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.

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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.

Having a big ping list added to your WordPress blog is not going to make or break you, but the more exposure, the better, right?

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.

During the “Keynote Coffee Chat with Matt Cutts, Matt told everyone what he thought of WordPress, and what many savvy internet marketers already know…

“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.

One of the first things you should do on a new WordPress install is to update your permalinks, and it’s really not very hard, but one of the things that gives people problems is that their .htaccess file isn’t writable.

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.

Changing the permalinks structure on an existing WordPress blog can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

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!

I’ve now redone the home page of the site, and added the final shoppingcart item,  which is a simple Wordpress theme match without a content importation.  In my rush to get the site live, I completely left that out, but now the shopping page is complete.

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.

Downloading and uploading files for Wordpress upgrades takes a little while, and the manual upgrade process can be somewhat tedious. That’s why frequently, Wordpress installations get ignored until they are far out of date.

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.

Release candidate one for Wordpress 2.31 was released less than a day ago.

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,