Wordpress is one of the best content management systems available on the Web.
That’s because you only have to learn how Wordpress works and that doesn’t require any technical skills.

Anyone can do this in a couple of hours and thus have a great website.

Photo Credit: Wolfgang Staudt

WordPress is so popular because it is:

• easy to use, whether you’re an Internet beginner or advanced website builder,
• search engine friendly, therefore search engines love Wordpress content and index that content fast,
• open source, so Wordpress is used by thousands and thousands of developers who add extra features every day,
• therefore highly flexible, there’s always a solution to every desire you may have for your blog.

It’s a breeze to install Wordpress and therefore used by many, but still thousands of people don’t know how to do just that. I want to change that, hence this free beginners guide!

In it, you’ll discover:

• How to Install Wordpress
• Configuring Your Wordpress Blog
• Titles and Descriptions
• Making Permalinks Pretty
• Reading Settings
• Wordpress Plugins
• How to Install Contact Forms
• Tracking
• Adding A Wordpress Theme
• How to FTP
• Uploading Your Theme
• Configuring widgets
• Configuring Categories
• Posting Content
• Hyper link
• Link Management

The guide also shows you how to get a domain name, pointing that to your host and how to host your website, so beginners find everything to start a great site.

So right-click the link below and select ‘Save Link As’ (Firefox) or ‘Save Target As’ (IExplorer) to download

How To Install Wordpress – Free Beginners Guide

Let me know what you think about this guide.
Post your comments below.

This is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

How To Install Wordpress – Free Beginners Guide

So I upgraded immediately (in under 1 minute using the Automatic Upgrade Plugin) and I liked what I saw.

As promised, there’s a completely new interface which I like. Comprehensive and conveniently arranged.

There are a lot of new features and improvements, like writing new posts and commenting right from the dashboard. Heck, you can even re-arrange the dashboard and put your favorite menu parts on top of it.

One of the other new features is automated upgrades, so after upgrading to Wordpress 2.7 there’s no need for the extra plugin mentioned above any more. I like that very much.

There’s more, just watch the video below that explains most of it.

And of course Lorelle, the Wordpress expert, has more information that you may want to check out.

I urge you to upgrade as soon as possible. It’s very worth while.
Let me know what you think of it.
Post your comments below.

This is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

WordPress 2.7 Upgrade

Before I go into some Wordpress security issues, let me emphasize I’m NOT an expert on this issue. Far from it. If you really want an expert to help you out with security issues, get in touch with my friend Tom Brownsword. He’s a certified security expert!

Again, I’m certainly not, but I certainly took some measures for my Wordpress security. Let me share them with you.

One of the first things you absolutely MUST do is change your password into something nobody can guess. A random set of at least 10 characters, some in capitals and including at least one special character, like !, ?, and @.

The downside is that these passwords are hard to remember and you shouldn’t store them electronically. So, what I do is think of a name of a far relative consisting of at least 10 characters. Then I change one of the letters into a digit and another one into a special character. The funny thing is, that, after I’m done, I can still recognize the name, but it now makes a great password.

The second security measure you should take is place an index file in every directory that hasn’t one. I usually redirect them to the home page of my blog, but you can also redirect them to a sales page or whatever.
Since Wordpress uses PHP, I always use index.php and the content is really simple:

<?php
header(‘Location: http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com/’);
?>

You can also use javascript to redirect:

<script language=”javascript”>
window.location.replace(“http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com/”);
</script>

Or, if you’re familiar with the concept, you can use a .htaccess file do accomplish the same. Some control panels provide this option.

Your next Wordpress security measure would be to make sure the permissions settings of your files and directories are all right.

This is a bit of technical matter, but basically you can set the rights to read (r), write (w) and execute (x) files for yourself as the owner, for the group the files belongs to and for other users.

Permission to read a file has a value of 4, write has a value of 2 and the execute value is 1. If you see a value of 7, it means that there is a permission to read, write and execute, 6 is only read and write permission.
Since permissions have to specified for all three groups, a permission setting always consists of 3 digits. 644 means that you have the rights to read and write and all others can only read. This is a safe permission setting. 777 would mean, that everyone has the rights to read, write and execute files. That’s a highly dangerous setting as you allow others to manipulate your files.

Sometimes, for instance when you install a script, you’ll be asked to set permissions to 777 in order for the install program to create and write files. Remember to always, always set permissins back to 644 when you’re done installing. Plus you should delete the install script.

You can set permissions using the CHMOD command. It’s available in the better FTP programs that allow you to upload files to your server. Almost all Control Panels also include a way to set permissions. Use these resources to check all your file permissions. The third digit should almost always be a 4!

Another Wordpress security measure is to limit access to your admin area. You can do that using a htaccess file in the admin area. It should contain a deny for all and an allow for your IP address.

There’s a Wordpress Security plugin that can help you detect vulnerabilities in your Wordpress blog. I just installed it and found 1 minor error in my permission settings as you can see in the image above.
So it’s been useful for me already. Consider installing it.

Don’t forget to always upgrade to the latest Wordpress version. I think this is included in Wordpress version 2.7, so you may need this plugin only once again.

Finally, check out this great article by Aaron Wall: New Wordpress Hacking Strategy.

Any other useful Wordpress security suggestions?
Put them in the comment section below.

This is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

Wordpress Security And A Plugin To Help You

I’m not talking about adding a widget or activating a plugin. That’s easy. As is changing a color or font which you can do in your CSS (which you also can test before implementing, read on).

No, I’m talking about changes that are more drastic and need to be tested before implementing them.

I did one recently. I replaced my sign up form at the top left in the sidebar from a 1 column form to a 2 column width. THAT is a risky theme change, because the CSS didn’t allow me to use the full width of the 2 columns, so I had to change it drastically and test if to see if it worked out ok.

Now, lots of people don’t do that, because it’s too hazardous. The thought of messing up a smoothly running theme and not being able to recover it is enough to abandon any plans in that direction.

Not me though.
I tweak my Wordpress themes on the fly!

Photo Credit: ariel wants a chip.

I’m going to explain how I do that below, but first let me emphasize that another method is just to announce changes in themes and warn your visitors that there may be some downtime at your blog.
In ClickNewz Updates 5/23/08 Lynn Terry shows you exactly how to do that.

So, here’s how I tweak my theme on the fly.

First, load the page you want to tweak in your browser and then save it on a temporary directory on your hard disk. Next, save the CSS file in that same directory. You can either find the URL of the CSS file in the source, but you can also copy it from your theme directory.
I always create an extra copy so that I have the originals available in case I mess up.

The first thing you have to do now is go back to the source of the page in your temporary directory and delete the full URL to the CSS file, since that one is in that same directory now.
So anything that looks like
  http://www.domain.com/wp-content/themes/themename/style.css
must be changed in just
  style.css

Now you can work with both the page and the CSS file in that temporary directory. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
But before making any changes, take a notepad to write down what changes you’re going to make, ok?

Now you can make your tweaks (and write them down!) locally on your hard disk, using your favorite editor. If you want to see the results, just click on the local page and it will pop up in your browser.
I’m using Firefox and I suggest you do that too -more on that in a minute-, but you also have to check if your tweaks look all right in other browsers too.

I prefer Firefox for several reasons, but for this purpose here’s the main one: you can install powerful “add-on’s” and one of them that we’re going to use here is Web Developer.

Because, in Web Developer we can change the HTML of any page online, without changing the source!
You just select ‘Miscellaneous’ from the toolbar and then click on ‘Change HTML’.
A sidebar pops up where you can change the HTML source and see the effects immediately.

Web Developer allows you to do exactly the same with the CSS (just click CSS and then ‘Edit CSS’ in the toolbar), simultaneous with changing HTML. It uses the same sidebar and you can switch between HTML and CSS.

Now, you DID write down the tweaks you’ve made to your local files, didn’t you? If so, then use these notes to make the same changes ‘on the fly’ using the sidebar of Web Developer!
You can see the effects immediately and tweak some more if you don’t like them. Meanwhile, your current Wordpress theme is still up and running!

If you like what you see and want to implement your tweaks, you first want to save a copy of the theme files you are going to change. I always add something like ‘original’ to the file name and save it.
So, the sidebar.php file for instance then would be saved as ’sidebar-original.php’. It’s important that you do this for the next step.

Now you can apply your tweaks – like in the example above in sidebar.php. Save it on your hard drive and make an extra copy of it, adding ‘new’ to the name, like sidebar-new.php.

Before uploading sidebar.php, open a new browser window showing the (part of the) page you are about to upload. Since I use Firefox, I do the same in IE Explorer to see if my tweaks look the same in there (and many times they don’t since IE Explorer render pages differently!).

Now you have to be quick.
Upload the tweaked page and CSS file, quickly reload the page in Firefox and IE Explorer and immediately replace the files you’ve just uploaded by the ones you saved as ‘original’, so ’sidebar-original.php’ now becomes sidebar.php and ’style-original.css’ becomes style.css again. Upload these files, and everything looks back to normal, as it was.

If necessary, re-read that again. You can do it in 10 to 20 seconds, 30 at the most. Hardly anyone will notice, certainly if you’re using your statistics to see what hours are quite and do this in that time frame.

But YOU now have the tweaked page in your browser window!

So you can check and double check. If necessary, you can repeat this process. If it’s like you want, just save the ‘new’ file as the one you want to upload (like ’sidebar-new.php as sidebar.php) and put it on your server.
Thus you will have tweaked your Wordpress theme on the fly, like I did.

So, what do you think?
Nice or too complicated?
Post your comments below.

This is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

How To Tweak Your Wordpress Theme On The Fly

I’m NOT a database specialist, so don’t ask me why it happens (if you do know, share it with me in a comment), but over time the database information of your Wordpress blog gets cluttered with overhead.

Therefore I re-organize my database quite frequently to delete any redundant information and thus optimize my tables to run my blog smoothly.

To do that, I have to login to my Cpanel, click PHPMyAdmin, open the database, select all tables and then repair or optimize them.

Photo Credit: rayced

That is not longer necessary!

Early this week I was browsing tubetorial.com when I found Michael Pick’s post ‘Optimize, Repair And Backup Your Database Within Wordpress‘. I was sold immediately.

Because WP-DBManager displays the actual situation of all your Wordpress tables showing you which tables have overhead. The plugin allows you to optimize and repair them from within your Wordpress admin section. You only have to login at your WP admin panel. The best part is, that you don’t have to know anything about the topic, just press a button and it’s done.

You can even automate the database optimization using the DB Options tab by just setting the number of days for the next automated optimization. Now, that’s what I call a great plugin.

Another advantage of WP-DBManager is, that you can store your backups on your server and manage them from there. You can set a maximum number of backups to be stored in there.
Personally, I don’t use this option. I have my backups emailed to me, but it can be handy.

I do not see any reason for the ‘Run SQL Query’. Maybe that’s a comfortable option for the more technically inclined amongst us. Especially since you can only use INSERT, UPDATE, REPLACE, DELETE, CREATE and ALTER statements.
A simple SELECT query would have been handy, but is not possible as far as I could see.

The biggest DISadvantage I see is that you are offered an option to empty and drop tables. That doesn’t make sense to me, unless you’re de-activating a plugin for which you don’t need the tables anymore. But it’s a very dangerous option to put into a plugin if you ask me.

For the rest I’m very happy with this database management plugin.

Try it and post your comments below. I’m curious as to what you think about this database manager.

This is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

Wordpress Backup And Database Optimizer Plugin

So, how does this affect you and your blog?

Well, first and foremost you should always upgrade to the latest version if it has the latest security fixes. Or if it has great new functionality issues. The latter seems the case in Wordpress 2.5.

At the official Wordpress site you can get a sneak peak of the new functionalities. The first thing that caught my eye was ‘faster load times’. I use quite some plugins and while I minimized on showing third party widgets, I’m always interested in speed when it comes to loading my web pages.

But also built-in galleries, tag management and one-click plugin upgrades sounds great. I’ve written before about the plugin that automates the task of updating plugins, but if that’s a standard feature from this version on, that’s one plugin less. And less plugins sounds to me as faster load times.

Photo Credit: Wolfgang Staudt

Unfortunately, Lorelle VanFossen reports that this new plugin-update feature doesn’t work very well. People testing the new version report that they still have to download and upload updated plugins manually. That’s too bad, but I have the same experience using my Update plugin, so that doesn’t make the situation worse.

While I didn’t want to upgrade yet -not stable, not official- I was curious as to what the new features might look. So, I searched for a beta tester and found the demo site of Chris Johnston. He allows you to really have a peak inside the admin panels. Thanks Chris.

If you’re interested, check it out. I personally found the navigation better. It shows the most important things first and lets you handle all elements like a batch job, which makes it an easy check list.
I haven’t played with the multi media files yet, but they sure look very promising. The new version also allows you to play around with the color schemes used in the Admin area.

After reading that one, I still had another concern: how would my plugins react to the new Wordpress version. I searched for more news on this issue and found a list of plugins that have been tested for compatibility with Version 2.5. It didn’t make me quite happy as there aren’t that many on that list, so better be careful when upgrading. Test your plugins!

Finally, I was curious as to any database changes. It appears now there are some and Harnknell isn’t optimistic as he’s expecting a Flamestorm of Wordpress 2.5.

As I wrote before, many Wordpress users are not technical people and just don’t know how to upgrade to the next Wordpress version.
There’s a great plugin that upgrades automatically for you. Get it!
But my advice is wait with your upgrade until first results come in. If they’re good, go ahead.

What do you think?
Do you always upgrade immediately?
Do you thinks it’s safe this time?
Post your comments below.

Edit:
I upgraded to 2.5.
Everything works fine, except the plugin Popularity Contest. I can’t activate it. Nothing happens when I do and there are no warnings. If anyone knows how to solve this problem, I’ll be all ears.

This is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

Should You Upgrade To Wordpress 2.5?

You see, I’ve had troubles with this site on several occasions because of Wordpress plugins that were out of date.

Google XML Sitemaps used to be a notorious one. Not updating this plugin lead to some severe errors about not being able to find stuff in the database (like Table ‘wp_post2cat’ doesn’t exist).

It’s obvious that you have to update your plugins regularly, or problems may occur.

But ‘updating regularly’ is a tedious and boring task.
First, you have to go to your Plugin-tab in your Wordpress admin section to discover what plugins are out of date.
Then you have to visit the source to download a new version. If you are like me, that’s in a separate directory on your hard disk. You have to ‘unzip’ the plugin and then…
Copy the plugin to your site and start up an FTP program to upload it to the server.
And repeat this for every plugin out of date!

Yuck!

Remember, it’s always wise to update Wordpress too.
Now, since we found a great solution to update Wordpress Automatically, I was looking for a similar solution to update the plugins.

Guess what? Found it!

It’s another great plugin called PlugInstaller.
It manages Wordpress plugins.

Pluginstaller fully wipes out the need to download a plugin archive, unpack it manually, copy it to your local site directory and upload it to your FTP server.
Instead, it shows an overview of all your active (and inactive) plugins, warns you if a plugin needs to be updated and does just that with the click of a button. No manual intervention necessary!

In addition, you can ADD a plugin URL (e.g. directly from a plugin repository website like the WordPress.org plugin repository) and have it automatically installed.

On top of that, it also checks for broken plugins.

I just love this one, because it saves me tons of time and a lot of annoyance. Besides that, it does the plugin management very well. So why not make it easy for yourself?
Try it and let me know what you think about this one. Post your comments below.

By the way -talking about comments-, Caroline Middlebrook recently installed the CommentLuv to encourage comments and she has posted an outstanding review about this plugin.

As you can see from the picture, I also installed it, but I’m not sure it will stay. It seems like a lot of overhead to just create another – extra – link in the comment section, so it still has to prove its value for me. It’s very well possible that I delete it at some point.

And that’s very easy using Pluginstaller.
Install this plugin and let me know how you’re doing.
Post your comments below.

This is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

Update Your Wordpress Plugins

I’ve seen many discussions on several forums, whether you should do that (immediately) or not. Sometimes there seems to be no reason to hurry, on other occasions there’s a security fix involved which needs to be done as soon as possible.

Image credit: Nikolay Bachiyski

Because I don’t care too much about the ‘reason why’, in general I tend to upgrade quite fast. Also because it’s quite easy.
You see, I always have the latest Wordpress version on my hard disk. I like to be up-to-date just in case I have to check something out. And once it’s there, it’s a breeze to fire up my FTP program and upload the new files from this directory to my server, carefully avoiding the wp-content folders and the config files.

So yes, it’s rather easy, but indeed you have to know what you’re doing, otherwise (overwriting your wp-config.php file) you can’t even access your blog anymore.

Yet I’ve seen so many posts desperately asking for help to upgrade.
It seems lots of people just don’t know how to upgrade their Wordpress safely. They freeze up only hearing about it.

That’s why I decided to give the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin a try.

Of course I started with creating a database backup and (just to be sure) copying all files to my hard disk, just in case anything goes wrong.

Then I went straight into my Admin section, installed the plugin, clicked the Manage tab and selected Automatic Upgrade.

In there, I selected the manual version. I like to see what happens and you probably can’t see anything when you select ‘automatic’.

In the first step, WAU backs up all the files that are in the Wordpress directory on your server. You can download them to your hard disk.
The plugin indicates that the next step will be a back up of your database.

And yes, it lets you download the database to your hard disk before announcing to show the option to upload the latest files.

In step three, the plugin lets you decide whether to get the new Wordpress files from wordpress.org directly (recommended) or from a version you have stored on your hard disk.
I selected the first option.

After a few seconds, the plugin reports to have downloaded and unzipped all necessary files successfully. And it indicated, that the next task will be to put the site into maintenance mode. If you click on next…

the site already IS in maintenance mode.
A very sober announcement about that is shown at the site.
The next task will de-activate all the plugins.

It shows so in the next task (except for the Wordpress automatic upgrade) and now the plugin will install new files.

In the next step, the plugin congratulates me, because all files have been upgraded to the latest version. Yet you still have to click an extra link to check if the database needs to be updated too. That happens in a separate window, so you’ll stay on top of things.
That’s necessary, because the final step still has to be done and that’s re-activating the plugins.

It just does that in the next task where you also get a great overview of all tasks accomplished and another opportunity to download the various backups.

Now, all you have to do (and the plugin prompts you) is to clean up the ugradation files that were made.

And that’s it!

Remark: I didn’t need to give my FTP credentials, but that may seem necessary in some cases where the plugin in not authorized to write on your server automatically.

Now here’s the brilliance of this plugin:

That means, that your theme – including any changes – stays untouched.

It was a breeze to update my wordpress software. I’m so confident this plugin works well, that I’ll select ‘automatic upgrade’ next time instead of manual.

So, for everyone afraid of upgrading, try it.
I think this plugin is great and it works like charm.

Anyone with a different opinion?

Update
Today, Februari 6 2008, I used this plugin to update this very blog successfully within exactly ONE minute.
Nothing is stopping you from updating to the latest Wordpress version anymore.
Wholeheartedly recommended.

This is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin

A cron job is a time-based scheduling service in a Unix operating systems.

If you want some program or code to start at a pre-defined time, you just enter the program name (or php page name) and the time or frequency it should be executed.
A little software program which runs constantly in the background of the server checks every minute to see if any of the scheduled jobs need to be executed. If so, it executes them.

Each line of a cron file represents a job and follows a particular format as a series of fields, separated by spaces and/or tabs. Each field can have a single value or a series of values.

Here’s what these fields mean (simplified):

# +—————- minute (0 – 59)
# | +————- hour (0 – 23)
# | | +———- day of month (1 – 31)
# | | | +——- month (1 – 12)
# | | | | +—- day of week (0 – 6) (Sunday=0 or 7)
# | | | | |
* * * * * command to be executed

But hosts present the information to be entered in different ways, which makes it more difficult to use cron jobs.

Some hosts even don’t allow cron jobs.

So, that’s why David came up with an alternative: a ‘cron job’-like plugin.
Very easy to install and use. In the ‘Manage’ tab you just specify what you want to be executed and when.

That’s it!

To have this plugin work properly, your theme MUST have the function wp_footer included in it, like this:
<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</body>
(most newer themes already have this in footer.php or possibly index.php).

Also, be aware that this plugin does NOT setup a cron job. Instead, it uses your blog page views to do the timing, in other words, it won’t work until someone requests to see a page from your blog.
For this reason, times are approximate and not exact, and if your blog gets few visits, the timing will be affected. If you need precise timing, it is best to use a systems timer like cron.
Checking URLs frequently (or many URL’s) can affect blog performance. This plugin prevents you checking a URL more often than once every 5 minutes.

Now, let me emphasize that I do NOT use this plugin. I’m quite familiar with setting up cron jobs so I use them.
But I know from experience, that it can be hard to set these crons up. That’s where this plugin may come in handy.
You can download it at Cron Job Plugin.

If you use this plugin, please let me know how you’re doing.
Post your comments below.

This is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

New Wordpress Plugin: Cron Jobs Alternative

I’ve always implemented these optimization tips myself, because they worked like charm and there was no adequate plugin available that suited my needs.

Until now.

Because I’ve implemented the All in One SEO Pack.

Easy to install and an easy to use Option page, where you can set the values that this plugin has to add to different pages.

But it also provides an extra information on your Write Post/Page pages where you can override default values and fill in the Meta Tags per post/page.

While it is said by many SEO experts, that the keyword meta tag isn’t that important right now (but could be in future?), the description tag is often used by search engines to further inform the searcher about your page. So that may be an important one, if you succeed to give your pages a description that entices searchers to click through.

Of course the Title tag is the most important one. This plugin let’s you handle it well.

Doesn’t get easier than this. Highly recommended.

As is a new plugin from again – sorry, can’t help it; the guy is just that good! – Joost de Valk.

For a long time, my RSS feed information is used on different scraper sites (which I will not name here) without proper acknowledgment.
They DO use my name, but for other people’s posts, not mine. That’s intentional malicious use of RSS feeds, just for the sake of loading their scraper sites with valuable content.

That’s where Joost’s new plugin comes in handy: it makes the scrapers work for you!

This very simple plugin adds a link back to your site or even to the post in your RSS feed.

Joost wrote this little gem based on a request of Jeremy Schoemaker, who was fed up with scraper sites using his content to rank above him in the search engines. He wanted to get some value out of these scrapers.

There. Two excellent reasons to install this great plugin. If your content is scraped, it will get you back links.

What more do you want from Wordpress SEO. Huh?
Post your experiences below.

This is a post from Affordable Internet Marketing, http://www.affordable-internet-marketing.com by Case Stevens.

Wordpress SEO