This post will be of interest to those of you using the WishList member plugin (WLM) and the 1Shopping Cart (1SC).

1SC has announced that they have changed the way their recurring payments work, and this will enable a much tighter integration with WLM.

The Current problem

1SC only provides what WLM call a simple integration.  This means that there is no notification back to your site if the 1SC recurring payment is cancelled.

When someone cancels a membership, you need to manually remove them from the WLM system, as you can imagine if you have a decent sized membership site this overhead can be quiet a burden.

What 1Shopping Cart Are Saying

Here is the notification I was sent from 1SC

Professional Cart Solutions is extremely pleased to announce the release of the long anticipated re-write of our Recurring Billing engine.

Our engineers have been diligently working on improving this feature over the past year, and now we are ready to launch!

The V2 Recurring billing engine will look and function exactly the same as the current and familiar tool, but watch for the following enhancements:

• Faster, more reliable processing
• Receive recurring orders on both the Desktop and Mobile Notifiers
• Access to recurring orders through the API
• Ability to retrieve notifications of recurring orders through the API

We will begin migrating users to the new recurring billing system as of August 10th, 2010; your account will be migrated on or after that date. Note that this change will be seamless and there will be no disruption to your recurring billing.

For those who have been inquiring about an integration between our system and WishList Member, you will be particularly happy to know that this release is the final step in their integration with our service.

Due to impending changes in the policies of major credit card providers, we must also inform you of the deprecation of the “Update Payment Information for all Recurring Events” feature. This is comes as a result of a decision by the Payment Card Industry deeming any non-customer initiated payment changes as unacceptable.

When Will THis Integration Happen

I don;t have any details from WLM on the time the re-code will take, what I recommend is that you keep any eye on the news page from WLM http://wishlistproducts.com/category/news/

You should also keep an eye on your WLM dashboard, this will alert you when new versions of the plugin are available, they do not update through the normal plugin route because it is a premium product.

Hat Tip

A big hat tip to Jenna Avery for giving me the heads up on this update.

I’m on holiday this week (or vacation as you say in Americaland) so here is a guest post from Jonas Bates . He works for webhostgear.com, a well-respected web hosting guide.

Blogging and WordPress Hosting

Does your business have a blog? If not, it may be the only one left that doesn’t. Blogging is a key part of any Internet marketing strategy, and many companies are benefitting tremendously from a combination of blogging and WordPress hosting that keeps fresh content associated with your business and directs traffic back to your primary website.

How to Make Blogging and WordPress Hosting Work for Your Business

The Internet is all about fresh content. As the saying goes “content is king.” To get people to your website, you need something new. To bring them back, you need to keep people talking. A blog can serve both of these purposes. Even if your main site needs to stay static by necessity (because you have a lot of offers, for example), your blog can always be changing, and can be a great source of link building too. Don’t shortchange the power of the blog.

But What About the WordPress Hosting? Where Does That Come In?

WordPress hosting is simply the easiest and most effective platform for blogging. A WordPress blog with a WordPress host is easy to set up, easy to use, and easy to optimize. You can have a WordPress blog hosted on a non-WordPress server, but why would you? WordPress hosts
are already set up with the right operating system, the right programming language, the right everything for a functional, efficient, eye-catching WordPress blog. There are already plenty of great WordPress features to choose from, and since WordPress is an open source application,
new ones are popping up all the time. WordPress is compatible with any web hosting.

Benefitting from Blogging and WordPress Hosting

Once you have your WordPress blog set up with your WordPress host, use it! Don’t let all that functionality go to waste. Make sure you’re posting every day, or at least a few times a week. If necessary, get some of your employees to contribute. As soon as people realize you’re not updating that blog regularly, they’ll stop coming back, and that can cost you big. So set it up and start blogging!

Image by tomandemma

Over the past few weeks I have been asking you what you wanted as a free information product to help you manage your WordPress site.  If you missed the posts they can be read at What Free WordPress Help Do You Need and Your WordPress Core Problem.

The overwhelming result was detailed instructions on how to do the various maintenance tasks a WordPress site requires.

I’ve been working through the problem and it is pretty big, so to help me break it down into smaller chunks, I am going to publish this as a series of blog posts and videos, then I’m going to package it up as a pdf with worksheets to download as a real information product once I’m done.

In part one of this series I would like to take you through an introduction to WordPress maintenance tasks.  I need as much feedback as possible, please leave comments if I have missed any items you want to know about , also if you are happy with the way the course looks let me know.

WordPress Maintenance An Introduction

This series of blog posts will take you through the various maintenance tasks required to keep your WordPress site running efficiently and securely.  This is a very practical series of posts, I will explain in detail why a maintenance task needs to be performed, how it is performed, I will also show you how to do it via a series of screen cast videos.

Why WordPress Needs So Much Maintenance

You may be asking yourself why WordPress needs so much maintenance?  Why is it constantly changing and why new items are being added.  In short why am I getting this maintenance headache?

WordPress is not a static product.  It is in a state of constant development.  This development is to add new functionality, to fix bugs and to close security loopholes.  This is why the WordPress core files need attention on a regular basis.

Plugins are a big part of WordPress, they offer extensions to the WordPress core functions and solve almost every problem a WordPress site owner may have.  These plugin updates need to be factored into your maintenance plans.

As WordPress develops so themes develop to take advantage of new functionality.  You may find that your theme requires an update, this is yet anther maintenance task you need to consider.

WordPress also suffers because of its popularity.  It is an easy target for hackers.  There are millions of WordPress sites, and many of the site owners are not trained in computer security.  As a result hacks are being made on outdated code, plugins with loop holes etc. Many of the updates and maintenance procedures required are to block loopholes and monitor for attacks.  You need to do this or risk a hacked site and all the pain and embarrassment that causes.  Ask your self this questions

“What would be the implications to my sites readers and customers if I was suddenly pointing to Viagra sites after a hack?”

The rest of this introduction will take you through the various on-going maintenance tasks  required to keep your site up and running.

Backup and Recovery

Backups are a crucial maintenance task of any computer site, not just WordPress, but you would be surprised how many people do not do backups, or do not perform full backups.

The flip side of this coin is that people have taken good backups, but have no idea how to recover the files and sql commands they have archived.

I will teach you the following things in the backup section of this series

• What to back up
• How to back it up manually
• How tO use backup plugins to automate this process
• Creating a backup schedule
• How to test backups for efficacy
• How to recover your archive

WordPress Core Updates

As mentioned, WordPress is not a static system, it is constantly evolving with new updates to add functionally, fix bugs or close security loopholes.  A major maintenance task is the update of the core WordPress system files and database configuration.

In the core updates modules I will take you through:

• Knowing when to update
• Manual updates
• Automatic updates the safe way
• Fixing a problematic update
• Rolling back to a previous version

Plugin Updates

Plugins are one of the very best parts of WordPress.  There is a huge active community of developers writing add ons for WordPress so that almost all problems a site owner can have are solved by the installation of  a plugin.

This huge benefit comes with a maintenance overhead. Just like WordPress core files, plugin developers are releasing upgraded functionality, bug fixes and security patches.  This all required maintenance.  If WordPress changes the way their core system works, this needs to be reflected in your plugins too.

In the plugin maintenance section I will take you through

• Finding out when to update your plugin (hint it’s not only when the plugin tells you to)
• Manually updating plugins
• Automatically updating plugins
• Batch updating plugins
• Troubleshooting plugin updates
• Rolling back plugins

Theme Updates

Theme update are probably the least frequent maintenance update you will need to perform.  In this section I will take you through:

• Finding out when a new version is available
• Installing your new update
• Copying any theme changes you have made
• Rolling back to an old version

Managing Users

If you run a multi user site, you may build up a large number of users, sometimes these users are no longer contributing to your site and as a result they pose a security risk and should be deleted.

I will teach you how to

• Find inactive users
• Removing and accrediting their posts to a live users

Managing Security

Security is an overlooked aspect of maintenance by most WordPress site owners.  This is because they don;t have a huge level of experience with IT security.  In this module I will take you through

• Initial security audit
• closing the Loopholes
• On-going security checks.

System Audits

There are two other maintenance tasks I recommend on a less frequent basis and they are plugin audits and database audits.

Plugin Audit

This is a review of your currently installed plugins, can you remove or deactivate any of these items to reduce the overhead on your system?  I will teach you how to:

• Find unused plugins
• Deactivation Test
• Deleting Files

Database Audit

As we add plugins, themes and other add ons to our WordPress site, new database tables are created.  As you database grows so the overhead on your site grows.  A minimal database is the best way to work, I will take you through

• Auditing your database tables
• Finding which ones are not required
• Gracefully arching and removing this unwanted data.

Maintenance Schedules

In the last part of the course I will bring it all together with a maintenance schedule, when to do the various maintenance tasks.

Your Feedback

As you know I am completely open to feedback on this free product I am creating for you.  If I have missed anything please leave a comment and I will add it to the mix.

Image by Usefulguy

I’m soft launching my new on-going maintenance program, full details are available at WordPress Maintenance Package.

Can it be any softer?

Image by naturesdawn

In a previous post I wrote about migrating your WordPress hosting companies.  Another common task I am asked to do it to change the domain name of a site but keep it on the existing hosting account.

Here is my how to on changing your WordPress site’s domain name

Why Change Your Domain Name

There are a number of reasons you may want to change your domain name, your company may change it’s name, your may be re-branding, you may have forgotten to renew your domain and lost it (you know who you are 🙂 ), you may be building the site with a temporary domain name but for whatever reason, it can be edited once your site has been built.

Before You Start

There are a couple of things you need to do before you start a domain name change.

Take a full backup – things can go wrong so you need a point in time to restore back to

Make sure the domain is pointing to your current installation, the test will be to attach to the new domain, you should be re-directed to the existing domain.

This is an intermediate to advanced how to.

There Are Three Ways To Do This

There are three ways to do this change, you can edit the general settings of your site, edit  the wp-config.php file or directly change your database.  They are ordered in ascending order of difficulty.

Edit General Settings

Scroll down to settings ->general and you will see two options with domain names WordPress Address and Blog Address.

To change the domain name, simply change the URLs in these two areas.

BE WARNED: As soon as you do this, your blogs address will be changed, if you do not have the new domain configured correctly, you will not be able to login.

Edit wp-config.php

The second way to change your domain name (and easiest to fix) is to set two new entries in your wp-config.php file.

Edi this file using the ftp client of your choosing and add the following two lines

define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://example.com/wordpress’);
define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://example.com/wordpress’);

These entries correspond to the two URLs from method one.  Enter your new domain name and save the new wp-config.php.

When you attempt to access the old domain you will be re-directed to the new one.  If you are having problems, simply remove these two lines and you will have access to your old domain.

Edit The Database Directly

This one is a bit more advanced, but if you are happy editing your WordPress database with tools like phpmyadmin then this is another way to change your domain name

Navigate to your options table, it may be called something like wp_options and find the two entries siteurl and home.  Edit these database entries with your new URL sand save them to the database.  Test as in the previous methods.

Save The Google Juice

If you have put a lot of time and effort into your content on the old domain name, there is agood chance you want to retain old links in Google.  Fortunately WordPress does a good job of this, it will do a 301 redirect from your old domain name to your new one.  A 301 redirect tells the search engines to change their index links to the new URL it is redirected to.

To test everything is working okay, type in site:yourdomain.com and click on a couple of links, if they go through and then redirect to your new URL everything is working great.

Search And Replace

Once you domain is working correctly, it is probably a good idea to search and replace your entire database to make sure any entries in blog posts etc are changed to the new domain.

I have already written about this in my WordPress Search And Replace post.

Wrap Up

It’s relatively painless to change your domain name, so don’t think you are stuck with a domain name you don’t really want.

Image by soschilds

I was recently faced with a task to change a lot of links on my site, and I thought I would share with you the easy way to do this.

My favourite theme Headway (aff) has changed it’s affiliate program so I needed to replace all of the affiliate links to the new one. I’ve got a few links peppered throughout my blog and the idea of going through all the posts is a bit of a pain.

There’s A Plugin For This

There’s a plugin to help you do that it’s called “Search and Replace” (note to self if you develop any plugins give them funky/exciting names not dull informative ones)  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/.

How It Works

Install the plugin as normal, and a new option is presented under tools -> search and replace.

You can then select the area you want to replace.  This can be in all area, just the content, comments users the list goes on, see the screen dump for details.

Add your search and replace comments at the bottom and click go.  It’s as simple as that.

Backup Your Database First – WordPress Search And Replace

Please, please create a backup first you are directly modifying the database here and the possibility of calamitous system failure are present.  You have been warned 🙂

Image by goulvenchampenois

last week I ran a survey asking what your core problems with WordPress are, if you missed it you can see the original blog post here What Free WordPress Help Do You Need

I would like to personally thank everyone one who took part in the survey, and I am very glad I did the survey.  It has really opened my eyes.  Instead of building the information product I think you would need, I can see the information product you really need.  This has helped me, I was so off track.

Your Responses

I think I know what information you need, but I just want to check in to make sure I am delivering exactly what you need.

The majority of the replies I received were about  the pain of the maintenance process of managing your WordPress blog, plugin updates, core WordPress files updates etc.

A couple of the responses I got will not make it to the information product stage, but will make great how to blog posts, I will be writing those over the next few weeks (thanks for giving me great subjects to write about).  Apologies if I am not delivering what you want, but I want to help as many people as possible.,

Here is what I think You have asked for

Title: The WordPress Maintenance Schedule

Outline: An information product showing you how and when to do the ongoing maintenance tasks for your WordPress site.  This will include upgrading the core WordPress files, plugin updates and maintenance, backups, security checks and theme maintenance.

I will take you through the simplest and fastest ways to do the maintenance including automation procedures so you can concentrate on creating content not maintenance tasks.

Format: PDF and Video Screen Casts

I’m looking forward to building this based upon your feedback , but ONLY  if this is EXACTLY  what you need,

If I spend 2-3 days making this product and it is not what you want and need this I’m going to feel like a total idiot after misjudging your feedback.

Is This What You Want And Need

If this is the information product you want more importantly need, then let me know,  how and why it will help you so I know I am on the right track.  If enough people tell me I am on the right track I will personally send you this product.

If this isn’t what you want, tell me what you would rather have using the form below and I will amend my offering.

Let Me Know

Please let me know using the form below, all feedback is appreciated.

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image by Urbanwoodchuck

I would like to take you through my preferred method of migrating a WordPress site between hosting companies.

So if you are planning to move your site from one hosting company for cost or reliability reasons, then this post is for you.

Pre-Migration Tasks

There are a couple of control tasks I like to do before the migration begins.  I like to take some metrics so you know that the migration has been a success once you are at the target hosting company.  The details I take are:

Record number of blog posts, comments, categories,and pages.  This can be quickly collected from the dashboard.

Take screen dumps of major pages so you can check everything has been taken across and more importantly looks okay.

Document your widgets what codes you are using etc.  I have seen widgets die during a migration.

1) Stop All Activity on Your Old Hosting Company

This is cut off time, no more posting of editing until the migration is complete or you risk loosing data.  This is especially important if you are a mulit-writer blog setup.

2) Build A New Database On Your Target Hosting Company

On your new hosting company the first stage is to create a new blank database.  Most hosting companies have some sort of database creation wizard, build an empty database ready to accept your data.

You will need to record the database name, user name, password and host for use later in the process when you update your wp-config.php.

3) Backup the database

Go to your old hosting company and look for a tool called phpmyadmin, nearly every hosting company I have worked with has this tool, it enables you to create a dump fo your database.

Navigate to export, make sure you select all the tables and create a dump file.  Save this somewhere on your local machine.

Check out my series on backup and recovery for more details at https://dev.neilmatthews.com/backup-recovery-introduction

4) Using FTP copy all of your WordPress files

Connect to your old hosting  site using an ftp client (I always recommend using sftp to make sure your site is secure) and download all of the files from your site to your local machine.  This may take some time depending upon the number of files on your site.   If you have thousands of images or added files the download may take a couple of hours.

5) Restore your Database To the Target Hosting Company

Connect to your new blank database using phpmyadmin, and run an import process, again refer to the recovery section of this series of posts  https://dev.neilmatthews.com/backup-recovery-introduction

If you have issues at this point, don’t panic, your site is still live on the old hosting service, you can take your time and experiment with the export/import process.  Then when you are happy start the entire process again.

6) Upload your WordPress files

This is the reverse process of step number 4.  Using FTP copy all of the saved files from your local drive up to your new hosting account.

The files should be copied to your http root, please check with your hosting company, but it is often called public_html or www.

7) Edit Your wp-config.php file

On your new hosting site, edit the file wp-config and adjust the configuration so your WordPress site points to your new database as created in point 2.

The things that will need to be altered are:

/** The name of the database for WordPress */

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘new db name‘);

/** MySQL database username */

define(‘DB_USER’, ‘new db user‘);

/** MySQL database password */

define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘new db password‘);

/** MySQL hostname */

define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘new db host‘);

Take A Deep Breathe

This is the point where you need to move your domain, this is where it can get a bit hairy, if you migration is not done properly, you site will go down  when you point to an incomplete WordPress migration.

Test Before Migrating

If you new hosting company supplies a temporary URL (Godaddy does for example.) add the following two lines to your wp-confog.php and set the URLs to be your temporary address.  This will enable you to test your config before migrating your domain name.

define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://example.com/wordpress’);
define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://example.com/wordpress’);

Remember to remove these once the test is done.,

9)Migrating Your Domain Name

Are you going to move your domain name to your new hosting, or just point it to the new hosting?  There are a few ways to migrate your domain

Changing The Name Servers (easiest)

Probably the easiest way to do the domain migration is to change the name servers on your old hosting account to the ones on

Unfortunately I cannot give detailed instructions on how to so this as every hosting company does it a little differently. But here is the process

1. Get the new name servers from your new hosting company, the usually take the form ns1.newhosting.com and ns2.newhosting.com.
2. Go to you old hosting and update the name server option
3. Domain replication will take place NB there is sometimes a propagation delay of up to 24 hours before name servers are updated.

Updating name servers leaves your domain registration with the old hosting company and ONLY points to a new hosting location.  If you want to move you hosting and domain registration use the next process.

Move your domain to the new hosting company (more complex)

A more complex and time consuming way to migrate your domains is to move your domain registration.  Again the process is different for each hosting company, please see their documentation.

1. Notify your new hosting company that you want to transfer a new domain into your account
2. Ensure the domain is unlocked at your old hosting company (see their documentation)
3. You will be supplied a series of migration codes enter these into the domain console as directed.
4. The migration process is initiated and the domain is migrated into your new hosting account, and pointed to the files / database you have moved.

Domain transfers can take a number of days so I recommend a hybrid approach of moving the name servers then moving the registration.

This is a very common occurence and your hosting company(s)  will be able yo help you.

10) Test, Test and Test Again

Your site should now be live on your new hosting account, it is time to test.  Here are some of the things you should check

Check you have the correct number of posts pages, comments etc from the check points you took in the pre-migration test stage

• Add a new test post
• Upload an image  file
• Test you can see images in your posts#
• Test your sidebar is working

Points  To Watch

Sometimes your upload path will be hard-coded with a directory that is not available on your new hosting. If this is the case you will not be able to upload files and you may have issues displaying images.

To test if this is an issue navigate to settings -> miscellaneous and if you see an entry with a long path rather than wp-content/uploads you may have an issue, set it to the default wp-content/uploads.

Another common problem is with the .htaccess files, and your permalinks, if your home page works, but not your posts and pages (you get 404 errors) then regenerate your permalinks form settings -> permalinks

Wrap Up

Migrating hosting accounts is not the easiest things in the world take it slowly and do each point carefully and you should be able to migrate your hosting.

I’ve been planning to create a new (and free) information product for the readers of my site, and the subscribers on my email list as a thank you for your subscription.

I would like to get your input on this “thing” I am going to create, can you please answer the following three questions so I create the product you really need.

I will use this “thing” going forward as a reward for new people joining my mailing list.

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I wrote a guest post over at Location Independant about fullfilment services if you run a physical product business.

Whilst not directly about WordPress it may interest those of your running e-commerce sites with wordpress.

Check out the guest post at http://locationindependentprofessionals.com