There’s a new version of WordPress which fixes a very serious security flaw… one that could enable one user to change other user’s posts – not good! The latest version is 2.3.3. If you need help checking your version or upgrading, please get the update here, or contact us for installation – we’re happy to help!

There’s a new version of WordPress hot off the presses! It’s a good idea to upgrade to this newest version because there are some serious security flaws in 2.3.1…

Download WordPress 2.3.2 or contact us for upgrade assistance.

We’ve been setting up a lot of WordPress blogs lately. It’s very powerful and makes web page editing easy. While researching how to make a page to show the latest blog posts, I found this great tutorial on making WordPress do your bidding:

WordPress Theme Hacks by WebDesignerWall

These tips highlight what makes WordPress so great – solutions are simple and elegant.

I’ve been working on an interesting new project involving WordPress, and while I was looking for a plugin to display theme thumbnail images, I found a whole bunch of very cool stuff! Here’s a list of what I found, in no particular order:

• All in One SEO Pack – A simple and very powerful plugin to manage all the items that make your site attractive to the search engines. You can set the meta tags for your blog’s home page and for any individual page.
• Sabre – To protect your signup process from automated signup bots. You can enable captcha (where the user types in a security code) or a math test to verify the visitor is human.
• WassUp – Peek at what your visitors are doing while they visit your blog. This is a supplement to a normal statistics program (like Google Analytics) and has some really nice features, such as who is on your site right now, and what pages have been viewed recently.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Makes a backup of your blog files and database, downloads the latest version of WordPress, and sends you to the upgrade page for completion. Updating doesn’t get much simpler than this! It’s important to keep up with the latest versions, so this is a really great tool to have!
• WordPress phpMyAdmin – Gives direct access to all of the contents of your database. Very useful, but also a potential disaster… don’t use empty, drop, or delete unless you mean to do it and know what will happen!

So there you have it, some very useful plugins. As always, let us know if you want one of these or any other plugins installed. We’re happy to help!

Here’s a really nice shopping cart plugin for WordPress:

WP e-Commerce

As with all shopping carts, it takes a bit of time to learn how all of the features work, and a bit of customization to make it look the way you want. You can get the cart for free, or you can upgrade to the Gold version, which gives you access to payment gateways and a couple of other features. Also with the Gold version you can add modules for member-only sites and grid view – a nice way to display your products. The Gold version costs $15 for a personal site and $250 for a business site, which is very reasonable considering the development time you’ll save by using a plugin.

Here's another great WordPress plugin which adds social bookmarking icons to each post.

Sociable Zyblog  

You can pick which sites you want to appear, and also sort them into your preferred order. Very nice! 

Today I found a really nifty plugin for WordPress which protects mailto links! Just install it and forget it – no more harvesters can collect email addresses from your blog.

EmailShroud for WordPress

It protects your WordPress pages, too, so if you're using that feature, you can add a link to your email with no problem. Nice!

So can you tell we've been doing a lot of work with WordPress lately? It's been wonderful, I've been finding all kinds of neat stuff. Today I found a site which has a nicely organized database of plugins:

http://wp-plugins.net/

I'm amazed by the number of things you can add right in to WordPress – it really is a great system for running a web site.

Google AdSense is a wonderful way to add passive income to your blog. Recently I found a great plugin for WordPress which will insert AdSense ads into your blog posts. It's really slick and has nice options to make it work just the way you want.

http://wordpress-plugins.biggnuts.com/adsense-plugin/  

WordPress recently came out with a new version – it's up to 2.2 now. One of the great new features is Widgets! It allows you to arrange your sidebar items as you like, just drag and drop to sort them. Plus, you can get widgets that do stuff, like I don't know what (I haven't researched it much yet), but here's a widget site. This is one of the best improvements to WordPress, ever!

You must have WordPress 2.0 or above, or it comes with the newest version. Be careful if you want to upgrade to version 2.1 or above – some older web hosting computers may not meet the minimum requirements. We've had a few customers unable to upgrade to the latest and greatest so if you've been on the same web hosting for more than say 2 years, you'll want to check your versions of PHP and MySQL. Here's what the WordPress web site says about it:

WARNING: WordPress Versions 2.1, 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3, and 2.2 require PHP version 4.2 or greater, and MySQL version 4.0 or greater! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO UPGRADE if your server does not meet the minimum requirements!
 

We're happy to help you get widgets going – just contact us!