Using WP-Cumulus in WP-Vybe:

The default Tags dropdown in WP-Vybe may be a bit bland for some people. This quick guide will show you how to install the WP-Cumulus plugin in your sidebar tabs panel instead of using the default dropdown menu.

First you will need to install the WP-Cumulus plugin (get it here) then go into the WP-Cumulus settings and change the following options:

• Width of the Flash tag cloud needs to be set to 278
• Height of the Flash tag cloud needs to be set to 209
• Use transparent mode needs to be on

Once those options are saved you will need to open your side-tabs.php file in your WP-Vybe theme folder and then find the following:

   <select name="tag-dropdown" onchange='document.location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;'> 
   <option value=""><?php echo attribute_escape(__('Select a Tag')); ?></option>
   <?php $posttags = get_terms('post_tag'); ?>
   <?php if ($posttags) {
    foreach($posttags as $tag) { 
     echo "<option value='";
     echo get_tag_link($tag);
     echo "'>";
     echo $tag->name;
     echo ""; }
    } ?>
   </select>

You will now need to replace those lines with the following:

<?php wp_cumulus_insert(); ?>

Save the file and upload it to your WP-Vybe folder. Now you can see your new tags section in action.

Using Global Translator in WP-Vybe:

For this modification we will be adding a 5th tab to our sidebar tabs panel. First you will need to download and install a plugin called Global Translator and activate it. Now navigate to your Global Translator settings section and change the following options:

Set Flags bar layout to Use a single and optimized image map and show: and use 14 flags for each row.

Now open your side-tabs.php file in your WP-Vybe theme folder and find the following:

  <ul class="tabs cleafix">  
  <li><a href="javascript:tabSwitch_2(1, 4, 'tab_', 'content_');" id="tab_1" class="on"><?php _e("Subscribe"); ?></a></li>
  <li><a href="javascript:tabSwitch_2(2, 4, 'tab_', 'content_');" id="tab_2"><?php _e("Archives"); ?></a></li>  
  <li><a href="javascript:tabSwitch_2(3, 4, 'tab_', 'content_');" id="tab_3"><?php _e("Tags"); ?></a></li>
  <li><a href="javascript:tabSwitch_2(4, 4, 'tab_', 'content_');" id="tab_4"><?php _e("Popular"); ?></a></li>
 </ul>

Change that code to:

 	<ul class="tabs cleafix">  
		<li><a href="javascript:tabSwitch_2(1, 5, 'tab_', 'content_');" id="tab_1" class="on"><?php _e("Subscribe"); ?></a></li>
		<li><a href="javascript:tabSwitch_2(2, 5, 'tab_', 'content_');" id="tab_2"><?php _e("Archives"); ?></a></li>  
		<li><a href="javascript:tabSwitch_2(3, 5, 'tab_', 'content_');" id="tab_3"><?php _e("Tags"); ?></a></li>
		<li><a href="javascript:tabSwitch_2(4, 5, 'tab_', 'content_');" id="tab_4"><?php _e("Popular"); ?></a></li>
		<li><a href="javascript:tabSwitch_2(5, 5, 'tab_', 'content_');" id="tab_5"><?php _e("Translate"); ?></a></li>
	</ul>

Now in side-tabs.php you need to add the following code in between the last two lines at the bottom of side-tabs.php.

	  <div id="content_5" class="cat_content" style="display:none">
  <div class="sidebox"><?php
if(function_exists("gltr_build_flags_bar")) { 
gltr_build_flags_bar(); 
}
?></div>
   </div>

Now that’s it, you now will have a fancy translator tab.

Featured:

If you’re like me you may think the featured links on the right hand side of the Features box is a waste of space and could be used for something better, then this short guide is for you.

The next customisation will show you how to remove the whole links section and place a banner in it’s place.

Open the style.css file in your WP-Vybe theme folder and find:

#my-glider .controls a, .control a:link, .controls a:visited {
 display:block;
 padding-left: 20px;
 background: transparent;
 }

Change to:

/* ---- #my-glider .controls a, .control a:link, .controls a:visited {
 display:block;
 padding-left: 20px;
 background: transparent;
 } ---- */

Now locate your features.php file in your WP-Vybe folder and find:

<?php _e("Featured Articles"); ?>

Remove that section of code. Now just below it you will need to remove the following chunk of code:

<?php $count = 1 ?>
<?php $featurecount = $wp_vybe_features_number; ?>
<?php $my_query = new WP_Query("category_name=featured&showposts=$featurecount");
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate[$post->ID] = $post->ID; ?>
 
<?php if ( $count == 1 ) { ?>
      <li><a class="active" href="#section<?php the_ID(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php } else { ?>
      <li><a href="#section<?php the_ID(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php } ?>
 
<?php $count = $count + 1 ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Our new banner link will go where that chunk of code was. For example you can use this code:

<div align="center"><a href="http://www.affiliatelink.com/"><img border="0" src="http://www.website.com/images/banner.jpg"/></a></div>

Keep in mind that the area is quite small, the largest banner can only be 249 pixels in height and 290 pixels in width.

To make things a bit fancier we could create rotating banners like on our homepage.

Instead of using the banner code above we can use a simple script to rotate different ads. Insert the following code where the large chunk of code was removed from features.php

<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!-- Begin
var how_many_ads = 2;
var now = new Date()
var sec = now.getSeconds()
var ad = sec % how_many_ads;
ad +=1;
if (ad==1) {
url="URL GOES HERE";
alt="ALT TEXT";
banner="IMAGE URL HERE";
width="NUMBER";
height="NUMBER";
}
if (ad==2) {
url="URL GOES HERE";
alt="ALT TEXT";
banner="IMAGE URL HERE";
width="NUMBER";
height="NUMBER";
}
document.write('<a href="' + url + '" target="_blank">');
document.write('<img src="' + banner + '" width=')
document.write(width + ' height=' + height + ' ');
document.write('alt="' + alt + '" border=0/>');
// End -->
</script>

The only part that needs to be edited for two banners is the two instances of the following code:

url="URL GOES HERE";
alt="ALT TEXT";
banner="IMAGE URL HERE";
width="NUMBER";
height="NUMBER";

Now you will have a fancy rotating banner ad.

This WordPress site uses Gravatar:

I love Gravatar but I think it’s lacking one major thing in WordPress Blogs. We need plugins to help the registration process without leaving our comment box. Currently there are no plugins that work to help the registration process, we still need to advertise to our commenters that Gravatar is in fact a feature on our blogs.

Open comments.php in your WP-Vybe theme folder and find the following line of code:

<!--<p><small><strong>XHTML:</strong> You can use these tags: <code><?php echo allowed_tags(); ?></code></small>-->

Now right below that line add something like the following:

<p><b>If you want a picture to show with your comment, go get a <a href="http://en.gravatar.com/" target="_self">Gravatar</a>!</b></p>

This small tweak is an easy way of telling your readers that you support Globally Recognised Avatars in your comments. It is a two minute modification but it is worth it.

Archives list:

Another small change I have made within my sidebar tabs section is to remove the archives dropdown and use a monthly list instead. Once again this modification can be seen in the right sidebar of our site.

To do the modification open side-tabs.php in your WP-Vybe theme folder and find:

 <div id="content_2" class="cat_content" style="display:none">
  <div class="sidebox">
   <select name="archive-dropdown" onchange='document.location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;'> 
    <option value=""><?php echo attribute_escape(__('Select Month')); ?></option> 
    <?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly&format=option&show_post_count=1'); ?>
   </select>
  </div> 
 </div>

Change to:

 <div id="content_2" class="cat_content" style="display:none">
                                 <ul>
                                       <?php wp_get_archives('title_li='); ?>
                                 </ul>
 </div>

It’s a pretty simple modification that can make your monthly archives a little quicker to access.

Ditching Popularity Contest:

One feature that I dislike in WP-Vybe 1.1 is the return of the popular sidebar tab that relies on the very outdated Popularity Contest plugin. Why support a plugin that causes so much trouble? Anyway here is a quick guide to setup the popular sidebar tab while using another plugin.

Download the plugin called Recently Popular and activate it. No need to activate the Recently Popular Widget because we are using the function to insert it into our sidebar.

Now locate your side-tabs.php file in your WP-Vybe theme folder and find the following lines:

<?php /* Alex King's <a href="http://alexking.org/blog/2007/10/02/popularity-contest-13b2">Popularity Contest plugin would work really well here. */ ?>
<?php if ( function_exists('akpc_most_popular') ) : ?>
  <ul><?php akpc_most_popular($limit=5); ?></ul>
<?php else : ?>
  <div class="sidebox"><p><?php _e('This feature has not been activated yet.'); ?></p></div>
<?php endif; ?>

Replace those lines with the following line:

<ul> <?php get_recently_popular(2, 'WEEK', 5, 0, 2); ?> </ul>

And that’s it! You will now have a popular posts tab that works a lot better.

One of the most popular ways of backing up your database is by using phpMyAdmin, which is included with most webhosts nowadays.

First you need to find out your database name. To do that you need to open the wp-config.php which is in the root of your WordPress directory on your server.

You will need to find the following line:

define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');    // The name of the database

Your database name will be located where the word ‘wordpress‘ is. Remember the database name.

Log into phpMyAdmin. If you don’t know how to access phpMyAdmin, just contact your webhost.

Once logged in you should see a page that resembles below. On that page you need to click on the link that says Databases.

The next page will give you a list of databases that are being used, click on the link with your database name. Example in the picture below:

You will now be presented with a new page that has a list of WordPress tables, you need to click the Export link at the top of the page. Example picture below:

The page that comes up is where you change the settings for your database. This section is the most important part of creating a database backup.

The left box shows some Export settings, in that box you need to highlight all the tables by clicking the ‘Select All‘ button. Then scroll down and make sure ‘SQL‘ is selected. Example picture below:

On the right under Options you need to make sure the first two options are unticked. The two options are listed below:

• Enclose export in a transaction
• Disable foreign key checks

The Structure option on the right hand side of the page needs to be ticked and also the following three options below:

• Add DROP TABLE / DROP VIEW
• Add AUTO_INCREMENT value
• Enclose table and field names with backquotes

To make things easy just use all the same settings that are used in the screenshot below:

In the Data section you need to have everything unticked except for the Data option. Example in the screenshot below:

Now for the final section at the bottom of the page you need to tick the ‘save as file‘ option and everything else can remain the same as seen in the screenshot below:

Following that four Compression options are shown, I like to use either ‘None‘ or ‘zipped‘ then hit the Go button in the bottom righthand corner then your database download will start.

I hope this guide has come in handy for some people, the last thing anybody ever wants is to lose a years worth of posts and hard work. We will put together a guide on restoring a database soon, that will come in handy for those who are moving servers or are just restoring a database due to it being corrupt.

One other way of backing up your database for safe keeping is by using a WordPress plugin called WP-DB-Backup and your database can be saved from within your WordPress Administration Panel. More information about the WP-DB-Backup plugin can be found here.

You can speed up your blog by removing or disabling as many plugins as possible, only use plugins which are really needed. Remember less is better! Having lots of plugins installed will add more PHP queries to your server which means more load when your site has a lots of visitors.

Install WP Super Cache:

WP Super Cache is another great plugin which needs to be built into WordPress. If your blog is constantly listed on the front page of Digg you will notice a severe drop in performance because your WordPress blog will be processing many PHP scripts for visitors which puts a huge strain on your server. This plugin will generate static html files for your blog that is less work for your server.

Images:

Hosting your own images will slow down your load times considerably if you’re on a lower quality Web Host. One thing you can do is use an image hosting site like Flickr. Flickr is using a huge amount of servers and can no doubt handle your blog images with a breeze. WordPress now has plenty of plugins that will help you integrate Flickr images into WordPress. In the long run you will save a lot of money on webhosting if you use a free third party image storage system.

Image compression can be another way of helping your blog load faster, whether it being compressing images for your posts or your image files for your theme. I like to use Adobe Photoshop for compressing my images. Photoshop has a “save for web” feature for compressing images and it does come in handy for shaving off a few bytes on images.

Video:

A trend nowadays is to create and use videos on your blog, while it can be nice to have a few videos on the front page of your blog you are actually slowing down your page load time and using lots of bandwidth if you are hosting your own videos. One way to speed up load times and save bandwidth in the process is to use external video hosting sites like YouTube and Google Video. Plenty of video hosting sites are floating around the internet to choose from. To note YouTube now supports HD and widescreen videos.

Defrag your Database:

If you have the luxury of having access to phpMyAdmin you can optimise your WordPress database. When in phpMyAdmin select all of your WordPress tables and select “optimise table” from the dropdown list.

Tidy up your CSS:

One way to to speed up your site’s load time is by making your CSS file size smaller. The idea behind this is to remove as much whitespace as possible. An example of cleaning up the style.css code is below.

Below is a example of most normal style.css files:

body {
 text-align: left;
 margin: 0;
 padding: 10px 0;
 line-height: 1.5em;
 }

The CSS code below is the very same as the code above, just without as much whitespace inbetween text.

body {text-align: left; margin: 0; padding: 10px 0; line-height: 1.5em;}

Of course tidying up a CSS file like this will make things a bit more confusing and harder to read, but all in all your CSS file will be faster loading and of a smaller file size.

Validate your Code:

Validating your code is very important, some serious errors can slow down your page loading.

Markup Validation Service

Update WordPress:

Yes that’s right, updating WordPress to the latest version can have it’s benefits. Besides security fixes some WordPress updates can have performance improvements.

Use a Minimalist Theme:

Using a Minimalist theme is another way of speeding up a blog, the downfall is that you need to sacrifice all the nice effects in a theme. A Minimalist theme has no images, AJAX or Javascripts. I personally like using fancy themes like my current theme which is called WP-Vybe made by Solosteam.

Web Hosting:

Choosing the right webhost is the hardest part about creating your own website. A majority of first-time website users tend to target webhosting companies that throw packages with unlimited data storage and bandwidth for $4.95 per month and so on. Well most of the time these plans can be great for the average website administrator until your site starts to gain popularity and starts to get more traffic. If you have a website that is pumping out lots of images, videos, PHP queries and has a large visitor base then you may want to look around and spend a bit more on your host. After all you don’t want to annoy your visitors or lose business because your blog is offline or timing out all of the time.

2. Keep all of your WordPress plugins and themes updated to their latest version. New versions of plugins and themes could contain security fixes.

3. Secure your plugins directory so plugins you are using can’t be seen. If your WordPress Blog was to be hacked it might be done by discovering an out-of-date plugin on your server with known security flaws.

By typing the following link into your browser you will be able to check if your WordPress plugins are being displayed.

http://www.mywebsite.com/wp-content/plugins/

Note: Replace www.mywebsite.com with your own domain name.

An easy fix to the issue above can be made by just placing a blank index.html file within your plugins folder. A more secure fix would be to edit your .htaccess file in the root of your WordPress directory on your server.

Open the .htaccess file in a text editor, I prefer to use PSPad which is a freeware program then add the following two lines to the bottom and save the file.

# Prevents directory listing
Options -Indexes

4. If, for some strange reason, you are using an earlier version of WordPress then you might want to hide your WordPress version number from the entire world by using the Replace WP-Version plugin. The version number that is being shown via the page source can be disguised by using The Replace WP-Version plugin.

5. The WordPress folder and file permissions is an important security aspect that quite a lot of people forget. All WordPress folders should be set to 755 and all files should be set to 644. If you like editing your theme via the Edit Themes panel within WordPress you will need to CHMOD your theme files to 666.

File permissions can be changed by your webhosting account’s administration panel (ex: cPanel) or by using a FTP program like FileZilla.

6. Backup your WordPress files and database on a regular basis.

For detailed information on backing up your database please go to the link below:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database

You could also be like me and use a terrific database plugin called WP-DB-Backup. The plugin can be downloaded below:
http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup

For backing up your files you can use a FTP program or see if your website host has a built-in file backup system.

7. Simple passwords for your WordPress blog should not be used. We have all done it at one time or another, using passwords like 123456 and abcdef is not a good idea at all! Be creative and create hard passwords using numbers, letters or even symbols like #, @, !, %.

Try a password generator if need be:
http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

8. One security tip that is rarely done is to delete the default admin user account. Creating your own account is a much safer idea. Hackers would only need to crack your login password because the username and ID number is already set when installing WordPress.

1. Create a new administrator acount in the Users section.
2. Log out of the default admin account.
3. Log in as the new user.
4. Delete the old admin from the user list.
5. Assign all posts, pages and links to the new user account.

9. A security exploit has been found in some themes on the internet. One method to check if your theme has this exploit is to search for the following line of code in your search.php:

<?php echo $_SERVER ['PHP_SELF']; ?>

This exploit allows your entire server to be searched.

Use this code instead:

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

10. WordPress allows unlimited login attempts and this can give experienced Hackers a chance to crack your password by doing brute-force attacks. I recommend using a plugin called Limit Login Attempts. The plugin works with the current version of WordPress (2.7).

Well that’s it for our WordPress security guide. I hope some of these tweaks will help protect you from the evil people on the internet!

Here are the steps for installing WordPress on your computer:

Part 1

Download the latest version of XAMPP, I personally like to use the lite version with the “executable” for easy installation.

Start the XAMPP installer, during installation you will be asked to choose a destination folder. I use c:\xampp for convenience. On the next install screen you will be given a few XAMPP options (as seen below), make sure the install Apache and MySQL services are both ticked and then click install. The Filezilla service is not needed.

Once the XAMPP installation is finished you will notice a new icon in your Window’s Taskbar (as seen below).

Double click the XAMPP icon in your Taskbar and the XAMPP Control Panel will come on screen (as seen below). You need to make sure both Apache and MySQL services are running. If they are then you’re good to go!

Open your internet browser and type the following address in the internet address bar: http://localhost/xampp/splash.php. You should now be greeted with the XAMPP Splash Screen (as seen below)

(I hope you’re all using one of the safest and most internet friendly browsers which is, Mozilla Firefox?)

After you have picked your language, you will then need to click phpMyAdmin (as seen below).

In the Create New Database Field, enter the word wordpress, and select utf8_unicode_ci in the drop down box in the next field. Click Create (as seen below). XAMPP is now installed!

Part 2

Download and unzip the latest version of WordPress from WordPress.org. The file sizes are normally under two megabytes.

You will then need to open the file wp-config-sample.php with Windows Notepad or WordPad. I personally like the freeware program PSPad for editing PHP files.

Within the wp-config-sample.php you need to find the following lines and make the details match my code:

define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');    // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'root');     // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', ''); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');    // 99% chance you won't need to change this value

You will not need a database password. You should only change the database name and database username. Then rename the file as wp-config.php and save it.

Now you will need to move the whole wordpress folder to Windows Start button > My Computer > C drive > xampp > htdocs (as seen below).

For the final step in this tutorial you need to enter the following address into your browser: http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php, and follow the steps.