My web site is using WordPress as the “engine” to build a convenient and efficient site. WordPress happens to be using “themes” to appropriately display the contents (that is what is differentiating each WP website from the others). This capacity has helped develop a thriving community of themes, some being free, some being purchased.

The main trouble is that themes like any other piece of software are susceptible to bugs and could be exploited by hackers. I recently noticed that my (previous) theme was clearly outdated (not updated in the last 24 months) and including some known security issues leaving it open to abuse.

Lesson learned: Do not use any piece of software (including a WP theme) if it is not actively supported.

Application: I decided to drop the free (and unsafe) theme I was using. I swithed other to one of the “official” themes from WordPress.org. And I am learning to configure it properly. Hence the changes you can currently observe.

So, I decided to create a kind of online portfolio in order to show only a severely reduced number of images – but specially curated to keep only those I really love. Thus they will become alittle more accessible.

But it became also the opportunity to share some of my intentions behind the pictures (in French). I don’t always randomly shoot pictures . I have some projects, some ideas, some intent. Sometimes, I can assemble them in a lighter package grouped around a common tune I chose. These portfolios now become available on :

Wild focus (photo.roumazeilles.net)

Updates are much less common, but it’s more of my own photo raw personality.

• Worried about WordPress and GDPR? Start Here
• GDPR: What Does the New Data Regulation Mean for Your Website, Business and Data?
• How to make a WordPress website compliant to GDPR
• Automattic and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• GDPR Compliance and WordPress Forms: Everything You Need to Know

Have a nice read!

Please, note: I am not a lawyer or your Legal Department, it all merely comes from my reading and my understanding.

Deployment

Cookies

First step (normally, this should be in place for quite some time already, since this started a long time ago): Add an informative message to inform visitors that you are collecting cookies.

I simply used a small plug-in (you can find others too) : Cookie Notice from dFactory.

Pros: It is working in various languges (and in English), it has been tested on more than 500,000 sites before mine, it starts in less than a minute.

Contact form

For many reasons, you will need to have a decent contact form (including to be able to answer GDPR-related requests). I recommend a simple and small (and free) forms editor like Ninja Forms.

In two minutes, you will have a working contact form. Don’t forget to add the checkbox with “By using this form you agree with the storage and handling of your data by this website” (This should be present on all your forms).

Then, you need to create a “Contact” page in WordPress. You will include the specific code to include the form you just created with the following shortcode:

Small GDPR support: Ninja forms allow you to setup forms without storing any data on the web site, reducing the load to comply with GDPR in simpler forms.

But, don’t forget to enable the sending of the confirmation message to the comment author (all the more because the post-form message includes mention of this confirmation – be consistent).

On top of this, if your web site includes a comment system (quite common fact), I recommend using a plugin to include the standard reminder checkbox: WP GDPR Compliance from Van Ons. Bonus: It makes some recommendations on various GDPR-related cases.

Data Protection Officer

Name somebody (with an email address) as the internal interface for all private data issues. It is not compulsory (for smaller teams) but it is so much clearer (and recommended) that somebody feels i charge of this (even the CEO). This person will be contacted bu visitors willing to know what data you collect and how to remove all their personal data from the web site (these are legal requirements).

Make sure that this person is reachable through a very easy interface (including the contact form or some other form).

Privacy policy

Above all, you must make sure that you can explain simply what are your intentions about private data you will collect (private data include email, name, IP address, etc.) and how you intend to comply with your legal obligations. This page must tell it all simply.

Try and write it right on the first attempt. You are legally bound to inform all your users any time you make a change (even simple ones)…

This is a WordPress page, rather than a poost (it must stay readily available and easily reachable by all even in the future).

I recommend to -more or less- follow the GDPR themes (it’s easier):

• Existence (or not) of a Data Protection Officer, in charge of the whole process of personal data handling
• Definition of data collection, handling, storing, transfer and removal processes
• Creation of a process to notify any data breach
• Explicit consent to data collection
• Right to access (and removal) of personal data

Access to personal data

You must give full access to any user’s personal data stored on the web site. This is realtively easy using a plugin (GDPR compliance from Scribit) and a specific page where you will only write the shortcode:

[gdpruserdata]

Of course, you can add some more details (refer to the plugin help information for more options).

Then, you can direct the requests to this page which will display the full breadth of personal data. As this is not a very nice page (rather dry reading), I recommend to keep it masked (I don’t feel it is necessary to show it permanently to all – answering requests should be enough).

Annoncement

Maybe not the worst or the most complicated, but I finally added a small message on the web site to announce the deployment of this whole process. Explaining is better than waiting for people to ask. And the message is positive: You care about your users and visitors.

this time, the intent is to share Marion Jonchères’ passion for cold, ice, snow and altitude. Here, you will only find extreme sports, high altitude mountaineering, North Pole or South Pole. But this is based on detailed commentaries and spectacular pictures.

I recommend you to go and see Ice-Altitude.com (and don’t hesitate to stop and leave your email to receive her information letter – in French).

I found a good web site that will help you determine if you are color blind and which will support web designers trying to make their web sites better: WeAreColorBlind.com. They are even providing patterns that show how best to use colors in this context.

If you want more support, I also recommend a visit to Chrometric, a web site where you will be able to freely download a tool to test your web site against various kinds of color blindnesses (you know that not all people have the same kind of insensitivity to colors, don’t you?) and allow you to test various solutions or improvement you may have designed.

For example, my other web site, www.YLovePhoto.com as seen by 6% of the male population:

From GraphJam.

This is time to start your own blog in order to earn some revenue protecting you against the current recession.

• YLovePhoto.com (site specializing in digital photography)
• YLoveBigCats.com (about felines and other big cats)
• YLoveIllusions.com (optical illusions)
• YWantVisits.com (SEO, traffic optimisation and web site revenue maximization)

Your opinion will be welcome, but -remember- this is beta-test. So, it is full of bugs, problems, issues and don’t come back and complain if your significant other dumps you because of it.

Note: Most (if not all) of the photo-related news here will be applied to YLovePhoto.com as soon as I feel free with this new web site.

I had a few difficulties to ensure that images where correctly aligned and displayed after the improvements in their presentation in WP2.6. For those really interested, I ended up adding the following to my CSS file:

/*************************************/
/* Align code for WP2.6 compatiblity */
/*************************************/
.aligncenter, div.aligncenter {
    display: block;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
}

.alignleft {
    float: left;
}
.alignright {
    float: right;
}

.wp-caption {
    border: 1px solid #ddd;
    text-align: center;
    background-color: #f3f3f3;
    padding-top: 4px;
    margin: 10px;
    /* optional rounded corners for browsers that support it */
    -moz-border-radius: 3px;
    -khtml-border-radius: 3px;
    -webkit-border-radius: 3px;
    border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
    font-size: 11px;
    line-height: 17px;
    padding: 0 4px 5px;
    margin: 0;
}

Thanks to the support of the WordPress.org forum.

Don’t worry, I may post something on Roumazeilles.net every day, but it does not mean that I am in front of the keyboard every day. Far from it. I am using one small advantage of WordPress (the software package supporting my web site). I can write posts and schedule them for future publication.

That way, I have no limit to my inspiration. For example, I have currently scheduled weekly posts about optical illusions for the coming 6 months, a full week of feline-related news (daily posts next week), a full week of daily videos titled “when XXXXX get bored” in a couple of months.

Aim

The first objective was to install two sets of forums (in French and in English, as for the news blogs) in their respective URLs.

• English forums
• French forums

The locations have an influence on the rest since I still wanted to have a good integration with the wordpress blogs. You are expected to install the forums inside the blog.

So, here is how I did it.

Configuration

The main issue is to install the software on the web site in the right location. The package is prepared to be downloaded into a bbpress sub-directory inside the wordpress directory, so I had to change the directory name just after decompression (And I did it twice: Once for each language).

The config.php file is set according to the following:

domain = 'http://www.roumazeilles.net'; // Example: 'http://bbpress.example.com'
	// There should be both a leading and trailing slash here. '/' is fine if the site is in root.
	$bb->path   = '/news/en/wordpress/forum/';				   // Example: '/forums/'

// What are you going to call me?
$bb->name   = 'Roumazeilles.net - English forums';

// This must be set before running the install script.
$bb->admin_email = 'wp_en_@roumazeilles.net';

// Set to true if you want pretty permalinks.
$bb->mod_rewrite = true;

// The number of topics that show on each page.
$bb->page_topics = 30;

// A user can edit a post for this many minutes after submitting.
$bb->edit_lock = 60;

// Your timezone offset.  Example: -7 for Pacific Daylight Time.
$bb->gmt_offset = 0;

// Change this to localize bbPress.  A corresponding MO file for the
// chosen language must be installed to bb-includes/languages.
// For example, install de.mo to bb-includes/languages and set BBLANG to 'de'
// to enable German language support.
define('BBLANG', '');

// Your Akismet Key.  You do not need a key to run bbPress, but if you want to take advantage
// of Akismet's powerful spam blocking, you'll need one.  You can get an Akismet key at
// http://wordpress.com/api-keys/
$bb->akismet_key = '1234567890'; // Example: '1234567890'


// The rest is only useful if you are integrating bbPress with WordPress.
// If you're not, just leave the rest as it is.

$bb->wp_table_prefix = 'en_';  // WordPress table prefix.  Example: 'wp_';
$bb->wp_home = 'https://www.roumazeilles.net/news/en/wordpress';  // WordPress - Options->General: Blog address (URL) // No trailing slash.  Example: 'http://example.com'
$bb->wp_siteurl = 'https://www.roumazeilles.net/news/en/wordpress';  // WordPress - Options->General: WordPress address (URL) // No trailing slash. Example: 'http://example.com'

/* Stop editing */

if ( !defined('BBPATH') )
	define('BBPATH', dirname(__FILE__) . '/' );
require_once( BBPATH . 'bb-settings.php' );

?>

In order to get a more direct access to the forums I also corrected slightly the web site .htaccess file to add the following redirecting lines that lead to more user-friendly addresses used here.

redirect 301 /forum/en https://www.roumazeilles.net/news/en/wordpress/forum/
redirect 301 /forum/fr https://www.roumazeilles.net/news/fr/wordpress/forum/

Additional steps

Directory access rights

I also directly had to modify the directory access rights on the web server.

chmod 644 ./forum/ (this may not be critical)
mkdir ./forum/bb-cache/
chmod 644 ./forum/bb-cache/ (this is needed to update the site-management options)

Theme

bbPress is using themes very similar to WordPress. This is helpful to reduce the amount of work involved in preparing the forums for a nicer presentation when you already have a WordPress theme.

However, it is clearly painful to create the many files expected by bbPress (I hope that this will be simplified in the future). Anyway, thanks to DreamWeaver 3.x and its very good support of HTML templates, thanks to the organization of my pages with a significant part located in the CSS file, it has been relatively easy to do this task. But it still is too much pain for a good software package. At least, if you don’t do anything, the Kakumei theme is used by default ensuring that your forums are displayed conveniently.

Internationalization

Now, since my web site is set both in English and in French, there is no reason for the forums to be set differently. The installation in English is standard, but the French bit is a little different. You need to update a separate file (named bbpress.pot) that will provide all of the needed text transalations.

I installed one in the language directory. That’s all. It’s unofficial translation, but that’s good for me.

Last comments

In the end, after a rather long testing phase on a hidden web site, I have been able to set the forums up rather easily (it could be better, but bbPress is still in development stages, so the issues were understandable -and they were not overwhelming). The documentation is very terse, but the community is active and supportive.

One thing I had difficulties with is that bbPress does a heavy use of page caching. When changing something in the configuration, you have to remember to reload from the site (not from the cache) or you get the feeling that nothing is ever happenning whatever your moves. Annoying if understandable for performance reasons.

Some are said to have lost 20% compared to last year.

• 404 page not found
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So I decided to add a spell checker to Opera (a plug-in to limit the risks of my own typos). I found a pretty simple one: Aspell for Windows that Opera will automatically recognize when it is installed. It has dictionaries for many languages (it is easy to create one from a mere word list in your own language if you need to). It supports several languages at the same time.

The only drawback is that it is not working in real-time, but you have to call it from a right-click on the mouse into the post box. I would have preferred an active underlining of wrongly-spelled words (like in Word or OpenOffice-Write).

May be you know a better one that you would like to share…

Note for new bloggers: Even if I have been waiting long for this, typos in your posts just pushes forward a bad image for your own web site. Go and correct this now.

Source: http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/opera/spell check/.

Install multiple versions of IE on your PC

If the number of visits is the judge, there are only very slim chances that you know about the mere existence of the RSS thread . This is why, I’ll try to speak a little about it and give you some tips about it.

The central idea is to ease the reading og articles from a web site by grouping them in a simpler form. You need a separated reader but, you may not know it, you already have one included in most modern web browsers. Instead of going to the site to check if there are news, your browser will receive updates any time there is something new. You’ll know if it is worth coming to the original web site.

Here are some informations as they were grouped by Codesqueeze.

Beginners

Veterans

Advice to bloggers

Now, if you blog or if you have a web site, it is strongly advised to include your own RSS version of the news and posts that you produce. It is favoring the most experienced readers who happen to also be the ones most able to extend the buzz around your activity or web site.

For the users of WordPress blogging software and WordPress.com sites, it’s just a matter of using the feature already included in your web site. You just have to make sure that the template you use is properly showing the existence of the RSS thread.