. Quoting the source here:

• The user interface for assigning taxonomy terms in Press This is shown to users who do not have permissions to use it.
• WP_Query is vulnerable to a SQL injection (SQLi) when passing unsafe data. WordPress core is not directly vulnerable to this issue, but we’ve added hardening to prevent plugins and themes from accidentally causing a vulnerability.
• A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability was discovered in the posts list table. Reported by Ian Dunn of the WordPress Security Team.
• An unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability was discovered in a REST API endpoint.

More details available at the official WordPress blog (or, should I say, the blog of WordPress blog?).

Redesigning the Paris Metro Map

Smashing Magazine

Not exactly web design, but I was so fascinated with the topic that I convinced myself that I can show it to you as a proper UX example.

This massive article appeared on Smashing Magazine following Constantine Konovalov redesigning the Paris metro map. What sparked the initiative? Well:

When you think about it, who didn’t have an issue with metro maps? I know I do each time I visit a new city. Milan was not easy.

Anyway, check out this amazing project or simply watch the video below.

A practical guide to Progressive Web Apps for organizations who don’t know anything about Progressive Web Apps

Record Sounds the Same

We wrote a great piece of content (humble, huh?) on Progressive Web Apps and their role in a world dominated by their native counterparts. The article by Record Sounds the Same is yet another perspective on the topic.

Guilty pleasures for designers

Jon Moore @ Medium

Everything from the loud sound of a new MacBook Pro keyboard to taking walks for brainstorming. Jon Moore summed up possibly every single guilty pleasure that a designer may experience during her or his career.

Find out what they are here.