1. Before beginning, be sure you have the latest cForms downloaded and unzipped from Delicious Days.

2. FTP to the plugins directory of the site, download a full backup copy of cForms.

3. Do a database backup in the wp-admin, if you haven’t already done it.

4. Deactivate cForms.

5. Upload the new cforms folder through ftp. (Be sure you are uploading the cforms folder and not the zip file name – this will cause cforms to have errors and partially work.)

6. Leave the ftp on for now – activate cForms again.

7. Go to the cForms admin page.

8. Does it say: It appears that cforms was not able to create abspath.php…?
If it does, start a new text file. Copy the green highlighted code cForms produced.
Looks like: <code>&lt;?php $abspath = ‘/home/www/domain-name.com/’; ?&gt;</code>
Paste that code into your new text file and save as abspath.php.
Upload that file to the cforms folder.

9. Refresh the cforms admin page to be sure it’s correct now.

10. If you see more notations at the top, such as upgrade database table, just follow the instructions. This isn’t as common anymore unless you’re upgrading a very old installation.

11. Final step: test one of the forms.

Failed tests:

1. Did you add the abspath.php file and is the path on that correct? If the installation is in a sub-directory, check to see that cforms recognized that and the sub-directory is showing at the end of the file path in abspath.php.

2. If cforms didn’t tell you to add the abspath.php file, check that it’s actually in the cforms folder anyway. If not, create one using the above code with the correct server path.

3. Is the cforms folder it’s own? In the plugins directory, when you open the cforms folder, do you see files or another cforms folder? If you see another cforms folder, you will have to open it, select all the files and folders, and drag them up one directory.

4. Follow this path in your ftp: cforms/js/. Download the cforms.js file and open for editing.
Just past the copyright information, look for this line:
<code>var sajax_uri = ‘/wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_ajax.php’;</code>

If the wordpress installation is in a sub-directory, add it to the code like this:
<code>var sajax_uri = ‘/sub-directory-name/wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_ajax.php’;</code>

Upload the file and re-test the form.

Unable to locate WordPress Plugin directory.

Warning: unlink(/tmp….

Unable to locate WordPress Content directory (wp-content)

How to fix:

The best solution is to create a new ftp login that goes directly to the sub-directory rather than to the root. This usually takes care of the problem right away. When you upgrade in the admin area, it normally asks you for this information before continuing.

If you don’t have control panel access for setting up a new ftp, Artyom’s Blog has a suggestion to try. I’ve not tested his method since I’ve had control panel access for all blogs that had issues, so try at your own risk.

Still having issues:

After clicking “Upgrade Database” – Fatal error: Call to undefined function: populate_roles_270() in /your-abspath/blog/wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php on line 904

For some odd reason, a wordpress file corrupts or does not always upload correct during manual upgrades. This actually resulted in issues through the entire admin. Simple solution was to re-upload the file: wp-admin/includes/schema.php

Yet one more issue to help:

Any error relating to tmp/anything directory couldn’t be found.

Add the following to the end of the wp-config.php file (but before ?>):

(I suggest this as a last resort if all else has failed to stop errors, but I have tested this method and it did resolve an issue for one site.)

Starting with 2.7 I typically deactivate and delete the automatic upgrade plugin after upgrade. But mostly of curiosity I left one on when upgrading to 2.7.1.

Question:
Should I definitely deactivate and delete the automatic upgrade plugin once upgrading to 2.7? Will it make a difference leaving it on?

Answer:
Yes. At the least it must be deactivated. It will cause an error during the attempt to auto upgrade if the plugin is still active. This won’t cause damage to your blog, but the upgrade will not work until you have deactivated the plugin.

This feature now being built-in to Word Press is very nice though. It skips several tedious steps from the the previous automatic upgrade plugin.

No Automatic Backup:
One important thing to remember though, you definitely need a database backup plugin now. It no longer takes you through the steps for backup during the upgrade.

I recommend WordPress Database Backup. It works very well, simple to use, and have used it myself to restore lost or corrupt databases with 100% success. This plugin also has automatic backup, which I highly rercommend taking the few seconds to set.

Recently, one of our customers told us that they were being required by their credit card company to pass a certification test verifying that their website was PCI compliant and wanted us to attend to it.

The company doing the compliance check was called Trustkeeper, and I’m very proud to report that right out of the box, with no changes on our part related to their cart, WP e-commerce passed the PCI compliance test with flying colors.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on PCI compliance, but I can tell you that we had no problem passing the test using the WP e-commerce software. We did have some server configuration changes, but those were unrelated to the WP or the cart plugin.

If you’re a WordPress lover and you’re in need of a shopping cart too, this one will meet your needs…   Please tell them that Scott sent ya!

This has most commonly been used in the page.php file of the WordPress themes only, but can certainly be applied to any page that you would like the ability to set the h1 tag (or some cases, if you prefer, the h2 tag). Remember, it is recommended to set the default theme h2 tags displaying the header of the pages to H1 for an SEO advantage.

This documentation will demonstrate applying this hack to page.php in your theme, but can easily be understood from that point on doing the same to your template pages, index.php, single.php, etc.

Step by Step:
1. You will need to be using an installed version of WordPress at least 2.x or greater as this method uses the “Custom Fields” you will find toward the bottom of the page in the admin area as you create or edit pages or posts.

2. In your favorite editor for editing your theme pages, or using the Theme Editor under the Presentation tab of the WordPress admin area, open pages.php for editing.

3. In the default theme of WordPress or the theme you are using, you will see a section toward the top of the file that looks exactly like or similar to this:

It’s this line – <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2> that you will be changing. It may not look exactly the same, but will almost always be enclosed in h2 tags.

You will want to replace the contents inside those tags, but it is highly recommended that if they currently say <h2></h2> to change those to h1.

4. Replace that line with the following:

So your file should now look similar to this:

5. Save the file and upload it to your theme folder or save the file in the theme editor.

6. Now you can edit or create new pages and use the custom fields to change the heading of the page without changing the actual title of the page.

7. To do this, as an example, let’s create a new page named “Test”.

8. Publish the page, then view it from your WordPress site.

9. You can see that not only the title in the browser, in the menu, and the heading of the page says “Test”.

10. Now back to the admin area, edit the page “Test”.
11. Scroll to the bottom of the editing area until you see “Custom Fields”.
12. You may have to click on the “+” sign to the right to see the area for editing these fields.

13. Here you will need to add “changeH1” to the key text box for the first time. Be sure that changeH1 is spelled exactly the same and the “H” is capitalized.

14. After you have done this the first time, you will be able to select the changeH1 from the drop-down box under the word Key instead. It is only necessary to add the key once with a value, and from that point, it will remain in the drop-down list to be selected easier.

15. Now change the header by typing a new one in the Value text box to the right. Let’s just test it out by typing “This is my new heading text”. Then click “Add Custom Field”.

16. Save and continue, or save the page now.

17. Go back to your site and refresh to see the change.

18. Now you can edit any page to display a different heading just by setting the “changeH1” key in the drop-down list and typing in the heading you want in value. Don’t forget to click “Add Custom Field”.

19. If you have already set a heading in a page using this method, you can also go back to editing the page, and change the value in the box just above where you set it originally. After making the change click on “update”.

We’ve been using it in several places for quite awhile now and although it recognizes standard .html for making links, nothing we did would force manual linebreaks. It was REALLY irritating and quite unprofessional looking.

Over on Lorele’s blog I found a suggestion but I couldn’t get that working either so I posted on the actual plug-in page. Finally, things slowed down enough that I asked Heather, our #1 programmer to try and figure it out and she was able to.

It turns out that the plug-in itself has to be edited, and rather than explain it here I’ll just place a version of the edited plug in.

So for those of you wish to force line breaks in the get author profile plug-in, you need to replace your version with this version and then simply type this >>> where you want the line break

Thank you to the original creator of the plug-in, thank you to Lorelle for almost solving it, and a giant thank you to Heather for actually making it work!

* There is no support for this edited plug-in, so any comments other than “thank you” will likely not be answered

Their 25+ page site previously required Front Page to edit, or another .html editor, and there was very little graphic appeal. It was all Times New Roman font on a white page, with the company logo in the upper left corner.

The design they chose (from Template Monster) was actually a Joomla template that we then converted to a 100% Wordpress 2.5 compatible theme, including fully widgetized sidebars.

We pulled in all of their existing content, and 301 redirected all of their old pages, to ensure no loss in traffic. Now, not only is is good looking, but any of the employees they desire can make edits as needed.

See the site here…

This goes against our usual practice of upgrading immediately every time a new version is released, and but the changes are just too major to have to deal with until we know more about how it affects plug-ins that we use.

The article goes into some pretty good detail about what’s changing, how it’s changing, how it might affect users, and even includes some great screenshots to illustrate their point. It’s a highly recommended read before you do your upgrade…

The process of upgrading your WordPress used to be a tedious one. You had to manually backup all of your files, download them deactivate all your plug-ins upload the new version run the upgrade

Assuming that everything went okay, you then had to manually reactivate all of your plug-ins. I went through the step by step Wordpress upgrade using a video on my main blog, and even though it was fairly straightforward it still took up too much of my time.

Thanks to a plug-in that was released last summer the process is now seamless and can be completed in under 60 seconds.

This video demonstrates the entire process from start to finish and is not so much a tutorial, as it is a quick demonstration of an amazing plug-in that’s made our lives much easier.

Thank you to Techie Buzz, for releasing it, thank you to Ronald Heureca who has pretty much perfected the automated process of this fantastic plug-in

No Video Responses have been posted yet.

Click here to post a video response.

Anyway, the original site is totally custom, and I think she matched it perfectly, right down to the “burned edges”…

Here’s the original site on one domain

Here’s the matched Wordpress theme on another

And here’s our ever growing samples page with our Wordpress portfolio…

Putting pictures in WordPress posts and pages is easy, but not exactly intuitive. This is a fast tutorial to show you how it’s done with minimum effort.

I added a new user, then logged in to post as that new user, and here’s what I saw at the “Write” screen -

Unfortunately, this option then prevents those “Contributors” from being able to add photos to a post, which is a shame.. After hitting the “Submit for Review button, I logged out, then back in as the Admin, and I see that there is a post pending for review – Nice

There was also no email notification to me as the Admin that a contributor had posted, but I guess you can’t have everything.

If anyone knows how to allow for photo uploads or add email notifications, please let me know here…

Apparently, a recent addition to WordPress (maybe 2.3?) added a button on the WordPress text editor that allows you to paste information directly from Microsoft Word, and instantly strips out all the formatting. I’m exactly not sure how long it’s been there, but it works very well.

First you have to open the advanced toolbar options to see the new button button -

This expands the menu to a second level where you will immediately see the option for Microsoft Word pasting.

Hitting that button opens another small window, where you can paste from Word to your hearts content.

Nice!

This is very odd… First they replaced Technorati in there with Google, and now they’ve removed altogether the ability to know instantly when someone links back to you.

That’s a shame, because I really like it! Perhaps it’s just a glitch and it will come back tomorrow?

At a recent presentation I gave about using Wordpress, I was adding a slide about the ping list, and decided to count them. I was surprised to see that there were only 46, but that’s what I put in the slide.

Apparently, at some point over the last couple of dozen installations, I dropped off a batch from my list, and even my own blog was running short.

Going back through my files and folders, and even some old blogs, I’ve now recompiled my ping list, and removed the duplicates, and I’m posting them here for your viewing pleasure.

To add to your ping list –

• login to WordPress admin
• go to the options tab
• go to the writing sub tab
• scroll further down than you probably ever have before
• paste into the field

There’s an old thread here at Digitalpoint with some detailed info for better pinging too, but I disagree with the detractors there. My own experience has shown me that it’s NOT a wasted or duplicated effort, I prefer these “manual” pings over Pingomatic, and that the no ping waiting plugin is was very cool. (sorry, the domain is gone!)

That’s it. Feel free to copy and paste my list below, with no reciprocal link required, no thanks necessary, and no paypal donation sent to scott (at) pdxtc.com

(I would however appreciate any comments added here if you notice anything missing…)

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping.php

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://bitacoles.net/notificacio.php

http://bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://bitacoras.net/ping/

http://blo.gs/ping.php

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://blogoole.com/ping/

http://blogoon.net/ping/

http://blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://blogsnow.com/ping

http://blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrp…

http://blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://blogupdate.org/ping/

http://blogupdate.org/sverige/ping/

http://bulkfeeds.net

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://catapings.com/ping.php

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi

http://feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/

http://imblogs.net/ping/

http://lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://mod-pubsub.org/ping.php

http://newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://packetmonster.net/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.blogg.de/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogoon.net/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/RPC2/

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/

http://pingoat.com/

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://pingqueue.com/rpc/

http://popdex.com/addsite.php

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2 euro.weblogs.com

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.britblog.com

http://rpc.britblog.com/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.wpkeys.com

http://rpc.wpkeys.com/

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz

http://snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://weblogalot.com/Ping/

http://weblogues.com/ping/

http://weblogues.com/RPC

http://weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://zing.zingfast.com

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast

They were happy with their look and feel what unhappy with having to keep someone on retainer just to make a couple of changes each month, featuring two of their tenants.

The site is an executive suite rental business, and the transition was completely seamless. They now have the ability to make changes themselves, and within just a few months, will recoup their entire investment.

Additionally, because the site is now in WordPress, all of the URLs are search engine friendly, and no longer contain multiple parameters that the search engines may have trouble crawling.

They can individually control all of their title tags, keyword tags and the meta description tag, so if they put their mind to it, they should now rank well in the search engines.

Here are some samples of our WordPress site matched themes, and site conversions

“If you do everything on WordPress, you’re pretty much covered for SEO.”

That’s exactly what he said, (I wrote it down) and I could barely believe my ears.  I mean, yeah, WordPress is pretty much magic when properly configured, but to have Matt Cutts from Google give it his stamp of approval at a conference presentation was pretty amazing to hear, especially since Google owns Blogger.

To be perfectly clear, Matt was speaking of a self hosted WordPress blog using their free software, and not free hosted blog platform available WordPress.com. There is a huge difference, so don’t be confused!

There are plenty of expensive and cumbersome options for building a website, that lock you into a certain web host, programmer or company, and that’s one of the things I love most about the open source WordPress system.  You’re free to host where you want,  tweak it to your hearts content, and you’re not locked in to an expensive solution.

I would have to say that while Wordpress isn’t quite perfect “right out of the box”, with just a few minor tweaks and plug-ins added, it can compete with almost anything else on the market for SEO purposes.

My own success with 100% Wordpress powered sites has been outstanding, and for a while, it was the best kept secret in SEO.  Now, with this public endorsement by one of the most famous names in search, I only see it’s use increasing over time, as the community continues to grow worldwide.

However, most people don’t even bother to update the default comment invitation lines that appear in their WordPress blog, because it’s just not something you think about.

If you scroll down below you’ll see that I’ve customized the comment message on this blog, and it’s really easy to do.

First, login to your WordPress admin, then go to presentation – theme editor.

Click on your single.php file over on the right.

Before you do a bunch of work to scroll to the bottom and make sure that you’re not seeing this message: “If this file were writable, you could edit it”

If you see that, then you need to adjust your permissions (FTP – CHMOD) on those files.

Once you are viewing single.php, then using Firefox or IE, (Ctrl-F), you can open a search box and with the Wordpress file editor, you will usually find this line “You can follow any comments”. I say usually because these files are in the theme, and most designers will not edit that message.

That will put you smack dab in the middle of your code for editing that text to say what you want. You can also use linebreaks and limited HTML tags, like bolds and breaks to format it however you like. Cool, huh?

Disclaimer:
ALWAYS make a backup of your work, even just in an open Notepad file. That way, if it screws up your formatting somehow you can paste it right back.

If you’re on an Apache host, you most likely have mod rewrite, and you most likely already have an htaccess file, in my experience.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your htaccess file is writable, and this can be done with your FTP software or your file manager inside your web hosting control.

Many web hosts block the visibility of your htaccess, so be sure to choose to show hidden files inside your FTP software or inside your web hosting control panel.

Make note of the original settings, then set the htaccess to 777, which should enable the WordPress admin control panel to do the rest.

Login to your WordPress admin control panel – options – permalinks

From there go to the custom option, and paste the following into the field -

/%category%/%postname%/

That will give you your category and post title for the end of your URL. I’ve been experimenting lately with just using /%postname%/ too, and if your blog is very niche, and you don’t want to to categorize your URLs, there’s no reason you can’t do that.

At that point, you should see this message appear the top -

You’re done!

Check your post for friendly URL’s and change your .htaccess back the way it was, and you’re good to go.

*disclaimer – We will not accept any liability if you do it incorrectly and it does not work, or you get hacked because you leave something writable, or you basically screw thiongs up. Just set your permalinks back to default, and all will be fine.

Once you have an established URL structure, a change can cause you to not only lose search engine visibility, but all of your PageRank will drop to zero, and all of your inbound links will no longer work. That can’t be good!

Additionally, if all of the page names in the search engines index cease to exist, then anyone that ever clicks on one of your Serps would be taken to a 404 error. That’s bad!

Sometimes there’s a lot of legitimate reason to want to change, usually because they were set up in correctly in the first place. The proper way to make change would be to implement real one redirects for every single URL that’s changing. This can be quite the daunting task.

Luckily there is a plug-in available to make this process painless. It’s called Dean’s Permalinks Migration, and here’s a three-minute video to show you how it works…

As a quick lesson in SEO, I’ll point out that on the homepage I’ve added text links to the purchase page,  using different anchor text five times.

Because I don’t have a lot of content on this site yet, I’ve chosen to place four primary search phrases there, made them bold, and then linked all four to my shopping cart page.

The fifth link, near the bottom of the homepage is nofollowed, so that I’m not wasting any link juice following text for which I don’t care to rank. Make sense?

Future posts will go into the plug-ins being used, but first I have to get the privacy and contact pages up, (which of course will be nofollowed). Stay tuned…

As an introductory offer, we are giving away one free default installation of Wordpress with every web hosting package.

Upon completion of a web hosting sign-up, simply e-mail support and request your free Wordpress installation. Within 24 hours, (one business day) we will install Wordpress on your domain, and e-mail you your admin username and password.

An account sign up with our Portland, Oregon Web hosting partner only takes a minute. This offer may not last – (but then again, it may!)

Where are the servers really located?
In Portland Oregons Pittock building & data center right in downtown Portland Oregon. We are simply a reseller of a virtual hosting package from Sri Lanka.

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All sites are backed up twice daily, so yes, your data is safe.

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Yes, very. The Pittock center is a state of the art facility that is used by XO communications, and Easystreet, and many other local ISP’s. There is no faster or more secure public web hosting facility in the state of Oregon

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Plan prices and instant signups start at $9.99 per month.

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I ran across a plug-in last night that was absolutely amazing, and I just tried it this morning – It’s called the Wordpress automatic upgrade.

I just upgraded a blog from an older version 2.2, to a new version 2.31 in under three minutes total.

I downloaded the plug-in, uploaded to the plug-ins directory, activated, and then clicked the link inside the description of the plug-in to begin.

It automatically deactivates and reactivates your plug-ins during the install, and backs up the files for download too, before the upgrade takes place.

For some reason, the “automated version” failed, but manually clicking next, next, next, had me completed in under three minutes, including downloading the backup file.

There’s really no FTP time either up or down, because the server goes directly to Wordpress.org to get the latest version. This is totally awesome, and this plug-in needs to become a part your standard upload.

Keep in mind of course that any plug-ins that don’t work with the new versions are going to delete you screwed and force a manual upgrade, but the new plug-in page from Wordpress 2.3x on will now automatically tell you when a plug-in is out of date. Try it for yourself…

It supposedly fixes about 20 known issues from the recent 2.3 update and will likely be well worth taking a look at.
As cool as the changes in version 2.3 were, it presented quite a nightmare to those that attempted upgrades without doing much research.

Many old plug-ins were broken – more than I can even believe, but it did force me to evaluate all of my own installations, both for myself and for clients, and two people are now making the rounds doing all of the upgrades for all the software as well as all the plug-ins,

Stay tuned for further notice on an actual release of 2.31, and if you’re brave enough (I’m not)  install the RC and tell me how it is

We’re excited for the launch of the new website, and we are currently implementing shopping cart. The anticipated launch date was November 1, but it’s looking like it may be sooner, so I thought I’d make the site live today.