1. h Mag

h MAG is a high end luxury magazine for the Hoboken market. They print 15,000 copies that are placed in every room at The W Hotel, delivered to every doorstep in town, distributed to over 100 retail establishments and handed out at the Path and Ferry stops. h Mag uses BuddyPress & WordPress MU to publish variety of content and is a highly interactive site and design.

2. Creative Ad Awards

Creative Ad Award is a fantastic advertising archive, serving advertising fans with high quality ads. They provide world’s most sophisticated, creative and fresh ads. Creative Ad Awards has highly customized WordPress to achieve this kind of design.

3. Kodingen

Kodingen is a cloud development environment, code editor, hosting service, database administration program, and collaboration platform. It includes web-based access to file systems and web-based FTP and SVN. This whole application has been developed as a BuddyPress plugin. It’s a fantastic presentation of what can be achieved by combining power of WordPress, Programming and Design.

4. Clouds 365 Project

Clouds 365 is a project by Kelly Delay, who decided to upload image of the clouds everyday on that website. The site has run successfully for 1 yr and now Kelly has decided to start the next year. Clouds 365 project got really popular and has some nice following. It’s a fresh new design and an excellent example of running a photo blog using WordPress.

5. DinDins Foods

DinDins Food is a New York city based company that produces organic toddler food in Manhattan. DinDins uses WordPress and Shopp plugin to power this e-commerce portal. The site wears a fresh design and goes with the theme of “Green”.

6. WSJ Magazine

Wall Street Journal is one of the most reputed media houses and they’ve selected WordPress as CMS for their website. WSJ’s skin is pretty neat and is a wonderful example of magazine theme applied on WordPress to achieve this result. The site is heavily customized to give it the look of an online magazine.

7. GigaOM Pro

GigaOM Pro is a WordPress/BuddyPress-powered premium research membership site, focused on four verticals: Mobile, Green IT, Infrastructure, and the Connected Consumer. A network of independent analysts provide in-depth research papers and research notes, which subscribers can view on the site or download as PDF documents. It’s a wonderful combo of BuddyPress features and a professional design.

8. My Telegraph

My Telegraph is the social networking part of The Daily Telegraph, one of the leading newspapers in The UK. It’s powered by WordPress and BuddyPress. Website’s features and design compliments The Daily Telegraph’s website design. This shows the power of WordPress as CMS.

9. IBN Live

IBN Live is one of the most popular websites in India, It’s powered by WordPress and has used various plugins to empower this very famous website. IBN Live is CNN-IBN’s venture with a clean and online newspaper like quality design.

10. Solo Practice University

Solo Practice University is a WordPress/BuddyPress-powered premium membership site, focused on building an educational and professional networking community for lawyers and law students. The theme is made in such a way that each blog acts as a classroom and using BuddyPress, they host group lectures for Law students. To be honest, this is one of the most beautiful and clean looking law sites that I’ve ever come across.

11. Better Codes

Bettercodes.org’s mission is to empower and engage software developers to share their ideas and thoughts. Connect them with like-minded people and allow collaboration between them. It’s a well-designed combo of WordPress & BuddyPress that is helping “Bettercodes” to grow at a good rate.

12. Ride Oregon

Ride Oregon is the official site for Travel Oregon’s (the Oregon Tourism Commission) focus on cycling-related travel and tourism in the state. Ride Oregon integrated WordPress Mu and BuddyPress to showcase cycling events, mountain biking trails, road rides happening in the state. It’s a fantastic website design and will attract your attention as soon as you’ll visit their homepage.

13. Irrational Games

Irrational Games is an award winning video game developer located in Boston, MA. The company has released games such as BioShock and Swat 4. Irrational games has an extensive and powerful community and it is powered by combo of WordPress mu & BuddyPress with a wonderful website design that enhances the overall experience.

14. Official Gazette

Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines is a blog that is edited at the president’s office and is one of the most visible blog from the government of Philippines. The blog provides news about the country and the government. It’s powered by WordPress with a nice and clean website design.

15. URB Magazine

URB is a monthly American magazine devoted to electronic music, hip hop and urban lifestyle and culture. The magazine was founded in 1990 and the website is equally popular. The website is an awesome example of how WordPress can power such busy and beautiful websites with ease. The site gets more than 10,000 visitors/day, has more than 9000 posts and some 40+ contributors.

16. Watermelon Ministries

Watermelon Ministries is a non-profit organization that provides creative services to other non-profit ministries and missionaries around the world. The site boasts a very beautiful website design that conveys the message of being creative! It’s powered by WordPress and even features a shopping cart running with WordPress.

17. Justin Guarini

Justin Guarini is American Idol season one runner up who is also TV Guide Network’s resident hosts. In addition to seeing him on the red carpet for TV Guide during Award Season covering The Oscars, The Grammys, The Emmys and more, Justin also hosts their movie premiere and junket specials. The site is powered by WordPress, it features blog, the website and a forum – we would have loved it even more if it used bbPress to power the forums, but then we can’t take the credit away from this nicely designed website running on WordPress.

18. Kim Kardashian

Kim Kardashian got popular after the launch of E! Entertainment reality series “Keeping up with the Kardashians.” Kim also banked on the controversy created with the launch of her sex tape with Ray J, a famous singer in America. Even Kim’s beauty got spellbound with WordPress’s features and this amazing website design.

19. Atlantic Southeast Airlines

Atlantic Southeast Airlines, Inc. was founded in 1979 in Atlanta, Ga., by three determined entrepreneurs who dreamed of safely connecting small communities to the Atlanta metropolis. Atlantic Southeast Airlines features and nice and clean looking website design that is powered by WordPress and is an example of the few airline companies using WordPress to power their website.

20. UPS Racing

UPS Racing website is powered by a completely customized WordPress theme that features behind the scenes video, photo galleries, blog posts, twitter updates, games, and promotions for the team. The site also features a custom administration module that allow editors to update promotional content on nearly every page, making it a great example of showcasing the power of WordPress.

21. HeyPapaLegend Studios

HeyPapaLegend Studios are specialists in composition, sound design and recording with a refreshing blend of youth & experience for the ad industry. They’ve used WordPress as CMS to power their beautiful looking website that comprises of flash, audio, videos and AJAX to showcase their work.

22. MySpace Developer Center

Who doesn’t know MySpace? It’s the same social network that you left to join your friend’s at Facebook. Anyhow, the site is powered by WordPress and features a trendy and young website design. We love the fact that the site is beautifully designed although there are slight issues in the website’s coding. Is anyone hearing us at MySpace? Probably they’ll do so when some interested developer will listen to us.

23. The Streamy Awards

As the first and most prestigious awards devoted to honoring excellence in web television, the Streamy Awards identify and celebrate the pioneers laying the groundwork for a new and dynamic entertainment medium. The website features bright colors and a nice looking website design powered by WordPress.

24. The Walk to Washington D.C.

The Walk to Washington is a initiative to gather 1,000,000 signatures on their petition for greater access, research and treatment for dealing with depression. It’s a beautifully designed website with great blend of colors and lighting used in the background. The site is a great example to showcase the power of WordPress as CMS for event based websites.

25. LA Marathon

The LA Marathon uses WordPress to power majority of its website, including static content, a forum powered by bbPress, videos, photos, and more. It’s a community that inspires athletes to connects them with each others. LA Marathon boasts nearly 20,000 participants and 1 million spectators and is one of the biggest organized road races in the world.

26. Harvard Gazette Online

The Harvard Gazette is Harvard’s official newspaper, highlighting faculty research, administrative staff, students, and events. Harvard is world’s most renowned institute for higher learning and its a no wonder that it’s part of this list. They decided to use WordPress to power this beautiful with easy to navigate website and that itself proves the ability and reach of WordPress.

27. Joint Use

Joint Use is an initiative to increase opportunity for children and adults to be more physically active. They encourage the shared use of gymnasiums, athletic fields and playgrounds by schools, private organizations etc. This helps in reducing the cost. The site is powered by WordPress and bbPress powers their forums. The website design is white and has used images to give the extra flair.

28. PerqWorks

Perqworks.com is Time off management application that manages leaves for your organization. Its powered by extensively customized WordPress for not just the front-end of the website but it integrates with the Perq Application. It’s a great display of what WordPress is capable of as CMS and not just for maintaining quality designed websites.

29. Kimberly Caldwell

Kimberly Caldwell is an american singer who came 7th in American Idol’s second season. She currently hosts various shows on Tv Guide Network. The celebrity decided to use WordPress to power their website that will also feature her debut album which is currently work in progress.

30. Leeds City College

Leeds City College was formed with the merger of Leeds College of Technology, Leeds Thomas Danby and Park Lane College Leeds & Keighley merged to form one of the largest and most influential colleges in UK. It’s using WordPress to create a course catalog that contains more than 2,000 courses and also uses WordPress to power its primary website.

31. Dot Kite

Dot Kite offers professional design services in many different areas. From furniture to consumer electronics, from packaging solutions to graphics and brand identity. They use WordPress to power their website and its not only nicely designed website, it uses javascript effects to make it visually more appealing.

32. Creative Spaces

Creative Spaces is a website that helps you to find suitable and affordable space to develop, exhibit or perform your work. Not only the concept is amazing, its the site’s design that steals your heart and attention instantly. It’s a fantastic display of website design & features combo running on WordPress.

33. Golf Royalty

Golf Royalty is popular irish website for golfers. It features innovative and dynamic reviews of Irish Golf Courses, Interactive Irish Golf Maps and the latest news & reviews. It’s a well designed, content rich website that uses WordPress to easily manage and display its content.

34. The Ford Story

The Ford Story is a website powered by WordPress integrated with various social media websites. The focus of the website is to connect with the customers and be open about the happenings around the ford cars & trucks. Ford is a fortune 500 company and they’ve used WordPress as CMS for this website and it means a lot for WordPress.  The Ford Story’s website design is one of my favorites as it’s a blend of great colors and uses javascripts to add various effects on the webpage.

35. 101 Holidays

101 Holidays is a unique selection of some of the world’s greatest travel experiences. Each of the holidays on this website has been carefully researched, and individually chosen by two of Britain’s leading travel writers, David Wickers and Mark Hodson. Launched in January 2009, 101 Holidays was named as one of the year’s 10 Hot Websites by The Times Magazine. 101 Holidays uses WordPress to display the content in a fantastically easy to use navigation and filters the destinations depending on the choices made by the user.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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Matt Mullenweg - The Super Hero!

If it weren’t for Matt Mullenweg creating WordPress, I would not have been here writing at this blog and you all wouldn’t have been reading this article. At the age of 19, he invented the core of Wordpress, and later when he turned 24, quit his job at CNET to fully focus on developing WordPress – a blogging platform. He is also the founder of Automattic, the business behind WordPress as well as famous spam fighter, Akismet.

Read this amazing piece at Skidzopedia – 17 people who changed the internet. Although, I would surely love to include the name of Max Levchin, Paypal’s founder; Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, Skype’s founders. I’m sure there must be more people on that list, still I would say that the list is pretty neat. I’m happy that people realize Matt’s hard work & contribution to the internet as he definitely deserves these kinda titles! What Say?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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1400 subscribers! Yipieee!

I would be honest, its been some time since I checked our subscriber base and the core reason was that Feedburner had been acting stupid, although I know that its been hovering around 1400 since some time. It’s helpful that I have the rough idea, however its difficult to digest that a service, owned by Google has been failing to provide good and dependable results. Many bloggers aren’t happy, some have accepted the service as it still gives a rough idea although on the other side some have shown a decline in interest as in current scenario there are other ways through which visitors can subscribe to their content. These days, most of the bloggers are  focusing towards either email marketing or towards increasing the twitter or facebook fans.

What are the alternatives?

Feedburner has been a great service and one of the only service that gives you the stats, helps you make money through Adsense and doesn’t charge a single dime. They offer so many features that others have failed to offer till date, however its the inconsistency in the service that made Jean & Samir Bhardwaj to look for alteratives. These are some of the alternatives that I liked -

• Feedblitz – This is definitely second most popular service. Feedblitz is very stable and has got good reviews lately. It is popularly praised for its email newsletter service and looks like a pretty good alternative to Feedburner. It comes at a price although, it shouldn’t be an issue for professional bloggers if they are still interested in RSS stats.
• WP FeedStats – This is a free WordPress plugin that displays the RSS subscription stats of your blog. The plugin displays the hits all the versions of the feed, be it RSS2, RSS or ATOM. The plugin looks decent I haven’t checked it personally, however, if we go by Samir’s judgement then it shouldn’t be a bad alternative to those looking for a free solution.
• Aweber & MailChimp – These two email subscription delivery services have gained a major chunk of market share as more and more bloggers have realized that email subscription is still best suited for marketing and advertisement for subscription. These email subscription tools offer great features and are at par with rss subscription services.

It’s pretty strange to see that there are hardly any decent alternatives to feedburner and probably one of the reason, why Google isn’t putting the heart and soul towards the service as much they’ve been doing for various other properties. And one of the reasons we don’t see many alternatives is because services like Facebook and Twitter have acted as a source of stats as well as good amount of traffic. What are your thoughts about the same? Do you think if feeds are relevant anymore or not?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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Zurb, a well-known company in the silicon valley that has worked with some of the top companies like Facebook, Ebay, Yahoo is behind Notable, an app that they built for internal use. Notable is a web-based application and great for designers and agencies who work from remote locations.

Notable - Easy collaboration for designers

The application works on Firefox, iPhone and of course, the browser-based functionality is available for all the platforms. You can clip any page on the browser and add notes on specific areas that you want to point out for the feedback. Once the feedback is uploaded on their servers, it can be discussed by team members using the comment form. All of this is part of the visual section, however since it’s focused towards the web agencies and freelancers, Zurb has taken care of the code and one of the best feature is that you can point out on the search engine optimization of the page as well!

Notable's Workspace

I was mostly impressed by Notable’s simplicity, its user interface is simple and without complex features that may confuse people. Its got the most important features packed for collaboration and notification, it allows you to restrict the collaborators to let them add notes or just view it.

Overall, I was fairly impressed with the application as it delivered all the features that we were looking in such an app. Notable certainly saves time as the feedback ends up being more contextual, visually accurate as it forces feedback givers to be specific. I would certainly suggest this app to all the freelancers who are into web designing as they’d find this app irresistible!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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WordPress For Windows

Microsoft has always been criticized for not adhering to Open standards and not being active in Open-source community. However, it looks like Microsoft has tried a fair bit of things to ensure that their products work well with popular web applications. I personally believe that Microsoft’s web servers aren’t good enough for PHP/MySQL driven websites and moreover, the security concern is one of the biggest factors to avoid Microsoft Windows. When Linux servers aren’t safe then no doubt, it’ll be a bigger pain to manage Windows Servers for security.

Security is another topic, coming back to the point of Microsoft & WordPress, I was a bit surprised to see how Microsoft has bundled WordPress in Web Platform Installer along with various other popular web applications like Drupal, Joomla etc. Check out the list of application in the gallery. Although, I was happy to see that Microsoft has made this move, this should give confidence to those who find working with Linux web servers and web applications a bit difficult.

Microsoft & WordPress technologies shake hands!

1. WordPress on SQL Server : With the help of IIS 7, SQL Server Express and WordPress on SQL Server distribution, its possible to run WordPress easily on Windows Vista, Windows 7 etc. It’s not the simplest way to install it, however this great guide by Zach Skyles Ownes should take you home.

2. SilverLight Gallery Plugin – Microsoft has been trying hard to make SilverLight popular among developers and end users. This plugin can surely help them achieve this goal. If this plugin gets adopted by bloggers, then the end users will have to install SilverLight in order to ensure that they can view the image gallery on their browsers.

3. SilverLight Bing Maps – This plugin integrates SilverLight & Bing Maps with WordPress. This plugin lets bloggers to put their location with interactive maps like Google Maps on their blog.

4. Windows Azure Storage for WordPress – This plugin lets WordPress users to store their media files and static files on Windows Azure platform whose more popular alternatives are Amazon Web Services or Rackspace Cloud Files.

Why is Microsoft doing this?

The first question that comes in mind that why is Microsoft trying to make its technologies work with WordPress, Drupal or other PHP/MySQL driven web applications. Well, Zach has already answered this question -

I’m a PHP-bred Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, and I love the fact that PHP now runs great on Windows, SQL Server, Windows Azure and SQL Azure.  It’s exciting to see how Microsoft technology can light up WordPress, whether it’s through Silverlight image gallery plugins, Bing Maps integration or future opportunities with technologies like our information service, Dallas.

Business sense says that Microsoft is using these popular web applications to make its existing or new technologies popular amongst end users, bloggers and developers. However, the interesting part will be to see that how many bloggers & developers [the ones not sold to Microsoft's technology] will be keen in adopting these? I personally welcome this move by Microsoft, although practically I doubt that I would use any of these technologies as I’m already comfortable with the setup that I currently have. What do you think about this move from Microsoft?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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Google Font Directory

Not long ago, I wrote a post about how one can utilize font web services like Typekit & Fontmeup to improve the typography of the webpages. Although, in order to utilize the actual power of these services one needs to shell out money from their pockets. Well, in order to fight the issues of improving the typography of the web pages, Google has come up with Google Font Directory. This is made possible with the help of CSS3 that allows web designers to use fonts that are stored on the web.

Prior to this, we were using WP Cufón, a WordPress plugin that lets you use the Cufon technique to display various fonts on the web page with the help of javascript. If you are interested in knowing the working behind Cufon then check out this link. However, with the launch of Google Font API, one can easily use the fonts available in the Google Font Directory. Thanks to Adrian, who has created WP Google Fonts, a WordPress plugin already using the Font API. We are currently running this plugin to improve the headings [h1, h2, h3....] of our posts and pages.

WordPress 3.0 RC1 is out! Expect the final version soon

WordPress 3.0 - The Ultimate One!

Last week, WordPress 3.0 RC1 was released. RC1 is supposed to be almost the final product where the bugs are generally not available. You can take version RC1 as the last step towards releasing the stable version. Well, it stable enough that it may get released as the final version, however with more than 20 million people using WordPress, it is a possibility that there may be more bugs that can be reported. We’ve already discussed about the upcoming and much awaited features like Custom Menus, improved custom post types, merger of WordPress MU as mult-site in WordPress 3.0, so I wonder if its necessary to talk about it again?

Although, If you are testing the RC and come across a bug, you can:

• Report it on the wp-testers mailing list
• Join the dev chat and tell us live at irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev
• File a bug ticket on the WordPress Trac.

Happy BirthDay WordPress!

Cake with WordPress Logo

On 27th May, WordPress turned 7! I’ve been late in wishing WordPress a happy birthday! Although, I did read somewhere – Its Better to be late than never! And I’m still wondering that what would be the apt gift for this occasion, may be you can suggest me something!

Its been 7 years and WordPress has grown from  b2/cafelog fork into a powerful CMS that is competing with the likes of Drupal, Joomla and other established content management systems. I’m sure writing this blog post would have been nostalgic for Matt. He shared that there are more than 1500 developers who are actively contributing in the development of WordPress and I must say that its an achievement! Motivating people to contribute together and to build a master piece like WordPress is really a commendable job and they all deserve millions of thanks from every WordPress user.

I remember that how I liked Blogger over WordPress in its early days, however as it was embraced by developers and I learnt new stuff, I realized that if I want to be a professional blogger, then it has to be WordPress and nothing else! Aha! not only for Matt, its kinda nostalgic for me too :)

I would like to once again wish Matt, team Automattic, those 1500 developers, plugin developers, theme developers [;)], those who use WordPress, those who spread the word about WordPress, in fact anyone who loves WordPress for making this a success!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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BuddyPress - "Social Networking in a box"

For WordPress, we have WordPress.com as the hosted service; For bbPress we have TalkPress; VideoPress plugin is also a hosted service in its own way; Not to forget about Akismet plugin either(well these are plugins however, they are useless if they don’t use the resources provided by Automattic as API). Automattic’s all major ventures have two things in common 1) they are open-source 2) they all are hosted services. However, one of the most sought-after plugin i.e. BuddyPress is only available as a plugin and there are no signs of the fact if its features will be provided as a hosted service any time soon or not.

Well, to me it will make sense if BuddyPress will become part of WordPress.com. Using the strong user base of WordPress.com, team Automattic should plan to include this “Social Networking in a box” and should plan to popularize it amongst users. This way the users will become more familiar with BuddyPress and will understand its power as well.

Recently, I’ve been looking into BuddyPress and was astonished to find out that one can literally build a Facebook out of it, if they plan to spend some time and money on it (well, not exactly but still it can be very close). Yet, publishers aren’t making full use of its power. In fact, I’ve  also noticed that even the developers like us haven’t really done much towards BuddyPress, even though its now available as a plugin for WordPress & WordPress MU both (not to forget that they become just “WordPress” in version 3).

I guess time is certainly not the factor since TalkPress came out after a long time since the inception of bbPress, however the business sense will be to ensure that users who were betrayed by Ning should get a chance to transfer their little social networks to hosted BuddyPress. Its been time since BuddyPress 1.0 surfaced and with the latest version it looks even more tempting.

Ning, a hosted social network that lets you create social networks of your own has recently changed their policy where they are asking a fee of $4.95 to $ 24.75 per month. In order to win the hearts of Ning users, Automattic did release an importer that will take the content from Ning and will make it run with BuddyPress. Matt from webmaster resource also adds that if Automattic will not launch the service anytime soon, then most likely some other enterprising developer or business owner will try and come up with a solution in that space, since popularity of Ning has proven that there are lot of people who want to start their little social networks!

Well, if you ask me that why I’m advocating the inclusion of BuddyPress in WordPress then here are little points that make me feel so -

1. Unleash the power of BuddyPress – As we all know that BuddyPress has grown a lot in features and matured as a platform in itself. You can check out these fantastic 59 excellent sites that are powered by BuddyPress to check out its power. Once people will become used to it, there will be quite a few who would want to come up with the next big idea that would drive the internet world in one way or the other. If WordPress was not made available then do you think Andy Peatling would have created BuddyPress?

2. More popularity of WordPress platform – To be honest, if someone would want to create a social network with features that come with default installation of WordPress & BuddyPress together, they would have to shell out hundreds and thousands of dollars however, with both scripts being open-source they’d become the choice of people and that would mean it would be an easier option for the webmasters as compared to dealing with much more complex Drupal.

3. More business and services – As we all know that WordPress has been really popular in the blogosphere and is becoming “hot cake” where business owners are embracing it as the choice of their CMS. It not only helps the team Automattic, however it helps thousands of developers in making a living. There are various WordPress plugin developers, theme developers and some have even created services around it, I’m sure there will be a lot more if BuddyPress will become common.

What are your thoughts about making BuddyPress as a hosted service? Do you think it will help Automattic and the community around WordPress & BuddyPress?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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I’ll be also listing various resources that can be used to further strengthen the security however, firstly I would like to put forth my views on the topic of why web-masters should use Mac or Linux. I would only list those points that are logical and none of them are influenced by any sorts. So here’s why I suggest so and how its easy to switch too -

1. To keep yourself safe from viruses :  I’ve used all three OSes and I’ve personally experienced that Mac & Linux aren’t prone to viruses as Windows is and the simple fact is that the market share of Windows is more than 90% and thats why almost every virus is targeted towards Windows Users. So, if you are using any of those two OSes you’d be safe from viruses and thus you reduce the chances of getting your website hacked.

2. For keeping others safe : As I’ve said that majority of cases that I’ve dealt are those where the webmaster’s computer was compromised. Moreover, once the sites are infected, they infect those computer who visit that site and that’s how they spread so quickly! Now, if at the first place the webmaster would have been using linux or mac, it would have ensured that at least they are not making the situation worse.

3. Switching is pretty easy – Most of the users give a reason that they won’t be able to switch because of the incompatibility issue and that they think that it would be pain to switch the platforms because of unavailability of ssoftware. I agree at one time it would have been difficult for most of the people, however web-masters specifically won’t find any issues in choosing these two platforms as most of their tasks are done online, else most of the software required have either a worthy alternative or if you are an open-source fan then you’d surely find most of them available for all three platforms. Here are some of the resources -

• A wonderful guide you can follow to make the easy switch.
• Various Windows Software alternatives for linux.
• Various Open-source software for Mac.

Try a gradual switch and start using these OSes and if you really want to run a windows software then you can try WineHQ or CrossOver (commercial) and most likely the software will work fine for you. If the software still doesn’t work and you don’t find any alternative then you can simply use VirtualBox or Parallels to run Windows inside Linux or Mac.

So when we know that for web-masters it can be easy to switch to Mac or Linux then why not use either of those two operating systems and keep yourself and the world safe from those malware? Anyway, enough of ranting – as I said that during my research, I did read quite a bit about security websites, so I would like to share that with you :

How to strengthen the security of your WordPress blog?

1. Don’t forget to read my articles that I wrote a while back on the topic of securing wordpress.
2. If possible switch your OS as soon as possible – Don’t think it as a stupid suggestion. Consider this one for sure!
3. Restrict WordPress admin use by IP Address.
4. Learn to restrict the FTP server access for specific IPs using VSFTPD – I know that not everyone gets a static IP address from their internet service providers, however use of VPN can certainly [I use StrongVPN] help you get over that problem.
5. More security steps that can be done through htaccess file, here are some 11 more steps that you can use.
6. Jeff Starr has created wonderful instructions for securing servers via htaccess and blocking the know malware techniques.
7. Blocking spam is equally important – Chances are that some spam comment will have the URL to a site that is infected, so its important to ensure that no spam comment passes through.

What else can be done other than IP address, Htaccess tricks?

Some of WordPress’ cool features come from allowing some files to be writable by web server. However, letting an application have write access to your files is a dangerous thing, particularly in a public environment. It is best, from a security perspective, to lock down your file permissions as much as possible and to loosen those restrictions on the occasions that you need to allow write access, or to create special folders with more lax restrictions for the purpose of doing things like uploading images. In short we are talking about CHMOD settings of the server.

All files should be owned by your user account, and should be writable by you and any file that needs write access from WordPress should be group-owned by the user account used by the webserver. Of course, learning this can surely take some time, but if you really want to secure your server, then this is one thing you should focus on!

• / — the root Wordpress directory: all files should be writable only by your user account.
  • EXCEPT .htaccess if you want WordPress to automatically generate rewrite rules for you
• /wp-admin/ — the WordPress administration area: all files should be writable only by your user account.
• /wp-includes/ — the bulk of WordPress application logic: all files should be writable only by your user account.
• /wp-images/ — image files used by WordPress: all files should be writable only by your user account.
• /wp-content/ — variable user-supplied content: intended by Developers to be completely writable by all (owner/user, group, and public).
  • /wp-content/themes/ — theme files. If you want to use the built-in theme editor, all files need to be group writable. If you do not want to use the built-in theme editor, all files can be writable only by your user account
  • /wp-content/plugins/ — plugin files: all files should be writable only by your user account.
  • other directories under /wp-content/ should be documented by whatever plugin / theme requires them. Permissions may vary.

Plugins that I prefer for securing WordPress

1. WordPress File Monitor - Think of it as a watch dog! It monitors your WordPress installation for added/deleted/changed files. When a change is detected an email alert can be sent to a specified address. So even if you add files using FTP, it will let you know. This is a fantastic way to ensure that no compromised file will go on server without going through its nose.

2. WordPress Firewall – I personally love this plugin. Of course, using this plugin means that you’d lose out on WordPress theme/plugin editing capabilities and few things here and there, however this plugin will ensure that everything will be super secure.

3. Block Bad Queries – Another gem from Jeff Starr. This plugin will ensure that your WordPress site will be safe from known vulnerabilities.

Well there have been countless number of posts on the topic of security and the worst part is that things aren’t improving a little bit. Its important to choose the right web-hosts as well. If this post of mine was a request towards web-masters, Mark Jaquith has asked web hosts to become more secure and to help web-masters in understanding the security of blogs/websites. It is one interesting read, so even if you are not a web host,  I would suggest you to read it.

What are your thoughts about changing the OS for ensuring safe and secure website? Do you think that one should go ahead and change their OS to ensure that their site will remain secure from malware to a large extent? Please share your thoughts in comments.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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Code is Poetry

Considering my love towards techie stuff and my love for WordPress, many have suggested to me that I should start coding myself. However, considering the fact that I haven’t gone through any formal education around computers and coding, I wonder if I can go ahead and create magical themes or plugins for WordPress. I won’t deny that I’ve given a shot to programming and for that I tried to learn Flex [I know its not related to WordPress, however there was a purpose behind it] however I couldn’t do anything with it due to lack of time and motivation.

I gave a thought on learning coding using WordPress as CMS, however all was in vein and I finally gave up on coding. However, don’t get surprised if you start seeing me posting tutorials related to coding anytime soon. During those motivational hours, when I tried to get my hands dirty with coding, I found out that IDEs [what the hell are IDEs?]are like “God send tools” for newbies. Although, I was equally surprised to find out that until recently there hasn’t been a single IDE that will be helpful in coding WordPress themes & plugins.

Note: Don’t Forget to check out the Big Question at the end of the post!

There have been only few IDEs, some of them are not known at all and all of them are commercial as well. Its definitely another surprise that WordPress, one of the most popular Open-Source CMS in the world doesn’t have any customized Open-Source IDE. We’ll surely discuss that further however, for now let us see the available IDEs for WordPress -

1. ThemeDreamer

ThemeDreamer is a Plugin for Dreamweaver that helps in coding for WordPress. The plugin is fantastic and provides WordPress functions as code hints as well. This is one feature that can surely help newbies to quickly learn the coding without worrying about remembering tons of available functions. The down side of ThemeDreamer is that its dependent on DreamWeaver [there is a positive as well, due to this it works on Mac & Windows] and which costs a fortune in itself and on top of it one needs to buy this plugin too. So if you are one of those who want to learn things without spending a single buck, then this is way too out of your budget.

Another reason, why this plugin fails to impress is that it is not up to date and probably one of the reason is that DreamWeaver CS5 supports WordPress & Drupal code hints. But then, there will be a dent of $400 if you buy CS5, although $0 if you plan to take the other route.

2. CodeLobster with WordPress plugin

CodeLobster is another IDE that provides WordPress functions although I’ve heard not so great reviews about this software. It doesn’t cost as much as Dreamweaver although when we talk about value for money, it doesn’t look like an impressive solution. To give you an idea about what users think about this IDE, i’ve taken this quote from its review by SoftPedia Editor -

The Good
As I thumb up, the autocomplete and function info options are to mention. They need work, but its a good start. Conversion options are also interesting, not something you find everywhere. I liked the interface: typical but clean and easy to use. Online help is available, for whenever you’re in need. CodeLobster is small and easy to install (unlike specialized platforms).

The Bad
I’m sorry to say this, but it still needs much work. If for web development some interesting features are implemented, for other languages (Java or SQL, for instance) support is perhaps too much said. I’ve seen better freeware, so…more is needed! Spellcheck wasn’t exactly OK either and the menu could have been better organized. “Best” for last: unexpected errors occurred for no reason. This is not acceptable for a shareware product.

The Truth
Well, if you are looking for the perfect code editor, you probably shouldn’t stop at CodeLobster. The intensions are good, but I feel it needs much more work to justify the 25 dollar fee for the license. It allows 30 days of free trial, so give it a shot.

3. Adobe DreamWeaver CS5

We’ve already talked about it and expressed our ‘not so great’ opinion because of the price associated with it. However, that was only for those who want to learn and code. Although, there is not doubt that how Dreamweaver has won the hearts of thousands of developers out there who take web development as carrier. They’ve recently integrated Auto Complete features for CMSs like WordPress, Drupal & Joomla. Its these little innovative features that keeps Adobe Dreamweaver ahead of all the other IDEs that you come across. Not only it has matured with time, it is currently best known commercial IDE for web development.

Check out DreamWeaver CS 5 in Action -

What are Open-Source Alternatives?

Now comes the big questions, is there any open-source IDE that gives Code hints for WordPress? Well, the answer is NO! There are various Open-source IDEs like NetBeans, Eclipse, Aptana etc. however, none of them provides code hints for WordPress. There aren’t any commercial plugins either for any of these.

Don’t you think that there should be an open-source IDE for popular CMSes like WordPress? Don’t you think that much more development will take place and more newbies will start to adapt these CMSes if they’ll see that switch can be easier through IDEs? Always eager to hear your thoughts so please take your time to leave a comment!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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Some of you will be surprised that why exactly is the post not about the linux web server setup for WordPress blogs. The reason is that one of my very good friend Shridhar Pare, owner of Xisto Network gave me a visit. As you can imagine we had long discussions about web, web hosting and forums where the knowledge lives. This is one of the reason that why I’m writing about Forums and not writing about hosting.

In my earlier post, I’ve discussed that how bbPress should be a plugin for WordPress. While going through my Google Reader, I came across a post by Dougal Campbell where he asks the question that if users like the idea of using WordPress itself as forum! Even Justin Tadlock has dwelled upon this idea before and has created a mockup about his idea [via Patrick Daly]-

I’d thought about this before and I completely believe that it would be fantastic to use WordPress as the forum. It is easily possible to create a theme for WordPress that looks like a forum, P2 Theme is a great example where the full editor is made available directly in the theme, which is one of the major features of forums. Lets see that how WordPress can provide the major features and where it lacks -

Forum Features that WordPress can provide

1. Forums post can be made through WordPress posts.
2. Categories can be the Forum sections.
3. Comments can be the forum replies.
4. Member profiles is part of WordPress by default.
5. Fantastic editor that lets users easily share photos and embed videos [remember: WordPress 2.9.2 has oEmbed support]

Of course, there are other features that you can have with the help of plugins that are available for WordPress and here are some of them that will always be useful in case you decide to use WordPress as forum -

1. Akismet can help protect you from Spam posts.
2. W3 Total Cache can ensure that there will be less burden on server.
3. Gravatar can be used in place of Avatars.
4. All in one seo pack can take care of the SEO of the forums.
5. Then there are plethora of plugins related to social media that can help you in building forums.

Forum features where WordPress lacks

1. There aren’t possibilities of creating private forums.
2. Membership level management is not as powerful as one would like
3. Private messaging systems

Well these are some of those features that aren’t in WordPress and the trouble of all this will only be experienced by those forum administrators who have larger forums otherwise major features are already covered by WordPress. There are plugins like SimplePress and BuddyPress that can give you more advanced forum features, in fact SimplePress is a plugin that converts WordPress into a good forum system. I haven’t played around with it so I wouldn’t be in a position to comment on the performance of it however, with the long list of features, I was certainly impressed.

What do you think about using WordPress as forums? Will you prefer your favorite CMS for running forums or will you prefer to use commercial solutions like Invision Power Board, vbulletin etc or will you be interested in using an open source solution for the forums?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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