CDN’s, catchy name, but what has it got to do with my website you may ask.  It’s all about speed my friend, and why your site needs to be speedy.  CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and it is a great way for you to speed up the load time of your WordPress site.

Obviously, we don’t like to do all this work ourselves (and you’re here so we guess you don’t either!) so we have a plugin today that will do it all for you!  W3 Total Cache has CDN support built right into it, we use it with Amazon S3, but the list of services you can use it with is large.

So what does it do?

A CDN is designed to help your site deliver the dynamic parts of your site quickly i.e., the content (posts, pages, menus) whilst getting someone else’s server to deliver the rest of the static content (theme files, images, videos).  This helps you save bandwidth from your server and gives the majority of the work to servers that can take the load, for instance Amazon’s S3 servers.  The CDN is designed to deliver these types of files and they are served up to your site visitor very quickly.  This means both parts of your site are sent at once from two URL’s; and as we know, a browser can stream multiple downloads in parallel meaning rapid delivery of your sites content.

So we had a post all lined up for you today and then the chaps over at WPMU went and sent us an e-mail that we just had to share.  So todays post is put back till Monday and instead we bring you WPMU’s 100 best WordPress plugins.

Be sure to pop over and check out the post in full, however we have replicated the list here just for you.  Enjoy!

A quick look today at Jetpack by Automatic, which is run by Mr WordPress himself, Matt Mullenweg.  A bit of an odd one this as it’s a plugin we use, but probably because we’re lazy!

So what does it do?

Good question; lots of things.  You initialise the plugin by logging in with your WordPress username and password and then the Jetpack dashboard is displayed, showing you what you can do with the plugin.  In brief it has options to configure the following;

All blogging sites are looking to engage users, we write this stuff to make your life easier and hope that you find what we put out worthwhile and informative.  If you do we hope you’ll comment, follow us on Twitter, follow the RSS feed and maybe register with the site to get all the updates and e-mails.  It’s important as the site matures that this two way interaction happens so that we know we are giving you what you want, not what we think you want and the best way for us to do that is to get you to sign up or register for the site.  So bring on Social Login.

So what does it do?

If you aren’t already logged in, go to the bottom of this page and check out the right most box just above the footer, you’ll see a box that has lots of easy ways for people to register on this site quickly and easily using a wide range of their social media profiles.  The plugin gets their names, e-mail address and some other bits depending on how you configure it and uses this info to create an account on your wordpress site for them.  Then you can send them e-mails when you need to and keep them informed about what is going on now and in the future.

Configuration

Setting up the plugin in WordPress is easy, the control panel provided gives you nice easy options with tickboxes and radio buttons, however configuring each social network isn’t so straightforward.  This issue is due to the varying nature of

Today’s post is all about the plugin, how can we better protect our site by using extra software for WordPress?  We aren’t going to review the plugins discussed here today as there are a few too many, we will do this in due course.  We feel that most of the plugins here are pretty much an install, activate and go affair, not that much configuration is needed as the default settings are usually all you need.

So why more security after all of the stuff we did yesterday?  Because it is the single most important thing you can do for your site before you write a single word.  Yes, it’s boring, yes it’s labour intensive but once you have done your first site using these tips and tricks you should be able to clone it making future installs a breeze, something that we will cover here in future posts.

Updates

The first thing we will cover is an easy one, UPDATE WORDPRESS people!  We can never understand why people don’t do this and hear things like ‘Oh, so and so plugin doesn’t work on 3.1.1 so we haven’t upgraded.  Hello…  GET ANOTHER PLUGIN RETARD.  If you site gets hacked because you couldn’t be bothered to press the annoying button at the top of the dashboard then quite frankly, hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Today we are going to take a look at WP Firewall 2, a nice simple way to protect your site from the most obvious ways that hackers will try to compromise your site.  There are 2 reasons that you need install this plugin right now; one – it’s free and two, you need know nothing about anything as you install it and it’s ready to go, whitelisting you’re IP Address so you don’t get blocked doing admin type stuff.

So what does it do?

The plugin is designed to investigate web requests (via the url) checking for WordPress specific hacks to identify and stop some of the better known vulnerabilities.  There are a few powerful, generic modules that you can download that already do this but they’re not always installed on web servers, and are usually difficult to configure.  It intelligently whitelists and blacklists dangerous looking phrases by looking at known exploit attempts to let bloggers sleep better at night.  In laymen’s terms it’ll help protect your site while you’re doing other stuff.

Right, a quick one today for all of you new to WordPress and lacking in the HTML knowledge to make your posts and pages as pretty as you’d like.  Simple TinyMCE editor (not a great name), use it to add more buttons and options to the menu bar on your WordPress editor a bit like this:

We don’t use it so much now as we have taught ourselves how to code the HTML needed to circumvent a lot of what Simple TinyMCE does but for those of you who want to add a table into your posts, use Google Fonts without the hassle or god forbid, align something centrally then this is the plugin for you.  Think of it as mini Microsoft Word menu for WordPress.

We like communication.  It means people are engaging in what we are trying to do, we’re doing what we set out to do and helping people in a position we were once in.  But how do you make sure people can get through to you via your website?  Contact Forms obviously!

Now usually we wouldn’t review three items in one post, but it’s Friday, we’re tired and lets face it, contact forms aren’t exactly exciting are they?  We have cut the list down to three plugins that we think cover all the bases from free, to reasonable, to wowsers, but that cover most of the things that we feel could ever be needed in a form.  So with no further hindrance let us introduce the three contenders (In no particular order):

1. Contact Form 7
2. Formidable Forms
3. Gravity Forms

So, it seems to us the best way to start this whole blog is to review what we used setting it up.  We managed to get everything set up on this particular blog in just under a day and we will keep adding and removing stuff as we are never happy!  But it’s amazing what you can get done if you use what’s already out there, for this review we will be looking at our floaty bar on the left with all the social media icons on it; The Floating Social Bar.

We’ve tried out a whole load of these things in our time and will review more as the days go by and we get settled into some sort of routine with our post writing.  We decided to use Floating Social as it was the easiest to configure and offered enough social media options for us without being overwhelming.  The plugin is made by the chaps at WPMU who are possibly the biggest WordPress plugin company that we have come across.  Now, at $35 per month the cost of a WPMU membership is not cheap, but however it is well worth it as you get access to not only the Floating Social bar but over 100 other amazing plugins, 150 themes and possibly the best customer support forum I have encountered on the web.  We believe that if you are serious about your website it is a resource that you cannot afford to miss out on.  But lets get back to Floating Social.

Ok we admit it.  We love YooTheme.  In fact, this website is built around one of their WordPress templates using their proprietry Warp Framework, which is very good and amongst the easiest of the template frameworks we have come across.  We’re not here to talk about that though.

Just out of Beta is a new jQuery toy for all those budding designers that are looking for a way to integrate a massive array of different fancy features into their sites.  The Widgetkit as it’s called comes in 2 flavours and can be obtained one of three ways: