I want to take you through a review of a plugin I highly recommend called backwpup.  This is a plugin which takes regular scheduled backups of your site.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backwpup/

I used to go on about the benefits of backupbuddy but I’ve gone off that plugin because I’ve seen it failing to take backups 0n a number of sites due to size, timeouts and other php issues.  This is not something you can have working some of the time an not others when you are talking about backups so I went looking for an alternative.

Backwpup also has the added bonus that it is free, the other quality backup plugins and services are usually premium.

You Are Taking Backups Aren’t You?

It still amazes me to see the number of sites that are not taking backups in the mistaken understanding that their hosting company is doing it for them.  This is not always the case you should always take a backup.

Install a backup plugin now and starting taking your own backups on a regular basis.

File And Database Backups

It is very important to remember that WordPress is made up of two components  the database which contains all your data and variable settings and the file base which contains your WordPress scripts, themes, plugins and any uploaded media such as images, videos, pdf etc.

Many plugins backup the database, but only a few do both, backwpup is one of those.

Scheduled Jobs

The plugin allows you to schedule backup jobs which run automatically, if you are anything like me, you will forget to run backups and right when you need an archive you wont have one.

I recommend have a backup routine of daily database backups and weekly full backups of database and file base.  BackWPup allows you to do this.

Offsite backups

Another great facility is the ability to push your archive files off your site.  This means you have an offsite copy of your data in case anything catastrophic happens to your hosting account.

With an offsite backup you can always rebuild your site.

BackWPup allows you to push your archive to an ftp site, amazon s3, your drop box account and a number of other services.

Alerting

The system has email alerts if anything goes wrong, please please check your backups, during my days in corporate IT I can remember three or four times when I came to do restores only to find the archives had failed and we were not aware of that.

The alerting email systems tells you about completed backups but also reports on an issues found during the backup.

Restoration

Backwpup comes with a restoration script, fingers crossed I’ve not had to restore a backup yet, and I haven’t use this script so I cannot comment on how good it is.

The documentation suggests it will take the database files and restore them automatically for you.  It’s very important to know how to recover in the event of a failure.

Wrap Up

If you don’t have a backup schedule in place or you only have a partial backup I recommend you download and install BackWPup.   I’m using it on all my sites now, and with my clients too.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backwpup/

Photo Credit: Daniel Leininger via Compfight cc

You are all probably aware of the premium plugin Premise and it’s landing page functionality, but did you know if also has membership site abilities too?

I used the membership site functionality on my latest WordPress Performance Tuning Course and found it really effective.

If you are looking to sell your content, then Premise is well worth a look.

An Overview Of Premise

In it’s first incarnation, Premise was a premium plugin designed to build landing page.  It was designed to build and test sales pages, video landing pages etc.

They have extended the plugin and added membership site features so you can build landing pages then deliver your information products all in one neat little suite.

The team behind Premise are the Copyblogger people, they also build Scribe the SEO plugin and various information products such as Teaching Sells.

 What It Costs

As mentioned Premise is a premium plugin it costs $165, which is more expensive than it’s competitors, but that is a one off price for unlimited sites and matches it’s competitors multi site license costs.

It’s more than just a membership site plugin as it has the landing page stuff, but a lower priced single site option would be  a good idea.

It has a 30 day money back guarantee.  I did a test drive of the original Premise and did not like it and found getting my money back very simple.

Installation

Installation is fairly simple, you install the plugin, add your license key and then there is a little bit of configuration.

You need to create and configure three pages, checkout, login and members page which involves creating pages and adding short codes.  The documentation is good, but hidden away.  You have been warned.

A word to the Premise team – a setup wizard for none-techies may be a good idea to get people up and running quickly.

Shopping Cart Integration

Premise integrates with Paypal and Authorize.net.  Not as many as the competition,  I always use Paypal so that is not an issue for me, but 1shopping cart people may be put off.

Paypal uses IPN for recurring payments, a much better method than Wishlist member uses and a great way to ensure your recurring payments are processed correctly, and for closing down access if people cancel or payments fail.

Problem with payments when using Wishlist member was my main reason for trying Premise, I’m happy to say I had none during my course launch.

Mailing List Integration

Premise integrates with Aweber, Mailchimp and Constant Contact.

I was very very impressed with the Mailchimp integration.  It uses something called single optin so I can be sure that once someone has joined my membership site they are also added to the mailing list for the course.

Imagine the scene,  you’ve just joined my membership site, Paypal has sent you an email, my website has sent you and email and my mailing list has also sent you a double optin request.  Too many emails,  and in my experience, 50%-60% do not complete the double optin process and are not added to your membership site email list.  A list you may use to tell your members when new content is ready etc.

With Wishlist Member I found I had to manually export users and import them into Mailchimp to ensure they were in my list.

Content Protection

Nothing earth shattering in this section,  it works very much like any other membership site.

You setup a membership access level which integrates with what Premise calls a product.  A product is the sale price which integrates to your shopping cart.

On your sales page you create a link to a product which upon payment integrates with an access level.  Sounds complex but it’s not.

On posts and  pages there is a check box to protect that content for members of a particular access level – pretty standard fare if you have used a membership site plugin before.

There are short codes to partially protect content on a page, for example you can setup a piece of teaser copy and only protect a download or video.

Talking about downloads, you can setup links to pdfs or other downloadable goodies which are protected for logged in users.  So Premise is a great way to sell you ebooks or video downloads.

You can drip feed new content to your people over days or weeks to stop  information overload and extend the lifetime of your membership content.

All of this is implemented in a very slick way and I found it very simple to protect my content.

Forum Integration

A featured I’m not using is members integration with the forum software Vbulletin.  This is a premium forum product that I don’t use.

I would like to see the team extend this and add other forum systems.  A protected members only forum is a great way to add value to your membership sites.

Personally I use the simple-press plugin and protect the pages it is on.

Downsides

There are a couple of features missing in this first edition of Premise membership sites:

• Your cannot protect categories
• Notification of new member signups, you need to login and review an orderes report
• On the landing page side, the need to get the new Google experiments split testing setup asap

Wrap Up

Premise is playing catch up with more established competitors like Wishlist Member but I enjoyed the plugin because of it’s solid payment collection process and ease of use for content protection makes it a winner in my opinion.

I’ll be using Premise going forward for my courses and I’m in the process of reverse engineering my old courses to use Premise.

You can checkout Premise at getpremise.com all links are affiliate links

 Image by tara_siuk

If you are anything like me,  finding free quality images for your blog posts is a real pain.  Enter Compfight an image search engine for Flickr.

What Is Compfight?

It is an image search engine that allows you to find images from the Flickr photo sharing service against a keyword that matches your content.

That is Compfight.com. there is also a WordPress plugin for Compfight which allows you to do all of this inside of WordPress and to give the correct attribution to the person that created the image.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/compfight/

Licensing

All of the images are licensed under the creative commons license, so they are free to use as long as you give an attribution link back to the original creator of the image.

There is a standard creative commons and a commercial license, since this is a business site I opted for the commercial license, this means the images are still free, but I have fewer images to choose from.

Settings

There are a series of settings you can make on the plugins to control which images are returned.  This is done from settings -> compfight.

You can set the license as discussed above, set safe search so adult content is never returned, and lastly the most useful function is to set image sizes you want.  I use a standard image size for all my posts of 240 x 180 pixels, setting this as my preference ensures I am only shown images that fit in my theme correctly.

Getting Images

There is a new camera icon in the insert tool bar, click on that and you are granted access to a search panel.

 

Type your desired keyword in that panel and your search results are presented.  The algorithm may need some work, but it is far better than the existing search function that comes with Flickr.  If you have ever used that, you will know the search results are very random.

Review the images retrieved for you, click on the one you like, with the size you like and it is automatically inserted into your post or page.  An automatic attribution link will also be added so you comply with the appropriate licensing.

Major Downside

One major flaw of the plugin, in my opinion, is that you cannot add an image to the featured image section of a post, only insert it into the body.

The way my theme works is to take the featured image and show it next to a post and on the blog home page.

As a result downloading files from compfight.com instead of using the plugin is far more effective for me.

Wrap Up

If you struggle to find high quality images to go with your high quality posts then this is a brilliant service or plugin for you .

Image via Compfight by davehogg

I would like to give you a review of the WordPress editorial calendar,  an excellent new plugin I’m using.  Download it at the following URL WordPress Editorial Calendar

WordPress editorial calendar; What Does It Do?

The WordPress editorial calendar allows you to setup a schedule of posts to publish or write in the future.  It also allows you to create a schedule of posts that are in outline or draft that you intend to write at a later date.

A new tab is added to the posts menu called calendar, and underneath that you have a wordpress editorial calendar layout of posts, these can be draft, scheduled or published.  You can editr you posts from this screen but I don’t recommend this, rather use editorial calendar as a drafting tool and edit your posts from the normal post editor.

The Problem Is Solves

I often get excellent ideas for a blog post and I immediately drop it into WordPress as a draft post, it will sit there for some time and often it is forgotten about.

Once it drops off the front page of the list of posts, that idea is lost, but with editorial calendar I can set a time when I want to write that post and I’m reminded about it from the visual editor.

I can drag and drop my ideas to different dates if I change my mind, a great post publishing tool all in all.

If you have time sensitive offers or content that needs to go out at a particular time of the year the WordPress editorial calendar will be an excellent tool for you.

Imagine sitting down at the start of the year and planning out all of your content and dropping it into the editorial calendar.

Here’s What It Looks Like

How I’ve Been Using It

I use it to draft out an idea, and drop it into a publishing slot, you can then spread your ideas out over a period of time.

I brainstorm lots of posts and leave them as drafts and the trouble I have is that they drop off the front page of the post editor and they are lost.

I have not been scheduling my posts through it, but I can see how that would be very useful if I had time sensitive content that I could write now and drop into a calendar in the future (of course you can also use the schedule date function on the normal post editor).

Get A Copy

Editorial calendar is a free plugin available at the plugin repository at this URL

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/editorial-calendar/

Image by 42931449@N07

In this post I want to give you a case study on how to build a multi language blog to serve site visitors who do not speak your base language.

I’ve been called in by a number of clients recently to build these types of sites and I want to share with you the easiest way to do this.

(more…)

I’m building a new e-commerce setup here at wpdude to sell my downloadable video courses, and as part of that project I’m using a new plugin called Cart66.

I thought a plugin review was due.

(more…)

I use Mailchimp to send out my weekly newsletter and numerous one-off email messages (I can hear you groaning already he’s on the sell again :)) I thought I would write a quick blog post saying why I use this over other systems such as Aweber or Contant Contact,

Free For First 2000 Signups

I bet that caught your attention, yes Mailchimp is completely free for the first 1000 subscribers you have.  You can send out 6000 emails per month, with a cap on 1000 emails in any 24 hour period.

This is great if you are just building your list and don’t want to be hit by the fees other email providers impose.

RSS Integration

One of the great featured of Mailchimp is the ability to create a recurring campaign based upon the RSS feed of a site.  I use this for my weekly newsletter.  I publish my content at my blog, then once a week, my RSS feed is automatically packaged up as a newsletter and sent to everyone on my list.

Easy Integration With WordPress

There are an array of plugins out there to integrate WordPress and Mailchimp.  I use a combination of Gravity forms and the Mailchimp integration, but I have also used this excellent one from Mailchimp themselves http://www.mailchimp.com/plugins/mailchimp-wordpress-plugin/ which allows you to create an easily customisable widget in your sidebar.  There is also a function to call which allows you to place the code anywhere in your theme files.

Integration With Other Systems

Mailchimp and a lot of the other software as a service supplies are working together to make integration very easy, for example I used Freshbooks for my invoicing, this integrates with Mailchimp so I could export data from one system into another

There is a big old list of integration providers, check out this page http://www.mailchimp.com/features/extras/

Ease Of Use

I’ve tried systems like Aweber, Constant contact and found them to be pretty un-intuitive, Mailchimp has none of those problems, I found it very easy to use, and they have some very good online training and documentation.

CAVEAT: I found it pretty difficult to get my head around the concept of groups within a mailing list, watch the videos before segmenting your list with groups.

It Does Everything You Would Expect

It has all the other good things you would expect from an email provider, autoresponders, list segmenting, reporting on your campaigns, import lists etc etc.

Give It A Go

I cannot stress how important my email list is to my business, it is the most important way to contact your clients or followers (if you are a pure blog) in a manner that they will give you their attention.  The sooner you start an email list the sooner you will see real growth in your business because of the offers you can make.

Sign up for a free account

Disclosure

If you sign up for Mailchimp I will receive something called monkey rewards, these entitle me to free upgraded on my Mailchimp account.  I can exchange monkey rewards for things such as spam checks, and an increased number of daily sends.

One of my favourite techie plugins is serverbuddy.  This excellent little plugin collects a load of information from your hosting and WordPress config

What Does It Do?

Serverbuddy collects a series of server configurations from your hosting setup and makes them available for you to review them.

This is very handy if you are troubleshooting setup configuration issues such as out of memory problems.

It also gives you a dashboard and highlights any problematic configurations it finds, the dashboards and ranks them like a traffic light green being good, yellow being suspect and red as a problem (see screen dump).

 

How I Use It

I use it in a number of ways, here are the main things I do

• Memory Usage and Available Memory
• Quick security check on file permissions
• Check The PHP config of a client site
• Check the cron for upcoming items.

Get A Copy Of ServerBuddy

Serverbuddy is a free plugin from the premium plugin shop http://pluginbuddy.com, you can download the plugin from the WordPress.org plugin repository at:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/serverbuddy-by-pluginbuddy/

This one is for the techies out there, WP-Overview is an excellent plugin which give you an overview of the memory usage and configuration of your site.  This in turn helps you to diagnose any problem you may be having.

What It Does

Once you have installed WP_Overview it give you a new dashboard widget which gives you a point in time report on memory usage, and various other configuration options for your site.

Download WP-Overview

You can get a copy of wp-overview from the following URL

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-overview-lite/

Installation

There is no special inssallation instructions for this plugin simply upload or search for wp-overview

Here’s What You Get.

Here is a screenshot of wp-overview from my site.  I’ve blank out some of the sensitive information

How I Use WP-Overview

I use it on performance or memory troubleshooting projects.  This give me a feel for the available memory and how much is being allocated to WordPress.

WP Troubleshooting

There will be a detailed video on using wp-overview in my WP Troubleshooting course along with detailed instructions on how to diagnose memory errors.

Image by wilcozpics

This time last year I wrote a post on a doing a new years blog tidy up, you can read it here https://dev.neilmatthews.com/year-blog-tidy/.

I think the post still stands and I want to update it by telling you about a new plugin I have been alerted to.

Plugins Garbage Collector

The plugin I have found is called Plugins Garbage Collector, it can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/plugins-garbage-collector/

It’s an incredibly useful plugin that helps to find redundant tables in your database which can then be tidied up.

What It Does

This clever little plugin references your installed and active plugins looking for table references, it then matches known and used tables up.  The remaining tables are marked as suspect and a list of tables you can delete are offered.

Running The Clean Up

A new menu option is added to tools-> Plugins Garbage Collector, click on scan and a list of suspect tables is presented.

Select the tables you want to remove and click on the delete button at the bottom of the page.

Backup Backup Backup

It does without saying (hopefully!)  that you should backup your database before running a plugin which will delete data from your site’s database tables.

For example the tables used by my theme headway have been flagged up, if I deleted them my site’s look and feel would be corrupted.

Follow the wise words of Spiderman “with great power comes great responsibility”.

Wrap Up

If you need help identifying if your tables are valid or not give me a shout. Hat tip to Michael Martine at Remarkablogger who brought this to my attention.

Image by paulk/