• Akismet (by Automattic): Comes bundled with WordPress, Akismet “blocks 99.9% of spam” from reaching your blog. (Ok, it does a decent job, but let’s not exaggerate Akismet, ok?)
• Broken Links Checker (by Janis Elsts): I only activate this occasionally to check for broken links, but it works well.
• Dagon Design Form Mailer (by Dagon): There are many Contact forms available, for some reason I stuck with Dagon’s.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (by Dagon): This sitemap is internal and displays the way I want it. (I’ll actually be using a BuddyPress plugin for this sites Sitemap) …
• fbLikeButton (by Dean Peters): Another “Like Button” which allows Facebook users to like an article, share it and so forth, effective!
• Google XML Sitemaps (by Arne Brachhold): This plugin generates an XML sitemap to help Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index the site.
• Greg’s Comment Length Limiter (by Greg Mulhauser): Long comments are unreadable and unhelpful, but I can limit them using this plugin.
• HeadSpace2 (by John Godley) / or All in One SEO Pack (by Michael Torbert): SEO plugins so you can add keywords, etc. Not needed for many new Themes, but still helpful.
• (Move Comments) [Deactivated until it's needed. This by Apostolos Dountsis works well]: Sometimes I move posts and want to move the comments too…
• Page Menu Editor (also built into All in One SEO plugin) (by Sarah Anderson). Many themes offer a top bar navigation where the Title is the same as the link (such as Home, Members, etc). To change the title tag use this plugin or the AIOSEO (assuming you don’t want to edit your theme header.php file).
• Page Links To (by Mark Jaquith): I moved some posts and pages and found this plugin helped clean up the links.
• RefTagger (Transform Bible references into links by Logos Bible Software): RefTagger supports all of the Bible book names and their standard abbreviations.
• Related Posts by Category (by Sergej Muller): I used to rely on categories to cross-reference posts, not so important now-a-days.
• Subscribe to Comments (by Mark Jaquith): Just a nice touch for those who post comments and want to see who responds.
• What Would Seth Godin Do (by Richard K Miller): Offers new and returning visitors different greetings, a friendly plugin.
• Widget Logic (by Alan Trewartha): Brilliant, lets me put different Sidebar content (widgets) on different posts, pages, home, whatever I need and want!!
• WordPress Security – see note below.
• WP-DBManager (by Leters Chan): A must have, to optimize, backup and otherwise manage the database from within the WP-Dashboard.

Plus a few others which are site-related

WordPress Security Plugins

There are quite a few plugins to help your WordPress site and there are several things you can do manually to improve security. Most of the manual steps are outlined quite clearly on the WordPress.org site and perhaps I’ll create a post with some links to other sites talking about this. However, there are a few things to remember:

1) Some security issues rest with your hosting company. Some issues I had in the past were taken care of when I checked with my host.

2) Some vulnerabilities are based on the version of WordPress, Themes, Plugins and so on you are using. The general rule is to update and stay up-to-date. When you login to your Dashboard, you will get a list of updates available.

3) Based on both these above points, you probably need to be careful taking advise or adding plugins which were written for older version of WordPress or specific themes. As I said above, I could add links to sites which have helped me in the past when security issues came up. However, some of the issues they mention have already been fixed in the latest version of WordPress.

Having said that, here are a couple of helpful plugins I use on certain sites:

• Secure WordPress (by jremillard): Gives the option to remove versions and protect against malicious requests (Malware).
• WordPress File Monitor (by Matt Walters): handy plugin which checks for added, changed or deleted files.
• WordPress Ultimate Security Check (by Eugene Pyvovarov): this free version does a check and tells you possible problems.
• WP Security Scan (by Michael Torbert): A set of Admin tools with quite a bit of info about your site including tools to fix many problems.

Brad mentions three plugins which you can’t see on the video. The are:

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-security-scan/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exploit-scanner/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-file-monitor/

Thanks Brad, much appreciated!

Follow us on Twitter!

Updated July 3, 2009:

(Scroll down for the actual article, right now I need to address some problems I had / am having with 2.8)

1) I am noticing some inconsistencies. These include

a) WWSG (What Would Seth Godin Do) plugin strangely comes up with “header already sent” errors. The Plugin worked fine for the first week … and when I deleted the error.log file, it hasn’t come back yet …

b) Although everything worked great for the first days, suddenly I had a “Redirect Loop” error with FireFox. Although one culprit turned out to be a plugin called “Redirect”, I occasionally get these errors. Today, one of my most viewed posts disappeared to a totally unique URL. (Meaning, the link became something I never created nor heard of before, it was just a weird URL that has nothing to do with my site!)

[The actual problem, just to explain, not to try to push the site, was: http://www.30-days.net/islam/basics/ramadan/ suddenly became http://www.30-days.net/ministry/ramadan/. (Link not activated since it generates errors on my site.) I have a category called "ministry", but it belongs in a totally different location!]

c) After some days, I noticed the site was getting slower. When I checked my Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets I found that old, experimental widgets were suddenly showing up in the “Inactive Widgets” at the bottom of the page.

I physically copied and pasted all my active Widgets into a text file, then activated Justin Tadlocks great “Widget Reset” plugin. After that, my widgets worked properly and the site runs faster. [NOTE: Widget Reset is in the WordPress Plugin Repository, just search for it, you don't have to go to Justin's site to download it. AND YES, it does work with WP 2.8. I just used it!]

I highly recommend you use Justin’s plugin if you have a cluttered “Inactive Widgets” section. BUT DO MAKE A BACKUP SOMEHOW OF YOUR OLD STUFF, Widget Reset totally deletes your widgets!! as it is supposed to.

d) There are a few other issues, but they don’t effect my site, they are just annoying. These include Dashboard > Appearance > Editor > click a file to Edit and find yourself at the bottom of the file. It is too easy to start typing before noticing you are in the wrong place:

MORE annoying, try clicking Dashboard > Posts > Edit > Filter (a category) > (do your edit and then click > Update Post … in WP 2.7 you had the option to “Return” which brought you back to the category you were editing. In 2.8 this has disappeared, at least on my host, so I have to click … > Edit and then apply the Filter again! I hope someone at WordPress noticed this “little” hitch, it wastes a lot of time, at least for me.

HERE IS THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE, plus tips at the end I updated later regarding Widgets and .htaccess problems…

WordPress 2.8 (named Baker after Jazz artist Chet Baker) has many new features and clever ideas built right into it. I’ll list some of the links at the bottom of this post.

When upgrading to WP 2.8, remember to do the following:

1) Make a backup of your database:
either via your control panel or use a plugin like WP-DBManager

2) Make sure all your plugins are up-to-date. Usually this just means clicking the automatic update feature, otherwise, download the new version and follow the instructions.

3) If you have customized anything within your WordPress installation, make sure you have a backup!
For example, if you changed the automatic post revisions feature, remember to backup the custom php files. And of course backup your customized Themes, wp-config.php file, .htaccess and any other files you may have changed. Just check for newer dates via your FTP software if you have forgotten which files you changed. (Tip: I wait a day or so before changing any core WP files so I can see which files are newer.)

4) If you have custom sidebars and have been using widgets such as widget_logic, you should copy the custom code into a text file and save it. WP 2.8 has added some widget logic of its own which may conflict with how your prior widgets were done.

5) Deactivate your plugins just as you start the upgrade process. If your theme is old and you were on a WP pre-2.5 version, it is a good idea to use the default theme for the few moments it will take upgrade.

NOTES: When you have successfully upgraded, check the links to posts from the home page work. If they do not, login to WP, click Settings >> Permalinks >> Save Settings (even if you have not made changes here, which in fact you shouldn’t have in the upgrade process).

NOTES 2: If you suddenly find you can’t login to WP after the upgrade (as happened right here), check the Codex Forums but what worked for me was to move the root directory .htaccess into my WP directory. That worked!

Here are links to detailed steps:

About WordPress 2.8:

What’s new in WordPress 2.8?

Upgrading WordPress:

Installing WordPress from the beginning:

New WordPress Installation Checklists:

WordPress Plugin Compatibility Checker:

Follow us on Twitter:

Not to worry, whether you are adding a video to your sidebar or to a post or page, do the following:

Grab your “embed” code. It will look something like this:

< 'object width="425" height="344" '>
< 'param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PObIJN17iNs&hl=en&fs=1">
< 'param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" '>< '/param '>
< 'param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" '>< '/param'>
< 'embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PObIJN17iNs&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344" '>< '/embed ' >
< '/'object>

Note that the actual URL or Link to the video is here:

http://www.youtube.com/v/PObIJN17iNs

the additional stuff starting with the & is not needed, in the case above, the &hl=en&fs=1

To embed this in your sidebar or page and have it validate and be somewhat shorter, all you need is the following:

<object class="aligncenter" width="425" height="344" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/gZ9sM8Lu4ug">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/gZ9sM8Lu4ug" />
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
</object>

The result is video which also validates.

(The class=”aligncenter” simply puts it in the center of the page, but you need to have a “aligncenter” defined in your CSS stylesheet somewhere to have that work.)

The whole structure of the WordPress has been designed to be flexible. And since I don’t have time to get into PHP nor even MySQL Database, I am very thankful to have a community where there are enough experts who are willing to offer advise, insight and point me in the right direction to find answers I need. Best of all, when January 1st comes around, I don’t have to worry if I changed all of my 200x to 200x since my pages and posts are automatically dated.

Yes, I would say WordPress is a system for me, a system which is getting better and better with each new release (and there have been many new releases, also a nice touch). For sure I will not be going back to HTML. As with any system, it isn’t perfect and I would love to see a few things added which I like (including the looks of the “themes” which tend to get pretty boring) but I see potential since it is a system which is trying to grow along with the Internet community it serves.

For example, some of the areas it is growing into is:

More CMS functionality (Content Management – in other words, like a traditional website not based on dates for your posts, but more for content as you want the public to see it and find it.)

More SEO friendly (Search Engine Optimization – always changing, but simply how to help search engines find you, and thus, eventually, have people find your site.)
[SEO is a huge topic, more on this later ...]

More users (WordPress has a strong following, and it is getting much stronger. In a year or so it is predicted WordPress will have 50% of the blog market.)

More later (there is a lot to be said about WordPress, so I’ll keep coming back to this.)

Bye for now … xodigoguy

While not all about the Internet is good, most people who have access to it would agree that the possibilities seem endless. But I must confess that trying to keep up with every new technology and trying to get my websites found, indexed and searched through the ever-growing web became tedious and much to much. So it was with much relief that I finally tried WordPress.

I probably would have tried WordPress sooner but upon reflection, I really couldn’t understand its benefits, or more likely, I really didn’t understand what WordPress was all about. I wasn’t into blogging anyway (remember those dreaded sites where friends and foes alike ranted on about the breakfast they had or the car ride they were on or how grandma had just come by to visit?). And since I had no big interest in blogging, I could not get a feel for what WordPress was all about. (I was using Blogger for a few niche items.)

I don’t recall exactly what the sequence of events was, but I did eventually decide to try WordPress “just to see what would happen.” And am I glad I did. I suddenly realized that despite some strange descriptions and marketing, this really was a tool that could help me.

Again, although I enjoyed creating websites, I found I simply had too many to update and change and add clever navigation to in a world of constantly shifting interests and needs. And in fact, it was really the old problems of creating internal links while pages would come or disappear into the archives which drove me to try WordPress in the first place.

From the descriptions I wasn’t much wiser:

• WordPress is a blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. (Wikipedia)
• WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. (WordPress Codex)
• Excellent open-source and free blogging software that should soon or later take over all its competitors (tutorialseek.com)

And of course these are today’s definitions – I seem to recall the older definitions were quite vague.

Here is a definition I like better (in the context of my article title):

• “Upgrading web applications is annoying – but not for WordPress users!”

And that is exactly what I found to be true. Instead of trying to update my HTML websites each year, particularly before the New Year came (“Copyright 200x”) I found I had a system at my finger-tips which updated almost everything for me. I found I could add or delete articles (called posts) or edit external links not just easily but also globally – meaning I did not have to worry about whether I remembered to fix all the links or whether I had remembered to add my new article link in all the right places.

In the last several months that I have been using WordPress, I can honestly say it has saved me a ton of work and thus time. I can spend much more effort on getting more projects done. What’s more, WordPress has a very large community which means that there is a good source of help to both understand WordPress and of course to resolve issues.

Does WordPress help my pagerank increase?

What I have not seen is any real change to the number of visitors who come to my sites. Checking the logs over the last months shows little sign that WordPress has helped me with PageRank or bringing me extra traffic. That is hardly surprising since people visit based on the content, not what tools I use to create the content. But I do think it is a myth to suggest that using WordPress will somehow make your site more visible in search engines or drive people to your site. Instead, WordPress is just a great tool for creating content and organizing it is an easy way.

See Matt Mullenweg’s video here regarding: Matt’s view of the future of WordPress

Actually, I happen to agree with him. Although I have tried to stay with the subject of my websites, they do tend to get dry after a while. And as far as SEO, (search engine optimization) it is obvious with so many blogs and websites who do diversify and get high pagerank and visits that niche is not necessary, certainly not at this time.

Although I am not a “blogger” in the sense of someone who just loves to right about every detail that comes to my mind, I am going to try to diversify on this blog. The proof of the pudding will obviously be in whether or not you and others come back to visit, so we will see after some months.

(And don’t worry, I am not going to create posts about what I ate or didn’t eat for breakfast – those types of blogs are of no interest to me whatsoever.)

If you are interested in getting started in the Niche blogging market, here are some tips from Maki:

Darren over at ProBlogger.net disagrees with diversity.

PS. You can see John’s presentation about blogging here >> 45 top blogging tips

Some days later WP 2.5 was available to me on other sites via the Fantastico administration panel supplied by my web host. I was delighted and quickly updated three other websites.

Only a few days later did I notice that my Visual editor (TinyMCE) was no longer working. I was stuck in HTML mode and I could not fix the problem. Searching the forums and various help files, there were a number of sensible suggestions and some not so sensible (such as adding a plugin to fix the problem – more on that in a moment).

Here for example is a link to the WordPress.org forum on the subject of fixing tinymce

I tried all the above (and other) fixes but nothing worked. Again, I now had 3 out of 4 websites where I could not use the visual editor. However, since one site did work, I realized there had to be another solution. I FTP’ed the WP 2.5 software to a non-working site, it also didn’t help.

Finally I found that my wp-config file, created using the Fantastico interface, had a tiny problem in it. It had a line-feed where none should be.

Once I corrected that, all my sites worked fine and even with upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1, every site has continued to work perfectly (as far as my Visual editor is concerned).

The wp-config.php file (found in the root directory of your blog, often www.mysite.com/blog) should look like this:

<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase. You won’t have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated. You can visit https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
// to get a phrase generated for you, or just make something up.
define(‘SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.

// Change this to localize WordPress. A corresponding MO file for the
// chosen language must be installed to wp-content/languages.
// For example, install de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to ‘de’
// to enable German language support.
define (‘WPLANG’, ”);

/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

define(‘ABSPATH’, dirname(__FILE__).’/');
require_once(ABSPATH.’wp-settings.php’);
?>

If however your Fantastico or other system has varied the file in anyway, even to just adding an extra line-feed, it is very possible that your blog, specifically in this case the tinyMCE which controls the visual editor, may not work properly.

PS. I add this help simply because I did not find the solution anywhere, and even doing a search now on Google I still don’t see this mentioned, at least not in an obvious way.

PPS. I think it is unwise to try to fix a WordPress release problem by adding a Plugin. If a new release has come out, then it has been tested to work in most environments without additional Plugins. It is more logical, I think, to look at the environment first unless the whole WordPress community has the same problem, which is unlikely.

Trust that helps solve your WordPress 2.5 tinyMCE visual editor problem! Ron