The recent release of WordPress 2.3 with new features and database changes begs the question, how should a webmaster plan and then implement the upgrade. Any upgrade that involves database changes should be undertaken carefully, and preparation is key to a successful upgrade.

\n\nTypically, most webmasters install custom themes and additional plugins, and of course they upload extra files such as images to their /wp-content/uploads folder. All of these files need to be backed up and stored off server prior to undertaking the upgrade process. The database itself also needs to be backed up.

\n\nBacking up your site is best achieved by installing the BackUpWordpress plugin and selecting the default backup options which will create a compressed file of your complete site including files and database. If anything does go wrong it should be relatively easy to restore this and import your database into MySQL using phpMyAdmin or your host’s preferred database manager.

\n\nOnce you are certain your site has been backed up, you’re ready to start preparing for the upgrade. Are your plugins and chosen theme compatible with WordPress 2.3? Most modern themes shouldn’t cause any problem except that non v2.3 themes may not include the tags code needed to make use of the new tags feature of WordPress 2.3. This is a relatively simple update to make, and simply involves adding extra php code to the theme’s index.php and single.php.

\n\nOpen index.php and single.php in your favorite text editor and search for the following code , and simply add the following code before or after depends on where you want the tags will be displayed (before or after your article).

\n\nThe plugins used in yor site will need to be checked against the list of compatible plugins. Any plugin that isn’t compatible will likely not work correctly or at all. You may need to contact the plugin author for an update or discontinue using that plugin until an update is available.

\n\nYou should now be ready to upgrade your installation to WordPress 2.3, and if your host provides wget functionality simply copy the zip file to your server then unzip them directly into your WordPress folder. If wget isn’t available to you, then you’ll need to download the zip file and use an ftp client to upload the unzipped files.

\n\nOnce you’ve uploaded your WordPress files, make sure your WordPress 2.3 compatible theme is uploaded to /wp-content/themes. Did you need updated plugins? Upload these to /wp-content/plugins. You should now be ready to initiate the WordPress update script.

\n\nNavigate to the admin section of your site, WordPress will automatically recognize that an upgrade is required. Once completed, and if all has gone to plan, you should be able to login to Dashboard without any difficulty. Good luck.

Blogger used to be a good blogging platform, especially for beginners. It was easy to use and setup, and not much technical know-how was required. There’s one major setback to using Blogger, though. You can’t take advantage of social bookmarking sites, at least not as effectively as you can with using WordPress. There are numerous WordPress Plugins, and some take advantage these sites.

These social sites act as a “vote” for your website. When people bookmark your blog posts or articles, they are sharing them with others. Other people pick up on your content, and they might bookmark them as well. The more votes the better. Google loves content, that’s no mystery. Google will reward your site for that content and the fact that high authority social bookmarking sites are linking to it. This means more traffic! A lot more in fact.

So how do we take advantage of these social sites when blogging? The answer is WordPress Plugins. Blogger doesn’t give us any way to automatically bookmark every post we make. It has to be done manually. That’s very time consuming! Services like OnlyWire or SocialMarker can make this a lot easier, but you still have to take the time to use those services.

There is a much easier way to drive this traffic to your blog. You have to be using WordPress to take advantage of this. WordPress is probably the most popular blogging platform, and it’s no wonder why that is. It requires a little more technical knowledge, but don’t be scared away. The benefits are far greater!

WordPress makes use of Plugins. WordPress Plugins are basically little applications that perform a function or process. There are numerous Plugins that were made for WordPress, and there will be many more no doubt. They all serve a different purpose.

Here are some WordPress Plugins that you DON?T want to be without so that you can utilize the power of social bookmarking sites:

ShareThis – Allows users to share and bookmark your posts.

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget ? This allows your readers to bookmark your posts.

ShareThis and AddThis are pretty much the same thing. It doesn’t hurt to have both. You want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to bookmark your posts.

OnlyWire Autosubmitter – This will automatically submit your posts to your OnlyWire account.

Sociable – Automatically adds links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.

Tweet My Blog – This will automatically post a tweet to your Twitter account when you make a new post, bringing more traffic to your blog. You can sign up for Tweet My Blog at my blog; there is a link in the resource box. You?re also going to need a Twitter account. So grab that and start getting followers, the more the better.

This is just a small example of the WordPress Plugins that are available. You want to make sure you have these Plugins installed so you get traffic from the social bookmarking sites. The potential here is huge, and you don’t want to miss out. If you’re not yet using WordPress to blog, I suggest you get on board.

WordPress is the most popular Blog platform in the world. It’s open source and a lot of people contribute to it from both application development or theme development perspective. And the most important one to us is that it’s totally free.

\n\nWant to own a WordPress, it’s not too hard, below are the 3 steps you can follow.

\n\n1. Find a Reliable Web Hosting for Blog

\n\nBlog is a special type of web site. You will need to have a place which can connect to internet to host it. There are a lot of blog hosting service provider. But just like another web site, a reliable web hosting package is crutial to all. But you have no need to get a VPS or dedicated web hosting sulution when you just start blogging. You can choose a shared web hosting solution which only cost you $3 to $7. This is good enough before you attract more than 10 thousand visit per day.

\n\n2. Install WordPress

\n\nInstalling a WordPress application is not hard. Right now, WordPress is so popular that the most of the web hosting service provider will pre-install it their web hosting environment. What you need to do is just by doing some simple click and get it setup.

\n\nBut if your web hosting package hasn’t pre-installed the WordPress scripts for you, you can go to www.wordpress.org, download the installation scripts, and upload them to your web hosting directory. WordPress configuration can be done via Web. So you need to type in the URL in the Browser where you upload WordPress script to, and system will automatically guide you through how to create the Blog.

\n\n3. Choose an Appropriate Theme for Your Blog

\n\nTheme is used to decide the outlook of your Blog, everyone want to get an attractive theme for their Blog. If you are technical enough (some CSS and php knowledge), you can create your own theme. Or you can download the theme the other open source contributors have built. A more realitics way is that you can download a free theme and make some adjustment to theme to make it work better to you. Want to download a theme, you can go to http://wptemplates.org/ to find a list of great and free WordPress template.

Blogging has provided an efficient and magnificent tool to publicize info about any company on the net. We have got so many blogging platforms and WordPress is one of them. WordPress has released its new version 2.6. WordPress 2.6 has got a no. of features for content creation and improvements. We will just take a look at the major and minor features of the newer version.

Here are the major important features of WordPress’s newer version:

Edit-Tracking: The new edit-tracking system will be quite handy for multi-author blogs. It allows you to see the changes made to a post and enable you to see who made what changes to a post and when. It also provides the option to revert back to the older version of a post, in case you make a mistake.

Press This: ?Press This? is like a bookmark you can add to your toolbar. It offers a fast and smart popup to do postings to your WordPress blog. Suppose you are viewing a Youtube video and finds it relevant for your blog and want to post it on your blog, then what you have to do is to just click ?Press this? button. It will automatically extract the embedded code and post it on your blog. In the same way you can post to your blog from anywhere on the net.

Google Gears Support: The most exciting feature of WordPress version 2.6 is support for Google Gears. Gears is an open source browser extension project provided by Google. You can cache the most important files of the WordPress management console to your local hard drive, by clicking the “Turbo” button in the upper right-hand corner of the WordPress administrative interface. It will allow the authors to keep blogging even if the network connectivity is temporarily lost.

Theme Previews: Theme Preview support permits the admin to preview how their site will look with a new user interface before making it live. As soon as you select a theme, it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content. It will be great for just test driving the themes prior to publishing. It will also be helpful for the persons developing a theme and need to test it without allowing anybody to see your ongoing mistakes development.

Following are the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

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• Word count: It does the counting of number of words in your post.
• Image captions: Now you can add sweet image captions at your will.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.

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Apart from these there are a number of small changes and new features. Only time will tell that how much these new features help the bloggers.

You have chosen your domain name and your hosting company (and they may well be one and the same). The next part of your journey in “getting started with your blog” is to install WordPress. It may be that you have decided to have your blog hosted on a “blogging platform”, like Blogger.com or WordPress.com. If you are happy to go down that road, great. I have a blog on both these platforms and they serve their purpose well. But for the majority of users involved in web marketing, or trying to get an online presence for their business – whatever it is – you will be installing WordPress on your own domain.

To be sure, much of the difficulty of installing WordPress has been eliminated by the Fantastico installer – a utility that is available on most hosting accounts. With Fantastico, all you need to do is answer a few prompts such as what directory to install WordPress in, and boom! – you’re done. Although I heartily recommend using it, and you may want to get on with your web marketing, I think a user should go through the manual install process at least once, to get familiar with how WordPress operates behind the scenes. Let us look at the process of installing WordPress manually:

1. Open www.wordpress.org in a browser. From there, click on the blue bar that says “download WordPress x.xx” – it will show the latest version. Right now, it is 2.7.1. (You may have to click on a second link to get it). Save this to your desktop or somewhere else convenient, and extract all files from the zip archive into a folder called “wp”.

2. Using an FTP client, connect to your domain – the hosting company will have given you the correct username and password when you signed up. Once connected, look for the “www” folder (also named “public_html”. Open this folder on the server (in the “remote” window in your FTP client) and in the “local” window, open the “wp” folder that you extracted the WordPress files into. Copy everything from “wp” into “www” and close your FTP client.

3. Log in to your domain’s Cpanel by entering www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel. Enter your username and password and scroll down until you see “MySQL databases”. Click on this and it will prompt for the name of your database. Use something short like “wp”, because it appends your username to it. Click “create database”, go back and scroll down to “Add new user”. Choose a username for your database – you can use your cpanel username and password if you wish, or a completely different one. After creating the user account, click “go back” and scroll down to “Add user to database”. Select the username and the database as above – not that your cpanel username is now stuck on the front of it. Click “add” and “all privileges” on the next screen. Then close the window – you’re done with setting up the database.

4. In your FTP client, right-click on the “wp-config-sample.php” file in the “www” folder. You need to change 3 things here – the “MySQL database name”, the “MySQL database username” and the “MySQL database password”. Just replace what’s inside the single quotes with your own details, close the file and save it as “wp-config.php”.

5. In your browser, open the address www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin/install.php. If you get an error message here, it usually indicates that one of thenames in wp-config.php is wrong. If all is well, you will then be prompted for the blog name, and your email. Pick a name that contains all or part of your keyword, enter your email address and click on “Install WordPress”. Take note of the admin username and password on the next screen, and log in with those details.

6. You are now in the “back office” of your blog or website. This is where you add content, set up new pages and change the appearance. To see what your site looks like, click “visit site” on the top left corner. You have done it – you have installed WordPress!

WordPress, the premier free open-source blogging utility, has gone through several upgrades in its life. Today it’s one of the most popular blogging tools on the Internet; it’s easy to use, powerful, and very versatile. It also has a very active base of skilled users who are eager to improve the product and to help out those who haven’t tried it before.\n

Though the Strayhorn 1.5 version is the favorite for many, it is not as stable or as secure as the newest version 2.0.3. The best part of the new version is the security patch; the new “nonce” security key reduces the chances of a malicious hacker finding a way into your admin panel. Besides the security patch, though, several minor bugs have been squashed with this version. Though a major upgrade to 2.1 is due out soon, the 2.0.3 is something you should definitely download and install if only because of the security fixes, which were actually backported from the major upgrade files.\n

In addition to the 2.0.3 install, you should be aware that some bugs have already been found, and that a plugin will need to be installed to repair those bugs. If you modify any of the files that this patch plugin fixes, you’ll need to either merge the changes with the new files or make those changes manually once again. You can find these issues by running a diff to locate changes; if the only changes you find are your own, then you’re fine, and otherwise you’ll need to merge them manually into the new files.\n

The short list of what WordPress 2.0.3 fixes includes:\n

?Small performance enhancements\n
?Movable Type / Typepad importer fix\n
?Enclosure (podcasting) fix\n
?The aforementioned security enhancements (nonces)\n

One mostly annoying bug shipped with 2.0.3 as well. It gives you an “Are You Sure?” dialog when you edit comments, and adds a backslash before each quotation mark in the post you’re editing. Make certain to download the patch.\n

What’s Up With The Security Problem?\n

The security problem seems minor, but the WordPress team is fixing it before it grows into something major. It’s a bug that takes advantage of the cookie you download when you sign into WordPress. The cookie in question prevents anyone unauthorized from accessing your admin panel. It’s tied to your user account, and verifies that you are the authorized administrator of the account you’re working on.\n

The bug that’s being fixed is one that takes advantage of a sociological trick. If someone created a link or a form pointing to your WordPress admin account, they might possibly be able to trick you into clicking the link. In the case of the one here, you delete a post. This sounds both minor and highly unlikely; but a small crack in the door can be exploited later by a dedicated hacker. And this is also the kind of bug that, a few years ago, allowed a hacker access to the Microsoft databases, from which he stole portions of the Longhorn and other codes. So yes, you do need to take it seriously.\n

WordPress had ensured you were safe from this kind of hacking by using a utility called HTTPREFERER. But this utility has some issues. For instance, with JavaScript in Internet Explorer, it can be spoofed. In addition, certain firewalls and proxies can strip the information it’s supposed to carry out, causing some people to be unable to use their WordPress admin accounts the way they’re supposed to be able to.\n

Now, instead of the HTTPREFERER, a nonce is used; this is a number used once. It’s like a password that changes every twelve hours, and is valid for twenty-four hours. The nonce is unique to the specific WordPress install being used, the WordPress user logged in, the action, the object of the action, and the 24-hour time of the action. When any of these is changed, the nonce is no longer valid. All plugin authors will have to ensure the nonce is added to their forms and other interactive capabilities that may be affected.\n

Upgrading from WordPress 2.0.2 to 2.0.3\n

As with any upgrade, the first thing you should do is back up everything: the files in your WordPress directory, the database plugin with any changes, and any data you have added should be backed up as well. In addition, it might be a good idea to do a second backup of your entire WordPress directory just in case something goes wrong with your install.\n

Now remove the wp-admin directory entirely. Also remove the wp-includes directory, except for any translation and language files or directories you may have added; add these files to the backup files you created earlier. Finally, remove all the files where WordPress is installed with the exception of the file http://wp-config.php.\n

Now you’re ready to start your install. Download and unpack the 2.0.3 version in a separate install directory. You want to make sure you can control files and directories you copy over. Now install the new wp-admin and wp-includes directories.\n

Install the rest of the files of the top directory, with the exception of the http://wp-config-sample.php file.\n

Now enter the admin panel. You should see the following message: “Your database is out of date. Please upgrade.” Follow the link provided to update the database, and follow the directions there. Now remove the files wp-admin/upgrade.php and wp-admin/install.php. Download the plugin fix; add it and activate it. Replace your backup files where they need to be, and do the comparisons if you’ve modified any of your earlier files. This should take care of the whole thing.\n

For geeks, there is also an upgrade package that only includes the changed files. Look for it under Changes Diff (2.0.2 > 2.0.3). It consists of a zip file that is much quicker to install, but you should be certain you can handle it before using it.

Through this PHP development, we designed web site solution and application, which are developed by using PHP. If you want to develop hi fi quality PHP and MySQL based we site, in a cost effective way, your search could be over. In fact we are high skilled professionals with many years of experience. As a result, it gives prompt and reliable performance. We have developed the enterprise edition of e-Commerce, Online Accounting software, community tools like Web Portal, which have many features, but the most popular is Chat, Web-mail and Web Calendar. We also offer an offshore development facility, which has similarity between offshore Staffing solutions for international clients for PHP, MySQL.

\n\nNow we introduce our self. We are Software development Company having well organized infrastructure to meet the development requirement of Software development. We have also well equipped office with excellent technical skilled team for the development of the software projects as well as online projects. We have excellent knowledge with PHP scripting. Our high quality team always focuses the metting of our client requirement, ensuring project completion on time, with the budgets and last but not the list meeting quality standards.

\n\nIn the areas of Web Designing, we offer IT service. We also offer Web Developing, on-site Consulting, Customized Application Development and Outsourcing of Software Solution. All our excellent teams of experienced PHP developers are assisted organizations for deploying their teamwork, resource planning, and customer and dealers management systems as websites development through our effective PHP programming service.

As WordPress and blogging become more and more popular, the list of customization options continues to grow. One can attribute that to each user wanting his or her blog to be unique or very much personalized. Who knows, one day a theme can be just as unique as the blog’s author! The following is an overview of the latest developments on WordPress themes.

\nWordPress Widgets

\nThe blog software developer has recently come up with an edition of this plug-in for the full-version WordPress. A Widget here refers to those tools you can use to modify your site?its sidebar, design, or general layout?without having to know and use HTML codes. About a hundred Widgets are featured in the WordPress Widgets blog, and they are classified in categories such as photography, music, discussion, video, income, and links, among others. It is a fun and easy way of customizing your site, so that it features everything you care about, and nothing you don’t.

\nNot all themes are ready for these Widgets, however, and some modifications need to be done to include this fun feature in the sites that make use of such themes. http://Automattic.com gives full instructions on how to go about making your WordPress site Widget-friendly. WordPress is continuously adding to their already-vast selection of Widgets to suit their user’s whims and personalities.

\nCanvas Plugin

\nThis blogger-friendly plugin has recently allowed blog users to create their very own theme for their WordPress blog. The good news is that this plugin allows users a pretty good level of customization without them having to study and use codes. The result: a site that looks very professional built within the range of a few minutes to a couple of hours. Even better news is that this plugin comes for free.

\nThis stand-alone plugin opens up to a bare starting point, with a selection of blocks that you can include in your layout by drag-and-drop method. Among the many features of Canvas are Banner, RSS, Static Text, Feature, Digg, Flickr, Random Tagline, Comment, Category List, Asides, Archive, Description, Calendar, Search, Post, and Navigation functions. Meanwhile, an Ink tab gives the user the freedom to determine the styles to be used on the page, sans the need to check the actual stylesheet. This tab proves to be quite useful for beginners, because it features help links that corresponds to each theme component, the style of which you may be about to identify. These links load the template with an indication of the part in question, to give the user a clear idea of what effect the change will have.

\n”Being Moderated” Notification

\nIt does not come as a surprise that some comments are being moderated by the recipient blog’s owner or moderator. However, it would be nice for you to let your eager comment writers know that you have received their comment, when the system is programmed to delay posting of comments on your blog until it has been read and approved by you. Without this notification activated, some of your readers may think that their comment just got lost and they’ll have to write their comment all over again, when in fact your blog has secured it and it’s only waiting for your approval. However, the blog author may need to be familiar with code to activate this feature. Nevertheless, it is one way to deter comment spammers from infiltrating your blog. Your may also word the notification in your liking. Here’s an example: “Thank you for your comment. It may take a while before your comment may be published. Please check back later.”

\nMore Themes to Match Content

\nWhile it is all up to the blog author to decide, it would be quite useful to have a theme that will give first-time readers of your blog a pretty good idea of what to expect by simply looking at the design in use. For this reason, WordPress theme designers are coming up with more specific themes to match a variety of specific types of content. Experts say that the first several seconds spent by a visitor on your blog determine the impression they get of your site. So if your site fails to capture attention right away, then it’s most likely that you’re losing potential repeat readers or site visits.

\nWhen designing your site or choosing the appropriate theme, keep in mind that the first concern of a site visitor is whether or not the site has the kind of information needed by him or her. The visual elements, being much faster to grasp than the textual, will help in a big way. If the theme you choose does not correspond to the general content of your site, then attracting more followers will need more effort. Whether we like it or not, looks matter for a lot of people, as this is how beliefs and opinions are initially formed.

\nWordPress Theme Contests

\nTo ensure your steady stream of new themes, WordPress and certain partners have organized theme contests to discover and recognize the best themes that have cropped up lately. Last year even saw several competitions that attracted theme creators and users alike. This year, however, the WordPress camp has witnessed a slowing down in the production of themes, perhaps due to the fading novelty of it all, not discounting the fact that a lot of those who submitted themes before did it for free.

\nNevertheless, customization of WordPress blogs still holds quite a lot of promise, with the arrival of new customization features, such as the Canvas and Widgets plugins. It also promises more highly-customizable themes in the future. For now, you would already be missing out on a lot if you are not already trying out the latest WordPress customization plugins. You can also try modifying some basic features, such as whether your front page should show excerpts or the full blog entries, or changing the number of posts that will show up on your blog index, or both. Whatever you choose, there are hundreds of themes available and other options for you to use, to get as close as ever to your most desired look for your blog.

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