It happens all the time on other sites, people change the way the site is setup, the permalinks, the urls, etc. and your links to them break. But, what about your site? Do you move things? Update them and change the URL? If you do, you may be breaking connections from others to your site.

Yes, the serious geek knows how to mess around and set up redirects- there is even a place to set them up in cpanel, but, this Redirection plugin will allow the novice do it from the WordPress interface!

Redirection – Manage 301 redirections without modifying Apache | Urban Giraffe
Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Our general advice is don’t move things, don’t change your permalinks, but if you do, this is the tool.

If there is one thing that seems overly complex to new WP users it’s FTP. I’m not quite sure why, maybe it’s the overly complex/techie look of most FTP programs (we like Transmit for the Mac- very sexy and sweet)- or recommend the FireFTP plugin for Firefox.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol- and it’s a fancy way of saying- copy files from your computer to a Web server. Not so hard. But, when it comes to loading a new plugin or theme for WordPress you used to have to go through all these steps:

Backup your Database

Once you’ve found a plugin or theme in your browser (preferably Firefox)- download it to your computer

1. Unstuff it on your computer
2. Open an FTP program and connect to your site
3. Navigate to the WP-Content folder
4. Browse your computer to find the file you’ve downloaded
5. Upload it to the WP-Content folder
6. Open your WordPress admin, go to Plugins or Presentation and activate the new addition.

Along comes Anirudh, and he writes this one click plugin- and all that goes away!

OneClick for WordPress | Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev
OneClick is a WordPress Plugin Firefox Extension combo which will change the way you look at wordpress forever. It reduces the effort needed to install a plugin or a theme for wordpress to just one simple click. It’s excellent for admins, non-techies, people with restrictive firewalls, and just about anyone who uses wordpress and installs plugins and themes.

Not only does this WordPress tool backup your files, providing role-back if your new plugin may bork your WP install, it has auto update notification (if he releases updates to it- a norm for Firefox installs- but not for WordPress, yet) so you will never be using the old version.

The one caveat is that it may be harder to delete some of your new themes or plugins- unless you go through his provided file nuke protocol.

We probably will stick to using our FTP process (we bill by the minute 🙂 – but for many of you, this may be another key to making WP the easiest system on the planet for publishing on the web.

If you do like his plugin- please go to the plugin rating contest and give him a thumbs up!

WordPress isn’t just for blogs- in fact, the word blog needs to die. WordPress builds a website- actively served, using a sophisticated Content Management System that is easy to use. It’s so easy- that smart companies are starting to use it to manage content and keep their site up-to-date, and W3C compliant for a lot less money.

Here are some of the sites we’ve found using WordPress as a back end. To verify- you just type /wp-admin after the url.

• http://www.xxlmag.com/ home isn’t WP, but it all leads to interior pages managed by WP.
  
• http://autoshows.ford.com/
• http://wildscotsman.com/whisky/ must be of age to view
• http://redblock.com.au/
• http://whoisjengordon.com/
• http://agenturblog.de/
• http://www.deliciousdays.com/
• http://allthingsd.com/
• http://www.2checkout.com/
• http://www.houseofnaked.com/ (it’s an ad agency- don’t worry)

Some, more than others look like a more conventional site. The point is, data from a database can be formatted anyway you want. The key is understanding the real beauty of a WordPress site is that everything offers the ability to build community.