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Welcome to part one of a two part series of articles that will guide you through the process of installing a fresh copy of WordPress or your public WordPress blog to your local machine. The first part of this series will guide you through the installation and configuration of a piece of software called WampServer. Why would you want to do this you ask? Having your WordPress blog installed on your local machine not only acts as a backup, but it gives you the option of really digging into the inner workings of your blog without having to worry about it breaking and therefor, rendering the thing useless to the public. Not only that, but it’s much faster to play with things on your local machine than it is with a LIVE site on the internet.

For this article, I am using Windows XP Service Pack 2 and something called WampServer. WampServer is a piece of software that installs everything you need to turn your PC into a webserver. This includes Apache, MySQL, PHP, SQLitemanager and PHPMyAdmin. Before we get started, head on over to the official WampServer download page and grab a copy of WampServer 2.

WampServer Installation:

The installation process is pretty simple. After accepting the license agreement and specifying where the WampServer files will be installed to, the installation file will be unpacked, doing all of the heavy work for you. Using a software application such as WampServer to install all of your webserver needs for you automatically, is the easiest way to turn your machine, into a web server. Once the installation is finished, you’ll be prompted to locate your default browser executable file. In my case, I had to direct the install to my FireFox executable file which is usually within the Mozilla folder.

One of the first things you’ll have to configure is the PHP mail parameters. For SMTP, the default value of localhost is correct. As for the email address, you can choose to type one in, or not. This can always be changed later. Once this setting is configured, you’ll be greeted with a confirmation box that tells you the installation of WampServer has been completed. Leave the option “Launch WampServer 2 now” check marked and click the finish button.

Configuring WampServer Files:

One important piece of information I have to mention. The webserver acts on port 80 which is the port responsible for HTTP traffic. If you are running Skype with it’s default configuration, you’ll notice that your Webserver is offline once you start the program. This is because by default, Skype uses port 80 and 443 for incoming connections. You can either change the port that Skype uses or you can close, then re open Skype after your Webserver is online, forcing Skype to use a different port. In essence, make sure port 80 is clear before you launch WampServer or else the Apache web service will not run.

I’ve also been informed by ayusli that will you also need to disable IIS if that is running on your system. If you don’t, you may not be able to access localhost.

Once your WampServer is online, you’ll need to edit a few files to change the configuration to allow for larger databases to be imported. These changes will take place within the PHP.ini file. The PHP.ini file is a text file that contains the configuration for the PHP programming language. The first thing you’ll need to change is the upload_max_filesize attribute. By default, this is set to 2Megabytes. This is too small of a value, so increase this to 50 or 100megs. It doesn’t need to have a specific value so long as it is larger than the size of the database file you will be importing later on in this guide. The other setting you’ll need to change is post_max_size. By default this is set to 8Megabytes. Change this to the same value as the upload_max_filesize limit. After you make this change, reboot your computer. This will ensure the changes you made to the php.ini file take effect.

End Of Part 1:

If you plan on doing a fresh install of WordPress, you won’t have to worry about making any changes to the PHP.ini file after you install WampServer. However, if you plan on taking a copy of your public blog and transferring it to your local machine, the changes described above need to happen or else you will likely run into problems such as your database file being too large to import.

Part 2 of this series will go into details on how to install a fresh copy of WordPress as well as how to transfer your existing WordPress blog on the internet onto your local machine. It’s not as easy as transferring the database and then extracting a backup of files into a folder. There are a few more required tricks that need to be performed before a public blog can be successfully transferred. Look for these tips in part two which should be published in the next few days.

9 WordPress admin themes: There aren’t a lot of developers and designers working on admin themes for WordPress and I was really pleasantly surprised to find this list on welovewp.com. This posts lists nine themes for the administration back end of WordPress. Some of them I had seen before such as Tiger and Spotmilk, but there were a few that were new to me. Josh (I am assuming that Josh wrote the above post, this is why an about page is so important and posts should list authors) has included thumbnails and small reviews for each of them.

• WP Tiger
• Spotmilk
• JS Spotmilk
• Planet X7
• afd WordPress2
• WordPress NiceAdmin
• WordTunes2
• Shuttle
• Digg
• Barunio

Unfortunately, two of the admin themes, Digg and WordTunes2 are MIA but I did manage to dig up one more that should be mentioned. If I missed a couple, please leave a comment and I will add it to the list.

It seems as though the word Howdy, is not liked by many people in many places. I’ve been monitoring an ongoing discussion taking place in the WordPress hackers mailing-list about the subject of the word Howdy being used in all instances of WordPress, despite the locality of the end user. The discussions have ranged from “Not everyone greets each other by saying Howdy” to “Whats the big deal about the word Howdy anyways, it’s not like it breaks WordPress”. The good news is, because WordPress is open source, there is generally someone out there who has the skill and know how to put together a solution for even the most mundane problems.

This brings me to the “No Howdy Plugin” created by Ozh. No Howdy provides you with the opportunity to change the text in that area of the WordPress administration panel, or you can completely remove the text from appearing in the first place.

To use this plugin, copy the text from the link above and paste it into Notepad or your favorite code editor such as Dreamweaver. Save the file as no_howdy_plugin.php and then upload the file to your plugins directory. Activate the plugin from within your administration panel and you’re all set. In order to customize the plugin, edit the plugin file by changing the word (Bonjour) to the text that you would like to have displayed.

Addendum from Ozh: the word “howdy” is localized, so for instance in the fr_FR translation it becomes “Bienvenue”.

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone! We hope everyone had a safe and fun time with family and friends.

2007 has almost come to a close and it’s always a good time to reflect on the previous 365 days. In this case, I take a look back at the progress of WordPress during 2007 by documenting each release of WordPress. For the timeline, I used a free web service called xtimeline. This timeline showcases all of the major releases of WordPress during 2007. The timeline begins on January 5th, 2007 and ends on October 26th, 2007. The space in between the months at the bottom of the timeline represent the days. You can also hover your mouse cursor over each entry to see the date. If you click on an entry, the details for that entry will show up on the sidebar on the right.

For those with Javascript disabled in their browser, here is the textual version of the timeline:

Jan 5, 2007 - Wordpress 2.0.6 is released to the public. This release included an important security fix along with a few other goodies.

Jan 15, 2007 - WordPress 2.0.7 was released because of a bug in certain versions of PHP which would cause a security vulnerability in a wordpress powered blog.

Jan 22, 2007 - 2.1 was one of the major releases to take place during 2007. This release included a number of new features along with 550 bug fixes.

Feb 21, 2007 - February was a quiet time in WordPress land in terms of releases. 2.1.1 and 2.0.9 were mostly security fix releases with 2.1.1 containing 30 bug fixes.

Apr 3, 2007 - Soon after the beginning of April 2007, WordPress released version 2.1.3 and 2.0.10. At this point, WordPress was still supporting both the 2.0 and 2.1 code branches with simultaneous releases.

May 16, 2007 - WordPress 2.2 makes it’s debut in May of 2007. This release included Widget integration and over two hundred bug fixes. This was a big release at the time because WordPress Widgets were now included into the core code.

Jun 21, 2007 - WordPress 2.2.1 was another bug fix release for the 2.2 branch of code. Most of the bug fixes in this release were annoying little things that when fixed, added polish to the code.

Aug 5, 2007 - WordPress 2.2.2 And 2.0.11 were security releases for both the 2.2 and 2.0 code branches.

Aug 28, 2007 - This was an exciting day for some as the first beta for WordPress 2.3 was released. One of the big features in this version was the canonical URLS or SEO-Friendly URL Redirection.

Sep 8, 2007 - WordPress 2.2.3 was another bug-fix release. Two of the security bugs in this release were of high priority, which explains why this version of WordPress was released shortly before 2.3

Sep 25, 2007 - What a day in the world of WordPress. September 25th marks the release date of 2.3. This release saw WordPress picking up native tagging support, seo friendly url redirection, automatic plugin update notifications and more.

Oct 26, 2007 - WordPress 2.3.1 was a bug and security fix release for the 2.3 code branch. Over twenty bugs were fixed with this release.

Dec 29, 2007 -  Just before we reached the end of the year, WordPress went ahead and released version 2.3.2 which contained a big security fix that dealt with users being able to gain access to draft posts. As a bonus, 2.3.2 gives users the ability to create their own DB error page.

After going through all of that in one year, what could possibly be next? Easy, WordPress 2.4 which is slated for release on January 24th, 2008. What can we look forward to in this version?

New User Features
*Admin redesign
* Widget-based dashboard
* You should be able to have any number of any widget
* Undo for comment editing
* Search for both posts and pages

Developer
* Use $wpdb->prepare everywhere
* Switch to expect unescaped data for internal functions
* XML-RPC refactor

Of course, the date and the features for this release are not guaranteed. I can however tell you that, the admin redesign that a lot of folks are looking forward to has begun. The latest SVN build shows an un-styled dashboard that is now in one giant column. Those that have seen the color scheme haven’t expressed a large amount of joy over the colors being used. However, there are already reports that users may be able to over-ride the admin CSS style with their own. It will be interesting to see if the majority of bugs that are introduced with the new administration panel will be squashed before January 24th.

WordPress has accomplished a lot during 2007. I’d like to take this time to thank the guys at Automattic for creating one hell of a piece of software. I also want to thank anyone and everyone who is involved with WordPress. Whether your a beta tester, bug squasher, theme developer, plugin developer, feature requester it doesn’t matter. Everyone involved has helped make WordPress what it is today.

Here is to a wonderful 2008!

I have to admit, I love WordPress Extend Plugins. My first experience with the service came in April of this year when I released Ajax Edit Comments. I was mainly drawn to the service because of the promise of added publicity and the ease of tracking statistics.

My plugin crossing the 10,000 mark is a testament in itself to how WP Extend (and the WP community) helps promote plugins.

Once you get used to it, WP Extend is an easy and powerful tool for launching (and maintaining) a plugin. Sure the SVN takes a little bit of getting used to, but numerous people have written great tutorials on how to get your plugin listed (Windows, Linux, Mac?).

And since WordPress 2.3, WordPress users are automatically notified when a plugin listed at WP Extend is updated. It can’t get any better than that. Or, can it?

I love you WP Extend Plugins, but I have several suggestions on how to make the service even more enjoyable.

Featured Plugins? Forever?

As much as I love you WP Extend, forever is not in my vocabulary. I can’t remember the last time I saw the featured plugins change. I think there’s some room to shake things up a bit and feature something new from time to time.

I know being listed in the featured section doesn’t guarantee more downloads, but a change in scenery would help keep things fresh.

Please Give the Newer Plugins a Chance for Most Popular

Plugins such as Sidebar Widgets, Google Sitemaps, or Akismet have been around for a while. Could the newer kids on the block have a shot at this popularity contest?

How about showing popularity relative to points in time, such as monthly?

How About Related Plugins?

Another suggestion I have is to show related plugins in addition to the awesome feature of showing what else was downloaded.

For example, for All in One SEO Pack, you can see the other plugins that were downloaded in addition to the SEO plugin. However, looking at the list reveals no related plugins.

In the case of SEO Pack, I think it would be great to see other SEO related plugins as well.

Could I Please Have Sort Options Within Tags?

The post tag currently has the most plugins for any tag. Right now it’s being sorted by most recently updated, which is fine. But I see growing pains as tags become more populated. It would be awesome if there was a sort option for most popular, most highly rated, and perhaps alphabetic.

Since the “most highly rated” suggestion can easily be gamed, I suggest the date of addition, ratings, and downloads be placed into an algorithm that determines the highest rated plugins.

Can I Please Change My Plugin’s Homepage URL?

I’ve run into a situation where my plugin’s homepage changed. I unfortunately cannot change this, not even in the coveted readme file. Could I please have an option in the readme file to specify my plugin’s homepage URL?

And Recommendations for Plugin Authors

WordPress Extend Plugins is a great tool, but only if you use it to its maximum potential. If you happen to have a FAQ, screenshots, installation instructions, or other information, please have this all listed on WP Extend instead of having a link directing users back to another website.

If you take the time to post the screenshots, FAQ, and other information on WP Extend, you’ll get more downloads. I promise. You’ll still get a lot of website traffic, especially if your users need help.

WP Extend Plugins should ideally be self-sustaining, so please make it more convenient for those browsing the directory and have as much information listed as possible so the user can make an educated download decision.

Conclusion

Matt and his Automattic team have done wonders with WP Extend. It’s helped plugins authors like me list their plugins with ease.

Please take my suggestions with a grain of salt as they come solely from my observations over the past year. If WP Extend Plugins implements just one of my suggestions, I will fall over myself in bliss.

If you are a user of WP Extend (plugin author or plugin seeker), please feel free to weigh in on my suggestions and perhaps add some of your own.

Half-Baked is a 2-column, red theme with support for a variety of plugins and a dynamic sidebar.

The Harvest is a 2-column theme designed specifically for use on tech or photography blogs.

Identity is a 3-column theme with black and white colors.

My Diary is a 2-column theme for personal blogs.

Redtopia is a 2-column, simple theme with bright red colors.

Automatic Plugin Update Checker simply notifies users when plugin updates are available without the plugin needing to be stored in the WP plugin repository.

AZ-One locates the Amazon store (com, ca, co.uk, de, fr, jp) closest to your visitor and changes the associate links on your site to direct the visitor to the right store.

Banner Admin allows you to manage various banner ads from different affiliate programs.

TextMe sends a carbon-copy of all admin emails sent via SMS to your cell phone.

Video Embedder makes it easy to embed videos from various sources, such as YouTube and Google Video.

Cubismo is a 2-column theme that allows for individual page descriptions.

Fluid Yellow Black is a 3-column, dark theme with a professional look.

Riva is a 3-column theme with built-in recent comments and related posts.

Weblogger is a simple, 3-column theme built with Adsense readiness.

Whitespace Nation is a 2-column, minimalistic theme with dark colors.

Willy the Cat is a 2-column theme with a stylish layout.

Add Alt adds empty alt attributes to the images in your Wordpress posts that lacks one.

Blog Voyeur lets you view what your readers are doing, how often they come back, and what they read.

Category Description Editor helps you make nice category descriptions that appear at the top of each category page.

CommentMailer helps you maintain the discussion on your blog by letting the commenters know that you have replied their comments on the comment section of your post.

QuickRSS allows you insert an RSS feed into your post.

Those in the blogosphere will at one time or another hear of a service called Technorati. What is Technorati anyways? Technorati is a search engine for blogs that scours the web to try and tell you what’s being said about what and by whom. In order to tell which blogs are the more popular of the bunch, Technorati uses a ranking system that determines how many people have linked to a blog which is called (Authority) and how many people have added that blog to their Technorati favorites.

BlogStorm has published an interesting post which clearly illustrates the need for a major overhaul of the Technorati ranking algorithm. In this article, BlogStorm describes four different blogs that have a high authority level and at times, a ranking of 1 within the Technorati ranks. Two of the blogs mentioned are authored by two of the biggest names in the WordPress arena, Matt Mullenwegs Photomatt blog and Alex Kings Denver Web Developer blog.

These two blogs have been removed from the Technorati Top 100 list because they didn’t get to that position naturally. By natural, I’m talking about someone linking to a specific post on their blog which would be a natural link. In the case of the Photomatt blog, Matt Mullenweg has the advantage of being linked to by default with any new WordPress installation via the BlogRoll. As for Alex King, he makes some of most popular plugins for WordPress, one of which is called Popularity Contest. According to BlogStorm, Yahoo reports 1.7 million links to the plugin home page.

If you still don’t understand what’s going on here, I’ll make it really simple. When you create a theme for WordPress, you usually add a link to your blog or homepage as a means of giving credit to yourself. If this theme becomes popular, each blog that the theme is installed on will have your link on it. Each blog that has a link to your site on it will bump up your authority ranking on Technorati which leads to the fundamental problem of the authority ranking system.

Their authority ranking is completely inaccurate. According to Technorati,

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days.

Also worthy of mentioning is this bit of text;

The #1 ranked blog is the blog with the most other distinct blogs linking to it in the last 6 months. If your blog’s rank is, say 305,316, this indicates that there are 305,315 blog ranks separating your blog from the #1 position.

So if you take into account what authority means, you can clearly understand why Photomatt and Alex King were leading the pack.

At first, I want to call Alex and Matt cheaters for gaming the system to get to the top, but that would be a hasty mistake. The fact of the matter is, the algorithm is wrong and it should not count these sort of links. For bloggers trying to make their way up in the blogosphere, it’s really upsetting that while you bust your butt writing content while obtaining legit links from other bloggers, you will never show up on the radar because other bloggers have developed a popular theme or plugin with their own little credit link attached.

So instead of banning people, what should Technorati do? What would you suggest to Technorati in terms of changing their algorithm so it’s fair for all bloggers? Or do you think that hand editing is the way to go and Technorati should just remove those sites from the Top 100 list if they are receiving non-organic links?

Lets face it, you may think that Technorati is no longer relevant in the blogosphere but you couldn’t be farther from the truth. Their numbers, rankings, and search engine still plays a significant role in the blogosphere. This is why this is a hot button issue and something has to be done about it.

*UPDATE*

It has been brought to my attention by Mark that the links contained in the blogroll on a default installation of WordPress no longer links to individuals. I have confirmed this and have crossed out that line of text within the post. However, it is true that at one point, he and others were linked to by default in the blogroll and that’s the main reason why Matt had such a high authority ranking. As was brought up by (ThatGirlAgain) in the commenting area, Alex King was also a beneficiary of the default blogroll.

Also, “you will never show up on the radar because other bloggers have developed a popular theme or plugin” has been taken out of context. It’s not that I don’t want creators of these wonderful things not to receive credit, I simply don’t want Technorati to allow these links to be part of the Authority equation.

Filter My RSS is a very useful, simplistic service that allows you to create filtered feeds (from existing feeds) using keywords. I have used something of the same nature on various other services but this is a once stop shop and it is very easy to use. Also, considering the fact that the filtered feed URI can be hand crafted and the simplicity of the service, I am assuming that it can scale very well. This is a classic example of an itch scratch software that can be useful to others as well. Here is the WeblogToolsCollection.com default feed, filtered for the keyword WordPress.

Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers From Original Blogger Jorn Barger: In many of my daily reads, I come upon an article or a link that makes me go Huh?!? “Original Blogger” Jorn Barger gives us his Top 10 Tips for new bloggers. Blogging has evolved a lot since he coined the term and intended it to be no more than a list of interesting links. Still, this post in Wired gives us an insight into what the original Weblog first was intended to be and prompted me to think about how it has evolved over the years. To me a blog is so many things at once that it is difficult to classify and the diversity of the term and the variety of purpose is what makes blogs so interesting to me.

What is your blog to you? What purpose does it serve?

Aspire is a beautiful 3-column theme with a stylish design.

Black Line is a 3-column theme with minimalistic layout. Gone.

Black Red is a 3-column theme with built-in Adsense readiness.

DGA Design 02 is a 2-column theme with stylish footer background.

Groucho is a 3-column with a very modern-looking design and built-in Flickr compatibility.

Benjamin Sterling Galleries uses your current flickr and/or picasa web photo album, the power of WordPress and jQuery, and some jQuery gallery plugins to embed your photos into your site/post.

WordPress Admin Reminder Plugin adds a reminder tip (in large red letters) in the top right corner of your WordPress admin pages.

Adsense Manager has been updated to include the new features added recently by Google.

Crossroads interfaces with Flickr, Lightbox, Greybox and Highslide image galleries, adding thumbnails and Flickr photo comments to your blog entries.

Minimalist Gallery allows you to display an image gallery in posts or pages.

Social Dropdown displays several social bookmarking options in a dropdown.

Gridline Lite is a 3-column, minimalistic theme that also comes in two other styles.

Insan is a 3-column theme with a very clean, professional layout and design.

More Than Multiple Widgets is a 2-column theme that six different widgetized areas throughout the header, sidebar, and footer.

Structure is a news/magazine-style theme with built-in video and image features and re-arrangeable content blocks.