Google Fonts, WordPress 3.0 & 7 yrs of Powerful blogging!

1 Jun, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Customization

Fonts Directory & Font API

Font Directory

Not long ago, I wrote a post about how one can utilize font web services like Typekit & Fontmeup to improve the typography of the webpages. Although, in order to utilize the actual power of these services one needs to shell out money from their pockets. Well, in order to fight the issues of improving the typography of the web pages, Google has come up with Google Font Directory. This is made possible with the help of CSS3 that allows web designers to use fonts that are stored on the web.

Prior to this, we were using WP Cufón, a plugin that lets you use the Cufon technique to display various fonts on the web page with the help of javascript. If you are interested in knowing the working behind Cufon then check out this link. However, with the launch of Google Font API, one can easily use the fonts available in the Google Font Directory. Thanks to Adrian, who has created WP Google Fonts, a plugin already using the Font API. We are currently running this plugin to improve the headings [h1, h2, h3....] of our posts and pages.

3.0 RC1 is out! Expect the final version soon

WordPress 3.0 - The ultimate one!

3.0 - The Ultimate One!

Last week, 3.0 RC1 was released. RC1 is supposed to be almost the final product where the bugs are generally not available. You can take version RC1 as the last step towards releasing the stable version. Well, it stable enough that it may get released as the final version, however with more than 20 million people using , it is a possibility that there may be more bugs that can be reported. We’ve already discussed about the upcoming and much awaited features like Custom Menus, improved custom post types, merger of MU as mult-site in WordPress 3.0, so I wonder if its necessary to talk about it again?

Although, If you are testing the RC and come across a bug, you can:

Happy BirthDay !

Cake with Logo

On 27th May, turned 7! I’ve been late in wishing a happy birthday! Although, I did read somewhere – Its Better to be late than never! And I’m still wondering that what would be the apt gift for this occasion, may be you can suggest me something!

Its been 7 years and has grown from  b2/cafelog fork into a powerful CMS that is competing with the likes of Drupal, Joomla and other established content management systems. I’m sure writing this blog post would have been nostalgic for Matt. He shared that there are more than 1500 developers who are actively contributing in the development of and I must say that its an achievement! Motivating people to contribute together and to build a master piece like is really a commendable job and they all deserve millions of thanks from every user.

I remember that how I liked Blogger over in its early days, however as it was embraced by developers and I learnt new stuff, I realized that if I want to be a professional blogger, then it has to be and nothing else! Aha! not only for Matt, its kinda nostalgic for me too :)

I would like to once again wish Matt, team Automattic, those 1500 developers, plugin developers, theme developers [;)], those who use , those who spread the word about , in fact anyone who loves for making this a success!

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WordPress itself as forums or should bbPress be a plugin?

4 May, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Customization, bbPress

Some of you will be surprised that why exactly is the post not about the linux web server setup for blogs. The reason is that one of my very good friend Shridhar Pare, owner of Xisto Network gave me a visit. As you can imagine we had long discussions about web, web hosting and forums where the knowledge lives. This is one of the reason that why I’m writing about Forums and not writing about hosting.

In my earlier post, I’ve discussed that how bbPress should be a plugin for WordPress. While going through my Reader, I came across a post by Dougal Campbell where he asks the question that if users like the idea of using itself as forum! Even Justin Tadlock has dwelled upon this idea before and has created a mockup about his idea [via Patrick Daly]-

I’d thought about this before and I completely believe that it would be fantastic to use as the forum. It is easily possible to create a theme for that looks like a forum, P2 Theme is a great example where the full editor is made available directly in the theme, which is one of the major features of forums. Lets see that how can provide the major features and where it lacks -

Forum Features that can provide

  1. Forums post can be made through posts.
  2. Categories can be the Forum sections.
  3. Comments can be the forum replies.
  4. Member profiles is part of by default.
  5. Fantastic editor that lets users easily share photos and embed videos [remember: WordPress 2.9.2 has oEmbed support]

Of course, there are other features that you can have with the help of plugins that are available for and here are some of them that will always be useful in case you decide to use as forum -

  1. Akismet can help protect you from Spam posts.
  2. W3 Total Cache can ensure that there will be less burden on server.
  3. Gravatar can be used in place of Avatars.
  4. All in one seo pack can take care of the SEO of the forums.
  5. Then there are plethora of plugins related to social media that can help you in building forums.

Forum features where lacks

  1. There aren’t possibilities of creating private forums.
  2. Membership level management is not as powerful as one would like
  3. Private messaging systems

Well these are some of those features that aren’t in and the trouble of all this will only be experienced by those forum administrators who have larger forums otherwise major features are already covered by . There are plugins like SimplePress and BuddyPress that can give you more advanced forum features, in fact SimplePress is a plugin that converts into a good forum system. I haven’t played around with it so I wouldn’t be in a position to comment on the performance of it however, with the long list of features, I was certainly impressed.

What do you think about using as forums? Will you prefer your favorite CMS for running forums or will you prefer to use commercial solutions like Invision Power Board, vbulletin etc or will you be interested in using an open source solution for the forums?

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WordPress 3.0 – The Ultimate One!

9 Apr, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Customization

Nearly a month is left before long awaited and much talked about 3.0 comes out. However, we are seeing a flurry posts on 3.0. Most of the bloggers are writing about this upcoming master piece, so I thought that I should write something about 3.0 too as Beta 1 has already been released. There are lot of new features in this release and I thought a small walkthrough won’t be bad!

Video for the Lazy Fellows!

Highlight Features of 3.0

I’m sure now you’ll be convinced that you’d want to upgrade to 3.0 right away, however it won’t be available till next month i.e. May 2010. Although there are few other things that have changed in 3.0 and lets have a look at them -

Other Important Features in 3.0

1. Choose username & password at installation – As we have already discussed that keeping “admin” as the username is not cool but it makes life easier for hackers. To avoid this, 3.0 will let you choose your desired username during installation itself! Thanks WP Cookies for the image.

custom-username-password.jpg

2. Custom Backgrounds made easy – 3.0 will support custom background for themes. By adding only 1 line of code in functions.php of the theme, users will be able to change the background of the blog with lot of ease! This means that any user will be able to literally change the look of their blog in couple of clicks.

3. Introducing Super Admin – Till now, “Administrator” role was the top user and it was able to do all the tasks. However, now there is a new user role i.e. “Super Administrator”. This new user role will be able to manage everything from individual blog features to multi-site features.

Well, there are hell lot of new additions or changes that anyone would love to list in a blog post, however its practically impossible to do so. Some are even way too difficult to explain – however those who are interested in the nitty gritty of the development can head over here and check out the current development process.

I must say that I’m UBER EXCITED about the release of 3.0. One of the key reason is that 3.0 will help theme & plugin developers a lot. Its shaping up as a mature CMS and it certainly helps us in faster development. You won’t believe, I literally wish every day that it gets released ASAP! What are your thoughts about 3.0? Will it be able to compete with Drupal anytime in near future?

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Use Content Delivery Network to load blog faster!

5 Feb, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Customization

nfs-need-for-speed.jpg

In last post, I told you about Content Delivery Networks and how to use them along with . Although, now I can suggest that one should certainly use Content Delivery Network as I’ve experienced the change in speed myself! Yesterday, I implemented CDN on this blog and the notice is considerable. The pages that used to take around 9 seconds to load are now loading in about 5 seconds. That’s a decent amount of difference! Now, I would tell you some of the questions that I had in my mind and I’m sure that you will be having them too -

Is it a costly affair?

Content delivery networks are considered to be costly, however surprisingly they are not. Most of the CDN providers run on Pay as you go pricing model and that lets you take control of things. In order to run the test, I signed up with MaxCDN, they have a fantastic offer – they are giving away 1 TB for $ 10. Of course, this is a trial run and a customer will be charged near about $100 for the next 1 Tb. Anyway, I’m not trying to promote any CDN provider, I went for MaxCDN for couple of reasons -

1. It was cheaper than other CDN providers.
2. It has been referred by Mashable, Joost de Valk, W3 Total Cache and I think that was more than enough for me.
3. 1 TB will run for months, there is no monthly payment, so I don’t have anything to lose.

Is it really hard to setup the CDN?

I wasn’t sure about this answer because there wasn’t anyone to tell me that how should I go about it. However, while playing with it – I realized that it is way to simple to setup the CDN. Of course, it would have been a nightmare without the W3 Total Cache. I just don’t have enough words for the praise of this plugin, still I would try to sum up in 2 words – Simply Marvelous!

So what’s the procedure?

I did the setup on MaxCDN and therefore, I would mention the steps for MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache settings only. If you plan to use any other CDN then you may have to refer to their support. I’m assuming that most of the CDN providers will have similar options only. Anyway, here’s how I completed the task -

1. Create a Pull Zone on CDN provider. In this (screenshot) most of the settings are generic, the only place where I got confused was Origin Server URL section. Anyway, I used the following settings and created the pull zone.

maxcdn-pull-zone.jpg

2. Asked WPWebhost to change the CName record as asked by MaxCDN. In many cases, Cname can be changed by you only, however WPWebhost doesn’t give the direct option to its users. However, support team was pretty quick in making the change. After the change, I waited for about 10-12 hrs for propagation. I tried to check http://cdn.blogdesignstudio.com and once I saw the whole website load without issues, I thought that it must be the right time to make changes in W3 Total Cache settings.

3. In the General Tab of W3 Total Cache, make sure that CDN should be enabled and the type should be selected as Origin Pull (mirror) [as shown in the screenshot]

cdn-settings.jpg

4. In the CDN Settings tab of W3 Total Cache, you can configure various options related to what you want to use through CDN and what exactly you want to serve using your own web host. What I changed was just one value; ensure that you need to just put the value of Custom CDN Domain (of the first screenshot) in “Replace Default Hostname With”. Here’s the screenshot of what I have -

cdn-settings2.jpg

That’s it! I just saved the settings and everything was working neatly for me. If you get decent traffic and want to ensure that your blog loads faster than others, then you should surely use a CDN. In the end, I can say that I’m happy with what I’ve achieved – I’ll be posting more techniques to ensure that we also contribute in making the web faster!

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What is Content Delivery Network & how to use it with WordPress?

1 Feb, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Customization

What is Content Delivery Network?

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, so as to avoid bottleneck near that server. Content types include web objects, downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications, real time media streams, and other components of internet delivery (DNS, routes, and database queries). [via Wikipedia]

Well, I’m sure it sounds alien to some of you. However, I can try and simplify this for you. Let’s take an example – You upload a 2 Mb file on a server that is located in United States, one of your visitor comes to the website from UK and at the same time another from US only. Who’ll get the faster download speed of that file? Of course, it’ll be the US guy. That is how a normal scenario runs. In CDN, a normal file is replicated on multiple servers (shown as middle servers in the image below) placed across the world. So, if a UK guy will be trying to access the same MP3 file, then he’ll get it delivery through UK server only and that will considerably reduce the page load speed.
cdnetwork.jpg

[Image credit - netdna]

Should we use CDN for a blog?

As we found out that CDN helps in reducing the speed. However, the question is that is the speed difference considerable enough? There have been many bloggers who have done their tests and found huge difference in the speed. Joost de Valk found out that his blog pages started loading in 2 sec. as compared to 7 seconds prior CDN’s application.

Well, that certainly sounds effective! Other than that, Dave Ward gives us a tip where we should use Google’s CDN based hosted javascript libraries to improve the blog page load speed. Other than that, Yahoo also suggests website owners to use CDN to improve the page load speed. Well, this only means that it makes sense to use CDN. Now, the big question arises -

How to use CDN with ?

Of course, if you just want use the ’s CDN based Javascript library then Dave Ward’s link will be more than enough for your help. However, if you want to make proper use of CDN, you’ll have to shell out some money from your pocket. Thankfully established companies like Amazon, MaxCDN, RackSpace and various others offer CDN services, you can always choose the one that suits your pocket.

Once you’ve decided the CDN provider, then you can use its power with the help of W3 Total Cache -

W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

[Click the image for bigger version]

So, as you can see with the help of W3 Total Cache you can easily make use of power of CDN’s and it should certainly help in improving the page load speed. Are you going to apply CDN on your blog?

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WordPress Security Service for free!

18 Jan, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Customization

secure-wordpress.jpg
(Image Credit – ClickonF5)

Since few months, I’ve been hearing lot of horror stories regarding the compromises that bloggers have to deal with. It’s open source nature, what has been the boon for , is now standing against it (For Hardcore Open-source lovers – I am in favor of Open-source all the way and that statement of mine should not be taken as personal attack). There have been many blogs that weren’t using the latest version of are now infected with some sort of worm or some hacker gets access to the web server and misuses your precious resources. There are cases where they even harm the website by effecting its search engine rankings.

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Widgetizing Your Non-Widget WordPress Theme

8 Jan, 2010 | Igor
Topics: Wordpress Customization

wordpress-widgets.jpg
(Image credit - Clockless)

Many of the promoted are described as being widget-ready. Widget-ready theme is a theme that has widgetized areas which allows you to dynamically manipulate these areas in a simple drag-and-drop fashion. Widgetized sidebar is another way to describe the same thing because most of the are used in the sidebars of the . However, sometimes you find a theme that you really like, but discover that it’s not ready. Don’t give up just yet, making widget-ready really isn’t as difficult as you might think. Follow the steps in this article and we will teach you how to Widgetize a theme making it a drag-drop widget theme.

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