1. Do you sell, or want to sell, digital content from your WordPress site while maintaining the security of your digital assets? 2. Are you frustrated with the e-commerce WordPress plugins you've looked at? Do you want a plugin with reliable customer service (where your questions get answered and issues get addressed)? 3. Do you hate the thought of paying ongoing fees and commissions to sell via a third party web site? If you are still reading, then the WordPress eStore plugin may be just what you need! Plugin Summary In a Nutshell... this sleek WordPress shopping cart plugin allows you to sell any form of digital products and services from your wordpress blog securely with complete automation. What I mean by complete automation is that once you set it up the whole process (The buying and the delivering of the product without revealing the real URL of the product) works on its own. An overview of the WP eStore plugin operations can be found here. Yes, you can sell physical products with this plugin too as long as you don't need complex shipping options. Plugin Features Below are just some of the notable features of the WP eStore Plugin: Security of Your Digital Asset Automatic instant digital product ...

I wanted to use widgets in the footer of my WordPress theme but my wordpress theme didn't come with a footer-sidebar by default. I didn't really wanted to change the theme just because of that. So I hacked the wordpress theme to introduce footer-sidebars. If you are looking for a tutorial that explains how you can add sidebars/widgets to the footer of your WordPress theme then keep reading. There are really three main parts to introducing a footer-sidebar 1. Registering the Sidebars in the WordPress Theme 2. Inserting the Sidebars In the WordPress Theme 3. Putting some style into the sidebars 1. Register the Sidebars in the WordPress Theme Go to the WordPress theme editor and open the Theme Functions (functions.php) file. Now Search for the following line in your Theme Functions (functions.php) if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) Once you find the above line then take a look at the the next line which should look similar to one of the followings depending on how many sidebars you have: register_sidebar(array( or register_sidebars(2,array( Say for example you have one sidebar in your theme and you want to add three rows of sidebars in the footer area so you can put widgets then overwrite the code with the following: register_sidebars(4,array( The above will register 4 sidebars (one ...

If you use YouTube videos in your blog then you might find some of the following tips and tricks pretty handy if you don't know them already. Link to a Chosen Start Time of a YouTube Video Say for example, you want to link to a nice video that you found on YouTube but it has some crap at the start which you don't really want your visitors to watch. In a situation like that you can just link to a specific time of that video so when the video starts it will start from that specific time and skip everytime before that. So if I wanted to link a YouTube video and wanted it to start playing from 1 minute and 17 seconds when someone follows the link then all I have to do is append #t=1m17s to the video URL. Original video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFoe6oS0Np0 Vidoe URL linked to a specific time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFoe6oS0Np0#t=1m17s Below is a link for a demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFoe6oS0Np0#t=1m17s Add a Video to Quick List for Future Viewing This is particularly useful when you are trying to find some videos on a specific topic but along the way you discover something interesting that you want to watch too but if you don't want to get distracted at that ...

I have been revisiting the various security settings of my WordPress blog after the sudden database table corruption of this blog for unknown reason last week. In this post I have highlighted some of the security tips that can help protect your blog from possible outside attacks. Use Strong Passwords for all Entry Points I was surprised to find out how many of my friends use the WordPress admin password generated by WordPress during install time and thinks that their blog is protected from attacks as they are using a strong password! The WordPress admin password generated during install time is normally pretty strong (consists lowercase and uppercase letters with numbers and symbols) so there is nothing wrong with that. I was mainly shocked to find out that their ftp/cPanel password for that domain is not that strong. It gets even better... one of them were using his partners name as the password (Did I mention that his partner's name was mentioned on his blog's 'About' page?)! The ftp/cPanel password for your domain is equally important. If someone can access your cPanel then that person can delete your WordPress database from the cPanel->Databases->MySQL Databases. Anyway, the bottom line is to use ...

I hope this doesn't happen to anyone else but this morning  my blog Tips and Tricks HQ somehow disappeared from the face of this earth! The day started as usual... I woke up in the morning went to my office and started checking my emails and found out that I received an email from SiteUptime (SiteUptime is a website monitoring service that checks your website at regular intervals and notifies you via email or SMS if it becomes unavailable) telling me that my site is down. So naturally I wanted to check if the site is up now. When I entered the site address in the address bar I got the following screen! [caption id="attachment_959" align="alignnone" width="444" caption="WordPress Blog Setup Screen"][/caption] You can probably imagine that at this point I was pretty scared! I always backup my database and WordPress files regularly so I wasn't completely in the water but what about all the articles that I have posted after the last backup? Not to mention the traffic that I am loosing now! Anyway, in my case the damage wasn't that severe. One of my WordPress database tables 'wp_options' was marked as crashed and I was getting the following error that I recovered from ...

WordPress Paypal Donation Plugin can be used to receive donation in one click. Donation can be received in multiple currencies. The plugin can be used in the sidebar, posts and pages. I decided to write this plugin after receiving several requests from my readers who liked my Wordpress Easy Paypal Payment or Donation Accept Plugin and wanted a simple donation plugin where the visitor can choose/update the donation amount. The donation header is customizable from the plugin settings option. Screenshot Following is a screenshot of the Wordpress Donation Plugin: [caption id="attachment_950" align="alignnone" width="112" caption="WordPress Paypal Donation Plugin Screenshot"][/caption] Plugin Installation 1. Unzip and Upload the folder 'wp-simple-paypal-donation' to the '/wp-content/plugins/' directory 2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress 3. Go to Settings and configure the options eg. your email, Subject text etc. 4. Use the Widget or add the following trigger text to a post or page where you want the donate button to appear. Plugin Usage There are three ways you can use this plugin: 1. Add the following trigger text to a post or page in HTML view: 2. Call the function from a template file: <?php echo paypal_donation_receive(); ?> 3. Use the WP PayPal Donation Widget from the Widgets menu. The Plugin in Action If you like this plugin then ...

According to Wikipedia "A trackback is one of three types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles". Most bloggers don't show pingbacks and tracbacks on their blog but if you want to show them then I recommend separating pingbacks and trackbacks from the comments. The main reason I like to separate them is because comments are sometimes an ongoing conversation and trackbacks in the middle kinda breaks the flow of the conversation. Here is how you can separate the pingbacks and trackbacks from the comments. search for the following line in your comments.php template file [lang='php'] [/lang] Put the following two lines just after the above line. [lang='php'] [/lang] Now look for the end of the 'for' loop so you can close the if statement that you just introduced. To do that search for the following line [lang='php'] endforeach; [/lang] Just above that line insert the following code to end the if statement [lang='php'] [/lang] This will filter out the trackbacks and only show comments in this section. If you don't want to show the pingbacks and trackbacks then you are done. If you do want to show the trackbacks ...

Working with Photoshop can be quite time consuming for both beginners and advanced users. Once you have worked with photoshop for a while, you will find that lot of the times you are using the same menu items or palette buttons. Photoshop has approximately 690 keyboard shortcuts. Here are some shortcuts for Photoshop users that will significantly improve the editing efficiency when using this software. I use Photoshop frequently to design icons, logos etc for website design and I find these set of shortcuts save a lot of my time when using Photoshop. Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts 1. Decrease brush size - [ Decreases the size of you brush by one size. 2. Increase brush size - ] Increases the size of you brush by one size. 3. Default Foreground and Background Colors - D Resets the Fore/Background color to the default color setting of black and white. 4. Deselect - Ctrl + D Deselects anything that is selected. 5. Merge Layers - Ctrl + E Merges all the layers into one. 6. New Layer - Ctrl+Shift+N Creates a new layer. 7. New Layer via Copy - Ctrl+J Creates a new layer that is the copy of the layer you have selected in the layer palette. 8. Send Backward - Ctrl+ [ Sends a layer behind another layer. 9. Send to Back - Ctrl+Shift+ [ Sends a ...

The WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart is a very easy to use plugin that allows you to sell products or services online in one click from your WordPress blog. Plugin Description WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart lets you add an 'Add to Cart' button anywhere on your blog. This plugin also allows you to add the shopping cart anywhere in a post or page or sidebar easily. The shopping cart shows the user what they currently have in the cart and allows them to add or remove items. The payment is processed by PayPal. Screenshots Simple Product Display Product Display with Variation Control Shopping Cart Screenshot Below is a screenshot of how the shopping cart looks when customers add products to the cart. [caption id="attachment_1350" align="alignnone" width="403" caption="Sample Shopping Cart Screenshot"][/caption] Demo of the WordPress Paypal Shopping Cart Plugin I am using the WordPress eStore (plugin to sell digital products securely) which is the premium version of the WordPress Paypal Shopping Cart plugin. So I had to disable it on this blog as it may conflict with the premium version but you can visit the WordPress eStore plugin page and play with the add to cart buttons to see how this plugin works (It will give you a good idea ...

You can now track where your friends and family are with Google's new feature for Google Map called "Latitude". Google Latitude can be used on the following compatible mobile devices: Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1 iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soon) most color BlackBerry devices most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones) Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones, such as Sony Ericsson devices (coming soon) If you don't have any compatible mobile devices, you can still use it as an iGoogle gadget and track your friends from you computer. This service is available for use in 27 countries at the moment. A lot of people are concerned with the privacy issue but everything about Google Latitude is opt-in. You can control exactly who gets to see your location. You can also decide the location that other people see. Google Latitude in Action Privacy Tips for Google Latitude The following video on privacy tips shows how you can adjust your privacy settings on Google Latitude. Remember, Google stores the most recent updated location on their servers. So if you don't want Google to store your location simply hide your location.