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Archive for the ‘Wordpress Plugins’ Category

It is very important that Wordpress is upgraded regularly as old versions can leave you prone to attack.  A lot of people will just never upgrade and this can leave some security holes, so its key to upgrade your legal Wordpress site or blog on a regular basis.

Its pretty easy to upgrade Wordpress by just downloading the software and then following the basic instructions, but it’s even easier with this auto upgrade plugin!

WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

WordPress automatic upgrade upgrades your wordpress installation by doing the following steps.

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

The plugin can also can be run in a automated mode where in you do not have to click on any links to go to the next step.

Go here to download this plugin now

Creating your lawyer website using Wordpress has many advantages including the ability to setup plugins that add different functionality to your site. Its pretty easy to setup plugins, you basically download it, then transfer the plugin to your sites plugin directory and then activate the plugin from within your wordpress admin panel.

One plugin that is very useful is the Broken Link Checker.

Sometimes, links get broken. A page is deleted, a subdirectory forgotten, a site moved to a different domain. Most likely many of your blog posts contain links. It is almost inevitable that over time some of them will lead to a “404 Not Found” error page. Obviously you don’t want your readers to be annoyed by clicking a link that leads nowhere. You can check the links yourself but that might be quite a task if you have a lot of posts. You could use your webserver’s stats but that only works for local links.

FEATURES OF BROKEN LINK CHECKER

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
• Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
• Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.
• Also detects redirected links.
• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
• Link checking intervals can be configured.
• New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
• You view broken links, redirects, and a complete list of links used on your site, in the Tools -> Broken Links tab.
• Searching and filtering links by URL, anchor text and so on is also possible.
• Each link can be edited or unlinked directly via the plugin’s page, without manually editing each post.

Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks (AKA blogroll), etc and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take from a few minutes to several hours. When parsing is complete, the plugin will start checking each link to see if it works. Again, how long this takes depends on how big your site is and how many links there are. You can monitor the progress and tweak various link checking options in Settings -> Link Checker.

The broken links, if any are found, will show up in a new tab of the WP admin panel – Tools -> Broken Links. A notification will also appear in the “Broken Link Checker” widget on the Dashboard. To save display space, you can keep the widget closed and configure it to expand automatically when problematic links are detected.

Download the Broken Link Checker

Your WordPress database contains every post, every comment and every link you have on your blog. If your database gets erased or corrupted, you stand to lose everything you have written. There are many reasons why this could happen and not all are things you can control. But what you can do is back up your data. After all, it is important. Right?

Some people might not even realize they need to backup the site or that its even possible. Usually you can do it from the web hosting control panel, but its somewhat complex and technical.  Yet like most things in Wordpress, theres an easier way to get it done using a plugin.

Wordpress has plenty of information on how to backup your Wordpress site and how important it is here.

There are plenty of free plugins available to backup your wordpress sites but I am using one that is a paid plugin called Backup Buddy and its very easy to use and works well.  Hopefully you will never need to know if it works but it’s important to have this done. Also when you backup your files, you should have them on a different server then your site is on, in case something bad happens to your existing web server.

BACKUP BUDDY PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS:

BackupBuddy is an all-in-one solution for backups, restoration, and migration. The single backup file created by the plugin can be used with the importer script to quickly and easily restore your site on the same server or even migrate to a new server with a different domain and database. Whether you’re an end user or a developer, this plugin is sure to bring you peace of mind and added safety in the event of data loss. Our goal is to keep the backup, restoration, and migration processes easy, fast, and reliable.

You can find more about it here

Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. The button comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing and usage history.

The E-mail tab makes it easy to share via Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL, and any other web-based e-mailer or desktop program. The Add to Favorites button (or Bookmark tab) helps users bookmark using any browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.).

Individual service icons let you optimize your blog posts for specific social sites. Choose from over 100 individual services.

Download it here

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your
WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as
well as custom ones.

Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap
is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap
protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified
about the update.

This is a great plugin and its important to create a site map for you site. This way Google can index all of the pages within your site.

Download this Plugin

One of the great things about using Wordpress is that you can add "plug-ins" which are programs that add functionality to your wordpress blog/site. There are 1000's of different wordpress plug ins and they are free and usually very easy to install and setup.

You can goto the Wordpress plugin directory to find all the different plugins that are available.

One of the first plugins you should have is the Akismet anti spam plugin.

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you
review the spam it catches under your blog's "Comments" admin screen.

This plugin really works great once installed because it captures all the spammer comments and if you don't have this in place, you will get bombarded with spammer comments that you will have to weed through in order to get to the regular non spam comments.

Download this plugin now.

You'll need a WordPress.com API key to use it.