Small Business Hosting: Internet Web Hosting Secrets Revealed » Tools

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.

Free FTP (FreeFTP.com)

admin — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:43:20 +0000

Program name:

FreeFTP.com

Version:

2.0

Supported OS:

Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2k, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows 95, Windows 2003 Server, Windows Vista

Screenshot:

Program information:

http://FreeFTP.com

Download:

http://www.freeftp.com/downloads/setup-freeftp.exe

UnPlugged™-X, a Photoshop™ plugin

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:48:05 +0000

Program name:

UnPlugged-X

Version:

2.1.68

Release date:

07/20/2007

Description:

A collection of over 100 different filter effects wrapped in a single plug-in.Combining all those effects into a single plug-in allows you to use them in ways not possible separately. With UnPlugged-X, the whole is larger than the sum of the parts.

Type:

Demo

Release type:

Major Update

Install support:

Install Only

Supported OS:

Win95,Win98,WinME,WinNT 4.x,Windows2000,WinXP,Windows2003,Windows Vista Starter,Windows Vista Home Basic,Windows Vista Home Premium,Windows Vista Business,Windows Vista Enterprise,Windows Vista Ultimate,Windows Vista Home Basic x64,Windows Vista Home Premium x64,Windows Vista Business x64,Windows Vista Enterprise x64,Windows Vista Ultimate x64

Language:

English

Changes:

Vastly improved layer system, new effects

Specific category:

Graphics

Category:

Graphic Apps::Other

System requirements:

1MB of harddisk space

Screenshot:

Icon:

Program information:

http://www.vanderlee.com/plugins_upx.html

Buy at:

http://www.vanderlee.com/plugins_unpluggedx_order.html

Company name:

VanDerLee

Address:

Aagje Dekenlaan 34

City/Town:

Bussum

Zip/Postal Code:

1403 HH

Country:

Netherlands

Website:

http://www.vanderlee.com

Author:

Martijn van der Lee

Fax:

+31-847-225-047

Size (Kb):

1380

Download:

ftp://ftp.vanderlee.com/pub/plugins/upx2168d.exe

Secondary download url:

http://www.vanderlee.com/download/upx2168d.exe

PuTTY: A Free Telnet/SSH Client

admin — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:47:39 +0000

PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. PuTTY is what is known a terminal emulator application which can act as a client for the SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP computing protocols.

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]