Humor Yourself, Backup Your WordPress Site

Safety FirstI’m sure you’ve read about if before. Before or after a tutorial on how to improve your site with a script, plugin or just plain regular hack. Read what you ask? To backup first and foremost. As you may have noticed some sites go offline for a while due to serious hardware failure. With a proper backup, all you have to is to restore the backup. I had a similar problem to other day where updating a bunch of modified PHP files via FTP at the same time somehow screwed up the contents of these files and subsequently a lot of data. Boy was I glad I backed up…

Backing up your software sounds like a chore to most of us out there, but I guarantee you you will thank yourself for doing it plus there a plenty of solutions to automate it.

Perhaps you’re not really sure when to backup and when not? Here’s just a few things you could be doing that in my opinion requires a backup first: [Read more...]

Edit Images in WordPress

The best way to add a bit of color to your site is by making good use of great imagery. Finding matching images for your posts can be difficult every now and then, but getting those images to show in a consistent manner throughout your site can be a pain. What I mean specifically is when you have finally found a matching image it most likely will not have the perfect resolution.

Perhaps you have noticed here on BloggingPro most images in post do not exceed the 240px range, but of course not all images can be found in exact that width. Most of the time you need to crop or resize those images you found to the proper width size.

[Read more...]

Everything You Wanted To Know About Custom Post Types

By now you should be aware that WordPress 3.0 comes shipped with Custom Post Types. It’s a feature that may not be easy to grasp at first, but it holds almost infinite power over what you can do with WordPress. Custom Post Types are not set in stone as to what they exactly are. It’s more important you realize that they can represent any type of content you want. WordPress already ships with several post types such as posts, pages, attachments and even revisions, so it’s basically up to your imagination what you can do with it.

There are three sources about Custom Post Types I think you all should read to get a better grasp of what it can do for you. I’ve heard people say that the new WordPress 3.0 Custom Post Types feature is really not all that important, but I’d like to show them different by presenting you these three great sources. [Read more...]

Everything You Need to Know About WordPress Security

WordPress SecurityKeeping your WordPress installation secure is usually not something a lot of people spend a great deal of time on. However, I believe WordPress security, tightening up the place should be your first priority every single time you install WordPress. No exceptions.

With the recent Pharma hack, more info about it plus a solution on Chris Pearson’s blog, going round I thought it was time to focus on WordPress security today. There are a lot of things you can do build extra layers of security for your WordPress installation.

There are a few different layers involved to secure your WordPress installation. I shall list them grouped together as much as possible. [Read more...]

Menu Management for WordPress

The soon to be released WordPress 3.0 comes with a new menu management, but your theme has to have this capability built in. But what if you’d rather not edit your theme files or simply don’t want to wait for WordPress 3.0? Luckily there are a few plugins out there that will enable you to have a very flexible menu – without the fancy interface though. These are plugins I have used extensively on many sites which required a custom menu.

Exclude Pages

Exclude Pages is a plugin that does exactly what the title suggest. It allows you to specify per page whether or not a page needs to be in the menu or not. This plugin adds a checkbox, ‘include this page in menus’ to your page edit screen. All you need to do is uncheck this to exclude pages from the page navigation so that users won’t see on your site. As simple as that. Do keep in mind that pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. [Read more...]

What Can You Expect From WordPress 3.0

WordPressThose of you who actively look at what kind of news is presented to you in your WordPress dashboard already know WordPresss 3.0 beta 1 is released just before the weekend. Even though the actual release of WordPress 3.0 will be at least a couple of weeks away, it’s good to be prepared to the new stuff which WordPress 3.0 will bring to the table.

You of course already knew WordPress 3.0 will be sporting a brand new default theme, named Twenty Ten, but there are quite a few more new features that can improve your WordPress experience. Instead of listing every single feature, I thought it would be nice to make a list of those who already wrote about WordPress 3.0. [Read more...]

Twenty Ten, a New Default Theme for WordPress

Twenty Ten ThumbnailWordPress is gearing up to release a new version, WordPress 3.0, which will house a lot of new cool features and the merging of WordPress MU with WordPress stand alone version. Alongside with this release WordPress will also be shipped with a brand new interpretation of what a default theme should be. For years the default theme has been Kubrick, but that’s all going to change.

I’ve never been a fan of either Kubrick’s look or code, but I must say Twenty Ten is genuinely a great base theme to use for all your WordPress projects, especially when working with Child Themes. Sure it’s not as advanced as say Thematic, but it does produce powerful semantic HRML and is in general very well SEO optimized. No surprise there because Ian Stewart, the creator of Thematic, was also the one who inspired Twenty Ten with his theme called Kirby, and recently joined Automattic as a Theme Wrangler. [Read more...]