Posted On August 30, 2010 at 10:03 in WebServer, WordPress
- Multiple Users: Do your clients want to make changes to their own websites? If so, WordPress allows you to create individual user accounts, which have their own passwords. You decide the status level for each client’s account. Each level (i.e., Administrator, Editor, Contributor, Author) has different permission settings, providing you with maximum flexibility, and minimizing potential damage caused by inexperienced users.
- Showcase Your Work: Are you really proud of the website you’ve created using WordPress? We encourage you to submit your site to the WordPress showcase! If selected, you’ll receive instant credibility as a designer, and your clients will love the publicity.
- Cut Costs: Creating custom designs from scratch takes time, and the cost of building a website increases as a result. By utilizing one of the many WordPress themes, you’ll minimize site-building time, allowing you to offer customers lower prices. Offering lower prices will ultimately help you bring in more clients.
- Community: New to designing with WordPress? Take advantage of one of the most active site developer communities on the Internet. Engage in WordPress forums that cover a range of topics, including “How-To,” “Troubleshooting,” and “Advanced WordPress.” Also, feel free to leave feedback and offer advice.
- Social Media: Getting connected through social media networks is one of the best ways to create buzz about your websites. The WordPress interface allows for tight integration with Facebook and Twitter, as well as other up-and-coming social networks. You’ll also have access to plugins, such as BuddyPress, which allow you to build social networks for your clients.
Posted by mason · Tags: WordPress · No Comments »
Posted On August 3, 2010 at 10:51 in How2, WordPress
Preparing your WordPress Upgrade
From time to time you may want to update your WordPress installation to the latest version. You might want to do this because you’ve seen a message at the top of your Dashboard telling you that a new release is available, because you’ve been made aware of some useful new functionality, or because a security fix has been released.
Check Requirements
Whatever the reason for updating, before getting started it is best to check the current minimum requirements page first to make sure that your web host has the required versions of PHP and MySQL. (If you are not sure, then your hosting provider should be able to tell you.)
Take a Backup
The next thing to do is to take a backup of your database. All your posts and Pages are held in the database, so you will need to have a copy of it in case, for whatever reason, you change your mind after upgrading and need to go back. If you are not sure how to backup your database, then complete instructions can be found in the WordPress Backups section of the Codex.
Disable Plugins
The final preperation step is to disable plugins. Now, you don’t have to do this, but every now and again a plugin hasn’t been updated to work with the latest version of WordPress, and causes a problem after the upgrade. So, it’s best to try and avoid that, yes? You can easily disable your plugins by heading to the Manage Plugins page in the Dashboard, changing the “Bulk Actions” pull down menu to “Deactivate” and clicking “Apply”.
Ready to Update
Now that you’ve checked that you’re ready to update, you’ve turned off your plugins and you’ve got your backup, it’s time to get started.
Step 1: Download & unzip the WordPress package from:
- If you will be uploading WordPress to a remote web server, download the WordPress package to your computer with a web browser and unzip the package.
- If you will be using FTP, skip to the next step – uploading files is covered later.
- If you have shell access to your web server, and are comfortable using console-based tools, you may wish to download WordPress directly to your web server using wget (or lynx or another console-based web browser) if you want to avoid FTPing:
- wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
- Then unzip the package using:
- tar -xzvf latest.tar.gzThe WordPress package will extract into a folder called wordpress in the same directory that you downloaded latest.tar.gz.
- Delete the old
wp-includes and wp-admin directories on your web host (through your FTP or shell access).
Then, run the following commands to unpack and copy the contents into your web directory.
tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz
sudo cp -R wordpress/* /var/www/
- If you do not have shell access to your web server, or you are not comfortable using console-based tools, you may wish to deploy WordPress directly to your web server using ZipDeploy.
Step 2: Update your installation files
This will update your database to be compatible with the latest code
Visit your main WordPress admin page at /wp-admin. You may be asked to login again. If a database upgrade is necessary at this point, WordPress will detect it and give you a link to a URL like http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php. Follow that link and follow the instructions. You should do this as soon as possible after step 1.
That’s it, you’re complete!
Posted by mason · Tags: command-line, HowTo, WordPress · No Comments »
Posted On June 29, 2010 at 09:39 in WordPress
Overview
WordPress is one of the most popular blogging and site-building applications available today. Its popularity amongst users is not without reason; WordPress has done an excellent job of empowering beginners by creating an intuitive administration panel, which enables users to post content and customize their sites without any knowledge of HTML or PHP. However, more expert users find the software extremely flexible and very tightly-coded for easy modification and customization.
Features
WordPress enables you to:
* Easily edit posts and pages right in your browser with a rich-text editor (no download/upload necessary).
* Create a full site by adding and modifying pages that aren’t blog posts.
* Switch between site themes, upload new, free themes from the powerful library of templates on WordPress.org, or even create your own.
* Allow multiple authors to post and edit–and customize their permissions.
* Make certain posts password-protected.
* Post to the future–just pick the date and time, and pre-written content will post automatically.
* Integrate various types of media (photos, videos, mp3s) to personalize your posts.
* Organize content into categories and subcategories and tag posts with keywords.
* Choose if readers can post comments or not–and if comments are enabled, require only registered users to comment and/or review comments before they’re made live.
* Protect your blog from SPAM with WordPress’s out-of-the-box tools or easy-to-install plugins.
* Connect with other blogs through WordPress’s support of automatic Trackback and Pingback standards.
* Integrate RSS feeds so readers can automatically keep up with your latest posts, comments and more.
* Take advantage of their full library of free plugins for further customization of your blog.
Posted by mason · Tags: WordPress · No Comments »
Posted On June 17, 2010 at 13:02 in Releases, WordPress
The latest stable release of WordPress (Version 3.0) is available in two formats from the links provided. If you have no idea what to do with this download, I recommend that your company contact me in getting WordPress installed onto your own dedicated web-server today.
A note on permissions, this is NOT security advice regarding file permissions. Different hosts will have different levels of security and if you are experiencing problems, speak to them first.
However, as a general guide:
If ANY file or folder is writable, your installation is considered insecure.
If you have to change ANY file or folder permission, your installation is insecure.
To increase your security if it requires you to change ANY permissions, you:
Must NOT use the built-in WP editor.
Must NOT use ANY plugin that needs to write anything to the server.
Must NOT use the built-in backup plugin option of saving to the server.
Must NOT use the cache facility in version 2.x
Directories should have permissions of 755. NEVER 777
All files should have permissions of 644.
If you do want to use the built-in editor, theme files should have permissions of 666. NEVER 777
If you are at all concerned, talk to your host.
Unfortunately, because WordPress does not provide information on file permissions I am limiting myself to the above.
Posted by mason No Comments »
Posted On March 8, 2010 at 13:05 in WordPress
A few days ago the theme here on WordPressMax was changed and a few days later I checked my stats in the WordPress dashboard and I saw nothing at all. Now I know I am not getting tons and tons of traffic but when I saw absolutely none for a few days I knew there was a problem with one of the plugins or the theme. If you recently changed or edited your theme this may be why. Here is a short WordPress guide to check and fix your stats.
The WordPress.com Stats uses a bit of code in your footer template to run the plugin. Even if you have a footer.php file the code below must be in the file in order for the plugin to work. I am not going to get into why or how because I don’t know and frankly all I wanted was for it to be fixed and it worked.
Open your footer.php file and make sure you have the needed code in place to run the plugin shown below, near the bottom of the file just above the closing body or html tags:
<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</body>
</html>
Posted by mason · Tags: Fix, Stats, WordPress · No Comments »