This week WordPress announced they updated their contact form builder for sites on WordPress.com. They also announced they were releasing a plugin that gives self hosted WordPress sites (i.e. WordPress.org) the same contact form.

Now the release of a plugin, especially one that is so utilitarian as a contact form might not seem that exciting to you. But the thing is, nearly every website needs to have a way for visitors to contact the owner of the site.

Insert Forms Button in Edit Screen

For folks who need something over and above a basic contact form, purchasing Gravity Forms is a great way to go.

Enter the Grunion

The folks at Automattic (the company behind WordPress) are calling this new plugin “Grunion” after a Californian coastal fish. Here are some things I like about this new plugin.

Seamless Integration

Grunion Forms Dialog

That makes it drop dead simple to access the form creation dialog screen. You can access it easily from any post or page on your WordPress installation. At the same time it doesn’t take up any extra screen real estate when not in use.

Clicking that button brings up a forms dialog box overlay that behaves in a similar manner to the upload/insert image dialog box.

Easily Customizable

Form Field Options

You also have the ability to customize each of the form field labels however you want to explain what info you want site visitors to enter. And while you are at it, making a field a required entry is as easy as clicking your mouse.

Set Recipient Email

Set Form Recipient Email

The plugin is set to default to the admin email for your site. However you can set each individual form to go to a different email address if you like. Or if you prefer, you can have it sent to multiple addresses.

That’s a very useful feature if you have multiple forms and a need to route them to different places, like if your site has multiple authors or you want to route different types of inquiries to different people.

Akismet Integration

The plugin has integration with Automattic’s powerful spam protection service, Akismet, built right in.

The nice thing about that is you can do away with Captcha forms, which tend to clash with site designs and are not particularly user friendly.

Built-in Archive

Feedbacks Menu Item

When you click it you are taken to a new dashboard page where there a record of received contact form messages is kept. It’s similar to the comments management menu. You have the option to delete the messages or mark them as spam if you don’t want them saved there.

All in all it is one of the most seamless integrations with WordPress that I’ve seen.

A Caution

I’m confident the folks at Automattic will be upgrading the plugin along the way and possibly adding features to it.

One note of caution with this early release, though: When I added a form to an existing page where I’d already typed in some text, the form deleted my existing content when it inserted the short codes for the form.

Since I had Revisions turned on it was no big deal to revert to a previous version of the page and just paste in the short codes.

It would be nice in future releases if the form would be inserted where the cursor was on the page in the same way that images are inserted. It’s a minor thing. But it could potentially freak someone out to have their content totally disappear!

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

Or, Why You Should Attend a WordCamp Near You

Talking with Matt Mullenweg

Well there are a couple reasons.

First, I never really shared what WordCamps are all about and why you should want to attend one.

The second reason I’m posting this new is that Frank Niemeir took some photos of me there. I talked with him at the time about getting copies of them, but I forgot about it and I’m sure he’s a busy guy. However Frank just emailed me the shots. Not that it would be hard to guess the ones Frank took based on quality alone, but they are the ones that I am in. (The other 2 came from my camera.)

Oh, and as an aside, check out the photo on Frank’s home page. If you click on it you will see the “before” and “after” versions of how he edited the photo in Photoshop. It’s pretty cool what he does.

What WordCamp Is

WordCamp Savannah 2010

WordCamps are grass roots community organized events put on by WordPress enthusiasts to bring together folks interested in the platform. Because the experience level of attendees often ranges from the core development team on down to people who have never used WordPress before there is nearly always something for everyone.

That broad spectrum approach makes WordCamps a great place to get your inner geek on without worrying about your eyes glazing over from over the top tech talk. There are developer tracks and newbie tracks. And some of the larger WordCamps will have other tracks as well.

Ultimately the two biggest advantages to attending WordCamps is learning more about WordPress and networking with other folks who are interested in WordPress. At WordCamp Savannah, for example, about half of the attendees were business men and women who were relatively new to WordPress and were looking to tap into the power of the platform to promote their businesses better online.

My WordCamp Experience

Since I do a fair amount of WordPress training as part of my business I volunteered to help out on the first day of WordCamp Savannah to answer questions in the beginner session. I’m pretty good at translating geek-speak into normal language so it was a natural contribution for me to make. And since we had something like 65 folks in the beginner session there was plenty for me to do that day. And I met some great folks too!

Matt, Chris, Mark and Andrew

So that night I put together a little 30 minute talk about some of the less common features that can be found in some WordPress themes, and presented it the next day.

And I got to meet some folks in person that I’d seen around online for years like WordPress core developers Mark Jaquith and Andrew Nacin. I also met a ton of new folks too like Shayne Anderson of 9Seeds and Sally Strebel from Page.ly. In fact, SuccessCREEations now offers WordPress web hosting because of that connection with Page.ly. Not only that, but Otto spent some time helping me out with a technical question I had about oEmbeds.

Whew!

Matt Mullenweg

Over the course of the weekend I ended up spending a little bit of time with WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg.

It started at the end of one of the days with a brief conversation that ranged across a few subjects. I shared the basics of a project I’m working on (which has since changed directions and morphed into something much bigger than I anticipated at the time. I can’t wait to tell y’all about it!)

Matt & Jane at the Crab Shack

Because I was a “pinch-speaker” I got invited to the speaker’s dinner after the conference. As we sat down I ended up at a table with Matt, Otto, and Michael Torbert, the guy behind the All In One SEO Pack plugin (which happens to be the most popular WordPress plugin behind the Akismet spam filter.) Let’s just say I did a lot of listening at dinner that night.

We ate at the Crab Shack out on Tybee Island so I offered to give folks rides back to their hotels back in Savannah since I was headed that way. Matt along with a couple other folks too me up on that.

Why do I share all this?

Well I say this to explain that I got a tiny peek at the guy who is arguably the single most influential person behind WordPress. (I’ve heard the terms benevolent dictatorship and oligarchy used to describe the WordPress organization, though I don’t know how fair those characterizations are.)

For me that was a refining moment as far as my business is concerned. SuccessCREEations has always been heavily oriented towards the WordPress platform. And because I liked what I saw when I got an up close and personal look at some of the WordPress core team I’ve made the decision to double down and hitch my company’s future to WordPress.

Matt & Me

Now I’m not saying that attending a WordCamp near you will necessarily change the direction of your whole business like it did mine.

But it just might.

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

I ran across this informative infographic this morning which shows some interesting info about the WordPress platform. It was created by the folks at Tech King (and you can find the original here if you want a larger size.)

WordPress Thoughts

A few things stand out to me looking through these stats.

First I was surprised that more than half of all WordPress.org (self hosted) sites are still using older versions of WordPress. It is especially surprising because it is really old news that older versions of WordPress get hacked and one of the biggest things you can do to protect your site is keep your software up to date. Well it turns out that statistic is just a little off in the infographic (but not much!)

According to official WordPress stats, the figure is just under half of all self-hosted WordPress sites are using older versions. That still means there are well over 6 million WordPress sites that are potentially exposed to security vulnerabilities. Not good.

CMS

Something else that jumped out at me is how thoroughly WordPress is dominating the open source CMS market. I knew there were way more WordPress sites out there than sites built with other big platforms like Drupal and Joomla. But I had no idea how many more there were.

And the thing is, WordPress is just beginning to come into its own as a CMS. The platform has grown significantly beyond its blogging roots. I only see that market share growing even more disproportionate as WordPress continues to add more CMS oriented features.

Blogging

I was surprised to see how small Blogger is compared to WordPress. It seems to me that most folks I know who started a blog went to Blogger first before graduating to WordPress. That’s how I got started years ago.

However, based on the Blogger market share in the infographic it would seem that that is not as common an approach as I assumed. (And yes, I do know what happens when I assume! )

Anyway, here’s the infographic for your enjoyment.

Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

There is no denying that social media is a huge phenomenon. At least 16 of the top 20 biggest websites in the world (according to Alexa) have some kind of a social media component. And of course Facebook, the granddaddy of all social media sites, claims over a half a billion users!

Numbers like that get people’s attention. And well they should.

Social media is revolutionizing business communication on a scale not seen since Gutenberg invented his movable type press back in the 1400′s. Businesses need to be tapping into it using sound strategies and tools to simplify and streamline things like building Facebook pages.

Even so there is one huge mistake that I see businesses make time and time again regarding social media. They neglect the most powerful piece of their media strategy.

Building an Audience

The true power of social media is in building an audience. As your audience grows you have a larger pool of people to market your goods and services to.

Business get enamored with the millions upon millions of people that are flocking to social media sites. To often the thinking goes something like, “Here’s a built in audience. All I have to do is get in front of them and I’ll have all the business I can stand.”

It is true that there are tons of folks on social media sites. And it is an excellent idea to get your business in front of as many people there as you can.

The trouble is audiences on social media sites can be a bit fickle. Raw numbers of followers, fans or people who “Like” your Facebook page are usually not a great way to measure your success with social media. (The one thing those numbers are good for is stroking the ego of the person managing those accounts for you.)

While harder to quantify, user engagement is a much more significant measure of success with social media. Because here’s the thing. Simply being in front of people does not turn them into your audience.

Just look at how the word audience is defined.

Audience

1. the group of spectators at a public event; listeners or viewers collectively, as in attendance at a theater or concert: The audience was respectful of the speaker’s opinion.
2. the persons reached by a book, radio or television broadcast, etc.; public: Some works of music have a wide and varied audience.
3. a regular public that manifests interest, support, enthusiasm, or the like; a following: Every art form has its audience.
4. opportunity to be heard; chance to speak to or before a person or group; a hearing.
5. a formal interview with a sovereign, high officer of government, or other high-ranking person: an audience with the pope.
6. the act of hearing, or attending to, words or sounds.

Notice that in order to call a group your audience they need to be “hearing or attending to words or sounds.”

So much of what businesses do on social media today is simply noise that no one is listening to.

Web Publishing

That’s why I see web publishing as the single most critical piece of any social media presence. More specifically I’m talking about content (i.e. articles, videos, photos, etc.) that is published on your own website, on your own domain, on a web hosting account that you pay for and control.

Don’t get me wrong. Social media is a fantastic tool to make initial contact with people you might never reach any other way and connect them to your business. Social media can be the widest part of your marketing fulling that brings potential customers into your business. But there has to be something that you are connecting them to which is more compelling than a “me too” Facebook page.

That something should be your main website.

With the powerful web publishing tools out there today like WordPress, there is no reason any organization can’t build a powerfully engaging web presence at their main website that keeps people coming back over and over again.

Besides, if your primary web marketing presence is a Facebook page then you are putting your organization’s online activity at the mercy of a monolithic company that is notorious for changing their rules on a whim, with no notice and no recourse. That’s a risky approach, to say the least!

Website First, Social Media After

Your first priority should be to build up your own website so that it becomes a strong healthy hive of activity on the web that’s centered around your organization.

Once you have your website in place and starting to build an actual audience, you know the “attending to your words” kind, then when you start engaging social media sites like Facebook and Twitter you will see much more success. People will see that you have something worthwhile to say and will pay much closer attention.

Not only that, but this approach will completely set your organization apart from the overwhelming majority of your competitors. But nearly all of them are still making the huge mistake of ignoring the power of web publishing. They go straight for big social media numbers with no plan to engage those passers-by and funnel them ever closer to paying customers.

Be forewarned. This approach is one that starts off more slowly. In the end, though, it is far more effective and worth it.

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

One of the strengths of WordPress is that it does very well in the search engines right out of the box. And then there are a ton of things you can do to give and extra boost to that natural SEO strength that WordPress has by default.

One of the easiest things to do is change the default WordPress permalink structure, which is one of the first things that most folks do when setting up a new WordPress website. (From your WordPress dashboard just go to Settings –> Permalinks and make your change there.)

What Are Permalinks?

For the uninitiated, Permalinks are what WordPress calls the URL structure that the software generates when creating posts and pages, etc. It’s everything that shows up after the “.com” (or .org, etc.) when navigating around your website.

Because WordPress uses the PHP programming language the default way WordPress sets up permalinks with with a /?p=123 kind of query. For example the default permalink format for this post would be:

• http://successcreeations.com/?p=2565

Besides being a little ugly, having permalinks like that does nothing for you in the search engines.

Improving SEO

When it comes to ranking well in the search engines it is important to have your most important keywords in the actual URL (i.e. web address or permalink) of your web page. The search engines certainly factor that in, though it is debatable how much so.

Since SEO experts are in the business of squeezing every bit of optimization out of each page you’ll often see them recommend either just using your post title or using your category (to get some extra keywords) along with the post title as your permalink structure. If we did that here, this post would look like one of these examples:

• http://successcreeations.com/choosing-the-best-wordpress-permalink-structure/
• http://successcreeations.com/wordpress/tips/choosing-the-best-wordpress-permalink-structure/

That’s definitely more readable. And it will also help out some with SEO for sure because it puts more of your permalinks.

But there’s a catch. It’s a big one, especially for small business websites.

WordPress Performance

Unfortunately, because of the way WordPress works, having a text variable such as the post name, category, tag or author can cause huge performance problems if you have more than a handful of pages beyond your blog posts. (You can find the technical explanation why here.)

While there is some discrepancy about how many pages it takes before it becomes a problem – I’ve seen anywhere from 10 – 50 pages – there is no denying that your site can easily get into a situation where it bogs down completely with those completely SEO-centric permalink structures.

While it’s true that folks who just blog on their WordPress websites can get away with these, this can become a big problem for most small businesses which tend to have more pages on their websites than most bloggers have. (For example, SuccessCREEations.com has 30 pages right now and I’m about to add a few more.)

As businesses grow the need to add pages on their website grows too. For example you’ll likely want to add pages as your product or service offering grows or when you add staff.

Better Choices

Because of the performance issue that results from the above approach when you have numerous pages you are much better off putting a numeric variable such as the year or post ID, or choosing a fixed plain text prefix such as “blog” or “article” before the text variable in your permalink settings.

Some examples in how that might look for this post:

• http://successcreeations.com/2010/choosing-the-best-wordpress-permalink-structure/
• http://successcreeations.com/2565/choosing-the-best-wordpress-permalink-structure/
• http://successcreeations.com/blog/choosing-the-best-wordpress-permalink-structure/
• http://successcreeations.com/article/choosing-the-best-wordpress-permalink-structure/

In your Permalink Settings these four examples would be entered like this:

• /%year%/%postname%/
• /%post_id%/%postname%/
• /blog/%postname%/
• /article/%postname%/

EDIT: Per Otto’s comment below (and he’s pretty much the authority on this particular issue, by the way) “fixed text” doesn’t solve the problem either.

Any of these eliminates the WordPress performance problem. Each of them has their strengths and weaknesses, and this is where we delve into the realm of opinion.

My Recommendation

Personally I prefer using /%post_id%/%postname%/ for permalinks. The downside of using this structure is that it uses an arbitrary and outwardly meaningless number in your URL which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to most website visitors. It is next to impossible to guess should anyone want to directly type your URL into their address bar.

However, on the plus side the post ID is a unique designator for each blog post. That means that you can share just the post ID and direct people to a specific blog post when you are short on space. Twitter is one such place where it could come in handy, as an example.

So http://successcreeations.com/2565/ will still get folks to this post and I have a built in URL shortener. I’ve found that to be pretty handy on several of my websites.

Trying a shorter version of the other options will just produce a list of all your blog posts. Well, OK. When you use the year you’ll just get a list of the posts in that year. But either way it’s not as useful, at least to my way of thinking.

That said, I can see the arguments in favor of some of the other options. So I ask you, which of the options makes more sense to you?

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

One of the great things about WordPress is how easy it is to add custom functionality just by installing plugins, which are simply packages of code that can easily be added and removed from a WordPress installation. There are currently well over 11,000 plugins available for free in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Any of these plugins can be installed right from the WordPress dashboard without having to mess with any programming!

And that doesn’t count all the great premium plugins that are available out there too.

Sorting through 11K+ plugins can be a little intimidating. So I thought I’d put together my Top 10 for small business websites.

These are completely based on my own scientific measures. Which basically means these are the ones I like best and think are most useful for small businesses. That said, I know there are a ton of great plugins I’m leaving out. If there’s one you think is great for small business websites then leave a comment and let us know.

Now on to…

The Plugin List

1. Akismet – I know. It’s not really fair to include this plugin since Akismet comes bundled with WordPress. However we absolutely do not want spam to make it to the front of our websites and Akismet does a fantastic job keeping our websites spam free.

2. All In One SEO Pack – Search Engine Optimization is another non-negotiable for small business websites. All In One SEO Pack is one of the best plugins to give you all the easy access to your SEO settings that you need to get the job done. (One note: if your site is on a premium theme like Headway or Genesis with SEO functionality built in then you won’t need this plugin.)

3. Automatic WordPress Backup – Backing up your website is another critical requirement for businesses. This plugin will back up the important parts of your WordPress website to an Amazon S3 account so you can have a reliable off-site backup of your website. If the worst happens you’ll be able to get back up and running quickly.

4. Google Analyticator – I tell my clients that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Google Analytics is one of the better metrics systems out there and this plugin makes it easy to integrate Google Analytics with your WordPress site so that you’ll know where your traffic is coming from and where it is going on your site.

5. Google XML Sitemaps – It is important to tell the search engines about the great content on your website so that it gets indexed properly and quickly. This plugin helps make that happen. New posts here on SuccessCREEations get indexed as fast as I can look them up after I hit the Publish button. I attribute that in large part to this plugin.

6. Gravity Forms – This is the first (of two) premium (i.e. “costs money”) plugins on my list. A very important part of a business website is gathering information from customers and visitors. Gravity Forms is, in my opinion, the best forms plugin out there for WordPress and well worth the nominal cost.

7. Scribe SEO – Are you an SEO expert? Neither am I, even though I know a ton about SEO. Scribe SEO takes the guess work out of optimizing our posts and pages. It integrates seamlessly with All In One SEO Pack (or select premium themes like Headway and Genesis). With the click of a mouse it will evaluate your content and tell you how to improve your on-page SEO. It’s well worth the price to use this premium plugin. (Unless of course you are already an SEO expert.)

8. Socialble – Making your content easy to share on social media is important as a business owner. You can use a handful of different plugins like I do here on SuccessCREEations. Or you can simply add Sociable and set whatever social media services you want to connect to all with one plugin.

9. W3 Total Cache – Speed is of the essence in business and W3 Total Cache can speed up your website dramatically. As I mentioned recently, this plugin makes it easy to use a CDN on your WordPress site, with all the benefits that go along with it. With W3 Total Cache properly set up your site will be ready for those huge traffic spikes from your brilliant blog posts. No worries.

10. WPtouch – Mobile is getting more and more important for businesses with all the new smart phones out there. WPtouch gives mobile visitors to your website with touch screens, like iPhones and Androids, a presentation that is easier to navigate than your normal website. It happens automatically when you install the plugin. Very nice.

Over to You

Now it’s your turn. What plugins do you think businesses should have on their sites?

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

You may have noticed that I recently re-themed SuccessCREEations here using the Genesis Theme Framework from StudioPress. There are several reasons why I did this.

But before I get into them I want to say one thing. Even though I decided to change this site, I still believe Headway is a great WordPress theme and I still recommend it to my clients whenever I think it will meet their needs the best. I’ve already extolled the virtues of Headway in other posts and they’ve only improved that theme since.

But let’s get back to Genesis.

My Own Reasons for Changing

I have long been a fan of themes designed by Brian Gardner, the head of StudioPress. In fact his were the first themes I purchased for working with client sites years ago. His themes are coded exceptionally well for performance and are easy to work with from a developer perspective.

We’ve started offering WordPress web hosting here at SuccessCREEations and Genesis is one (of the many) options available for customers to purchase directly from inside our hosting dashboard. Since Headway isn’t (at least not yet anyway) it makes sense for me to use using Genesis.

And honestly, I like to change things up from time to time. In fact I am already talking about my team on how I’m going to adjust the current Genesis child theme that we’ve got here on SuccessCREEations to better represent our brand.

But the single biggest reason I made the change is because I see that the Genesis theme framework is…

Great for Small Business

The closer I looked at what the folks at StudioPress are doing with Genesis and where they are going the more I began to realize that it is a great platform for small business.

Here are some reasons why I see it that way.

1. Theme Framework

First Genesis is an entire theme framework rather than just a single theme. With this theme framework there is a core theme, Genesis, which has most of the functionality and does the heavy lifting of the theme, and there is a child theme which acts like a skin over the top of the Genesis theme framework.

A big advantage of this type of theme framework versus a traditional WordPress theme is that the core Genesis theme can be upgraded without danger of disrupting the look and layout of the small business website. Another advantage is that a small business can redesign their site with a completely different look and layout simply by creating a new child theme and yet still maintain all the core functionality.

That way everything will continue to work for their site in exactly the same way they are used to it working.

That’s huge: Flexibility without having to retrain staff!

2. Great Support

The StudioPress support forums are some of the best of any theme I’ve worked with. They are very active, and well moderated with people who know the StudioPress themes inside and out. There is a thriving community growing up around the themes.

This means that the do-it-yourself solo entrepreneur or very small business person working on a very tight budget can get answers to questions about the theme relatively quickly and easily.

3. Highly Configurable

Genesis has a huge variety of configuration that can happen all from inside the WordPress dashboard without any need for messing with programming. For example Genesis makes it easy to change the sidebar layout on your posts and pages with just a mouse click. Not only that, but the StudioPress folks have created some great plugins to add even more customization for those who want to fine tune all sorts of things.

• Want to have custom sidebars on a post by post basis? There’s a plugin for that.
• How about different navigation menus on different pages of your website? There’s a plugin for that.
• Or maybe you want to be able to easily create clean URL redirects, but without the extra coding I had do go through for my affiliate links? There’s a plugin for that too!

All that built in, or easy to add on, functionality means that the business can focus on running their business and creating great content to attract customers rather than having to mess with programming their site.

4. Fantastic SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is hugely important for small business websites. Genesis is coded very cleanly so that it serves up WordPress pages very quickly. Speed is becoming a more important factor for SEO.

Not only that, but the code in Genesis has all of the latest SEO best practices built in. They make it easy to manage all of the various settings to maximize search engine optimization right from your edit screen and without any programming required.

This gives businesses using Genesis a competitive advantage!

5. High Security

WordPress security is a growing concern as the number of websites powered by the platform continues to grow at a record pace. As more and more websites are created in, or switch over to WordPress the platform will likely become more targeted by hackers.

And that’s a powerful reason why it’s critical that your small business website has a theme that follows all of the WordPress security best practices. Genesis does.

The theme developers invited WordPress Lead Developer, Mark Jaquith to perform a security audit on Genesis. Here’s what Mark had to say about Genesis:

“StudioPress reached out to me to do a security review before Genesis was even released, and I did another review for Genesis 1.3. They were very responsive to my suggestions, and the result is a theme framework that follows all the WordPress security best practices. It’s clear StudioPress made security a priority when developing Genesis and from a security standpoint, Genesis 1.3 is at the top of its class.”

That priority on security with Genesis provides huge peace of mind for small businesses!

6. Plays Well With Other Scripts

Many times small businesses are looking to integrate other scripts with their websites to do things beyond what WordPress does. Some of the themes out there cause difficulty integrating with these non-WordPress programs. Go into the support forums of some themes and you will find a big long list of “known conflicts,” often with popular WordPress plugins.

Genesis rarely (if ever) has this problem. From my experience, if it works with WordPress it will work with Genesis.

This is a big deal for small businesses that need even more from their website than what WordPress offers.

What It All Means

At the end of the day all these factors add up to make Genesis a great WordPress theme framework for small business websites.

Click the banner below to learn more about the Genesis framework.

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

Spam is the scourge of the internet. No one wants to have spam comments filling up their WordPress website. It reflects poorly on you as a site owner, and this is especially true if you WordPress site represents your business!

Fortunately there are some great tools available to make eradicating spam on your WordPress site a piece of cake.

Akismet

The easiest way to deal with over 99% of your spam is to use the single most downloaded WordPress plugin, Akismet. (It comes bundled with the core WordPress software.)

Once you activate Akismet you will have to enter your WordPress API key. There are a couple way to get one.

If you have an account at WordPress.com then you already have one. (If you don’t you can sign up for free.) Simply go to your WordPress.com Profile Personal Settings and you’ll see your API key near the top of the page.

Copy that string of letters and numbers and paste them into the Plugins –> Akismet Settings on the dashboard of your own site. Then click the “Update Options” button and you’ll be set.

Then Akismet will automatically compare every comment to their database. The ones it calculates are spam will go to a spam moderation folder on your dashboard and your site visitors will never see them. For the occasional spam comment that gets through you can just click the red “Spam” link under that comment in your comments list and it will pull it back from your site.

It’s a good idea to scan through all the comments that get marked as spam periodically because it will also occasionally mark a legitimate comment as spam. When it does, just click the yellow “Not Spam” link and the comment will be move to your moderation folder where you can approve it so it shows up on the front page of your WordPress site.

A couple things about the way Akismet works. The filter learns from every single WordPress site owner. By marking spam comments as “spam” or “not spam”, you are “training” Akismet – and not just for your site, but for every WordPress site that’s using Akismet.

Because that’s the case, it’s a good idea to be judicious with marking comments as spam. When you do you are affecting that commenter across every WordPress site. Using that power vindictively could very well come back to haunt you. I’m just saying.

Defensio

A strong Akismet competitor in my mind is Defensio. Defensio actually does more than just protect your site from spam. It also can filter out profanity and keep out links to malware by blocking links to executable files and scripts.

I was an early tester for Defensio and I have to say I like the service. The way spam is presented makes it a little faster to double check for good comments trapped by mistake. I switch between Akismet and Defensio on my sites and both do a great job.

Here’s a video with more about Defensio:

Like Akismet you will also need to get an API key to use Defensio on your site. You get one by signing up on their website.

One note: You don’t want to run Akismet and Defensio at the same time. Deactivate one before you activate the other so they don’t conflict with one another and cause problems with your site.

Bad Behavior

Another line of defense against spam on your WordPress site is Bad Behavior.

Bad Behavior is designed to use along side other spam filters such as Akismet or Defensio and works differently. Instead of filtering spam comments once they are entered into your website, Bad Behavior targets the methods by which spam is delivered.

If you still feel overwhelmed by dealing with your spam with one of the other plugins, you can add Bad Behavior and dramatically reduce the number of spam comments you ever even see on your site. Bad Behavior will block most spammer from even being able to access your site.

Simply install the plugin, activate it, and your WordPress site is doubly protected!

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks in the WordPress world. And much of the excitement has been centered around one premium WordPress theme: Thesis.

Now before I get into all this I feel I should point out that I am an affiliate with Thesis, along with several other premium WordPress themes. For example, SuccessCREEations uses Headway and New Media Profit Path uses Genesis from StudioPress. I recommend each of these theme frameworks depending on the needs of the client.

Background

The dustup has been brewing for well over a year. The main issue was that the Thesis license agreement was apparently at odds with the WordPress GPL license.

Basically WordPress, headed by Matt Mullenweg, has taken the position that, since WordPress has a GPL license, then WordPress plugins and themes also need to use that license. In the broadest, non-lawyerly terms the GPL license allows people to charge whatever they want for their software, but end users who purchase it are then free to use the software any way they want.

Thesis, and in particular lead developer Chris Pearson have long maintained that the way WordPress is applying GPL to themes is a legal gray area that hasn’t been tested in court and they have every right to restrict how purchasers of their theme use it after purchase.

It’s been a running feud that seemed to flair up ever few months whenever someone prominent in the WordPress community wrote a post about GPL with lively discussions flowing in the comment sections of those posts.

Coming to a Head

Then a couple weeks ago things came to a head. It started with a simple tweet. Which led to a flurry of tweets back and forth. Both sides went a little over the edge, in my opinion.

The conflict culminated in a video interview, sort of a point-counterpoint between Matt and Chris:

If you take the time to listen to the interview in that video, it seems that Chris comes across worked up, angry and, dare I say it, a touch arrogant.

I’ve seen a lot of chatter in the last couple weeks from people who have watched the video and many of them who were considering Thesis are having second thoughts now. Seems they just plain didn’t like the way Chris presented himself.

My impression is that Matt comes from a perspective of abundance. He sees that there is plenty of money to go around and, based on several of the premium theme developers who are releasing their themes with GPL and have booming businesses he doesn’t see a more open license as getting in the way of profitability.

With my nautical background I’d say it this way: A rising tide raises all the ships in the harbor.

Chris, on the other hand seems to be trapped in a scarcity mindset. He comes across as afraid that if he doesn’t restrict what people do with his work then they will take advantage of him and he will lose income.

Neither side really comes across smelling like a rose in this exchange. But over all it seemed to me like Chris lost this particular battle.

Fallout

Then, after all that, about a week later Chris announced that Thesis was moving to a split GPL license.

So on top of loosing the battle, it seems Chris capitulated and lost the war too.

More Fallout?

Now we’re starting to see some high profile bloggers replacing the Thesis themes on their sites. Social Media powerhouse Chris Brogan is one example. This week he switched to Genesis by StudioPress.

Now Chris (do we have enough Chris’s in this post yet?) says the change was purely a business decision, and I get that. He’s careful to point out that Thesis is a great theme and that the GPL dustup has been resolved so it is a non-issue.

But it still begs the question, is this the beginning of a wide scale abandonment of Thesis by the WordPress community? If so, how much does Chris Pearson’s approach and style throughout the feud play into it?

Then the Real Bombshell

Then the real piece of news related to this whole thing that I find completely shocking. Last week, Brian Clark, half owner of Thesis with Chris Pearson, announced he and Chris are parting ways!

Brian says the breakup of their partnership was months in the making. But I find it interesting that, according to Brian, Chris’ stance on the whole GPL thing was the beginning of the end of their working together.

Now I don’t have any knowledge of their business arrangement but from where I sit it seems obvious that Brian was the marketing force that propelled Thesis to it’s current place of prominence. Granted, it’s because Chris delivers the goods that there are so many satisfied customers at this point.

But I’ll be curious to see if Thesis continues to thrive without that marketing support.

Or has Chris Pearson torpedoed his business by taking it down this road?

Amazing how much drama can go on in a community as geeky as we have with WordPress, eh?

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

Backing up your data has been a necessary part of life at least as long as we’ve had computers. Far too many people live out on the raggedy edge, care free and unafraid, never giving a second thought about backups.

Until something bad happens and they loose a bunch of their data, that is.

Our office here at SuccessCREEations is almost exclusively a Mac office so we run Time Machine backups hourly on our work computers to an external hard drive. Not only that, but we also back up every single computer off site via JungleDisk every night.

Redundancy is a good thing!

Two Recent Examples

I was reminded about need for backing up your WordPress site by recent examples that happened to people I know.

In the first case, Viveka Von Rosen’s site was attacked by a hacker. I wrote about that last week when I explained how to protect WordPress from hackers.

Also last week, Cheryl Smith had her site go down for, um, other reasons.

Fortunately it worked out well for both of them. But in both cases it could have been much less stressful if they were backing up their sites regularly.

That said, here are three easy way to back up your WordPress site.

1. WP DB Backup Plugin

My primary backup for years has been the WP DB Backup plugin. You can set this plugin to automatically backup your WordPress MySQL database and email it to you. A Gmail address would be great for this.

As a note, at this writing the plugin page says it’s compatible through WordPress 2.9.2 but I’ve not encountered any problems using it on version 3.0.

That works great if you already have all of your theme files and your uploads in your possession like I do. But if you don’t you might need a more substantial backup system.

2. Automatic WordPress Backup Plugin

The Automatic WordPress Backup Plugin is an option to back up everything on your site. It will also send the backups to your Amazon S3 account. (And if you don’t have one they have a video on the site to show how to set it up.)

Amazon S3 is the same service that my JungleDisk backs up our computer to. And I’m also using Amazon S3 to host all the videos on New Media Profit Path as well. I’ve really been surprised how inexpensive it’s been for me. I’ve got several Gigs of storage and it’s still under $1 a month.

To me, that’s mighty inexpensive insurance!

Unfortunately this method does take some technical skilz to set up. If that’s not you there is another option.

3. VaultPress

If you’re looking for worry free backups then VaultPress may be the right answer. You just install and turn a plugin, activate it (which is easier than it sounds) and VaulPress will take care of everything else for you.

Their starting price of $15 per month is not insignificant. But if your business depends on your WordPress site then $180 a year is a very small price to pay to make sure that you don’t loose any of your critical data.

So there you have it. Three easy ways to backup your WordPress site.

How do you backup your site?

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.