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.

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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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11 Must install plugins for multi-authored WordPress blogs

31 Mar, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Plugins

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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 . 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 , it’ll only become easier -

Must Install 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, 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 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.

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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 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.

author-exposed.jpg

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 as a social networking site. It literally adds Facebook like features in a install. It’s a great plugin for a blog with multiple authors.

8. WordPress to SyslogWelcome to the Home of OSSEC.jpg – WPsyslog2 is a global log plugin for . 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.

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11 ultimate resources to help you become WordPress champ!

19 Feb, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Blogging Resources

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One of the core reason for the popularity of is the community around it. There are thousands of fans and supporters who have created free themes, free and most importantly thousands of tutorials, documentations to make it simpler for you to understand and use ! A simple search will ensure that you’d get answer to most of you problems, so we though of listing the best resources about for you – don’t forget to subscribe them in your feed reader!

Official Channel for news & updates about

1. WordPress Development blog – Official blog about the latest development happening around open-source application.
2. Latest news about WordPress.com – Official blog about the latest happenings around .com (i.e. the hosted service).
3. Planet WordPress – An aggregator of some of the handpicked blogs by the Automattic team. It aggregates posts from various blogs owned by Automattic, core developers and some community blogs.

Blogs from community

1. Weblog Tools Collection

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A multi-author blog that has been delivering high quality content from long time now. The focus of the blog is to talk about tools that help bloggers in running their blogs. It mostly covers , themes and tools related to since has become the synonym for “best blogging software”.

2. Pro Blog Design

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Another multi-author blog that has been getting extremely popular and has a thriving community around itself. This blog publishes lots of related articles. Although, its just not about . This blog also tells you that how you can design a better blog yourself. There are various resourceful posts that ensure that you will always pointed to the best of the best stuff!

3. Cats Who Code

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A blog by Jean-Baptiste Jung that features super quality posts every now and then. Blog’s primary focus is web development, however it features posts on more than often. The blog is so good that it is part of Smashing Network and I’m sure a quick look by you at the content quality will convince you to include it in your feed reader. You may also want to follow WP Recipes, a focused blog by the same person.

4. WPHacks

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Unfortunately, this blog hasn’t been updated since December 2010. However, it has got some of the best hacks that you’d ever come across. We even designed and customized this based blog with Kyle Eslick, owner of WPHacks. In simple words, WPHacks’ archive is a true gold mine when it comes to .

5. WPscoop & WPVote.

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WPscoop & WPVote are digg like services for related stuff. If you have a blog that is about or if you have written a tutorial, hack or a post related to then feel free to submit the links to these niche bookmarking services. This will not only help generate traffic for your blog but they also act as a great resource to find out what all you can achieve with .

6. WP Beginner.

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WP Beginner is one of my favorite blogs when it comes to . Its constantly updated and has been truly focused on making easy for the beginners to adopt. The guides in the blog are very simple to understand and have been written to ensure that even the new users won’t find it difficult to follow the instructions.

7. WP Tavern.

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We’ve already featured a great interview by Jeff Chandler, Guru behind WPTavern. Even though, we’ve listed this as 7th blog in this list, I’m sure if you’d ask from any lover – they’d easily place this blog as number one resource at the moment. Jeff ensures that you get all the scoop and information around on this blog and thats why it becomes one of our favorite destination as well.

8. WP Engineer.

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WPEngineer is yet another blog that rocks. It features pretty neat articles on how to customize according to the way you want. This blog will definitely be liked by budding developers as the posts are focused towards editing themes. So if you have a brave heart and love to play around with tech stuff, then you’d surely fall in love with this blog.

If by any chance you think we’ve missed a worthy blog on the topic of – please let us know about it and we’d happy to include it in this list. If you liked this post, then don’t forget to share it with others!

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7 Tools from Google that save life of business owners!

13 Feb, 2010 | mayank
Topics: web design

google-god.jpg

[image credit : LTSeo]

For hundreds and thousands of businesses, the term “ is God” is true. It helps business owners to generate their living-hood and the best part is that they ensure that it can help in every possible way and that too with ease! provides various tools that help webmasters in ranking your website well in ’s search engine index. Here are some of them -

Google Adwords

To start with a commercial product, Adwords is the program that helps you in generating targeted traffic for your website. It lets you target the visitors from every possible manner. You can target visitors specific from a city, state, country and who are searching for specific terms. This is now considered to be de-facto of getting the most targeted traffic!

Google Adsense

If Adwords is for business owners to get targeted visitors, Adsense is the program that helps business owners in making money from the visitors they get on their website. I’m sure that there would be no one on the internet who wouldn’t have seen those ads. Well, there are business who’ve made millions out of it!

Google Analytics

How many people are visiting my website? Where are they coming from? Whey are they going to? Well, there are whole lot of questions like these that get answered by Analytics, one of the most powerful tool given for free by ! It integrates with Adwords & Adsense to give us the overall picture of the traffic of the website!

Google Webmaster Tools

GWT is one tool that tells you if there are any broken links on your website. If is able to crawl your website to include in the index or not. It gives the ability to control the speed of Bot’s visit, finds out if your website is infected from malware. It also tell you that if your website is loading slow for users. Isn’t that a must have a tool?

Google Keyword Tool

keyword tool is a true gem! As a business owner, you can find out that what exactly visitors are searching for. With the correct strategy, a business owner can easily get their website ranked for the right keywords and thus can reap the benefits easily!

Google Ad Planner

This tool from can help you in digging out some very useful information about the competing websites. Not only that, it can certainly help in finding out that what all keywords one should target. After all, choosing the right keywords means eliminating maximum competition!

Google Traffic Estimator

This little nifty tool will help you find out that how much traffic will you get for the keywords that you are eying on. Of course, this is integrated with Adwords and thats why you see Adwords Logo on top of it. But does that matter when they aren’t charging a single buck from you?

There are other fantastic tools that will surely help you in one way or the other. I’m sure that you’d find them equally useful – Google Zeitgeist, Google Trends, Google website optimizer and Google Insights for search. If you know any other tool, please share it with us and I’ll include it over here.

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Use beautiful fonts for typography on your blog!

9 Feb, 2010 | mayank
Topics: web design

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definitely plays an important role in enhancing or diminishing the overall look of any . And all the web designers/developers were stuck with certain font families, even if they wanted to use the font of their choice, they couldn’t do it freely without compromising on various aspects. Of course, there were other ways too and I would love to include all those methods along with their pros & cons.

siFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is an open source JavaScript and Adobe Flash dynamic web fonts implementation, enabling the replacement of text elements on HTML web pages with Flash equivalents. sIFR embeds a font in a Flash element that displays the text, preempting the need for a font to have been manually pre-installed on a user’s system. [via : wikipedia]

In even simpler words, instead of showing the normal text – it is replaced by Adobe Flash’s text and the font embedded in that flash file is used to display the text. You can add shadow, effects to the text and the best part is that its cross-browser compatible and thats why its loved. However, siFR is often criticized for making the pages load slower and is not supported by iPhone.

Cufon

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to siFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use [This is not the case, if you are using WordPress]. Some of the benefits of Cufon over siFR are that it loads faster, no are required. [Via - Github]

Of course, nothing comes with cons. Cufon comes with the inability to highlight and copy/paste, not all fonts are supported. However, still its one of the preferred methods of using other fonts. We are using Cufon on this blog, so it can be a good example for you to look at.

There are other ways as well like Typeface.js, FLIR (Face Lift Image Replacement), however as browsers are getting better in supporting CSS3 – the better its becoming to improve the of the webpages. Although, with this method, copyright issues often come into play. In order to avoid these issues, few web services have come up with a model where by paying some fee, web designers will be able to choose various fonts (without worrying about licenses) for their website and the fonts will be served from their servers. Here are these services -

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Typekit

Typekit is one such service that has partnered with type foundries and have taken care of the legal issues. They let you choose the fonts using their web based editor. They have a plugin for WordPress, that lets you integrate this service with ease. There is an option of free plan and if you have one blog, you should definitely try this service.

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FontMeUp

FontMeUp is another service that allows you to use any font on your website. They have a similar concept and have hundreds of fonts to choose from. They also have a free plan and a plugin.

So after, looking at the benefits of these services, I’m tempted to use these service for this blog. I’ll notify as soon as this will be applied and will try to post the results as well. Personally, I see no reason for not trying these services and why any one else shouldn’t. Will you be using these to improve the on your blog or will you be going via existing ways?

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Use Content Delivery Network to load blog faster!

5 Feb, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Customization

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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]

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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 -

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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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