The first step to creating a blog for personal or business use is the obvious: Get the thing up and running in one piece. However, it doesn’t (and shouldn’t) stop there, as there are tons of widgets, plug-ins, add-ons, and more that not only increase the functionality of your blog but can also help you retain users, bring new ones, and monetize more efficiently [...]

Amp Up Your Blog With These Add Ons

Community ACL sets itself apart from other permission control solutions utilising the new framework of Joomla! 1.5 to create a Access Level Control component that does very little to the core and is universally supported by other Joomla! components, modules and menu items.

In a recent announcement Harvest said:

Everything is organized in a easy-to-scan dashboard for you to track what is outstanding, and what has been recently accepted or declined.

To enable the Estimates feature: Go to Manage > Account Settings, and you’ll find a new Customize Modules section. Click on Choose Modules and you can activate the new Estimates feature.

Jeremy Levitt from ServiceSeeking said:

Now, a customer will simply be required to tell you whether their job is small (5 Credits), medium (10 Credits) or large (15 Credits). We have phased out “undisclosed budgets” and all current projects have been adjusted as a result of the change. We hope this change makes quoting a little bit easier.

Personally, this is a great step forward helping me to focus on the work I want to do, be it helping maintain a site (small job) or develop from the ground-up an e-commerce site (large job).

Done! You’ve successfully moved your WordPress website to a new domain and new hosting account.

1. Open ec_management.class.php with a text editor
2. After line #54

   if(isset($_POST['EC_doPost'])) {

   paste this,

   $statusPost = $_POST['EC_statusPost'];

3. Comment out line #59 or #60

   'post_date' => date('Y-m-d H:i:s')

   by putting // at the beginning of the line

4. Under the commented line paste

   'post_date' => current_time('mysql')

No assumed prior web development knowledge is required, but will be helpful.

Inclusions

What is included in the workshop:

• Continental breakfast, lunch catered by Subway and dinner caterering.
• Handbook with helpful cheat sheets and detailed instructions to refer to at home.
• Priority support from web experts within an attendees-only private forum

Requirements

• You must bring a laptop computer with a wireless card (to connect to the Internet). If this is not possible a laptop can be hired for the workshop, please contact me no less than a fortnight prior to the workshop.
• You must be willing to register a domain name for your website (e.g. visser.com.au) and pay the ongoing fees yourself (approx. $20 per year).
• You must be willing to pay website hosting and pay the ongoing fees yourself (approx. $50 per year).
• You must have the most recent version of the browser Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox installed on your computer.
• You should have a basic comfort with computer skills such as typing, copying/pasting, creating emails and browsing the Internet.

Objectives

Objectives of the 7 hour workshop is to achieve the following goals:

• Purchase an available domain from Webcity (www.webcity.com.au)
• Purchase website hosting from Host Ultra (www.hostultra.com)
• Download and install WordPress (www.wordpress.org) in our new website hosting account
• Install and activate a WordPress theme in our new WordPress site
• Modify existing and create new WordPress Posts and Pages

As the workshop is limited to a  single block of 7 hours a dedicated forum will be setup and made available for registered attendees to ask questions before, during, and after the closing of the workshop.

WP User Manager

I install and configure WP User Manager on all commercial Wordpress-powered sites requiring custom user profile fields, Dealsway Solution’s plugin really is in a league of its own, plus I’d like to give back to the Wordpress community!

A modified release of WP User Manager 0.4 is available for download that ammends the HTML and CSS styling of custom fields to conform with the Wordpress 2.5 Administration layout.

Download WP User Manager 0.4.1 Update

Look familiar? There is a bug in the current release of WP-Forum which exists in the plugin’s PHP function ul() hidden away in cookies.php of the plugin root directory. To fix this issue open cookies.php with your favourite text editor and replace…

function ul($user_id){
if(!isset($_COOKIE[’session’])){
update_usermeta( $user_id, ‘lastvisit’, time() );
return true;
}
return false;
}

with…

function ul($user_id){
if(isset($_COOKIE[’session’])){
update_usermeta( $user_id, ‘lastvisit’, time() );
return true;
}
return false;
}

Save your changes and refresh the page. All done.

The donations cloud is something like a tag cloud, only that it displays – donations. The more a person donates, the larger the link to his/her website will be.

There is a critical bug in 0.1.1 (currently available version at time of writing) whereby if you increase the value of DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT and a visitor donates a value less than your DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT amount the donation will not be visible and the visitor who just generously made a donation will call foul.

To resolve this issue do the following:

1. Open an FTP connection to your website
2. Edit donationscloud.php (/wp-content/plugins/donationscloud/...)
3. On line #45 change the value of “5.00″ to be the same as what you set for DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT within settings.php (/wp-content/plugins/donationscloud/...)
4. Save changes

By increasing the minimum value that visitors can donate any future donations will appear in the donation cloud. Looking at the source for Donations Cloud it seems there is no minimum amount checking meaning someone who donates $4.99 will not receive a back-link, this should be announced to visitors and/or a server response mentioning that a donation of less than the minimum amount will not generate a backlink.