WordPress For Windows

Microsoft has always been criticized for not adhering to Open standards and not being active in Open-source community. However, it looks like Microsoft has tried a fair bit of things to ensure that their products work well with popular web applications. I personally believe that Microsoft’s web servers aren’t good enough for PHP/MySQL driven websites and moreover, the security concern is one of the biggest factors to avoid Microsoft Windows. When Linux servers aren’t safe then no doubt, it’ll be a bigger pain to manage Windows Servers for security.

Security is another topic, coming back to the point of Microsoft & WordPress, I was a bit surprised to see how Microsoft has bundled WordPress in Web Platform Installer along with various other popular web applications like Drupal, Joomla etc. Check out the list of application in the gallery. Although, I was happy to see that Microsoft has made this move, this should give confidence to those who find working with Linux web servers and web applications a bit difficult.

Microsoft & WordPress technologies shake hands!

1. WordPress on SQL Server : With the help of IIS 7, SQL Server Express and WordPress on SQL Server distribution, its possible to run WordPress easily on Windows Vista, Windows 7 etc. It’s not the simplest way to install it, however this great guide by Zach Skyles Ownes should take you home.

2. SilverLight Gallery Plugin – Microsoft has been trying hard to make SilverLight popular among developers and end users. This plugin can surely help them achieve this goal. If this plugin gets adopted by bloggers, then the end users will have to install SilverLight in order to ensure that they can view the image gallery on their browsers.

3. SilverLight Bing Maps – This plugin integrates SilverLight & Bing Maps with WordPress. This plugin lets bloggers to put their location with interactive maps like Google Maps on their blog.

4. Windows Azure Storage for WordPress – This plugin lets WordPress users to store their media files and static files on Windows Azure platform whose more popular alternatives are Amazon Web Services or Rackspace Cloud Files.

Why is Microsoft doing this?

The first question that comes in mind that why is Microsoft trying to make its technologies work with WordPress, Drupal or other PHP/MySQL driven web applications. Well, Zach has already answered this question -

I’m a PHP-bred Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, and I love the fact that PHP now runs great on Windows, SQL Server, Windows Azure and SQL Azure.  It’s exciting to see how Microsoft technology can light up WordPress, whether it’s through Silverlight image gallery plugins, Bing Maps integration or future opportunities with technologies like our information service, Dallas.

Business sense says that Microsoft is using these popular web applications to make its existing or new technologies popular amongst end users, bloggers and developers. However, the interesting part will be to see that how many bloggers & developers [the ones not sold to Microsoft's technology] will be keen in adopting these? I personally welcome this move by Microsoft, although practically I doubt that I would use any of these technologies as I’m already comfortable with the setup that I currently have. What do you think about this move from Microsoft?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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From last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to ensure that how WordPress can be secured enough to avoid any kind of malware attack. In the course, I found lot of new information about securing web applications and realized that how small and little settings can make and break things. While my struggle to know more about security was going on, I came across the launch post of VaultPress, a blog backup and protection service from Automattic.

Please note that the service has been announced in beta and is available for only few users. One can apply for the invite over here. It’ll be a premium service and while signing up you can also mention that how much are you comfortable in paying for this kind of a service. If I were to decide the price, I would keep it around $10/month. I’ve not tested the service myself, however we could gather all the information about VaultPress from the coverage it has received from the biggies like TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Silicon Alley Insider, VaultPress blog and finally my favorite WordPress Tavern.

Features of VaultPress

1. Focused on WordPress.org users – WordPress.com is one of the most powerful and secure blog services around. However, same can’t be said for the users who use self hosted WordPress version on their own servers. There have been many horror stories in the past where many self hosted WordPress installs got infected from malware and much hoopla was created. VaultPress has been designed to work with self hosted WordPress to ensure that they can also get the quality backup and security service to avoid any mishap.

2. Real Time & Complete Backups – VaultPress is an all-in-one backup package. It will backup posts, categories, tags and rest of the data along with themes, files etc. Jeff @ WordPress Tavern reckons that VaultPress will face stiff competition from Backupify, BackupBuddy and other backup plugins. According to Matt, founder of WordPress, VaultPress will be able to make the backup instantly as soon as one would publish the changes on the blog or website.

3. Safeguards against Zero-Day Attacks – This is one feature that I would be most interested in as this is one feature that no one else is offering. VaultPress will be able to safeguard your blog against the Zero-Day Attacks focused towards WordPress. It will also monitor your site to alert you against any suspicious or hacking activity.

Well, keeping these features in mind. We can install few plugins that can help us achieve similar level of protection and that too free of cost. We just need to ensure that we configure the plugins in the right manner. Here’s the guide …

Get VaultPress Security Features Before Hand!

1. Automatic WordPress Backup – This little plugin saves all the important files including themes, plugins and database on Amazon S3. The plugin allows you to schedule the backup of the database or just files or if you want you can ask for the complete backup as well. The plugin will send you the confirmation messages over the email, so you will constantly be aware of the happenings. Amazon S3 can be used as a backup service for your blog’s important files and believe me in most of the cases this will not cost you more than $5/month. Only in case of large publishers this cost can be more than $15/month i.e. the indicative price of VaultPress. By the way, Amazon S3 can help you in improving the site load time as well, don’t forget to check our guide on how to optimize the WordPress blogs.

2. WordPress Firewall – This nifty plugin monitors changes in the files, attacks based on various Zero-day patterns. Of course, this is not the ultimate solution however, our experience has been pretty neat with this plugin. It did alert me whenever I tried to make any change in the theme files or plugin files. It didn’t allow the change until and unless I approved the change. Make sure that if you are planning to install this, then you may get lot of notifications. So keep the settings appropriate or use GMail filters for ease!

3. OSSEC – OSSEC is an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System. It performs log analysis, file integrity checking, policy monitoring, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response. Of course, this is something which will not be as easy as installing WordPress plugins, however investing a little time on this can ensure that you’ll have real peace of mind in future!! There is enough documentation available for avoiding initial hiccups!

Of course, the first two plugins won’t ensure that you are getting instant and real time backups. However, a regular and weekly backup will ensure that you’ll be able to bring your blog back from a situation where nothing will look nice in the world. I hope you understand the point that i’m trying to make here! If you install OSSEC then I’m sure one could easily compare this setup with something that VaultPress will offer in future!

Isn’t it neat that you can enjoy the VaultPress like features even before you can get a hand on it or if VaultPress looks out of budget!

The success of VaultPress will depend on the following factors; 1) what will be the cost involved for end users and 2) how effective its monitoring system will be. I’m sure the takers of this service will be much more than any other similar service as it directly comes out from the makers of WordPress. However, personally I’ll be willing to test other services if they offer similar features at a competitive price. What are your initial thoughts on VaultPress.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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[Image Credit - Hongkiat ]

Some of the most successful blogs that we see on Technorati Top 100 blogs are multi-authored blogs and most of them are powered by WordPress. Most of you can imagine that if running a successful single author blog can be a daunting task then how difficult it will be to manage a blog that has multiple authors. Be it advertising, blog metrics or logging activity there are various factors that a webmaster has to look into and with help of these plugins, it’ll only become easier -

Must Install Plugins for Multi-Author Blogs

1. Author Advertising Plugin – This plugin allows blog admins to create a revenue sharing program utilising one of the many advertising programs out there i.e Yahoo, Google Adsense, Amazon, Allposters etc. It can also be used as a banner manager, author photo/website widgets etc.

2. Members – Members is a plugin that extends your control over your blog. It’s a user, role, and content management plugin that was created to make WordPress a more powerful CMS. The plugin is created with a components-based system — you only have to use the features you want. The foundation of the plugin is its extensive role and capability management system. This is the backbone of all the current features and planned future features.

3. Blog Metrics – This plugin displays number of posts per month, average number of words per post and various other metrics in the dashboard. The reports are generated of overall blog statistics and is extremely useful in multi-author blogs as the reports are generated for individual authors as well.

4. Co-Authors Plus -Allows multiple authors to be assigned to a Post or Page via the search-as-you-type inputs. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s posts page and feed. New template tags allow listing of co-authors. Editors and Administrators may assign co-authors to a post. Additionally, co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is usual).

5. Author Exposed – Author Exposed is a simple WordPress plugin that allows your visitors easy and elegant way to see more details about the post author. This plugin pulls the author’s details from the profile and is linked to a hidden layer (div). By clicking on the author link the layer pop’s up with author info gathered from the profile page, plus gravatar photo, if author email is assigned with one.

6. Quick Notes On WP Dashboard – If you blog with multiple persons, you can leave a message for the others. In the plugin file, you can determine, what capabilities a user must have to read the notes, and what capabilities he must have to write/modify them. By default, Authors and higher can write, and every registered user can read. Great Add-on for true collaboration.

7. BuddyPress – BuddyPress makes the whole WordPress as a social networking site. It literally adds Facebook like features in a WordPress install. It’s a great plugin for a blog with multiple authors.

8. WordPress to Syslog – WPsyslog2 is a global log plugin for WordPress. It keeps track of all system events and log them to syslog. It tracks events such as new posts, new profiles, new users, failed logins, logins, logouts, etc. It also tracks the latest vulnerabilities and alerts if any of them are triggered, becoming very useful when integrated with a log analysis tool, like OSSEC HIDS.

9. Future Calendar – It adds a simple month-by-month calendar that shows all the months you have future posts for (and the current month no matter what), it highlights the days you have posts for, and as an added bonus if you click a day the Post Timestamp boxes change to that day, month and year (although it doesn’t check the edit timestamp box to avoid accidental changes).

10. User Photo – Allows a user to associate a profile photo with their account through their “Your Profile” page. Admins may add a user profile photo by accessing the “Edit User” page. Uploaded images are resized to fit the dimensions specified on the options page; a thumbnail image correspondingly is also generated. User photos may be displayed within a post or a comment to help identify the author.

11. Post by Author – This plugin will show the last X posts by the current author either at the bottom of every post, or where you manually specify in each post. Using the built-in options page, you can choose the number of posts to show, set the header text, choose to show the post dates, select the format of the date, and choose whether or not to include the current post in the list.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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I am sure, I don’t need to explain anything about Spam over here. Blog spam is nothing new and there have been already many articles written about it. However, I still get questions like “What is the best strategy to avoid spam comments?” Just to kick start things, I would like to mention the definition that has been given in everybody’s favorite website i.e. WikiPedia -

Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.

How to fight comment spam

There are various plugins although in my four years of experience as professional blogger, I’ve come across only handful of plugins that have done wonderful job for me. They have been shared by lots of experienced bloggers over and over again and here I am, who would like to share it with you one more time!

1. Akismet – This wonderful service from Automattic has been consistently helping thousands of bloggers in fighting blog spam. Not only it is available for WordPress, it has been extended for various other platforms like Movable Type, Drupal etc. There is no reason, why I would not suggest this plugin to any person who is using WordPress.

2. WP-Spam Free – Scott Allen has rightly described it as an Extremely Powerful Anti-Spam Plugin! Its so powerful that it literally makes your blog secure from all the comment spam. Although, this plugin is infamous for using extra resources from server. If you have a high traffic blog and get lots of spam comments, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t be using this plugin. Personally, its my favorite among all the plugins that I’m listing over here.

3. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam – Another wonderful plugin for fighting spam on blogs. It not only helps to fight blog comment spam. It also can be extended to fight automated registrations and automated contact form submissions. This plugin uses a familiar trick of fighting comment spam i.e. CAPTCHA verification. It has lots of configuration options and if you don’t want to rely on automatic anti-spam plugins like Akismet & WP-Spam Free then this plugin will easily serve the purpose for you. [Plugin Homepage]

[Photo Credit - ScoopDog]
4. Bad Behavior – This wonderful script has been developed to fight against spam bots. It’s not specific to WordPress and is available for other content management systems. Its pretty light on servers and has been made available on plethora of CMSes. It has done a wonderful job in keeping this blog spam free from long time and will continue to do so!

5. reCAPTCHA – reCAPTCHA is a service that is used by thousands of popular websites to fight spam bots. The service can be easily integrated in a WordPress blog with the help of this plugin. I like this service/plugin because it definitely has proven its effectiveness to fight the spam bots and also because it helps in digitizing various books. Here’s what they have to say about digitizing the books part -

While the world is in the process of digitizing books, sometimes certain words cannot be read. reCAPTCHA uses a combination of these words, further distorts them, and then constructs a CAPTCHA image. After a ceratin percentage of users solve the ‘uknown’ word the same way it is assumed that it is the correct spelling of the word. This helps digitize books, giving users a reason to solve reCAPTCHA forms.

I hope that you’ll find these plugins useful enough (just the way I have) to keep you blog spam free!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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WordPress is the best blogging platform and there is no doubt about that, other than that it is also becoming the first choice CMS (content management system) for corporates too. One of the major reason for the same is that WordPress is pretty simple and even though it has got less inbuilt features, there are thousands of plugins that are available for free and extend the it to match the existing CMS. It’s simplicity attracts thousands of developers and is one of the fastest growing CMS at the moment.

Because of this simplicity offered by WordPress, there are many developers who create high quality plugins, however many plugin authors develop the plugin whose code quality is not up to the mark and thus causes issue. We at Blog Design Studio have faced many issues while integrating various plugins in our themes and we always felt the need of a repository that has listed only high quality plugins. I’m sure that the team and Incsub must have faced the same problem and thus in order to address this issue, they’ve launched an app store called WP Plugins.

WordPress plugin developers can upload their plugins on this WordPress powered site and allows them to sell them to users. Plugin authors get the option of selling the plugins for one time fee or as subscription based offer that gives users the access for support and future upgrades.

My opinion about WP Plugins

There has been a wonderful conversation going on at the TechCrunch’s post about this App Store, where there are mixed reactions for this particular service. There are some hard core fans (open-source fans) who didn’t like the idea of this App Store, however if I were to give my opinion, I would say this idea is fantastic as this particular option allows plugin developers to develop high quality plugins without worrying about marketing, selling options. Other than that, users will also be able to access high quality plugins at one single place. It definitely is a win-win situation for everyone, however, the idea will only flourish or will be helpful for users only if there will be enough plugin developers who’d sign up for this initiative and not launch their own app stores in future.

Although, I do agree that they should mention that they aren’t affiliated with WordPress! There are some people who just don’t get it by looking at the site and seeing no logo of Automattic.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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The company’s name is After The DeadLine and as I said earlier that this service/plugin actually proof reads your blog posts and tells you if you’ve made spelling or grammatical mistakes or not. After The DeadLine has been already integrated in WordPress.com & is available as a free plugin for WordPress.org users.

The bad thing about it is that – I deliberately made few grammatical mistakes while writing this blog posts and it couldn’t pick up even a single one, although the good thing is that this plugin is intelligent enough and as announced by Matt – it will learn as more and more people will start using it.

I would suggest that bloggers should install this plugin and use it before publishing their posts as not only this will help bloggers like me (who don’t have English as part of their culture). Of course, proof reading of posts is possible if people use expensive software like MS Word or Apple Pages, however not everyone can afford those software, so I’m sure that this free plugin will surely help them in improving their writing style and will ensure that there will be far less errors in their blog posts.

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Apart from that, Jeff Chandler posted the idea of having bbPress as WordPress plugin. I would definitely love to see a bbPress plugin for WordPress or a bbPress lite plugin with WordPress. The plugin should allow bloggers to create small forums along with the blog and should allow those forums posts to be displayed in the blog as blog posts based on the blogger’s discretion. There are few other bloggers who appreciated the idea; however, Chip Bennett and few others are not happy with the idea as this kind of plugin will make database heavier.

What are your thoughts about having bbPress Lite as a plugin for WordPress? Do you think it’ll make life easier for those who are not technically sound – I’m sure we can have many ideas floating around this topic.

Note – There is no plugin in the making and this was just an idea that came in Jeff’s mind and I just think that it’s a wonderful idea. May be Movable Type community would be interested in such kind of suggestion.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Anyway, after recovering from the first little shock of the day – I realized that the link showed the UPCOMING ROLE MANAGEMENT PLUGIN for WordPress. From the looks of the preview, it looks like an amazing and easy to use role management plugin and I’m sure that many WordPress developers along with many User Generated Content based WordPress blogs will find this plugin pretty helpful.

Here’s how the plugin looks like -

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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We are WordPress theme developers and have provided free themes (not as much as others have, although we plan to release many free themes in coming time) and we understand that how good it feels, when someone appreciates your work by either giving donation or if they just give some exposure to us by writing about our theme. I guess this week is my confession week and in this post, I would accept my fault of not saying thanks to the developers as much as I could have by writing about their wonderful work as often as I could have. After reading the post, I thought that it is a good reminder of saying thanks and fixing up my mistake, so here I would like to say thanks to all the developers who have contributed in this wonderful community in anyway!

And now some special thanks to these wonderful people whose plugins I’ve been using since long time -

Matt Mullenweg – Do I need to say anything about him? Thanks for giving us WordPress and lot more!

Michael Torbert – I would like to thank Michael for creating All-in-one-seo pack. I’m sure this plugin has made life simpler for the bloggers tremendously as not only it helps in taking care of the onsite SEO areas.

Oliver Seidel – Thanks to Oliver who created cforms plugin. I don’t think that there is any other plugin that will match this wonderful form plugin ever. This plugin powers both the forms that you see on this blog. It is so extensive in features that I used to wonder if I will be ever able to understand this plugin. No wonder that why Oliver (not the plugin developer but our lead designer/coder) has fallen in love with this plugin!

Alex Rabe – I guess Oliver (our designer) was absolutely right when he said that NextGEN Gallery plugin is a CMS in itself! Alex has created this master piece as it literally serves most of the purpose of any gallery requirement that you will have. At one stage bloggers found ways to integrate Gallery 2 (Gallery 3 beta is also out) with WordPress, however I’m sure that after this plugin, not many would like to go through the pain of integrating both these brilliant software.

Ozh – Another person for whom all the words of appreciation will be less for the amount of work that he has done for the WordPress community. You should check out his contribution in the area of WordPress over here and you’d know that why I said so in the first line!

Rob Marsh – Rob has made some of the most wonderful plugins for WordPress. Similar Posts is one of them and I’ve been using it on my blog since early days. I noticed that Rob hasn’t posted on his blog since long, I wonder if we all got late to thank him for all his efforts.

Peter Liebetrau – Peter came as saviour for all of those who were worried about the memory usage of Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin. He created Simple Google Sitemap plugin and after the release of this plugin, I immediately shifted to it. Not that I don’t like Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin by Arne Brachhold, it’s just that it was slightly heavier on the server and I wanted to free up the space. In fact, I would like to thank Arne for creating that wonderful plugin as it offers many more features that no other plugin offers. Thanks to both of you guys!

Austin Matzko – I would like to thank Austin for creating many wonderful plugins that you can download from here. I’m sure that your automatic backup plugin must have saved thousands of bloggers from any calamity!

Lester Chan – Thanks a million for creating so many plugins for WordPress. Not only it has made life simple for bloggers, many of your plugins help WordPress become a complete CMS! I’m sure that no CMS will be complete if it doesn’t have poll functionality.

Scott Allen – I’ve already covered WP-SpamFree plugin by Scott on this blog, however the amount of peace this plugin has given me is beyond my ability to explain it in words. It is by far my favorite plugin along with Akismet to fight the comment spam.

Antonio Perez – Inserting YouTube videos was always a pain, however with the help of Antonio’s plugin; it became super easy to include videos from YouTube but from MetaCafe too (there are some good videos on it too).

Apart from that I would like to thank my friends Keith & Rajesh for developing WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin and Platinum SEO pack respectively.

In the end, I would like to thank my buddy – Oliver (our designer/coder for wordpress themes) for all your efforts in building Blog Design Studio! It wouldn’t have been possible without you at all!

I think this is the least minimum we all bloggers can do to encourage these wonderful developers for building a great community around WordPress and making it more and more usable with the help of their plugins and themes. Thanks once again to all of you!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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There are various threats for WordPress and they can be easily become part of your WordPress blog with the help of plugins, themes and through various security vulnerabilities. To counter this, Sergej Muller has created a wonderful plugin that acts as an Antivirus for WordPress (english translation)!

(Photo Credit – Nirmal)

This plugin scans your WordPress theme for any sort of malicious injections and vulnerabilities on daily basis and lets you run the scan manually too. This is definitely a must have plugin for all of us as it’ll not only keep our blog safe but will also ensure that no other visitor will get infected from any such malicious activity.

Thanks Keith.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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