We all know WordPress is one of the most versatile and easy to use CMSs, with plenty of features which made him one of the best blogging platform available on the market. However it still lacks and adequate support for multilingual blogs, for instance when we’d need ot post the same article in more than one language at the same time.

If the CMS itself does not provide enough support for this feature, we can sort thing out pretty easily with a few plugins:

• Google Ajax Translation, this Google API makes available translation to users on your blog frontpage. It is not to be considered a proper WordPress plugin but it works just as good.

• WPML Multilingual CMS, with this plugin we would be able to get a fully working multilingual blogs in just a few minutes. No need of any change inside the source code or tables, it works straight out of the box.

   

• qTranslate, with this plugin we would be able to manage content in different languages from the WordPress editor, through automatic translation and permalink management.

A news realase of WordPress has just been made available and is supposed to fix several security flaws, as explained here on the WP blog.

WordPress got so popular that any security update can actually be crucial, considering the amount of websites using it. Recently a well-known vulnerability allowed a worm to spread around affecting several blogs, according to this article. Still, there’s something more we can do to make our WordPress installation safer.

The WordPress Exploit Scanner extension can scan for well-known vulnerabilities and exploits which might affect your WordPress installation. In order to be used you just need to download, the extension, upload it on you server, active it by the extensions dashboard and a link will pop-up on your general dashboard.

Once you run the extension (it might need a few minutes to complete the task) the report you get is extensive. The plugin analyse in depth every single file, looking for malicious code embedded into standard file. It’s pretty useful, even if a standard report can require some programming knowledge to be fully understood. It’s a very neat tool, I guess it should be included in every WordPress standard setup.

Analytics360 integrates Google Analytics into WordPress

MailChimp has relesead Analytics360, a WordPress plugin which brings Google Analytics in your WordPress dashboard.

I recently came across this really useful wordpress plugins which basically integrates your Google Analytics account straight into your WordPress installation.

I’m quite of an analytics freak I must say, I spend way to much time flickering through browser tabs checking all the different analytics accounts I have.

This WordPress extension comes quite handy, especially when running multiple accounts on the same service (Google Analytics in this case).

360 Analytics does not reduce or modifiy the quality and quantity of information you usually get about your website when logging into your Google Analytics account.

The plugin comes straight from MailChimp and can be used in conjunction with their email marketing services to track the performance of your email campaigns on your site traffic.

By the way: I should start considering how effective are WordPress plugins in terms of marketing… this very extension is quite of an example)

We all know SEO is not science: most of SEO practices come from direct experience or reliable source but there’s som much uncertainity that makes everything blend into doubts.

That’s the reason why advices coming straight from Matt Cutts or the Google webmaster blog should be taken definetely seriously. We’ve already seen Matt getting into certain topics put into the spotlight of the SEO community and giving useful (altough sometimes ambigous) insight.

This time he realeased a bunch of slides he presented to the 2009 San Francisco Wordcamp

Following is a resume of the main points he discussed:

Crawlers and PageRank algorithm

• Google spiders go crowling pages in a pagerank order: highest pagerank pages get crawled before pages with a lower pagerank
• Being relevant and reputable is the actual criteria that works behind the Page Rank

Keywords and content optimization

• When it comes to keywords, put yourself into the user shoes: think about what he would type in his search string
• Do not think about stuffing your pages with keywords: write naturally.
• ALT attribute are handy (3-4 relevant words)

WordPress

• Set your permalink to domain.com/post-title (setting -> reading -> custom permalink structure /%postname%/)
• Modify your titles and file names (urls) acconrding to the content

This is the powerpoint format. Slides are also available from Google Docs.

Restrict access to users on WordPress

Have you ever thought of make some content of your WordPress blog available only to certain users? Do you need to restrict access only to a certain type of users to selected blog pages or post? Ever thought of create a reserved area for registered users on your WordPress blog?

Some time ago, while working on a client’s project with a*dult content, I came up with the idea of restricting access only to a certain type of users. This would have avoided any problem with underage visitors. The thing was that he only wanted to use WordPress, because it was the only content management system it was familiar with.

So I started thinking how this could be sorted out. Actually WordPress does not come out of the box with such a feature. What we needed was some sort of plugin able to distinguish between users according to some extra information.

The issue was promtly solved with two different plugins:

• Disclose Secret allows to restrict access to certain pages or posts only to users complying with certain criteria.
• Cimy Extra Fields for WordPress makes some more data available for any users. This extra fields can be used to distinguish in between differents types of users therefore setting up specific access to content

With these two plugins we can manage access to any type of content for any type of users, even feeds, archieves, homepages and search results.

WordPress is indeed versatile and fully customizable. However, if you really want to create reserved areas for users with a secured login procedure, there’s plenty of CMS out there which can do this job pretty well, even through a SSH connection.

Still, if you just want to make sure that you blog is read only by the right people, this might be the best option: simple, easy to deploy and safe enough.

So here’s a short list of the most useful WordPress plugins for those who need some promotion and craving for some good quality traffic.

Nb: this is not the same old list of SEO and Social plugins. These add-ons will actually drive traffic to your blog e ven if you’ve just started from scratch.

One of the great qualities of WordPress, besides its ease to use it’s the fact that is fully customizable. We can just tweak it the way we want, and with the rght tools we’re able to turn it into one of the most versatile blogging platform on the internet.

Plus there’s a huge community ready to put out tons of apps to satisfy any needs. The thumb rule is: thi

nk about anyway you can spread your content, than try to imagine a plugin able to do it and look for it on the wordpress plugin website.

Pingcrawl – This comes straight out from Bluehat SEO. If you don’t know this blog you’d better check it out it’s proably one of the best resources around for SEO with a really interesting approach to coding and the internet. Anyway, the plugin woks with Google API: everytime you publish a new posts, Pingcrawl looks for blogs related to your posts keywords and posts a linkback to them at the end of your post. It’s a really smart way to get some backlinks.

Linkcurl – It works in a very similar way to Pingcrawl. It differs for requirements and code but it’s another great piece of code you got to have. Works with WordPress 2.3+ but needs PHP5.

Twitter Tools – I still find hard to rationalize all the hype around Twitter in term of its online marketing use but after being using this plugin for a while I can definetely say it’s a powerful tool if wisely used.
This plugin twits a link to your post every time you publish something. Basically you ping all your followers every time you publish your blog.

Auto Social Poster – Ever wondered what would it be to be able to post a link to your latest post on the social bookmarks with the most traffic? If you want to kickstart your blog promotion probably it’s one of the best way to do it. With this plugin you’ll be able to post to a bunch of social bookmarks at the same time and get you some relevant backlinks to get your website quickly indexed by Google.

If you´re not able to get a copy of your plugin, you might also try to take a look to this website.

I always loved WordPress for it’s ease to use, user friendly interface, ever growing library of add-ons. All these qualities have contributed through the years in making WordPress the latest CMS revolution for the masses, allowing anyone to set up his own little space on the net.

At first I used to copy and paste the analytics code into the footer. Kind of lame I must say. If you’re using a template with a auto-update feature be ready to copy and paste again your analytics code when the latest update comes out.

In order to avoid this are available two tools which might make life easier while working on Analytics and WordPress

Google Analytics for WordPress: it features Google Image tracking which means that traffic from Images would be considered as a proper source instead of just as a referrer. Quite of a bonus considering how much traffic might come from Image sometimes.

Google Analyticator: This one is good as well. The bonus comes with the chance to embed code directly into pages from wordpress front-end.

It’s not over yet… I’ll describe some nice trick to twek your analytics account and get even more data about your blog… stay tuned.