As many of you are aware, I have been building a rather extensive and large WordPress Website for my family genealogy (http://many-roads.com).  As of this writing the site encompasses some 3 GB of space, an average of 120 unique readers per day with approximately 300 page reads, 10,000+ pages, images and documents (for me this is huge).

I have posted a series of articles on ManyRoads describing that site’s construction and tool base.  Since much of the discussion involves WordPress use, I thought it germain to place a link to the article stream here.

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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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There are numerous actions a prudent web admin can take to make their site more secure. In an effort to place the key safety precautions you can employ on a WordPress site I have gathered a number of actions from multiple sources and placed them here.

Please note that this posting is not original content, rather it is a merged aggregation from the references listed below.

Item 1.

Always Upgrade to the current version of WordPress

Upgrade your WordPress as soon as possible. Most WordPress releases patch security loopholes, fixes which are essential for your continued protection.

Item 2.

Change Default Passwords

That is the first thing to do, if you are still using the default 6 lettered admin password which is sent to you via e-mail. Give a tight and secure password with numbers and letters and symbols jumbled up so that granny’s bruteforcing technique doesn’t cost you your blog. Don’t be too concerned about loosing your password and choose a simple password as you can always change your lost WordPress password.

Item 3.

Remove WordPress ‘version string’ in your theme files

1. Go to WordPress dashboard, click on presentation -> edit themes -> header.php
2. Find and remove this. bloginfo(‘version’) Save the file.

Explanation: Hide the version number of your WordPress such that it will be hard for hacker to find security loopholes for the specific version of WordPress.

Item 4.

Place empty ‘index.html’ file in the plugins folder

1. Open a text editor ’save as’ and save the file as index.html (be sure to change the filetype from text files to all files if you are running in windows)
2. Upload the file to WordPress wp-content/plugins folder in your web server.

Explanation: Hide the plugins used by your WordPress blog. It uses the same concept as above which is to hide security loopholes in the plugins.

Item 5.

Upload a copy of .htaccess file in the wp-admin and wp-includes folders

1. Using FTP program or your webserver file manager, go to the root folder of your server and download .htaccess file (set ’show hidden files’ first if you’re using FTP program such as FileZilla)
2. Go to your wp-admin folder
3. Upload the .htaccess file you’ve downloaded from the top level directory.

Item 6.

Use SSH instead of Telnet, SFTP instead of FTP

For real security use ssh to access your site instead of ftp which is inherently insecure and open to snooping of your account details as the authorization details (login & password) are transmitted in clear over the internet. With ssh you can use secure ftp protocol like sftp to do anything you can do with ftp. Similarly you can use ssh instead of telnet to securely connect to your Linux / Unix server

Item 7.

Create a robot.txt to place in your top level directory

Recommended contents include:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /category/*/*
Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */feed
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Allow: /wp-content/uploads

References:

• http://www.bloganything.net/922/secure-your-wordpress-blog
• http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/20-wordpress-security-plug-ins-and-tips-to-keep-hackers-away/
• wordpress codex

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As many of you may have noticed, I have been working on improving the ‘noticability’ of my sites using select WordPress Plugins. I can say with certainty now that the following plugins have had a very positive impact on my SEO rankings but more importantly on my site traffic. The plugins I refer to are:

• YARPP- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin- I use this plugin with customized settings (variable per site and my business objectives) to improve cross-linking of information on my site.  This not only improves some of the ratings in Google but seems to have a positive impact on whether or not people stay on the site and look at additional related information.  AND.. since I am in the business of providing information to people, this serves a very improtant function. (Similar functionality can be made available via Simple Tags– although I find this plugin superior.)
• All in One SEO- This plugin is very useful in improving what Google and others see when they examine my web-pages. The one dependency I have observed in using this plugin is to load the same keywords I use/ generate in Simple Tags in the Home Keywords area of this plugin.  This seems to provide a higher hit rate on my pages when the search engines come by.  It additionally appears to have a positive impact on making relevant pages available to search engines.
• SEO Smart Links- I use this plugin for much the same reason as YARPP.  The big plus is that this plugin places hot links within the body of Posts/Pages to facilitate cross-navigation around the site.
• Simple Tags- is possibly the key to everything.  If you are like me and often forget to tag things this plugin makes it easy to augment and re-tag your entire site at will. If you keep the tag list in this plugin as your master, it also makes it easy to cross-link and cross-reference all your SEO data across the site.
  • Be certain to look at the admin function for this tool because you can invoke the following key functions:
  • Related Posts- cross-linking of posts where content is similar (similar to YARPP)
  • Related Pages- cross-linking of pages where content is similar (similar to YARPP)
  • Relevant Tags- listing of the tags used on the Page/ Post

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In order to better understand the relative merits of moving from NoFollow to DoFollow, I have begun a test on this site.

Basically I am using two new (for me) plugins.

• Lucia’sLinkLove -and-
• Nofollow Reciprocity

The basic notion is that Lucia’s LinkLove allows for an automatic reset of the default NoFollow for comments to DoFollow, after pre-determined number (determined by me) of approved comments have been added by a given user to this site. The NoFollow Reciprocity module sets and/all comments to NoFollow if the receiveing site has their site set to NoFollow.

Hopefully this test will demonstrate an uptick in this site’s ratings and traffic without a significant additional burden in SPAM.  I’ll post the results of my test, as they become obvious.  If you have ideas of other plugins that I should add to this mix, please let me know.

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Updated:11 April 2009

Updated: 15 April 2009

Like many of you, I am always in search of excellent themes for my existing and new WordPress sites.   Also, probably like most of you, I seem to be constantly searching the web for them.  In order to help consolidate my list of useful sites (eliminating many I find either to expensive or of too poor quality, here is my list:

• WordPress
• WordPress Multi-User
• Top WordPress Themes
• Bala Sadish sites:
  • WordPress Theme Park
  • Play with WP Themes Info
  • WordPress Rocks
• Smashing Magazine
• BlogOh!Blog
• MyGreenCorner
• WP Skins
• Fresheezy
• EZwpthemes
• Site Ground
• WeLoveWP
• Free WordPress Themes
• Widget Ready Themes
• Free WordPress Themes
• OSS Skins
• WordPress Themeland
• WordPress2u
• ThemeBot

Reviews

• The TOP 7 Premium WordPress Themes For FREE
• 15 High Quality Premium-Like Free WordPress Themes

If you have other ideas or suggestions please be sure to let me know and I’ll add them here.

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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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Most of these pointers are courtesy of: http://mywebresource.com

• .htaccess Generator
• .htaccess URL Rewrite
• Adsense Calculator
• AdSense Preview
• Advanced Meta-Tags Generator
• Advanced Syntax Highlighting
• Alexa Rank Comparison
• Alexa Traffic Rank
• Backlink Checker
• Base64 Encoding / Decoding
• Broken Link Checker
• Check Server Headers
• Class C Checker
• Code to Text Ratio
• CPM Advertising ROI Calculator
• CSS Coder
• CSS Navigation Menu Generator
• Datetime format converter
• DHTML Tooltip
• Dig Utility
• DNS Utility
• Domain Age
• Domain Look-up
• Domain Lookup Tool
• Domain Typo Generator
• Domain Whois
• Dropdown menu
• Fetch Header
• Fetch HTML content
• Floating Layer
• Future PageRank
• Google Banned Checker
• Google Dance Tool
• Google Datacenter Search
• Google PageRank Prediction
• Google Suggest Scraper Tool
• Google vs Yahoo Search Results
• Graphical Search Engine Comparison
• HTML Encoder
• HTML Entities Encode / Decode
• HTML Optimizer
• HTML to PHP Converter
• HTTP Headers
• Indexed pages
• Internet Explorer Scrollbar Color
• IP Convert
• IP Location
• Keyword Cloud
• Keyword Density
• Keyword Density Checker
• Keyword Difficulty Check
• Keyword Optimizer
• Keyword Suggestion
• Keyword Suggestions for Google
• Keyword Suggestions for Overture
• Keyword Typo Generator
• Link Extractor
• Link Popularity
• Link Popularity
• Link Price Calculator
• List Cleaner
• md5 Encrypt
• META Analyzer
• Meta Tag Generator
• Meta-tags Extractor
• Meta-tags Generator
• Multi-Rank Checker
• Multiple Data Center Google Search
• Multiple Datacenter Keyword Position Check
• Multiple Datacenter Link Popularity Check
• Page Comparison
• Page Size Lookup
• PageRank Checker
• PageRank Lookup
• PageRank Search
• Password Encryption Utility
• Password Strength Checker
• Ping Test
• Ping Utility
• Pop-Up window generator
• Rank Checker
• Regular Expression Match
• Regular Expression Pattern Extractor
• Reverse IP/Look-up
• Robots.txt Generator
• ROI Calculator
• Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker
• Search Engine Keyword Position
• Search Engine Position
• Search Listings Preview
• Server Status
• Site Link Analyzer
• Source Code Viewer
• Spider Simulator
• Spider View
• URL Encoding
• URL Rewriting
• Visual PageRank
• Website Pattern Extractor
• Website Speed Test
• Whois – Domain Search
• Your Browser Details

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CSS: Style Sheet Guidelines

Web applications should always adhere to W3C standards and validate correctly. Numerous excellent CSS style Guides are available that discuss the how-tos of achieving these objectives, below are a few:

References:

• Miha Hribar
• Interface / CSS Coding Guidelines
• NYPL Style Guide

Tutorial:

• Style Master CSS Tutorial

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Goals

Establish an overall goal for your web site. Who will your audience be? What information do you want to convey to this audience?

Targets

Which of the following will your audience be using?

• Web browsers (FireFox, Netscape, Internet Explorer, AOL, Opera, lynx)
• browser versions (2.0+ 4.0+, 5.0+, 6.0+, 7.0)
• platforms (Windows, MAC, UNIX, Linux)
• screen resolution – The most popular screen resolutions at this time is 1024 x 768.

Design your site so that it meets the specifications of the target (s) chosen. See www.thecounter.com/stats to see current statistics regarding the most frequently used browser versions, monitor resolutions and operating systems.

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