WordPress + Windows: Tips & Trix You Can Use

On the second day, I presented a talk during one of the “un-conference” sessions.  The talk was titled: “Microsoft + WordPress: Tips & Trix You Can Use”.  My goal was to show folks how easy it is to run WordPress on Windows, as well as a bunch of tools & plug-ins that make building your site on Windows a great experience.   Thanks to all of the folks who took the time to attend and had plenty of questions to ask! I’ve now posted my talk up on SkyDrive. You can download the presentation, or view it online in the PowerPoint Web App.  The presentation features a lot of screenshots, but I have included links to all of the relevant downloads in the slide notes.

WordPress + Windows: Links & Resources

To get started with running WordPress on Windows, visit http://microsoft.com/web. From there you can install WordPress via the app gallery within Microsoft Web Platform Installer, or you can use the new Microsoft WebMatrix beta tool too.  The WebMatrix also features the ability to publish your WordPress site back out to any host (Windows or Linux) via FTP, or to Windows hosts using the easy-to-use “Web Deploy” technology built into WebMatrix & the IIS Web Server. Tools For Working With Your Site IIS SEO Toolkit Expression Web Super Preview for side-by-side browser viewing. Super Preview for Internet Explorer (FREE tool that lets you view your site in multiple versions of IE side by side.) Windows Live Writer 2011  Check out WordPress Plugins for WLW: All-In-One SEO, Comment Management, Custom Fields, Title/Tagline editing) Microsoft Tech Plugins for WordPress Bing 404 Plugin for WordPress (Download) Bing Maps Plugins for WordPress (Silverlight Bing Maps, AJAX Bing Maps, Bing Maps Widget) Silverlight Gallery Plugin

WordPress + The Cloud

Do you have a lot of media files as part of your website? Podcasts? Videos? Big high resolution images? Those can add up on your bandwidth costs, especially on a low-end shared hosting account.  Perhaps you should consider hosting your media in the cloud!Read more at blogs.msdn.com

Uses of the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin for WordPress (Video)

Whenever we post things on a website the search engines index the page based on the address of that content. What happens if you move it? People will no longer be able to access it using your old link and the search engines will start fresh with the new page once (if?) they find it. This video shows you how you can use the Quick Page/Post Redirect to prevent losing referring traffic when you rename a permalink in WordPress. This plugin also has a number of great other uses, in fact I demonstrate how it was used to redirect old links from my Joomla based website to a WordPress based revision of the site as well. Don’t lose your SEO juice when you make changes, let your content be found.

See more at joesgonesocial.com

Armando’s wp-security Bookmarks

04 SEP 10 Theme Playground | 12 Clever Tips for Securing Your WordPress Site SAVE PEOPLE 32 No one is safe. The most you can do, and the smartest you can be, is to follow the steps I’ve outlined below. With any luck you’ll avoid any WordPress security issues in the future. TAGS SHARED wp-security

Pimp your wp-config.php | Digging into WordPress SAVE PEOPLE 227 Easily, the most important file in your WordPress installation is the wp-config.php file. It serves as your site’s base configuration file, controlling key aspects of WordPress’ functionality and enabling WordPress to do mission-critical stuff like connect to the database. Without wp-config.php, WordPress simply won’t work. So whenever you install WordPress, one of the first things to do is pimp your wp-config.php. TAGS SHARED wp-security

Easy PHP Blackhole Trap with WHOIS Lookup for Bad Bots • Perishable Press SAVE PEOPLE 163 In five easy steps, you can set up your own Blackhole to trap bad bots and protect your site from evil scripts, bandwidth thieves, content scrapers, spammers, and other malicious behavior TAGS SHARED wp-security

10 Useful WordPress Security Tweaks - Smashing Magazine SAVE PEOPLE 1123 Security has always been a hot topic. Offline, people buy wired homes, car alarms and gadgets to bring their security to the max. Online, security is important, too, especially for people who make a living from websites and blogs. In this article, we’ll show you some useful tweaks to protect your WordPress-powered blog. TAGS SHARED wp-security

Hardening WordPress « WordPress Codex SAVE PEOPLE 547 We will go through some common things you can do to keep your WordPress installation secure. TAGS SHARED wp-security Read more at www.delicious.com

I don’t even know what to say. I’d like to thank my God, parents, my wife, my kids, my clients, my college professors, that friend who first introduced me to the web, Al Gore for inventing it…

Obviously this isn’t a real certification…but IS hilarious! It’s a product of Matt Mullenweg’s recent public conversations with Chris Pearson, founder of Thesis, over what the WordPress GPL does and does not mean for theme frameworks built on top of it. See this Mixergy interview (with Andrew Warner) for a complete explanation from both gentlemen including the famous “three most important” quote.

By the way, Pearson did finally agree to a partial GPL with Thesis so all is well again.

A huge thank you to Matt for sending not only this certificate (sure to be framed) but some other WordPress swag along with it. Very cool to see that not only is he a coding genius and successful entrepreneur, but he’s got a fantastic sense of humor.

PS – Just for fun, here’s my appearance on Mixergy earlier this year. Read more at www.liftdevelopment.com

10 Most Popular Posts at Amplify.com

Today I was reviewing my stats for posts to see which content I produced was getting the most views. I was a little surprised by the most popular post that was related to the new menu feature in WordPress during the beta lead up to the release of WordPress 3. I am pleased that the resources for Amplify users made #2 because it is part of a curative effort on my part to improve the experience of new users on Amplify.com. Amazingly the #4 post is from yesterday. Anyone that knows me well will attest that I am a strong and loyal advocate to products and services that I find that work well and are supported by the producers. Ironically I woke up today to see that @scoblelizer had joined Amplify and posted a couple of thought updates. Thrilled to see Amplify getting some recognition and looking forward to Roberts take on it.  Here is the summary list and date they were published:

New Menu Feature in WordPress 3 makes it a much better CMS 4/5/2010 Resources for Amplify.com users or the curious 6/7/2010 Never miss another Amplify.com Community Chat Second… [Shortened] 7/24/2010 This is why I @amplifytheweb. 8/10/2010 Your chance to chat live with CEO @egoldstein of @amplif… [Shortened] 7/22/2010 Join @louisgray @egoldstein and the Amplify community … [Shortened] 6/16/2010 People you should follow on Amplify.com #ff #amplify 8/6/2010 Why I don’t like Zynga and Google sells out again 7/11/2010 Android Developers – All your Droid are Belong to Us 6/27/2010 I need your help again, tell me how I can help you (again). 7/30/2010 Read more at joesgonesocial.com

Joomla And WordPress: A Matter Of Mental Models

Open-source content management systems (CMS) are a large family of Web applications, but if we’re looking for stability, performance and average technical requirements, we’ll come up with a handful of options. In the past, choosing the “right” CMS was a matter of the project’s requirements, but now this is not completely valid because the paradigm of extensibility had driven the development of major CMS’ towards a model of core features that are extensible with plug-ins that fill virtually any requirement.

Picking the right CMS is then a matter of “mental models”: choosing the one that best fits our vision of how a Web application should work and what it should provide to users and administrators. In this article, we’ll explore the main difference in the mental models: of WordPress and Joomla for theming and extending their core.

WordPress and Joomla are two of the most popular open-source CMS’ around. They offer large and active developer communities and excellent documentation.

WordPress is the first choice among the designer community mostly because of its well-designed back end and wide availability of excellent themes.

Joomla, meanwhile, suffers from Mambo’s legacy, which was notorious for low performance and semantically incorrect output (such as nested tables for layout). But since the release of version 1.5, Joomla has a completely rewritten core, with improved extensibility and better HTML output.

One difference between WordPress and Joomla is their theming model. A website developer migrating from Joomla to WordPress might feel that the latter requires too much theme coding, while a developer moving the other way might feel that Joomla is less flexible and customizable. The reason for this is the different models on which the themes of these CMS’ are based. Read more at www.smashingmagazine.com