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WordPress, IIS and Plesk “Unable to find wp-content” Woes and Solution

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on
November 23rd, 2011
in
HOW-TO, WordPress FAQs, WordPress Hack

I tried to help a co-worker with a professional blog for a TV channel yesterday and ran into some weird issues. We host the blog on a Windows 2008 server with IIS and Plesk. The WordPress install from within the Plesk worked fine but ours did not. The “white screen of death” on the install screen was perplexing (more on that at the bottom of this article), but every time he tried to either upgrade WordPress or install or upgrade a plugin or theme, he would receive warnings or failures stating that WordPress was unable to find the wp-content directory. This warning can take various forms but circle around the fact that WordPress did not find the right directory in the expected place. The obvious and painless solution is to upload the files directly to the server using FTP and then control the blog from within wp-admin. In this case, [...]

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Fast as a CannonBall, in under 5 minutes!

34
responses
by
on
November 10th, 2011
in
Blogging News, Weblog Add-Ons, WordPress FAQs

Notice anything different about Weblog Tools Collection? The name of the post probably gave it away. This blog is rocking in speed and deliverability! How you ask? Thanks to the fine work of the people over at Cloudflare.com CloudFlare is a free(mium) service that was recommended to me by our own James. He had heard about it in conversations with some folks over dinner and wanted us to try it out. While this blog has gotten loaded over the years with JavaScript from various sources and code cruft of years, it has also gotten quite slow as a result. It is not the server (though Spam storms never help) and MySql running on the same server does not help. I had added caching thanks to WP Super Cache and had tweaked most of the settings to be tolerable on the server. I had even tried a CDN at one point [...]

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Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011

8
responses
by
on
October 6th, 2011
in
General

There is not much that I can say in a few words here that you have not already heard elsewhere in the news. However, I would like to pay my respects to Steve. Steve Jobs was and will be one of the greatest influencers in my life. I learned about him in college, started to follow his career and philosophy as a student of his, and became an ardent fan of the man and his career as I learned more about him. He was a brilliant thinker, a fantastic leader and a living legend to me. His commitment to the computing experience is shared by many but is paralleled by few. His death is even closer to home because of personal reasons but I mourn his loss with more heaviness in my heart than I have ever felt for someone I have only known through the media. I can selfishly [...]

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How WordPress Beat Joomla!

41
responses
by
on
August 5th, 2011
in
Best of WordPress, WordPress Discussions

This is a Guest Post by Dan Norris. Dan might be writing more for Weblog Tools Collection in the near future. So please stay tuned. 5 years ago when I started Web Circle I did a bunch of research on which CMS to choose and decided on Joomla!. For a year or so it was the CMS we used for pretty much every website and it was very sophisticated for what it could do at the time – particularly with the growing extensions directory. However as time went on and WordPress got better and better we gradually moved to using WordPress for most of our small business websites. Since these days we focus predominantly on small business website design, WordPress has become the platform we use for the majority of our new sites (note we also still use Joomla!). In 2006 In 2006 WordPress was seen mainly as a blogging [...]

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Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else

25
responses
by
on
January 14th, 2011
in
WordPress Templates WordPress Skins WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else: Siobhan on WPMU.org has a nicely illustrated, researched and explained article on why users should never search for “Free WordPress Themes” in Google or any other search engine. Not enough can be said to avoid the malicious theme hawkers on the Internet and I appreciate the work and the explanation. The problem is that most users, who are new to the ways of WordPress, will still use Google to search for themes and will download the first link that provides them with a free theme that catches their fancy. I would go so far as to say that somewhat knowledgeable users might still be tempted to ignore any possible bad effects from these themes; e.g. users continue to flock to sites that provide collections of serial numbers online in spite of being riddled with porn and adware. My [...]

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The anatomy of a WordPress theme

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responses
by
on
January 11th, 2011
in
Best of WordPress, WordPress, Wordpress for Beginners

The anatomy of a WordPress theme: Joost de Valk from Yoast has posted a fantastic infographic (a very tall and descriptive image) of all the details on how a WordPress theme works. Very interesting for new theme developers, and a good frame of reference for WordPress DIYers looking to find a quick solution to a theme issue.

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One Tool Inadvertently Helps Cure Others’ Ills

2
responses
by
on
December 2nd, 2010
in
Cool Scripts, WordPress Plugins

So we have not made it a secret on this blog that we are big fans of VaultPress as a product (Disclosure: They are advertisers on this blog). I have been using it on this blog (amongst others) for our protection and have happily paid for our privilege and peace of mind. It has been a little rocky to get started and we have offered and received help and feedback for the issues we ran into during the initial sync with VaultPress. The peace of mind is satisfying, the support is very reasonable, the product is a “set it and forget it” and as such, it runs on its own. I check the security area once in a while and marvel at the number of comments and other statistics that are mildly interesting but not all that helpful. Then I noticed something last morning that made me think. I know that does not [...]

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WordPress Admin Themes Drought

12
responses
by
on
September 28th, 2010
in
Best of WordPress, Blog Templates Blog Skins Blog Themes, WordPress Templates WordPress Skins WordPress Themes

The most requested search item on this blog is “WordPress admin themes”. With variations of the various search terms, I would guess that we receive many hundreds of hits a day on just this blog from WordPress enthusiasts looking for themes to adorn their admin panel with. A simple search on Google reveals an old post from this blog listing 9 admin themes (I don’t link to it because most of the themes listed are dead or deprecated). Here is a list of nice admin themes that I can find, which are still being produced and regularly updated. Fluency Admin by Dean J. Robinson. A nice looking, well documented, well translated admin theme that is often updated. Wait for it ….. thats it!! (that I could find, please let us know if you know of others that are of high quality and updated regularly) There are various useful and popular [...]

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WordPress.com and Windows Live partnering together

6
responses
by
on
September 27th, 2010
in
Blogging News, WordPress News

WordPress.com and Windows Live are partnering together and providing an upgrade for 30 million Windows Live Spaces customers. This partnership was announced at TechCrunch Disrupt. You can read more about the partnership, the Windows Live Spaces importer for WordPress.com, the added ability to Publicize on Messenger on the WordPress.com blog. Via: Windows Team Blog.

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