An Expert Interview with Sophia Phillips – WordPress expert working at WordPrax

At KrishaWeb, our team is glad to introduce one of the best WordPress Expert ― Sophia Phillips. She is top-notch WordPress expert working at WordPrax, a marketplace that help businesses to take it to the next level by getting them right marketing professionals. Besides, she has written innumerable articles on WordPress and other technical topics.

If you too strive for bringing some change in your business, you can have a peek-a-boo into the conversation with one of the team member. Here is the brief WordPress conversation between Pratik (KrishaWeb) and Sophia (WordPrax)

Pratik: Why WordPress.com is considered more secure than WordPress.org?

Sophia: A very well-known fact is that when you choose WordPress.com, you don’t need to look up for a hosting provider to host your WordPress blog or website. On the other hand, the responsibility to host, maintain and backup your website is on you when you choose the .org version. With responsibility, come fears of security and other challenges. Fair enough?

Here is when we deem the WordPress hosted websites as far more secure than WordPress.org websites which demand self-maintenance and security services. Though, there is VaultPress for it, but relying on a third-party vendor for hosting and security can be difficult at times.

Pratik: What do you mean by custom field in WordPress?

Sophia: The power of WordPress is extraordinary and there are some great features like Custom fields for enriched WordPress experience. In other words, Custom fields boost the content so that it’s readable and engaging for your audience.

You can use custom fields to:

• Add additional information to the posts.
• Add title, author name and so on…
• Be more precise and you can add date and time to your posts using the custom fields.

Still want to do more? A very interesting custom field “Guest author name” can also be added. Whatever your mind can think of, you can add as many of them.

Pratik: What are the types of hooks in WordPress and mention their functions?

Sophia: To start in simple words, Hooks stimulate the plugins to get into motion and the functions of a particular plugin is set to work when called for!

There are major 2 types of hooks named:

• Actions: Set your plugin to motion to change the text of the post on your WordPress website/ blog and it is saved to the database in the action function.
• Filters: In this one too, the text of the post is modified. The difference lies in the thing that the modification takes place while displaying on the browser screen.

Pratik: In what case you don’t see plugin menu?

Sophia: When a beginner starts with WordPress, they seem very excited about downloading plugins. What actually pisses them is they don’t see any plugin menu on the sidebar admin panel! This can be due to 2 main reasons:

• Check that you are login as the admin of the website; else you will not be able to see that menu.
• Also, check if your theme allows for plugin menu or not?

Most probably, checking out on these 2 issues will rule out the problem.

Pratik: What is the role of Contributor in WordPress?

Sophia: Just for some information in the background, there are user roles in the WordPress website. There is the super user, which we call the admin of any website and then there are contributors. A contributor can:

• Edit the posts created by him only.
• Delete the posts created by him.

Admin has this power to control who can edit and delete the posts. It gives a chance to let other bloggers write for one another in a safe and secure manner.

Pratik: What are the steps you can take if your WordPress file is hacked?

Sophia: It is definitely a very frustrating and stressful issue to deal with a hacked WordPress site. Steps you can take to fix your hacked website are:

• Checking what type of hack is it? Is it a redirection type of hack?
• After you check on these steps, immediately contact your web hosting company.
• The professionals will actually do the best thing for you by restoring from backup as well as removing the malware.

Pratik: What are the rules that you have to follow for WordPress plugin development?

Sophia: I am going to keep it short and simple here. You need to take care of the following things:

• A real strategy is a must.
• Coding standards should be healthy.
• Security is the key.
• Pay heed to internationalization.
• Loading what is required.
• Debugging and tidying up.

Pratik: Name 10 template files for development WordPress Theme?

Sophia: Here is the list of topmost important template files used for WordPress theme development:

1. Index.php
2. Header.php
3. Footer.php
4. Page.php
5. Single.php
6. Archive.php
7. Search.php
8. Author.php
9. 404.php
10. Comments.php

Pratik: What is the difference between the wp_title and the_title tags?

Sophia: Let’s get straight onto the answer. wp_title is used out of the loop and is instrumental in displaying the title of a page. On the other hand, the_title tag is responsible to show the title of a post.

Pratik: How to modify the parent theme behavior within the child theme?

Sophia: To save a considerable amount of time on customization of themes, here is when <functions.php> file comes handy. We can use this file to create a child theme and modify the parent theme behaviour. This is really a beneficial way out that does the trick and the customizations are also retained.

• Any other suggestions or recommendations for the WordPress Developers

Have a reliable backup solution at your end before the things go worst is the best recommendation for every other WordPress developer out there. A web app firewall is as important as a backup solution and Sucuri is our best bet.

Thank you Sophia for taking the time to answer my questions and sharing some great insights with us.

Let us know if you have got the answers of your WordPress queries in comment box below. You can also ask your questions in comment box or tweet us your queries using #AskExpertswithKWT.