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How to Add WordPress Plugins

By on October 23, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Add WordPress Plugins

When it comes to utilizing the power of WordPress, the one thing that sets is apart from other platforms is the plugin system. Plugins allow you to easily add advanced functionality to WordPress and can help you perform a wide variety of tasks. However, you need to learn how to add WordPress Plugin before you can start using them on your own blog or website.

There are two different ways to add plugins to WordPress. The first one is to go out and find the plugin you are looking for on the internet. You can then download the file that they give you. From there, all you have to do is log in to your WordPress blog and select the add new plugin link. WordPress will then have you point to the file you downloaded and it will automatically upload it into the correct directory.

The second way to learn how to add WordPress plugin is to use the built in search feature. You can type in a certain keyword or phrase and WordPress will automatically show you the plugins that it finds based on your search. Best of all, you can also see ratings for each plugin and see which one is the best option for you.

Once you find a plugin you like, just click the install button and WordPress will take care of uploading the plugin for you. If you do this method, you do not even have to upload the files yourself. It is really that easy!

As you can see, there are a few different ways to learn how to add plugins to the WordPress platform. Regardless of the way you choose, you can quickly start adding a lot more functionality to your blog or website.

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How to Integrate Facebook comments for wordpress to your blog or website?

By on October 6, 2011 in Randy Roedl

www.getyourblogready.com – for wordpress blog tips and training – one way to encourage visitors interaction with your site, is to utilize this plugin, you will be able to get more visitor participation, more interaction, and make your comment system more fun, and exciting, and at the same time you will be utilizing a very reliable and one of the most popular platform which is facebook, right on your wordpress blog or website.

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WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers1

By on October 5, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers

WordPress is an open source web publishing platform used by millions of people around the world. It’s known to be relatively easy for a beginner to learn and start creating content for their blogs or websites.

However, there are few features that if not setup correctly, can do your site more harm than good. All the steps below assume that you are logged into your WordPress Dashboard (administration area).

The WordPress Tagline

The default WordPress tagline is “”Just another WordPress blog””. This acts as a subtitle for your blog or website and is meant to be descriptive of your content. Leaving this default text in the tagline text box means that your visitors and search engines will see this. It sure isn’t descriptive of what your site is really about is it?

You can easily replace this tagline with your own by going to:

Settings–>General–>Tagline

(make sure to save your changes)

Membership and User Role Rules

You have the ability to add additional users to your blog or website for the purpose of adding content or submitting articles for review. There two settings here:

Settings–>General–>Membership

Settings–>General–>New User Default Role

Be careful if you decide to let anyone register for your site. Spammers love it when this option is ticked without having hardened security measures in place first.

You will also want to choose the default role for new users wisely. WordPress allows five user roles:

Administrator
Editor
Contributor
Author
Subscriber

Each user role is allowed to access different administration areas of your WordPress installation. This can be a powerful way to organize your users but can also be potentially disasterous if one of those users accidentally deactivates a plugin or theme that your site depends on.

You can always add additional users manually without the need to open registration to the public by going to:

Users–>Add New

Set the Correct Timezone

99% of WordPress websites I’m brought in to help with do not have the timezone correctly set to match the location of the owner. The time is detected automatically, and you would think this would be OK, but it can cause a usability issue with your users.

Why? Imagine I live in California and my site offers news and updates about the Stock Market or Wall Street. Further imagine that I schedule an article to post at a specific time in order to target either my night owl readers or the early risers about a specific stock tip.

Well, if I’m in California and I schedule my article to post at 5:00am what happens if I didn’t set my timezone to match my location? You guessed it, that article would be published based on whatever timezone is set by default. This would not position my site as having “”breaking news”” for my target market.

What timezone is set by default? The timezone that gets chosen is directly based upon the timezone that is set on the server computer at your hosting company. I host some of my websites with West Coast based hosting companies but I live on the East Coast…therefore I need to make sure to set my timezone to Eastern Standard Time instead Pacific Standard Time.

(scheduling your article post times is a built-in feature of WordPress by the way)

Set Update Services

When you publish a new content WordPress provides a way for you to let other people now you’ve updated your site. Go here:

Writing–>Update Services

You’ll see that there is an text input box with one web address inside it. That address connects your website with the Ping-O-Matic search engine update service. Every time you add something new, your site tells Ping-O-Matic and Ping-O-Matic tells various search services.

You can add more update services to this list so you can be assured that any new content you create is automatically being distributed and indexed by a variety of update services. You can view a long list here.

Creating Human Readable URLs

When you create a page or blog post in WordPress, it is given a unique ID for use in the programming code and database. Because of this, when you view a page or post url in your browser address bar, you see something similar to this on the end of your web address:?p=123

The code at the end of that url address above is referencing the page/post ID of 123. That’s not very readable or descriptive to a person is it? Additionally that address contains absolutely no keywords that could be utilized by search engines to help them return relevant results to your content. Luckily, you can change how these look and make them much better.

Go to: Settings–>Permalinks

You will see that you have four choices of different url structures to choose from:

Default
Day and name
Month and name
Numeric
Custom Structure

I use different Custom Structures based on the needs of particular websites and I would recommend doing the same. You can learn more about Custom Permalink Structures here.

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How to Edit WordPress Widgets

By on September 9, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Edit WordPress Widgets

One of the things most people like about WordPress is the built in widget system. Widgets make it really easy to manage the sidebar elements of your blog or website. Depending on your theme, you may also be able to use widgets to control other sections of your WordPress blog or website.

However, in order to take advantage of the widget system you need to learn how to edit WordPress widgets to suit your needs. The good news is doing this is really, really easy.

To get started with widgets, just navigate to the widgets section within the WordPress administration panel. If you are unfamiliar with this, you can find the link to the widgets section along the left hand side of the screen.

Once you are in the widgets section, you will see a variety of different options available to you. WordPress comes with a handful of built in widgets, such as recent posts, recent comments, tags, categories, and search.

To activate any of these widgets, just click and drag it to the sidebar section which can be found on the right side of the screen. Then let go of your mouse button to automatically place the widget in the sidebar you choose.

Another cool thing about widgets is that you can drag and drop them to determine the order they show up on your sidebar. They will appear exactly the way you place them within the widget screen. If you place recent comments above recent posts, then they will show up just like that on your blog or website.

As far as editing widgets go, each widget has different options which can be configured. If you see an arrow next to the name of the widget, you can click on it to expand it. This will then give you a variety of options that can be customized for that specific widget. A good example of this is setting the number of recent posts to show.

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How to Install and Activate a WordPress Theme1

By on August 12, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Install and Activate a WordPress Theme

[This tutorial applies to WordPress blogs running in a self-hosted environment, meaning that you’ve installed WordPress on a web host of your own. It doesn’t apply to blogs hosted on free WordPress.com accounts.]

Installing a WordPress theme is very straightforward. WordPress themes available for download from various places on the Internet are typically packaged in .zip files (i.e. theme-name.zip). Installing a WordPress theme involves nothing more than unzipping the .zip file into the appropriate directory of your WordPress installation, and activating the theme from your WordPress administration console.

Structure of a WordPress Theme

In order for you to install your new WordPress theme correctly, you need to understand the basics of how the WordPress system interacts with themes. A WordPress theme needs three essential files in order to work correctly with the WordPress administration:

o An index.php file: This file is the controller of a WordPress blog. Most WordPress themes also have other PHP files that represent various sections of a WordPress page, but index.php is the only truly necessary PHP file.

o A style.css file: This file controls the look and layout of the WordPress-based website using style definitions. It also contains the information that is used in the Manage Themes section of WordPress to display the theme name, version, author, and description

o A “”screenshot”” image: This image is used to create preview of the corresponding theme in the Manage Themes section of the WordPress administration. It can be any of the common web graphics files (png, jpg, gif), but it needs to be named screenshot. For instance, screenshot.png, screenshot.jpg, or screenshot.gif.

If you’ve gotten your theme from a designer who knows what he’s doing, you don’t really need to worry about making sure the theme is set up correctly. If you’re not sure, you might just want to double-check that you’ve got the basic files needed to install your theme.

WordPress Directory Structure

The WordPress directory structure contains three folders in the root directory:

o wp-admino wp-contento wp-includes

Under the wp-content folder there is a folder called themes. Inside this folder is where you need to deposit the folder that contains your theme. Here’s an example. Say I’m installing a theme for a recipe blog. The theme is called Recipe, and its folder structure looks like this:

recipe-blog/ index.phpstyle.cssscreenshot.png

This theme would normally be packaged in a .zip file. To use the theme, I would need to unpackage the file, then upload it (probably using FTP) into my WordPress themes folder. If I have WordPress installed on my web server under a directory called blog, my directory structure would look like this:

/WordPress/wp-content/themes/recipe-blog/

index.php

style.css

screenshot.png

Activating a WordPress Theme

After I upload the theme to the correct directory, I can now go to my WordPress administration to activate it. After logging in to the WordPress admin section, I go to Appearances->Themes. I can see that my new theme is installed correctly and ready to be activated, because I can see it in under Available Themes on the Manage Themes page.

At this point, all I have to do is click on the Activate link associated with my new theme. My new theme is now active on my WordPress blog.

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How To Create Your Own WordPress Plugin And Distribute It Online

By on August 8, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How To Create Your Own WordPress Plugin And Distribute It Online

Creating your own WordPress plugin takes a little bit of programming background, though nothing that you really have to pay an arm and a leg for. Most of the how to can be found online. But once you create your WordPress plugin, you’ve got to get it out there, so that it starts to bring out the results you are looking for. For that you will need to focus on distribution, but let’s take it one step at a time.

First, you must determine what it is about your WordPress blog that is lacking. Brainstorm a list of functions that you would like to be able to include on your blog. Once you have the concrete details in place, it is time to learn the PHP language for creating a WordPress plugin. What you will want to do is create one or several files that bear the commands you have given to your plugin in the PHP language. In order to teach yourself PHP, it will take a considerable amount more time and space than can be provided here, but it is recommended that you run Google searches for “”learn PHP”” or “”understand PHP language.”” Once you’ve read up on how the formatting operates, you should be prepared to write the code for the plugin itself.

Taking your ideas, and the PHP translation of those ideas, you can easily and effectively incorporate them into the blog by a simple copy and paste into the body of the code. If you are not creating the plugin for yourself but for other WordPress users, then you may want to create an additional txt file and submit to the plugin directory. Getting the word out on your plugin creation will generate more interest, and if it is something that you charge for, it will lead to more money as well.

But exposure is key and to do that you will have to not only get your WordPress plugin seen, but also promoted. Promoting your plugin is simple, but work intensive. There are a number of traditional marketing tactics that you may wish to use, but one of the most dynamic is social media, because things have the potential to go viral much more quickly. If you have a product that is viable and that others find of interest, it could be that you attract thousands of users without ever spending one dime on marketing promotion.

Learning the tools of the WordPress trade will give you more power for functionality on your own blog, and it could help you generate interest in your site or products increasing their earning potential in the process. If you’re ready to take your plugin to the next level, then create and distribute wisely.

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