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Font Awesome

Plugging Font Awesome icons into a WordPress site produces an interesting problem. It has always been peculiar that the Font Awesome site recommends using <i></i> to tag the icon. Using this tag, though, doesn’t allow menu items to highlight, at least in the theme I use. Making them <span></span>, which you can do, fixes the problem!

It seems that using <i></i> tags is as stupid as it looks. It never meant “icon,” like some say, nor “italic,” but that is how browsers always interpreted it; that is, they italicize the text within the open and close “i” tags. Technically, it means, “idiomatic” text, or text that is somehow set off from normal text. For example, a company name is often italicized so you are alerted that it is distinct from a regular word. Also, you used to always see foreign words italicized. But “idiomatic” shouldn’t include icons — they aren’t text.

Plugin Pros & Cons

Those very handy WordPress plugins are great, but not so great when they crash the site.

When they get abandoned by the creator and aren’t kept up to date, that can be a major source of pain. Consider that plugins have to be generic, which means pack in a bunch of things that you probably don’t need.

The solution? Add plugins for needed functionality, but replace them with your own code, which won’t have all the unnecessary overhead, as you can.

For big things like site backups, SEO, site protection, mail campaigns and subs, it’s impractical to write your own solution. But it seems there are numerous plugins that do the job right and have been for some time, making it likely they’ll continue to exist for a while, and not be buggy.

But it’s good to keep track of what all your plugins do, and remove the unused ones ASAP.

Plugin Notes Plus

To keep those details, like noting plugins for potential removal, there’s a useful plugin, called Plugin Notes Plus, that, as the name implies, lets you keep notes on each plugin. Its really an essential tool for WordPress.

Set It & Forgot It: Update Your PHP Version on WordPress Localhost

This won’t be of interest, unless having to locally configure WordPress and update its PHP.

Many times, you’ll run a LAMP or WAMP bundle like XAMPP, which bundles Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP, and provides a control panel, especially on Windows. On Linux, it’s fairly easy just to install these programs separately. Anyway, these details are only of interest to WordPress admins, running Linux. The steps here are for Linux, but similar for Windows.

I had a problem with Apache (server software), because you set it and forget it. I had to update a local WordPress site and had the new Apache version installed, but it wasn’t picking it up in WordPress. I looked for a configuration in WordPress, but nothing. WordPress will just use whatever is active on your system.

There are only a few steps shown, for the very specific case of WordPress on Linux, localhost. When you’re running a live site your service provider generally takes care of the details of updating things like the Apache host.

Of course you need to get the new PHP version, in this case PHP 8.0. The steps for that are well-documented and easily found via web search. Reminder: Perform the usual back up of your system and apply any updates.

Again, this is for a Linux system, but the principle is the same for any system using Apache.

linuxUser@client ~ $ sudo a2dismod php7.4
linuxUser@client ~ $ sudo a2enmod php8.0
linuxUser@client ~ $ sudo systemctl restart apache2
    

As shown, you turn off old Apache in your O/S, then set it to the new one. But I faced an issue: it wouldn’t take, and it took a while to figure out the sticking point.

Sticking Point

My problem was in having updated to PHP 8.0, those updates wouldn’t apply to WordPress. Once explicitly updated, something was stopping WordPress from picking up on 8.0. The sticking point was that I had confirmed the PHP version, and had disabled the version my system said was running, version 7.4. It turned out there was yet another version of PHP, 5.4, running. It was necessary to specify a2dismod php5.4. After that was disabled, I went back into WordPress and finally it was picking up on version 8.0 of PHP (and not giving a “Update your PHP” message any more).

It’s advisable to check your install, using the following command.

linuxUser@client ~ $ sudo systemctl status apache2.service