WP-Tuner for WordPress is a powerful and easy way to answer hard questions about why your blog is slow or cranky. What’s causing the slowdown? Is it a plugin? Is it your host? This plugin will help you find out. One problem, though, with this particular plugin is that it’s not for the novice. Advanced WP users will be able to understand what the plugin tells them, but it may not be that obvious for everyone.

WP-Tuner is recommended to be used by:

• WordPress site administrators
• WordPress plugin and theme designers
• WordPress developers

WP-Tuner can also be used with a number of advanced ways, like hooking any WordPress action to it. You can even use it to time anything at all in WordPress.

Installing WP-Tuner is as easy as installing any other plugin: upload using your favorite FTP client, and activate via the plugins page. Be sure to read the plugin’s readme file and the associated help documents before using it.

Used with a bit of common sense, this powerful plugin will help blog administrators as well as software developers improve their WordPress blog performance.

As if that wasn’t weird enough, it seems that the spam got through Akismet multiple times. The spam messages came from these IP addresses:

• 94.102.60.150
• 94.102.60.151
• 94.102.60.152
• 94.102.60.153

Searching Google with the IP addresses brings up a lot of discussion about the spamming incident. Apparently, this has happened to a lot of blogs over a short period of time, and most, if not all, of the affected blogs were on WordPress.

So, what on earth was that about? It seems like somebody’s testing a brand-new spam tool that actively tagrets WordPress blogs. I’ve already blocked the said IP addresses via .htaccess, but who knows when the next spam attack will come?

This is probably the best time to brush up on some basic comment spam prevention tips. WordPress has some built-in spam prevention features, like:

• Keep comment modderation on; make sure that people need to have a previous comment approved first before they can successfully comment.
• If a comment has more than two links contained in it, it should be automatically moderated.
• Fill out the “common spam words” form in WordPress so that comments get moderated when anything within the comment (including the author URI, author name, author email and the body of the comment itself) matches the words in the blacklist.
• Akismet may not be built in WordPress by default, but it is included in the installation and installing it is the first thing I do when setting up a new blog. It still is the best spam filter out there.

If you have other anti-spam measures you implement on your blogs, just drop a comment and tell me about it.

OK, I used: Wordpress Instant Upgarde by Zironoa .

Here’s a little blurb from their homepage:

How does it work?
The InstantUpgrade plugin downloads the latest WordPress version from the WordPress server and unpacks it at your server. In the next step, it deletes all of your old WordPress files (except wp-content/ and wp-config.php) and puts the new files into your WordPress directory. Finally, it runs the database upgrade script. That procedure is exactly what the official guide proposes, only 30 times faster and with you leaning back.

Is it safe to use?
Yes. The plugin interfaces are very intuitive, everything is well explained. Before the upgrade process, comprehensive checks are performed to ensure that nothing can be broken. As for security: The plugin cannot do anything that you or your webserver couldn’t do anyway. So, yes, it is safe to use. (However, bad things can *always* happen, so you should always have backups of your database and files.)

I encountered a few snags along the way, though. Snags like directory permissions (mostly writing privileges), but that was because I changed write privileges as my WordPress blog needed a little more security.  For standard WordPress installations though, the plugin install and activation was very smooth. 

Zirona noted that you should not use this plugin if you installed WordPress via Fantastico.  The only harm that may happen to you is that you cannot use Fantastico to update/upgrade your WordPress anymore.  You’d be using this plugin from thereon.  Well that’s all the harm it did me.

Suggestions:

• I would suggest that you install another WordPress blog to test the plugin first.  I have one that just sits there for this purpose.  So everytime a new plugin surfaces, and I believe is useful to me, I install it on that test WordPress site first.  Don’t worry about overcrowding your hosting account, hey most hosting accounts have the basic 5GB standard package anyway. 
• I would suggest that you BACK-UP your data first.  Everything …. texts, images, your database… hey you better backup your directory tree even through FTP.  I did.  Believe you me that backup is hard work… but definitely worth it!

But my client wanted it upgrade for some reason, I pressed on to ask “Why?” and he went on to say “Well you see I have a personal/family blog and I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1 already and it all works well.”, he said.  “Hmmm… Ok!” was my YM reply.  And so I finally did.

I knew that when I do this that I’m jumping from the safety of Fantastico to the world of manual upgrades from hereon, but the client wanted it so what the hey.  I did it.  Works well.  The only draw back was that I had to install a wordpress script that would check the version against the most current online version and let IT update my Wordpress. 

Goodbye Fantastico … for now, at least for this client.

I’d still go the Fantastico way for my other clients.  I’m happy nonetheless that I have known this little script that acts like how I would like Fantastico to upgrade/update my Wordpress…

Oh, if you want me to tell you that Wordpress plugin… Will post that up next time! 

Hang on tight!

No limits are set and over the next weeks we will dig a little deeper into some of the ways WordPress can be used, helping you with the (coding) basics to use WP as more than a blogging platform. For now I will list the different options WP can be used for. This list is not limited.

Blogging Platform

Blogging obviously is the main usage of WordPress.

Photoblog

Because it is very simple to upload images with WordPress soon users started to regularly post photos, using WordPress as a photoblog. Until the release of WP2.5 photobloggers had to use the custom fields to upload thumbnails for the archive or to create a filmstrip in the footer. With the new media uploader in WP2.5 this is not longer needed. WP now automatically generates a medium sized and a small thumbnail. Thumbnail sizes can be specified in the settings and used for the archives display or a filmstrip.

There aren’t many photolog themes for Wp and even less generate the photolog feeling with only one picture on the mainpage and a click on the picture goes to the previous entry. With the arrival of the Monotone Photolog Theme for WordPress theming in this area soon make become more popular. AFAIK Monotone officially is only released for WordPress.com, but can be retrieved from the SVN Directory.

Tumblelog

Tumblr is a popular platform, perfect for quick blogging items people stumble upon. I mentioned in my previous entry that Chyrp a great self-hosted platform is for your own tumblog (?!), but also WordPress can be used as tumble-engine.

Using WordPress as a tumblelog is not difficult: there are several themes to make your Wp blog more tumblr-alike and there’s even a Quick Post plugin for WordPress, providing the blogger with bookmarklets to easily submit content to their WordPress powered tumblelog.

Start tumbling with WP in the true self-hosted spirit!

Magazine

Since several months there has been a rise in the number of premium themes for WordPress, many of them focusing on providing a newspaper, magazine alike look for WordPress

Revolution by Brian Gardner was one of the first really popular ones, together with Mimbo, which initially was released under the GPL and later evolved into a second, Pro version, with custom image uploader.

Magazine themes for WordPress rely heavily on the usage of Custom Fields and Conditional Tags.
Most magazine themes have featured posts, use many thumbnail images on the main page and display recent entries from different categories. The success of a magazine theme IMHO heavily relies on the quality of the top navigation bar.

Online Shop

The real success of WordPress isn’t just the blog platform software, but the whole community around. And the great plugins. WP-eCommerce is one of the more extensive plugins, powering a complete online store front-end, based on WordPress. The competition in the eCommerce area is heavy with options such as the hosted Shopify platform or the well-known open-source osCommerce software., but when it comes to ease of use and features the WP-eCommerce plugin can compete with all of them and according to the plugin homepage even powers more shops than osCommerce does.

Contact Manager and Customer Relation Management

Both Design Intelliction’s WP-Contact Manager and Slipfire’s WP-CRM plugins prove that there really aren’t any limits to WordPress’s versatility.

WP-Contact Manager is a theme for WordPress using several plugins, Wp-CRM is a full-blown plugin, inspired by WP-Contact Contact Manager and 37Signals’s Highrise.

With both options it is easy to maintain, publish your contact list online.

Twitter Platform

The excellent Prologue theme for WP offer every blogger a Twitter alike platform:… without the 140 characters limitation.

Use it for your company, with your friends or just for fun!
The theme is slick, fast loading and depending on what you tweet… fun! Prologue even allows comments. I reckon FriendFeed Comments is the perfect addition to this theme.

Other Usage Options

As shown so far, there really are no limits set to the way Wp can be used. I use this blogging platform as a personal wiki, tumbling interesting topics. Other bloggers, developers use WordPress as a CMS, although it isn’t entirely clear to me what Content Management System really means in this matter. Smarter navigaition? *Nuke alike left sidebar or is every blog per se a CMS?

I am sure with time more and more ways to use WordPress will appear.

Update: As Andreas notes in the comments, WordPress can also be used as job board with the help of the RecruitPress plugin.

Franky writes in his free time at iFranky and can be followed on twitter. Be warned, his twitter account is heavily G&T powered!

Now Technorati, and most likely other services like it are taking a hard look at older WordPress run blogs and are saying “upgrade or we will stop indexing your site”.

From Technorati’s blog:

Blogs that have been compromised by this security vulnerability are typified by having links to spam destinations inserted onto the blog page. These link insertions may be invisible to casual observations; the links are often obscured by style attributes that render them invisible. These links are still seen by crawlers such as Technorati’s, Google’s and Yahoo’s. You can find these links by viewing the source of the blog pages or, when using Firefox, looking under “Tools” -> “Page Info” -> “Links”. Blogs hosted on wordpress.com are not affected by this issue; only blogs hosted on their own installations of WordPress from wordpress.org require concern.

Because of this ongoing problem, we’re discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven’t been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) — this has been reported by many WordPress users.

I guess that means that now is the time to upgrade, as the effects of not upgrading and thus being spammed are very far reaching. Splashpress Media had a problem with this once and one of our sites was put on StopBadware.org’s list, making sure that everyone that found us through Google’s search results was warned that we were an unsafe site to browse. This made traffic and revenue plummet and it took a long time to get off that list, even once the issue was resolved.

It isn’t that hard to upgrade, so what are you waiting for? Upgrade to WordPress 2.3.3 or WordPress 2.5 today!

I know a little about caching, and various different administration themes, and things like Windows Live Writer, but what other things do you do to optimize your interactions with WordPress? Any fancy plugins? Any fancy software? Let me know in the comments below.

I know that myself, and many other people I know, are just like Mark and Jim from WTC in that right after installing WordPress, we turn it off.

Why do we turn it off? Well, mostly because it doesn’t work as effectively as doing things by hand for people that understand how to make text bold and add in image code.

I enjoy seeing that the HTML code is being properly formatted, and that nothing extra is being added. I love controlling how my text is presented, and I feel that the visual editor hinders me in that respect.

The flip side though is that people without any understanding of HTML tags and whatnot love the editor, as it gives them an interface more like the ever prevalent Microsoft Word.

Where do you stand? Is the WordPress visual editor on or off on your installations?

It covers things like tags, update notifications and what all these things mean. He goes over many of the new additions that will make developers happy as well.

Here is just a snippet from that post:

Observant users may notice that there is no way to edit those tags, manage a list of tags, or delete tags. I will point out that, there are already plugins that add management tools to WordPress for tagging and the development team has purposefully taken a “wait and see” approach to tags in this release. It does not make a lot of sense to add tons of UI that is later discovered to be superfluous or rarely used. Instead, they have opted to wait and see what plugins become popular with an open mind about possible integration in future releases.

Check it out on Technosailor.

Running your Wordpress blog can feel like a full-time job sometimes. We’ve compiled an A-Z list of more than 50 plugins to help you streamline everything you need to do out back. As with any plugins list, don’t install them all at once!