Blog

Below you can see all our latest blog posts on various WordPress and non WordPress issues, news, plugins, work etc.

If you would like to keep up to date with our blog posts then we also provide a handy RSS feed of these posts and can also be found tweeting: follow us @TheBlogHouse.

The Blog House

WordPress + IIS 7.5 + .NET in root

Or put another way – you want WordPress to run alongside existing web site content and / or site(s) on Windows Server 2008 under one domain name. For example:

1. www.mysite.com (.aspx) + Your-New-WordPress-Site(s) running as www.mysite.com/something
1. /virtualsite (.asp)
2. /virtualsite2 (.aspx)

IIS 7.5 + WordPress + Existing site(s)

I haven’t got time to go over how to install WordPress on a Windows server (happy to do this in comments if people want help), so cutting to the chase:

• You have all the standard WordPress files in the root and some other file type as the default document e.g. default.aspx or index.html
• You need to get WordPress playing alongside these other sites and default documents
• You have URL Rewrite Module 2.0 installed and working already for your other .asp, .aspx or .html content

You need to edit your web.config file so you place something like the following as the first rule:

<rewrite>
    <rules>
        <rule name="Main Rule" stopProcessing="true">
            <match url="^(MainBlogCategory|tag|page|author|feed|OtherCategories)(.*)$" ignoreCase="false" />
            <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php" />
        </rule>
       Your Existing rules continue below...

If the above makes no sense or you want more help shout below.

Thanks

The Best Subscribe to commment plugin?

The Best E-Commerce Plugin for WordPress?

Well let me take you on a little journey…

What E-Commerce Plugins Are Out There?

Loads, frankly. More than I have time to write about here today. So, in alphabetical order no less, here are 6 contenders and a little bit about each of them:

An example Shopping Cart

eShop (available here)
Once installed will give you shopping cart functionality to any Page in WordPress, lots of payment options and allows product options.

Quick Shop (available here)
Adds a nice sidebar cart widget and a button to TinyMCE to add products to posts/pages. Simple, minimal & PayPal compatible.

Shopp (available here)
Once you’ve flicked the switch you’ll have access to more features than I’m able to list in this tiny intro. Shopp offers a great deal of customisation to practically every aspect of the shopping experience but you’ll pay for the privilege with prices starting from $55.

WP e-Commerce (available here)
A seriously popular shop plugin, WP e-Commerce claims to be the ‘best’ out there and in terms of bells and whistles this is certainly hard to argue with. Some of the additional features of this plugin are premium, so you’ll have to reach into your pocket before you can see them on your website.

WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart (available here)
Comes with a cart which can be added to by clicking an “Add to Cart” PayPal button on posts and pages. You can add options to products but primarily it adds the “Add to Cart” button.

YAK for WordPress (available here)
Another no frills, really simple plugin which allows you to associates products with posts or pages as well as offering  categorisation and of course various payment methods.

And the Best E-Commerce Plugin Is…

Ah, I knew you were going to ask that.  I’m going to have to put my cards on the table and say that when it came to the crunch I didn’t have time to investigate all of them.  Who does when you’ve got a deadline to meet? So instead I weighed up the pros and cons of these plugins from their respective write-ups and finally narrowed the choice down to 2 finalists.

WP e-Commerce and Shopp

Unfortunately, in every battle there is a winner and a loser.  WP e-Commerce looked really good.  I even installed it and it functioned really well but the problem was that there seemed to be too many premium upgrades relating to the core functionality my client had asked for.  And so, regrettably, and even though it was a truly exceptional plugin, I dismissed WP e-Commerce and move on to the winner of this imaginary bout:

Shopp

Yes, it’s a premium plugin but what appealed to me was that it had everything I needed, everything that myself and my client considered to be at the core of a great online store and everything would work straight out of the box.

To my utter amazement that was exactly what happened and I instantly had the framework for an e-commerce website live and ready to go.

Since then I have become something of a convert to the Shopp plugin. It’s easy to set up, easy to administer, the documentation on the website is not just comprehensive but it actually make sense and it useful…  Of course all of that is good but there is icing on this particular cake in the form of theme templates which allow you to customise the look and functionality of 99% of the customer facing aspects of the shop.

And that last 1%?

Just write your own code, drop it in your own templates and you’ll have that covered too.

What can you do with it?

A Shopp Category Listing

The last website I built with this plugin was for Coco Joy Boutique who sell handmade jewellery, bridal accessories and monsters (yes, monsters) and this serves as quite a nice little showcase for what is possible using Shopp. With it I have used some of the core functionality that you would usually expect to see like categories, carts, products, images, etc.  but the custom design used on the site I think would have challenged some of the lesser plugins.

With Shopp it was just a case of getting in there, digging in and coding up a solution.

And finally…

So that was my experience of falling for an e-commerce plugin but what’s yours? Was I wrong? Do my affections belong elsewhere? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the shop plugins mentioned here (or any others for that matter) in the comments area below:

When not working with The Blog House, Adam’s alter ego beckons as he dons cape and mask as one of the Superhighwaymen.

Google Instant Search and SEO

First up what is Google Instant Search?

Well Instant Search really needs to be seen to be believed and if you are in the USA or are signed into Google and in the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Russia AND using Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or IE 8 you will be able to do so anytime from now.

For those who can’t see Instant Search yet, think of Instant Search as all the clever Google Ajax technologies and Ad Words stats etc being combined into a master tool speeding up users queries on average by 2 – 5 seconds per query. Google basically shows you your search results LIVE whilst you type each character so naturally being interested in SEO for both our own projects and client’s what does this mean for SEO as we know it?

Google Instant Search and our thoughts regarding SEO

• First page results are going to be even more important for getting users using Google Instant Search to your web site.
• Second page results are going to be for people who really know what they are looking for.
• With the above in mind, getting in the top 3 or even 2 results is going to be even more important especially for highly competitive keyword terms which will have more sponsored ads at the top of the listings pushing the natural results down the page.
• You will need to start paying a lot more attention to the Google suggest results in order to see which keywords are more valuable – number of searches via Adwords tools etc is simply not going to be enough to ensure you know what Google thinks it knows about the end user’s queries.
• Are we going to start to see SEO people targeting 1 and 2 letter combinations to get in the top 3 results for popular queries and if so will Google spot these and remove them?
• Google’s results look A LOT different on lower resolution screens like netbooks making the top 2 results the most important for these users.
• How is this going to affect mobile searches when it is rolled out in the coming months?

What can you do now?

• We would advise going and using Google Instant search using the current search terms that bring you the most traffic now.
• Check if your site shows up in the top 3 results for the keywords important for you
• Start thinking about how you can target some of the important keywords that are now showing up around the important keywords your site use and get in touch if you need professional help and advice.

Is SEO as we know it dead?

No and not by a long way but we can see top 3 results becoming even more valued with the roll out of Google Instant Search over the coming months.

What do you think?

Let us know your thoughts on Instant Search below…

UPDATE: Check out this great summary of the work that has gone into the new Google Instant Search

How to Customize Twenty Ten

Twenty Ten is the new default theme for WordPress 3.0 and makes great use of all the new features this new major release brings so it seems to make sense to start with this as a base for your next WordPress based project’s theme yeah?

Well before you start jumping in and hacking the code you need to realise Twenty Ten is in fact a Parent Theme and you can make ALL your required CSS / Function and Template modifications in a subdirectory so when the main Twenty Theme is updated all those tweaks and hacks won’t be lost for ever – cool ay?

Of course WordPress do a great job of explaining how to start working with Child Themes using Twenty Ten as the base here but we thought we would summarise our take on this for those who need the bare minimum to get started: Got your favourite PHP / CSS editor ready? Great let’s begin…

How to set up your directory should be set up

The most important aspect of getting your new child theme working is making sure you have the required files in the correct place like this:

• web root
  • wp-content
    • themes (directory where all your themes are)
      • twentyten (directory where the Twenty Ten Theme is)
      • your-new-twentyten-child (directory of your new child theme – you can call this anything!)
        • style.css (the only 100% required file in a child theme which must be named style.css)
        • functions.php – this is optional but is the place to add new functions to your theme. It is loaded in addition to the parent’s functions.php and right before the parent’s file.
        • header.php, index.php etc – Again you don’t need these but the best thing to do is make a copy of the original Twenty Ten Theme files you want to modify and store them here. Then edit these copies to remove things that you cannot do via the nice new options within the WordPress Admin area and be safe in the knowledge you can always just delete your copies to get back to the Twenty Ten Originals

What needs to be in the child style.css file as a bare minimum

The following is the standard

/*
Theme Name:     My Twenty Ten Child
Theme URI:      http: //thebloghouse.com
Description:    My child theme for the Twenty Ten theme
Author:                Andy
Author URI:     http: //thebloghouse.com
Template:       twentyten
Version:        0.1.0
*/

@import url("../twentyten/style.css");

/* The following CSS is our example - you do not need to change your site's title link colour */

#site-title a {
    color: #009900;
}

Seems easy enough yeah?

Only thing you need to watch out for is if you want to say change the way Twenty Ten deals with certain CSS values you need to make sure you copy the full original CSS into your style CSS and change each value. By this we mean say you want to change the nice new Twenty Ten footer. You would find the following in the original style.css and copy this to your style.css file:

#colophon {
 border-top: 2pt solid #000;
 }

However simply removing the border-top: 2pt solid #000; part will NOT remove the border – you would need to have the following none value to override the original style.css:

#colophon {
 border-top: none;
 }

Obviously this is a very quick and simplistic look at the great work that everyone who has worked on and contributed to WordPress 3.0 and the Twenty Ten theme but if you are struggling with the basics hopefully the info above might help.

If not I would suggest reading the documentation again here, check out the 1 hour + video below by Steve Bruner and his WordPress 3.0 Customization Techniques or feel free to post a question in the comments below.

Microsoft irrelevant in 5 years?

I am a technology fan first and foremost and secondly a long time Microsoft user of their products and software as I have grown up, like most of my generation (I am 29) using Microsoft technology in both my daily work and personal life as Microsoft / Windows put simply was that ubiquitous that computing WAS Microsoft to most people. However since Vista, and especially since Bill left back in July 2008 Microsoft seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot and not moving forward hence the main thrust of this post – I think unless something drastic happens in the next 6 months they will be irrelevant within 5 years at most.

A brief history of (my) time with Microsoft Software

My own personal relationship with Microsoft started back with Windows 95 and has continued since then via Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, WHS (Windows Home Server) , 7, their server operating systems (2000, 2003 and 2008), the Office suite of software, their programming languages  (ASP, .NET) and their mobile versions CE, Pocket PC, Mobile, 6, 6.1, 6.5. Splitting things up let me explain where I think  Microsoft have done well and where they have stagnated or even worse gone backwards:

Home Operating Systems

Windows lead the world back in the early home computing days of Windows 98 and effectively created what we all take for granted as working home computers these days. They then released Millennium Edition which was possibly their lowest point and reached their peak with Windows XP. XP worked well most of the time, was intuitive and fairly light – certainly when compared to the heavy best that replaced it – Vista. So many things were wrong with Vista it was unfunny but after Service Pack 1 at least you could use your computer almost as well as it worked with the older Windows XP. Then Windows 7 came along, which is what I am typing this post on and it has honestly been a reliable operating system so far but there are still small glitches like thumbnails not showing as soon as I go into my folders, shutting down gives me warnings about background tasks still running and this is all on a fairly high end Core i7 based desktop with 3GB triple channel Ram and fancy graphics card.

Yesterday, I tried the latest version of Ubuntu – 10.04 Lucid Lynx and honestly if I hadn’t have paid for Windows 7 already and I was building a new PC I would use this as my default operating system as everything just works, it looks nice and it hides the geeky parts of the underlying Linux back end very well.

From Windows Vista onwards I think Microsoft have lost their way in the digital, tech hungry homes of today. Windows 7 is good but if we are all honest it is what Vista should have been all those years ago and it hasn’t exactly been a game changer has it?

The only product that has excited me and been innovative over the last few years has been something called Windows Home Server which explained simply, sits on your home network sharing files, allowing remote access to your files and computers as well as most importantly, automatically backs up all your home computer’s each night. A lot of you probably won’t have heard of this though as Microsoft never really promoted it to the mainstream and things don’t look like they will be changing anytime soon as the new version, codenamed Vail (see the excellent We Got Served preview) has not got the killer feature for me and other long term WHS users have wanted – Windows Media Centre built in to allow you to stick a TV Tuner in and record TV and stream it wherever you want within your home and externally.

Put simply Windows 7 will be my last Microsoft operating system with an old copy of Windows XP or Windows 7 on a virtual machine somewhere for the rare old programs that I might need to use someday.

Server operating systems

Windows 2003 is fairly rock solid as most will agree and 2008 is fine by all accounts but as a seasoned web developer I made the decision 2 years ago to abandon the bloat of Windows ASP.NET and start developing in PHP which lead me to look at Linux based Web servers in more depth. All the various Linux based web servers have their pros and cons but going with Ubuntu or Red Hat as your particular flavour and then using Nginx (Apache if you can’t use this) and the various PHP caching systems like XCache make Windows Server and IIS look very slow, inefficient, bloated and tired. Finally we get onto the latest trend in web servers and their OS  – VPS based systems which allow you to have your own self contained chunk of a server to act and control effectively like your own dedicated server at a fraction of the price. Microsoft based Operating Systems are again being left behind in this modern technological revolution as all the leading web hosting companies if they are honest with you will tell you, Windows Server is simply not ready for prime time, reliable VPS based hosting unlike the free Linux based VPS solutions. These Linxu based VPS servers are put simply reducing web site owner’s costs AND also allowing instant scalbibily in temrs of badnwidth, ram, CPU cycles at a touch of a web admin panel and again we will likely not be going near another Windows Server based server again unless we have to 100% support ASP.

Software

MS Office which is £200+ here in the UK is simply not worth that as Open Office is so good at dealing with your Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and FREE that again I can’t see once people try it why they would go the paid Microsoft route again. Email used to be one of the main reasons people stumped up the cash to get the full Office email software but this can now be dealt with either by the impressive and also free Mozilla Thunderbird or if you have faith in ‘the cloud’ Gmail is by all accounts is great. Does anyone really care what Office 2010 will do? I am convinced it will be an incremental upgrade not a revolution and will again be effectively the same product as Office 97 which WAS good for it’s time but is simply dated today.

Mobile (Cell) Phone Operating Systems

Having started back with the Windows based PDAs then moved on to the latest Windows Mobile based smart phones nothing has fundamentally changed with the Windows Mobile OS since the first Pocket PC devices back in 2002. Yes there have been new features stuck on top but fundamentally you could be given a PDA with Pocket PC on from 2002 and a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone from 2009 and you would essentially be looking at the same thing. That folks, is now 8 years of incremental updates whilst the World has moved on, worked together on open source based systems and there has been genuine innovation via software companies like Google, Apple and hardware manufacturers like HTC and Motorola. The iPhone was released in 2007 – nearly 3 years ago now and it is only now just been resoundingly bettered by the Google Android powered HTC Desire which by the way, having just purchased myself prompted me to write this post as there is simply nothing based on Windows Mobile that comes remotely close to it.

The only reason I have personally persevered until now with Windows Mobile is the amazing work the Windows Mobile Communities like XDA Developers do creating custom ROMS and software you can add and flash to your Windows Mobile based devices to sit on top and mask the awful underlying Windows Mobile OS.

What about Windows Phone 7 you say?

Well to me and many other’s it looks like an Apple rip off, has less functionality than Windows Mobile (no cut and paste!), is locked down to such an extent that there will simply be no development community and will be released in 6 months+ when the world and their dog have got used to Android or Apple based smart phones. I honesty think Windows Phone 7 will be one of the most embarrassing and irrelevant product launches in tech history.

So the future…

The future might have been looking slightly better if projects like the genuinely interesting and innovative Courier Tablet hadn’t been cancelled, Bing was actually doing well in it’s own right not because it isn’t set as the default search engine on Windows machines and Microsoft had a decent strategy in the era of smartphones and innovation taking place monthly or yearly at worst, not every 5 years or more like Microsoft seem to be able to deal with. Microsoft have rested on their past glories for too long and when people look back on 2010 I think they will say this year was the year that cemented their epitaph as a previous generation big time tech company who couldn’t innovate and react quickly enough to their smaller, smarter and predominantly open source rivals.

Free Events Plugin with full PayPal integration

Advanced Events Registration by Seth Shoultes is FREE in it’s basic (still advanced) form and allows you to take online registrations for events, meetings, conference and seminars etc and accept PayPal payments for these.

It also allows you to capture the registering persons contact information to the WordPress database as well as provides the ability to send the registrar to your PayPal payment site for online collection of event fees. PayPal payments are captured to the database using the PayPal Standard IPN.

Reporting features provide a list of events, list of attendees, and the ability to export all attendees AND any answers they have given to custom questions to Excel (.CSV). We highly recommend you check it out.

Override WordPress Shortcode to show [ ] brackets

The easiest way we have found to fix this is do the following:

Use the following numeric character references instead of normal [ ] as this way WordPress doesn’t process your plugins shortcode

e.g. [showphones make=’htc’ ] is the same as [showphones make='htc']

So just remember to replace [ with [ and ] with ]

The Blog House Expands

• PSD to custom WordPress Theme
• Bespoke WordPress Theme Design and coding
• Logo Design

Why now I hear you ask…

Well, since soft launching the company last year we have been so busy with our first few clients sites and our top secret WordPress plugin that we put off offering anything publicly as we simply couldn’t guarantee any sort of reliable time frame to turn this extra work around.

However, today that has all changed as Adam and Paul have officially come on board to work as part of The Blog House so get in touch if you have been wanting to deal with a WordPress company based in the UK that can handle everything WordPress related.

WordPress App for Google Android

The initial release has focused on giving you the ability to manage your blog while on the go.

Features include the ability to:

• Configure and manage multiple blogs
• Comment moderation including the ability to reply to comments
• Create and Edit Posts including categories, tags and photos
• Create and Edit Pages
• Get notified of new comments in the Android notification bar

Here is a brief video showing the app in action:

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