Click on the logo to learn more about this plugin

Ok, so I first heard of CommentLuv some 6 months ago when our blogger friend in Uruguay, Gera @sweetsfoods started raving about it.  I favorited his review about it, CommentLuv Premium Plugin Review: 7 Reasons Why this Plugin Rocks, and made a mental note “must go back and read all about this WordPress plugin for comments when I have a moment”.  Fast-forward over 5 months and I finally found that moment!

I am happy to announce on behalf of the Zomppa team that CommentLuv has now been activated on this site. For those of you not familiar with what on earth I am talking about, this is very much a give and take feature in the comment sections of blogs and websites where everyone gets to be a winner really.  It helps to build links and traffic to and from websites. Here is the basic lowdown:

1. This is a special premium plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites
2. It is really 8 plugins in one so if you know anything about WordPress sites, you know that the fewer the plugins you install on your website, the lesser the chances of miscommunications between plugins and also with WordPress itself.
3. It basically eradicates spam on comments
4. When fellow bloggers comment on an article of ours now, they can include a link back to a recent post of theirs.  This helps build-up their list of backlinks to the site, and we get to help promote your material.
5. When we comment on other CommentLuv enabled sites, we also got to do point 4 on other blogs which in turn will help drive traffic to our site.
6. There are additional features which you can activate on the plugin that allow people leaving comments to also include keywords of theirs and also share the fact that they have left a comment on your site on other social media channels.

Essentially, you will now notice we have a little CommentLuv icon at the bottom of our comment sections.  If you put in your details and your website address, the options to backlink to one of your last 10 posts will then come up.

I could go on about this more, but really, for a full review on the plugin, do check out Gera’s very comprehensive review  CommentLuv Premium Plugin Review: 7 Reasons Why this Plugin Rocks. We have only had it active on our site for about a week now, and look forward to playing around with it some more and see how it starts to affect our traffic and also that of our readers.  So, if you are already using CommentLuv on your blog, come join us! If you are not, consider joining in, I guess!

Part 3 of my series will focus entirely on PLUGINS!

Image by Fuelyourcoding

There are thousands upon thousands of WordPress plug-ins and widgets available for download. The vast majority of them are free and on a donation basis. I always like throw a couple of $ at least through Paypal as many of them are terrific and help your site. While there are indeed many to choose from and every site will need different features and tools, there are some more essential than others.  I have * the ones I feel are essentials.

Anti-Spam Plugins

• Akismet*: This is one that you will find has already been loaded up with your WordPress install and will require an API key and activation.  This is your main plugin for addressing comment and trackback spam.   Word of warning with this plugin: like any spamguard, it sometimes is overly cautious, and marks good comments/commenters as spam so it’s always best to check the “spammed” comments section from time to time
• Spammer Blocker: if you are tired of manually blocking spammers’s IP addresses by yourself, you can use this plugin. It blocks all visitors who posted a comment that was later marked as a spam.

Setting up Analytics

• Google Analytics for WordPress*: Adds Google Analytics to your blog. Set up for this is pretty straight forward so just follow the instructions. Google Analytics will generate a UA code for your site that you will just insert on the site to authenticate.

SEO Plugins

Your theme may already come with some SEO software, but here are some additional plugins to insert.

• Google XML Maps: This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. Not needed if you install SEO Yoast.
• WordPress SEO by Yoast: This plugin incorporates everything you need for SEO from a snippet preview that helps you optimize your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

Database Backup

• WP-DB Backup*: Always back up your data! Thankfully I have never had fist hand experience of this, but I can only imagine how terrible it must feel to loose months/years worth of posts because you didn’t back-up your database. this allows you to easily back up your wordpress databases. I generally set mine up to back up on a weekly basis, but blogs that are being updated more regularly, you may want to do this daily.
• Additional Tip: I generally save a copy of my WP-Content folder on my hard disk on a monthly basis.  This way, all theme files, plugins, images, etc that you have uploaded to the site are backed-up.

Set up FeedBurner:

Many paid themes have a feedburner setting in them so you may not need to install this plugin, but you will need to set up your feedburner account.

• FeedBurner FeedSmith: Before activating this plugin fully, you will have to set up your Feedburner account. All you need to do with this plugin is go to the settings, put in the Feedburner feed address you set up, and the plugin will then detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed.

Additional useful plugins:

• WP Super Cache*: I believe a similar plugin is now pre-installed with the new version of WordPress.  As your blog grows, this plugin will become more of an asset. It generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress, and allows for quicker page loading for your readers.
• AddThis: great plugin allowing readers to share your posts by email and various social media platforms.  This plugin also has useful analytics.
• Contact Form 7*: Many contact form plugins out there, but this is my favourite one.
• Social Media Widget: Many of these out there and quite often your purchased theme will include setup to link your social media pages and accounts to your blog.  This is just one example of a plugin.
• Broken Link Checker: Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. Very helpful for older posts. you don’t want your readers to be linked through to a resource that is no longer online.
• WP-Print: Helpful if you want people to print out a post in a printer-friendly way.
• My page order & category order: These plugins allow you to sort the order you want your pages and categories to show up on navigation bars.
• Leenkme: Plugin which allows you to automatically update your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. This plugin requires a small subscription charge.
• WordPress Editorial Calendar: If like Zomppa you have a number of contributors, this plugin comes in quite handy for scheduling posts.

Ok, well that’s about it on the plugin front.  There are many others that I use and have tested out, but these were the main ones that I find myself using often. I always come across new ones all the time.

This brings to a close my posts dedicated to WordPress set-up, let me know if you have any questions and I will do my best to address them or at least point you in the direction of some good resources.

Check out the two previous posts here:

Setting up your Foodie Blog on WordPress: Part 1, WordPress installation

Setting up your Foodie Blog on WordPress: Part 2, Themes and Settings

Additional useful resources that cover the whole WordPress set-up process:

Installing WordPress: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

WordPress video tutorials on A4Magic.com

WordPress training by Atomic Design Studios

In last week’s post, Setting up your Foodie Blog on WordPress, I covered the initial part getting a domain name, hosting service, and installing WordPress, and this week I will tackle theme selection, security settings and discussion settings.

Selecting and installing themes

There are thousands of themes out there: ones specific for blogs, ones for photos, ones for business, ones for video/music, you name it, just like iPhone apps, there’s a theme for it. The main thing you have to take into consideration is the free v paid themes question.  As I stated in my previous post, I recommend spending that little bit of money (usually no more than $100) as the main elements that come into play are better coding for SEO and support for paid themes. When you take on a free theme, you are usually left to your own devices essentially.  If you want to make slight modifications to the look and feel of your blog or if something doesn’t work quite right, it is very unlikely that you will get a response to that call for help you made to the theme developer. When you pay for a theme, you are not only paying for better design and coding, but also the costs incurred in having people available to provide you with the tech support you need for that theme.

Paid WordPress themes are generally termed as Premium WordPress Themes, and http://www.premiumwp.com/ is the best site to visit as it acts as a portal almost to many of the theme developer companies out there that develop premium themes.  Our little Zomppa magazine site is run on a Solostream theme and I have to say that I have been very happy with Solostream and great themes they develop.  I actually use about four of their themes and they just keep getting better and better.  Their support forum is also top notch and they usually get back me the same day with an answer.

I have also been very happy with Headway Themes and I have used Woo Themes and Elegant Themes quite effectively.  The one challenge with playing around with different themes from different designers is that the settings for those themes all look quite different on the dashboard end.  Seeing as I am very accustomed to using Solostream’s settings, I find it takes a little time to get my way around other theme settings.  This shouldn’t be a challenge for most of you really as you will likely just select one theme for one site, but just be aware of that factor if you decide to change themes in the future or work on other WordPress sites.

You may have also heard of Thesis and Genesis.  They are WordPress Frameworks and have a slightly longer learning curve than regular premium themes. They provide a large amount of built-in control and flexibility which allow you to create many different styles and layouts for your blog. They essentially make it possible for you to customize your site more and build one that looks very unique.  I have no experience of using these two frameworks as to date I have not had the time to dive in and learn how they work.  Even though I have set up and run a number of WordPress sites, this is not my day job, it is just where my geek side comes out and the hours of the day run out at some point.

Moving on to those all-important security settings. So, you now have everything installed and are now ready to start posting stuff! Okay, wait up a second.  Before you start posting anything, you will want to make sure that you have some security settings and actions in place.

Security Settings and Discussion Settings

WordPress on the whole is pretty secure, but there are a few minor security issues that should be addressed on a new install.

• Disable Remote Publishing: Unless you use an external blog editor most folks recommend disabling both Atom and SML-PRC publishing. These settings are under Settings > Writing.
• Disable Post Via Email: These settings are also under Settings > Writing. I doubt very much than any of you will be wishing to post via email, so don’t put any real information in this section.
• Remove The Admin Account: You’ll want to delete the default admin account that is automatically created when you install WordPress. Hackers know that this account is automatically added by default and is automatically assigned ID#1 making it an easy starting point for them. Once you have created another user account name for yourself, just go to users and delete the admin account.
• Set up an htaccess file to prevent people from browsing your directories.

Up until now, I have steered clear of mentioning cPanel/File Manager and FTP sites to not complicate matters for newbies. To upload the htaccess file you will need to use either the File Manager on your host’s cPanel or an FTP client like Fetch to upload the file through the FTP site. If I have lost you here, please visit this post, that will hopefully help. If you are still lost, give me a shout in the comments section and I will get back to you.

Discussion Settings

Seeing as blogs are about having a conversation, you will need establish from the start the type of parameters you will want to set for comments and pingbacks. The Settings > Discussion area has some important options that you will set according to your own personal preferences. Lets go through them all:

• Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article – This will notify any other wordpress blogs that you link to in an article with a pingback. Pingbacks can send decent traffic to your site so it is best to keep this one checked.
• Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) This notifies you if any other wordpress blogs link to you and adds a pingback/trackback to the comments of the article that was linked to. Best to also keep this one checked
• Allow people to post comments on the article – This one is obviously a personal preference, but if you want to have a blog, you generally need to have comments open.  The only time I recommend turning these off is if you are using WordPress to set up a static website for business or something.
• Comment author must fill out name and e-mail – Best having this checked to reduce the amount of spam you get in your comments. (I will also talk about a couple of plugins that can assist with spam in my next post)
• Users must be registered and logged in to comment – In most blogs you will not want to require readers to register to comments, but if you do, then check that box.
• Automatically close comments on articles older than x days – Some bloggers choose to close comments for older posts as it becomes to cumbersome to have to go back and answer questions, etc. Again, up to you.
• Enable threaded (nested) comments — levels deep – No idea what this does actually.  Something I can look into more…
• Break comments into pages with — comments per page and the — page displayed by default. If you have a very active blog with 50+ comments per post, this feature will let you break up the comments into different pages.
• Email me whenever – Anyone posts a comment – If you have a high traffic blog, you may not want to get an email every time someone posts a comment on your site. Personal preference again.
• Email me whenever – A comment is held for moderation – If you would like to get an email whenever there is a comment awaiting moderation on your blog, check this option. Generally you would want to check this one.
• Before a comment appears – An administrator must always approve the comment – If you want to have to approve every comment before it goes live, check this option. Some may choose to do this so that they can check for spam or inappropriate comments before they actually show up on the blog. Because I generally set up two plugins to address spam on sites, I don’t get much spam so my preference is to keep this open on most blogs.  That said, I do get an email every time someone comments so if anything inappropriate is posted, I have the option to delete it.
• Before a comment appears – Comment author must have a previously approved comment – If the comment author comments have been approved in the past on the blog, their comments will post automatically.

That brings this tutorial to an end folks.  Come back next Tuesday for a post dedicated to plugins! This will include database backup plugins and analytics plugins.

BTW, if you are having trouble transferring over from Blogger or WordPress.com, let me know.  I don’t have any direct experience of handling such transfers, but I can put you in touch with some folks who do.

Check out the other two posts in this series:

Setting up your Foodie Blog on WordPress: Part 1, WordPress installation

Setting up your Foodie Blog on WordPress: Part 3, Plugins

Additional useful resources that cover the whole WordPress set-up process:

Installing WordPress: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

WordPress video tutorials on A4Magic.com

WordPress training by Atomic Design Studios

In a call with my fellow Zomppas a couple of weeks back, we were chatting about how we had noticed that many of the foodie bloggers and arts & crafts bloggers we follow are growing more and more dissatisfied with their Blogger and WordPress.com hosted sites, and that they are contemplating a move to a WordPress.org self-hosted site.  We realized that some posts dedicated to this more technical topic area would actually prove quite helpful to many of our readers and fellow foodies who want to improve their blogs or even start start one.

I have been working with WordPress for about four years now, and my biggest pride and joy is zomppa.com, of course!   I should specify that the instructions that follow are relevant to WordPress.org self-hosted sites and not WordPress.com hosted sites (please read up about them to see how they differ).

To spare you all a ridiculously long post with techie information overload, I will break this up into a series of four posts over the month of February:

1. WordPress installation and basic setup of your site
2. Customization and theme selection
3. Essential plug-ins, security and analytics set up
4. Answer any questions that may arise from first three posts

There are plenty of similar step by step approaches out there in the blogosphere on how to set up WordPress sites, and no doubt, other people will have slightly differing views on the order and emphasis I may put on some steps, and that is cool. This is just how I go about setting up WordPress site, and I hope it is helpful.

1.  Register your domain name
My preference is to register my domains with the likes of www.godaddy.com or www.register.com, rather than with my host provider service I’m going to host the site with. This way, should you decide to change host provider, you wont have as many complications in maintaining your site live.

2.  Select a host provider and the right package for you:
You will want to do your research and read reviews before selecting a host provider. If your site is going to be mainly country specific, then for SEO purposes, it is good to select a host provider based in that country. If you want your site to have an international spread and are hopeful for sizeable traffic from around the world, then I would recommend using one of the biggies like Hostgator or Lunarpages, as they will provide round the clock 24/7 support.

In selecting your package you will have to gauge the number of sites that you intend to host and the amount of bandwidth you will need. Larger sites with lots of content (especially site-hosted video) will likely need their own account. Most host providers do list all this information and are usually pretty helpful in assisting you to determine which package best meets your needs. You can always upgrade in any case.

3.  Installing WordPress

• Once you have purchased your account package, they will send you an email with all your account access instructions. This will include the 2 nameservers addresses, and usernames and passwords for your control panel (cPanel) and FTP (if you have purchased a hosting plan for more than one site).
• You will then go to your GoDaddy account and change your nameservers so that they point to your host provider. (You click on the “Advanced Settings” for your domain and see a hyperlink in the bottom left corner to set your nameservers)
• All the big host providers like Dreamhost and Hostgator have quick install features for WordPress based sites so all you will have to do is insert your domain name and it will install WordPress on your domain.  You will then receive an email informing you that a WordPress site has been set up under your domain and they will give you the username and password to access the back-end/dashboard of the site.

4.  Basic Initial Set-up for WordPress

The WordPress Dashboard can look somewhat daunting upon first arrival so let me just walk you through a few things that you will want to set up on your site before you start putting up content.

• General settings: In here you will want to set your site title & tagline, along with the date, time, etc
• Fix permalinks: Unless you want your posts to have non-SEO friendly URLs with numbers, you will want to change the default permalink to a date and post name setting (0r just a post name “/%postname%/” setting).
• Set up users: If you plan on having other people put updates to the site, you will need to create accounts for them. As the administrator, you can then establish the level of access that they will have. Unless you are certain of other users expertise in using WordPress, I would stay away from giving them Administrator and editor privileges.
• Selecting and installing themes: There are thousands of themes out there, and in my next post I will write more about the various choices out there.  For now, my main recommendation would be that you select a paid theme rather than a free one as they will be coded better for search-engine optimization, and they come with much needed support from the developers if you need assistance with your theme.
• Install basic plug-ins and widgets: Again, there are thousands upon thousands of plug-ins and widgets available for download. I will write more about plug-ins in my next post.

Check out the other two posts in the series:

Setting up your Foodie Blog on WordPress: Part 2, Themes and Settings

Setting up your Foodie Blog on WordPress: Part 3, Plugins

Additional useful resources that cover the whole WordPress set-up process:

Installing WordPress: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

WordPress video tutorials on A4Magic.com

WordPress training by Atomic Design Studios

Check us out on Tip Day Thursday!