Have you ever searched for a way to make a WordPress.com blog more robust? How about a way to make a WordPress hosted blog or site more secure and simpler to set up and maintain?A few WordPress superstars have teamed up to create WPEngine, a new and very exciting platform that promises to do all of the above and more.WordPress has become the killer platform for many bloggers, small businesses and developers/consultants with multiple clients.However, there’s a middle ground between a WordPress.com blog and a hosted WordPress site that a few apps are attempting to cover. This middle ground includes people who don’t have the technical skills of a WordPress developer or even a website administrator but who still want to take advantage of a greater part of the WordPress ecosystem of plugins and other benefits.About the ProductWPEngine offers a WordPress VIP-type experience for smaller-scale websites, and it includes top-notch…

A couple of weeks ago Pawan from MaxBlogPress.com contacted me, saying he had developed a new plugin that would significantly boost the number of sign-ups I was getting to my email newsletter.
I have known Pawan for a while, and I use many of his plugins, so I said “Sure.” He sent me the files, and I installed it on Daily Blog Tips. The plugin is called Subscribers Magnet, and the idea is to create multiple “hit” points (i.e., methods and places your visitors can use to sign-up) to increase the number of new email subscribers you get per day.
The idea sounded cool, but only when I started playing with the plugin I realized it was a really neat piece of software, and here is why.
First of all it integrates with most email marketing applications (e.g., Aweber, iContact, ConstantContact), so getting the plugin to work is straight forward.…

As usual, let’s start by pasting the function in your functions.php file:

function get_category_id($cat_name){
$term = get_term_by(‘name’, $cat_name, ‘category’);
return $term->term_id;
}

Once you saved the file, just call the function with your category name as a parameter. Example:

$category_ID = get_category_id(‘WordPress Tutorials’);

Looking for WordPress hosting? Try WP Web Host. Prices starts at $5/month and you can try it for free!WordPress function: Get category ID using category name

As a follow up to Jonathan Bailey’s great post yesterday, Blogging Pitfalls: Becoming a Spammer, I wanted to talk about comment spam a bit more.  Bloggers are often inundated with comment spam, which can get so bad that they might even reconsider moderating comments.
Unfortunately, there are some forms of comment spam that have gotten out of control over the past year or so, and bloggers need to be aware of these spam tactics, try to identify them, and mark those comments as spam using their comment spam detection tool (for example, Akismet).  Identifying comments as spam helps your spam tool better identify them in the future, so hopefully, they won’t get through to your moderation queue anymore.
But how do you know if a comment is spam if it’s not the usual link-filled or gibberish spam comment that can be identified with a cursory glance?  That’s the problem with…

We have been working diligently on updating Digging into WordPress and finding the best print-on-demand solution. Thanks to your suggestions and ideas for book printing, there were many options to check out. After sizing things up, we’re pleased to announce the following:

Digging into WordPress version 3.0 will be released near the end of August
Printed editions of DiW will be available in September

We’re still working out the specifics regarding cost, shipping, and so forth, but the book will be updated soon and printed books are back on the menu. So that’s the plan at this point – no hard promises but rather strong goals for DiW v3.0.

As always, stay tuned for more news!
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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.A website without multimedia is like a cupcake without icing: Functional but lacking. These days, all manner of web pages from huge company sites to small business blogs are expected to add audio, photo, or video to their posts and homepages.While this all sounds well and good for multimedia companies that produce endless amounts of content, small businesses with text-based websites can run into trouble finding and providing appropriate content. The real trick is adding multimedia that enriches your site, product, or brand without taking away from your company’s core message and aesthetic. And how do you get a rich multimedia experience without hiring a coder?This is rarely easy. To help, we’ve collected some simple resources to add audio, photo or video to your blog. The BasicsFor…

How to Build a Successful Blog Business is a straight forward guide to building a publishing business online that covers everything from choosing a niche to hiring staff, registering a business to selling it, finding traffic to monetizing it.
Collis is a web veteran with a wealth of experience and an easy to read style. He has founded sites such as the Tuts+ network, the Envato Marketplaces, FreelanceSwitch and AppStorm which combined serve up over 50 million pageviews a month.
In How to Build a Successful Blog Business Collis shares tips from his years of operating kick ass blogs, and reveals stats, graphs, revenue figures and inside details from three real world case studies.
Nowhere else will you be able to find information like this. Step behind the scenes of Envato’s wildly successful sites and find out how you build blogs that are both profitable and popular. This is the…

A comprehensive WordPress installation, albeit simple to produce, often requires multiple steps — many of which can easily be omitted accidentally. How many times have you forgotten to customize your permalink structure? How about adding in a sitemap plugin? What about changing your timezone? If you’ve installed WordPress more than once, chances are you’ve missed something. Take the following steps and you’ll never miss anything again.

Step 1: Get WordPress from SVN
The number one mistake for a flexible WordPress installation happens right from the get-go. I’ve seen numerous developers manually download, unzip, and upload WordPress to their site. This is not only a waste of time, but it also reduces flexibility.
If you download WordPress from SVN, all you need to do is run the following in command-line:
svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.0 .
Maybe you want the latest developer version. That’s even simpler:
svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/ .
Why is this…

Here at Digging Into WordPress, we’ve attached thumbnail images to every single (non-link-style) post since day one. We started before WordPress 3.0 had the specific feature for thumbnails. We did it just by attaching a file path to the thumbnail image as a custom field. We clearly display each of those thumbnails in the design of the homepage and other various pages where it makes sense.
The biggest reason we decided to attach post thumbnails from the beginning was that it is just an interesting bit of data to have available for every single post. It means that we could do something like display random thumbnails in the sidebar, or display thumbnails next to search results. We don’t do either of those things in this current design, but it’s always a possibility and possibilities are awesome.
Another thing that is a cool thing to build with thumbnails is unique archive…

Brian Casel is a web designer and owner of ThemeJam WordPress Themes and CasJam Media. You can follow Brian on his blog at BrianCasel.com or on Twitter @CasJam.It’s no secret that web design is a fast-growing industry. Virtually every type of business is in need of a quality website. There are opportunities at the large agency level down to freelancers developing small-business websites from home.So how do you break into this exciting field? With little or no experience creating websites, getting yourself up to speed can be a daunting task. There are so many different avenues of design and development to explore. Which way should you go first? Which skill sets suit you the best?We aim to give you an overview of a few things things that are essential to a well-rounded knowledge of web design. These are starting-points, if you will. Below each item, we’ve listed additional resources for…

As usual, the first thing to do is to paste the function in your functions.php file:

function get_average_readers($feed_id,$interval = 7){
$today = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("now"));
$ago = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("-".$interval." days"));
$feed_url="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=".$feed_id."&dates=".$ago.",".$today;
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feed_url);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];

$nb = 0;
foreach($xml->feed->children() as $circ){
$nb += $circ['circulation'];
}

return round($nb/$interval);
}

Once done, you can call the function wherever you want in your theme files. Pass your Feedburner feed id as a parameter:

<?php
$nb = get_average_readers('catswhocode');
echo "I have ".$nb." RSS readers";
?>

Code initially published on Cats Who Blog.
Looking for WordPress hosting? Try WP Web Host. Prices starts at $5/month and you can try it for free!How to display your average feed readers

Chalk this one up as a victory for the free software movement: Thesis, the wildly popular proprietary WordPress theme from developer/designer Chris Pearson, is now available under a split GPL, the license that makes it possible to alter and redistribute this software as you see fit.Pearson’s decision marks the end of a high-drama clash between him and Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and a handful of related software. Some folks wondered if the battle of words might end in a battle of legal precedent as Mullenweg struggled to preserve free software principles and Pearson struggled to maintain control over his highly successful software.Thesis caused a bit of a ruckus when it was first released a couple years ago; being built on WordPress and using the WordPress plugin API (GPL software), the theme was supposedly subject to the same share-and-share-alike principles and should have…

About a month ago I posted about how fast WordPress 3.0 was being downloaded and there was a terrific discussion about the sheer amount of data that was being grabbed to get at the 3.0 version of WordPress.  We even had some comments as to why it was being downloaded at that scale.
Well as of today the download counter reads that it has been downloaded just over 10.3 million times since it was released last month and the counter keeps rolling along!
So what is it that makes the WordPress platform so popular?  What is it that drives people to download it over 10 million times?
If you had the opportunity to talk to a non WordPress user what would you tell them about it to show that it is worth downloading and putting to use for a website?
What is your favorite thing about WordPress?  What is your…

Configuring your WordPress permalinks is simple and only takes a second, but understanding what they are and how they work is key to setting up the best permalink structure possible. Your site’s permalinks are like the street address for your site’s web pages. They help both people and robots understand your site’s structure and navigate its contents. There is no “one magic permalink recipe to rule them all,” but keeping a few tips in mind makes it easy to optimize your WordPress permalinks. This DiW article shows you how..

WordPress makes it so easy
WordPress gives you full control over your permalinks. First, you have control over the general structure of your permalinks. Navigate to Settings > Permalinks and you will see several options for configuring your permalinks:

This is where you configure the general structure of your permalinks, as seen here with green underline. The portion underlined in red…

Custom fields in WordPress make it easy to customize your theme in a variety of ways; plus, they are simple to implement for posts and pages. Attachments, on the other hand, take a bit more work to implement, requiring you to read through and decipher core source code in order to make them work. We’ll be walking through the use of a couple undocumented WordPress hooks in this tutorial to make this process much easier.

Preface: About The Hooks
Both these hooks have been around since WordPress 2.5, and are applied in wp-admin/includes/media.php, but remain underused in the community most likely because they’re undocumented in the Codex. Below is where the hooks are applied in the core code, letting us know what will be passed to the functions we add to each hook.
attachment_fields_to_edit

function get_attachment_fields_to_edit($post, $errors = null) {
// …
$form_fields = apply_filters(“attachment_fields_to_edit”, $form_fields, $post);
// …
}…