Microsoft Word and WordPress

As much as I discourage the use of Microsoft Word, I know its widely used as the preferred method of writing for some people. Be it for a letter, a resume, or even in some cases, a blog post. Some people use Word to write their blogposts, then copy and paste them into WordPress.

This isn’t unusual at all, and in some cases I would even encourage it. Using an editor like Word has tremendous advantages for some people, for example:

• Comfortable environment. You’ve been using Word for ever and you’re comfortable with it.
• Custom dictionaries and strong spell check. If you’ve been using Word for sometime, you might have customized your dictionaries to suit your language and even the niche in which you write. For example, a technical writer may have certain terms added to the dictionary over time and adding all of these into the browser’s dictionary would be a lot of work.
• Automatic saving and backup. You can take full advantage of your existing backup system without having to worry about your blog too much. I’ve had friends loose hours of writing because something; went wrong in their editing window in the browser.
• Offline writing. If you’re on the go a lot, you may or may not have access to the internet. Sometimes it may be safer to keep your work offline until you’re ready to publish it. This way you always have the latest version in your computer. — I use Evernote for this by the way, it lets me work online when I’m online and offline when I’m not.

With all that said, if you’re using WordPress, you should be aware of a cool little function that is provided to Microsoft Word users. After finishing an article or a composition, most people would simply copy and paste the writing into the WordPress post screen, publish and be done with it. But that’s just for the inexperienced.

WordPress has a paste from Word function that cleans up the text and code from Word and makes it more web friendly. If you’re using Word and want to publish in WordPress, you should take a look and use it, it could save you time and effort, not to mention a lot of headaches.

How to Use it

The paste from Word function is only available through the Visual Editor in WordPress.

To access it:

Create a new post for WordPress

Make sure you’re in the Visual mode. There’s a tab on the upper right hand corner of the editing box, if you’re on the HTML tab, click on Visual.

To paste from Word, use the clipboard icon with the MS Word logo on it. Its the 2nd icon to the right of the “Paragraph” type of selection:

A new window will pop up where you can paste the stuff you copied from Word. This should help you maintain your styles in Word, like bold, italic, and headings as well.

Conclusion

This little handy trick should help you publish faster and more consistently when you use Microsoft Word as your editor of choice. Whatever you do, do not, go back and forth between the Visual and HTML tabs (unless you know exactly why and what you’re doing).

If you’re going to use Word to publish in your WordPress website, you should stick to one or the other while writing any one single post. WordPress tends to change a few characters when you go from Visual to HTML and you don’t really want that because your posts could come out with the wrong formatting or not be visible at all.

Related posts:

1. Troubleshooting and Modifying your (WordPress) website
2. Tiny WordPress improvement.
3. List of words to blacklist in your WordPress site.

There’s always a list of stuff you do before you post to your blog. Whether you realize it or not, there are a number of things that must be done before you hit that Publish button on your next blog post.

For example, did you…

• Categorize your post properly?
• Use proper title (h1, h2, h3,…) tags?
• Give it some tags to contextualize it?
• Did you add your trackback links?
• Have you optimized your slug?
• Spell check?
• Did you remember to give your post an image or a thumbnail?
• Did you remember to ____________?
• Linkify the post?

The list can go on an on depending on your own workflow. But stop worrying about these things, note them down on a list so you can keep it handy as reference. Better yet, get this plugin.

About Pre-Publish reminders

The plugin is written by Nick Ohrn and it is highly rated. Despite its low total download numbers, it serves a very good purpose for those of you that want to make sure you cross all your t’s and dot your i’s.

Installing Pre-Publish Reminders is as simple as installing any other plugin. Click on install then activate.

Pre-Publish Reminders is a great little plugin that presents you with a customized list of stuff to do before you publish your post; hence the name.

Quick & Easy

Installation is pretty standard. Go to your plugins section, click on add new, then find the plugin and install it. Nothing special about that; you can activate it at the same time.

After you install it and activate it, the plugin shows up under Tools and its listed under its own name. Configuration for the plugin is pretty simple. The configuration page gives you all the options needed to start using the plugin, you can add, delete or customize reminders.

Adding reminders

Adding a new reminder, you can select the color for text or background with a color picker.

Type in the text you want to show up as the reminder. Tip: Don’t make the text there too long. You’ll be seeing this text in your post edit screen when you create a new post so think about that. I prefer brevity in the text field because I put my list of reminders on the side directly above the save/edit/date panel. Notice the nice touch to where you can add a color and a color background to our reminder with a slick color picker. You can add one more level of customization to your reminder and make it Bold (strong), Italicized (emphasized) or Underlined. Click on Save then your reminder will be available from your post page.

Using the Reminders

Pre-Publish Reminders in action. Three sample reminders shown.

Simplify things and actually make this plugin a useful addition to your toolset, I suggest you do the same. Drag the panel up to the top of your page and place it directly above the Publish panel as shown on the picture.

As you work through your post, use the reminders to keep you on track. The reminders have a nice little check-box next to them to mark them as completed allowing you to focus on your content and not the stuff you need to do to publish.

Instead of just text, I wish you could put hyperlinks as the reminders. This would come in handy for some of you; for example if you want to do some keyword analysis before you publish, you could have one of the reminders actually take you to your keyword analysis tool.

Deleting Reminders

I almost feel silly telling you how to delete reminders because it is so simple, but here it is. To delete a reminder, just go to the options page for the plugin, select the reminder you want then click delete.

Related posts:

1. How I do a semi-automatic glossary on WordPress
2. How to Completely Uninstall WP-e-commerce shopping cart plugin.
3. WordPress plugin idea. Examination Plugin.

That’s a tough question, and one that many people will answer right away with their first choice for hosting. But really, is anyone else’s opinion of a host the most important thing you need before making a decision? I don’t think so. Many different things come into play when you begin to answer some of the questions that really matter. Below are a few hosts I recommend and the reasons why. I have personally used these services with varying degrees of success, keep in mind this is mostly for LAMP style of hosting. I briefly talk about Godaddy dedicated servers. I’ll eventually give you a good review for VPS and Dedicated servers, but this is mostly for shared hosting.

Dreamhost. Is my current choice.
I have to admit, I’ve complained about Dreamhost many times before. Sometimes in their blog, sometimes on twitter and I’ve even bitched them out on email. The support guys take it in stride each time. The past couple of times I had a problem, I handled it differently and approached them nicely. It all got resolved within minutes. You must be thinking the fact that you contact them enough to notice these kind of things should be a sign on its own. Granted once or twice a year my services will be unavailable for sometime.
There’s another side to that story, every host I’ve worked with for more than 2 years has gone down about 2 or 3 times during the year. It happens. Sometimes its a datacenter outage, sometimes its just a mistake or spike in traffic. Fortunately for us as consumers we’ll be seeing less and less outages as our data gets distributed across the cloud. In the meantime, for the price you pay, and the services you get Dreamhost cannot be beat. You need to be a developer, or a geek like me to actually need or use their stuff. I’ll have to write a review to show you all that you can do with Dreamhost. Some of it you can do it with other hosts, some of it is only available in premium plans, and some of it is just not doable in other hosts. If these terms make a twinkle in your eye, Dreamhost is for you: Perl, SSH, SVN, Shell (bash,tsch, and fish can be installed) *unlimited* storage, users, domains and bandwidth , RSYNC, PHP, and there’s so much more. I pay from ~14 to ~18 USD per month because I use one of their private server plans, but you can find deals for 3 – 7 dollars per month.

Bluehost is a web hosting provider that has managed to serve 1000s of customers. Up until a couple years ago they were my choice host for new projects and for clients that needed basic hosting. They have a full service line of products and some people swear by them. I no longer use them for my own personal reasons. You ought to do your research if you really want to use them before you hand out any cash to them, refunds can be tough and watch out for auto-renewals. They make you jump through a couple of hoops to cancel your account if you want to do so. Otherwise they are stable and very reliable. Support isn’t that great, a little slow for my taste, but they get the job done. They offer all the hyped and standard bells and whistles, like Dreamhost as far as the unlimited things go. However you don’t have SVN for example. You’ll be using SFTP/SSH after you give them your Driver’s License, or you can use FTP & the ubiquitous cPanel. Highly rated always and one of WordPress’ recommendations on their hosting page. –But then again, they recommend Godaddy for hosting, and I would just simply never make such a recommendation. That leads me to my next point.

Godaddy. Don’t get it, I warn you now. I sigh if you got it already, but let me know if I can help you get out of trouble. In the other hand I will probably not help you if you went against my advice not to get it and you still did. Especially Windows based hosting. IMO, it is useless, cumbersome and poorly implemented. Godaddy does domains better than any other registrar I’ve tried, I currently host all my domains with them. Also, I must say that I don’t recommend shared hosting. If we go to dedicated server hosting, they are pretty good. I used them for a heavily trafficked server for about a year (100k pagevies/month is a lot for me.) And never had a problem I didn’t cause myself. The only problems I ever encountered in there were caused by me running the wrong command, or updating the wrong RPM. I had a Dedicated Fedora server. BTW, you’ll never learn as much about hosting as when you host your own server completely.

JustHost. Has a large fan base, I admin 2 WordPress blogs hosted on JustHost and it has been a pleasure working with them. Haven’t had any downtime since I started working with them. I would recommend it if its within the budget. I have not done a full through review and have not used for personal projects or clients. I’ve always had clients come to me with hosting already on JustHost. I think they charge extra for SSH access if I remember correctly and I thought that was the only downside and kind of a tacky thing to do IMO.

Liquidweb. By far the best host I’ve worked with for standard LAMP type of websites, with the basics like PHP, MySQL, Apache and the usual suspects. (Joomla, WordPress, Wikis). They truly have support heroes there. I moved a client from a crappy ancient host named XO, and there were some issues with DNS and MX records during the transfer. The liquidhost guys responded super quick to all my emails, I chatted with some of them and even called in a couple of times. Each time I interacted with them, they knew exactly what to do, where the problem might have been and what to tell the other host. If you can afford slighlty higher than the cheap hosting online, these guys are for you.

Hostgator. I find it to be highly rated by everyone. I got a chance to work on a couple of sites recently and I find their service up to par, fast and always reliable. The DNS instructions were a little bit fuzzy, on your control panel you have your DNS servers shown there but in some other locations it says to use more generic name servers. With this uncertainty of what the right settings should have been, and a super slow time to update records, it made a site move take about 10 hours longer than it should have. I don’t think its Hostgators’ fault, but I never have to wait longer than 20 – 30 minutes for DNS to update. Maybe its the network that Hostgator is being hosted from, or I was simply on a busy host with a busy name server.

InMotion Hosting. I learned about them at WordCamp LA 2009. I actually won a year of free hosting with their business class hosting plan. I’m using it for the development of the muychingon.com site that went down earlier this year for a facelift. So far they are fast, reliable and quick to work with. I think certain things are a little bit rough around the edges, but in general things work as they should and support is outstanding. Good as any other good host. They seem to have a lot of awards and stuff and they’ve been around for a while. I don’t think they’re going away anytime soon.

Do your shopping around. Take your time, if you’re itching to get your content up and make it available to the world right away, why don’t you setup a free account at WordPress.com, then you can take a little bit of time to really research your hosting options. Most of the prices you see advertised with super low rates like $3.99/month or something like that require you to pay two years in advance. You want to make sure you’ve made a good decision when you agree to a two year contract. Also, I recommend Dreamhost again in this regard, because you’ve got nothing to loose. They give you a 97 day return policy. That’s 3 full months of time to completely take their service for a ride. Okay, enough about hosting and dreamhost… but I’m just sayin.

My previous article shows some of the questions I ask when checking out a new host or evaluating a current one. http://notagrouch.com/technophile/wordpress/evaluate-webhost.html

Related posts:

1. WordPress Host recommendations
2. How to evaluate a WebHost
3. Hide your website during development.

When you want to setup a website, or an online store, or even your own social network, you will most likely need a webhost. These are some questions I run through when evaluating a webhost.

This is very much a work in progress, and you’re looking at version .01 of this. Your feedback is appreciated in the comments and come back soon. The corners will be nicely polished and you’ll be confident when you buy your next hosting package. Questions in the meantime? send me a tweet @notagrouch

For Any kind of Hosting

• On a shared plan, do you get SSH access?
• On a virtual server plan, do you get root to your own vm?
• Do you get regular shell user access?
• SFTP access but no shell access?
• Can you create additional users to manage your account?
• What operating system do they use for their hosting services?
• Do they offer upgrades in case you need to expand quickly?
• Do they offer 24×7 phone customer support? If not included with my hosting package, can I pay for it?
• Can you schedule scripts and commands? This is usually called “cron”
• Can you create “unlimited” databases?
• Can you host “Unlimited” domains?
• Can I send e-mail out from my host?
• How many users on my server?
• Do I have processor & memory guaranteed?
• What is the upload/download speeds, practically.
• Do they use cPanel? usermin? custom? no control panel?
• Do they provide you with installation scripts for the software you want?
• Can you have long running processes?
• Do they have a trial period?

For High Availability Hosting (need to list more)

• Where is my data?
• Is it distributed in multiple geographical locations? in the same data center?
• What type of internet connection does your datacenter have?
• Review SLAs & service features.
• How long before my site is up in case of hardware failure?
• What monitoring system watches over your hosts?
• What is your downtime to alert policy?
• How long before I’m back up after a hardware/datacenter/process failure?

For Special Application hosting (more needed)

• What version of the software do you run? (PHP, Ruby, Java, Python)
• Can I run multiple versions of it in parallel?
• Can I run my own version?
• Do you have SVN?
• Can I setup my own?

Related posts:

1. What Host should I buy?
2. WordPress Host recommendations
3. Remote Access to MySQL Database for WordPress

If a piece of software knows there’s a problem its great when it alerts you of this problem. Even better than just an alert, is a follow up action to correct the problem.

WordPress has this type of mechanics, for some things, for example, the Auto save feature.

If you open up a draft of a post, you might get a warning like this one:

But then when you actually go to the linkprovided and try to compare the versions to make sure you’re working on the right one WordPress might tell you this:

Why?

If WordPress knows or can know that the revisions are identical, why take me through all the clicks and follow-up with this? Seems like a costly operation and a waste of time for me as a user.

A better approach would be to present me with a warning that says that there is another revision that was autosaved, but the current one and the autosaved are identical. This would just be an alert that can be dismissed. Some built in support could come along with the alert, like a warning to the user to check other tabs or windows they might have open that are causing the auto-save to trigger and prevent mangling your working document. But there shouldn’t be anything for WordPress to do.

There is no need to take me through a bunch of clicks and page loads just to see that there’s nothing for me to actually do.

Related posts:

1. List of words to blacklist in your WordPress site.
2. Write in Word, publish with WordPress
3. Favorite WordPress Plugins List

If you haven’t heard of Quix, and you’re a webmaster, or a webdmin, or work on SEO a lot, you definitely want to check it out. I’ve been using it since the day it was announced and I love it, it hasn’t replaced some of my major tools, but it is very helpful and extremely useful when I want to do quick analysis and check for “stuff”. You can actually dig pretty deep into different types of information about a website or specific URL.

What kind of stuff? Well head over to its page to read more about it, you can also read Yoast’s original announcement and read more there. There is a video on the right that shows you what it can do.

I put together a cheatsheet for myself a while ago, and I just cleaned it up a bit, so I thought I’d share it with you. I know, I know, other people have already made them before. I like mine because its compact, landscape oriented and easy to edit. You can easily copy it into your own Google Docs or your computer and make changes as you see fit, take sections out, make comments or notes, or whatever.

You can get to Quix Cheatsheet here hosted on Google Docs, or download a PDF version of it: Quix Cheatsheet (PDF) You can also download it in different formats, making it easy for you to edit on your own computer, from Google docs as shown below:

Many thanks to Yoast for making this available for us.

Related posts:

1. Google Sidewiki. Awesome.

• Do you support (fill in the blank) theme?

It depends, if its a popular theme, chances are I can install it for you. The ones that are supported for sure are: Thesis, Athahualpa, Revolution, Flexx, beyond that, almost any highly rated plugin from the official repository will do too, but just to be sure please check with me.

• Do you support (fill in the blank) plugin?

The same applies as the first question above, for themes. Please see it.

• WordPress says its really easy to install already, they have a 5 minute installation guide, why don’t I just do it myself?

Please, by all means if you want to roll up your sleeves and give this a try yourself, then go for it. Millions of people have done it and new people do it everyday. It isn’t that hard, there are so many free resources online already that can help you get started too. The services I offer give you peace of mind and worry free maintenance, but if you have time to do it yourself I encourage you to do so. If you run into any issues, please let me know if I can answer any questions for you.

• But, the hosts you recommend already offer automatic WordPress Installations, why is yours any better?

The automatic installation they offer is just a basic installation. You still need to go through at least 6 pages of configurations and settings before your website is ready to go. Not to mention, you have to make sure you have a backup, e-mail works, your urls are well formed, and that you know how to use the site.

• Do I need to give you my username and password?

It is up to you, there are two ways to do this, you can create your account as a master account, then go into the control panel and create me an account. Or you can give me your username and password, let me do all the work I need to do, then you can change your password when I’m finished. It is all up to you, I recommend that you create me a separate account so you can easily turn it on and off when you need my help.

• How can you say its Free?

In order to have a website of your own, you need to pay somebody for hosting. This hosting fee is going to be there no matter where you go. The reason I’m offering you this service for free is that when you buy hosting from my recommended host, they pay me a commission fee. This commision fee ends up paying for your installation, maintenance and support. So, technically it isn’t free as in a free lunch, but at least it doesn’t come out of your pocket. In this case the host pays me a percentage of your fee.

• But I still have to pay?

Your only costs are those you pay directly to Dreamhost, and your registrar where you bought your domain, I recommend Godaddy, I have over 60 domains registered with them. But I would not recommend their Windows hosting. (World’s Largest Registrar – GoDaddy.com). Remember, you need a domain of your own. If you need help with this, please let me know and I’ll be happy to walk you through it.

Related posts:

1. Favorite WordPress Plugins List
2. Tiny WordPress improvement.
3. Troubleshooting and Modifying your (WordPress) website

When I install WordPress for you, you get a bunch of pre-installed plugins. You also get to pick additional ones from the list below; these also happen to be some of my favorite plugins.

Optional plugins:

Adsense-Deluxe
All in One SEO Pack
Articles
Category Posts Widget
Contact Form 7
Display Widgets
Inline Posts
Lifestream
NextGEN Gallery
OpenID
Ozh’ Who Sees Ad
Page Links To
Photo Dropper
Popularity Contest
RSS Footer
Redirection
SEO Smart Links
SexyBookmarks
Statpress Reloaded
Subscribe to comments
Subscribe-Remind
TweetSuite
Twitter Tools
WP Since Last Visit
WP-Polls
WP-PostRatings
WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam
WP-Syntax
WordPress Download Monitor
cForms II

Included:

Akismet
Google Analytics for WordPress
Google XML Sitemaps
Maintenance Mode
Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu
Really Simple CAPTCHA
WP-DBManager
WordPress.com

Additional Options

There are some plugins that require extra configuration. The plugins listed below can be installed for an additional fee.
wp-e-commerce
Featured Content Gallery
FeedWordPress

More Plugins

If you would like to add a plugin to the list, please speak up in the comments. I’ll probably add it to the next revision of this list, or you can do it in private.

Related posts:

1. Favorite WordPress Plugins List
2. List of words to blacklist in your WordPress site.
3. How I do a semi-automatic glossary on WordPress

When I install WordPress for you, you get a bunch of pre-installed plugins. You also get to pick additional ones from the list below; these also happen to be some of my favorite plugins.

Optional plugins:

Adsense-Deluxe
All in One SEO Pack
Articles
Category Posts Widget
Contact Form 7^[1]
Display Widgets
Inline Posts
Lifestream(see it in action right here)
NextGEN Gallery
OpenID
Ozh’ Who Sees Ad
Page Links To
Photo Dropper
Popularity Contest
RSS Footer
Redirection
SEO Smart Links
SexyBookmarks
Statpress Reloaded
Subscribe to comments
Subscribe-Remind
TweetSuite
Twitter Tools
WP Since Last Visit
WP-Polls^[2]
WP-PostRatings^[2]
WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam
WP-Syntax
Wordpress Download Monitor
cForms II^[2]

Included:

Akismet
Google Analytics for WordPress
Google XML Sitemaps
Maintenance Mode
Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu
Really Simple CAPTCHA^[3]
WP-DBManager
WordPress.com

Additional Options

There are some plugins that require extra configuration. The plugins listed below can be installed for an additional fee.
wp-e-commerce^[4]
Featured Content Gallery
FeedWordPress

More Plugins

If you would like to add a plugin to the list, please speak up in the comments. I’ll probably add it to the next revision of this list, or you can do it in private.

1. With one basic contact form installed.
2. Installation only
3. Included when you use Contact Form 7
4. Please note: This plugin is free, but desirable addons may be purchased directly from Instinct

To help reduce Spam comments on your WordPress website, you can and should use Akismet. It seems to be the most accurate and effective plugin. That’s the only plugin to control spam that I run in all the sites I manage. There’s one more thing you can do to improve your site’s SPAM catching ability: Blacklisted Words.

Here’s the best list of blacklisted words for your WordPress website. You can just go to your comment moderation options and add them there. Get the file right here. wordpress-blacklist-words

What does it do?
Protects WordPress from Spam
Saves you time, (moderate real comments, not spam)
Reduces load times (less spam comments to display and clean up make your site run better)

This list is for English words to blacklist and protect you from spam. If you have an interest for other languages, please let me know in the comments. I’ll be happy to compile one for your language.

Related posts:

1. Favorite WordPress Plugins List
2. WordPress Widgets vs Plugins, what’s the difference?
3. Free WordPress Installation FAQ

The plugin wp-e-commerce keeps getting regular updates. There is a new update for it available in the control panel of your plugin administrative dashboard in WordPress. But before you upgrade automatically, you should read this:

The update instructions in the readme file are pretty clear. Just copy over the existing files and you should be good to go; emphasis on “should.” Notice that the readme file also says not to overwrite the files in your images folder or your files folder if you have images or downloadable files for your products.

The way I updated this plugin to minimize the hassle, was to use rsync: briefly the steps are noted below:

• Deactivate your plugin
• Get the zip file from instinct
• go to a tmp directory
• unzip it
• backup or make copies of the files you’ve changed
• rsync the updated files onto the existing plugin
• bring in your changes back into the plugin, e.g. Language files.
• Activate the plugin

# go to temp directory
cd /tmp
# unzip the file, you'll have a folder named wp-e-commerce.
unzip wp-e-commerce.3.7.5RC4.zip
 
# figure out which files you need to backup before the next steps.
 
 
# I usually save the language file that I've modified to .modded so when RSYNC
# overwrites the files over, I can just copy that "modded" file onto the new one
# or merge the differences in. In this case, from 3.7.4 to 3.7.5 (rc4) it looks like
# there are new definitions in there so rather than just writing over the file with our
# backup, we'll bring in the changes we've made into the new file. 
# In the case of the images and downloadable files, the Rsync job should preserve your
# files.
 
# rsync from /tmp/wp-e-commerce to wp-content/plugins
# use the -n option to test
# when ready, remove the "-n" option
# Note that Rsync will only update files which are newer in the plugin.
# generally this will work
# cd your wordpress root
rsync -P -rvvia /tmp/wp-e-commerce wp-content/plugins/

The changes I had made to the Language file EN_en.php were only a few so it was easy to bring them over to the new file. Please note that the new language file has new definitions so you don’t want to just overwrite it with your old ones –I don’t think. Instead just copy over your changes to the new file. Also note that RSYNC should preserve your image files and downloadable files.

Related posts:

1. How to Completely Uninstall WP-e-commerce shopping cart plugin.
2. How I do a semi-automatic glossary on WordPress
3. Featured Plugin: Pre-Publish Reminders

I’ve been working on two sites to bring forward a shop. One of the sites is solely based on wp-e-commerce and wordpress and the shop functions will be in a catalog format. The other site will only have shopping functions, like “add to cart” or “buy now”.

I have to do testing a lot to make sure nothing is breaking as I make changes. Here are the steps I’ve taken to completely uninstall wp-e-commerce whenever I need to start the installation or configuration from scratch in order to test something. This is specifically for WP 2.8.5, using the 3.7.4 stable version of wp-e-commerce.

There are three steps to completely uninstalling wp-e-commerce.

1. deactivate the plugin & delete the files from your host.
2. find the options and tables to delete in MySQL.
3. remove the stuff from the database

The forums at Instinct have a lot of information, in there I found the basis to uninstalling the plugin completely.

Anyway, after you’ve uninstalled and deleted the plugin.. lets find the options and tables to delete in MySQL.

To get the rows that got inserted into the wp-options table, run this:

mysql -uuser -ppassword -e "select * from wp_options;" database > remove.wpsc.options.sql
cat remove.wpsc.options.sql | awk '{print $3}' > new.rows.txt &&  mv new.rows.txt remove.wpsc.options.sql

Then you need to delete many rows in this txt file. As a general rule I found that wp-e-commerce adds all its rows into the wp_options table adjacent to each other. You should remove everything before the first row, and everything after the last row of options. These are: widget_wpsc_categorisation and user_account_url respectively, as of 3.7.4 I had 51 rows in there. I ended up with a file that had this in it:

widget_wpsc_categorisation
wpsc_purchaselogs_fixed
wpsc_version
country_form_field
email_form_field
wpsc_minor_version
show_thumbnails
product_image_width
product_image_height
category_image_width
category_image_height
product_list_url
shopping_cart_url
checkout_url
transact_url
payment_gateway
cart_location
currency_type
currency_sign_location
gst_rate
max_downloads
display_pnp
display_specials
do_not_use_shipping
postage_and_packaging
purch_log_email
return_email
terms_and_conditions
google_key
google_id
default_brand
wpsc_default_category
product_view
add_plustax
nzshpcrt_first_load
show_categorybrands
paypal_business
paypal_url
paypal_ipn
paypal_multiple_business
paypal_multiple_url
product_ratings
wpsc_email_receipt
wpsc_email_admin
wpsc_selected_theme
single_view_image_height
single_view_image_width
wpsc_gallery_image_height
wpsc_gallery_image_width
custom_gateway_options
wpsc_category_url_cache
user_account_url

I had to turn that into a sql statement file, in my case I’ll name it drop.wpecommerce.options.sql
Assuming you have already cleaned your file up, and have just the rows for the wp-e-commerce options in the file, you can do some tweaks and fancy search & replacements, or just do it by hand, but make it look like this:

DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name in ('widget_wpsc_categorisation','wpsc_version','wpsc_minor_version','show_thumbnails','product_image_width','product_image_height','category_image_width','category_image_height','product_list_url','shopping_cart_url','checkout_url','transact_url','payment_gateway','cart_location','currency_type','currency_sign_location','gst_rate','max_downloads','display_pnp','display_specials','do_not_use_shipping','postage_and_packaging','purch_log_email','return_email','terms_and_conditions','google_key','google_id','default_brand','wpsc_default_category','product_view','add_plustax','nzshpcrt_first_load','show_categorybrands','paypal_business','paypal_url','paypal_ipn','paypal_multiple_business','paypal_multiple_url','product_ratings','wpsc_email_receipt','wpsc_email_admin','wpsc_selected_theme','single_view_image_height','single_view_image_width','wpsc_gallery_image_height','wpsc_gallery_image_width','custom_gateway_options','wpsc_category_url_cache','user_account_url');

Save the above to a file named drop.wpecommerce.options.sql, we’ll run it later along with the tables drop statements.

To get the tables that wp-e-commerce inserts and remove them, follow these steps:

# get the tables that are like wp_wpsc -- change this to your own prefix
mysql -uusername -ppassword -e "show tables like 'wp_wpsc%'" database > remove.wp-e-commerce.tables.sql
 
# replace the end of each line with a comma.
sed 's/$/,/g' remove.wp-e-commerce.tables.sql > new.file && mv new.file remove.wp-e-commerce.tables.sql
 
# remove the topmost line
sed '1d' remove.wp-e-commerce.tables.sql > new.file && mv new.file remove.wp-e-commerce.tables.sql
 
# insert drop table statement
sed '1i\
DROP TABLE' remove.wp-e-commerce.tables.sql > new.file && mv new.file remove.wp-e-commerce.tables.sql
 
# add semi-colon at the end of line
sed '$s/\,/\;/g' remove.wp-e-commerce.tables.sql > new.file && mv new.file remove.wp-e-commerce.tables.sql
 
#Run the command against MySQL, run the one for options as well.
mysql -uusername -ppassword database < drop.wpecommerce.options.sql
mysql -uusername -ppassword database < remove.wp-e-commerce.tables.sql

This seems to work for me allowing me to install wp-e-commerce from scratch whenever I need to.

Please note, BIG DISCLAIMER. This will probably loose all your data in regards to a store. I use this when I need to test the installtion of wp-e-commerce from scratch. You should NOT run this against your production store, unless you know what you’re doing. Also, I love this plugin, I should mention that I’m only uninstalling it because I’m doing constant testing.

If you need help uninstalling a newer or older version of the plugin, please let me know. I can probably help you but I haven’t gotten around to update this article

Related posts:

1. Updating to wp-e-commerce 3.7.5
2. Featured Plugin: Pre-Publish Reminders
3. WordPress plugin idea. Examination Plugin.

Finally ready to get your own WordPress blog? or website? Well take a minute to explore your options. After helping many of you with your WordPress sites I’ve realized that hosting makes a big difference. Here are some tips that can help you get a good host without breaking the bank. These are also good if you’re trying to move away from a host that isn’t working out for you.

Get a host that supports:

SFTP instead of just FTP. Preferably
Multiple Databases instead of just one.
Multiple Domains instead of just one.
Unified login management.

Get a host that runs:

Linux or another Unix variant.
MySQL
Apache

Stay away from:

IIS, Windows, FTP-only.

For inexpensive shared web hosting, I personally use these hosts for different projects:
Dreamhost, Liquidweb, JustHost & BlueHost.

They are good and have all that you need. If you want to read more about hosting for WordPress, I recommend you take a look at this:
http://wordpress.org/hosting/.

Related posts:

1. What Host should I buy?
2. How to evaluate a WebHost

Here’s a quick visual tutorial on how to connect to a Remote MySQL Database, using MySQL Administrator.

These instructions should be compatible with all hosts that allow remote connections to MySQL and have CPanel. Most hosts I’ve dealt with, offering C-Panel allow this type of connection, but YMMV.  Check their documentation, or just try my tutorial. If their documentation isn’t clear, or the tutorial I wrote doesn’t match what you see with your webhost. Let your webhost know, or you can ask for help in the comments.

Works in all 3 major platforms

You can use this for MySQL Administrator in Mac, Linux & Windows

The Goal here is to: Connect to your WordPress Database on a regular webhost such as Dreamhost.com using MySQL Administrator. You can probably configure other webhosts which offer C-Panel and MySQL with minor tweaks to the instructions, and really it doesn’t have to be a WordPress Database.

It should take you about 5-10 minutes to complete

Get your external IP Address

If you’re connecting to a remote webserver, you most likely will need your external IP Address.

It should be something like NNN.NNN.NNN.NNN where each “N” is a number from 1 to 254.  Down below you’ll see the same number in a slightly different format: ipnnn-nnn-nnn-nnn.your.service.provider.com. That’s it! That’s your IP Address. Note it down, you’ll need it shortly.

Add your IP Address to the Remote MySQL

Log into your CPanel and add Databases, then click on Remote MySQL. The next screen will let you enter the IP Address you got from ipchicken. Type in the address and click “Add Host.” Make sure there are no spaces before or after the address.

Verify your IP Address was added

After you enter the address in there, you should see it listed under “Access Hosts.” This tells the MySQL Server that your IP Address is allowed to connect remotely. You’ll need to change this if your IP Changes periodically.

Please note that you might want to do the previous step only when you need to access your database remotely. As with any other service that is available on the internet, having a port open can potentially lead to someone trying to hack your server. Please Please Please note that I said POTENTIALLY. It isn’t a trivial thing to do, but if you’re paranoid you could just activate this for the time when you need to work on your database then remove the IP when you’re finished.

Configure a new MySQL Administrator Connection

Assuming you’ve already installed MySQL Administrator, you now need to create a new connection. Start the program, and click on the “…” next to the Stored Connection data field. This will take you to the screen you see below and you can configure your connection information there.

Usually, the fields are the same as you have for CPanel. Username usually matches the one you use to login to your webhost’s cPanel. Password is also generally the same.  Hostname could be different in different cases, your best bet and most defaults is the same as your domain, e.g. www.example.com. Schema is the database name.

Use the Stored Connections Dropdown to connect

Using the dropdown menu from the MySQL Administrator, you can select the configuration you just created and be on your way to MySQL Administration bliss. If you like using a program in your Desktop, and prefer graphical interfaces (GUIs) instead of text-only or web applications, this is what you need.

Go crazy in there looking around

Just don’t start changing things you’re not sure about. This is one of many ways of administering your MySQL database, and it works particularly well for WordPress Installations. A companion to MySQL Administrator is MySQL Query Browser which allows you to actually run queries against the databases so you may change many fields at once, or do special queries from your desktop. This works both on Windows and Mac, and if memory serves me well even Linux.

What can you actually do with this?

A few of the things you can get done with this are:

• Changing many posts at once with a MySQL query.
• Running a query to see how many plugins you have installed.
• Auditing your database to make sure you haven’t been hacked.
• Making a Backup (use the Schedule Tab under Backup for automatic nightly backups)
• Restoring your database from a backup after a problem.
• Exporting registered users for an external report.
• Learn the WordPress Database structure.

Looking for a good webhost that I recommend?
>>Dreamhost, Use Promo Code MYSQLREMOTE or visit them with this link To Sign up and get up to $77.00 off. That's a great deal if you're ready. You can also start a Free Trial. (non-affiliate link)
>> JustHost, I wrote this tutorial on a Justhost.com account. Get started right here. They're fast, highly recommended and I like them so far (non-affiliate link)
>> LiquidWeb, My Favorite new host. Get started right here. LiquidWeb has what they call Heroic 24/7 support, so far I'm impressed and have been getting help quickly each time I need it. (non-affiliate link)
>> Bluehost, Decent webhost, my least favorite of the four, but good enough. Check them out their offerings right here. (non-affiliate link)

Please share this post if you found it useful. You can use one of the buttons below to Tweet it, send it to FaceBook, or LinkedIn, or save it to other locations. Your comments and feedback is also welcome!

Related posts:

1. How I do a semi-automatic glossary on WordPress
2. How to evaluate a WebHost
3. How to Completely Uninstall WP-e-commerce shopping cart plugin.

What is the difference between plugins and widgets?

Plugins are functions that do something to your website. They could serve a back-end purpose and never be visible to you or the public. In the other hand, a widget usually is the representation of a plugin in the form of an object that can be placed somewhere on your website via the widgets interface under the appearance menu.

Widgets are always plugins, but plugins don’t always have widgets. A widget usually is a pretty and easy way of using a plugin. I hope this short explanation clears some things up if you’re just starting with WordPress.

Related posts:

1. Favorite WordPress Plugins List
2. ideas for 2 new plugins.
3. WordPress plugin idea. Examination Plugin.

After a few months of being online, I have finally opened up the ability to leave comments on this site. You don’t even have to register, simply go to an article and at the bottom you’ll see the form to leave a comment. You must fill out your name and an e-mail address though, as well as verify that you are a real person by entering the verification code.

I encourage you to give me feedback on any of the posts you’ve read or liked. I particularly would love to hear if any of my techniques or how tos have been useful. No “first” or “nice post” or similarly useless comments please. If you don’t have feedback, but you have a question about something I wrote, feel free to ask about that as well. I would love it if you paid attention to these articles:

• Getting started with Blogging
• Writing your first blogposts
• What defines a Blog today?

You could also give me feedback on any of these archives, or the general look and feel of the site. For Webmasters and Bloggers, if you leave your website in your comment, I will check out your site and I usually will comment back.

No related posts.

If you happen to be a writer of any kind, and run your own blog you want to check out these plugins. Even if you’re a casual blogger –that makes you a writer of some kind right? You should find these useful. All of these are very simple to install, there are other alternatives and some of them are fine. I list a few more I haven’t tried at the end of the listing, and if I’ve missed any others feel free to leave a comment. Keep in mind that these are to help with writing and not with blog maintenance, comment management, SEO, and other blog related tasks. I found a number of other posts out there with titles like: A gazillion WordPress plugins for writers, and they list many plugins that are irrelevant to the craft of writing. I hope to keep adding and maintaning this list as time goes by but I will also aim to keep the focus of the title. There are many other fine plugins out there but they don’t necessarily help a writer’s task, I hope the ones listed here do.

Footnotes. I use footnotes a lot, perhaps more than I should. Think you need footnotes? I found the perfect plugin to help with this, WP Footnotes is the plugin you need to compliment your articles with fancy, well organized and auto-generated footnotes. All you have to do is place double parentheses around the text. The plugin will automatically parse the footnotes and display them at the end of your article in order and with a small link back up to the location that originated the footnote. Thats it, wrap it ( ( and ) ) with no spaces and you’ll see it in action.

WP-Footnotes Configuration Screen

Article Listing. Another way of listing your articles, this plugin allows you to selectively display articles on a page. Its called Articles and its by Alex King. You can find it here, about 7 plugins down –yeah most of them are worth checking out while you’re there.

My own blog's admin view for Hackadelic Series.

Including Posts. If you have pages in which you want to include posts, you can use Inline Post Plugin for WordPress. This is useful if you often write pages or formal posts which you want to compliment with more dynamic and informal blog posts inline with the main content.

Thesaurus. The official Plugin repository for WordPress has a Thesaurus plugin listed, but it shows that it hasn’t been updated in a while. Furthermore, I’m not sure if it will add itself to the writing panel. The page instructs you to install it on your sidebar but why would ou want it there and not in the edit post/page pages? Anyone else know of a good thesaurus that is available while you edit? Maybe even a FF plugin?

Columns. If you want to split your text into columns and you don’t want to mess with tables (because you shouldn’t), you can use this plugin to get you out of prose boredom. WP Post Columns helps you split your text into as many columns as you want easily. You simply use a short tag notation of [ column ] [ / column ]. To wrap the text, at the end you close with [ end_columns ]. You can specify width and padding for each column independently. Its neat and it seems like a great plugin so far. Here’s a nice example page. I wish it would support this though: [ column automake="2" ] content [ / column ] so where that would automatically split the text evenly into two columns, right now you have to split it manually.

Acronyms. Acronyms are used a lot in technical writing and so you should help your readers understand what each acronym stands for. The plugin for this is titled Acronyms and it has tons of built-in definitions. You can easily add or remove any terms as you see fit. To show you how a visitor benefits from this plugin, look at this: “YMMV” is an acronym, if you mouse over it it will show you what it stands for.

Auto linking. If you’re a journalist or a very active blogger you may find this useful. SEO Smart Links is the plugin I like to recommend for auto linking. The admin panel offers a lot of options and lets you automatically define certain words to link to any URL you want. You can also let it automatically link to categories, tags, and posts which can dramatically increase the amount of information you convey to your visitors.

Templates. If you often need to post articles with the same outline, or skeleton you could probably save some time with a template. Check out Post Templates, this plugin allows you to save a template for future use. You can use it for both posts and pages and if needed you can use a page or a post to create a template.

Series. If you want to tie your posts under a general taxonomy, you put them in categories. If you want to file them away you can list them in pages and you could use tags to assign them to topics. But what if you want to tie an arbitrary group of posts that have different categories and tags? You could use what is known as a series. I have a couple of them around my site. Justin Tadlock describes how to do it here if you’re familiar with your theme or want to learn, that’s a great way to do it, but I found Hackadelic Series. Hackadelic Series works great and it does the job just like I want it. It is similar to plugins that do related posts but you have a little more control over the articles that get listed. To use it, put the name of the series into a custom field with the name of series and the plugin does the rest. Don’t look for many configurations under the hood, “it just works” I say. I’ve yet to have a problem with it and I’m using it in 4 different websites.

Software Code. If you’re a technical writer and often need to present code snippets, you can use WP Syntax. It will help you highlight code so it is easy for your visitors to read and follow.

–
Also see:
FD-Footnotes. I’ve never used it, but it has a high rating.
Annotation Plugin. I’ve never used it, and activity on it seems low. nyone tried it?
Magazine Columns. Also haven’t had a chance to test it yet, the download history doesn’t build much confidence either.
Organize Series. Haven’t tried it yet.
WP Print. By WordPress Guru Lester “GaMerZ” Chan, if you want to offer a nice print view for your visitors, check this one out.

No related posts.

Nextgen Gallery is awesome, it displays images in your WordPress installation in a way that is very customizable and using the plugin itself is a breeze.

Recently it got updated to version 1.3.4 3.1.5 1.4.1. If you’re using a custom template, this upgrade most likely broke your installation. The reason seems to be that the upgrade removes or overwrites the view directory found under the wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/ folder.

If you use the automatic upgrade feature from WordPress, then you’ll need to put back your template from a backup. If you’re doing the upgrade manually then just be careful not to overwrite your template and you should be fine. If you’re not using custom templates, then this issue probably doesn’t affect you.

Related posts:

1. Favorite WordPress Plugins List
2. Updating to wp-e-commerce 3.7.5

Last night, as I was writing one of the posts for my blogging tutorial series, I wanted a way to get columns working in a post. Newspaper style, or magazine style some may call it. I thought it would be really cool if I could wrap content around short tags that would automatically make columns. I even thought of the short tag notation, options available how to use it and all that fun stuff. I went to sleep thinking I would ask my buddy Steve to help me write it or point me in the write direction on how this might be accomplished, if he didn’t know I was going to check out Scriptlance to see if someobdy wanted to make it for me.

Silly me… this for one, isn’t trivial, and when I came to my senses this morning I decided to just look for a plugin that would do what I wanted. I expected some plugins to be available but I didn’t think that they would be very simple to use or even work well with other plugins. Lucky for me, I found the right plugin on my first search with “columns wordpress plugin” in google. The plugin is called: WP Post Columns. It basically does everything I thought about last night and it seems to do it well. Take a look at this example of a poem I really like, I’ve split it into two columns with this plugin.

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost.

The plugin is not in the official WordPress repository but its very easy to install, just the standard stuff, download, unzip, upload, activate. Or you can try using the uploader function in your WordPress plugin administration console.

The plugin works right out of the box and has no configuration options right now, the author says its because the plugin is beta but I don’t know if it needs configuration options. I think if its smart enough. The plugin can be found here.

Related posts:

1. Favorite WordPress Plugins List
2. How I do a semi-automatic glossary on WordPress
3. How to Completely Uninstall WP-e-commerce shopping cart plugin.

Using a plugin and a simple process, you can easily add a Glossary to WordPress. You’d think that there would be a plugin out there by now to do this. As a matter of fact, there seem to be a few, but none of them really do the job right AFAIAC.

If I could and ever did write it, I think version 0.01 would be based on this requirements.

• Able to add terms through a friendly management page.
• Able to add terms by using shortcodes in posts, on the fly. Something like this {{term:definition}} that would actually enter that into the database.
• Have the ability to only link the first instance of the word in a page.
• The ability to prevent autolinking with a shortcode. For example, if you have defined the word Genus, you should be able to do this !!Genus so it does not automatically link.

There is no plugin out there that does all this in addition to the expected Glossary services like a list of terms alphabetized and paged and all that. So the way I am handling this for now is with a plugin and a manual process.  The plugin is SEO Smart Links, which I think could easily be converted to do all this by itself but I’m hesitant to try this. I want to get exactly what I want down in paper first before I try to hack any code.

SEO Smart Links allows you to define a term, or group of terms that will automatically link to a given URL. It is really great and the admin panel features are well polished.

In theory this is how you add a new term:

1. Create a post for the term which you want to define.
2. Get its URL. If you’re using pretty permalinks then you should be able to guess the URL in advance.
3. Next go to the SEO Smart Links admin panel and define the term you want, and point it to the link you got on step two.
4. Save it and you are done. Notice the many different options that SEO Smart Links gives you.

If you know your permalink structure, you can add as many definitions to the SEO Smart Links panel as you want all in one motion since you can guess the URL in advance. Then you go through and fix any broken links. After you’ve added a number of these you probably want to have them displayed on a nice listing along with other words that belong to your glossary.

To do this, you can create a new page, called “Glossary” or whatever you want and either apply a theme template to list the terms alphabetically and paged, or you could just use php-exec to call the logic to display the terms. Either way you’ll have to do a good amount of testing and tweaking until you get it all right.

I’m currently on the first part of this project, I have defined a number of terms and have the posts ready to go. When you click on a term that I’ve defined, you will be taken to the page which defines the term. After you’ve seen the definition, you’ll find a link to the main glossary from the bottom of the article or on a conditional sidebar. I haven’t decided this part yet.

I will try to get the automatic Glossary page listing by the time I have 25 terms defined. The definition post should be categorized as a glossary term, or according to your own Glossary category; this will help you maintain regular SEO smart links mixed up with the single purpose Glossary of terms link.

edit: I think I figured out a better way to do this, I’m working on it and it seems much simpler. See this post.

Related posts:

1. Favorite WordPress Plugins List
2. Favorite WordPress Plugins List
3. Featured Plugin: Pre-Publish Reminders