Hey there,

I currently run an independent website for game reviews and such, and with each passing year I'm find I'm considering shutting it down more and more for various reasons. However, I'd really not like to have all the stuff my team and I have written just disappear one day.

So, what are the best options for preserving the site as and when I stop paying for server hosting?

I do weekly backups using updraft, but not sure how I'd view them without uploading them to the server.

Is there a way to host an offline version so I can basically look at the site on my pc as it is now?

I'm a fairly low-experience user tbh (I took over the site from someone who set it all up, and tbh I'm not super familiar with intricate tech of the backend. I know how to do what I need to to keep it up and running, but anything outside of that is more luck than judgement) so any 'wordpress for dummies' style advice is massively appreciated!

A few months ago, we shared a project I was working on called Desktop Mode, which aimed to turn WordPress admin into more of a desktop-style environment.

Since then, the project has evolved far beyond what I originally had in mind.

It is now called OpenStation.

After spending a lot of time rethinking the architecture and optimizing performance, some parts of OpenStation are now actually faster to load than their equivalent WordPress admin screens.

But performance is only one part of the story. The project has grown into a much more complete environment, with things like:

• Multiple windows and desktops
• Drag and drop between applications
• A built-in open source image editor
• An extensible application system
• Games and other experiments
• A completely different way of navigating and working with WordPress

OpenStation is free and open source, and the code is available on GitHub.

I honestly didn't expect the project to evolve this much when I made the original post.

I'm not particularly comfortable putting myself or my work out there publicly, but I've been putting a huge amount of effort into making OpenStation something that is genuinely good, rather than just another WordPress admin skin.

I've also recently started a YouTube channel to document the project and share some of the things I'm building along the way.

You can find the project here:

Website: https://openstation.me
GitHub: https://github.com/WordPress/openstation

And here's a short video showing what the current version looks like:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8yIMWhGI3FE

I'm sharing it again because I'd genuinely like to hear what people think about the direction it has taken.

In particular, I'm interested in feedback from people who use WordPress admin regularly. What would make something like this genuinely useful to you?

PS: We are ACTIVELY working on improving it every single day!

So, I just need a very basic site. I'm an author, just need a homepage to put books, release dates. Maybe one news page. Not thinking about newsletters yet and won't be getting a forum. That's it. No e commerce, nada.

I had an existing site which was created by a pro author but it looked old and tired and was done with elementor pro, the licence of which has now expired (he left it for me for a short time but it's gone now), it was a bit fancy and I struggled to maintain it. I have created a staging site on bluehost to set up my own.

using twenty twenty four I started following the official WP tutorial videos.

For a start, I don't see "static" as a page option on the settings/readings page. Secondly, wtf are wonderblocks doing there? Where did they come from? When the tutorial selects a block pattern of "page", I don't see it. I see posts, but not page. I don't see the other templates he sees.

I did, I admit, try out a lot of combinations of other themes and then had to delete a load of plug ins but I think I cleaned everything ok. Here's a cap of what I've got.

Wonderblocks though? I don't want them. I just want the wordpress ones.

(I installed Gutenburg manually but it's made no difference, also says it might not work with my version of WP anyway)

Hi everyone is it possible to remove Elementor without losing all the styling I have on it . then reinstalling again and restoring those set settings ?

Now the reason I am asking this is because the current install of Elementor seems to be missing some files , this was a result of a website migration so it seem like most files and subfolders were lost during the migration of the site .

Any type of info would be greatly appreciated.

Hi everyone! I spent the weekend rebuilding my entire website from scratch in wordpress, got everything functional except for my blog landing page. I'm a WYSIWYG vet who can usually figure everything out with some searching but I'm stuck.

Using:

Spectra Blocks (Free)
Theme: Astra (Free)

Blank page created and set as Post page.

At first I thought it wasn't mapping correctly, but it is. I've already set the correct page in Reading, cleared cache on the page, and tests posts show up on the page when I go to site/blog. (I can't find any help beyond these suggestions in web searches)

Problem: Only the header/footer and the test posts show (title text). There appears to be something overriding the style of the post and my pattern (container with photo and text) that works on every other page does not display at all.

I've created 7 other pages that all work correctly with the same pattern, header, and footer. I've exhausted going through all the settings I can find.

Any ideas on what else I might try? Thank you!

Finally got my first WordPress plugin approved on wp.org. Took two rounds of revisions to get there.

It's my first plugin, first time going through the wp.ore process. I had no idea how any of it worked going in, review, requirements, etc.

I built Creaclone Duplicator to duplicate WooCommerce products, posts, and pages without needing a bloated all-in-one duplicator plugin.

Writing the plugin was the easy part. Figuring out which features actually made sense to build took a while, and setting up Freemius for licensing took longer than the plugin itself. But I didn't want to build my own licensing system from scratch (yet).

I still have a lot to do: new features, support, getting reviews, testing against new WP versions.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Here it is if anyone wants to check it out:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/creaclone-duplicator/

Hey everyone,

I would like to know how you approach performance and scaling specifically for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday rush.

With high traffic spikes, tons of concurrent users adding items to carts, and hitting checkout at the same time, server resources get pushed hard. For some client sites, I usually have to temporarily scale up CPU and RAM just to keep the servers from crashing.

To tackle this, I'm currently building a custom theme from scratch focused on raw performance, minimizing database queries and keeping WordPress/WooCommerce hooks and filters to an absolute minimum.

Right now, full-page caching is enabled everywhere except for the dynamic areas (side cart, cart page, and checkout). I'm also creating a theme from scratch and I'm trying to optimize everything and avoiding to do a lot of calls to database or adding lot of filters/actions.

I’m also implementing:

* Cloudflare, CDN
* SiteGround Memcached (Object Caching)
* Server resource scaling

What are your go-to optimizations to prep for the BFCM surge? Or do you keep your stores running lean enough year-round that Black Friday doesn't require any special prep?

I work for a small to medium size hospitality chain (around 50 cafe's). We’re preparing for a planned growth phase to approximately 200 locations and are beginning work on a new staff intranet.

At current, I am the business’s sole developer and have hard-coded several internal web applications and tools. For the intranet, however, our marketing team will manage most of the content / presentation, while I’ll primarily maintain the underlying functionality and integrations. We therefore need a reliable drag-and-drop editing experience for non-technical users without preventing me from working directly with the source code.

I’m currently running separate marketing and development WordPress environments with MariaDB through Docker on an always-on computer. WordPress will act as the private editing environment and will eventually be reachable remotely through a protected Cloudflare Tunnel. The employee-facing intranet itself will be hosted separately through Cloudflare Pages and a Worker.

Our main requirements are:

• A user-friendly drag-and-drop editor that doesn’t become frustrating or overly restrictive.
• The ability for Marketing and HR to manage which roles or specific employees can access particular content. eg. recruitment guides only available to managers.
• Proper server-side enforcement of those permissions, rather than simply hiding content visually.
• The ability for me to develop custom themes, plugins, integrations and backend functionality directly in code.
• A modular setup that avoids excessive page-builder lock-in and remains maintainable as the intranet grows.

For the initial prototype, I’m comparing a custom interface built with native WordPress blocks against visual editing workflows using Elementor and Beaver Builder.

Has anyone implemented a similar division between a marketing-managed visual editor and a separately maintained technical backend?

I’d particularly appreciate experiences involving role-restricted content, custom development alongside the editor, performance, maintainability and how difficult it was to move away from the chosen editing approach later.

Hi everyone,

I’m troubleshooting an issue on a WordPress website where the EA Duplicator option suddenly disappeared from the Pages section.

Here’s what I found:

• WordPress: 6.7.7
• PHP: 8.3
• Elementor: 3.29.1
• Essential Addons for Elementor: 6.2.3
• Theme: Hub

Previously, Essential Addons was active and the EA Duplicator option was available when managing Pages.

Now, Essential Addons appears as inactive. When I click Activate, WordPress immediately shows:

The website then displays a white screen.

To recover the website, I renamed the plugin folder:

essential-addons-for-elementor-lite

to:

essential-addons-for-elementor-lite-disabled

After doing this, the website became accessible again.

WordPress then shows:

I also checked the Apache error log, but it only showed AH01797 and AH01276 access/directory errors, not the PHP fatal error from the EA activation.

My questions:

1. Could Essential Addons 6.2.3 have a compatibility issue with PHP 8.3 / Elementor 3.29.1?
2. What is the best way to get the actual PHP fatal error causing the activation failure?
3. Would updating Essential Addons to a newer version be the recommended fix?
4. Is there anything I should check before updating it on a live production website?

I currently have Essential Addons disabled and the website is working. I don't want to activate it again until I understand the cause.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I am working for a small-medium sized corp that has 5 child companies that I am designing websites for and building out in Wordpress. Initially I got some time to do some research in data analytics and web designing. Now though, I am literally just making the sites in wordpress and am still an intern. Like I make the pages in wordpress, and then present it to my superivsor and marketing manager for them to review weekly.

I work 3 days a week and get paid 19 an hour.

They basically told me that they wont have the budget to actually hire me but want me to stay till the end of the year to try and get as many of the websites made as I can. I *want* to do this but I am afraid that I am getting underpaid to do this kind of work.

I am aware im not a full blown web dev, but I do write basic scripts for funcitonality and I am making the site essentially fully on my own. I feel like I should at least get like a different job title so that I can put it on my resume.

My goal is eventually to be an actual web dev. I have an associates in computer and web programming and have built websites from scratch with html/css/js, php, sql servers. I am still working on growing my knowledge of technologies but Its a start.

I guess I just want some advice on what I should do not only with my position, but moving forward with careers.

Thanks in advance.

Cloudflare recently introduced EmDash, an open-source CMS designed around AI agents.

Its premise is that traditional CMS platforms were built for humans:

Humans open dashboards.

Humans install plugins.

Humans edit pages.

Humans hit publish and immediately notice the typo.

An AI-native CMS starts with a different assumption. The builder, administrator, or primary user might be an agent interacting through an MCP server or CLI.

That does not make EmDash a WordPress killer. WordPress has an ecosystem that cannot be recreated by announcing a GitHub repository and believing in yourself very hard.

But I think the architectural question is real.

Can WordPress become truly agent-native through plugins and new APIs?

Or will AI-native content management require systems designed from scratch around permissions, rollback, structured context, and machine-readable operations?

I covered EmDash, WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, and the wider CMS identity crisis in Episode 2 of Headless:

YouTube
Spotify
Apple Podcasts

I’m especially curious what WordPress developers think.

Renovate the house?

Or admit it was built before electricity and start drawing new blueprints?

Hi,

I have recently startet learning Wordpress to build a website. I'm using Astra as the theme, Elementor as the page builder and Woocommerce for the shop.

The problem is that the Website has to be 100% danish, because that's the audience i'm building it for. When i choose a theme that i like, some parts like the shopping cart or product page are in english, and it doesn't seem possible to change it.

I have seen that some paid themes like GeneratePress supports danish as a language, which i imagine would solve the problem.

My question is; is it only possible to make the website 100% danish, if the theme supports danish? Do you know of any free themes that could be used?

Thank you in advance!

Hi! I have several sites with large media folders. I also have a local server and a Synology NAS for storage. Is there a best practice for backing up a server? I know, db + rsyn files but anything that makes this easy? A docker container? A script for rotating backups? Maybe even active backup for business from Synology? How do guys do it?

I haven't touched the Guttenberg blocks in a couple of years and instead used Spectra due to it being easier to make containers and layouts. While I like the idea of using the default option and not having to add another plugin, I wasn't able to do really what I wanted to with it.

I'm curious what it's like currently? Especially when it comes to laying out pages?

Months ago the same gpt chat recommended its API to me but in the end I didn't do it because I had other projects.

Now it's making me very dizzy. First he tells me to do it with WP writer, I tell him to do it gpt chat that I know he can, he tells me "oh yes, that's right, I can with the api", but then I get more dizzy and he uses the virtual browser.

After that you can't put images and I have to upload them to wordpress. Then yes with the virtual browser but you can't put them in the home. After yes.

I'm starting to get tired of how stupid it is.

What is the best way to make basic articles of about 400 words-600 with one or two images, h1, h2, h3, basic keyword search (social traffic) and little else

Hey, I need to change the language of: "Instrument-making trade" , please help me.

Curious what everyone is using for website images nowadays - JPEG, AVIF or WebP?

When making websites on Wordpress I’ve generally stuck with WebP (converting) because it seems like a good balance between image quality and file size, and I’ve found it helps with PageSpeed compared with standard JPEGs.

Just wondering if AVIF has now become the better option, or whether WebP is still the safer/default choice for WordPress and WooCommerce sites.

Would be good to hear what others are using in practice, especially anyone focused on Core Web Vitals and keeping sites lightweight.

The short version;
Please try to break my plugin, and give me feedback - on everything you can think of!.
The plugin adds three product types to WooCommerce: Ticket, Timeslot Ticket, and Pass. Customer buys through the normal shop, gets a QR code. Your door staff open a full-screen scanner page on their phone and check people in. No app to install, no external ticketing service, no per-ticket fee.

The Long version;

Three new WooCommerce product types, each enabled individually:

• Ticket - validity window plus N uses, fixed or customer-picked start date
• Timeslot Ticket - per-slot capacity, recurring schedule generation, unpaid reservations auto-released
• Pass - season / membership / annual, with guest passes, cardholder photo and scan cooldown

At the door

• Scanner page at /check-in/ on your own domain, full screen, no app install
• Native BarcodeDetector where the browser has it, in-page decode where it doesn't
• Colour-coded http responses result: valid / used / expired / cooldown / not found
• Cardholder photo shown beside a pass result so staff can eyeball it
• Dedicated Scanner role - check-in only.
• Validation is server-side, and there's a REST check-in endpoint if you'd rather point create/use your own custom scanner.

Admin

• A dashboard per product type: search, manual check-in, resend, reset, cancel
• Check-in analytics by day and hour, with CSV export
• Runs on manage_woocommerce, so shop managers don't need admin accounts

Customer

• Tickets and Passes tabs in My Account
• QR on screen, or a printable PDF("ticket")
• Live status (active / used / expired / cancelled / not yet valid) and uses remaining
• export for .ics so it can be added to calendar the most common calendars
• Guest pass hand-out and photo upload from the account page It's brand new and I'd rather hear what's broken from this sub than from a venue on a Friday night.
  

Requires;

• WooCommerceWP 6.5+
  
• PHP 8.0+
  

Find 'n try it here;

• Wordpress.org - Tickets & Passes for WooCommerce

• Playground Blueprint (3 product pre-setup)

Its GPLv2, 100% free, no pro version, nothing to upsell you. I'm happy to any hear feedback! - both good and bad.

For those using WebP on WordPress sites, what are you using to convert your JPEG/PNG images before uploading them to the Media Library? Or are you converting post upload via code or plugin?

On one website there was 1000 jpegs which I used custom code to convert to Webp in batches.

What I want to know, is there an easy way to convert them beforehand?

Any particular desktop apps, websites or batch converters you recommend that keep the quality good while reducing file size?

Just looking for a simple workflow that keeps the site lightweight.

Read more here- https://x.com/SybreWaaijer/status/2093382158349951136

same person who highlighted the recent issue with WPForms.

So I want opinions...

I have a client that puts so much stress in my life but he has never been late and never cheapens out, 10+ years.

He has 9 sites, separate from each other.

It was late at night so only the WordPress files were uploaded. He didn't want the MySQL database or installation to occur until the morning...I said whatever...

No messages the next day, 11 days later he comes and wants to continue.

For those 11-12 days later...the files sat there, no installing.

So we went to see the sites and 3 of them had WordPress installed...I went to see the MySQL databases and none existed. I looked in the wp-config.php and the MySQL databases were some external databases on a .de (Germany) site.

He thinks some evil bot attacked his 3 sites and the other 6 are going to be attacked.

So in your opinion, did an evil bot or a human setup WordPress in those 3 sites. Please give a quick reasoning for your answer.

This is the client that calls me at 3 in the morning if there are 3 spam comments, again, evil bots trying to hack his sites and I am sure his microwave. He is somewhere in Europe so 3am is like 8/9/10am for him.

We need a system of shame for plugin developers who take features that were free and lock them away in the paid version. How you gonna "update" your plugin by making it worse? How desperate does that make you look that you can't innovate something that adds value so you feel you have no choice but to do a takebackskies. 🤮

Hi there, installed Wpmgr on my VPS and seems pretty cool to manage multiple sites.

I only need a way to generate monthly reports with all the activity done in a client site.

The built-in report feature seems for internal use, I’d like some reporting feature to generate a well formatted and “dumb” language monthly report for clients.

Curious about what you use for it!

Hi, I’m having an issue with WooCommerce / WooPayments.

On My Account → Payment methods, saved cards work correctly. I can save a test card during checkout, and it then appears in the customer account.

However, when I click “Add payment method”, the page
/my-account/add-payment-method/
is completely blank. No card form appears.

What I’ve already checked:

• WooCommerce: 11.0.1
• WooPayments: 11.0.1
• Card payments are enabled
• “Enable payments via saved cards” is enabled
• Saving a card during checkout works
• The saved card then appears correctly under My Account → Payment methods
• The add-payment-method endpoint is correctly configured in WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced
• I cleared and temporarily disabled my cache plugin: no change
• I temporarily disabled my “Customize My Account” plugin: no change

So the issue seems limited to the Add Payment Method endpoint/form itself.

Has anyone seen this with WooPayments 11.0.1?
Is there anything specific I should check in the browser console/network tab, or is this a known WooPayments issue?

Thanks!

I wanted to use my local AI coding tool to modify pages on a WordPress site, but I couldn't find a way to get the pages exposed to my AI coding tool.

I wrote a tool to download posts and pages to a local file system and push it back up. This gives me AI coding tool full access to modify the content - which is really useful when I want AI to generate full pages or make content modifications across multiple pages.

Does something like this exist already or would anyone find this useful?

https://github.com/jonmchan/wp-local-sync