If you are a WordPress user, then you definitely know the importance of keeping backup copies of our files and database because there is always a risk of losing your data. How? your site might get hack (WordPress security level or server security level). What’s worst? You could lose all the files and databases. There are a lot of ways to strengthen your WordPress blog’s security but we still think one of the best way is to backup regularly so that you can re-install your files or content and roll backed to your post in no time if the site is compromised.

Here, we have chosen some of the plugins and services which can be helpful in terms of backing up your WordPress files and databases. Full list after jump.

WordPress Plugins

These plugins are used to take a back up of your critical data, files, tables and save them to your archives or any of the online storages for free or for a nominal price. Schedule the storage automatically and manage your entire database with these.

WP-DB-Backup

WP-DB-Backup plugin creates a backup of your core database tables and also other tables in the database and gives you an option of saving your back up data either to your server or download to your computer or save get you backup file e-mailed to you.

Bei Fen – Backup plugin

Bei Fen backup plugin gives you the choice of taking a backup of either your complete WordPress installation or only the files or only your database and the backups can be restored with a single click.

WP Time Machine

This plugin creates an archive of your files and uploads and data and provides a connection to any of the free online storages like Dropbox, or Amazons AWS S3 and also to an FTP. You could exclude your cache directories or some of your MySQL tables which don’t start with your table prefix.

WordPress Backup

WordPress Backup plugin is used to zip your back up your images, current theme directory and your plugin directory.

WP S3 Backup

With WP S3 Backups take a backup of the parts automatically and install them to Amazon S3, a service to safeguard your important files at a comparatively lesser price.

WordPress DB Manager

A complete plugin to optimize, repair, backup, restore, and delete the backup database and also to run your queries is offered by WP-DB Manager. Also manages the automatic scheduling of the back-up and manages your whole database.

WordPress EZ Backup

An administrator plugin WordPress EZ Backup create backup archives of your entire site, archives of any MySQL database chosen by you. You can view the Live log file of your backup procedure. Has an interactive Help & Auto Settings of your web server configuration.

DBC Backup plugin

DBC Backup plugin schedules daily database backups with the wp cron system where your backup file is protected by a small hash key and are transferred to an export directory, .ht access and an imdex.html file. You can compress your backup as Gzip or Bzip2.

BackWPup

Other than taking a backup of your WordPress Blog database and files, BackWPup plugin optimizes checks & repairs the database, stores the backup either to Folder, FTP Server, Amazon S3, RackSpaceClous and sends a log or backup via e-mail.

Online Storages

Taking a backup of your data means storing it in a secure place which should also retrieves your data at a much faster rate. These online storage options helps you keep a check on your data where you can share, upload and edit your files.

Dropbox

Sync your files or your WordPress data of any size online automatically and also when new changes and files are detected and store them on Dropbox’s secure servers. Share and control the access of your files with other people. Get a storage space of 2GB for free and up to 100 GB for premium usage.

IDrive

IDrive offers you the facilities of Automatic and Continuous Backup, True Archiving, Versioning, Mapped Drive Backup and more with an online backup space of 2GB for free in IDrive Basic Package and a space of 150 – 500 GB for premium users and a 50GB pack for multiple users for Business under the IDrive Pro package.

Humyo

Humyo offers a free online storage space of 5GB for media files and 5GB for non-media files where you can access these via web only, but once you upgrade your account to Premium one, you get 100 GB storage along with automatic backup, sharing, uploading & downloading files, access via web, phone, PC, extra secure SSL encryption at a price of $69.99 per year.

Binfire

Binfire offers File hosting, Collaboration and Project Management site in its free version with 10GB storage space, file uploads of 200 MB, Private & Project web folder, File locking, Member permissions, Whiteboards, Status reports, Intuitive tasks & Milestones for projects and more.

Backup Services

The Backup services take a backup of your blog, and store them securely and restore them in case of a crash and provide you with many other services like upgrading your versions, giving you the authority of controlling your data, migrating to a new server and more.

blogVault

blogVault creates a backup of your blog which includes the full posts, comments, images, plugins, themes and style sheets by copying them into its secure and robust servers which lets you restore the contents any time easily.

Backupify

Backupify is a service to backup your archives, cloud accounts, SaaS data, WordPress data and social media files on a daily basis to the Amazon S3 cloud with great security and a data duplication policy. You could not only backup your data but also control your data independently.

Backup Buddy

Backup Buddy schedules and backs up your data to Amazon S3 server or an e-mail or an FTP / FTPS account, Restore your WordPress site with your themes, widgets, plugins etc., on the same server or migrate it to a new server with a new name and domain like Sandbox or Playground site.  Upgrade your newer versions of the plugin in WP Dashboard

Online backup for WordPress

Backup Technology specializes in online backup and disaster recovery and provides on-demand backup through an enterprise level backup service where the data is highly encrypted and compressed and stored in a secure data centre. Provides you an online backup of 50 MB for free with the facilities of locked and email backups.

VaultPress

VaultPress safeguards everything from our plugins, themes, comments, post-revisions with WordPress multi-cloud backups. Updates your blog with hot – fixes and protects them with zero-day vulnerabilities.

myEASYBackup

myEASYbackup plugin performs a backup by creating a single file called dataset which compresses the data in a .zip file format and saves them outside WordPress installation directory. You could download, upload and delete your data sets.

One of the main reasons WordPress enjoys such an unrivaled and ever-growing popularity is the constant stream of feature-rich and diverse themes that are released every day. Of course, it is the premium themes that are currently getting, as you would expect, the better reviews and deserved attention. Having said that, you should not under-estimate the quality of the the free themes that have been recently released, as this post aims to shows you.

As well as the always popular portfolio, magazine and general blogging styled themes, we have also listed a couple of bare bone themes, near the bottom of the post, which will be very useful for developers.

News

News, from DevPress.com, is an extremely powerful and feature rich theme designed for content-heavy websites.
News Home & Downloads →
View the Demo →

Dione

Dione is a videos showcase theme that utilizes the Custom post type feature available with WP 3.0. There are video guides available showing illustrating how to add videos to the showcase and also how to create a standard blog section.
Dione Home & Downloads →
View the Demo →

whitePress

whitePress Home & Downloads →
View the Demo →

Vanadiumitic

Vanadiumitic comes with a featured content section, dropdown menu, subscription buttons (Twitter, Facebook and RSS), automatic thumbnail re-sizer, popular posts, featured posts, featured video and a lot more! This magazine type blog theme is great for personal blogs, tech blogs, design blogs and other related blog niches.
Vanadiumitic Home & Downloads →
Demo →

Typominima

Typominima, a free typography based, gorgeous, minimal WordPress theme fit for the writer inside you.
If you’re looking for a free theme to help you put the content in spotlight, without worrying about it being suffocated by advertising space and unnecessary design blign, than Typominima is the perfect free WordPress theme.
Typominima →
View the Demo →

Modernist

Modernist has been designed with a focus on optimal typography in order to better showcase your content: text, images and video. This fast loading theme supports widgets, is SEO optimized, has clean and documented code and also includes some cool CSS3 enhancements.
Modernist Home & Downloads →
View the Demo →

Bronte

Bronte is a 2 column minimalistic and elegant theme. Here are some of its features: jQuery slider, Custom menu, tabbed content , Twitter feeds, Featured thumbnails, widgetized sidebar and footer, Theme option page, Banner ads, Adsense, etc.
Bronte Home & Downloads →
View the Demo →

Blogum

Blogum is a simple, grid based blog WordPress theme, designed in a modern & minimalist style. The theme has a heavy focus on your content and very clean feel. Theme supports all WordPress 3.0 features and gives you extra flexibility.
Blogum Home & Downloads →
View the Demo →

Reptile WordPress Theme Framework

Reptile is similar to middleware and sits between your skin (theme) and WordPress. While your theme can interact directly with WordPress, Reptile includes helper functions to make many of these tasks easier. Komodo is the default skin included with Reptile and is built using the 960.gs CSS framework.
Reptile WordPress Theme Framework Home & Downloads →

Reference

With visitor conversion in mind, this theme features additional widget areas in all the important locations, including a top banner, a menu widget area (perfect for text links ads), three top boxes (perfect for latest news or lead generation forms), as well as 4 bottom area widget boxes (perfect for blogrolls or an “About” paragraph).
Reference Home & Downloads →

Autobahn

Autobahn is a WordPress theme built entirely in HTML5. It’s suitable for anyone looking for an elegant, readable theme and for developers looking to build their own HTML5 theme from a flexible starting point.
Autobahn Home & Downloads →

Suburbia

Suburbia is a clean and flexible WordPress grid-based magazine theme designed in a modern and minimalist style. This theme is also suitable for blogs and misc. projects. Suburbia supports all WordPress 3.0 features and gives you an extra flexibility in every single step you make.
Portfolio Press Home & Downloads →
View the Demo →

Portfolio Press

Portfolio Press Home & Downloads →
View the Demo →
Portfolio Press is a new feature rich HTML5 portfolio theme. It uses custom post types for portfolio pages, takes advantage of the new menu navigation, and includes a ton of cool features. Have a look at this short video for an overview:

Portfolium

Portfolium is a clean and flexible WordPress grid-based portfolio theme designed in a modern & minimalist style. It is ideal for designers, artists, photographers, and other creative specialists who require a professional portfolio theme.
Portfolium Home & Downloads →
View the Demo →

Aqualine

Aqualine is a unique and minimalist WordPress theme, that you can easily make customization to suit your needs. It is packed with an extensive options page – easily customize your theme without touching any code: Pick your own color accent, choose a thumbnail with excerpts layout, or display your full posts, amongst many other built in options.
Aqualine Home & Downloads →
View the Demo →

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems for blogs, portfolios, and other types of sites, but with the right plugins and/or themes it can also be used for e-commerce. While WordPress is not specifically intended to be used for e-commerce sites, the quality of available plugins and themes has increased in recent years. In this post we’ll feature more than 30 resources and tutorials to help you get started with e-commerce for WordPress.

WordPress E-Commerce Plugins:

WP e-Commerce Pluign (free with premium upgrades available)

Shopp ($55)

WordPress E-Commerce Themes:

ShopperPress ($79)

Crafty Cart (free)

Viroshop ($37)

WPA Storefront ($32)

The Furniture Store ($47)

The Jewelry Shop ($47)

The Clothes Shop ($42)

AppCloud ($35)

Kelontong ($35)

Store ($65)

WP Store ($65)

e-Commerce ($65)

Kidz Store ($65)

eShop ($65)

wpShop ($37)

eGoods ($32)

Ecommerce Theme ($79.95)

When coding a WordPress site, you often need to get a category ID. If you ever wanted to be able to get a category ID from the category name, then just read this recipe, I’m pretty sure you will like it.

As usual, let’s start by pasting the function in your functions.php file:

function get_category_id($cat_name){
	$term = get_term_by('name', $cat_name, 'category');
	return $term->term_id;
}

Once you saved the file, just call the function with your category name as a parameter. Example:

$category_ID = get_category_id('WordPress Tutorials');

WordPress has become one of the top choices for content management systems among website owners. This has happened for several reasons, but one is the readily available collection of themes that can transform the appearance and functionality of a site. There are all kinds of themes out there, but some of my favorites are the ones that take a minimalistic approach so the content can do the talking. If you’ve been on the lookout for some nice minimal WordPress themes, then you’re in luck. Here are 10 free ones that you should find useful.

Un.complicated

The Standard

Lifestreaming White

Clear

The Daily Grind

Blue Bubble

Minimal Press

Foliogrid

Clean Home

Vostok

WordPress is a great platform for setting up an online store, and there is a wide range of themes available to help sellers reach target customers. This post presents 20 of the best ecommerce themes, including both free and premium examples, covering storefront templates aimed at a variety of niche markets.

1. Store

The Store template is a great ecommerce WordPress theme, with a really good-looking and functional interface; it’s easy-to install and maintain with accessible backend administration. The theme’s creators are available for pre-sales questions and customer support.

2. Ecommerce Theme

This is a very popular theme enabling users to set up and manage effective ecommerce stores. The theme is search engine optimised and customisable so can be adapted to suit any home-based business niche.

3. AppCloud

AppCloud is a beautifully clean and professional looking theme, with a two-column layout, integrated slideshow and the choice of horizontal or vertical orientation for images and apps. The theme’s ecommerce features include featured, top-selling and categorised product lists.

4. eShop

This theme offers extreme ease of use for both sellers and customers, simple to configure with an intuitive and crisply designed interface. The template has powerful features and can be tweaked to suit any product.

5. WP Store

Sellers can establish an online store from scratch with this theme, showcasing products and with easy payments, shipping and stock management.

6. Auction Theme

This premium WordPress theme offers users the chance to create an online auction or reverse auction website. Whether its cars or bikes, books or antiques, once the easy-to-use theme is setup traders can auction any kind of property online.

7. Market Theme

Market Theme transforms any WordPress into a fully operational online store. In its default setup the theme has the look and feel of a regular blog, but there are many options to customise the design including the choice of a grid-view shop front to showcase products.

8. Kidz Store

This bright and friendly theme is a great way to present products aimed at children and, more importantly, their parents. The colourful and functional shop front is supported with backend administration and all the necessary ecommerce features.

9. StorePress

This premium theme allows sellers to transform WordPress blogs into accessible online stores with a sleek and professional aesthetic. The design has widget-ready pages, PayPal integration and a solid range of ecommerce tools.

10. eGoods

eGoods is aimed at traders who sell downloadable products and receive payment via PayPal. The theme options include a choice of light or dark colour scheme, both very visually appealing, and customisable layout for images and text. The design includes featured products, bestsellers, recent releases, reduced items and gift vouchers.

11. Vanilla Cart

Vanilla Cart is an attractively minimal and crisply designed shopping theme with thoroughly customisable template. The simple yet beautiful design, with a light colour scheme and the emphasis on product shots, allows the stock to speak for itself.

12. Color Cart

This theme is based on Vanilla Cart, with the added twist of a colour wheel in the options. A choice of eight hues allows users to bring a splash of colour to ecommerce stores, carefully selecting just the right combination to suit their niche market.

13. Cherry Cart

This theme is absolutely minimalist, pared down to a single column with no side bar or blog category. Built around the concept of ‘embracing simplicity and constraint’, Cherry Cart is a remarkably inviting platform in which to showcase products.

14. Classified Ads Theme

This brilliant theme allows users to turn their blogs into classified ads websites. Users manage the site and in return charge to display ads on the site. The design is PayPal integrated, features an admin panel and is fully customisable to suit any classified ads market.

15. folioShop

The folioShop is aimed at sellers who want an attractive and intuitive interface in which to showcase products to be shipped out or downloaded by customers. The theme features an installation wizard, visual help guide and all layered PSD files.

16. ClassiPress

ClassiPress is a professional theme for turning WordPress blogs into classified ads sites. The latest version of the theme features unlimited custom fields and forms, ad packages, blog option, directory-style homepage, email alerts, featured ads carousel, transaction logging and Twitter feed.

17. wpShop

This premium theme presents a great looking ecommerce store in a choice of light or dark colour schemes. The package includes all layered PSD files, installation wizard, help guide and is available in English and German languages.

18. Simple Cart

Simple Cart is a simple and great looking theme for sellers to present products in a gridded shop front, with a friendly wood effect background. The colour scheme can be switched and users may install their own images into the fully customisable design.

19. Tobashop

Tobashop is integrated with another WordPress ecommerce theme, eShop, to make use of the powerful plugins in order to create an online store with a highly professional feel.

20. enVirashop

This theme requires no plugins and offers users all the tools needed to establish an ecommerce niche. The theme is fully customizable so sellers can tailor the perfect online storefront to cater to their target market.

It can be pretty tough call to decide whether to invest in a premium WordPress theme or simply stick with a free one. This could be caused by a common perception we are shared – premium and paid stuff are always better than the free ones. Well, not always, at least that’s what we think.

we beg to differ, and in today’s post we want to show you some really nice WordPress theme that is going to cost you nothing, not even the time to search. All you need to do is scroll. We promise it’s going to be awesome.

Corporate Life

Features | Demo | Download

Furvious

Features | Demo | Download

Profile

Features | Demo | Download

Dimaggio

Features | Demo | Download

Tarantino

Features | Demo | Download

Stone Room

Features | Demo | Download

Stunning Press

Features | Demo | Download

Berita

Features | Demo | Download

Shopping Press

Features | Demo | Download

Marangal

Features | Demo | Download

Ice Breaker

Features | Demo | Download

Appcloud

Features | Demo | Download

MiniCard

Features | Demo | Download

Neutica

Features | Demo | Download

Manifest

Features | Demo | Download

Mayumi

Features | Demo | Download

Vivee

Features | Demo | Download

Inuit Types

Features | Demo | Download

Smartblue

Features | Demo | Download

Thrilling Theme

Features | Demo | Download

Satoshi

Features | Demo | Download

Workoholic

Features | Demo | Download

Fullscreen

Features | Demo | Download

Modularity

Features | Demo | Download

Highdef

Features | Demo | Download

Gamezine

Features | Demo | Download

Rockstar

Features | Demo | Download

Early Morning

Features | Demo | Download

Byty

Features | Demo | Download

Gumball Special

Features | Demo | Download

Changing Room

Features | Demo | Download

Isotherm News

Features | Demo | Download

Rask

Features | Demo | Download

Igloo

Features | Demo | Download

Gran Impetu

Features | Demo | Download

Skyye

Features | Demo | Download

One Room

Features | Demo | Download

Yoghurt

Features | Demo | Download

Blogtheme

Features | Demo | Download

Astra

Features | Demo | Download

Tree House

Features | Demo | Download

MiniMag

Features | Demo | Download

Old School

Features | Demo | Download

Hybrid News

Features | Demo | Download

Vector Flower

Features | Demo | Download

City Journal

Features | Demo | Download

Craftworks

Features | Demo | Download

Joyous Childhood

Features | Demo | Download

Artwork

Features | Demo | Download

Spexel

Features | Demo | Download

Lap of Luxury

Features | Demo | Download

Contact Form is one of the most important page for all websites. If you are running an e-commerce website, you need a contact form so that your potential buyers can reach you to get more information. Even if you run a personal blog, you will also need a contact form so that bloggers from same niche or advertisers can contact you easily.

There are some great online form providers such as Wufoo and FormSpring. These services allow you to create contact forms, survey forms and registrations form easily without knowing much about web programming languages.

If you are using WordPress, then you can use WordPress plugins to build your contact form easily. However, there are a lot of Contact Form Plugins in WordPress Plugin Repository. Some of the plugins are rather too old, not able to support the latest version of WordPress or just having too little features.

So, we decided to gather 18 Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins that will suit everyone needs. These plugins are tested by us and support WordPress 2.9.1.

1. cformsII

cforms is a highly customizable Ajax driven contact form plugin. It lets you to create multi page forms or multiple forms on one page easily. They are few more cool features such as Role Manager support, Tell-A-Friend, Fully localization, Backup and Restore. Antispam is also supported by using CAPTCHA or Q&A.

2. Contact Form 7

Another highly customizable form plugin. You can add fields and alter the look and feel of your contact form through CSS. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

3. Clean Contact

Clean Contact is a simple contact form for WordPress. It requires less to no configuration and able to run out of the box upon installation. You can specify the Thank You Message and also Thank You Url, which is the URL that users would be redirect to after the form is being sent.

4. Dagon Design Form Mailer

This plugin also known as Secure Form Mailer, offers a lot of features such as multiple forms, multiple recipients, auto reply, multiple attachments, message template system and also numerous security features.

5. MM Forms

MM Forms is an easy form build for WordPress, but it has a lot of features. With this plugin, you are able to create multiple contact forms for your site, spam filter with Akismet, protection by CAPTCHA, Ajax submission with jQuery and also custom fields. Some of the special features that offered by this plugin include saving form submission to database, export to CSV and even has a RSS feed for form submission.

6. WP Contact Form

Simple Contact Form plugin for WordPress. You can use this plugin to add contact form for both a post or page.

7. SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF)

This WordPress plugin utilize both jQuery and its plugin SimpleModal for the modal dialog box. You can even insert the contact form to your template files. So, it is suitable for theme developer who want to include contact form in the template files.

8. Tiny Contact Form

A very simple contact form, without fancy features but you are allow to add contact form through sidebar widget or template files by calling the correct function name.

9. Scaleable Contact Form

With Scaleable Contact Form, you can have either Ajax or non-Ajax version contact form at no time. Extra fields can be added and set to both required or non-required. Able to add contact form to your template files too.

10. Visitor Contact Forms

To use this plugin, you need to create a contact form at http://www.visitorcontact.com/. After that, just fill in your form ID to the plugin page and you are done. There are a lot of cool features, such as Geocoding, Captcha Spam Protection, Contact Manager, Skype Status and much more.

11. Fast and Secure Contact Form

This plugin allows optional extra fields of any type: text, textarea, checkbox, radio, select. It doesn’t require Javascript and has very tight security features.

12. ONW Simple Contact Form

ONW Simple Contact Form is a small WordPress plugin that allows WordPress users to add contact form to any page or post through WordPress short code. However, users are not allowed to add fields to the form.

Search Google and just about every article you come along will tell you that in order to have a secure blog, you need X amount of plugins. I disagree. I use none yet I’m satisfied I have a reasonable level of security. I use a number of techniques to keep the site safe, which I’ll discuss over the course of the post.

1. Restrict access to wp-admin by IP

Something I started doing recently is only allowing my IP to access the wp-admin directory. This stops someone taking the site by brute force (unless they’re on my PC!) and ensures that only I can control the site the easy way. Of course, the database is still relatively vulnerable, but this is a fairly good way of stopping attacks at the front door:

<Files wp-login.php>
Order deny,allow
Deny from All
Allow from 123.456.789.0
</Files>

2. Super strong database password.

Using the cPanel password generator, I can create a fairly secure database password, something vitally important. If I hacker had access to the database, they can do anything. Quite literally. A second step I take is to always rename the database from the Fantastico generated name as Fantastico always generates a wp_ style name, making the site easily identifiable as running WP. Doing so is fairly easy manually although this is one of the few times I’d recommend a plugin; the security scan plugin can rename your database in a single click.

3. Protect wp-config.php

With a strong database name and password, you obviously now need to protect the file that contains these. The following .htaccess code does the trick by preventing access to the most important file you’ve got.

# protect wpconfig.php
<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

Another interesting trick from site is to move the sensitive data in the wp-config.php to an unreachable location (ie below www in your directory) and then do a PHP include to the sensitive information – I found this on DevLounge and it’s actually quite clever if you think about and certainly something to look into more closely (ie read the post linked to).

4. Be careful with plugins

Plugins are often a way into your blog. Something badly coded can be a backdoor for hackers – for that reason you should always be careful about the plugins that you use. I personally limit myslef to ten plugins and popular ones at that that are less likely to have a hole in them (making the presumption that they’re good so they must be well coded) and that as they’re popular if a problem is found an update will be released in good time. Plugins which want updating a lot go, regardless of how useful the functionality may be.

5. Use SSL if you can

A favourite of list posts about WordPress security is to say how important using SSL is and here’s a plugin to use it. I’ll explain a bit more. Essentially, SSL or secure socket layer is encrypting your data. That does mean by standard your WordPress password is being sent with no protection at all and so could be intercepted with relative ease by a hacker. If your web host offers an SSL certificate, take it and use it (with one of the plugins available). If it doesn’t offer you a certificate, certainly seriously consider tip #1. The codex has some excellent info on this subject.

6. Keep users in check.

Now that you’ve got a super secure site, safe from attack from the outside, now it’s time to like at the inside. You thought you could trust John to write stuff? Turns out he’s inserting dodgy links in your theme and using your server to host his images. This is all relatively easy to stop – you just need to be very careful what permissions you give other users in the first place. WordPress by default has a number of user options – Subscriber, Contributor, Author, Editor and Administrator. It’s so so important that you get these permissions right as if you don’t then John has the power to wreck your blog. There are also a number of plugins available which allow you to customise user permissions – Justin Tadlock’s members plugin and the role manager plugin, which is my personal favourite; install it and it lists just about every single permission there is and offer you the option to add or remove it. As Justin Lee Collins might say, “good times!”

7. Stay up-to-date

New WordPress releases are frequent and often the upgrade is a security fix, so staying up-to-date with the new releases is paramount. Staying updated is as simple as clicking the upgrade button when a new version of WP is available, but before you do that, make sure you’ve backed up. Doing so is really easy with the WordPress Database Backup plugin which you can set to email backups to an email address (set up a Gmail account specifically for this purpose) at regular intervals — mine backs up every day.

8. Protect the installation files

Big thanks to Jeff Starr for his help with the rest of this post – I wanted to make sure I had a good range covered, so Jeff kindly pointed me in a couple of different directions, which includes his “Important Security Fix for WordPress“, essentially pointing out that the install.php file may display to anyone if your server goes down, allowing said anyone to completely reinstall WordPress on your site and have control of it too. Bad times. Thankfully, there’s a blissfully easy solution: delete the install.php file. FTP (that is a verb ) into /wp-admin/ and delete the install.php file and you’ll have that street of vulnerability closed.

9. Stopping spam

The next point Jeff pointed out was stopping spam and the well recognised way to do this is to stop annoying scripts with the stopping no-referrers technique:

#Stop annoying spammers
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*wpshout. [OR,NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) - [F,L]
</IfModule>

Obviously you’ll need to change wpshout to your domain.

10. Remove error messages from the login screen

Finally, this is a great tip that goes in your functions.php file and removes error messages from the login screen – thus hackers wouldn’t know if the username or password was incorrect. Clever!

add_filter('login_errors',create_function('$a', "return null;"));

WordPress was build to be used for blogging only but with the use of many valuable plugins you can extend it to a full content management system. I don’t think so if anything is left out which you can’t find in Plugins, means you can turn your WordPress into whatever you want.

Here i have collected 20 useful WordPress Plug-ins that will add up more functionality to your WordPress site.

1. Relevanssi

The matching engine Relevanssi uses is a fairly simple and in some ways limited, but it is a significant improvement over basic WordPress search and offers the necessary functionality for .

Download

2. Flutter

Flutter is a feature rich WordPress CMS plugin that focuses on easy templating for the developer and simplifies content management for the admin by creating custom write panels that can be fully customized (radio buttons, file uploads, image uploads, checkboxes, etc).

Download

3. WP-CMS Post Control

Post Control from WordPress CMS Modifications builds upon the new controls in WordPress 2.7 to give you complete control over your write options.

Download

4. Custom Admin Branding

he Custom Admin Branding Plugin allows you to brand and customize the WordPress administration area for clients or for personal use. You can display custom images and styles for the login screen, admin header and footer.

Download

5. User Access Manager

With the “User Access Manager”-plugin you can manage the access to your posts, pages and files. You only create a user group, put registered users to this and set up the rights for this group.

Download

6. More Fields

More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post.

Download

7. WordPress Navigation List

The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site’s navigation.

Download

8. WPML Multilingual CMS Plugin

WPML makes multilingual content management easy, just like running a site in one language.

Download

9. MailPress

Allows you to send beautiful and styled html and plain text mails based on dedicated themes and templates.

Download

10. PageMash

Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

Download

11. Flexi Pages Widget

Flexi Pages Widget is a highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. Can be used as an alternative to the default ‘Pages’ widget.

Download

12. Role Scoper

Role Scoper is a comprehensive access control solution, giving you CMS-like control of reading and editing permissions. Assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.

Download

13. Yoast Breadcrumbs

Easily add breadcrumbs to your template. If you’re using one of the supported WordPress frameworks, it’s as easy as enabling the plugin and checking the “Try to add automatically box”, if you’re not using one of those, adding it is as simple as adding one line of code to your template!

Download

14. WP eCommerce

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

Download

15. Single Post Templates

The Single Post Template plugin adds the ability for your theme to include “Post Templates” in much the same way you can add “Page Templates”, allowing you to choose (via a simple dropdown) which post template you want to use, on a per-post basis.

Download

16. cForm II

cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!

Download

17. Idealien Category Enhancements

This plugin makes category templates be selectable by drop-down list from the manage > categories screen of the admin console. It makes the selection / use of category and post templates as easy as page templates.

Download

18. WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Download

19. Permalinks Moved Permanently

If you just migrated your WordPress blog from one permalink structure to another, and you don’t want to lose Pagerank or traffic that accesses your blog through the old permalinks, this is for you.

Download

20. Pods CMS

Pods is a CMS framework for WordPress. It allows you to add and display your own content types.

Download

When ever you write something on your blog you always want to share it with others, even your blog readers want the same (if they like it off course) . To do this there are lots of wordpress plugins available giving readers the ability to bookmark your site to a number of social networking and bookmarking sites.

I tried to compile a list of more than 35 plugins that will let you make your WordPress blog more social. I suggest you do not install all of them just choose one which you like the most or think is the best.

1. Sociable

Sociable is a plugin which adds social media buttons to your posts, and does so easily, and beautifully.
Download

2. Bookmark Me

Bookmark me is a WordPress plugin made to add the “social bookmark buttons” on each post. It is different to other social bookmarks plugins because it’s focused on collecting non-english bookmarks site.
Download

3. Bookmarkify

The Social Media Marketing Plugin that lets you put social bookmarking links in your posts and other pages. Help your readers promote your blog and watch your traffic grow!
Download

4. ShareThis

This is very widely used plugin.
Download

5. PingPressFM

PingPressFM is a WordPress plugin which submits your posts to Ping.fm. A service which can update more than 30 snetworks from one source.
Download

6. obsocialbookmarker

obsocialbookmarker is a social bookmarking plugin which adds user-submission links at the bottom of each post for various social bookmarking sites.
Download

7. iBegin Share

iBegin Share is the 100% open source solution that makes sharing and spreading your content easier than ever, all while giving you complete control.
Download

8. I Love Social Bookmarking

I Love Social Bookmarking is a simple WordPress plugin that allows your readers to submit your content to social media services via a clutter-free drop-down list of attractive icons.
Download

9. Social Bookmarking RELOADED

The Social Bookmarking RELOADED plugin for WordPress adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts and/or pages that allow your visitors to easily submit them in a number of social bookmarking sites.
Download

10. Social Bookmarks

Gives you 50 social bookmarking submission icons to choose from including all of the major bookmarking services and lots of smaller ones.
Download

11. Social Dropdown

This plugin displays several social bookmarking options in a dropdown. Unlike other social bookmarking displays, this does not cause clutter and takes up little screen space.
Download

12. SociBook

A really simple plugin that will add bookmark links of Del.icio.us, Digg it, Slashdot, RawSugar, Yahoo! MyWeb, and many other links to your wordpress. You can decide which bookmark services you want to show and in what order. You also can define, a own iconset.
Download

13. SocioFluid

SocioFluid adds to your wordpress posts the buttons to the major bookmarking sites.
I am using this plugin on this blog. As i like its look and big icons display.
Download

14. WP PunchCard

WP PunchCard is a WordPress plugin for installing PunchCard into WordPress with extreme simplicity.
Download

15. ComplexLife

This is a lifestreaming WP plugin.
Download

16. Follow Me

The Follow Me widget allows you to display links to all your social media profiles in one, easy-to-access button or window.
Download

17. LifeStream

Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.
Download

18. Meet Your Commenters

When someone comments on your blog and writes a comment with his/her URL, is leaving more information than you think. This wordpress plugin displays web pages and profiles of those users in the dashboard, so you can add them as friends if you are in the same social network
Download

19. Retaggr

Using this plugin you can make your virtual business card which links to your social networking profiles.
Download

20. SezWho

Using this plugin you can make your virtual business card which links to your social networking profiles.
Download

21. Social Homes

A WordPress plug-in which adds a sidebar widget containing a subtle list of all your social homes as linked favicons.
Download

22. Digg Digg

Digg Digg is a social vote button wordpress plugin, which including Digg, Reddit, Dzone and Yahoo Buzz buttons wordpress content integration.
Download

23. Digg This

Digg this wordpress plugin is a plugin that detects incoming links from Digg.com to your wordpress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story.
Download

24. DiggZ-Et

It automatically displays a “digg” button for each post/page.
Download

25. Dugg Widget

Displays your past 10 dugg stories and make it a widget.
Download

26. FriendFeed Activity Widget

The FriendFeed Activity Widget is a simple WordPress widget plugin that pulls your FriendFeed stream, pretties it up a bit and shares it with visitors to your blog. It’s essentially a lifestream plugin that requires just a few steps to set up.
Download

27. FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin

This plugin will allow you to display on your own site the comments that people make on FriendFeed about your post.
Download

28. Stumble Reviews

Allows you to add the reviews that appear on StumbleUpon (StumbleUpon reviews) for a given page to be displayed on that page.
Download

29. Twitter Updater

The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.
Download

30. WordPress Twitter Widget

Twitter Widget Pro properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing, feeds that include friends or just one user, and can even display profile images for the users.
Download

31. WP-Profilactic

The WP-Profilactic Plugin publishes your LifeStream or informs readers where to find you online by parseing your aggregated online activity feed from Profilactic.
Download

32. Hocus Pocus Buttons

Hocus Pocus Buttons is a WordPress-Plugin that provides sidebar widget with a widerange set of buttons for social bookmarking websites.
Download

33. KnxDT Bookmarks

With this plugin you can send and share your favorites posts (your readers can do this too) to popular social bookmarking services like Digg, Meneame, Delicious, Technorati, Yahoo, Google.
Download

34. Gregarious

The Gregarious plugin supersedes the Digg This Reloaded Plugin and allows for seamless integration between your WordPress Blog and social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Reddit and more.
Download

35. Hey Social

Hey Social is the coolest way to interact with the visitors of your blog,
Download

If you are already using anyone of above do comment about its usability and function.

When your blog starts growing and gets popular, you have to take care of security risks and issues. Most of bloggers and web masters fail to recognize the importance of securing their blog. Hackers can do lots of things after breaking in, they can attack your site viewers with Trojan viruses to steal information from their computers and if it’s going to happen Google will block your site with a message on it i.e “This site may harm your computer”. But you don’t have to worry about it if you are using WordPress, as there are lots of plugins to help you out.

In this post i have listed top 10 wordpress security plugins to secure your blog from hackers.

1. Invisible Defender

Invisible Defender is a WordPress plugin, which protects registration, login and comment forms from spambots by adding two extra fields hidden by CSS. This approach gave me 100% anti-spam protection on one of my sites.

Download | Home Page

2. AskApache Password Protect

AskApache Password Protect adds some serious password protection to your WordPress Blog. Not only does it protect your wp-admin directory, but also your wp-includes, wp-content, plugins, etc. plugins as well.

Download | Home Page

3. Secure WordPress

This plugins helps to secure your WordPress installation: Remove Error information on login page; adds index.html to plugin directory; removes the wp-version, except in admin area.

Download | Home Page

4. WordPress Database Backup

WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

Download | Home Page

5. WP Security Scan

Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions. It scans your blog and checks passwords, file permissions, database security and WP version hiding.

Download | Home Page

6. WordPress File Monitor

Monitors your WordPress installation for added/deleted/changed files. When a change is detected an email alert can be sent to a specified address.

Download | Home Page

7. Force SSL

For those will an SSL certificate, this plugin forces an HTTPS connection for security purposes. Force SSL simply redirects requests made via regular old http to requests for trusty new https, and that’s about it.

Download | Home Page

8. Admin SSL

This WordPress plugin secures wordpress login and admin pages, supports all SSL setups and encrypt cookie contents.

Download | Home Page

9. Replace WP-Version

Security your WordPress-Installation and eliminate or replace your wp-version and database-version on easy way with a small plugin.

Download | Home Page

10. WP-dephorm

wp-dephorm protects your users from the prying eyes of phorm. This is achieved by setting a cookie to opt out of the phorm information mining. Your blog viewers will not have there information stored and used in marketing campaigns whilst viewing your site.

Download | Home Page

Twitter is obviously a very useful tools for bloggers. Did you ever wanted to know how many times your posts are sent to Twitter by your readers? If yes, just read on and learn how to know it, and display it on your blog, in full text mode.

paste the following function in your functions.php file:

<?php
function tweets($url){
  $content = file_get_contents("http://api.tweetmeme.com/url_info?url=".$url);
  $x = new SimpleXmlElement($content);
  $tweets = $x->story->url_count;
  echo "Tweets: ".$tweets;
}

Once done, you can get the number of tweets for any web page you want, for exemple:

<?php tweets("http://www.cosmos-blog.com"); ?>

To automatically display how many times your posts has been tweet, open the single.php file file and paste the following code:

<?php tweets($post->permalink); ?>

Do you know that WordPress have a built-in RSS reader? Today, I’m glad to show you an updated version of this very popular hack.

Simply paste the following code where you want the feed to be displayed. Don’t forget to define feed url at line 4.

<?php if(function_exists(‘fetch_feed’)) {

include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.’/feed.php’);
$feed = fetch_feed(‘http://feeds.feedburner.com/cosmosblog’);

$limit = $feed->get_item_quantity(7); // specify number of items
$items = $feed->get_items(0, $limit); // create an array of items

}
if ($limit == 0) echo ‘<div>The feed is either empty or unavailable.</div>’;
else foreach ($items as $item) : ?>

<div>
<a href="<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>"
  title="<?php echo $item->get_date(‘j F Y @ g:i a’); ?>">
<?php echo $item->get_title(); ?>
</a>
</div>
<div>
<?php echo substr($item->get_description(), 0, 200); ?>
<span>[...]</span>
</div>

<?php endforeach; ?>

Thanks to Jeff Starr from Digging into WordPress for this great tip!

when you’ve visited your WordPress site’s dashboard in the past 24 hours you probably noticed that WordPress 2.9 is now available to download.    I know many people like to wait to upgrade to give theme and plugin authors a chance to create updates, but the new changes in WordPress 2.9 seem to be playing nice with everything based upon all the reports I’ve read.  I’ve also upgraded most of my websites that use WordPress without any theme or plugin conflicts.

If you are interested in learning about what is new in WordPress 2.9, there is a great write up posted on Quick Online Tips which you can view here.  The post features the following new features:

1. Thrash It
2. Image Editor
3. Batch Plugin Update
4. Easier Video Embeds
5. Database Optimization Support

What is your favorite new feature in WordPress 2.9?

For millions of bloggers worldwide, WordPress is the platform of choice. Offering the widest range of plugins and features — both user-designed and official, a massive network of bloggers and inbuilt installations, and the perfect price ($0), there’s no wonder why this blogging platform has become the industry standard.

Of course, WordPress isn’t limited to blogs and bloggers. With such powerful customization options, thousands of big name corporate websites are running on the WordPress platform. Design and development blogs, some of the most popular online presences, almost always use WordPress as their platform of choice.

If you’re thinking of launching a design blog, these twelve plugins should always be on your to-download list. From server protection to intense design options, customizing your WordPress design and development blog is much simpler with these 12 plugins on your server.

1. Lightbox 2 Plugin for Images

The original lightbox plugin, Lightbox 2, has some pretty cool features that make it a virtual requirement for any WordPress based design website. Images are the life and soul of any design website — without them it’s hard to draw attention or valuable links — and presenting those images is just as important as having them there. Using a simple lightbox plugin, you can let your readers view images and design examples without having to open them in another tab or window.

While the original plugin is the most popular, there are several others around that offer similar features, and often more customization options. For Picasa users, the Picasa Lightbox plugin will save you time and server space by directly loading images from your Picasa account. Flexible Lightbox seamlessly integrates the lightbox feature into your gallery options, making the entire process more simple for you. Finally, the Lightbox Gallery Plugin changes your gallery viewing mode to lightbox by default, saving your visitors the trouble of having to click through to new tabs to view images.

2. Super Cache for Digg, StumbleUpon and Other Traffic

Everyone’s seen the Digg effect in action. Small blogs that normally get by on 1000 views per day get crushed under the weight of one of the world’s biggest social bookmarking websites. Even a small slither of Digg’s traffic is enough to cripple your server, and occasionally even prompt your host to investigate for dDos attacks.

This plugin protects you from being overwhelmed with traffic from a front page link on any of the major industry websites. It’s awesome to be flooded with traffic, but it’s a real problem when that traffic leaves your website down for days, or even completely spent for a month. A quick installation of Super Cache can save you a lot of trouble when your posts start getting ultra-popular.

3. WP Print for Printable Tutorials

If you’re running a design blog, you know how essential guides and tutorials are for traffic generation. Running a great tutorial on your blog gets you picked up by other design blogs, generating valuable links and potentially lucrative traffic. From Photoshop tutorials to advanced web development case studies, posting the hard data can put your blog above the rest.

WP Print makes it easy for your readers to print out tutorials, even if they cover multiple pages. Some of your audience might not be reading on advanced design rigs, and having a printed copy could save hours of flicking back and forth between windows — not everyone has a dual monitor setup! Worried about important content missing from the print version? Relax. You can customize what should and shouldn’t be included in the plugin’s options.

4. Mobile Press for Mobile Blog Access

As good as today’s smart phones are, visiting a blog on them is an infuriating experience. There’s the tiny text, the frequent dividers, and the advertising that seems to take up 90% of the screen space. Visiting your average design blog leaves most people constantly double-tapping their iPhone screens just to view the text.

Mobile Press changes all that. Instead of having your mobile users make do with a full size theme, you can create a custom mobile theme for your design blog. For a WordPress designer, there’s a great opportunity for extra exposure — create a mobile theme for your already popular design website. Worried about losing advertising revenue? Simply change your mobile theme to allow for small page ads, leaving your mobile visitors free to click through to advertiser websites too.

5. Google XML Sitemaps for SEO Benefits

Getting your blog ranked high on Google can be incredibly difficult, especially in a competitive field like design. Sure, you could go down the natural SEO route, with every post adding to an incredibly large backlog of SEO-buildind content, or you could optimize what you’ve got. The first part of the equation is making sure that search engines have access to your website.

The Google XML Sitemap plugin makes the whole process simple. Instead of having to crawl through your website manually, a sitemap gives search engine crawlers direct instructions on what to index. This plugin automates the whole process, making your SEO efforts less of a drain.

This plugin works especially well alongside…

6. The All in One SEO Pack

SEO can be seriously draining, and a waste of valuable time when you could be focusing on more lucrative activities. Don’t spend all day doing basic SEO tasks when this useful plugin pack could be doing them for you. Even if you’re an absolute WordPress beginner, this highly useful

plugin pack will make your SEO efforts so much more simple. There’s no real need to tweak options if you don’t want to. Just install the plugin and your website will immediately get some SEO benefits.

If you’re using your design blog to make money, either through affiliate programs or on-page advertising, maintaining a high search engine ranking is essential. Give this plugin pack a try, along with the XML Sitemaps plugin, and watch as your rankings soar.

7. Author Exposed for Guest Posts and Multiple Writers

Running a busy design blog on your own is almost impossible, which is why so many top design blogs run articles, guides and studies from a wide variety of writers. Whether you’re employing writers to help run your blog or simply inviting people to submit guest posts, adding variety to your blog is a great way to make it to the top.

Author Exposed allows you to have individual profiles for each and every writer that submits content to your blog. By including Gravatar pictures and important link information, this resource box styled plugin is far superior to WP’s somewhat bulky standard solution.

8. All-in-One Video Pack for Video Tutorials and Features

Five years ago, big images were enough for people to flock to your blog posts. Now, things are different. Every design post is backed up with supporting images, and the new golden content is video. From design tutorials to interviews with famous web presences and designers, adding video to your web design blog is a sure-fire way to bring in some fresh new traffic.

The All in One Video Pack makes it easy to add video to your WordPress blog. This isn’t just Youtube embeds either, but dedicated and powerful online video from several different sources. You can upload media directly from your editing software, do live uploads from your webcam, and even have your readers post their own video responses and comments. With support for over 150 different types of online video, finding and uploading video content that supports your blog post is easy.

9. WP Ban for Managing Comments and Users

The internet, for all its brilliant advances, still has one major problem: anonymous trolls. Sure, they’re entertaining sometimes, and yes, they can occasionally bring life to a stale discussion, but there’s nothing more annoying than having them pop up in the comments section of your design blog.

WP Ban makes it easy to manage community annoyances. Using this simple plugin, you can choose to ban users by IP address, restrict the usage of certain names, or even wipe out entire characters entirely. If your WordPress blog is being troubled by permanent annoyances, give this plugin a try.

WP Ban has another great benefit — spam prevention. Akismet does a great job keeping spam out of your comments section, but it doesn’t do too much to prevent the annoying SEO spammers that seem to pop up from time to time. Don’t want them clogging up your comments section? Use WP Ban to limit their ability to post comments.

10. TTFTitles for Dynamic Titles and Custom Title Fonts

The standard title text can become a bit boring from time to time, and this plugin lets you keep it interesting. By adding custom fonts to your post titles, you can draw attention to special posts, differentiate between authors, and introduce some cool new design elements to your blog. Sounds useful for a blog that’s all about design, right?

TTFTitles is the plugin to use if you want interesting post titles. Truth be told, you’re not actually adding a new font to your blog. Instead, this plugin generates an image from an online font database, and uses it as the title of your new post. While you’re not generating a custom font on your own blog, the visual effect is exactly the same. Great design is all about creating attention, and this plugin will surely have your visitors talking.

11. Javascript Pull Quotes for Quotes and Inspiration

If there’s one advantage Tumblr has over WordPress, it’s the ease of quoting other posts, and adding well known adages to your blog. In WordPress, you’ve got to manually increase the text size and add emphasis tags, whereas other blogging platforms allow you to simply pick the “quote” option from a drop down menu.

Javascript Pull Quotes makes adding quotes to your blog much more simple. By giving your quotes a different design, you can easily separate them from your body text and keep your inspiration away from the rest of your content. Don’t want to use a particular quote style? Don’t worry, this plugin is completely customizable, right down to the font and style used for your quotations.

12. Post Typographer for Simple, Attractive Typography

What would a design blog be without good typography? Thousands of bloggers and webmasters spend days making sure their WordPress theme is perfect, all the while ignoring the most important design element on their page: the text. A focus on typography is essential for any design blogger. If you’re spending time on your page design but ignoring your text, you need to reassess your design and take another look at how things should be.

Post Typographer is a very simple text design plugin that automatically improves the look of your text. From post titles to body content, this plugin changes your letter spacing to improve readability, switches dashes to more attractive alternatives, and makes your posts more easy to read and much more appealing to the eye.

–

These twelve plugins are a great foundation for your WordPress design blog. Of course, any serious blogger would look at installing more as soon as they could. From social media manipulation and management to much more advanced design tools, the amount of WordPress plugins that are out there is truly astonishing. For design and development bloggers, the need to be on top of all these plugins is important, so get out there, get downloading, and get busy customizing your design blog.

On that note, have you got a favorite WordPress plugin? Design related or not, fire away in the comments with your favorite WordPress plugins, widgets and more.

This code is poweful but definitely easy to implement. Just paste it on your functions.php file and it will automatically output your post content in columns.
Your post content will be splitted on <h2> tags.

function my_multi_col($content){
$columns = explode('<h2>', $content);

$i = 0;

	foreach ($columns as $column){
	if (($i % 2) == 0){
		$return .= '<div class="content_left">' . "\n";
		if ($i > 1){
		$return .= "<h2>";
	} else{
		$return .= '<div class="content_right">' . "\n <h2>";
	}
		$return .= $column;
		$return .= '</p></div>';
		$i++;
	}

	if(isset($columns[1])){
	    $content = wpautop($return);
	}else{
	    $content = wpautop($content);
	}
	echo $content;
}
}
add_filter('the_content', 'my_multi_col');

Don’t forget to add the following styles to your style.css file :

.content_right, .content_left{
    float:left;
    width:45%;
}

.content_left{
    padding-right:5%;
}

Thanks to www.kriesi.at for contributing this great function to the community!

WordPress is a very powerful blogging engine, which serve content to billions of readers on a daily basis. But not only: WordPress can be used in a wide variety of ways: Photoblog, online magazine, classified site… And with all that power, WordPress can also help you to make more money online than a simple site or a blogger blog.

In this article, I’m going to show you 10 powerful and easy to implement WordPress hacks to make more money online.

Insert ads in your RSS feed

RSS feeds are the new newsletters. Everyday, more and more people use RSS to access content from their favorite websites, so what about monetitizing yours?
Simply paste the following code on the functions.php file from your theme. Create that file if it doesn’t exists by default.
Once saved, ads should be displayed on your blog RSS feed!

function insertRss($content) {
    if(is_feed()){
        $content = 'text before content'.$content.'<hr /><a href="http://www.wprecipes.com">Did you visited WpRecipes today?</a><hr />';
    }
    return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content', 'insertRss');

Source : http://www.webinventif.fr/wordpress-ajouter-du-contenu-dans-son-flux/

Display ads to search engines visitors only

It is a well known fact in the world of internet marketing that people coming to your site from search engines have more chances to click on your ads than your regular visitors.
In order to avoid AdSense “Smart Pricing”, you should definitely only display your ads to visitors coming from search engines.

To do so, we first have to create a function. Paste the code below in your theme functions.php file.

function scratch99_fromasearchengine(){
  $ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
  $SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.');
  foreach ($SE as $source) {
    if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) return true;
  }
  return false;
}

The $SE array is where you specify search engines. You can easily ad new search engines by adding new elements to the array.

Then, paste the following code anywhere on your template where you want your ads to be displayed only to visitors comming from SERPs.

if (function_exists('scratch99_fromasearchengine')) {
  if (scratch99_fromasearchengine()) {
    INSERT YOUR CODE HERE
  }
}

Source : http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-display-adsense-to-search-engines-visitors-only

Make your title tag SEO friendly

I recently talked about the benefits of having an optimized <title> tag. After the theory, let’s dive into the practice.

Open your header.php file for edition. find the <title> tag, and replace it by the following:

<title>
<?php if (is_home () ) {
    bloginfo('name');
} elseif ( is_category() ) {
    single_cat_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo('name');
} elseif (is_single() ) {
    single_post_title();
} elseif (is_page() ) {
    bloginfo('name'); echo ': '; single_post_title();
} else {
    wp_title('',true);
} ?>
</title>

This code will generate SEO optimized title tags according to the following model:

• If the visitor is on the blog homepage: We’ll display the blog name.
• If the visitor is on a category page: We’ll display the category name and the blog name.
• If the visitor is on an article page: We’ll only display the article title.
• If the visitor is on a static page: We’ll display the blog name, and the page title.

Note that if you’re, like me, using the super cool Thesis WordPress theme, you don’t need to implement that hack. Thesis do it by default!
Source : http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-make-your-title-tag-seo-friendly

Allow your visitors to send your posts by email

Althought I personnally almost never send “Your should visit that page” emails to my family or friends, lots of Internet users are doing it.

This is definitely a good thing for website owners, because it bring new visitors, and they can become regular readers. This is the reason why you should implement this pretty nice function to allow your visitors to send your blog posts by email.

Paste the following function to your functions.php file.That’s all. Hard to do something simpler

function direct_email($text="Envoyer par mail"){
        global $post;
        $title = htmlspecialchars($post->post_title);
        $subject = 'Sur '.htmlspecialchars(get_bloginfo('name')).' : '.$title;
        $body = 'Je recommande cette page : '.$title.'. Consultable à cette adresse : '.get_permalink($post->ID);
        //$body .= '. Extrait: '.$post->post_excerpt; // http://www.webinventif.fr/wordpress-hors-boucle/
        $link = '<a rel="nofollow" href="mailto:?subject='.rawurlencode($subject).'&amp;body='.rawurlencode($body).'" title="'.$text.' : '.$title.'">'.$text.'</a>';
        return $link;
}

Source : http://www.webinventif.fr/wordpress-lien-envoyer-page-mail/

Automatically insert content after each post

On most blogs, bloggers ad some stuff after the post content: Advertisments, related posts or these “Subscribe to RSS feed” boxes.
Whatever you want to display, this solution is pretty good for that. Sure, you can “simply” edit your theme single.php file, but using this method, your message will stay even if you switch themes.
One more time, you just have to paste the function into the functions.php file eused by your theme.

function insertFootNote($content) {
        if(!is_feed() && !is_home()) {
                $content.= "<div class='subscribe'>";
                $content.= "<h4>Enjoyed this article?</h4>";
                $content.= "<p>Subscribe to our  <a href='http://feeds2.feedburner.com/WpRecipes'>RSS feed</a> and never miss a recipe!</p>";
                $content.= "</div>";
        }
        return $content;
}
add_filter ('the_content', 'insertFootNote');

Source : http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-automatically-insert-content-after-each-post

Display a Tweetmeme “Retweet” buton where, and when you want

Tweetmeme have a pretty cool service which allow people to share your blog post on Twitter. If you don’t already pay a lot of attention to Twitter, you have to know that it is know one of the bigger traffic provider on my blogs, as well as on very popular ones as such as Mashable or Smashing Magazine.

This hack is very easy to implement. You just have to copy the following code, and paste it into your function.php file.

function tweetmeme(){
	return '<div class="tweetmeme"><script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script></div>';
}
add_shortcode('tweet', 'tweetmeme');

Once done, you can display the Tweetmeme “retweet” button anywhere on your posts. In WordPress editor, make sure you are in HTML mode and insert the following:

[tweet]

Source : http://www.wprecipes.com/wordpress-tip-create-a-tweetmeme-retweeet-shortcode

Detect IE6 (And open popups!)

If you’re a Cats Who Code reader, there no doubt that you know how much I hate Internet Explorer 6.
But as an Internet marketer, IE6 also have good points : As an obsolete browser, some of its versions do not have any anti pop-up blockers. Which means that you can do a real pop-up fiesta to each of your beloved IE6 users and make some money.

After all, as a profesionnal web developer IE6 was the cause of many headaches and night work. So, it is worth a pop up or two (or more).

To implement this hack, just open your header.php file and paste the following.

<!--[if lte IE 6]>
   <!-- insert your ad script here -->
<![endif]-->

Cloak affiliate links

Whenever you talk about any kind of products on your blog as such as WordPress themes, hosting, or even plane tickets, there’s for sure some affiliate link to grab in order to make some money.
But some people, who wants to make money too, will join the same affiliate programs and sign in using their own link, instead of yours. And as you probably know, in the world of affiliate marketing, most of the time it is the first clicked link who’ll bring money to the site owner, so you have to “hide” your affiliate links.

You can do it using various method: A simple url shortener, a plugin as such as Redirection (I use it on all my blogs) or even a dedicated free service named aCloaker.

Display Adsense with a shortcode

Adsense is hard. On some pages, clicks can make you earn $2, while they are just $0.10 on some other. To optimize your Adsense earnings, you should definitely implement Adsense only when you want to.
This nifty hack will allow you to do it easily.

One more time, you have to open your functions.php file and paste the following code in it. Remember to change the Adsense code, or my ads will be displayed instead of yours!

function showads() {
    return '<script type="text/javascript"><!--
    google_ad_client = "pub-3637220125174754";
    google_ad_slot = "4668915978";
    google_ad_width = 468;
    google_ad_height = 60;
    //-->
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
    </script>';
}

add_shortcode('adsense', 'showads');

Once you inserted the code and saved your functions.php file, you’ll be able to embed your adsense code on your posts and display it exactly where you want. To do so, simply paste the following code on the editor, in html mode:

[adsense]

Source : http://www.catswhoblog.com/how-to-display-adsense-ads-only-when-you-want-to

(Try to) block AdBlock

If you want to get info from a book, you have to buy the book and read it. With blogs, you can access millions of interesting pages for free. Bloggers don’t want people to pay for their content, because advertisment is bringing their income.

Sadly, some people who don’t understand that if a blogger don’t make enought money with blogs, he’ll have to take a daily job and stop blogging. Some nasty people who want to access info without giving anything back created a Firefox plugin named AdBlock. Its purpose is to block ads, which is definitely a bad thing for our businesses.

To implement this hack, you have to embed all your ads within a specific css class. It is called myTestAd in this example:

<div class="myTestAd" style=" text-align:center;margin:10px">
    <!-- advert code goes here -->
</div>

Once done, we have to verify that the iframe element doesn’t have a height of 0. Using MooTools, we can come up with that code:

Window.onDomReady(TestPage);

function TestPage() {
    if ($E(".myTestAd iframe").clientHeight == 0)
        alert("You are blocking my ads, you swine!");
}

Source : http://www.thepcspy.com/read/how_to_block_adblock