Small Business Hosting: Internet Web Hosting Secrets Revealed » wordpress

WordPress Member Area

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:48:17 +0000

We needed to create a site that could limit some pages and posts to logged in members only. To do this we used three different free plugins.

To protect the content we used:

Member Access

We quickly discovered that the default registration page and log in pages would be pretty confusing to people. These pages look like they belong on WordPress.com and not on our site. To help solve this problem we were able to customize the default log in and registration pages to look like it belonged to our site and not WordPress.com. In order to accomplish this we used:

The plugin worked great for the registration process, but was still pretty awkward to use as a log in process. Forcing the user to go to another pages to log in seemed like a lot to ask of our user. We wanted users to be able to log in from any page to get instant access to the content. To smooth out the log in process so we used:

AJAX Login Widget++

This worked out pretty well, but we needed to modify the template to link to our new registration screen. The authors did make this customization pretty easy. We were only able to add this to a widget and not within a page, but that’s a lot better than other options.

The combination of these plugins work very well to create a basic member site. You should be aware that there is no paid membership option or any control over levels of membership, but it works well.

WordPress.org Vs WordPress.com With Douglas Welch

admin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:08:17 +0000

On this episode I talk with Douglas Welch about the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org and when you might want to use WordPress.org vs WordPress.com.

WordPress.com is hosted and managed by automattic (the company behing wordpress). If you choose WordPress.com you don’t install or control the software.

WordPress.org is the home of the open source wordpress software. This is where you get the software that you install on your own site so you are responsible to manage the software yourself.

Links

WordPress.org

WordPress.com (Here’s their explanation of the difference)

Douglas Welch (computer and new media consultant)

New Media Interchange (Doug’s New Media Group)

LA Friday Coffee (Doug’s coffee meetup)

SEO – Ashley Berman Hale

admin — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:09:29 +0000

I got the opportunity to have a great conversation with Ashley Berman Hale. During out conversation we discussed various topics to help local businesses to understand SEO and web promotion.

We talked about many SEO related topics including:

Building Web Sites

Should you use CMS or not
- Which CMS’s are available
  - WordPress
  - Joomla
  - Drupal
  - Other

Site Content and SEO

site structure
natural linking
usability
information architecture

Getting ranked locally

Edit you own local search listing

I’ve listed some of the resources we discussed here:

Webmaster Help Forum

Local Listing Info

Add your business to Google local search at the Google Local Business Center

MSN Local Listing Center

Yahoo! Local Listings

Below you’ll find the info for Ashley Berman Hale

You can contact Ashley at Ashley’s LinkedIn page

Choosing a CMS

admin — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 02:57:11 +0000

As a small business owner you might be in a position to choose a CMS (Contact Managment System) yourself, but you should have an idea of the options available to you so you can my more informed about this impact of one choice or the other. In this episode Glenn and Gerry discussus varius options available for a CMS.

Joomla – Interview with Joe Hacobian

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 05:37:30 +0000

Recently I got the oportinuity to talk with Joe Hacobian of the The Los Angeles Joomla, and Web CMS Meetup. Joe is a heavy proponent of Joomla which is a PHP Contact Management System to help small business maintain their own websites. I think you’ll gain some inside into what Joomla is all about by listening to this interview.

You can find Joe at cinematicpictures.com and you can find his Joomla group at www.meetup.com/LA-Joomla.

WordPress Question Answered by Matt Mullenweg?

bennett — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 16:19:23 +0000

Charles Stricklin

First I’d like I’d like to thank Charles and the crew over at the WordPress Podcast for airing my question to Matt (the founding developer of the popular open-source blogging software WordPress) . It was a nice treat to have Matt right there to answer my question. I’m not sure if he answered my question directly or not (is he running for office by chance), but I think he said, “There’s not a chance of making anything stable”. He talked about support for 2.0 as being a problem, but it was important to have that version there for people that could not upgrade to newer versions of other software like php and MySQL. In fact without that version I problably would never have started to use WordPress. I know several people that had to use that version due to their server configuration.

My basic warning for small business is to not use this software unless you have some one you can count on to help you not only fix it, but also maintain it on a regular basis. The risk it just to high. Once a site is compromised it will take some serious expertise to restore it. Most of the time in order to sovle this problem the site needs to be deleted and rebuilt from scratch. Backups can help, but sometimes the compromised it not noticed for quite awhile and trying to return to a version that is still available and does not contain any compromised or contaminated in anyway it difficult to discover.

If google discovers a problem with your site it will be delisted pretty quickly and users will be steared away from it. Now used get omonis looking red screen warning them that your site might distroy the visiters computer. Most users (I’d say 99%) will not continue and will probably not return.

Jonathan Bailey

We use WordPress for this site primarily because our focus is on doing a podcast and wordpress really helps us distribute our podcast. We use a script to automatically update the the WordPress software and log in frequently enough to be notified of WordPress updates. Also we use several plugins to make you (our readers) experience more useful and enjoyable, but these plugins also need to be updated. It’s getting to the point that every time I login in to add some information I have to do some type of update as well.

The problem with WordPress are not unique to WordPress. Any php software that you install
on your site that allows you to add any kind of content to your site has the potential of being compromise and allow malicious user to add or change information on your site.

Fast and Secure(ish) WordPress Installer.

bennett — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 17:52:19 +0000

I created a little quick installer for WordPress for those who have ssh access. This process assumes you have your database setup already.

Its features include:

Automatically downloads and installed latest version
Set the 4 secret keys: AUTH_KEY, SECURE_AUTH_KEY, LOGGED_IN_KEY and NONCE_KEY to random values
Set the $table_prefix to a random value

Here’s the process.

Use Telnet or Putty to connect to your website and log into the shell
Change to the directory where you want to install WordPress
Type the following line:
wget http://www.sbhosting.com/tools/wpi.sh
Type the following line:
chmod +x wpi.sh
Run the script by typing:
./wpi.sh
Point your browser to directory where you just installed WordPress.
Follow the standard installation instruction.

That’s it. Let me know if you have any question.

Dream Host Logo

I talked with a few of the guys over at DreamHost.com and they told me that they do all this as part of their own wordpress installer. If you sign up for an account over at DreamHost you can use the discount code SBHOSTING and get a free domain name or use SBHOSTING1 and get $25 OFF.

Note: This script has been updated for WordPress 2.7

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCIvNty8FAQ 480 395]