Author: Paul
Learn WordPress 6.3
The latest version of WordPress is now 6.3
It's very helpful to learn all about this new version even you are not using this latest version. It will help you to prepare your website for the upgrade.
Explore WordPress 6.3 and Learn the New Features
First of all you need to prepare a good compatible hosting server and then check the right plugins that are compatible to this version of WordPress. Jonathan's "Testing your plugins for PHP version compatibility is a great helpful tutorial! If you are a WordPress developer, you need to update your PHP knowledge to PHP 8, because PHP 7 is now officially End of Life (EOL)?Any plugins you develop and maintain must support PHP 8.
WordPress 3.8.3
Again? Within 7 or 8 days, we upgraded from WordPress 3.8.2 to WordPress 3.8.3.
Does WordPress Update Too Frequently?
Frequent software updates may cause users a lot of trouble when they don't know how and some have too much customization (so auto updates may break the themes or plugins they have.
Fortunately, the websites we have been designing for our clients can update without breaking the code and the sites.
Also we love Softaculous Auto Update, which can update WordPress and send us an email notice: "Your site has updated to WordPress 3.8.3" within one day or two.
You may not have to update from 3.8.2 if you don't use "Quick Draft"
The “Quick Draft” tool on the dashboard screen was broken in the 3.8.2 update. If you tried to use it, your draft would disappear and it wouldn’t save. While we doubt anyone was writing a novella using this tool, any loss of content is unacceptable to us.
WordPress 3.9
WordPress 3.8.2
Quick, you need to update your WordPress 3.8.x to 3.8.2 if you have not already!
Version 3.8.2 addressed some security issues and fixed 9 bugs and Version 3.8.1 addressed 31 bugs.
You may have serious security issues if you just ignor it.
- Potential authentication cookie forgery. CVE-2014-0166.
- Privilege escalation: prevent contributors from publishing posts. CVE-2014-0165.
- (Hardening) Pass along additional information when processing pingbacks to help hosts identify potentially abusive requests.
- (Hardening) Fix a low-impact SQL injection by trusted users.
- (Hardening) Prevent possible cross-domain scripting through Plupload, the third-party library WordPress uses for uploading files.
WordPress Meetups
Meetups are great places where you can meet people who like the same stuff. WordPress meetups can help WordPress users learn from experts, developers or other WordPress users by sharing experience and lessons learned through failures or success.
I live and work in San Francisco Bay Area or the Silicon Valley satellite cities so I love to visit these WordPress meetups
1) http://www.meetup.com/wordpress-sf The San Francisco WordPress Meetup led by Zach Berke
Upcoming event:
Optimizing WordPress for Conversions
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Time: Wednesday, April 2, 2014 6:00 PM
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Meeting address:
Automattic's New Home
132 Hawthorne Lane, San Francisco, CA (map)
2) http://www.meetup.com/Eastbay-WordPress-Meetup/ East Bay WP Meetup ( they usually meet in Oakland, Northern California )
Their next meetup:
Setting up Google Analytics in WordPress
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Sunday, April 20, 2014
to
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Tech Liminal
555 12th St, Oakland, CA (map)
Some themes come with a place to paste your Google Analytics tracking code, but there are also plenty of plugins, and some of them display your analytics in your WordPress dashboard. Is it better to put your tracking code in your theme, or a plugin? Which plugins are best, and why?
I'll sign up for both above and hope to meet you there!
Keep Writing and Blogging
I'm so glad to find the some of my friends are starting to use WordPress to blog or build their business websites.
Bill Belew, a famous blogger in Silicon Valley, aka the traffic professor, has been encouraging people to write and blog about what they really like and he say, "Keep blogging and the people will come to your site", not in only a few months, but up to 5 or 6 months.
However, it seems to generate good traffic, you need to at least write one or two articles a day.
The second important thing for a good blogger is to have high quality articles. You need to create some "timeless contents", meaning the contents will remain valuable even as the time goes by.
Next is that you need to provide "timely contents", which Google would like as "Fresh stuff'. Blogs are usually updated more often by the Google indexer/spider just because usually blog contents are fresh. And WordPress has a great system to notify Google and other Web crawlers to index your new contents. For further reading, you may want to check this article on SearchEnglishWatch.com by Ray "Catfish" Comstock:
4 Types of Timely Content for Google’s “Fresh” Update
where the author said the bloggers need to create "keyword focused content on a continual basis". The four asset types to create a steady stream of keyword rich content he recommends are 1)Press Releases 2)Marketing Automation Content 3)Social Media 4)User-Generated Content (CGC). For the last one, it is an important part of Web2.0. No! Web2.0 is not old and it is working the best! Facebook is the best example! Twitter is also in this category. As I see it, not everyone can write so many articles as Bill Belew (and he has been running blogs on 9 different topics!). If you are the one with creative ideas but cannot write much, you should work with some copywriters or ghost writers to create blogs with lots of fresh continuous contents. When the bloggers success in doing this, they can sure monetize their rich content websites.
For bloggers who really want to make money from their WordPress websites, they also need to install a few must-have WordPress plugins, such as "WordPress SEO by Yoast", "Better WP Security", "Online Backup for WordPress", and some good plugins or themes that let you easily place your Google Adsense, and traffic monitoring code ( Sitemeters or Google Analytics )
WordPress 4.0 ?
Oh, no. Too soon to expect WordPress Version 4.0 as we are currently have 3.4.2 as the stable version and 3.5 beta 3 is in the shop.
For security purpose, we should never run beta version for production.
Trying the Latest WordPress
If you want to try the latest version of WordPress, you may do so on your sand box or dev server to test out your plugins. To get the latest version of beta, you may install "WordPress Beta Tester" at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester/.
This plugin "Allows you to easily upgrade to Beta releases. Once installed it will enable you to upgrade your blog to the latest Beta or Release candidate at the click of a button using the built in upgrader. " After you install and activate this plugin, go to Tools, then Beta Testing, then check the second option
* Bleeding edge nightlies This is the bleeding edge development code which may be unstable at times. Only use this if you really know what you are doing.
You'll see a fair warning:
Please note: Once you have switched your blog to one of these beta versions of software it will not always be possible to downgrade as the database structure maybe updated during the development of a major release.
Then you can head for the Dashboard, Updates ( yourdomain/installationfolder/wp-admin/update-core.php ), you can click "Update Now". Then after you go to the Dashboard Home, you will see:
You are using WordPress 3.5-beta3-22584. (as of today 11/15/2012 ).
You may also directly download the latest WordPress beta version 3.5 (as of this writing) at http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.5-beta3.zip after the release note at http://wordpress.org/news/2012/11/wordpress-3-5-beta-3/
Meanwhile, you may want to keep your eyes on the known issues and bug fixes by checking http://wordpress.org/news/2012/11/wordpress-3-5-beta-3/ .
We will sure to publish new video tutorials on WordPress 4.0 when it comes out, but we saw a guy try to get grab our attention using a "WordPress 4.0" title for his video and end up getting a few "dislike". In the video, it even uses the typo "WopdPress 4.0" to "fool" audience. It looks like a "April Fool" joke.
Looking ahead is good but we shall never rush. We are glad that WordPress development does not rush its users from 3.0 to 4.0, then WordPress 5.0.... like Drupal 5, Drupal 6, Drupal 7 (and their upgrade from Drupal 6 to 7 is pretty complicated to many regular users: ...Disable all custom and contributed modules... Remove all old files and directories ... oh, Gosh!) Upgrading to a new version of WordPress is a breeze if we have well design themes and plugins, much easier than other CMS, thanks to the great WordPress architecture design.
Learning WordPress 4.0
For someone who is new to WordPress, they may want to start with the latest version. Actually if you learn WordPress 3.x well, you will find it easy to master WordPress 4.0. This is our belief. The new WordPress UI is only getting better and better and more intuitive. This is what we have been experiencing since WordPress 2.0. Just like HTML 5.0, with HTML 4 basics, things will become easier for 5.0.
10 Steps for A Successful Business Website on WordPress
1. Prepare some real contents that may be interesting to a group of people (Contents are the King! Know your audience.)
2. Find and sign up a good hosting service that gives you PHP, MySQL ( if you've already have one, you may skip this.)
(We don't like Windows hosting, which may also be more expensive. Linux is great)
3. Do the simple basic WordPress installation on your website and add a good theme (could be free!) and add your own logo for branding
4. Install some must-have WordPress plugins
(for better security, fighting spam, better SEO, social bookmarking, etc.)
5. Build Basic Menu for Your Site ( About Us, Contact Us, Our Products/Services) AND
create some useful information pages on the topics related to your products!
6. Set up Google Analytics for your site and put the code into your WordPress site
7. Submit your site with Google webmaster tool
8. Promote your site on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube!
9. Update your website at least 3 times a week with useful and fresh contents!
10. Respond to comments on your web contents And
add more popular content according to your Google Analytics reports.
If you just want sell your products or services without offering any useful stuff ( free tips or handy tools), your visitor won't come back to your site again even you got a way to direct them to your site ( via Google Adwords, or other paid advertisement). If you don't have time to write yourself, hire some good copywriters.
If you'd like have to hire someone to help you with any of the above steps, please contact one of our WordPress professionals.
$60 for Your Website with Your Domain For One Year!
It is a great package for your own website with your own domain.
Actually, this is you will get for $60 a year ( or $96 for two years! or $7 for month by month):
- Unlimited Disk Space ( so that you can host lots of big files online)
- Unlimited Data Transfer (Traffic)
- Unlimited MySQL 5 Databases & PostgreSQL Databases for WordPress
- Up to 6 Add-on Domains ( It means you have put your other 5 domains, existing or new, on the same server and same account. The first domain is free as long as you host with them or you may pay for the domain later in case you don't want them to host any more)
- Unlimited FTP accounts, Mail Boxes, Autoresponders, Mailman Mailing Lists .... ( See details at Arvixe Site )
- Best of all you can have Softaculous Script Installer
for you to quickly install WordPress (in one minute) - Last but not least you can help support us for more useful WordPress tutorial creation because we are an affiliate of this hosting company and your order will help us a lot financially.
For your own domain and website, order this affordable hosting service today!
How to Set Up Menu & Submenu for Drupal 7 with Artisteer Theme
Many Artisteer users created their pretty Drupal 7 Themes but don't know how to configure them.
Our video tutorial is show you how to set up the Menus and Submenus after you activate the new themes.
You may also download the theme: https://wp89.com/learn/download/kaibodrp01.zip in this tutorial.
SEO Copy Writing
SEO Copywriting is important for your websites to rank higher in SERPs (search engine result pages?
Using WordPress for your website already gives you great built-in SEO advantages, but if you can do your copywriting with SEO in mind, I mean "do better SEO copywriting", your traffic may rank much better and you may get better target traffic and leads from your visitors and better sales or popularity for your websites.
Do you think you can do copywriting for your websites? Maybe not until you read this great copywriting e-Book, grab a copy for yourself before the discounts are gone. Click to get one: SEO Copywriting e-Book. You may buy it and download it and read it and be ready to write great contents for your readers and search engines for your websites. You may also get paid well by doing great SEO copywriting for others. Yes, great SEO copywriters now are in great need, expecially for our professionals clients such law firms, real estate agents, financial investment advisers and clinics.
I got my copy, did you get yours? the SEO Copywriting eBook by Ian Lurie (he's been doing online marketing for 13 years....that's before Google was even BORN).
SEO still lives and dies based on good copywriting. If you’re going to move up in the rankings and stay there, you have to know how to write customer- and search engine-friendly content. But you’re a writer. You shouldn’t have to learn about SEO, keyword mining, pagerank and the robots meta tag. You just want to write quality copy that search engines will like. That’s why I wrote The Unscary, Real World Guide to SEO Copywriting. In it, you’ll find: Plain language and understandable explanations about why and how search engines review your writing. The six rules for successful SEO copywriting. Guidelines for writing headlines that will attract both search engines and readers. Rules for writing good link text. How to create highly relevant ‘clusters’ of content on your site. Not a single use of the word ‘algorithm’. The book’s short, sweet and to the point: 30 pages, 6 rules for better SEO copywriting. .