WordPressing » WordPress

Enable Multi-User for WordPress 3

Martin Metzmacher — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 20:29:57 +0000

WordPress 3 can do multiple blogs out of the pocket.

Here are some easy steps you need to take in order to make it work:

1. Add this to your config.php

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

2. Add a DNS wildcard (and a Server Alias if needed)

3. Log in as Super-Admin and have fun

Remember that it can take a while for DNS settings to become active. If you want to map multiple top level domains to one WordPress installation you will need the Domain Mapping Plugin.

Incompatible archive: PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature

Martin Metzmacher — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 07:32:33 +0000

If you are trying to update your WordPress blog or some plugins and you get that error message:

Incompatible archive: PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature

chances are that you have maxed out the space on your hosting account. That way there is no space left to save the temporary installation files that are needed for the update. Do a clean up or assign some more space and you are ready to go!

Give your Blog Posts the Perfect Finishing Touch

Martin Metzmacher — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:43:21 +0000

So you have written a post for your WordPress blog. Congratulations! Now all you need to do is have more viewers read your post. How do you do that? Well, this article is all about giving your WordPress blog posts the perfect finishing touches so that more viewers can read your posts. A lot of traffic will then go to your blog site, and you will become an authority of your niche in the online community.

Reduce the Title Length

After adding the new post, you need to put the title and the body of the article where they belong in the Edit Post page. Have a look at your title. Is it too long? Well, you need to trim it down to seven words or less. There are several reasons why this is important, but one of them is that you don’t want your blog post URL to be too long. Once you’ve done that, check the Permalink under the title box where you inserted your title. Click on edit, and then copy paste your title to the link, and WordPress will automatically supply the dashes. Furthermore, if your title contains words such as ‘and’ or ‘or’, words that Google doesn’t look for because they are too common, you don’t have to include them in the Permalink to make the link even shorter, provided that the title still makes sense by dong so.

More Tag

Now take a look at the body of your article. Remember that in the home page of your blog, your post title is listed along with a few parts of the body. You can define which part of the body is shown in the home page before another link prompts visitors to Read More. You can do this by putting a More tag by clicking on the more tag button at the Edit Post page, in line with other features such as bold and italic. The following is a picture of the more tag button:

Figure 1. The more tag button.

In connection with the more tag button. You can also edit the Read More text which reads “read more” by default. You can customize this to say, “Continue reading article so and so,” for example. You can do this by at the “Read More” Text feature under SEO Details and Additional Style.

Add Tags

Adding Tags to your blog post is very important because it contributes largely to describing your post and allowing it to be found through searching or browsing. You can add tags at the Post Tags section at the Edit Post page. There is a blank space where you can type in specific words, usually subject words, that define the content of your article. For a start, you can use the Suggested tags located at the bottom of the Post tags section. You can click Suggested tags by Yahoo and WordPress will automatically show you Yahoo’s suggestions on what tags you should label your article with. You can then choose some or all of these suggestions by clicking on them and then clicking add in the Post Tags section.

Of course, you can then proceed to typing what you think are the words that best define the content of your article. You can start looking at the title, and see if it contains words or groups of words which you want to add as tags. Then, scan the whole document from top to bottom and look for key words or phrases which you can add as tags. Not only that, you can also use words that are not found in the article. For example, if you are doing a review about a PDF research article online, you can add the words PDF and research as tags, even if these words aren’t found in your article. In addition, it is also a good strategy to add names as tags because people like to search for names. Following our previous example, you can tag the name of the author of the PDF research article you made a review about.

Add Category

Under the Post Tags section in the Edit Post page, you have the Categories section, which contains all the categories that you made for your blog posts. It is very important that you choose the right category for your blog post so that it will not appear lost or out of place in a certain category. Apparently, you should figure out what the main thought of your article is, and this is especially important if your blog is composed of several categories which are sub-niches to the general niche of your blog. For example, if your blog is all about behavioral targeting, you can have categories like behavioral marketing, behavioral advertising, and behavioral targeting. You need to know which category to put your article, but if you’re really not sure, it may be wise to just label it under the category which is the overall niche of your blog.

Add Post Image and Thumbnail Image

A blog post looks so much better if it has a high quality picture in it. Thus, it is very important to have a thumbnail image and a post image for your article. When a visitor views your blog home page, he will be more enticed to read the rest of the article if it is accompanied by a thumbnail image, and reading the article, he will find it more visually interesting at least if it is accompanied by a post image.

To put an image to your post, I suggest that you look for pictures at Flickr. However, be sure to use those pictures under the Creative Commons license. According to creativecommons.org, “Creative Commons is a non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright.” Indeed it is the surest way of using a picture online without having to worry about copyright issues. To do this, you need to search for pictures in this link: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. Once you find the picture that you are looking for, clicking on it will lead you directly to its own page. In this page, there is an ALL SIZES on top of the picture which will take you to the page containing links to all sizes of the picture, from thumbnail to original. For the thumbnail image, click on the thumbnail size button. This will show you the thumbnail version of the picture. Right click on that picture and choose Copy Image URL. Then paste this URL to the Thumbnail Image blank on the Post Image and Thumbnail section of the WordPress Edit Page. Then, type a thumbnail image text at the bottom. This text is usually the title of your blog post, so just copy that. Do the same for the post image, but this time, click on the Small size button in the Flickr page.

Meta Description

Meta Description is very important for your blog post as well. This is usually composed of a phrase or sentence, or two, which summarizes the entire content of your article. This is actually the first couple of lines which appear with your link and blog post title at a Google Search listing. You can write the meta description at the Meta Description box under the SEO Details and Additional Style section.

When writing the meta description, it is very important to include the title of your blog post and some of the tags you chose for the article. This makes your article a lot more relevant to visitors who may have used your tags in Google search to come across a listing which contains your blog post. Furthermore, the meta description should be the short summary of your entire article. This is important because when people read it in the Google listing, they will learn right away what the post is about and will really benefit from the information they get from just a few lines. Then they will think to themselves, “Oh I learned about this from your blog post without even opening it yet.”

Published on date

Finally, you can also edit the date when you want your blog post to appear on your blog. When you have edited several blog posts and are ready to publish them all, you don’t have to publish them all on the same date or immediately. You can choose to Publish some of them a week after and the others the following week, or even publish one article per week at a time, depending on your preferences. You can do this by looking at the upper right portion of the Edit Post page, in the Publish section. Click on Edit, then select a date when you want the post published.

The good thing about this is that your blog will seem to be very busy when it appears to be posting blogs every now and then. Another good thing is that after setting a date, if you check the home page of your blog, you will see on the upper right portion, a very cool feature which lists Next Week’s Topics, which are the titles of the posts which you set to be published next week. This gives you the upper hand on the Google listing for when these future posts will finally appear next week, because some of the tags for those articles already appear in your page at present.

These are the finishing touches you can do for your blog posts in WordPress. Do all of these before hitting the Publish button, and see amazing results! Enjoy!

Automatically install plugins via FTP

Martin Metzmacher — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:36:36 +0000

In you wp-config.php just add those lines:

define(“FTP_HOST”, “server”);
define(“FTP_USER”, “user”);
define(“FTP_PASS”, “password”);

And WordPress will “remember” your FTP data. Great to use together with Plugin Central!

Difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

Martin Metzmacher — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 12:40:44 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBr5RsdxU3Q

WordPress is a great piece of software that is not only used for blogging, but also for making normal websites. In this video I explain the difference between hosting your blog or website on wordpress.com or on your own server (= called wordpress.org, because you download the software from that website).

Why businesses should use WordPress CMS

Martin Metzmacher — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:48:47 +0000

Matt just linked on Facebook to an article about 21 reasons why anyone should use WordPress.

@Eric Marden pointed out that this was a little bit too geeky to show to the next business owner you want to convince that WordPress is the best choice to use for your business.

SO..Let’s do that here – I’ll give you a head start:

it’s easy to learn – you don’t wast time reading 500-page manuals or having weeks of workshops
it’s being developed by a company that is not going broke any time soon
it gives you the freedom to chose your developers – no more being stuck with CMS of company X
it runs on pretty much every server
it’s constantly forcing off and integrating new cool stuff back to the core like WP MU, BuddyPress or bbPress

…so what do you think is the main reason that businesses should use WordPress? Leave a comment!

Buddypress: Bonding While Blogging

Martin Metzmacher — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:48:17 +0000

Buddypress refers to a group of WordPress MU specific plugins. Each plugin provides a different functionality. Though it has all the features that are associated with WordPress, it enables social networking. Since its modules can function independently, this means you can choose the features you want to. Buddypress also has a core plugin required by other plugins. It enables sharing of functions and helps to make functional changes to the WordPress MU interface.

Features

One of the best features of Buddypress is private messaging. This works like internal site email. Members can message people on their blog network as well as forward and respond to received messages. Through the administrative section, you can send messages to multiple friends as well as to people throughout the network.

Members of a Buddypress network can easily interact with one another as on popular networking sites, by adding a particular person as a friend. Each member can view a list of ‘friends’ and you have the option of making certain posts private.

To allow members to post on a particular content, Buddypress has a section called Wire. This can also be used by members to leave messages on a particular person’s profile. Moreover, you can check out what others are doing on Buddypress, since every activity is recorded. What are the activities within Buddypress? Wire posts, Blog comments, blog posts and more.

The package of plugins also offers status updates for each member logged on. The blog functionality of Buddypress means that one can conveniently find blogs by another member or read the comments on his own.

Finally, installing Buddypress enables one to create and share photo albums. If you are convinced about its features, here’s how to install the set of plugins.

Bloggers just love its multi-user functionality while posting content.

Installation

WordPress MU can be installed just like WordPress. A word of advice – do not edit the name of the wp-config-sample.php file. Doing this will result in a blank page being displayed at your site. The name will be changed during the setup process.

The first step is to download the installation package at http://buddypress.org/download. This will guide you to the most recent release of the plugin package. After separating the components from the ZIP file, transfer these to a directory on your computer.

To install the components, upload all the component directories and files to the wp-content/mu-plugins folder. Go to the Buddypress-theme folder. You will see two folders inside: Buddypress-member and Buddypress-home. Click on the wp-content/themes directory of the installation. Remove the home folder from your server and upload the two directories to the themes folder.

Go to your WordPress MU admin panel. Provided you have copied all of the plugin files and directories to the correct location, you will see sections under Site Admin titled Buddypress, Profile Fields, etc.

Finally, you need to activate the Buddypress Home Theme on your site. Select the Themes option from Site Admin panel and activate the Buddypress Home Theme. Now go to Design option under Themes and click on Buddypress Home Theme to activate it for your site. If you have done all this right, you will be able to see the new theme through your site URL.

I love WordPress!

Martin Metzmacher — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:51:57 +0000

I love WordPress because it is so simple and can power a lot of different sites: normal websites, blogs, social sites and even web shops. It started out as a blogging system, but has developed into a more comprehensive system that can handle a lot of different sites. If you are not overly concerned about user rights management and you like and fast and easy workflow, you will soon become a fan of WordPress. I surely am! On this page I show that it is very easy to create a professional website using WordPress CMS. I will offer advice on installation, themes and plugins. Actually this blog is created out of an egocentric movement: often times I find myself doing the same things again and again, whereas it would have been easier just to write a list the first-time. This is why you will see many (10) lists. On top of this I hope that this will be an educational resource for the people that I work with. Using these easy principles and step by step instructions you will get your content management handled very efficiently.