Here is an interesting offer from FreeAutoResponder.biz.

They have a FREE Version of their List Building Plugin and of course they have their paid version which as lots of other goodies enabled.

Their is a One Time Offer on The PRO ( paid ) version for $27 USD which is you skip by and want to buy it later it does become $67 USD.

Personally, if you really want to avoid using a 3rd Party Autoresponder Service ( which I highly recommend that you shouldn’t ) as the price is too high then this might be an option.

I’ve got the Free Version to test out and see if it’s all good without any hidden surprises and I’ll report back here…

In the meantime if you want to check this out for yourself then you can Grab Your Free Copy.

There are a few interesting Bonuses and you can sign up for a few of the owners Email Courses do to with list building and Autoresponders… Everything helps.

[Aside]

The Ideal situation is to have the Leads saved on your SIte AND in your 3rd Party Autoresponder Service. I’ll have to check out if there are any plugins for that. The reason this is good is just in case your 3rd Party Autoresponder service goes strange for whatever reason and you still have your list. I know of a few non WordPress Scripts do have this functionality.

EasyVideoPress is a new Premium WordPress Plugin that allows you to

• Easily Publish Any Video on Your Blog
• Easily Customize the Video
• Easily Monetize the Video

Here is what Easy Video Press could do for you in a nutshell:

Publishing Videos on your Blogs

• Easy integration with WordPress
• Video player with support for practically all video formats
• Supports mp3 playback
• Supports YouTube playback
• Supports New Youtube short urls
• Host videos on your site or Amazon S3
• Supports low and high quality video
• Full screen support
• Show multiple videos on a single page or post or any of the new WordPress taxonomies
• Can automatically start playing when the page loads

Customizing Videos

• Overlay the video with an image or flash file throughout the videos (for branding purpose and call to action)
• Show a cover page before the video plays (for branding and call to action)
• Option to automatically hide the playback controls
• Change the size of your videos
• Change video player control’s colors
• Hide or show controls
• All of the above can be done on a video by video basis

Monetizing Videos

• Share (send to friend) option (not for .swf videos)
• Overlay can be linked to another web page
• Redirect to new page when the video or YouTube or sound playback finishes
• All of the above can be done on a video by video basis

Plus with this plugin, you can also create time-limited, unique download links for zip files, Adobe Acrobat documents, or any file you can store on Amazon S3. You just create a post, use the magic shortcode generator with the "download link" option and that’s it! A protected download link will be created with time limit as well.

Get your Copy Of Easy Video Press

If you have recently upgraded to 3.0, please open your config file and get new security keys. WP 3.0 uses a different set of security keys than prior versions. It uses the same set as WP MU does, so you will have to get new ones.

You will find it below the database information

WP Authentication-Security_Keys

Copy and paste the link highlighted below into your browser address bar. You will see something like the above , but with the actual keys.

WP Authentication-Security_Key URL

This is what your config file should look like once you copied the keys. then you just save and close in the upper right corner.

UPDATE

I’ve just noticed that this is happening under the "Posts belonging to Category ‘Plugins’" pages. I think that’s my fault!

UPDATE #2

Well I finally got to delve into where the "code" was misbehaving. The funny thing is that on this current theme, the Categories Widget is using the archive.php file, under /wp-content/themes/eximius. Of course this is the Eximus Theme. Now the archive.php is using the_excerpt() function to display the post and not the_content() function. There is a much better description of what’s going on at http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/the_excerpt It’s time for a theme change anyways now the site is upgraded to WordPress 3.0.

I’ll give credit where credit is due.

Thanks goes to  Artem Russakovskii and his post on wordpress-plugin-development-how-to-include-css-and-javascript-conditionally-and-only-when-needed-by-the-posts

And as a follow up from the good folk from the WP Codex – http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_enqueue_style and also regarding a new look on CSS and styling Anchor Tags – the Proper Way…. as shown by Anatoly Lubarsky at http://blogs.x2line.com/al/articles/159.aspx

To all of the above, a big thanks. I went from “hey how do you go adding in CSS with a plugin” to having it working in about 20 minutes, including research and dreaming up new stuff.

That’s another step forward in the Plugin “How To’s”.

First, how do blogs get hacked in the first place? Because of it’s design, there are many vulnerable areas in a WP site.In brief:

• Outdated plugins and themes
• Using plugins from unknown sources
• using an older version of WordPress
• Weak passwords
• using admin as your username
• insecure or incomplete installations
• leaving certain files on your server, such as the readme.html
• not removing your WP version from various areas on your site.
• keeping the default database prefix.
• and several other ways that we’ll cover another time.

Fortunately, WP has several plugins that make doing many of these security measures a breeze.

Here’s a list of my favorite ones

Login Lockdown ~ records the IP address of every failed login attempt. If more than a set number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. This can be modified via the Options panel and admisitrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the panel.

WP Secure ~ does a multitude of functions that used to have be done manually, such as:

upgrade to the last version of wordpress
check plugins that are out of date
Remove error information on login-page
Hide your wordpress version(frontend & dashboard)
Remove really simple discovery
Remove Windows Live Writer
Remove core update information
Remove plugin & theme update information
Add index.php for plugin directory which hides your plugins folder
Change the default admin username & tests the strength of your password
Restrict access to wp-config.php file, wp-includes & wp-content folders
Restrict wp-admin for only your Ip
–> Restrict access to wp-admin Manual
–> Check files and folder permissions

Secure WordPress ~ does pretty much the same thing as WP secure, plus it also provides a  free malware and vulnerabilities scan with SiteSecurityMonitor.com

WP-MalWatch ~ is a scanner designed to help alert you when hackers have been at work inside your blog. WP Malwatch does not protect your blog, it only logs suspicious events and alerts you possible security breaches.

AntiVirus ~ scans your blog for exploits and spam injections and provides anti-virus protection for your blog. Although it’s a very useful plugin, many themes will show a false positive, because it doesn’t recognize some of the code that is used.

WordPress File Monitor ~ monitors your WP site for added/deleted/changed files. When a change is detected an email alert can be sent to a specified address. Be aware that whenever a plugin updates, or creates any change, you will be notified.

There are many others out there. As I test them out, I will tell you what I think.

Look them over and choose the ones that you like best. I have them all installed and have not had any compatibility problems so far.

There is a plugin for just about anything you want you website to do.

If you can’t find what you are looking for then you need to find Tim Brownlaw. The code guru of the internet. By the way did I mention that he is the owner of www.advancedwordpresstutorials.com

There are some good sites which explain this with some example code. Some good examples are available at: http://wpengineer.com/wordpress-built-a-widget/ If you do want to try out the example on that page you’ll need to do a couple of things.

Create a new folder under your ../wp-content/plugins .
Create a new file to save it in.
Add the Plugin Header – The example on the page doesn’t show one – it’s an example!
Add a registration function to keep things happy. What is there won’t work – or it didn’t work for me so needed this addition.

Now this example code worked after I performed the changes above ( Yes I am going to describe them in a moment!) . As it is an example – you are going to have to make some decisions on what you are going to call it etc.
Step 1.

Now as this is an example of a Multi Widget – I created a folder called multi-1 ( when I’m experimenting/Developing – I always put my plug-in code in Folders ).
Step 2.

Next is to copy and paste the sample code into a file – again I called this multi-1.php and this lives in the previously created folder with the same name.
Step 3.

Add in the following Plugin Header – Remember this is an example bit of code we are just seeing what it does…So some of the info doesn’t matter. The one that does is the Plugin Name.

Plugin Name: Multi -1
Plugin URI: http://www.somewhere.com
Description: Example of a Multi Widget
Version: 0.1
Author: Multi-1
Author URI: http://www.somewhere.com

The important line here is Plugin Name: Multi -1 as this is what you are going to see in your Plugin page – the plugin name called Mutli-1 – so you can find it to activate it. That always helps.
Step 4.

Add the additional registration code. This is a snippet of the original code from the example.

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<label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>">
Title: <input id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>"
name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('title'); ?>" type="text" value="<?php echo attribute_escape($title); ?>" /></label></p> <p><label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('entry_title'); ?>">Title for entry feed: <input id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('entry_title'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('entry_title'); ?>" type="text" value="<?php echo attribute_escape($entry_title); ?>" /></label></p> <p><label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('comments_title'); ?>">Title for comments feed: <input id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('comments_title'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('comments_title'); ?>" type="text" value="<?php echo attribute_escape($comments_title); ?>" /></label></p> <?php } } register_widget('My_RSS_Widget');

} And this is the code with the added function.

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add_action(‘widgets_init’, ‘My_RSS_Widget_init’);
function My_RSS_Widget_init () { 
 register_widget(‘My_RSS_Widget’);
}

Again this is just one way to achieve this…

The bit we changed is…

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add_action('widgets_init', 'My_RSS_Widget_init');
function My_RSS_Widget_init () {
 register_widget('My_RSS_Widget');
}

So after you’ve done all that, you can go into your Plugins panel and activate the plugin called Multi-1 . Then go into Appearance -> Widgets and install a few instances of Multi-1. One thing I did check was the table – wp-options – to see what the new entries were. This new wp_widget class takes care of the creating and destroying of each widgets values. Which if I were to do this the old way.. I’d have to write the code to achieve the same thing. This is where this Class really shines. So now I ( and you ) can get busy creating multi widgets and not worry about all the “housekeeping” code.
Just remember…

This new class only works with WordPress 2.8 and above. Can’t say it works in the upcoming WordPress 3 as it’s not around yet… Everyone should be running the latest versions of WordPress anyway so if they want to use your new Multi Widget – they’ll have no excuses not too! Ok, I think that covers most of it.. If not, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you on it. What I have described here is exactly what I have done and it works a treat. So it’s a very good “framework” to build upon. Have fun!

It’s been a slow start in getting this website up and running. As you can imagine, there is a lot of information out there regarding WordPress and it takes time to learn it and then provide that information here for you. The aim is to make this a central location that will reference as much of the information “out there” as we can and add our own explanations to make things clearer when required.

And not  forgetting our contributors who help provide the content and keep me under control, a big thank you to you.

I’m out looking  for more contributors… If you are interested, just drop me an email.

Last but not least, to all those individuals and companies that have given so much information and guidance on their own websites, a big thank you. It’s the combined efforts of many that makes the internet the Rich information resource that it is.

If you have a “WordPress” related site, please drop me an email and I’ll get you and your site included on here. “Sounds like another plugin is needed..A Resource review Page.”

So again, have yourself a very Happy 2010 and we look forward in providing you with more great information and helping you get the most out of your WordPress Experience.

Cheers

Tim Brownlaw and the AWT Team.

Domain Name remains the same

If you are moving the site onto a different server and using the same domain name, then it’s a simple matter to export(backup) the site files and the Database and import them onto the new server. Made much easier if the hosting account has Cpanel.

Moving to a different URL

If the installed version is living on a domain that is different to the one it’s being moved too, then it gets a little more complicated.

WordPress Stores absolute URL’s inside the Database itself so if you change the sites URL, things won’t match up.

There is an easy solution.

The team over at Justcoded.com have come up with a little script that performs all the necessary changes for you. You can read more about that, and get the script from

http://justcoded.com/article/wordpress-tips-moving-site-to-another-server/.

I’ve not yet tried it, but I  will because I’ll soon be moving some of my development sites I have installed on my onto some of my hosting accounts. Plus I’m sure some of my students will want to do the same thing at some stage.

Thanks to the “JustCoded” Team for providing this and some other useful tips on their site.

(I’m not affiliated with JustCoded – I just like what they have done. So if you do get to use them for any projects, I don’t get anything in return.)