W3 Total Cache is a new wordpress plugin that improves the user experience on your blog by improving your server performance. W3 caches every aspect of your site and helps your server to reduce download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
W3 Total Cache plugin remedies numerous performance reducing aspects of any web site going far beyond merely reducing CPU usage (load) and bandwidth consumption for HTML pages alone. Equally important, the plugin requires no theme modifications, modifications to your .htaccess (mod_rewrite rules) or programming compromises to reap the benefits. Setup is easy.
Today I came across a great new theme directory which really tries to help users and not just show the basic themes. The directory is called ThemeGrade and instead of just showcasing the themes it also rates them in terms of general quality and seo.
Features include:
User-friendly Theme Search
The themes are grouped into many categories that it would be easy to find the themes of your choice. Are you looking for a 3-column magazine style themes that are free? Simply select “3 columns”, “Magazine Style”, “Free” and click on the search button and the themes will be shown in the result page!
Theme General Test
Each and every one of the Wordpress theme listed on ThemeGrade has undergone comprehensive tests. The general tests of a theme give you an idea of how well the designer coded the theme. When pass, the score will be added to the General test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the general test score of the theme.
Theme SEO Test
The SEO tests of a theme give you an idea of how well a theme had been optimized for search engines. When pass, the score will be added to the SEO test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the SEO test score of the theme.After you get the general and the SEO test score, the total score of a theme can be calculated. To do that, first, take the general test score and multiply by 0.6 and the SEO test score multiply by 0.4. Sum up the two number and you’ll get the total score of a theme.
Different Ranking Status for Themes
What makes ThemeGrade so special is the ranking system. Quality themes will be awarded either a Gold, Silver or Bronze status. The themes with the highest standard are those which score more than 90% and are awarded with the GOLD status! Ever since I outlined the details of each test, I have found out a few things that I could improve for my themes especially the SEO part.
Two New Themes will be reviewed Daily
Selecting good quality themes and reviewing them in such details take a lot of time.
Divine is a clever little tool that allows you to make Wordpress pages using your pre-made Photoshop works, allowing you unlimited customization right down to the smallest details. All this can be done with minimal knowledge of site creation assuming you know how to use Photoshop but that’s a separate issue.
Yes, you are only as good as your Photoshop template. You see, the idea behind this is to design the perfect visual template within Photoshop then to upload it to Divine, adding all the interchangeable information within Divine. It works surprisingly well and at the moment it is absolutely free however because of this they have limited the number of functions.
It’s clear that a lot of effort has been put into the project and the example that have been put up look great. Ease of use is the key term here, the website not only offers a simple tutorial to Divines use but it has a guide to installing wordpress.
I’m impressed, with features including Built-in FTP-client, Supports for all Photoshop filters and Encoding support the internet could be well on its way to being neater and more stylish, well in terms of Wordpress websites anyway and I think we can all agree that’s a good thing.
If you work as a webmaster and maintain several blogs, or if you just maintain your own hosted somewhere, you would know that it has some extra management costs. WordPress represents the most used platform around the web, which means that vulnerabilities will appear constantly. And the last one it’s making a big impact around the blogger platform.
This vulnerability that appeared recently attacked thousands of WordPress self-hosted blogs (WordPress.com blogs are excluded), and it’s giving a lot of users a big headache. But the good news is for those that upgrade their platform regularly and have already the latest WordPress 2.8.4 are also immune.
Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) wrote a few days ago about this incident and extremely recommending an upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4. This is of course what we would recommend to you to apply as soon as possible.
How do I update my WordPress platform?
You didn’t have the chance to do it already? Here’s a short video (1min 20seconds) about the entire process:
How Can I be certain that my Blog will always be safe?
Simple: You can’t. You can never tell when these vulnerabilities will appear. We can recommend to you this:
Keep your platform updated. Don’t wait until attacks are being public and in massive proportions, use always the last WordPress build.
Keep a daily backup. On a previous post, we mentioned about Blog Backupr, a great and free tool that automates all your backups. Give it a try.
Our friends over at Sizlopedia have released a great new free Wordpress theme that is worth a look. The theme is called MacPress and is actually being currently used on the Sizlopedia site itself.
Here you go with some of the features of MacPress:
Compatibility – It is compatible with the latest version of Wordpress.
Elegant Design – Much like Leopard, the theme has a eye-catching UI of its own.
Theme Options – The theme also comes with a built-in Options panel.
Validated Code – From the XHTML to the CSS, every bit of codehas been validated.
SEO Friendly – It bears a fine code with SEO friendly tags and structure.
And some of the features planned for the future releases:
Styles Chooser – The Options panel would allow the user to select a pre-defined style.
Magazine Layout – A switcher between normal/magazine layout modes.
Intense Debate may have been acquired by Automattic (the people behind WordPress), but Disqus remains the blogosphere’s favorite comment networking service. Not content to rest on their laurels, they’re rolling out a slew of new features with Disqus 3 next week.
Now all I need is a white label version of Disqus, and I just might use it on my blogs.
Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog. It includes a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches.
There are dozens and dozens of these applications, scripts and widgets available, but one of my favorites it is definitely is Ptwix. Simple script that you can use it on your website or blog, that shows your Twitter timeline with a very cool design.
The installation process it’s quite simple, just uploaded to your current server and modify the configuration files with your Twitter account. Since the code is based in PHP and AJAX you will be able to use it in almost any platform, including WordPress of course.
The configuration file is named PtwiX_reader.php and you’ll only need to edit these lines:
BlogBackupr it’s a simple and nice web app that automatically backups all your posts in your blog. It represents a very easy way for you to not worry so much about vulnerabilities in the platform, loosing data, accidental deletion, etc.
It works with all blogs that have RSS-feed, that is the minimum requirement. Among the features that you can find in this web app:
Completely free.
No installation required.
Once you register, the backups are performed regularly without requiring your intervention.
You can export and import all those backups whenever you want.
Automatic restore supported for WordPress.org, WordPress.com and Blogger.com
WordPress users include these backups: full posts, comments, pages, categories and media.
You can have backups without giving your WordPress credentials. Will just use the public feed.
CSS file and images from the blog template are also saved.
This is your administration site where you can execute all necessary tasks with the added blogs:
The main differences are related in bugs fixing about the previous version. Here are some of them:
Translation of role names fixed
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
Upload error messages are now correctly reported
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
Switched back to curl as the default transport
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload
To see all tickets that were fixed from Beta 1, check this link. I really enjoy watching this kind of transparency in projects, where you can give your feedback, insert about a bug and see the evolution about it: owner, priority, state.
As we announced earlier, WordPress released their new version: 2.8, that has big performance improvements. Even though this feature isn’t brand new, it is a nice option that you can give it a try: Wordpress Antivirus Plug-In.
The plug-in has a new version, 0.4, that appeared a few days back and it already includes compatibility with the latest WordPress version.
So what exactly a blog antivirus can do? You may ask. Well, this plug-in can help you out on monitoring possible platform vulnerabilities, virus injections, malicious links inserted, etc. Includes also features like email notifications and whitelisting.
The installation process it’s the same as every WordPress plug-in:
1.Download AntiVirus plugin
2.Unzip the archive
3.Upload the folder antivirus into ./wp-content/plugins/
4.Go to tab Plugins
5.Activate AntiVirus
6.Edit settings
7.Ready
WordPress users and webmasters always find the need to keep a good eye on the deployed platform in case any vulnerability appears and, if that happens, just pray for a quick hotfix. It’s nice to have a quick option that can help you be more proactive about the health of your deployments.
W3 Total Cache is a new wordpress plugin that improves the user experience on your blog by improving your server performance. W3 caches every aspect of your site and helps your server to reduce download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
There are dozens and dozens of these applications, scripts and widgets available, but one of my favorites it is definitely is 
BlogBackupr
As we’ve announced earlier 
