Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category


WordPress 2.9 Upgrade: Image Editing, Undo/Trash, Improved Video Embeds

February 3rd, 2010 by James

We have recently upgraded the OM4 platform to include the latest WordPress (2.9 and 2.9.1) features.

There are quite a few improvements, including:

  • Undo/trash feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash).
  • Built-in image editor, which allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images.
  • Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv.
  • Improved visual editor
  • Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
  • and many more

The full list of over 500 new features, changes upgrades and improvements can be found here.

We hope these performance improvements make administering your website a much more enjoyable task.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask below or post your question on our forums.

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Posted by James Tags: , , ,
Posted in News, OM4 Features, WordPress | 2 Comments »


Keeping WordPress Secure

September 10th, 2009 by Glenn

Recently Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post explaining why a strategy of keeping up to date with WordPress upgrades and patches is a good idea: How To Keep WordPress Secure

All our OM4 websites run on WordPress. Each time a WordPress upgrade or patch is released, we assess it and apply it.

When security patches are released, we apply them promptly.

With larger upgrades, it might take us a bit longer to make sure any required changes are integrated to enable new functionality. Some upgrades introduce a lot of new functionality that require changes to theme files. Sometimes plugins aren’t compatible with updates and we have to co-ordinate the update with plugin updates to keep everything working together.

We’ve been doing this ever since launching our first WordPress site, and plan to keep doing it. As Matt says, there are no guarantees, but it is a good strategy for keeping your WordPress website secure.

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WordPress 2.8 Upgrade: Improved Dashboard Performance and Widgets

July 16th, 2009 by James

We have recently upgraded the OM4 platform to include the lastest WordPress (2.8 and 2.8.1) features.

There are quite a few improvements, including:

  • A much faster dashboard interface
  • A new drag-and-drop sidebar widgets interface
  • New screen options on every dashboard page (the tab at the top right)
  • Improved timezone support with automatic daylight savings time adjustment
  • Support for more than one image gallery on a single page
  • and many more

The full list of over 180 new features, changes upgrades and improvements can be found here.

Our Own Performance Benchmarks

Our own before and after testing has demonstrated an average of a 55% decrease in dashboard page load times:

  • Main Dashboard
    • Before: 50 file requests,  366KB total file size
    • After: 13 file requests,  167KB total file size
  • Write Post Screen (with visual editor and kitchen sink enabled)
    • Before: 108 file requests,  774KB total file size
    • After: 23 file requests,  340KB total file size
  • Manage Pages Screen
    • Before: 16 file requests,  289KB total file size
    • After: 11 file requests,  173KB total file size

We hope these performance improvements make administering your website a much more enjoyable task.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask below or post your question on our forums.

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Intermittent WordPress dashboard performance problems resolved

March 25th, 2009 by James

There have been a few reports recently about the WordPress dashboard sometimes responding slowly. This was occurring for some of our OM4 WordPressMU client sites.

Occasionally a dashboard page load could take up to 15-30 seconds to complete. This is much longer than a typical page load, and could be quite frustrating.

The problem was caused by a bug in WordPress MU – we’ve applied a fix to our platform because it was so annoying but the problem is due to be fixed in the next version of WordPress MU (2.7.1) as well.

We’re always on the lookout for performance issues with our OM4 WordPress sites and fix them if they occur. So if you notice any problems, please let us know.

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WordPress 2.7 Upgrade: New Dashboard Design and Features

February 6th, 2009 by James

As promised last week, we have upgraded the OM4 platform to include the lastest WordPress (2.7) features.

There are quite a few improvements, including:

  • Completely new Dashboard design and navigation menu
  • Threaded comments, paging and the ability to reply to comments directly from your dashboard
  • Bulk post/page editing
  • Quick editing of posts/pages
  • Drag and drop rearranging of dashboard widgets/boxes
  • Ability to upload files without having to create a post or page first
  • Easy moderation of comments using keyboard shortcuts
  • and many more

The video below also illustrates some of these changes. Alternatively a more detailed list of the changes is available here.

The new dashboard will take a little bit of getting used to, but once you’ve used it for a few days you should find that it’s a lot easier to use.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask below or post your question on our forums.

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WordPress 2.7 for MU

January 30th, 2009 by Glenn

WordPress 2.7 has now been released for WordPress MU.

WordPress 2.7 Dashboard

WordPress 2.7 Dashboard

As we have clients running on both WordPress and WordPress MU sites, we have been holding off upgrading. But we are now doing final testing and should upgrade all client sites next week (first week of February).

The 2.7 Dashboard is a great piece of work. The menus have changed a bit, but the new menus are very easy to understand so you shouldn’t have trouble using them.

There are many new features in the Dashboard that are intuitive to use.

If you would like to get a quick overview of the changes that are coming, you can play the video below. And you can read a more detailed list of the changes in text form as well.

If there is anything that doesn’t make sense to you, pop on to our forums and you can ask any questions there.

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Launching a Wordpress Blog

September 27th, 2008 by Glenn

Andrew Lindstrom wrote a list of 7 Must Dos Before Launching Your Blog.

A very good list Andrew, we do all of these ourselves.

Two minor add ons to the list.

Search Meter. If you want to track what people search for once they arrive at your site, you can use a plugin called Search Meter.

Robots. You might want to set up Robots.txt to stop robots indexing some parts of your site – we use KB Robots.txt for this purpose, as it works well for both Wordpress and Wordpress MU. Its a minor detail, but I like to disallow wp-login.php ( Google seems to have a fascination for indexing your Wordpress login page, sometimes before more prominent and useful pages).

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New OM4 website dashboard features

September 15th, 2008 by James

Today we have upgraded all OM4 web sites to include the latest WordPress 2.6+ features.

WordPress 2.6 Image Control

WordPress 2.6 Images

There are quite a few improvements:

  • Image captions.
  • An improved image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing of images (see screenshot).
  • Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web.
  • Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging.
  • Word count for both posts and pages.
  • Bulk activation and deactivation of plugins.
  • Drag and drop reordering of image Galleries.
  • Customizable default avatars.
  • Media uploading while in full-screen mode.
  • Toggling between the flash media uploader and the classic one.
  • Various bug fixes.

More information on these features can be found here.

For those of you that use a desktop blogging client such as Windows Live Writer, you will have to go to your Dashboard -> Settings -> Writing and enable the remote publishing options.

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Migrating Your Wordpress.com Site to your own Domain and Host

July 4th, 2008 by Glenn

Setting up a blog on Wordpress.com – a hosted platform for Wordpress blogs – is quick and easy. But once you get serious about wanting to build your own business, you will be interested in your own domain name.

Wordpress.com allows you to upgrade to your own domain for a small fee, which is a great feature. (OM4Business.com also allows you to have a free hosted Wordpress site with a mapped domain, but we don’t charge for it).

Some people want to migrate from Wordpress.com to their own domain on another host. And this is where it gets a bit tricky. It is very easy to move, but very easy to lose all your search engine indexing. So your traffic might take a big hit, and take a long time to recover.

Think about it – if you have a page indexed at mysite.wordpress.com, when that page goes off the air (because it is now at mysite.com), Google just rubs it out of the index.

Worpdress.com doesn’t offer you any way to redirect your subdomain site to a new domain hosted elsewhere.

However there is a way to migrate without losing your search rankings.

  1. Buy your new domain mysite.com through your own domain registrar.
  2. Have a look at what Google and Yahoo have already indexed for your site. Use the site:mysite.wordpress.com query in Google and Yahoo search to do this. You’ll need to keep an eye on this to notice re-indexing.
  3. Pay $10 and upgrade to your new domain with Wordpress.com. Wordpress will automatically create redirects for all your pages at mysite.wordpress.com to mysite.com (for the technically minded, these are 302 redirects, not 301s). Wordpress.com will also update the xml sitemap for your site, showing the new domain name.
  4. Now you have to be patient and wait for your site to be spidered and for the search engines to follow the redirects. Use that same query on site:mysite.com to see when your pages are re-indexed at the new location.
  5. When the index for your key pages is complete, you can move your Wordpress.com site to your new home – perhaps you will download Wordpress from Wordpress.org to do this, or be moving your site to our platform. Either way you will need to use the Export function to get your site content in XML and import it to the new site. You will need to have a copy of all your media files (images, videos, PDFs) and migrate these yourself, as these don’t come with the export.
  6. Don’t change the page slugs. Google now has mysite.com (and mysite.com/about) indexed, and this is exactly what the URLs are for your site at your new domain.

Your new site – mysite.com – is now operational on its new host, and your ’search engine equity’ has been preserved.

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Posted by Glenn Tags: , ,
Posted in WordPress | 2 Comments »