Daily Tip: How to Customize Your WordPress Login Logo in Under a Minute

A customized WordPress login is a nice touch to any site, especially if you’re making it for someone other than yourself. There should be no need to install a plugin to do this for you. In order to keep your site lean, you’ll want to avoid adding loads of plugins that do little things like this.

Here’s how you can customize your WordPress login with your own logo in under a minute. Simply add this to your theme’s functions.php file:

function my_custom_login_logo() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
h1 a { background-image:url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/logo.png) !important; }
</style>';
}
add_action('login_head', 'my_custom_login_logo');

Replace the logo.png with your filename and make sure to drop the file in your theme’s images directory.

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Daily Tip: How to Enable Custom Backgrounds for WordPress 3.0 Themes

Enabling custom backgrounds is probably one of the easiest things you can do to improve a WordPress theme that you’re building or customizing. It takes one small addition to your theme’s functions.php file:

add_custom_background();

Save that and you’ll get Backgrounds added to the Dashboard >> Appearance menu, as shown here.

This will allow you or others using the theme to easily upload a background image and/or set a background color through the WordPress dashboard:

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Daily Tip: How to Enable Custom Backgrounds for WordPress 3.0 Themes

Enabling custom backgrounds is probably one of the easiest things you can do to improve a WordPress theme that you’re building or customizing. It takes one small addition to your theme’s functions.php file:

add_custom_background();

Save that and you’ll get Backgrounds added to the Dashboard >> Appearance menu, as shown here.

This will allow you or others using the theme to easily upload a background image and/or set a background color through the WordPress dashboard:

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Discover Your Hidden Market by Analyzing Google Top Search Queries

Top Search Queries is one of the most useful services provided by Google Webmaster Tools. It provides you with detailed information about when your site pops up in their search engine and what pages are attracting clicks. Specifically, you’ll find out:

• The total number of Google Web Search queries that returned pages from your site results over the given period.
• The top search queries that returned pages from your site.
• Impressions: The number of times pages from your site were viewed in search results.
• Clicks: The number of times your site’s listing was clicked in search results for a particular query.
• CTR (clickthrough rate): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click to your site.

3 Steps to Maximize Your Google Search Query Traffic and Increase Your Clickthrough Rate

If you don’t have access to Google Webmaster Tools, it’s very easy to set up. Follow our Quick Start Guide to Using Google Webmaster Tools With WordPress and you can activate the free service in under two minutes. Make sure you’re also hooked up to Google Analytics. You’ll now have access to information that will help you to discover what people are looking for when they find your website.

Step 1. Use Google Webmaster Tools to find out what queries are resulting in traffic to your website.

Immediately when you sign into your account you will see your top search queries in the dashboard. Click on “more” just underneath the queries to see a full detailed graph. You’ll be able to sort your traffic by country, date, and search types.

Make note of the impressions (number of times your page is viewed in search results) vs. clicks (number of times your page was clicked for that query).

Step 2. Sift the Data for Valuable Information.

Don’t worry. You won’t need to be an SEO expert to analyze this data. Here’s what a sample looks like:

So, let’s say you’ve got 4600 impressions due to people searching for “lollipop candy” and a 3% clickthrough rate. That’s great if you’re a candy supplier, but it’s not so hot if you’re an investment banking firm who happened to use a lollipop image in a blog post. You can disregard that information, even though it’s brought you a bit of traffic.

Focus on the queries that are the most relevant to your industry, even if they’re not exactly what you’ve determined to be your main focus. For example, you’re operating a store that sells bags, shoes, and other accessories but you’re getting loads of traffic from the query “matching eyeshadow”. If you can find a way to relate this to your industry, then you may have found a small gold mine.

Step 3: Actively promote products and content related to your most relevant top search queries.

• Write more content to establish your business as an industry expert. If your site is getting tons of search queries from terms that your’re not currently focusing on, it may be time to change your focus. Give that hidden market a reason to stay, click through and buy your brand by focusing more on offering what your users are going to your site to find.
• Feature products that are relevant to what people are searching for. There is only so much real estate on your front page but a good look at your queries will tell you exactly what is driving buyers to your catalog of products and services.
• Consider adding new products that may be accessories to your main product line. If your site has solid search engine positioning and a decent clickthrough rate for items related to your main line, it may be profitable to expand your offerings into related areas.

Conclusion:

Google’s top search query results can help you to formulate an aggressive strategy to increase your clickthroughs and bump up your sales with a few tweaks. A thoughtful combination of content creation, product selection and placement will not only improve your traffic but should also make your site more focused and keep you competitive. Reconsider your site’s focus and your social media strategy. Is your content descriptive of the top queries that are leading potential customers to your website? Or is there a possibility that your top sales demographic may be lurking just beneath the surface? Take a little time today to check out your top search queries and see if you can’t find a hidden market just waiting to be tapped.

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Daily Tip: 3 Steps to Debugging a WordPress Multisite Network

If you receive an error with your WordPress network, chances are that it is due to a failure that happens when WordPress cannot find one or more of the global tables for the network in the database. There are three major steps to walk through in the debugging process. This will help you to cover all your bases before seeking further help.

Step 1: Check with your host to make sure that your account fulfills the technical requirements for a Multisite network.

If your account is not equipped to run multisite, then your host may have disabled the functionality from running, which will result in errors. Check with your host to see if you need to upgrade your account.

Step 2: Inspect your wp-config.php file.

Check wp-config.php for the following:

• correct database details
• SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL constant
• MULTISITE constant
• $base variable
• table prefix

If you have any code after this line, then it needs to be moved up above the “stop editing line”:

require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');

Step 3: Check your database.

Check to make sure that all of the extra network tables have been created:

• wp_blogs
• wp_blog_versions
• wp_registration_log
• wp_signups
• wp_site
• wp_sitemeta

For a complete overview and description of all Multisite database tables, check out the breakdown in the WordPress codex.

Another unusual reason that site creation might stop working on your network is that the location of the database server may have changed. In that case you’ll need to update your wp-config.php file. After covering all these bases, then you’re sure to hit the forums with the full knowledge that you’ve done a thorough check through all the usual suspects.

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Daily Tip: How to Disable Comments On Older Posts to Cut Down on Spam

If you’re getting a fair bit of spam on older blog posts, you may want to disable commenting on posts older than a year or two. Because your posts are still indexed by search engines, you’ll still be getting traffic there, but you may not want the burden of answering questions on posts that are obsolete.

You can easily do this in less than a minute with this SQL query. Sign in to phpmyadmin for your WordPress database and run this query:

UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = 'closed' WHERE post_date < '2009-01-01' AND post_status = 'publish';

You can change the date to whatever suits your site’s needs.

Source: Perishable Press

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Guide to Setting up E-Commerce on WordPress: 4 Things You Absolutely Need to Start Selling Online

Creating an online store is a process that may seem mysterious and complicated when you first look at it. This guide will help to simplify the process and get you selling in no time. If you want to use WordPress to manage your e-commerce operation, then we’ll take you there from start to finish.

There are two ways to sell on your website. The quickest way is to add a “Buy Now” button, which is linked to your account with PayPal or another payment processer. The transaction will then take place at the payment processor’s website and not on your own.

The second way to sell on your website is to use your payment gateway’s API to process transactions directly on your website. This means that when the customer checks out, everything happens on your website. This is preferable to the customer getting redirected to another site for the purchase. It’s this second process that we’re going to focus on in this tutorial. So let’s take the guesswork out of it and walk through the four main elements that you will need for an effective e-commerce setup.

1. Merchant Account

A merchant account is a type of bank account that allows your business to accept payments by debit or credit cards. This is not your own business bank account. You will need to acquire a merchant account. You may be able to get one through your bank, but sometimes this isn’t easy for a small business. More than likely you will need to go through an intermediary for an internet merchant account. When selecting a merchant account provider, you’ll want to research and compare fees among them, make sure they offer a guarantee, as well quality support and policies that suit your business’ needs.

2. Payment Gateway

A payment gateway is an e-commerce service that authorizes payments for online businesses. It handles the technical part of the transaction processing, similar to the way a physical POS (point-of-sale) terminal would do so onsite for a retailer.

Some merchant accounts come complete with their own payment gateways. However, the gateways may not be compatible with your shopping cart, so you’ll need to make sure that you’re not getting set up with some obscure gateway that no cart will support. Also, you don’t have to use your merchant account provider’s gateway. You can select one on your own. You are probably safest selecting from one of the most widely-used gateways, such as PayPal, Authorize.net, Google Checkout, 2CheckOut, or Amazon Payments.

We can’t necessarily recommend which would be best for you because each business will have different needs and varying volumes of transaction. However, we can offer a few tips to help you with the selection process.

Tips for Selecting a Payment Gateway:

• Easy to Integrate with WordPress – Do a little research to make sure that your payment gateway will be easy to set up with WordPress. It’s helpful to already know which plugin you’ll be working with to provide your shopping cart, as you’ll need your gateway to be supported by the shopping cart you use.
• Performance and Reliability – You’ll want to choose a payment gateway that is known for rock solid reliability, as you don’t want their service to go down when your customers are trying to make purchases.
• Security -Your customer’s information must be safe with the gateway that is processing your credit cards. Therefore, you want to make sure that the provider follows industry standards for encryption and security protocols.
• Support – Select a payment gateway that is known for providing excellent support, because it will be taking a percentage of your sales. Make sure that they will be able to answer any of your questions and swiftly handle support issues if anything goes wrong.

3. SSL Certificate

SSL stands for “Secure Socket Layer”. SSL certificates are used to confirm the identity of a website or server, encrypt data during transmission, and ensure the integrity of transmitted data.

If you’re processing transactions on your website, you will need to have an SSL Certificate. Ordinarily, this is something that you obtain from your host. If you do not purchase it from your host, you can usually get your hosting provider to install the certificate for you. For most sites, an SSL certificate will generally be in the range of $20 to $80 a year, depending on your needs.

4. Shopping Cart

WordPress has many shopping cart plugins and the one you choose will depend on the complexity of the functionality your store requires and what gateway you intend to use to process your payments. You have many to choose from in both the free and premium categories and I suggest that you make a checklist of everything you’re hoping for your cart to do before settling on a plugin.

What to Look For in a WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin

• Updated for the latest version of WordPress – This is important for security reasons as well as a sign that there is an active development community surrounding the plugin to continue to improve it.
• Ease of Implementation – If you’re setting up your store yourself, then you’ll want a shopping cart plugin that is basically plug and play, unless you have decent experience with PHP.
• Payment Gateways Supported – You will either choose your cart based on what payment gateway you’re planning to use or choose your gateway based on what your cart supports. In either scenario, you’ll want to verify which gateways are supported.
• Design of the Cart – If the shopping cart you select is very unattractive right out of the box, then you’ll need to spend a lot of time theming it and it will take you more time to get off the ground.
• Documentation and Professional Support -You’ll want to select a cart that has decent documentation and support for customizations you want to add now and in the future. While your store may be a simple setup at first, you want the ability to expand as necessary.

Conclusion:

The bottom line is that if you have a website dedicated to selling online and you don’t accept credit cards, then you’re losing massive amounts of business and opportunities to further brand your products and services.

Certainly, the ease of simply adding a “Buy Now” button that redirects you to an offsite payment gateway is probably much less time consuming to set up. However, in this scenario you will lose your ability to keep your branding consistent throughout the purchasing process. Why sacrifice your traffic for a little convenience? This is your website and you want it to be as professional and effective a tool as possible. If you put a a little more effort into how your online store is set up, you’ll have total branding control over your transactions, as well as the ability to steer and retain your customers.

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Using WordPress as a True CMS

OK, so everybody is always talking about how WordPress is no longer a simple blogging platform but a true CMS.

This is true, WordPress can be put to use for a wide variety of websites, whether it be a local community website or, especially with the help of WPMUdev.org, a fully-fledged social networking arena.

However, there are a few things that you can do to truly revolutionize your website, and to make it much more of a CMS than is currently available via most themes, and that is what this article is all about.

This has been written for those who are new to WordPress, as well as seasoned users, so there will be certain things here that may be obvious to many users, such as how to use a nicer permalink structure or create a page template, but just skip those sections, as there may be a hidden gem here that will give you that excited feeling we get, and have you rushing off to test some code. For those of you looking to branch out form the norm, take a look, and this may give you some pointers.

Changing Your WordPress Permalinks

Don’t you just hate those URL’s you get when using the default setup of WordPress that look something like:

http://YOURSITE.com/?p=123

They really don’t help with your Google rating at all, and that is something that should make you rush to make changes.

I always use the following format, and believe that this is what many others use also:

http://YOURSITE.com/categoryname/posttitle

To do this, go to Settings>>Permalinks & select the Custom Structure, and type in:

/%category%/%postname%/

This structure is fine for smaller blogs but may cause performance problems with larger sites.  To find out more about this, take a look at this article.

How To Set a Static Page in WordPress

Nothing looks more bloggy than a home page with a list of latest posts.

This is why you may want to consider using one of your pages as the home page instead of the traditional one.

To do this, go to Settings>>Reading and select the page that you would like to use as your home page.

Creating Page Templates in WordPress

To create a different look for different pages, you just need to create new page files, which can then be uploaded to your main theme’s folder and selected from a drop-down menu whenever a page is created or edited.

The easiest way to do this, is to edit the current page.php file, and make your changes to it, save it under a different name, such as page2.php, and then select it if you want to use that design.

Of course, it would be best to name it something more descriptive, especially if you create a variety of different templates, as you will then know where you are when editing pages.

At the top of the new template page, you will need to have the following:

<?php

/*

Template Name: YOUR TEMPLATE NAME

*/
?>

Creating Category and Post Templates in WordPress

There are ways to create a different look to various categories by hard-coding, but there is a much simpler way, and that is by using the Idealien Category Enhancements plugin.

Not only will this allow you to have a different look to the category.php page but, depending on the category you are in, it also allows you to have a specific look to all posts in a certain category/sub-category.

This involves adding code at the top of each edited category page, in the same way as with the page template above. This code is:

<?php /*
Category Template: Custom Template Name
*/ ?>

I have found that the section of this plugin that deals with linking in your seperate single.php files does not always work correctly, as it doesn’t seem to call the seperate file.

If this happens, then don’t panic, as there is a plugin that deals with this very nicely.

The Single Post Template plugin allows you to easily add as many templates to your create/edit posts section of admin, and you can then select the template you wish to use for each post.  This is probably a much better way to deal with it if your posts are in multiple categories, as you get to choose which template to use.

Simple Redirection in WordPress

If you want to have full control over your menus, enabling you to link easily to posts or external links from a page menu, this is very simple to do, with very little editing.

Open your page.php file, and find the following:

<?php get_header(); ?>

Change this to the following:

<?php
global $post; // < — globalize, just in case
$field = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘redirect’, true);
if($field) wp_redirect(clean_url($field), 301);
get_header();?>

Once you have done this, you can create a simple redirect by creating a new page and using the custom fields section.

Name: redirect
Value: FULL URL TO WHERE YOU WANT TO REDIRECT

Showing Alternate Headers on your WordPress Pages and Posts

If you want to show different headers, depending on which part of your site users are on, you can do this by replacing a single line of code.

Find the following line of code in a file such as page.php, single.php, category.php, etc:

<?php get_header(); ?>

Replace this with this code:

<?php include (‘ALTERNATEFILE.php’); ?>

To make this easy on yourself, you should use alternate names such as header-portfolio.php, header-blog.php, header-gallery.php, etc.

Calling Alternate style.css files in WordPress

So, you have a different header for various sections of your site, but the CSS is all the same. Why not have a seperate CSS file for different areas of your site?

Again, this is done by simply replacing a single line of code.

Find this code (or something similar):

<style type=”text/css” media=”screen”><!– @import url( <?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’); ?> ); –></style>

Replace it with this code:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/wp-content/themes/imwp/style2.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />

I hope that this article has shown you a few things you may not have known about, and will enable you to make WordPress work for you as a CMS more than ever.

I am currently working on a website that includes all of these methods, so why not take a look at it and see it in action:

www.moonworksfestivals.com

Plugin Downloads

These are the two plugins discussed above, in the category/post/page templates section.

Idealien Category Enhancements

Single Post Template Plugin

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WordPress Troubleshooting Basics: How to Check Your Error Logs

Checking your error logs can help you to isolate the source of problems you’re having with your WordPress installation. It can also help you to describe your issues more accurately to others who might be of help. Nearly every one of us has turned to forums for help when troubleshooting WordPress. Articulating your problem when you’re not sure what is going on can prove to be quite challenging. Want to know how to get help faster? Provide information that will help others to help you. One question you’re bound to be asked is, “What do your error logs say?”

What is an Error Log?

Server error logs are where Apache will send diagnostic information and record any errors that it encounters in processing requests. You can find out everything you ever wanted to know about error logs at the Apache website.

The location of your logs depends on the how your server is ste up. Believe it or not, they’re not hidden by a magical veil; you can actually access them through the control panel set up by your host. Most of the time your hosting provider will have one of two major types of control panels: Plesk or cPanel. We’ll walk you through the process of retrieving your error logs from either one, since these are the most common.

How to Check Your Error Logs Using Plesk

Log into your Plesk control panel. Select your domain. Then select “Log Manager”. You’ll see a number of different logs there. Select error_log and it will launch in a new window.

How to Check Your Error Logs Using cPanel

Log in to cPanel. There should be a section that says Logs. Click on the error logs icon. It will take you to a new page that will look like this:

So, you’ve got your logs. Now what? The logged items are dated, so scroll down to the very bottom, if they’re in order, and look for the errors that you’ve been seeing on your site. Copy and paste the pertinent ones from the day you’re accessing them and start googling, or save them to add to the error information that you’re posting about in the forums. Checking your error logs frequently can help you to detect problems your visitors might be having that you don’t know about. This will help you will help you to keep your site running smoothly.

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Daily Tip: Display Your Most Popular Posts In the Last 30 Days Without a Plugin

Here’s a bit of code that I’ve found to be handy. Sometimes you have a site that is already running so many plugins and you hesitate to add another one on top just to display popular posts. Instead you can use this to change your WordPress loop to show your most popular posts by comment count in the last 30 days:

<ul>
<?php
function filter_where($where = '') {
    //posts in the last 30 days
    $where .= " AND post_date > '" . date('Y-m-d', strtotime('-30 days')) . "'";
    return $where;
}

add_filter('posts_where', 'filter_where');

query_posts('post_type=post&amp;posts_per_page=10&amp;orderby=comment_count&amp;order=DESC');

while (have_posts()): the_post(); ?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php printf(esc_attr('Permalink to %s'), the_title_attribute('echo=0')); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php

endwhile;

wp_reset_query();
?>
</ul>

Just add this to your template where you want to use it. No plugins necessary!

Source: DeluxeBlogTips.com

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