For some this may sound like a silly question, for others it’s a wake up call!

Today it’s pretty common for business owners to back up their servers and computers. More and more computers at home are being backed up but it’s rare that we see new clients who have a complete backup of their website. If you own a laptop you need an online backup like Carbonite or Mozy!

The best solutions for WordPress Website backups is BackupBuddy from iThemes.

Although this isn’t a free plugin ($45 for personal, $75 for business) it’s priceless if you have a problem!

I’m afraid people “over trust” their web hosting and I’m not talking about their company going out of business, rather their site getting hacked or what seems like a simple theme or plugin or WordPress upgrade that crashes their site. I don’t think you have to worry so much about losing your site data if you use a major host like Hostgator or Bluehost.

If you use a friends server or some other rogue setup I can’t stress backup any more!

To purchase BackupBuddy follow our link here: http://CyberInnovation.com/BackupBuddy

Installation and Configuration

BackupBuddy is easy to install, with only a few options to configure and you can schedule regular database or full content/database backups.

After you install BackupBuddy you’ll need to enter your supplied license key or login with your username/password you created when you purchased the plugin

Next find the BackupBuddy tab in the left column of WordPress and start at the “Settings” tab.

The first section of settings are the notifications. Here you setup an email address to receive notifications on successful or un-successful backups.

Next is the FTP settings where you can have your backup files uploaded off site! Don’t have a FTP site you can use? Simply get a secondary web hosting account with Hostgator or Bluehost and setup BackupBuddy to store your backups on the secondary web hosting site!

Next is Amazon S3. We won’t go into detail here but if you prefer to store you backups on Amazon S3 prices are much more reasonable and if you have multiple sites this may be a better solution than FTP. This is an API connection which has fewer issues than FTP username/passwords can have

Miscellaneous Settings: IMPORTANT!

Maximum number of archive backups is likely one of the MOST IMPORTANT settings in BackupBuddy. If you have unlimited storage this isn’t a problem but many hosting accounts are limited so too many backups can fill up your empty space and shut down your website!

It varies site by site but we generally set this to 10 backups TOTAL. We generally run a full backup weekly or monthly and database only backups daily or weekly.

Database backups are very small and not a problem. Most full backups are also small but we do have some clients with large amounts of video/audio and PDF files. These can create very large backups and although BackupBuddy excludes backup up the backup archive files, 10 files at 500mb each can add up quickly!

Set your limit and monitor you have enough backups at anytime!

There are additional settings to exclude certain folders or secondary sites you may have installed on the site for testing purposes.

Scheduling

The next tab/page in the sidebar under BackupBuddy is “Scheduling.” Here we generally setup two schedules: One for a database only backup and one for a full database/content backup. You can set them individually for daily, weekly, bi-weekly and monthly. More options may come in the future but this is pretty comprehensive for backup scheduling.

Backups

The last option in the left tab for BackupBuddy is “Backups” which is why we are here! Simply click the Full Backup or Database backup and wait.. don’t refresh your browser and your backup will run!

A list of your backup archives are displayed and again look at your settings page to limit the number of archive files.

ImportBuddy.php

IF you are forced to restore your website from a full backup OR you need to move your WordPress website to a new hosting company you can do it very easily with BackupBuddy. I say “easy” compared to how we had to do it in the past!

Before BackupBuddy we used a plugin to back up the database but used FTP to move the files to the new host. We had to manually create a MySQL Database and import the DB backup then go into the tables and manually change settings to match the new host.

With BackupBuddy you will need to create a database on your web host in cPanel or your web hosting dashboard. After that you simply upload your BackupBuddy zipped copy of your website which you downloaded or stored on a FTP server or Amazon S3 from our settings above.

Next you download a copy of the ImportBuddy.php and also upload that do your new server under the HTML or Public HTML folder of your website. Once the backup zip file and importbuddy files are in your web server folder simply type in your domain name and the link to the import file. Here’s an example “yourdomainname.com/importbuddy.php”

You will be prompted with a few questions, your database username/password, name of database and then the restore process starts.

Success!

You’ll be amazed at the speed and success of the restored WordPress site. As with any backup system there may be some rogue or unique changes you need to make but generally they aren’t an issue with BackupBuddy rather a oversite. If we move a website from one domain to another, any internal links embedded in pages won’t change. There are plugins out there like Velvet Blues that will find your old URL’s and change them to your new domain name.

Summary

Although this is a very detailed description of BackupBuddy it’s not a complete tutorial. If you need assistance or help installing configuring or restoring with BackupBuddy, we are here to help.

To purchase BackupBuddy simply follow our link: http://CyberInnovation.com/BackupBuddy

If you have any comments or questions please let us know, we are happy to help!

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WordPress Website Design-Development-Hosting-Training-Consulting

More and more we are getting requests from our clients asking how they can add polls to their website.

If you want to give your visitors the ability to vote on your content, ask a question or get their feedback, you can do this with polls.

Below are more details and reading, if you prefer to watch a video instead click here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are a number of WordPress plugins but we prefer to use a couple:

WP-Polls

PollDaddy.com

WP-Polls is one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress directory.

Simply install the plugin, scroll down to the bottom left side of your dashboard and you’ll see a menu item called “Polls” (with a bar graph)

Here you can add a Poll or question you want to ask. Then add the answers you want people to vote on and click save. It’s that easy!

Now in your Post or Page editor you can look for this icon and simply enter the poll id from your “manage list of polls”

The shortcode is added automatically to your page to display the poll.

Or you can go to your widgets and drag the WP-Polls widget to your sidebar

WP-Polls Options

You can:

• set numerous options globally or on a per poll basis
• show results immediately or disable results
• allow more than one answer to be chosen or just one
• block repeat voters via cookie, IP or both

Results are available as graphs in the dashboard and much more!

Polldaddy.com is our preferred plugin!

Polldaddy.com is a company owned/manage by Automattic which also manages WordPress.org. I’m not sure you could find a better connection between two service but that being said they are two services.

Like above you add the free Polldaddy.com plugin to WordPress.

Next go to http://PollDaddy.com and create a free account. Now in your Polls>Options enter your username/password to make the plugin connect to your account.

Now honestly creating basic polls is very similar to WP-Polls but you get additional styling CSS options on a per poll basis.

PollDaddy.com plugin has 20 preset styles and the option to choose Wide-Medium-Narrow

Once you have saved the poll you can then hover over “Share-Embed” to get the Shortcode for embedding into pages/posts but many other options for Java Script, Twitter and others!

There is NOT a simple widget to drop the polls into the sidebar. I suspect it would be tough to offer a plugin as you save the width, color, layout in the polls editor for each INDIVIDUAL post. So you simply copy the script above to an html/text widget.

Adding Media to your Polls

If you want to take your polls to the next level and say vote on an image you can do this with Polldaddy.com. You cannot do this from the dashboard but don’t worry.

Go to your PollDaddy.com dashboard and create a new poll. When you type in your questions or answers you have a choice to upload “Media”

Once you have completed creating your poll and setting your options you can now go back to your WordPress Dashboard and go to Polls>edit and then choose “All my Polls”

You will see the polls you create online and get the same shortcode/embed code and your polls can now show media to allow your visitors to vote on!

Summary

In summary polls are pretty simple. You can install either plugin and setup a quick poll. Then add it to a page/post using the supplied shortcode. Both have similar options to expire on a certain date, allow more than one answer, block by cookie/ip and both allow you to customize the templates.

PollDaddy.com is a free service that allows you to do more with your polls. Now you can add media to your polls to allow visitors to vote on image or other media. There are over 20 pre-designed templates and you can choose from narrow-medium-wide size for your polls.

If you have any questions or have an experience with either of these plugins please make a comment here!

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WordPress Website Design-Development-Hosting-Training-Consulting

While working on WordPress project with a client today we ran into an interesting problem. Our client had a 30mb audio MP3 file they wanted to host on their website for playback by anyone who registered for the free newsletter. The page was hidden and re-directed after successful newsletter registration. Of course this page and MP3 can be found by search engines so if this is a problem for your situation and you don’t want people finding your hidden files don’t host your MP3 or any large file in this manner!

WordPress support for large files

There are numerous was to create a link, to a large file in a page. Or you can add a plugin to host, stream or play the MP3 files in WordPress. Some of you reading this will think they are crazy for hosting a large file and worry about monthly bandwidth limits? They have an unlimited account and we aren’t hosting top 40 music files or movies so it’s relative to the hosted content!

Problem

The problem was the client couldn’t upload the MP3 file via the WordPress Media Library upload. The PHP limits were restricting large files commonly anything over 8mb???

To get around this problem and avoid PHP editing we helped the client this way:

We logged into the website cPanel and simply clicked on “File manager.”

Next you double click on sub-folders or click the plus in the folder structure to dig down to the WordPress content library. The window will be open in the right pane.

example: ../wp-content/uploads/2010/2 (of course your year and month will change with the date you upload)

With the folder open on the right next click “Upload” in the top toolbar.

You will see your maximum file size upload. Often this is greater than the WordPress limits but if it’s less than your file size STOP HERE and contact your web host to increase your limit!

Next simply click Browse and choose your file and upload.

Back to WordPress

Now login to your WordPress Dashboard and add the plugin “Add to Server” from Dion Hulse

Next go to your Media Library in the Dashboard and you’ll see a new link

Next choose Add from Server and you are taken to a file browser similar to file manager in cPanel. Simply drill down to your directory and choose the file or files and import.

You will now find your files in Media Library!

Other considerations

Maybe you have a need to upload a large number of files? It could be a combination of photos, video, documents or ?? Maybe you want to FTP a bunch of files and then add to the media library instead of uploading one by one in the media library!

If you find any other solutions or ideas please post them here!

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1. Moving a WordPress website from a sub-directory to your root: hosted with GoDaddy

WordPress Website Design-Development-Hosting-Training-Consulting

http://LCRMarion.org

I really enjoyed developing this website solution for a local church in Marion, IA. If there was ever a perfect fit for WordPress, a church comes very close. You have diverse congregation of people, the church staff and volunteer committees and groups inside the church. All of them share the need to communicate to the congregation on a regular and timely basis.

To date, most churches have used the traditional print newsletter on a monthly basis, weekly printed bulletins at the weekend services (for those members who attend) and more recently churches are using email, some too much!

The Details of the website

We developed a WordPress website using the bSocial Theme from iThemes.com and transferred their existing web pages to the new site. We then trained the staff on how to login and update and change the pages when they want to. We learned many of the pages hadn’t been updated for over a year and there were pages they wanted to add!

Next we added an online calendar and again trained the staff to add events based on a number of categories. They have started with simply the weekly services but soon plan to add all upcoming events around the church and groups/committees!

Next we connected their photos page to their SmugMug photo hosting site. The church has a photography club and all members who take photos upload to the SmugMug professional hosting site in high resolution. Now members of the church can order photos, posters, canvas prints and more!

The website pulls the most recent photos from the SmugMug website via the WP-SmugMug Plugin. As new photos are added the website is updated automatically!

Finally we setup the pastors and church leaders with the concept of blogging and the ability to send updates to the congregation when they publish a blog post. They can now post weekly sermon notes and other news/events without waiting for the weekly bulletin or monthly newsletter. This will allow more timely communications.

We added a video box for the church to include recent videos of events or videos pertaining to the holidays or sermon series!

Email, Facebook, Twitter integration with WordPress

We installed the Subscribe2 plugin to allow people visiting the website to sign up for email news and updates. Any blog post will be sent to their email automatically. This is similar to aWeber or Constant Contact but for free! It also allows the church to upload their existing email list of church members and manually add new members when they like. This is a powerful way to communicate but wait…

Next we add the blog RSS feed to the notes page of the Facebook fan page for the church. Now anytime the church posts to the blog it updates Facebook automatically! But wait…

Using the Twitter Tools plugin we also connected blog posts to Twitter updates. Again any blog post updates the churches Twitter account!

So ANY BLOG POST to the website is automatically sent to the email subscribers, updates Facebook and updates Twitter! Very powerful!

Christian Plugins

We did a search for terms like bible or church and Christian and came up with some very nice plugins!

Bible Reading Plan allowed us to put a widget on the main page with daily Bible Reading plans based on the bible used by LCRMarion.org! It supports many versions of the bible so this could be used for many denominations!

The Holy Scripturizer plugin is a really cool plugin. The plugin searches the pages and blog posts for any reference to a bible verse and automatically links them to the bible verse online AND displays a popup. The church can also choose their bible of preference!

Sermon Browser is an amazing plugin! The church is going to implement this next year but the site is setup and we have tested the plugin. Basically the plugin allows the church to upload audio/video copies of sermons and library sort them by date, pastor, series, keywords and more! Notes can be connected to a sermon and linked to iTunes for Podcasting support!

Additional Plugins

WP FollowMe was added to put a floating icon on the right side of the website to allow people to easily follow LCRMarion.org on Twitter.com

We also added the TweetMe – Retweet plugin so visitors can re-tweet any content or post they like. Sociable was added to extend this functionality to Facebook, LinkedIn and more!

There are many other backend plugins for backup and database management, SEO, XML sitemaps, Google Analytics and more!

In Closing

Churches today are looking for ways to reach out using technology to their current congregation and to find new ways to attract members to their church. Churches are also aging and looking for ways to bring younger people and families to their congregation. Collaborative WordPress sites that implement Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook, Twitter but more importantly have the ability to blog post their updates when they happen vs waiting till the the next weekend service or monthly newsletter!

We have started working on a new website for the LCR Youth. The goal of the separate site is to connect to youth from 6th grade to high school seniors but more importantly to stay connected to the youth through college and into the future!

More updates coming soon!

If you are looking for a solution for your church contact us today to get a quote and learn more about our services!

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WordPress Website Design-Development-Hosting-Training-Consulting

A default install of WordPress.org includes a blogging engine whereby the authors can post updates, news etc.. But by default the blog followers can only get these updates via an RSS feed not email???? Some of you may be asking already what is RSS and what is a “feed” and another day I’ll talk in more detail about RSS and Feed Readers.

Point is the majority of Internet users understand email and the last thing they want is another RSS Reader on top of checking in with their social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn or by following Twitter. If you own/manage/contribute to a blog and people find your blog interesting you want to give them an option to subscribe to your posts/news/updates.

Another way to say this is every time you update your WordPress.org site (either posts-pages or both) an email is sent to your email subscriber base. So how do you collect these email subscribers?

There are numerous plugins available for WordPress.org and external solutions that can be linked into your blog. Today I’ll talk about the most popular solutions chosen by our clients.

Subscribe2 – (Free)

Subscribe2 is a Free plugin to add email user management to your WordPress site. Due to the cost this is a very popular plug-in especially for people getting started with their first blog.

Once you install and activate Subscribe2 your registered users in WordPress are notified of any changes/blog posts moving forward. You can disable notifications for page updates or only send updates for certain categories. There are a number of settings to set future configurations if you add categories etc..

You also have the ability to edit the default subscription/notification and unsubscribe emails. HTML or text emails, send email for every post or a daily/weekly digest.

A common option is to enable the sidebar widget so you can add the “email subscription” widget to your blog. Now people can easily add their name and email address and click subscribe.

To see an example of the widget you can visit: http://LaurieSexton.com

To learn more about Subscribe2 visit: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe2/

If you need more advanced Double-Opt In email management or you want more control over the look/feel of the HTML notifications keep reading. Otherwise Subscribe2 will take care of your needs for a very good cost!

G-Lock Double Opt-in Manager (Free up to $349)

If you need a more advanced email subscription manager and/or you are looking to do a lot bulk mail G-Lock has a free plugin to manage your email subscribers in WordPress. They also offer a separate program for bulk mailing and there is a free version, Personal version $149.00 and Business Edition $349. Here is the description of the personal version right from the G-Lock website:

You can easily manage opt-in mailing lists for your subscribers, create personalized messages such as HTML newsletters, e-magazines, account statements, reports, statistics, bills to your customers and send them with G-Lock EasyMail in just minutes. G-Lock EasyMail easy-to-use address book provides a convenient place to store the recipient information. You can use the program built-in database to segment your recipients into groups in order to send more relevant targeted emails.

Visit the G-Lock website here: http://www.glockeasymail.com/

To learn more about the WordPress plugin go here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/g-lock-double-opt-in-manager/

If you are looking to just notify subscribers of blog posts/updates Subscribe2 will take care of your needs. If you need to bulk mail, send newsletters and sync your subscriber info to another program G-Lock is a good solution and one time cost.

aWeber.com (Starts at $19/month)

aWeber is not specifically created or developed for WordPress but it’s very powerful and easy to integrate with any web platform! With aWeber  you have a simple “subscribe to” form on your website but your subscriber information is stored at aWeber. Now you can login to aWeber and create amazing newsletters, announcements and more! Plus you configure Blog/RSS to subscribers so anytime you update your WordPress blog you subscribers get an update.

Custom landing/confirmation pages. You can also create custom confirmation landing pages and direct subscribers to specific website URL’s. So when a subscriber enters their email address and name they click submit and are redirected to your custom confirmation page saying thank you then a link to redirect them back to your site.

Custom fields: Do you want to collect a full name? Postal address? phone? or any other questions? You can create custom sign up forms and ask any question you like.

Custom HTML emails: You can edit your HTML formatted emails going to your subscribes to include your colors/logos, links to other sites or information and make it look more like a custom newsletter. There are numerous templates to choose from and edit to fit your needs

You pay a flat monthly fee and you can create multiple subscriber lists, multiple registration forms, multiple HTML templates, multiple RSS to email templates etc…

The theme with aWeber is “multiple.” If you have multiple websites and/or want to manage multiple subscriber lists or maybe you just want one list but you have multiple sites you can copy the same subscriber form to all your websites and collect all your subscribers into one solution at aWeber.

To learn more about aWeber and get a free trial account click here: http://aWeber.com

CyberInnovation.com – Consulting and/or implementation services

We can help your organization with a strategy to drive more people to your website and collect email subscribers for future marketing and updates. Our focus is to help our clients balance form with function which in turn compares price to features. Whether you need a consultant to help you build your solution or our designers/developers to create a solution for you we can help! Contact us today for more information!

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WordPress Website Design-Development-Hosting-Training-Consulting