\nNathan Ingram opens his virtual office doors during this informal, unstructured webinar to answer your questions. There is no agenda and no planned content. Bring your questions and Nathan will answer them first come, first served. Get your answers and learn from the questions of others.\n\n\n\nRegister once for all Office Hours from July - September 2024.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","EventOrganizerNames":"Nathan Ingram","inline_featured_image":"","footnotes":"","livestream_public":1,"is_multi-day_event":0,"livestream_zoom_registration_link":"https:\/\/us06web.zoom.us\/webinar\/register\/WN_mdTdrWEuSKyWaKWYQNpN8A","livestream_replay_set":0,"livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1-gPDsTkUbbPZfy6S7mIIMR_9BabAhVLn\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/6ZIo2CfkLcdfvFHZ3YO1EOU2riY?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_live_transcript_text":"I'm glad you're all here. Let us hear from you in the chat what you've been working on this week.\r\n\r\nOh, it's my mic wrong probably.\r\n\r\nIs everything else has been wrong today. Oh, yeah, that's okay. It's better. That's a great upgrade your audio.\r\n\r\nThank you Chris.\r\n\r\nAll right. Well, welcome everybody. Glad you're here. Just about to get started. We're a few minutes late.\r\n\r\nYeah, sorry about that. Sorry. Did I blow you out with the mic volume a little bit. Sorry about that. You're awake now. Right.\r\n\r\nAll right. So glad you're all here. We'll give it another minute or so for folks to connect before we dive in with David Johnson.\r\n\r\nSo happy to have David back. We'll be talking about things that are happening. It's solid.\r\n\r\nOh, good. Okay, that's great.\r\n\r\nOh, fantastic. Glad to hear it.\r\n\r\nSo once again, the link is in the chat if you want to ask questions. For today. Plenty of space for questions.\r\n\r\nAnd we're just about to get started\r\n\r\nall right.\r\n\r\nI am not familiar with that. CEU I'm going to get our recording started and we will dive right in with David.\r\n\r\nWell, Happy Friday, everybody. It's a rare Friday office hours here on solid Academy. Glad you're with us. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host of solid Academy joined today by David Johnson, the product owner at solid WP Hey David, welcome back. Hey, Nathan. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me today. Absolutely. Absolutely. So David is here to chat with us about an email that went out earlier this week. Also, we had a question pop up about it during plugin roundup did not answer at that point knowing that David was going to be with us. So David, tell us a little bit about some of the development that's happening at solid WP and specifically about the email that went out about solid backups. Yeah, absolutely. Glad to do it. So we we you may actually have not gotten the email yet. There is there is a reason there's a couple of layers of different emails. In fact, some people are getting too many emails. So I'll just explain what's going on. If you're a solid backups user, and you have solid backups installed, and on any site if you've configured it to use Google Drive as a remote backups, destination, then we are announcing that as of August 1, the support for Google Drive is coming to an end. And so that was something that first of all we regretted to even have to make that decision. But unfortunately, the situation that developed kind of forced our hand a little bit and so we had to make a judgment call and decided to go ahead and proceed with removing support and to try to give people as much notice as possible. So you may have noticed we pushed out an update to solid backups on Monday and that would have been a trigger for an email. If you had Google Drive configured on a site where solid backups upgraded updated that day. Then you should have gotten an email and potentially two depending on your email address and how you're configured so we made sure that one went out to the WP site admin address. We also did a quick lookup and sent an email to the licensed solid WP account holder email address so that you would have gotten it yeah, if you don't use Google Drive, you would not have gotten an email that's about to change. We are sending an email. I think the details are being finalized on that it might go out today might go out Monday, but we are sending a separate email to anybody that has a license that could include solid backups, just in case because if you know if your site hasn't updated yet, that sort of thing. We want to make sure that you know everybody gets a chance to hear about it just in case you happen to be using Google Drive. So wanted everybody to have as much time as possible to make the necessary adjustments. So if you're using Google Drive, you know you've got until the end of the month basically to reconfigure and use some other destinations and so I'm here to answer questions about that. certainly happy to talk about it as much or as little as we need to. I'm seeing some of you just don't use Google Drive. And that's great. So you're not going to see any change. Good question. Yeah. That's a great question right there. Google has a habit of changing things which I think we've all seen right So David, can you tell us the short version of the story? Yeah, I'll keep it short. But that's exactly the deal. Google changed the requirements around access to the Google Drive API. And in in a lot of cases, you with software, you know, you just update you know? You put developers on the task and they touch the code and they do the things. The issue that we have is a couple fold. One is there were some substantial changes required. And we have a situation right now with solid backups where the existing plugin has been on the market since 2010. And I went back and dug around we started supporting Google Drive in 2014. That's 10 years ago. So a lot of the code that affects how we integrate with Google Drive is 10 years old, and it touches a lot of different parts of the plug in and so when we started to evaluate what it would take, it was a massive undertaking to make the changes and we just didn't have a lot of time. And so once we finished our assessment on that we said, you know, we need to use as much of the remaining clock that's ticking. Google gave us a clock. And it was it's unique to us. In other words, they notified us specifically that changes were coming. And this will be happening with anybody else. It integrates with Google Drive, there's an annual review process. And so it just happened that ours was now and so for us to meet the requirements that we were going to be that were that were necessary for us to continue to stay in compliance was just a massive, massive deal. And as we've talked about previously, here, we have been working on what we believe is a much better use of our development resources, which is a brand new ground up reimagining of what a backup solution for the modern era looks like. So that's an item that is is we felt like was a better way overall, even if we had enough time. It's a better way for us to serve our long term clients and users is to continue to work on that because we believe it's going to be a game changer. Yeah, absolutely. So practical questions like Sue is asking if she has Google Drive set up for a client but the client isn't the site admin. We would need to alert those folks. That's true there is there's another way that someone might see it. If they if they sign into the WordPress admin there is an admin notice that shows up on every page of WP admin until you there's no we made a tough choice here too, which is not dismissible. The only way for that admin notice to go away is if you no longer have any Google Drive destination, so we just wanted to make sure that someone didn't click it and then close it and forget. So and because of that, it's never I've never been that close as admin notices right click I hate admin. We all hate admin notices. Oh, hey, admin, notice but in a case like this, it's like you know what, if you're expecting that your backups are running and being delivered to a remote destination. The last thing we want to do is create a situation where your backups are no longer being delivered to that remote destination, and you don't realize it. So it was it was a painful process, really, frankly, to think about all the different ways that we wanted to make sure to make this visible. Yeah. So one of the things I really appreciated David in our conversations about this was knowing that I mean, if we're gonna take a backup destination away, we're gonna give you something in return exactly what I'm talking about stash a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. So we kind of keyed in on maybe two major reasons why someone might use Google Drive. One is, one is it's been around forever. It's been around for a long time and back in the day was free. And storage, up to a certain amount is still free, depending on the type of Google account that you have. So it may be cost, you know, that that's, that's a reason, but another one is just convenience. You know, we all have Google accounts, most of us, you know, nearly all of us. So, you know, if you're going to integrate with something, it might just be handy. To use Google Drive. So what we decided to do is that if you are using Google Drive, just reach out to account services, and you can use the main solid web contact form and just select in the drop down. Like if a question about my account mentioned that you're using Google Drive, and our Account Services team will take a look at your your available stash storage. Some of you you might be paying for more stash, you may have you know, there are lots of different situations as a reason we didn't just make a blanket, you know thing happen, but if you just reach out, we will make sure that you get plenty of stash storage at no additional cost. So we sell additional SAS storage but in this case, this is a this is a clear situation where it makes sense for us to make sure that you have what you need and that way you can easily switch over to stash and of course we provide stash storage that comes from us. It integrates nicely, easy to easy to use. I hope so but if you have any questions about that, certainly you can ask here or Account Services will take care of you but we want to make sure that that stash is an option to solve for both convenience and cost. Yeah, stash is by far the easiest remote destination to set up. You just log in with your solid WP username and password and you're at it's it's there. Yep. And managing your existing staff storage if you need to go in there and see what files are there and clean them up or whatever. It's easy to do as you do it right inside of solid backup. So it's it's not difficult at all. Yeah, for sure.\r\n\r\nStacy's asking is the new version, whatever we're going to call this we've been calling it next gen backups. Yeah. We have a we have an official name now.\r\n\r\nCan you say the name I can't say the name. I've heard this yet. You're gonna love this. Are you ready? It's solid backups. Next Gen.\r\n\r\nSo we were kind of good. We had this hilarious internal conversation around a codename, you know like Mac OS does when they released, you know, Mojave or or Sequoia, I think is the new Mac OS version that's coming. So we thought well, we want to make sure that it's distinguishable from the existing product because it works completely differently. But also solid backups is a great name and and we wanted to kind of make sure that everybody understands that the what we know today as solid backups is going to continue to be supported for a while, especially because right now solid backups. Next Gen is, is in a very new state. And so we're going to be adding features to it so when it launches here in the not too distant future. It's going to have the essentials. And then we'll be looking at what features to add. And so if it would really be interested in feedback about that, but yeah, solid backups. Next Gen is its name. And so to follow up on this question, you know, will it integrate with other backup solutions? I'm really curious Stacy about what you what you have in mind with that. So one of the conversations that we've we've certainly dealt with is remote destinations. As of right now we have built from the ground up a brand new server based cloud first remote destination that it will directly integrate with and it's a really powerful integration. It uses all new tech under the hood. It allows us to do things like actually do incremental backups and and reduce the amount of server load on your hosting provider. And that's something we haven't really talked about here in a lot of detail. But I won't bog us down into tech details but but we're really excited about that because it's really going to perform well. But let's see. Oh, Am I loud? Sorry. I'll back up. It's probably who knows Zim normally normalizes the audio, but we've had some issues today. Yeah.\r\n\r\nOkay, so I'm catching up on the on the comments here.\r\n\r\nYeah, so the are we going to have like a solid backups classic. And then at least you didn't call the new one solid? Backups. Gutenberg is one. Oh, gosh, yeah. Yeah. Pick a. Pick a nightmare. We had a bunch of hilarious discussions around that. But for now solid backups will remain solid backups, probably within a few months of launch. We're timing for launch is interesting. I will say we are we are expecting to open our waitlist for the beta, which you are all invited to once we open that waitlist that's in about two weeks. I think we'll be opening that beta. Somewhere around the 22nd I think is the plan right now of the month. And with the beta waitlist, shouldn't you shouldn't be on a waitlist for long. I think we're going to be ready for for beta pretty quickly after that. We're still dialing in a few details on that. But all that to say once we have a nice little round of beta and get feedback and learn, you know where we might have opportunities you know, to to improve or whatever. Then we'll we'll be formally announcing the launch and then sometime after that, the existing product that we all know and love will become labeled solid backups, Legacy so there'll be solid backups next gen and solid backups legacy for some period of time. That makes sense. Yeah. So a couple of questions that popped up about the legacy, I think toolkit which was all the things sure various flavors over the years is next gen backups going to be part of the toolkit or how's that gonna work? Oh, that's a great question. With toolkit, I think is that, like, we have, we have scenarios we have people who bought lifetime deals a long time ago. And then there are there are people who paid for legacy, you know, offers that we don't currently continue to offer but you're you're still grandfathered. In at that pricing and so forth. It renews every year. So I think there's some question about what exactly will happen with people who have a lifetime deal. But because this is a new product, but if you have a bundle of some sort that you continually renew every year and that bundle includes backups in some way so I think that's the case with toolkit Sherry depending on it Yes. If you Yeah, you pay. Okay, yeah, super. So then you will you will get solid backups next gen. It will become available and for some period of time you'll be able to continue to use the existing solid backups products you know, alongside so you'll be able to use either you know, it's kind of a both and situation either or both and and we will storage in the next gen solid backups. Next Gen is a completely different critter because of the new tech so we're not calling it stash it doesn't wear the same name, but you will get a generous amount of storage. And so we're currently that's one of the things that our our team is doing now is like sorting out like if you have X amount of storage in in your current stash situation. What does that look like for next gen it's going to be more I don't know how much more Yeah, and so these questions are natural whenever Yes, we get to a transition period like this. Oh, my goodness, there were so many when we switched, you know, from I iThemes to solid WP and one thing I'll say is just sort of, um, kind of see. Yeah, I have two perspectives on all of this as a user and then as you know, somebody that works with solid. I have been very impressed with the way the solid slash stellar team has been very transparent and also very honoring of people who have held former licenses for all these years. And I expect that will continue. I will say I joined the solid team after the rebrand, like shortly after the rebrand. And so I wasn't involved in all the decision making and all of the things and when I joined the team, that was one of the things I wanted to look at, like how are we treating our users and our customers and those people who do have no existing and I've also had the same perspective. Nathan, I've been very impressed. And I will say I believe in this team. The stellar team is committed to our customers. And so and that comes through in a lot of ways that you may or may not be able to see and but this is one of them. So right yeah, there's other flavors of licenses we've had in the past with like Backup Buddy gold was one that was like a like a lifetime deal for backup, buddy. Sure. And put you on the spot. Is there. Has there been conversations about how that's gonna go forward into next gen. There have been some conversations and I will say I want to be cautious in what I say right now. I will say this is getting a lot of attention. So we're trying to make sure that everyone is accounted for. And the one thing that I just am not able to commit to today is exactly what will happen with lifetime deals. Because this is kind of a new, a new thing. And we've we've invested months now and re engineering it there there may be an ask at some point for you to pay for something related to the new product if you have a lifetime deal, but I don't know that for sure. And so I don't want to I don't want to scare you, you know and go away. You know you this is not included.\r\n\r\nI just don't quite have the answer on the lifetime deals just yet. That being said, as I as I mentioned, we're paying a lot of attention to it. And and we we definitely want to make sure that you have an opportunity to use the new tool. We are going to support solid backups.\r\n\r\nThe product that we all know and love today that will soon be labeled solid backups legacy will be supporting that for some period of time and supporting kind of means different things to different people. So the the main things that we're going to be looking at is we're going to make sure that it's compatible with WordPress, new WordPress versions and will continue to you know, fix bugs and things but for new features, we're investing those resources in solid backups next gen for the foreseeable future. And that just makes sense. You know that the same approach was taken back in the day when I think sunsetted the builder theme, right. It was a almost three year process where Wow, it went from maybe longer than that because it really wasn't inactive development for a year, year and a half before it was sunset. But even then security, WordPress compatibility all of that was maintained for a think two years or so. Not that that's what's going to happen here. But it's it shows the way that's been handled in the past. Yeah, exactly. And philosophically, that's the goal. We you know, there will be some things about next gen that are different enough from the way that that the former Backup Buddy you know, now solid backups works that people need some time you know, to try out the new next gen tool and maybe to adjust workflows and it is a completely conceptually it's completely different. It relies on solid WP resources, our server horsepower and our storage and it is intended to make the actual demands that go on your hosting account very minimal, to the point of like nearly non existent, which is great because if you've ever had a situation where you ran out of storage and your hosting account because you your site got big enough that the that the backup copy that had to be built on your site was, you know, essentially a little more than double your current. You need you need to you need to double your current site size at least. And so that's all gone with the new with the new system were weird literally sucking the files off of your your hosting account and crunching them on our end. And so you won't need that much storage at all. So there's a lot of new things that are conceptually different about the way that solid backups nextgen works. And again, I could talk about this more I just don't there there are limits to what I can say but I also just don't want to dominate the entire office hours session so glad to answer more questions either here and or in the in the academy slack afterwards.\r\n\r\nGot it. So I'm getting I'm getting a note that my volume is incredibly low. So I'm just going to switch to a\r\n\r\nI can also turn mine down not as good mic for the moment until I'm get this worked out.\r\n\r\nIs this a little better, folks? At least for the moment? It's probably a little more echoey sorry about that. I have no idea. Other than zoom hates me today.\r\n\r\nYeah. Okay. So folks, we have David for maybe a minute or two more. Are there any other questions that we didn't get to David that you folks would like to know see wanted to know if it's a we're moving to next generation. Next Gen backups. Is that going to be a new plugin install? I would imagine it is right. Yeah, it's actually we're going to we're going to run all of the almost all of your interactions through Central. And so this is another kind of an interesting twist. If you're not using solid Central.\r\n\r\nYou'll have the ability to connect your sites that use next gen backups. And you'll you'll be able to connect them to central you may not have all the premium features of central like uptime monitoring and some of the other things that are paid features. But if you have the solid sweet, you're sad anyway, doesn't really matter. But if you're if you're just using solid backups, let's say and not using central, you'll connect your site to central we've got a new connection process, which is really slick. We're excited about that as well. And one of the things that will happen there is that you'll you'll actually configure your backups directly in central there is a plugin, but we'll install it in the background so you don't even have to touch it. But we're also going to make the plugin available in the.org directory probably not right away, but it'll it'll be available on wordpress.org At some point in the not too distant future. So we're hoping to keep the plugin interaction kind of minimal, minimal if you're using solid backups already, you'll be able to run them in parallel so you can you can continue to do what you're doing as long as it's not a Google Drive destination. And those two systems can run side by side so you can get familiar with the new one and decide you know, what you like and we definitely want to hear about, you know, feature requests and feedback and all that sort of good stuff.\r\n\r\nAnd of course, if you like what you see you can make the switch and and actually uninstall solid backups, the existing product when you're ready.\r\n\r\nSo, you know, it'll just depend on on a number of factors there with respect to how well solid backups nextgen meets your needs. And then we're hoping we'll do that very well. And of course, we'll have training about that here on Academy when as soon as things become available, just like we always do. So 100% Yeah, yeah. All right. David, thanks so much for your time today. I know you've got a lot going on, but appreciate you taking a few minutes to chat with us and update us on all this. That's happening. Oh, glad to do it. Do we want to talk about our new product beta that launches on Monday? I don't think we want to talk about anything new. I mean, that's right. Does anybody want to hear about that?\r\n\r\nI mean, I don't have to share interests. Nobody wants to know Yeah.\r\n\r\nTell us what's coming. Yep. So we've we've been in development on a brand new tool called solid performance. And this is a solution that is intended to help deliver faster website page load speeds to your users. We all know we have a lot of different ways to go about this. And the sort of exciting thing is that solid performance is launching in a private beta on Monday. If you're part of solid, you'll get an email inviting you to it. It might even go out as late as or as early as today. But I kind of think it'll be Monday at this point. You'll get an invite to that it's a closed beta. Right now. solid performance does one thing only, and that is page caching. And it is It's one reason why it's a beta for now, is that we're building other tools to help speed up your site. But what we find is that page caching is the bang for the buck is the one thing you can do that delivers the most value and some of the great solutions that are out there. Like W three TC is a great example right? It does all the things but when you boil it down, the most important one is page caching. And so we're we've engineered that from the ground up as a as a as a solid WP quality engineering product. And we're excited about the beta love to have you try it out. It's got some pretty fascinating features like it does smart exclusions. So one of the things that's really great about that is if you have WooCommerce installed as a great example, right? You never want to cache your checkout page, your cart page, you know, some of the other pages. And so this detects when you have WooCommerce installed finds those pages and automatically prevents them from being included in caching. So there's some really kind of smart thing we don't even show that to you like it's it's just happening under the hood behind the scenes. So there's some really cool stuff there that, again, excited to talk about it. We can talk more about it in the future, but that beta will open up on Monday. So watch your watch your inbox for an invite. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. Well, that was worth an extra couple of minutes. Oh, good.\r\n\r\nI was I was like, if I suggest another topic that it works out to be when you want to hear about Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, David, thanks again for joining us. Really appreciate your time and for the updates. Thanks for the invite. Good to see everybody and we'll we'll talk to you next time.\r\n\r\nAll right, folks, I'm gonna try switching I think I know what's wrong with my mic. So give me one second.\r\n\r\nNope, that's not what's wrong with my mic, so I have no idea what's going on with my mic. I'll just continue to use this other microphone not quite as good but you can all hear me well enough now correct.\r\n\r\nYeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.\r\n\r\nOh, my All right.\r\n\r\nYeah, I don't know what's the deal with this mic, but it's not showing up correctly in Zoom audio settings.\r\n\r\nSo let's get into some questions. If you have if you have a question you haven't asked yet. The link is in the chat. We will get started with question number one from Karen. Actually, I'm going to start with a question that Kay asked in the q&a. Kay asked Can solid backup send a zipped file directly to a file server it absolutely can. For many years, the SFTP option here has been available in Backup Buddy and solid backups. There's also even an email option if you're just sending the data back. I wouldn't send the 30 100 megabyte or whatever size backup through email but if it's a database backup, which is typically you know, maybe a megabyte or two that's usually you can even email so all those settings are here. I would not use FTP as it's not secure, but you can certainly set up SFTP you just add the credentials and it will send it right over to an SFTP address. So that is that's been Yeah, that's been there for quite some time and it does work.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's move on then to Karen's question. Karen, are you here? Looks like you're here.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nOkay, Karen, we redesigned a simple membership site for a new client. It's the same site to ask you about before. We're starting about to start the build. The current site is built on WP bakery. I'm sorry. And it's using simple membership. I remember which the client decided to stick with instead PNP for several reasons, okay. For sites that one have so much data that needs exporting user blog post yet, and two settings that need to be copied. How do you decide when to keep the current site and build on it? Versus starting all over with a brand new install? We've done both and they have their advantage? Yeah, you're exactly right. For this site, my inclination is to start with a brand new install because the current site is built with bakery and the site has been hacked. Before. Oh, gosh. Okay. So\r\n\r\nlet's see. Karen, are you here is this Karen is the Karen I'm looking at in the attendees is Are you the one that asked this question or is it a different Karen?\r\n\r\nMaybe another Karen. Okay. So Karen. Okay. So Karen, I am going to do my best. There's probably some questions I need to answer from you before I can give really good advice but because this is tough, and so you're exactly right. In that deciding to keep the current site and build on it versus start from new and import. It is a hard question to answer. And, you know, there's not there's not a hard and fast rule.\r\n\r\nYou kind of have to waive which option is going to be the bigger pain. And honestly, in this case, I think importing is probably going to be the bigger pain simply because you have a membership plugin that has members and the question I can't remember specifically about this site. Whether there was a subscription payment I think there was and simply for that reason, I would not try that like importing that's going to be tough. So if you're preserving the membership plugin, and there's payments, I would stick with the current site why you know, wipe as much of the bakery as you can and build on that. If there are not payments involved, and it's just access controls, then it becomes a toss up. And a lot of that will depend on how big the site is. But there's a wonderful plugin called shortcodes finder. That is\r\n\r\nreally helpful when you are untangling a bakery site. So we have used this this plugin a number of times. It will reveal all the short codes that are used on the site period. And you can specifically use the a search for certain shortcuts that relate to WP bakery.\r\n\r\nSo this will let you find all of those shortcodes and replace them.\r\n\r\nSo that might be this plugin is what I've used in the past to D bakery a site and it works pretty well. The other thing that I would suggest is with an old site you have a lot of stuff in the options table which can tend to slow down the site. We showed this plugin on a roundup a couple of months ago. It's one of your posts, new plugins that he did himself and it was called like AAA options something.\r\n\r\nYeah, this one AAA option optimizer.\r\n\r\nAnd this lets you go through and clear out old unused stuff in your options table. That's just garbage and clutter that slows down the site on load.\r\n\r\nAnd there's likely a bunch of garbage in there that you can clean out. So with the shortcuts finder and with the option optimizer, I think you'll be fine to build on your existing site.\r\n\r\nThe X Factor in that scenario is the hack. I mean if the app was cleaned up well you're okay if it wasn't you.\r\n\r\nI think I would still try to build on the current site because moving members and subscriptions and all of that is gonna be a pain. It's just going to be difficult.\r\n\r\nPaste the option. Yeah, here's the link to that one. We reviewed that one back in I believe it was the June plugin roundup\r\n\r\nmight have been May.\r\n\r\nGood grief hasn't been that long ago.\r\n\r\nYep, it was the may plug in Roundup. That was the last if so if you want to view of how this works. It was the last plugin we had in the May 2024 plugin Roundup. It is excellent. Works very, very well.\r\n\r\nOkay, so Karen, hopefully that helps. I agree with you that this is almost a toss up.\r\n\r\nIf you can figure out a way to migrate all those members and subscriptions and all over.\r\n\r\nI would I would do that and start with a new site but I bet you that's going to be more complicated and then building on what you've got. So let's move on then to the next question, which is from Kay.\r\n\r\nAll right. Hey,\r\n\r\nNathan, when and how should I use the Kadence advanced query Loop block instead of the post grid carousel?\r\n\r\nWhen should I use the repeater block? When should they be combined with ACF? Okay.\r\n\r\nThese may be too big for office hours and I think it is so my next question is can we have a lesson on these Kadence blocks in the fall maybe in combination with dynamic content? I'd like to know how to plan and think yeah, so Kay, let's see. Here's the unfortunately I'm not an expert on the Kadence advanced query loop. We still build in my agency with Beaver Builder.\r\n\r\nAnd so I, I would, it's very likely you know, as much about this as I do.\r\n\r\nSo I'm not going to be a ton of help here. The repeater block and ACF again. This is a good question. And what I'll have to do is try to find a presenter now. Okay, so here's the thing.\r\n\r\nBack when there was a deep, you know, there's much more of a connection with I iThemes and Kadence. You know, back when Kadence came over as a stellar product because for a little while Kadence lived underneath I themes just structurally, and the i themes, you know, billing and the all the support that Kadence started was using that team now. Kadence is on its own and solid WP, they're like CO equal products like LearnDash. Right. So it we will have to find a presenter from Kadence who can do that and see if they're able to come on with us and talk about that. So the that's why you're not seeing as much Kadence specific training here on solid Academy because we're not like they're not part of AI themes like it was in the past anymore. So does that make sense? That's why this is a little more complicated for me. To answer.\r\n\r\nSo, the answer the question is yes, I will see if we can get someone I'm not even sure if like it used to be Kathy Zant. Right. But Kathy is no longer with the Kadence team. So I'm not I'm not sure if Ben will have been written or will have the time to come on. Solid Academy and do this this training. Has anybody looked like there's probably YouTube training about this?\r\n\r\nSo that's where I would suggest that you look, there's a ton of Kadence like the Kadence team tends to create their own training and release it on you know, YouTube, so it's it's evergreen. That's where I would suggest that you start because it may take a little while to get live training on about that. So yeah, I would recommend K yeah, like I said, go look at the actual Kadence videos. There's a lot of other creators on YouTube that are building Kadence tutorials. It's very likely there's someone there who has already created a video about this. David McCann is another one. Yeah. That you might find with this. So I'll just say solid academies not going to be your primary resource for Kadence training.\r\n\r\nI would I would look in their channels first. Just in the same way. We're not the the avenue for training for LearnDash. So that's, yeah, that's what I would recommend. But I will see if we can do something with Kadence later in the fall. Just don't don't rely on me for that.\r\n\r\nOkay, next up, is Does that make sense? Everybody? Is that fair? Hope that makes sense.\r\n\r\nAll right, next up is Tanya, Tanya is up.\r\n\r\nOkie dokie.\r\n\r\nTanya, what is the best way to join a live stream if your email has decided to take a break from accepting emails from zoom? Interesting. I always have to register to get the link from the website even though I'm already registered. Well that's interesting.\r\n\r\nYeah, I I've heard other people that have had issues getting emails from zoom too and I don't know if that's a zoom email delivery thing.\r\n\r\nAre you here telling you Yeah, so have you tried using a different email?\r\n\r\nOh, no. Okay. You may not you may not have gotten the one like a reminder for today because today is the first in a new quarter. So you would have had to re register for office hours.\r\n\r\nAnd that's, you know, I've mentioned that a couple of times probably had mentioned that last week in office hours I should have. I did drop a thing in the slack Academy slack today reminding everybody about that. But you today is a little different because you know, every quarter we asked you to re register.\r\n\r\nSo, that may that may be the answer for today. But I understand that there is deliverability with Zoom emails and that's completely unfortunately, out of our control.\r\n\r\nTry different email. I don't know that's that's a really crappy answer. Sorry.\r\n\r\nYes, Sadie, we we were on holiday yesterday in the US.\r\n\r\nAll right. So let's Tanya is there a way to add a link to the website?\r\n\r\nNo, because every link is individual.\r\n\r\nSo the solid Academy website has the join link. But you have to go and register right. It's not just like the link you get in your email is specific to you. It's not an everybody can use it.\r\n\r\nBlink Yeah.\r\n\r\nZoom man.\r\n\r\nI will say I saw somebody saying earlier though. I don't care how bad Zoom is it will never be as bad as Microsoft Teams. Oh my gosh. Teams is horrible.\r\n\r\nOkay, anyway, any other teams haters out there? Wow. I know. It's done. Teams is awful.\r\n\r\nHorrible.\r\n\r\nYou can only see my chin\r\n\r\nis that better?\r\n\r\nAnyway, okay.\r\n\r\nWell, okay, and zoom is not as bad as GoToWebinar used to be.\r\n\r\nOkay, anyway, Gene gene is up next. Are you here Gene?\r\n\r\nGene can't join us live. Okay. Gene is asking. Could you give expand on the difference between solid security version management that updates a plug in that is vulnerable and the patch stack paid version that patches vulnerabilities are two great question. Okay. Could I plug in vulnerability leave a hole that allows someone to change the username and password.\r\n\r\nOkay, these are two separate questions. So I'm going to answer one at a time. All right, so the first feature of solid security that you're talking about here Jean is the version management feature. So that's here at features site check version management.\r\n\r\nSo version management does several things. First, it can be used to auto update certain themes and plugins you can do all or just automatically update some plugins for example, so that's pretty cool, or none.\r\n\r\nIt will also scan your hosting environment for old outdated versions of WordPress because I'm sure that none of you like I would never leave a staging site out there in some sub domain that was in Yeah, that would never do that. But just in case you did, there's this option to scan for old WordPress sites that are out of date and vulnerable. And then this is the feature that Jean is talking about auto update if fixes vulnerability. So when the site scan happens twice a day on your site from solid security. If there is a theme or a plugin that has a vulnerability and a patch is issued that will automatically cause that theme or plugin to update without you having to lift a finger so that's super helpful.\r\n\r\nNow, the other feature Jean is talking about is the patch stack firewall, which offers virtual patching. Now the way this works is, as traffic is coming into your website, in the WordPress layer, their patch stack is sitting right so all traffic passes through the patch stack firewall. Patch stack, sees that you have a vulnerable theme or plugin and knows what that vulnerability is. And it automatically blocks traffic that would try to exploit that vulnerability. Does that make sense to explain that well enough, so it automatically blocks traffic that is has characteristics that would that patch that sees or trying to exploit that vulnerability. So the virtual patching is in place until the theme or plugin author updates the actual plugin with a fix. And then once they do that, then the version management comes along and actually updates the plugin at which time virtual patching is no longer necessary. Does that make sense everybody?\r\n\r\nNow, the next question here is could a plugin vulnerability leave a hole that allows someone to change the username and password and the answer is yes, absolutely.\r\n\r\nThat is possible. That's not often what hackers tend to do. But yes.\r\n\r\nAnd Tanya just dropped a link in the chat about a plugin that got hacked and hackers added in different admin accounts. That's usually what happens. Usually they don't try to change the existing ones. Usually they add new ones. But it absolutely could. Not changing the username is interesting. That does require a direct database hit which I guess they could do.\r\n\r\nBut yes, it could possibly happen.\r\n\r\nJean I remember I can't remember where that discussion was happening. If it was in Slack or wherever and I remember seeing this that you were asking. My recommendation would be to install the stream plugin.\r\n\r\nWe use stream on all of our sites in this tracks everything that happens on the site\r\n\r\neven to a higher detail than the solid security logging does.\r\n\r\nSo this would let you see if maybe a user came in and did that. Or who actually did that or how it happened.\r\n\r\nBut I would definitely make sure and I think yes this happened in the academy slack. There was a conversation about this. And my recommendation was to reach out to Tom rate that we watch your website and get that site looked at by him.\r\n\r\nHe'll add it to monitoring for free and if you let him know what's going on he'll take a look at it.\r\n\r\nYeah, so this is not something I tried to fix myself. I would get a security Pro to look at it if this is happening. And let let somebody like Thomas fix it for you.\r\n\r\nSpeaking of Thomas Rafe Thomas had a kidney stone this week, which is why he couldn't join us which sucks if you ever had a kidney stone that is pretty awful.\r\n\r\nAnd we will get that live stream with Tom rakeback scheduled as soon as we get availability from him because there are definitely some security issues to talk about with the polyfill exploit and so forth.\r\n\r\nAll righty.\r\n\r\nNext up is Stacey and this is the last question. So if you have a question to ask, use the link in the chat.\r\n\r\nOkay, Stacy, do you or anyone in the group have any new tricks for stopping credit card testers on WooCommerce sites? I had a bunch of fake orders show up on a site the other day it's behind Cloudflare I can see tons of events in Cloudflare that aren't getting through and I have turnstyle on the site, but somehow they have sneaked through several of these fake orders.\r\n\r\nSeveral months ago I turn I installed turnstile and haven't had issues until now. Most of them got stopped at the payment processor I think to got through but was flagged a third party fraud detector I have in place. Okay. So Stacy, that's interesting. So you're using the simple Cloudflare turnstyle plugin\r\n\r\nthat tells me that probably this is an actual human being.\r\n\r\nYou're doing fake orders.\r\n\r\nSo that's going to make it harder.\r\n\r\nAnd you have to you have to do what you've done which is stopping at the payment processor and having a fraud detector.\r\n\r\nThe car that the testing attacks that got through more they they weren't like immediately one after each other right? They were spaced out in time, not like the bot type where you'll get 40 orders in the course of a minute, right? These were more spaced out like it would take a human being to do this.\r\n\r\nYeah, so I mean, this is like, you know the difference between automated spam on your contact form and a human like people hire humans to go and fill out garbage in your contact form and pass the CAPTCHA.\r\n\r\nThis is like that, but for ecommerce. So that is hard and you may you have to rely on.\r\n\r\nYou have to rely on your payment processor.\r\n\r\nSo if you're saying there's a ton of events in CloudFlare, then yeah, it very well could be that it's multiple things happening right like there could be a bot attack. And a human being.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nAre the\r\n\r\nare the what are the orders from?\r\n\r\nDoes this site only sell to the USA or does it sell internationally\r\n\r\nUSA Canada and you have traffic other than US and Canada blocked in Cloudflare.\r\n\r\nWith like a geo rule or make them pass a managed challenge. Of course in this case it would matter and they could just get a VPN there are VPN rules.\r\n\r\nThe big traffic was being from the Philippines. Okay, so\r\n\r\nnow you're down didn't so you're down at this point to the way out the factors here right. It's like I can bump up my level of aggressiveness against spam email, but I might get some false positives along the way.\r\n\r\nSo you can and matter of fact, Troy bland C's newest rule set for Cloudflare that he published a post about it in the admin bar a few weeks ago.\r\n\r\nHe has a pretty good rule that targets VPN providers.\r\n\r\nAnd you could just block ASN is that or VPN providers. That's I can't tell you exactly what that is. Actually, I may be able to see if I can pull that but anyway, you can semi effectively blocked VPN traffic.\r\n\r\nBut you take the risk of blocking good traffic at the same time and that's where it you know, that's where you have a talk with the client and say, Look, this is what's going on. These are our options. Pick your poison.\r\n\r\nYeah\r\n\r\nit's really annoying.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, I will have a conversation with the client and educate them and help them make a decision. That's really the only thing to do at this point. What a mess\r\n\r\nAh, yes, good. That's good. Yeah, that the the fraud detection at the payment processor, right, that's, that's your best bet at this point.\r\n\r\nAll right. Couple more questions came in. Ben, is next.\r\n\r\nAnything you need to do with solid security if you change the domain you should relicense and that's just a simple process of going into if you change the domain of the website, solid WP licensing and you're going to want to relicense it basically you just hit Change the licensed URL here. It will prompt you to sign in again. And then it'll relicense the site with that domain.\r\n\r\nThat's all you need to do.\r\n\r\nIs that what you're after Ben?\r\n\r\nGreat. All right, one more question from sherry. Now we're down to the last question again. No.\r\n\r\nAll right, Sherry, I have a maintenance client where the CDN was not set up like I'd normally do. Because the company was taken over by European Corporation. And then we're going to set up their own thing. Well, that never happened.\r\n\r\nNow that I have access to their registrar, I want to set up Cloudflare. So I wanted to see if one, I could use the internal connection via an access or go outside and access and set up Cloudflare separately. Should I charge extra? Even though this feels like it's part of the maintenance scope? It's a gray area for me. Okay, great question. So first of all, I have a lot of experience using Nexus. I think Nexus uses the Cloudflare CDN. I don't think their internal tools do Cloudflare DNS. I could be 100% wrong about that.\r\n\r\nI have no idea.\r\n\r\nIf it were me, I would regardless, I mean, again, this is me, I'm talking for me. Me, I would not want my DNS controlled by the registrar. So I would want to set up Cloudflare on its own, and then set up just had it pushed through to Nexus. Now, that being said, I would reach out to Nexus support and ask them if there are implications with that. Like, is that going to goof up something they're doing with caching or whatever? Ask their support and see what they say. Does that make sense? But I would default to wanting to have my own Cloudflare account that I control that separate from the host second should I charge extra for doing this?\r\n\r\nWould you have charged extra if they had at the beginning? Just use your host your your management and you set up Cloudflare for him probably not right?\r\n\r\nYeah, I you could. I probably wouldn't. What do y'all think should she charge or not? Yes or no? Charge? Yes. Charge no in the chat. What would you do? Just give us a yes or no? Take a quick vote\r\n\r\neverybody's asleep today\r\n\r\nStacey, that's great. Yeah, I would probably default towards no to this sharing. I wouldn't I don't think I would charge. That's part of our management protocol.\r\n\r\nYeah, so I'd want to set that up. But ultimately it's going to be a lot less headache in the future.\r\n\r\nAll right. Last call.\r\n\r\nBen if you're having trouble enabling patch stack again, you may need to go in to the patch stack lives I don't have patch stack setup on WP Nathan. But there will be a patch stack section here in the licensing. You may need to release the old domain from patch stack and then re add it for the new one.\r\n\r\nOr change the licensing.\r\n\r\nYeah, that's what's going on then it you don't have any licenses left because patch stack is still licensed on that old domain.\r\n\r\nYeah, that's I'm gonna guess that's what's going on.\r\n\r\nOh, you have eight remaining. That's weird\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nIf that doesn't work, then then you have to reach out to solid support. I'm not gonna I don't know what else to tell you to do there because that should do it.\r\n\r\nOh, by the way, for those of you Okay, gosh, I don't know if I should even be saying this\r\n\r\nI'm gonna say it anyway.\r\n\r\nNobody tell anybody okay, but if, if you've been putting off bumping or adding patch stack to some of your sites, if you're a legacy toolkit member, and you've been waiting for a deal.\r\n\r\nThere might be one coming. There's gonna be a big stellar sale very soon. So just there.\r\n\r\nThere might be a deal kind of, he didn't hear that from me.\r\n\r\nOkay, anybody else before we wrap up\r\n\r\nthen Well, I checked management the site is enabled but not in dopey admin.\r\n\r\nWe tried logging out logging back in then I don't think that will matter. But yeah, I'm not sure what to tell you there been. I would be probably going to have to reach out to support. It's probably a simple answer. But I'm not sure what it would be.\r\n\r\nAll righty. Well, that wraps us up for this very rare Friday office hours. We've got a few things coming up next week.\r\n\r\nYes, don't forget that on Tuesday. It is WordPress 66. The release is imminent and we will have our very own Timothy Jacobs coming to talk about the new WordPress release as usual. That is going to be on launch day. So it's very possible that during this live stream, WordPress 6.6 will drop. We've moved news roundup as a result of that 6.6 launch party. We move that forward a day to Wednesday of next week. So news roundup is coming up on Wednesday lot to talk about their office hours on Thursday. Oh, you know what? This is? The wrong week.\r\n\r\nOkay, let me rewind all of that. That is in two weeks from now, next week. It really helps to have the calendar view up why don't I do that?\r\n\r\nNext week, the only thing we're going to have is office hours because I will be in Ottawa next week for WordCamp Canada we will have office hours as usual on Thursday from one to 2pm Central. But that'll be the only live stream we have next week. The following week is WordPress six six news roundup and office hours. And that will have Lindsey Halsey coming back with us for advanced SEO this this month. That's our premium course. So it should be a lot of fun. All right, with that now we'll wrap things up. Thanks for hanging out with me for the last hour. Have a great weekend. I'll see you back next Thursday for office hours here on solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nTranscribed by https:\/\/otter.ai\r\n","livestream_vimeo_video_id":978423287}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448534,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content );
Nexcess.comServers.comLiquidWeb.com
Search our site for answers
Help Docs Software Kadence Nathan Ingram’s Office Hours

Nathan Ingram’s Office Hours

Nathan Ingram opens his virtual office doors during this informal, unstructured webinar to answer your questions. There is no agenda and no planned content. Bring your questions and Nathan will answer them first come, first served. Get your answers and learn from the questions of others.

Register once for all Office Hours from July – September 2024.

Was this article helpful?