Designs with WordPress

Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category

Here are 4 ways to back up your Wordpress (wp) website. Some are redundant and when you run into a problem you'll want to have several options to restore your pages.

From Inside of Wordpress Tools

1. Export from the tools menu
This will let you export all posts or posts by authors in an .xml file. This will be exported as am xml file and check to be sure you received the whole file. Once downloaded count to 12, then look in an asii editor (like Homesite or Dreamweaver) for the complete closing tag </rss> . Sometimes the file does not get downloaded.

Use this before making small reversions, or to be used as a last resort for restoring a site.

2. wp-dbManager plugin,
Once installed go to your tools menu and click on backup. This plugin will back up the database and let you schedule automatic backups. Do this before changing versions. Or once a week ( or what ever).

From Outside of Wordpress

1. From your ftp software (fileZilla or Core FTP Light , Free programs) create a new folder label it with a date example: Backup 100324.

Down load the wp-content folder and all the root files. This should be done before you start working on styles sheets or making any changes like themes or versions updates.

This will not copy your post or pages just additional stuff you add on: Themes, plugins, languages and etcs.

2. Back up your data base from the phpMyAdmin. Your best bet is to have your hosting company walk you through this process. It is pretty simple and painless, a redundancy of WP-DB-Backup, but worth the time if something goes wrong.

WordPress is adding a new description to their Resume:

I Always thought blogging was social, but now Wordpress will take it to a new level. The goal is to leave MySpace and FaceBook in the dust.

Matt Mullenweg says; The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards. We invest countless hour giving our data to networks like MySpace, essentially sharecropping on their land for the privilege of being able to connect to our friends. It’s our friends, our time, our connections, our data — it should be our software.

It make sense to have control of the look and feel of your design, but also what and who you share your pages with.

The update has been extended for another week to March 17th +/- a day or more, and it maybe a couple of more days before it finally gets to your browser. You can expect there's going to be some work to the themes and plugins to upgrade to the new 2.5.

Because of the extra time it will take before all the plugins and themes are ready there will be some time to do some preparation & cleaning including:

1. Change and clean the navigation: I always recommend a well thought out navigation system and looking at my own sites, well Its a good time to re-think the categories.
2. Fix broken links internal and external links.
3. Make sure each page has all the meta tags, title, keywords, and description tags.
4. Check for missing image tags: alt, height and width tags.
5. Add a contact pages.

I do back ups weekly and it will be part of the requirements for upgrading to the new WordPress 2.5 so it you haven't done that in a while know is the time, and check it to make sure it's readable.

Maybe I should say, Not so New Blog, it's been around since January 2007.

Avis is putting a good team together to manage their blog: Eibhlin Payne- Head of Customer Support in UK, Stephen Spiers- Intranet Webmaster, Avis UK, and Xavier Vallee- Head of Marketing in UK. They all have pretty impressive resumes.

The site it self is customer focused. If you look at the topics there's lots of information and helpful hints for using Avis.

There's a topic "We try harder" (also the name of the web site), at first thought: It doesn't work with the rest of the topics, but when I clicked on the link I was pretty impressed how Avis markets themselves with charities, fund raisers, and marketing through the years.

The blog itself uses Wordpress to manage the blog and the design is their own. I like Wordpress and use it myself, but that's another blog.

As a travel agent you can feel safe about sending your customers to We Try Harder.