We Fix WordPress Blogs

We would like to send out some special holiday cheer to all our wonderful clients, partners, and friends. We are so thankful to have such a great network of people who we enjoy working with!

May 2009 be filled with tons of inspirational blog posts, huge traffic influxes and more twitter followers then you could ever dream of…

Cheers! Dana & Karen

WordPress 2.7 or “Coltrane” was released last night. Here are some of the features you can look forward to:

1. A new interface that allows you to do things faster with fewer clicks.
2. A drag-and-drop dashboard that allows you to arrange the things that are most important to you (actually everything is pretty customizable now).
3. Install any plugin from WordPress.org with a single click.
4. Automatic, built-in upgrades for new releases with a single click.

The WeFixWP team wants everyone to take special notice of feature #4. We want to caution those of you out there with custom themes and/or those of you who have lots of plugins - it still may not be as easy as you think.

While WordPress is making a great effort to offer the ability for all to upgrade future releases with one click, it’s still important to remember (as with all software) things can go wrong.

Please backup your blog’s database and turn off all your plugins before pressing that button. Also, take the time to ensure that your theme as well as all your plugins are compatible with the newest release.

We’ve already read tweets from those who have plunged into the upgrade and came out with a broken blog and without a rollback. Diligence will still be important moving forward.

That said, we are still excited because this upgrade looks rather nice - good luck out there!

The WeFixWP team has been fielding a lot of questions this week about missing sidebars when viewing the blog in Internet Explorer.

If your blog looked OK one day and a mess the next, the fix can be actually pretty simple. Here’s what check for first:

1. Review some of your recent posts by Manage > Posts > Edit
2. Click over to the HTML tab
3. Look for some rogue code, often you’ll find an unneeded <div> tag or another HTML tag that was not closed properly.
4. Delete the code and press the Save button.
5. Your sidebars should now be back in IE.

How to prevent this? Be careful when cutting and pasting content from Word documents and other websites / blogs because they often have HTML formatting that gets entered into your site and causing havoc.

Take advantage of the Kitchen Sink icon (see image below) to reveal more editing features. Then either use the Paste as Plain Text (T) or Paste from Word (W) icons to clean up any formatting brought over. When pasting from Word, we often click on the HTML tab and remove all extraneous formatting code that is often found toward the top of the post editor.

If that doesn’t bring back the toolbars, you may have a theme problem - but it’s a good place to start.

The Simple Trackback Validation Plugin performs simple tests on all incoming trackbacks to eliminate trackback spam from being published on your site as a comment.

According to the developers, the plugin does the following when a trackback is received:

Checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to. (This reveals almost every spam trackback [more than 99%]  since spammers do usually use bots which are not running on the machine of their customers.)

Retrieves the web page located at the URL included in the trackback. (If the page doesn’t link to your blog, the trackback is considered to be spam. Since most trackback spammers do not set up custom web pages linking to the blogs they attack, this simple test will quickly reveal illegitimate trackbacks. Also, bloggers can be stopped abusing trackback by sending trackbacks with their blog software or webservices without having a link to the post.)

Why do we like it so much?

• Works right out of the box
• Has extended configuration and options for logging, moderating, and spam indicating
• Plays nicely (and in conjunction) with Akismet

Nothing’s slipped through this plugin yet, so add it to your blog now and ward off pesky spam.

Yesterday, the WordPress team announced their newest software release: 2.6.5. According to Ryan Boren …

WordPress 2.6.5 is immediately available and fixes one security problem and three bugs. We recommend everyone upgrade to this release.

The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x. If you are interested only in the security fix, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.

2.6.5 contains three other small fixes in addition to the XSS fix. The first prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision. The second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types. The third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests. For a list of changed files, consult the full changeset between 2.6.3 and 2.6.5.

Note that we are skipping version 2.6.4 and jumping from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 to avoid confusion with a fake 2.6.4 release that made the rounds. There is not and never will be a version 2.6.4.

Interested in upgrading, let the WeFixWP team know!

Blogs and spam seem to best friends, but fortunately Akismet can help you dramatically squelch those awful comments from reaching your adoring audience.

Included in every release of WordPress (it’s an Automattic-authored plugin after all), The WeFixWP team has trapped millions and millions of spam comments for our clients - and our own blogs, too - by installing it.

Why do we like it so much?

• Easy to implement and use
• Traps most spam in its tracks
• Continuous and collaborative “learning” of the plugin keeps false positives from slipping through

Fun fact: Matt Mullenweg revealed at WordCamp NY that he developed Akismet for his mom (who he knew wouldn’t appreciate seeing any “icky” comments).

We understand that bloggers often like more protection and have also installed more than one spam plugin, such as Bad Behavior, Defensio, Spam Karma, or WP-SpamFree. Luckily, most of them work quite well together and it does little harm to have both.

However, we must say that we have experienced lots of issues with Spam Karma because it tends to fill your database up quickly and cause performance issues, so take care with that one.

The All in One SEO Pack plugin is currently rated the second most popular plugin on WordPress.org, and it’s certainly not an accident. Since the WeFixWP team first stumbled upon it, we have recommended it all all our clients as a simple way to convince popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN to crawl your site.

Why do we like it so much:

• This plugin is super-easy to install and configure
• It automatically optimizes your titles to display the blog’s title after the more important post/page title
• You can override any title with one of your own
• Automatically generate keywords (from categories and tags) and descriptions (from your excerpts or yoru first paragraph)
• Tweak any META description and keywords you want on any post, page, or archive
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs (from category, tag, and archive templates)

If you have installed any of these plugins, we’d recommend that you uninstall them in favor of All-in-One:

• Another Wordpress Meta Plugin
• Head META Description
• Optimal Title
• SEO Title Tag
• SEO Post Link

We agree with the All in One developers when they say, “… about 20% of effort needed by you to achieve 80% of results with on-page factors.” Be sure to install this plugin as part of your SEO techniques.

We often get asked to recommend a good reliable WordPress host or even troubleshoot a slow performing site/blog (which is many times due to a poor host). While everyone likes to pick the least expensive host they can, there are other factors that play into picking a good WordPress host, even some that most people don’t consider…

• First, make sure they meet WordPress’ minimum hosting requirements. While almost all Linux based hosts do meet them, it can’t hurt to double check.
• Don’t host on a Windows server. While WordPress technically can run on Windows IIS, it’s a pain and prone to problems.
• Make sure they have good WordPress support (or at least know what it is). While we like to think that WordPress is mainstream, you would be surprised that some hosts don’t mention it anywhere. We suggest you search on the hosts knowledge base or forum for the term “WordPress” and see what they have published. If there is none or the info is sparse, move on. Also stay away from hosts that push competing blog software like MovableType - we know from experience
• Don’t pick a host simply because they offer an auto-installer for WordPress (ala Fantastico, etc.). While these are handy and can quickly install WordPress, they are often not the latest version and are not automatically/easily updated. NOTE: There are some good hosts that keep their auto-installer updated (BlueHost does this). You typically can also install WordPress yourself at any host that offers an auto-installer.
• We strongly recommend that you don’t host your site on a service that started primarily as a Domain Name registrar (examples: Network Solutions, GoDaddy, etc.). They always try to force you into their silly plans and onto other useless services of theirs. They also typically have the worst control panels. In fact, we like to keep the place where we register domains completely separate from where we host our sites. It makes it easier to hop to other hosts if needed.

You might be saying by now, who’s left after ruling all these hosts out? Here’s the hosts that we suggest along with some notes on what we like/dislike about them…

MediaTemple:
+ Reasonably priced Grid-Service (gs) service ($17-$20/month - depending on hosting term)
+ Grid-Service’s on-demand scalability
+ Great, easy to use control panel
+ Robust knowledgebase and user forum
+ For power users* - easy SSH access, subversion pre-installed

DreamHost:
+ Inexpensive ($7-$11/month - depending on hosting term)
+ Nice, easy to use control panel
+ Robust Wiki based knowledge base
+ For power users* - easy SSH access, subversion pre-installed

Bluehost:
+ Inexpensive ($7-$10/month - depending on hosting term)
+ Up-to-date WordPress Auto-Installer (WordPress updates are made available within 24 hours)
+ cPanel based control panel (which we feel is not that user friendly)
+ For power users* - SSH access requires you to send them a copy of a driver license or passport, subversion available but not supported

*ssh access and subversion are not required for WordPress, but are very handy for advanced users who would like to use subversion to install and upgrade WordPress

We’d love to hear from you - who do you host your WordPress site with? Why do you love/hate them?

Related Posts:

When good hosts go bad (for WordPress anyway)
Moving to a New Host is NOT for the Faint-Hearted
Affiliate Blogging: Hosting Considerations

Here’s a quick little tip to help keep your blogs copyright year automatically up to date. Many themes already include this functionality, but some do not. This code should work with any PHP based system but we are focusing on WordPress here…

• In the WordPress admin dashboard, go to the Theme Editor (under Design > Theme Editor) and select the Footer template from the listed theme template files (usually called footer.php).
• Look in the editor window (where the code is show) and scroll until you find your copyright text. Something like…

  <div id="footer">
  	All contents Copyright 2005
  </div>

  Cover your butt: Before you edit any template files you can copy and save the original text in the editor window to a text file on your local computer. This way you can simply copy it back to theme template file if you really mess something up.

• To make the year dynamic we can simply use the PHP date command to grab the current year. So you would change the copyright text to…

  <div id="footer">
  	All contents Copyright <?php echo date("Y"); ?>
  </div>

• You can also add in the copyright symbol (All contents Copyright © 2008) using the code…

  <div id="footer">
  	All contents Copyright &copy; <?php echo date("Y"); ?>
  </div>

• If you want to have a starting copyright date (All contents Copyright 2005 - 2008) you would use…

  <div id="footer">
  	All contents Copyright 2005 - <?php echo date("Y"); ?>
  </div>

  This will leave the starting year always set to 2005 and the ending year will always be the current year.

• When you have your updated code in there, hit the “Update File” button and go check out your handy work on your home page.

ContentRobot is pleased to offer a new service - We Fix WordPress Blogs!

We believe that many WordPress users that could take advantage our enhancing, upgrading, fixing, and migrating services. Despite the many tools out there to assist them, some are hesitant or unwilling to maintain their blogs - and we’d be happy to help them.

Looking forward to assisting anyone who needs a bit of WordPress expertise!