Freshly Pressed

There are so many blogs already, so why make yet another? Well, we could give a really long answer and bore you to tears, but maybe the best reply is the simple, but honest, ‘Why not?‘

We have such a great bunch of clients using FreshlyPressed as their hosting platform so we thought, why not give something back. James [FreshlyPressed administrator] also runs his own site [JamesICT] and has kindly offered us many of his informative articles and guides to be included here as well.

But this blog isn’t just about providing information, it is also a chance for YOU to actively join in and share your ideas, suggestions and whatever else you would like others to know. Whether it be ideas about hosting, your tips and handy hints on web site design, or maybe even a link to site you think you would like to share with others, get in touch with one of the FreshlyPressed Admin team and they will gladly register you so you can join in and have your say…

Why?

Because each time a page on your site loads, if your browser has to execute any PHP queries, it adds to the load time. So, the obvious thing to do to reuce this waste of time is to replace the PHP queries with static HTML. That way, every time a page loads, your browser just reads the HTML instead of having to contact the database.

I have found myself thinking quite a lot about this recently, with making a new theme. Because a theme is for multiple users, you have no choice but to make it do a lot of queries, but if you are happy with your chosen theme, why not take a minute to look through and see what changes you can make.

Here is a typical example:

Often in the header of a theme you will see the following or similar:

<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

This will mean the site, when loading, will do a database query to find the domain name. To stop this from happening, you simply need to enter the domain name yourself and remove the query. Of course, if you only have a couple you will not notice much in terms of gained speed on your site, but if there are many – and that is more often than not, the case with many themes – then making these changes will make a significant difference.

James has been ‘playing’ again and this time he has decided to give his new theme ONLY to those clients with us at FreshlyPressed.

It’s a great looking theme with so much built-in functionality, you would be silly not to take a moment and have a look.

Well? What are you waiting for – here it is!

As many of our clients noticed, we had a major outage [some 36 hours in total] on October 2nd.

This was due to a major component fault and involved rebuilding the RAID components. Due to the nature of this collapse, it was impossible to speed up the process of repair. Our technicians worked round the clock to make sure that everything was rebuilt and restored correctly.

Thank you for your patience during this time.

——————

I would also like to add that any downtime is always frustrating and certainly not our intention. We have confidence in our system and in this light, all of our own sites and web based elements are placed on our servers as well. So, when you are down, so are we.

Thank you to all of those clients who showed patience during this time. Anger and aggression does not make the process move any quicker.

For all of our FreshlyPressed clients, a new Members Only area has been put in place which includes such resources as providing information and guidelines on how to use the various areas within your account.

Here are a few of the recently added items:

The FreshlyPressed Hosting Firewall – how it works and what not to do.
Adding a certificate and exception to your browser
Addon domains versus Parked domains
Referrals – how they work
Setting up an email account
FTP options – including cPanel File manager and Web DISK
Feedback and forum – in the form of comments
cPanel – how to use it most effectively

If you would like to access this new section of FreshlyPressed, please get in touch with one of the FreshlyPressed Admin team and they will gladly add you to the registry.

Your feedback and/or suggestions are very welcome.

One of the more frequent issues that comes up when helping people get set up and started with WordPress, is that they often have no concept of what FTP [File Transfer Protocol] actually means. And as much as you don’t have to use an FTP program in order to run a WordPress site, there can be no argument that it is very beneficial if you do. Image upload functionality has greatly improved as each WordPress version has been released, but if you want to work on theme designs and make changes to graphics, headers and backgrounds using images, then FTP is a definite requirement.

FTP also provides much more flexibility in how you choose to keep your file structures on your site. By default, WordPress will upload files to a directory structure such as /wp-content/uploads/year/month/filename which is fine, but if you are like me, you may prefer to keep all of your audio files in one location and all of your images in another. FTP enables this choice – WordPresss does not.
So, if you would like to have more control of how you set up your themes, and upload your files and plugins, then FTP is an obvious need.

And luckily, there are many free FTP clients available for you to choose – even in the form of addons in browsers such as Firefox.

Three free FTP clients that I highly recommend:

FireFTP [a Firefox addon] ~ AL FTP ~ Filezilla

[Original article source: JamesICT]

As more and more versions of WordPress are released, unfortunately more and more hacks become prevalent, especially in outdated versions. So, the obvious way to keep your WordPress installation secure, is to keep your site upgraded to the latest version. This is the Number One way to keep your safe free of hacks.

However, there are many other things you can do, including the following:

1. Make sure you do not give unnecessary ‘Write’ permissions to directories and files that do not need it [done via FTP].

2. Moderate your registrations for users on your site.

3. Use secure passwords.

All very simplistic and not very hard to implement and yet in doing so, you will make your site so much more secure.

I am constantly amazed at how many sites I work on for people, that have such simple passwords in place. If your name is John, it is probably not the best idea to use ‘john‘ as your password. And yes, this would seem obvious, but as I say, I see this kind of thing all the time. Look at it this way: no amount of secuirty will keep out unwanted visits to your files, if you are silly enough to leave the key on display at the front door.

Of course, one of your best safeguards if you are hacked and you are at risk of losing all of your site content, is to make sure you do regular backups of your database. This will be covered in a more in-depth article to come soon, but for now, let me highly recommend that you do at least a ‘weekly’ backup of your database. It really does give you peace of mind.

A few excellent articles on WordPress security:

Is your WordPress blog hacked?

Hardening WordPress

WordPress Hacked

[Original article source: JamesICT]

Did you know that you can make your category archives individual in style for each? Take JamesICT.com as an example. If you take a quick look at the categories there [as listed above in the menu bar] you can see that each archive has it’s own introduction, particular to each on an individual basis. Likewise, the Post Its archive is styled slightly differently, in that it has no category bar underneath each post, as do the other archives.

So, how do we get this result? Well, it is quite simple to be honest. All you need to do is copy your archives.php code into a text editor and then set about making any changes you wish. You can make as many structural and CSS changes as like and is only limited by your imagination. To make each one display differently on your site, you need to save each with a different name. This is the important bit and is controlled by something known as the WordPress Template Hierarchy, which without going into too much detail here, runs something like this [as applied to categories]:

Category Templates:
1. category-id.php – If the category’s ID were 6, WordPress would look for category-6.php
2. category.php
3. archive.php
4. index.php

So, what you need to do with each individually structured/styled category archive is simply name it appropriately, i.e as in the example above: category-id.php

In the instance on JamesICT.com, the Post Its category is ID:24, so the category archive template is named category-24.php. The Themes category archive is based on it being category ID:14, so it becomes category-14.php and so on.

It is then just a simple matter of uploading your new files into the relevant theme directory and hey presto, you have individually styled category archives on your site.

[Original article source: JamesICT]

One of the latest features of Wordpress is the inclusion of post revisions [since about version 2.6 if memory serves me correctly] and whilst I can see the use of it in some instances, personally, I would rather it was not automatically enabled.

Basically, it is an autosave function and I find that it gets in my way rather than helps me in my writing. There is always going to be that instance when I wish it was there I guess, but having not had it in place for so long, i just don’t need it now.

So, how to disable it? It would be nice if there was a tickbox which would allow for this, but unfortunately there isn’t. So it involves a simple piece of code being added to your wp-config.php file.

To do this, you need a text editor [no. not Notepad] and you simply add the following line of code to the file [directly under the other lines of 'define' already in place].

define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

Alternatively, you can limit the amount of post revisions saved if you wish. use the following coe and change the number ‘4′ to whatever suits you best:

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’,4);

There is also a simple little plugin that will do this for you at http://exper.3drecursions.com/2008/07/25/disable-revisions-and-autosave-plugin/

Deleting Post Revisions already made.

One other aspect to mention here too. It may be that you already have lost of post revisions and you now want to get rid of them all. This does involve using phpMyAdmin though [or other MySQL manager] and you need to run a bit of code via your SQL QUERY panel. [Original source: via]

DELETE a,b,c
FROM wp_posts a
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id)
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id)
WHERE a.post_type = ‘revision’

Just make sure that your WordPress installation is using the prefix: wp_

If not, adjust the code to suit your changed prefix.

[As always, if you need a hand to do any of this, please do get in touch with us.]

[Original article source: JamesICT]

Two plugins that I highly recommend are:

1. Admin Management Xtended:
When you want to edit properties of posts/pages, you’ll have to open the edit page, set the new options and save the post/page… which obviously takes time. For those who are using WordPress as a CMS, it’s important to be able to manage contents easily and quickly. That’s what this plugin helps to do.

It adds some icons to the Manage posts/pages view with AJAX-driven CMS-known functions like toggling post/page visibility, changing publication date and title without having to open the edit screens or reload the page. Plus changing page order via Drag’n’Drop *, inline category management and inline tag management.

2. Reveal ID’s for WP Admin
With WordPress 2.5 being released, the post IDs in the Manage Posts/Pages view were removed as it is. Propably due to the fact that the common user dont need them. However, for advanced WordPress Users/ developers those IDs were quite interesting for some plugins or template tags.

What this plugin does is to reveal most removed entry IDs on admin pages, showing the entry IDs, as it was in versions prior to 2.5