One thing I’m really glad to see is the change with permalinks. /%postname%/ will no longer be a custom setting that you manually enter. It will be a selectable option. This one is big because the performance issues associated with using /%postname%/ has been fixed.  For those who may have shied away from using that in the past: if you’re considering changing your permalinks, make sure you have redirects in place – test and make sure things are working if you change your permalinks.

Other improvements: drag and drop to upload media like images, pdfs, etc.  – this one will help lots of people.

See Mashable’s great in depth writeup. As always, when a new version drops, be sure to upgrade your WordPress site.

The gist was this: be aware of what plugins you are using on your site. Check out the plugin before installing, know what it’s supposed to do, check it’s stats, who wrote it, is it maintained, is it documented, is it current and will it work with the latest WordPress. There are a lot of good free WordPress plugins out there, but there are also a lot that will cause you problems. I also touched on premium plugins – they’re worth it for the development cycle and support.

Don’t  leave  unused plugins installed – clean up after yourself. Unused plugins that are still activated can slow things down and unused, un-updated plugins can be a security risk for your site.

Not all plugins play well with others, some may conflict with your theme, they can even slow your site down depending on how they’re written/coded.  To take a page from Carolyn Shelby’s presentation:  If you have a site, you should be familiar with enough  html, php, and the general workings of WordPress to be able to spot something not quite right. I’ll add, if you’re not, then you need someone on your team or that you can go to, to help you make the call.

Scott Hendison did a great overview of WordPress SEO by Yoast on the panel, and Ben Cook covered some of the reasoning on how to best use Categories and Tags in WordPress – and if you weren’t there, you missed Ben’s great Lego slides – I looked for the Panda one for this post, but didn’t spot it.

SEO and Performance

• WordPress SEO by Yoast
• W3 Total Cache

Social

• Socialize
• Share This
• Social Media Widget
• Simple Facebook Connect
• Simple Twitter Connect
• Google Plus Widget

Other Plugins

• Broken Link Checker
• Viper’s Video Quicktags
• Cookies for Comments
• Redirection (although I’m a fan of working directly in .htaccess)
• Login Lockdown

Premium Plugins

• Gravity Forms
• Wishlist Member
• BackupBuddy
• WordPress Mega Menu
• Cart66

I saw a few tweets that mentioned some other plugins, I’ll be checking those out – do you have any favorites?

It’s going to be a great event, if you’re there, come say hi!

I’ll also be doing a full day workshop on the 10th – if you’ve been thinking of doing your WordPress site, or setting up your blog – I’ll be taking a limited number of people through the process, hands-on, step by step.  We’ll start with installation, theme choice, and cover SEO, customizations, backups and more – your technical and design issues tackled live. More on the WordPress workshop ->

Look for more on WordPress from me – I’ve got some top secret stuff in the works.

Google is generating these links automatically based on your page structure – you have to have them to get these links. They’re easy to add, but there are a few things you’ll want to do to increase the chance that yours will be picked up.

Make sure your long pages with multiple topics are structured properly. What does this mean? It means use the H1 tag for the main heading, H2 for the main sections, H3 for sub-sections and so on.  Then be sure to include a table of contents that links to the named anchors in the document. This can be a simple bulleted list with the links to the appropriate section of the document.

Example: Creating Named Anchors

Here’s an example right here on this site. We’ve added the anchors and table of contents to our FAQ page.  Here is a step by step on how to add them:  (we’ll assume your page is already using a solid structure with Hx tags and such)

First: Add your anchors.

<a name="why_wordpress"></a>

Place this at the point the section starts, this is where the link in your table of contents will “jump” to when clicked.

Now link your table of contents list to the named anchors you created.

<a href="#why_wordpress">Why WordPress?</a>

Repeat for each item in your table of contents and page.  It takes a bit of extra work, but it’s worth it!

Mashable on the Attack

How to know if you’ve been affected:

• In your permalinks, look for additions that looks like:
  ...eval(base64_decode...
• Also check your users, you may have an additional admin user – look for one you don’t recognize.

Read more details at Lorelle’s blog: Old Versions of WordPress Under Attack. There’s also detailed instructions on how to recover if you’ve been attacked and hacked.

If you haven’t, check your site and upgrade now!

Latest version of WordPress

Highly recommend you take care of this one pronto, before the script-kiddies and other “bad guys” find you or you might just find yourself locked out. Not cool.

Sooner or later, you’re bound to run into this situation: you go to your site, prepared to make a post or update a widget and you know everything was fine when you last logged in yesterday – and yet you get some error: you see the install wordpress screen (aack!) or you see some odd php like error, but no site, or maybe you catch a database connection error…. now what?

• Grab a new backup of the database and files. this step is especially important if you don’t have a regular backup of things on your site. to do this, first grab the database: you’ll do this via your hosting control panel – look for phpmyadmin and download all the tables in the database that your wordpress install uses.
• then using your ftp client, backup all the files that make wordpress go. this will also include the uploads folder which includes all the stuff you’ve uploaded to use in posts on your site, like images, possible video, pdf files, etc.

In some cases, your hosting Control Panel will have a backup everything (all files and databases) you can use this too, the important thing is that you have a complete backup.

Now: take a deep breath and get ready to answer some questions about your site, and be honest.

What was the last thing you did on the site? were you installing a plugin, were you trying to upgrade wordpress, were you updating a theme, were you installing a theme? Be honest – I can’t tell you how many sites i’ve worked on where they swear they hadn’t done a thing – and it turns out that an upgrade process went wrong or a theme wasn’t completely uploaded.

Were you upgrading wordpress? if yes, then did it finish as expected or did you get an error of some type part way through: if you didn’t get a specific error, did you get a blank screen?

What you can try:  re-upload the same version of wordpress – manually via ftp. if you get another blank screen, these usually indicate a memory issue – you can verify this through use of your error_log files. If it’s a memory error, it will show up there. What this means:  your hostng account isn’t allocated enough memory to run whatever part of the upgrade process it was in when the error occurred. sometimes this can be manually corrected, in other cases, you may need to upgrade your hosting or try the upgrade when the server is less busy.

If you were installing a new theme – make sure all the files were uploaded to the right place. Themes go in the wp-content/themes/yourthemename folder or directory. If the files aren’t all there, then reupload them – and try to activate the theme again. If that still doesn’t work, delete the new theme and let the site go back to the default theme, then try it again. Some themes may not work with the newer versions of WordPress.

Sometimes a newly installed plugin won’t play nice – if you can’t get to wordpress admin to disable it – ftp in and delete that plugins directory and all files – wordpress will automatically deactivate any plugins it can’t locate.

If you’re still stuck, get help from your webmaster or give WordPress Angel a call. Good luck!

First, what’s a Guest Post? This is a common thing – and a good way to expand your reach with your audience. A Guest Post is simply a post made to your blog by another author. typically it’s something they do once or possibly for a series of posts. Think of it as filling in on a talk show. Luckily, WordPress provides the means for you to easily enable a guest post – without much fuss.

These allow you to set up a user with access to only a specific set of functions. It starts with creating a user account for your guest. You can use an existing subscriber account or create a new one in your Dashboard. Here’s what to look for on the screen:

Summary of WordPress Roles:

You’ll probably want to assign them the role of Contributor - this allows them to write and manage their posts, but they cannot publish. This reserves control over that to you. Pretty cool huh?

Use of roles makes coordinating a guest post much easier and simpler, since they can login when they’re ready and do their thing, and you can approve and publish when you’re ready.

Of particular interest, to those of you running older versions of WordPress – is the section about having your site hacked and having spammy links injected into your site. Matt mentions making WordPress easier to update than it is today – they are making strides in this direction, but in the past, it wasn’t always as easy. That’s why there are a lot of older WordPress installs that are subject to the spammy links exploit.

If you use Google’s Webmaster Tools and you have an older WordPress site that has been hacked, you may see a warning something like this:

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines … This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party.

Google will then list some of the links they found on your site.

What to do if this happens to you? Upgrade your site, of course. Then you’ll want to ask Google for re-inclusion. Matt mentions in the interview when asking for re-inclusion, you should detail what happened and I’d add that you might want to mention what was done to clean-up. According to Matt, it’s a pretty good way of getting back in the index if this has happened to your site.

Other topics discussed included WordPress SEO, (which I’ll cover in another post), Akismet, and Meta-tags.SEOBook Interviews Matt Mullenweg