Wordpress Plugins
WordPress v2.9.1, Upgrading Plugins, Is Good!
Have you updated your WordPress sites yet to version 2.9.1? Actually version 2.9 didn’t last long, went Whoosh! and we had 2.9.1.
It doesn’t matter really because what I want to tell you about is the upgrading of plugins, it is so good now.
Once you upgrade to 2.9.1 and you have plugins to upgrade too, go to the Upgrade option under Tools and there will be waiting for you all the plugins that need to be upgraded.
So all you have to do is, tick the little box ‘Select all’ or maybe you don’t want to upgrade them all, then tick the boxes beside each plugin that you want to upgrade and then the button to Upgrade.
WordPress now puts the site into Maintenance Mode and when all are successfully upgraded, disables maintenance node and you are set to go. Now if a plugin is not compatible with the latest version of WordPress, then that plugin will not be upgraded. So we shouldn’t have that thing happen anymore, where an incompatible plugin can stuff up everything and you have to go through that painful process of deactivating and activating each one until you found the culprit. This is great.
Remember if you haven’t upgraded to version 2.9 or 2.9.1 if you missed v2.9, do that first and then the plugin upgrade option will be there under Upgrade at Tools.
This is so good! Saves so much time too.
Talk again soon
Take care
Cheers
Carmel
Insights, Very Useful
I have been using a WordPress plugin for some time now, called Insights. I used it mainly to make the post have more visual appeal either with images or videos.
It is only recently that I have started to find out just what this plugin can do.
After you install and activate it, you will find it under where you input your posts or pages, it sits right under the editor too, so you don’t have to go looking for it.
Most of us at some time or other have set up sites that we don’t have a lot of interest in. Maybe for something like the 30 Day Challenge or another learning type course and after we have learnt the process, the sites just sit there. gathering cyber dust (that’s harder to get rid of than Aussie dust from a dust storm)
Maybe it was a dud, maybe we didn’t want to write all that unique content or rewrite those PLR articles. The site could bring in some revenue but we don’t know what to post on it.
Well the WordPress plugin, Insights, will help you find content for these sites. Sure it won’t be uniquely written by you but maybe the keywords you researched have prospects for getting you some traffic.
With Insights you have the ability to search for and add to your site, content from -
Your Blog – your own blog, you can update and add to and link posts and pages:
Images – you can add images to a post or page:
Videos, search so much easier with Insights for related videos:
Widipedia – that place with so much info:
Google – where so much info is:
News – the lasest news on your topic to add to you post:
Blogs – other people’s blogs for related content
Books – Google books, I forget about searching for related books
Maps – insert a Google Map in your posts or pages
And…..all in real time too….
Now not only can you do all these searches from just under your post or page but you can insert the information you want in that post or page.
With a little intro from you and a little ‘outro’ at the end you have a kind of unique post. But better still, add another plugin, WPUnique and all your posts through Insights become unique to your site.
Well think about it, if you have selected the content from a few sources, arranged it on your post or page, added a little bit of your own content, like a few or more words from you the Blogger, then you have a post to your blog that will not be anywhere else on the WWW.
The option to search your own site/blog means that you can do the linking within your blog so easily, Insights does it for you. The SE robots love that internal linking, they just gobble them up through your site.
If you are doing anything for local offline businesses, the option to add a Google Map is so cool.
The other good thing about this plugin is that it is free, yes! free. I’ve seen other plugins that do not provide you with as many options as this one and you have to pay for them. Insights is free
Now no more excuses, no more sitting looking at your computer screen with the “What to write?” look on your face. Go download the Insights plugin and post away.
Go do it now! Download Insights here
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/insights/
You can’t say I don’t try to make it easy for you…
Catch you later
Take care
Cheers
Carmel
Cyber Shoplifters, How Do They Get Their Kicks?
What do people who steal from others on the Internet get out of it. I call them cyber shoplifters, petty thieves.
In the off line world, shoplifters get a bit of an adrenalin rush when they get away with stealing from retail stores. They’ve beat the security system and the store detective/detection.
But in the online world, where or how do they get their kicks? Do they get any satisfaction from sitting in front of their computer, 
Googling all the different words that will get them through to a download page to steal someone’s product…..the mind boggles at the mentality….you have to feel sorry for them. What a life they must have or NOT!!! Some achievement.
I know there are forums where they pass around how they got to these download pages but they are still nameless/faceless, they use avatars and nicknames so no one really knows who or what they are. Still with achievements like they have, maybe that is the idea.
Recently someone got through to a download page of mine, well to actually get there they had to subscribe to my list for that product and as soon as that happened and no payment, I sent them an email asking for their receipt number so I could put them in a draw for ‘money’ prize competition. Naturally I didn’t hear….lol.
But then I went to the site and checked on a great WordPress plugin called StatsPress Reloaded. This plugin shows you the terms searched and the page on your site that is accessed.
There was only the one search that qualified. So I went and changed everything that this ‘petty thief/cyber shoplifter’ could have passed on.
Then for several days everytime the search term appeared in the StatsPress they went through to another page. So my little cyber shoplifter looked like a ‘BIG DUMBE DILL’ to those on the forums where he big-noted himself.
Not the most satisfying experience for the poor little no-name/no-face.
So if you want very up to date stats, take a look at StatsPress Reloaded, it’s a free plugin and well worth adding to your favourite plugins list. You can take a look at it here
Well that’s my little tip for today, take care and I’ll catch you later.
Cheers
Carmel
Posted in Wordpress Plugins
A Lil’Bit About WordPress You May Not Know
I had payed and signed up for a membership, registered and confirmed my subscription and waited for the next step.
Nothing…..no email telling me how to access, checked the trash folder…..nothing.
Now this membership was set up with WordPress, which is fine, I’ve joined many membership sites set up with WordPress. Actually I’m getting ready to set up one myself. And….I’m very thankful that this happened as you will see.
Anyway, I was about to contact the person who owned the site when I needed to check a few of the folders that I have emails directed to and there it was…Guess who sent it? WordPress….that’s who it was from and I have a folder where anything with WordPress in the ‘From’ goes directly to that particular folder(the folder is called something else, not WordPress but that’s my filing system).
I have never had a site where ‘anyone can register’ so had never come across this before.
Now I was adding the plugin Web Invoices to one of my sites to make sending accounts to clients easier. This is a great plugin, actually there are two of them, I’ll tell you my pick later.
With this plugin, you need to enter your clients, they don’t register, that’s how my site is set. They need a username and password to access their past invoices and the WordPress will send that to them automatically the same as if they were registering as a new user.
So that was the email that would go out to clients and they would have no idea why they were getting an email from WordPress and who the heck is WordPress anyway? (these clients don’t do much stuff on the Internet)
So Google, being such a good friend of mine, helped me to find a plugin for WordPress that would solve this problem.
There are a couple, actually three that I considered. The one I chose has templates of the emails which can be easily changed to suit and now the clients will know just who is sending them an email.
If you install it through your dashboard, which is very easy, that should be the latest version, (I had to upgrade mine as soon as it was activated) so check just in case, because the latest version has some really good ‘Settings’ options. You can reword the email that goes to the client/user and even send a test so that you are sure it is right.
This is the plugins site.
http://epicalex.com/new-user-email-set-up/
And it works like a treat!!
Now read all about Web Invoice here
Cannot Login To Your WordPress Site/Blog?
Cannot Login To My WordPress Site
If this ever happens to you, don’t panic, don’t go changing your password. Take a deep breath, go get your coffee/tea/soft beverage of choice and prepare for an almost mind numbing experience, ( the harder beverage of choice can come later, you’ll enjoy it more then)
In more cases than not, the reason you cannot login to your WordPress site/blog is caused by a plugin. I said “take a deep breath etc” because if you have many plugins then this little job can take some time.
Firstly to be able to login, go to your FTP client and change the name of the plugins folder to anything you like as long as it is not just ‘plugins’. I changed mine to oldplugins.
Now go back and try to login, you should have access now. In the Plugins section you should have error messages for all your plugins telling you that they cannot be found and have been deactivated or something to that effect.
Next make a folder on your desktop or wherever you like and call it ‘oldplugins’ then download all the plugins from that folder on your site.
Make a new folder in your wp-comments called, you guessed it, plugins.
Now the ‘fun’ begins! Upload each plugin that is in the ‘oldplugins’ folder to the new ‘plugins’ folder, one at a time.
So what you do is:-
Upload plugin.
Activate plugin
Log out
Log in
If you get back into your site, that plugin is fine.
If you find that the plugin from your folder needs upgrading after you upload it, don’t do the upgrade before you log out and then in. If the logging out and in works, then upgrade the plugin and try the log out and in again.
Do this for every plugin and you should find that after activating one of them, you will not be able to login. That one till be the culprit.
Go back to your FTP client, delete it from your system and if it is for a function that you cannot live without, there is probably another that will perform the same or similar function.
This incompatibility can happen after installation of a new plugin or an upgrade of a plugin too, could be the WP version and the plugin version not getting along.
I did think that the way the auto upgrade for plugins in the 2.8 version was great and it still is but from now on I will only ever upgrade one plugin per login session and make sure I can log out and in again.
Thank goodness all is back to normal, well normal for me, could be different for you 
To WWW or Not That Is Google’s Question?
The Plugin That Lets You Have Your Own Way With Google..
If, like I have a couple of times, you have forgotten to check the URL of your WordPress site when you first set it up, click on Settings, the first screen that comes up will have the WordPress Address URL and the Blog Address URL.
For setting up as better Search Engine fodder they should both be:-
http://www. then the domain name. If your site addresses are just the http:// then you are in need of this plugin. It is called Enforce WWW Preference. You can find it here:- Enforce WWW Preferences
Once again, if you have upgraded to the 2.7.1 version of WordPress then all
Smashy download
you need to do is, download the zip file, go to Add New in the Plugins section of your Dashboard menu, browse to where you saved the zip file, click on the Upload button, when the next screen comes up, click on the Activate plugin and you’re nearly done.
One last step, you need to go to Google Webmaster Tools, your Google account gets you in (don’t have a Google account?, sign up for one it’s free).
You need to verify your site by adding a piece of code that is supplied.. This piece of code goes into the header.php file in the Editor Section of Appearance on your site. Look for these tags </head> <body> and paste the code before the </head> tag, click update/save.
Now go back to Google Webmaster Tools and hit the Verify button and all should be well, your site should be verified.
Now in the Webmaster Tools, click on Settings in the side menu and you will see the preferred domain feature options for whichever way you want your URL to be indexed, the www or the non www.
This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.
Google Webmaster Tools is not a bad place to visit, they have lots of good ‘stuff’ there to help with your sites, have a wander while you’re there doing this.
There you go, some talented person has coded this for you and me, to help us keep the search engines happy and coming back to visit our sites.
If you find the plugin useful, then why not let the person who built it know. If you aren’t comfortable with the Paypal button, Mark has a great wish list with Amazon. Just thought I would mention that as the wish list is a good idea. Go push his buttons, you’ll find them at the bottom of the plugin link here
Posted in Wordpress Plugins
WordPress 2.7.1 Upgrading and New Plugins Feature
WordPress 2.7.1 version is available and to upgrade is a breeze, literally one click and it’s done. Remember to back up your database first with the inbuilt backup option, it’s under tools.
Great new features in WordPress 2.7 and 2.7.1 gets even better.
Now there is another feature that has changed with this update, it is how you get your plugins. Not sure if it’s me and my computer or it is how things will be from now on but……..you do it all from your Dashboard Menu for Plugins under Add New.
I have tried uploading a couple of plugins via FTP and they haven’t appeared on the plugins page, seems like it is all done via the Add New section. Which, by the way is very good.
On the Add New page, you can search for plugins via Term, Author and Tag and you will get a list of related keywords with description and rating and the option to install your selection.
There is also several options like, Featured, Popular, Newest and Recently Updated. As of writing, there are
4 Plugins in the Featured section
165 Pages of plugins in the Popular Section
178 Pages of plugins in the Newest
and
178 Pages also in the Recently Updated
That’s a couple or two to check out while you’re waiting for something to upload, download, (good for when a video is buffering/streaming and you have the sound down to zero, so you can listen to it later without the stuttering).
Big choice!
You have the option also to upload a plugin from your computer but it must be in zip format. So no need to download the zip and extract the files anymore, just download the zip and this handy little option uploads the plugin zip and does all the work for you, too easy.
So now I’m off to organise my favourite plugins into a folder with the zip files only. I’ve been known to delete the zips once I’ve extracted the files, so may have some chasing to do. Still when you know what’s ahead, it is a good chase.
WordPress just gets better and better!
WordPress Plugins, Three Handy Ones.
Three plugins I’ve found recently, thought you might like to take a look.
So this first plugin was just what I’ve been looking for.
From Manuel Grabowski
I know most people use Google Analytics and yes, they are good and your stats from your web host cpanel are excellent too but this one is right on your site, in your Dashboard and so easy to check.
You get in the Overview (Includes Column Graph for daily quick comparison)
- Hits (date, time, IP etc)
- Search Terms
- Referrers
- Agents (bots)
- Pages
- Spiders
There are many options to enable you to collect data on your site’s stats,
and you get all this right there on your Dashboard, no bringing up a new browser.
WordPress.com have great stats built in, and I’ve tried the plugin for my own hosted sites but no matter what, I’ve never been able to get the API key to work on a WordPress.org site.
This plugin (previously known as StatPress) shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.
Once the plugin StatPress has been activated it immediately starts to collect information. Using StatPress you can see your visitors actions while they are surfing your blog or check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories. In the Dashboard menu you will find the StatPress page where you could look up the statistics (overview or detailed). StatPress also includes a widget you can add to a sidebar (or easy PHP code if you can’t use widgets!).
StatPress speaks English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Norwegian, Dutch, Brazilian, Turkish, Swedish!
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From Vladimir Prelovac
SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.
Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.
Everything happens completely transparent, and you can edit the options from the administration settings panel.
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WP125
From redwall_hp
Easily and efficiently manage your 125×125 advertisments with this plugin. Used on The Theme Blog’s sidebar, WP125 provides a simple admin panel system for creating new ad campaigns, setting a time for removal and reviewing click statistics.
This plugin is for the little 125×125 ad blocks like the ones on my sidebar or similar type ads, you can use this plugin on a single colums too.
From this plugin’s admin panel, you can control those little 125x125s.
The features included are:
* One or two column ad display, and support through template tags to implement your own unconventional design.
* Show as many ads as you want, and in either manual or random order
* Keep track of how many times an ad is clicked
* When creating a new ad, you don’t have to calculate the end date yourself. Just input how many days you wish the ad to run for, and the correct date will be applied. The ad will be automatically taken down when the time comes.
* When an ad run is over, the record is archived on the Inactive ads screen, so you can check on the final click count, or revive the ad for another run.
* When an ad slot is empty, a placeholder ad of your choice will be displayed. This could be a �Your Ad Here� image linking to a page with statistics and pricing, or an affiliate link.
* Optionally recieve email notifications when an ad expires. Useful if you send follow-up messages to advertisers, or if you just want to stay in the know.
Hope you find these useful
I’ll add these three to my WordPress Plugins page.too.
Catch you later,
Cheers
Carmel
PS if you check out the last sentence above, the link for “WordPress Plugins” was done by the SEO Smart Links Plugin automatically……Nice!
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To Comment or Not To Comment! Problem Solved -
Just setting up a site as a CMS using WordPress, I’ve done this many times and one of the things that is not needed when setting sites up this way, that comes with every WordPress installation, is the ‘Comments’.
Of course you can untick the “comments” before you publish a post or page but it shows up as “no comments” or ” no comments allowed”, something to that effect.
So I went looking and found a very neat little plugin called – wait for it!- “No Comments Plugin”.
And….it works like a treat, activate it and no more comments or notation that the comments have been turned off.
Very neat, very nice, very light!
If you go the the ‘Add New’ plugin and search for no comments and it should be the first result. Install, activate and Presto!!
Talk later,
Cheers
Carmel