For those of you out there interested in seeing a genealogy site built using ‘mostly’ WordPress, please visit ManyRoads.  Obviously the site is one of mine (my family genealogy).  However, I think it provides a pretty decent example of what you can do to slice and dice a ‘bunch’ of information into a ‘pretty useful’ format.

I have tried to use a plugin for the genealogy database backend (TNG).  Security remains a problem for that plugin, in that it does not work for me.  However I do have a single set of logins between the two systems and databases when used in the manner seen on the site. As is likely obvious, the ManyRoads site uses a large number of plugins including (Revised list as of 29 January 2010):

• Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.
• All in One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. Options configuration panel | Upgrade to Pro Version | Donate | Support | Amazon Wishlist
• AStickyPostOrderER - AStickyPostOrderER lets you customize the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all, in WordPress 2.3+ blog. Useful when using WordPress as a Content Management System. Now with pagination of post lists.
• AVH First Defense Against Spam - This plugin gives you the ability to block spammers before content is served.
• Bad Behavior - Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
• Category Order- The Category Order plugin allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop.
• cforms- cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more. Please see ____HISTORY.txt for what’s new and current bugfixes.
• Collapsing Blogroll- Output the built-in blogroll where the shortcode [collroll] is placed in the post/page. The categories can be collapsed.
• Count Per Day- Counter, shows reads per page; today, yesterday, last week, last months … on dashboard and widget.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator- Generates a fully customizable sitemap
• EG-Series- Better organize and highlight your posts by grouping them into series.
• Enhanced Links- Allows to get better control over the links listing. Also provides a widget view of the links. Please make a donation if you are satisfied.
• Enhanced Recent Posts- A plugin for wordpress which enhances the built-in “Recent Posts” widget. Please make a donation if you are satisfied.
• Exclude Pages from Navigation- Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.
• Flexi Pages Widget- A highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. User friendly widget control comes with various options.
• Global Post Password- Enables you to define a global password for all password-protected posts. Click here to change the password.
• Google XML Sitemaps- This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
• Hana Flv Player- The best way to embed Flash Player and Flash movie in your WordPress Blog. Includes GPL Flowplayer and OS FLV player. Usage: [hana-flv-player video='/source_video.flv' /]
• Hungred Feature Post List- This plugin is design for hungred.com and people who face the same problem! Please visit the plugin page for more information.
• Just One Category- On a category’s archive page do not show posts from that category’s children categories unless those posts are also a member of the original category in question. Based on Front Page Categories by Ryan Boren.
• List category posts- List Category Posts allows you to list posts from a category into a post/page using the [catlist] shortcode. This shortcode accepts a category name or id, the order in which you want the posts to display, and the number of posts to display. You can use [catlist] as many times as needed with different arguments. Usage: [catlist argument1=value1 argument2=value2].
• My Page Order- My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.
• NextGEN Gallery- A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the Web 2.0.
• OpenBook- Displays a book’s cover image, title, author, and other book data from Open Library.
• p2pConverter- This plugin allows you to easily convert a post to a page and vice versa through an easy to use interface. You may either click on your Manage tab in Administration, and you will see a Convert option under Posts and Pages sub-tabs, or click Convert while editing a post or page in the bottom right side bar. A p2pConverter role capability prevents unwanted users from converting pages (i.e. only Administrators and Editors have this ability), which can be adjusted by using a Role Manager plugin.
• Page Links To- Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.
• pageMash- Manage your multitude of pages with pageMash’s slick drag-and-drop style, ajax interface. Allows quick sorting, hiding and organising of parenting.
• PollDaddy Polls- Create and manage PollDaddy polls and ratings in WordPress
• RB Internal Links- Link to other blog posts and pages without specifying the full URL. Uses a UI to ease finding the post or page you want to link to.
• Redirection- Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors
• Secure WordPress- Little basics for secure your WordPress-installation.
• SEO Smart Links- SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
• SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam- Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. This prevents spam from automated bots. Also is WPMU and BuddyPress compatible. Settings | Donate
• SidebarTabs- sidebarTabs allows you to easily widgets into Tabs
• Simple Tags- Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.8 and 2.9 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags !
• Snazzy Archives- Snazzy Archives is a visualization plugin for your WordPress site which creates completely unique archive pages.
• Social Bookmarks- Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. Use the plugin options under Dashboard > Social to configure it.
• Subpage Listing- Displays a directory-like listing of subpages where <!–%subpages%–> exists in the content of pages. It will be displayed if a page is blank. txfx_wp_subpages() can be used to display subpages in the sidebar. See this plugin’s site for details.
• TNG WordPress Integration- Integrates TNG (The Next Generation of Genealogy) with WordPress.
• Topsy Retweet Button- Provides a Twitter retweet button powered by Topsy.
• TreeMagic-Cypress- Way of making Internet and Intranet information easily accessible
• Visitor Maps and Who’s Online- Displays Visitor Maps with location pins, city, and country. Includes a Who’s Online Sidebar to show how many users are online. Includes a Who’s Online admin dashboard to view visitor details. The visitor details include: what page the visitor is on, IP address, host lookup, online time, city, state, country, geolocation maps and more. No API key needed. Settings | Donate
• WordPress Download Monitor- Manage downloads on your site, view and show hits, and output in posts. If you are upgrading Download Monitor it is a good idea to back-up your database first just in case. You may need to re-save your permalink settings after upgrading if your downloads stop working.
• WP-phpMyAdmin- Provides phpMyAdmin from the WordPress admin console
• WP-PostViews- Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. Modified by David Potter to include options for when and where to display view counts.
• WP-Print- Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• wp-scanner activator- This Plugin adds <!- wpscanner -> to enable wp-scanner to scan your blog.
• WP-SpamFree- An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.
• WP Render Blogroll Links- Outputs your Blogroll links to a Page or Post. Add [wp-blogroll] to a Page or Post and all your WordPress links/Blogrolls will be rendered. This extremely simple plug-in enables you to create your own Links page without having to write a custom template.The output can easily be styled with CSS. Each category with its links is encapsulated in a DIV with a classname called “linkcat”. All the links are attributed with the class “brlink”.
• WP to Twitter- Updates Twitter when you create a new blog post or add to your blogroll using Cli.gs. With a Cli.gs API key, creates a clig in your Cli.gs account with the name of your post as the title.
• YD Zoomify- This WordPress plugin allows for simple insertion of a Zoomify zoomable web image in a post content, page or template.

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Because most of us post to BLOGs in order to be read, having a good and complete list of update services is essential. As I was surfing the web I came across a rather complete, current, and thoughtful listing. This list is maintained and located at:

http://elliottback.com/wp/a-list-of-rpc-and-rpc2-to-ping/

Many thanks to Elliot C. Back.

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I don’t know how many folks, like me, have had troubles using phpMyAdmin to perform large MySQL database restores, but if you have, then perhaps this little set of pointers will help you out. I know this process has made my life easier.

As most of you probably already know, phpMyAdmin is a wonderful toolset. It makes database management and editting both simple and straightforward. However, one of the major drawbacks to the phpMyAdmin toolset is that it is VERY slow to upload large amounts of SQL or perform Database restores using the Import function. For those of us with large and very large MySQL databases this presents a major issue. So what can be done to get around the problem?

The obvious conclusion is that a tool other than phpMyAdmin is needed. MySQL Administrator is the tool I have discovered that works best for me. The tool is starightforward, secure, and fast. The process I have found to work is as follows:

• Download and install MySQL Administrator (and set it up so that it is able to log directly into your database server). This is easy to do; the only gotcha I encountered is: remember not to use http:// in your url address.
• “Connect” MySQL Administrator to the system where you keep your MySQL DB.
• Using the Backup function, create a backup of the DB and store it somewhere easy to locate.
• When you need to do a restore (or ‘yes’ even a copy) all you need do is log into MySQL Administrator, connect to your database system and access Restore Backup. Interestingly this backup need not have been generated via MySQL Administrator; I have used phpMyAdmin generated files successfully.
• If you are performing a simple restore, all you need to do is point the restore to the target DB and wait. In my expereince, it takes about 5 minutes to restore a 25MB database.

If this were all that we could do the tool, that would be enough, however, there are other useful functions that you can employ with a couple of small ‘tricks’. For example, if you want to create a new DB and freeze an old one, all you need to do is:

• create the new database per your usual process (remember the name you give to this new DB).
• backup the database you want to clone
• open a copy of the ‘backed up’ database in your favorite editor (I use geany)
• do a gloabl search and replace of the old database name with the new one- per the name you created in the first step above
• restore this editted file into your blank database using the functions within MySQL Administrator
• point your application to the database of your choosing– now that you have at least two.

I find this process to be extremely helpful in upgrading and testing systems.

I hope this little tutorial helpful. I wish I had figured this out years ago, myself.

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We are pleased to announce that as of today, our website is “Green”. We have just moved to a new host that certifies a net zero carbon footprint. We know this is not a huge contribution, but every little bit helps.

To learn more about this please visit the Ambient Webs LLC We Are Green page.

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For those of you who have been kind enough to spend time on our site, we thank you AND we are pleased to say that we have made a significant breakthrough in our site’s performance.

The long and short of the issue is Plugins. Plugins can act as a significant drag on your site’s performance. We have noticed load times on this site approaching 11+ seconds (wayyyy to slow!). Now the load times are running at about 4.5 seconds (we think that’s much better!). In order to solve this load dilemma we have been using a set of free tools from Pingdom.

Areas of problems we noticed in our debug process included:

• misplaced and missing image directories in the tarski theme (we now have three directories of our little gif images… because of the errant calls within the theme internal calls)
• broken image links (yes we were part of the problem too…)
• numerous poor (read slooowwwwww) plugins; these are all removed

Additionally we have learned to remove any unused (not active) plugin. Inactive plugins can still act as a performance hit. And lastly, I scrubbed our DB. Numerous plugins had left a trail of unused tables and rows in our DB– the worst culprits were a forum plugin and an audit trail plugin.

Again, thank you to everyone for sticking with us. We appreciate your patience and hope you will find our little lessons-learned useful.

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The TreeMagic-Banyan tools on this site now provide easy access to more than 800 cross referenced WordPress articles.  These articles are read and cross referenced using AmbientWebs unique SWED  based technologies and served on our Banyan portal.
To gain access to this wealth of WordPress knowledge from the world’s leading WordPress sites, simply double-click on any word and open the WP Banyan Portal.  Let us know what you think.  Use our contact form to provide us with your observations and feedback.

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WordPressHelp (WPH) is very pleased to announce that we have implemented the newest release of TreeMagic-Banyan thereby aggregating the web’s most important WordPress information all in one location!!!

In our continuing efforts to make WordPress easier to use, WPH now affords WP developers & users the opportunity to double-click on any text word on this site and gain “instant” access to related WP resource information from:

• WordPress
• Lorelle
• Automattic
• WordPress Themes
• WordPressHelp
• AmbientWebs and
• TreeMagic

Users may access the information from these sites either individually (via the drop-down menu which appears when you double-click on a term) or in a collective, intelligently, pre-processed and correlated fashion (via the WP Banyan Portal). This Web 3 functionality allows users access information ‘on-the spot’ and then return to the source for continued reading and information gathering.

If you have additional sites you wish for us to incorporate in our WP Banyan Portal and TM-Banyan Search function, please use our Contact page to let us know.

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AmbientWebs is pleased to inform everyone that the following sites are now enabled with TreeMagic-Cypress or TreeMagic-Banyan:

• TreeMagic-Cypress sites:
  • http://treemagic.org
  • http://drdiab.info
  • http://ambientwebs.com
  • http://goodwines.org
• TreeMagic-Banyan sites:
  • http://wordpresshelp.org
  • http://processteam.org

Please let us know other sites that are using the plugin… oh and we are also interested in what you might want to see this plugin do next….

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