Archive for the ‘Foundation’ Category

Simple:Press Forum – Is The Best Good Enough?

May 28th, 2010 by Keith from shrewdies | 1 Comment | Filed in Foundation
Simple:Press Forum is definitely the best forum software I’ve used for WordPress.

There is no WordPress plugin to touch it, and the alternatives are simply too cumbersome to integrate.

For most needs, Simple:Press forum provides all that you need, but I’ve also mentioned before that it is not as simple to administer as some – but only because it has a wealth of options. And under the lid, tweaking the code is not particularly easy – again because there is so much included that it can be hard to find exactly what you want to change.

Mechanics aside, I have been trying for months to develop a simpler alternative built on posts and comments. This is not the most difficult coding challenge, but it is time-consuming, and there always seems something more important to do. Whilst doing the more important things, I noticed that Pods CMS has recently changed there forum for a completely different, simpler interface.

Looking deeper, I saw that it was based on Stack Overflow. Similar, in some ways, to Yahoo Answers, this approach means that we can focus on answering questions. This is a bit of an eye-opener for me, and I realize that promoting a forum to answer questions and share experiences and opinions is asking too much for one application.

I’ve decided to split my forum into a Question And Answer Section and a Discussion Forum. In an ideal world, these would be linked, and it would be absolutely possible to build such a beast with Pods CMS. But the time to build this from scratch means I’d rather look for something usable now, and seek better integration later.

The key here is to find something usable that is easily integrated into WordPress.

Step forward Question2Answer.

I’ve installed it on own of my sites, and I’ll report back on the details later. I’ve no intention to import questions from Simple:Press Forum, as I believe the two applications can work side by side. There will probably be a few more integration issues, but installation of Question2Answer using the WordPress user records was surprisingly easy.

Rather than repeat it here, I’ll refer you to my Question2Answer WordPress installation notes on the author’s support site.

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wp-config.php Essentials

May 1st, 2010 by Keith from shrewdies | No Comments | Filed in Foundation
wp-config.php is essential to WordPress.

For manual installers, it is set and forget. For automatic installers (SimpleScripts or Fantastico) it is often quite invisible.

Unless something unexpected changes, WordPress 3 adds little different to the way wp-config.php works, so it is still vital to learn a couple of tweaks.

wp-config.php is well documented internally, and the installation instructions tell you what you need to change to make sure that your WordPress installation can see the database.

But, there are two situations that commonly occur in a standard WordPress installation that are far from ideal: memory exhausted messages and excessive page and post revisions.
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WordPress 3.0 Beta

April 30th, 2010 by Keith from shrewdies | 7 Comments | Filed in Foundation
WordPress 3.0 Beta is now available, so I used it today on a new website.

I wouldn’t normally use a beta version on a production website, but the full release will be available before that site is fully live, giving me a chance to test some new features.

Site installation continues to be simple, and I took the simplest option of using the automatic script provided by my server host. This has the nice option of changing the default admin username to something less guessable – always a good idea for improved security.

WordPress Settings

Settings are the same as version 2, so I made the usual adjustments: (more…)

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WordPress Upgrade 2.9

December 22nd, 2009 by Keith from shrewdies | 1 Comment | Filed in Foundation

WordPress upgrade is now so easy, there is almost nothing to it.

The new upgrade to WordPress 2.9 is typical of the inbuilt update routine. It simply updates itself, but there are a couple of points to watch out for.

WordPress Upgrade Fatal Error

WordPress Upgrade Fatal Error

First, the usual warning – backup your database and files.

It is easy to be complacent here, and assume that it never goes wrong. Frankly, it hardly ever fails, but if it does, it leaves you with no website, and no easy way of recovering it. If you are happy to run the risk of starting from scratch, then skip the backup – it’s what dummies do.
For us shrewdies, a quick backup is the first step in upgrading WordPress. The backup service from your web host admin panel will do it easily in one step (unless you have a very poor host).

Second, simply click the “Upgrade Automatically” button, and wait a few seconds. It is that easy – but what if it goes wrong?

Occasionally, you will see a message like:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2515174 bytes) in [your-wp-path]/wp-includes/http.php on line 1331

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WordPress MU

October 17th, 2009 by Keith from shrewdies | No Comments | Filed in Foundation
I had my chance, today, to see if my perfect instructions for installing WordPress MU are still perfect.

Actually, I can see immediately that perfection falls short by lacking a screenshot.

So I’ve added one.

WordPress MU Installation

WordPress MU Installation

There are still no Fantastico or Simple Scripts that I am aware of to install automatically, so you have to copy the files to your server, then fill in the form shown above (with your own details, of course).

The choice of sub-domains or sub-directories defaults to the correct choice. I cannot think of a reason why you would want subdirectories, but this would make an interesting topic for discussion in the WordPress MU Installation Forum, if you think you need sub-directories.

The manual install routine is still extremely simple, but as with most things, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. The wrong way is to leap in without planning. The right way is to follow these simple steps.
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What Is The Point Of Re-Installing WordPress?

September 29th, 2009 by Keith from shrewdies | No Comments | Filed in Foundation
Installing WordPress is simple, and upgrading WordPress is simple, but upgrading after a long time, with many version changes is like installing again. In fact, re-installing is much harder than a brand new install.

Let this be a lesson. If you ever want to revive a neglected site – just start again.

WordPress Update

WordPress Update

The first hurdle is the incredible change in WordPress and it’s plugins over the last couple of years. WordPress has added functionality (e.g. tags) that was once only available as plugins.

More importantly, as I indicated in my last post, the purpose of this site has changed, and with it the categories and tags.

The good news is that the basic site is now upgraded and working. The purpose is clear, and now enshrined on a brand new About page. The bad news is that there are a lot of old posts and pages that need re-writing – and none of them really worth the effort.

If you need to revitalize an old site, you need to think about upgrading or starting with a brand new install.

It is easy to decide what to do – just look at your visitor logs. You will see one of three possible situations:

  1. Very little traffic, or
  2. Generally little traffic except for a few pages, or
  3. Lots of traffic.

For 1. you should (more…)

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What Is The Point Of shrewdies.net?

September 24th, 2009 by Keith from shrewdies | No Comments | Filed in Foundation

Trying to get this site relaunched has, as usual raised many interesting topics.

Topics typical, no doubt of the web business owner who tries to cover all aspects of building a site.

After a few days of tinkering with technical aspects of WordPress and its extensive collection of plugins and themes, I have come to the conclusion that I’ve lost the plot!

When I launched this site, I was clear that I wanted it to focus on the technical aspects of running a business. The aspects that a large enterprise would handover to the IT department. The aspects that a one man business either learns, or farms out to a website developer and hosting service. My strategy was to document the development of websites as I built them, including documentation of this site.

I set these objectives over 2 years ago and last worked on the site over 18 months ago. The plan is out-of-date, and it is seriously hampering the relaunch. It proves the strength of a well laid-out plan.

So before you start on building your web business, make sure the plan is set. If you’ve been running for a while, make sure the plan is current.

The planning process is beyond the scope of this website. I’ll be back soon with the pointers to the best way to build a plan. In the meantime, heed the warning. If you work for yourself, don’t start building the website without a current web business plan. If you are designing and building a website for a client, do not start without their current web business plan.

One exception is the very basic site for existing businesses. It needs a privacy policy and a contact page. Most web businesses also need to encourage feedback and interaction beyond simple commenting on your own articles. Therefore, a forum is important, and you can start one with a general group and a ‘Please Help’ forum. I’ll cover this in more detail in the next post.

Without the plan, you simply end up with a series of articles that do not relate to each other. Categories are so vital to making a website work. As time passes, you can tweak them. But when you don’t do it, or leave the plan unmanaged for 18 months, you end up with this – a rambling out of context article that you cannot even categorize.

Pitfalls and problems might be a good category to add – but never add categories on-the-fly, unless they are in the web business plan.

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Google Keyword Grouping

September 18th, 2009 by Keith from shrewdies | No Comments | Filed in Foundation

I’ve neglected this site of late, but this will be changing soon.

As well as new site management tools, I will soon be launching a new web business management site. In fact it’s a business methodology that applies to bricks-n-mortar businesses, and almost any enterprise.

Just to keep you interested, and to prove there is life around here somewhere, I’ve made a public demo of a filtering technique that I use in Google Spreadsheets.

I find that filtering is imperative for keyword grouping, and though some authorities decry spreadsheets, I will be explaining soon just how valuable they can be (not to mention free). Now filtering is great in Excel, or even better, in Open Office, but I need to keep my office on the web, so I like to use Google Docs.

Unfortunately, even though they have now added a rudimentary filtering solution in the new List View, there is no custom filtering.

The Google Spreadsheet Custom Filter Demo solves that problem. It should be self explanatory, but if not, please ask your questions in the comments box below.

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Multi User Web Hosting: WPMU From Scratch

February 24th, 2008 by Keith from shrewdies | 1 Comment | Filed in Foundation


Multi User
Thanks to (nz)dave for this image
How different is Multi User Web Hosting compared to a standard hosted WordPress installation?
There are more similarities than differences, but you must prepare properly and keep your wits about you.

My standard WordPress installation wizard starts after you have a domain up and running. WordPress Multi User (WPMU) installation requires some changes to how your domain is configured. Specifically, you need to change DNS records if you want user blogs to be userblog.domain.com rather than www.domain.com/userblog.

I need to do a separate Multi User Wizard, but for now, I will list all the steps I took to get WPMU running. I’m pretty sure that the plugins and other configuration steps will differ, so I will generate the first phase of my Multi User Wizard over the next few days.

For now, the installation steps, with a couple of warnings, are:
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