Month: April 2011
Top WordPress Websites
WordPress has been helping more and more people and businesses create top Websites and it is by far the top CMS around the world.
So it is very interesting to find out the top WordPress Websites, or we can call them the "WordPress Heroes"
This post will be update from time to time so you may want to bookmark it and come back for the latest about WordPress world.
At https://wp89.com/learn/sample-wordpress-sites, I said that 99 percent of my clients' Websites are run on this great WordPress publishing system. Actually the following popular WordPress Websites will be more eye openers:
- The New York Times: they have been running over 60 blogs on WordPress, before that they were using Webcrossing, which I was using to build online forums for Kaiser members and doctors from 2000 to 2006. They are just like me: once they found WordPress, they never looked back. NYtimes.com traffic is now ranking 84 globally according to alexa, and WordPress contribute a lot to its success.
- Mashable.com: Alexa Ranking 246
- Tutsplus.com Alexa Ranking:579
- css-tricks.com Alexa Ranking 1,717
- Makeuseof.com Alexa Ranking:1,265
- Venturebeat.com, Alexa ranking 2,745
- smashingmagazine.com
- ChineseBay.com
- Kaibo2.com
- WP89.com, yes, this site itself is WordPress site
We'll find out more great WordPress sites and update soon.
Oops! ( we got a typo earlier: heros should be heroes)
Page Links To
"Page Links To" is another must-have WordPress Plugin, which we find very handy when we want to create a hand-crafted menu that links to pages, posts, categories, or anything within your site, just like the "WordPress Tips" item in the top menu of this menu. We actually use it to create a link to point to "WordPress Tips" category page.
Some people also find it useful when needing to redirect an old page (301 permanent or 302 temporary redirect to a new page or post.
The plugin was created and maintained by Mark Jaquith, and you can find it at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-links-to/
WordPress Tips:(1)
How to Reset Your Admin Password If Your forget the Email or Have No Access To the Mailbox?
Sometimes, you may forget your admin user name and/or password, and even forget the email you use for that admin account. Dead? Reinstall? No, we can have an easy way to reset the password if you have access to the MySQL database.
Suppose your WordPress tables use the default prefix wp, then you may use phpMyAdmin (most hosting services offer you that handy tool to manage your databases.) If you forget which database you use for that WordPress installation, you may go to the WordPress installation folder, and open the wp-config.php and find the database name.
Then go to wp_users, and browse the user ID 1, you can modify the user_email value and then go to WordPress site to request a reset. After you get the password reset, you may restore the old user_email or the encrypted password string if you make a copy of them. Before you restore the old password, you may even create an additional admin account for future use. For security purpose, some people even remove the user with ID 1 and use other user account as admin.
WordPress Tutorials for Developers & Designers
Even though I've been developing WordPress Web sites for lots of clients over the passed few years, I still found Lynda.com's WordPress Tutorials very useful.
They offer a few quite updated WordPress Tutorials
- Creating and Editing Custom Themes
- WordPress:Creating Custom Widgets and Plugins with PHP
Their price is so reasonable that you may be surprised to find their video tutorials are of very high quality too. The instructors are all experienced WordPress old-timer and developers. You may give it a try for free for 7 days!
Promote a 7-day free trial to lynda.com.
Once you create an account, just search for "WordPress" and you can start learning right away. After you finish the courses, you can get an online certificate like this one:
Bookmark or Tell A Friend:
WordPress Security Updates
Good catch: "WordPress 3.1.2 is now available and is a security release for all previous WordPress versions. This release addresses a vulnerability that allowed Contributor-level users to improperly publish posts." Does this sound familiar if you have been following WordPress updates for a while.
Well, I found that most security patches are related to certain kind of level access users. We do not give Contributor-level or higher to any users unless it is really necessary or to someone you can trust to certain extend.
Of course, whenever possible, we should upgrade our WordPress as soon as the new security release is available. For this reason, we found that Lunarpages hosting is great as their setting allows you to do "one click upgrade" from the WordPress Dashboard | Updates. For VPS hosting such as Linode or Slicehost, you need to change the owner of the WordPress installation folder to www-data to enable the "one-click" upgrade, but if you are not familiar with Linux, the process could be a bit tricky. What I mean is, in order to do the automatic WordPress upgrade withou FTP, we need to make the files and folders writable by the Web server. It is the same requirement for installing plugins without ftp and writing config files.
e.g. If your WordPress is installed in /var/www/wordpress, the basic linux command is
chowner -R www-data /var/www/wordpress
However, some people are also concern about another security issue caused by this setup if there are other sites (owned by different people) sharing the same Web servers.
Well, if you want convenience, you sacrifice your security on the other hand. If you do want more security, don't share your Web server with others, and it means you need to pay more. It is like sharing the same house or room with your schoolmates.
SEO Ultimate
Great free WordPress plug-in to improve your site SEO.
I love its additional functions
1) Link Mask Generator
2)redirect to new URL for old URL modified
Where to get it?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-ultimate/