Automattic  – the creators of WordPress released their thirteenth major release code named as “Thelonious” and otherwise called as WordPress 3.0.

It is indeed worth the upgrade and the options of upgrading should already be available in your blog admin pages. So what is new in WordPress 3.0. Let’s take a quick look at it -

1. New Default Theme (Twenty Ten): One of the most refreshing changes is that Kubrick is gone and there is a new default theme called as the Twenty Ten theme. This is to go with the new theme APIs. Twenty Ten is a more modern and flexible theme that takes advantage of a lot of the new features.
2. A Newer and Lighter Admin Interface: WordPress 3.0 comes with a new administration interface. The new interface has contextual help on every page and has a light feel to it.
3. WordPress MU Merger: WordPress MU has now been designed into the wordpress administration in WordPress 3.0. This will let users create multiple blogs from a single installation.
4. WordPress URL shortener: URL shortening can now be done from within your blog as WordPress 3.0 has integrated support for URL shorteners including their own wp.me.
5. Choice of Admin name: You can now choose an admin name when you install a new blog and will not have to rely on the default “admin” username any more.

There are many other important updates in the new WordPress. You can watch the below video to learn more.

One of the major bugs that I found after upgrading to the new version was with the plugin “DB Cache Reloaded”. WordPress now has integrated a few new plugins which are probably conflicting with DB cache and producing the below error -

“Call to undefined method wpdb::get_blog_prefix() in /home/xxxx/xxxx/xxxxx.com/public_html/wp-includes/user.php on line XXX“

The easiest resolution to this error is to deactivate the “DB Cache Reloaded” plugin.

In conclusion I should say that WordPress 3.0 will change the way people blog. It is a welcome change – the admin interface and the contextual help and everything else. Upgrade and enjoy.

A few days back, I published a guest post at daily blog tips about WordPress blog backups. You can read that post here.

I thought I would follow it up with this post here, though I am a bit off-schedule and a bit too late to follow up that post.

Blogging is a phenomenon that has changed the way business is done on the internet. It started as a mode of expression of thoughts and feelings of an individual, and went on to become one of the most preferred forms of marketing. Blogging has changed its appearance since it first started and WordPress has changed the way people blog.

WordPress is one of the most preferred platforms for blogging and most of the successful bloggers prefer blogging on WordPress because of the sheer customization options that it offers them. Over the past few years, WordPress has added to its features by constantly upgrading and add to it numerous third party plugins that are either free or, paid.

And that happened….

I was super excited when I first started my blog. As I graduated from a free blog at WordPress to a self-hosted wordpress installation, I bought my own hosting plan from a not so well knows hosting company. Why a not so well known hosting company? Because my cash resources were limited and I had to manage with it.

But I was happy with the service that my hosting company provided and everything went fine for almost a year and a half until one day when I found that my blogs were not working. When the situation did not improve for more than 2 days I wrote to my hosting company to understand the reason. I felt as if my world came crashing down when I got a reply from them. Their servers were attacked by a hacker and they had lost everything that was installed on their servers. When I checked with them for a copy of my blog, I got no response. I kept writing to them but the result was the same.

My worst fears come true…

I had no backup of my blog and with every passing day my desperation grew. My blog had more than a year of content which meant almost 400 posts. Since my blog was a single author blog, it was all my own hard work. I had no clue what to do.

Finally after about 4 days I got a reply that the hosting company could not revive from the hacker attack and that they were closing down. Regarding the backup for my blog, they informed me that they were sorry for the inconvenience and that they had no backup to give me.

The most ignored aspect in Blogging

There are thousands of enhancements that we do to our blogs and there are thousands of plugins to do this. Plugins to drive targeted traffic, to optimize them for the search engines etc. But one of the most ignored aspects in all of this is creating a backup for your blogs.

Almost all servers that are compatible with WordPress installations provide an option of creating a backup for your database. Since WordPress is a blog platform that works entirely on a MySQL database, keeping a backup for your database is good enough. There are other options as well which help in creating a backup, yet most of the blogs today focus the least on creating one for their blog and prefer relying solely on their hosting companies.

Why?

It is because we have so much to do in blogging that we do not find enough time to creating backups. The thousands of courses and e-books available on the internet that claim to teach blogging focuses the least on maintaining backups for your blogs.

The easiest option for a backup

WordPress has a lot of extremely useful plugins that can do the job of creating a backup automatically for you. In addition to the two plugins that I have written about at dailyblogtips.com, the following five are a few other good plugins that I have experience with and which according to me are indeed the best are:

1. WP backup by BTE – This simple plugin takes a copy of all plugins, theme and upload directories and copies them into a directory under wp-content as a zip file.  This zip file is then sent out via email to your preferred email address.
2. WP-DB-Backup – This is a plugin developed by skippy.net and does pretty much the same thing as wordpress database backup. You can download it from http://skippy.net/wordpress-database-backup/.
3. Wp2blosxom – This plugin exports all your posts into a zip file that contains a blosxom style directory hierarchy of posts
4. DBC Backup – DBC Backup uses the wp-cron system to create daily backup of the wordpress database.
5. myEASYbackup – This is by far the best backup plugin available. This plugin creates a backup of both the code and the MySQL tables and also helps you restore the wordpress installation with a single click.

In addition to using these plugins and maintaining backups for your blogs it is also important that you ensure that you protect your WordPress installation from hackers and spammers. Constantly upgrading your WordPress installation to the latest version is one of the best ways to keep your blogs secure.

Funny question, ain’t it?

At least I thought otherwise and hence never bothered to secure my blogs. I felt that my blogs were invincible and that nothing could happen to them.

I was mistaken. Terribly mistaken….!

For those of you who are regular visitors to my blog, you would have noticed that my blog was down for almost 3-5 days. And when it came back online, there were a few articles that were missing.

This was the status with my other blogs. A few were even worse. There were entire articles that were gone and my blogs went back almost a year back in time.

It was a simple server hack that happened to the hosting servers where I was hosting my blog. My hosting company could not recover from the hack and came back to me showing their helplessness at restoring the data back. All that they needed were a few words to explain their helplessness, but what I lost was my efforts of a lifetime.

But, was it really their fault? No it wasn’t. It indeed was my fault. I never backed up my blogs or, their data. Consequently I lost everything that I had built over a period of 3-4 years.

WordPress Backup :-

How can you backup your wordpress blogs? All it requires is understanding the capability of the WordPress blogging platform. The enhancements that WordPress offers, in itself is sufficient for creating a backup of your blog. When I say, enhancements, what I mean is “Plugins”.

Let take a look at these few plugins that can help your backup your blogs:-

1. WP-DB-Backup – This is by far the best and  easiest of backup plugins that I have used till now. It helps you back the primary tables in your blog database and also provides you an option to choose the other tables that you want to backup. It also provides you an option to automatically email a copy of the backup to a preferred email of your choice.
2. WordPress Automatic Online Backup - Another very useful plugin. This plugin offers you the facility to create a free account with wordpressbackup.com, and let’s you store your wordpress blog’s backups at their servers. The setup is a bit difficult, otherwise the plugin is extremely good and feature rich.
3. Secure WordPress – This is not a backup tool. Still it is very important to secure your wordpress installations. Of the rest everything that it does it also removes error information on login page; adds index.html to plugin directory and removes the wp-version.
4. WordPress Backup – This is a plugin by the Blog Traffic Exchange team. Once again the installation is a bit difficult though it is not rocket science, but the plugin is extremely useful in creating a backup of your themes folder, plugins folder and your database.
5. DBC Backup – This plugin is similar to the one above, but it works on cron jobs. You need to have the basic knowledge about working with hosting servers to install this plugin. But once installed, this can come in very handy.

Use one or, all of these plugins as per your requirement and protect your blog. A slight carelessness from you could cost you, about a couple of years’ efforts.

In addition to all this, always ensure that you upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest version in order to keep it secure.

Don’t forget to comment on which of these plugins you like the most and which is the one that you have installed in your blog.

Photograph courtesy Carl Silver

In case you are, then let me ask you to rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 on your skills with WordPress. Read on as you rate yourself.

You may even take the vote that you see here.

When I started blogging about 3 years back, I first set up my blog at blogger.com, which I believe, is one of the favorite platforms for all bloggers. But as you season as a blogger, your interest changes shores to WordPress. This is exactly what happened with me. After blogging for almost about 8-9 months, I learnt about WordPress and the extendability that it offers to a blogger. I was so amazed and awed at the potential of WordPress that I straightaway headed over to a hosting company and bought a domain and installed my first WordPress blog. The story doesn’t end there….!

WordPress offers a world famous 5-minute installation process, which ensures that you are up with your blog in minutes. This statement is where I started my blog installation. But……It took me about 2 days to get my blog up and running. If your start-up was better than me then I should say that you are a much better player than me.

Let me tell you the points where I got stuck up:-

1. My hosting was not compatible for a WordPress Installation.
2. I couldn’t figure out how to import my blogger blog into my new wordpress blog.
3. My theme would not install properly because of some stupid permission problems.
4. My database would not install properly.
5. I did not know how to configure my config.php file.
6. I couldn’t install the plugins that was required.

These were just the problems with my startup. The hiccups extended on until about 5 months into my launch by which time I had gained a fairly good understanding of php and MySQL, probably because I had an interest in it.

I had been on the lookout for a course that could offer the initial assistance required to any blogger starting off with WordPress and gradually handhold them until they could popularize their blog and earn from it. I had even thought of starting a WordPress Master course. While I was playing with this idea, I stumbled upon another course by a good friend of mine who was heading the Max Blog Press team. This course is called WordPress Wizard. Though it is not a membership course, it offers an indepth study into WordPress and WordPress blog management.

You might want to check out this course in case you are really keen towards launching a WordPress blog or, even bettering the blog that you are currently running on WordPress.

If not, then it is time that you do so. If you are still wondering as to why should you upgrade then read through a few of the features in the latest version of the world’s favorite blogging platform and you will be convinced.

You can find much more information about the Version 2.8 at the official page at WordPress.

A few of the highlights of the latest version is as follows:

1. WordPress 2.8 sports a new drag-and-drop widgets option in your admin interface. All you now need to do is just drag the widgets that you want to display in your sidebar and drop it. No need to even save it after dropping the widget.
2. The theme editors and plugin editors have a new feature. It now highlights syntax for editing and also has a built-in function lookup option.
3. In all the earlier versions, installing the theme meant that you have to have an FTP application installed. In WordPress version 2.8, all you need to do is just browse the theme directory and install themes directly from the admin.
4. Now the dashboard widgets can be arranged in upto four columns thus making it easy to navigate and use your dashboard.
5. WordPress 2.8 now supports timezones and even automatic daylight savings time adjustmentdirectly from your admin panel.
6. You can also configure the number of items to show on the management pages with an option in the Screen Options.
7. The best part of the latest version is that it supports IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module, which has known to create problems in the earlier versions.

There were multiple reasons why I was eagerly awaiting the release of WordPress version 2.8. But the most impressive of these is the fact that

- You can now easily install themes from your admin panel directly. This was always a challenge for me and I has always wanted WordPress to implement this feature in one of their releases.

- Widgets on you sidebars was another aspect that seemed interesting to me. In all the earlier versions, you had to first select a sidebar from the drop-down menu (this is, if you had multiple sidebars in your theme), then click a widget to select it for your sidebar. After all this if you forget to save the changes, all your changes were gone. In the latest version, all this is got rid off. All that you need to do is drag and drop your favorite widgets onto the sidebar of your choice.

Go ahead and upgrade your database, if you haven’t already.