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/
WordPress Bible 2nd Edition: Covers WordPress 3.1
Finally we have an updated WordPress book for WP newbies, WP developers and designers.
This book covers WordPress 3.1! Yes! It is a
WordPress 3.1 Book!
Introducing WordPress Bible 2nd Edition! 744 pages Published by Wiley
# ISBN-10: 0470937815
# ISBN-13: 978-0470937815
Part I: Getting Started With WordPress gives you basics to get a WordPress blog off the ground. You also find background information to help us to understand the philosophies to guide us to use WordPress as a platform software or application development.
Part II: Working with Plugins," shows us how to use the WordPress plugin APIs to make WordPress a real application or software development platform,
Part III: Working with Themes and Template Tags," is great for designers or developers who work with designers to create great user interface or workflow on WordPress system.
Part IV, "Creating Content" is mainly for newbies to just use WordPress to create contents. It helps the reader to understand the concepts and principles of the WordPress Admin and creating great contents on this semantic publishing platform.
Part V: "Keeping Up with the Joneses:Maintenance and Upgrades" talks about WP automatic upgrades, backup, maintenance and security. You'll also learn the caching strategy to make your WordPress site scale well.
Part VI talks about two major WordPress uses: as a blogging sytem or a CMS (content management system)
Part VII talks about WordPress Econsystem covering its multisite functionality, adding User Forums with bbPress, creating social networks with BuddyPress, using BackPress as a development framework ...
This book will be available in April, 2011, but you can order it now at Amazon.com: WordPress Bible
Must Have WordPress Plug-in:Configure SMTP
If you have problem sending email from your WordPress for "reset password", "register (new users)" and notification, your hosting server may have turned off php mail() function. A great solution is to install WordPress plug-in named Configure SMTP and use your own SMTP server to send mail.
Read the Rest...
WordPress Security Tips:1
Amazingly, lots of WordPress Web sites are still using default "admin" user name for the admin log in. After WordPress 3.0, you may choose a hard to guess admin user name. If your WordPress site was created before that, you may go to your phpMyAdmin and the 'wp-users' table to change 'admin' to a new user name of your choice.
The bottom line is
Do Not Use The Default "admin" User Name
Also try to use a longer ( more than 10 characters long) user name for your WordPress admin account.
Another tip related to this is:
Prevent Log In Error To Be Displayed
Even with WordPress 3.1, the default setting is still "showing log in error" when you type in a wrong user name. This makes it convenient for users who really forget their user name or password, but it also gives too much information for hackers.
A trick to prevent the log in error to be displayed is to insert this simple line of code in the functions.php at your current theme folder (e.g. wp-content/themes/twentyten )
add_filter('login_errors',create_function('$a', "return null;"));
Remember to backup your functions.php file so you can roll-back the change in case you do it wrong.
Installing WordPress Quickly
For most of my clients, I can create a new WordPress installation quickly, then upload my custom themes before I input my clients content.
Within 30 minutes, a professional site prototype is ready for review. This is first step for more site owner's input.
Here's the video to show you
How to Install WordPress 3.1 with most affordable Web Hosting
For the same good hosting we have been using for many of our clients, please click "Best Affordable Hosting"
Tips When Installing WordPress In Fantastico
1. Don't use "Admin" as the Administrator-username, but some hard to guess (easy to remember) user name. e.g. bbbestadmin333 (no space) . This is not something you can change easily in the WordPress dashboard. You may only change it via the MySQL db admin or some SQL script.
2. I prefer not to install the WordPress in the root folder, I always put something like
"bayarea" (or name or your city with no space: sanjose) in the field of "Install in directory": fremont
If you email me, I can tell the trick how to show the front page of the WordPress installation in the subfolder.
By putting a simple index.php in the root, your visit will see the contents of http://yourdomain.com/sanjose at http://yourdomain.com/ root folder.