These are my notes from our February 22nd OKC WordPress User’s Group meeting. About 14 of us are here tonight. MY THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS.
Chris Jean from iThemes.com is here again!
jcriley.com – afhmarketing.com
– mainly search engine marketing
Tonight we are going to talk about several WordPress plug-ins
First hearing from Larry Stone, going to talk about
I am a natural problem solver, but not a natural problem see-er
– at Cuppy Joes recently, I noticed how they had a popup link for their Twitter
– my sandbox site: www.stonesthrow.me
I like the iThemes theme “Essence”
In the “old days” of WordPress you had to download plugins, have an ftp client, etc. No more!
– now in WordPress you can select Plug-ins, and ADD NEW
– can search WordPress plug-ins right from your site
– today we are going to install “Wordpress for Twitter”
– look at how many stars a plug-in has, how many people are using it, and how many problems/bugs they are having/reporting
THIS IS REALLY GREAT. I ACTUALLY HAVE STILL BEEN USING FTP TO INSTALL NEW PLUGINS, I’LL HAVE TO GIVE THIS A TRY!
Now discussing how to insert widgets
Takeaway: You can install and configure plug-ins now within WordPress
Now hearing from Justin of iThemes.com, talking about the Backup Buddy plug-in
– using a sandbox site tonight: http://project1.ithemes.com/
– this theme is still in beta, and will be released in about 2 weeks
– if you want to beta test this, email justin [at] ithemes [dot] com
One advantage of pluginbuddy is it can migrate a site to a new URL/domain, so if you have something on a test server it will
– Chris Jean has used this successfully with a 800 MB mySQL database
– on the destination server you just have to put a single zip file and 1 php file, you don’t have to install WP first (importbuddy.php file is downloadable from within the plugin, this is the script that handles the restore)
– can do scheduling of backups
– can also use ftp to send backup file to another server for a restore or backup, including Amazon S3 or other storage
– if you have mySQL credentials the program will create a new mySQL database when you restore it
I AM THINKING THIS IS GREAT BECAUSE OF THE FILE SIZE LIMITS I RAN INTO PREVIOUSLY WHEN I HAD TO MOVE/RESTORE MY WORDPRESS BLOG TO A NEW WEB HOST
Good idea for busy site to backup during non-peak hours
Now demonstrating how to do a restore on a new site
– Justin ftped the zip backup and 1 php file into the root of the new server/site
– the script prompts you for all required info, including mySQL database you want to use
– if you use an existing mySQL user that has rights for the new database you want to create, it will create that database on the fly
THIS IS REALLY IMPRESSIVE!!!
Going to probably priced this with a tiered model, free for individuals up to a certain number of users
It is not easy to make a large PHP zip file backup
– current most popular WP backup does the database only
currently iThemes has a list of about 20 plugins they want to develop
Now David North is going to discuss WordPress Thumbnails
– lots of themes don’t have the thumbnail feature
– WordPress has added things to make this work, but you have to do some minor tweaks to your theme to make this work
– see this post for instructions about how to do this