Create My - eCommerce and Web Design Hornsby - eCommerces and Web Design Sydney

Installing WPMU on Media Temple VPS (Plesk) in 5 Minutes!

This is a quick post to help you install WordPress ? (WPMU) on Media Temple. This is a task that you would think would be very easy (and is with Terminal). MT go all out to advertise that they are super easy to use. This is not so! They use Plesk which is a quite a dog of a service compared to cPanel. I am sure there is going to be something great you can do with Plesk I don’t know about. This said for what I need it for it is very limited.

I am going to assume that since you are setting up WPMU that you can sign-up up to MT without assistance.

So you have gotten setup with MT and the first thing you notice is that the File Manager sucks!

1. First turn on SSH access for Media Temple
2. Open Terminal, Putty etc
3. In Terminal type in

   ssh root@yourdomain.com

4. Enter your password
5. In Terminal type in

   cd /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/httpdocs/

6. In Terminal type in

   wget http://mu.wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

7. In Terminal type in

    tar zxvf wordpress-mu-2.9.1.1.tar.gz
   

   or what ever version downloaded (the ls command will show you all of the files)

8. In Terminal type in

   chmod 777 /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/httpdocs /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/httpdocs/wp-content/
   

9. In Terminal type in

   rm index.html

10. Navigate you browser to yourdomain.com
11. Enter in all your database information and you are away as Media Temple VHOSTS is pre-configured
12. In Terminal type in

    chmod 755 /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/httpdocs /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/httpdocs/wp-content/

So in 12 easy steps you have WPMU on Media Temple.

Whoops! iBooks looks like Delicious

iPad Sexy Video

While the iPad has it flaws, it has the best marketing video. There is a lot of potential with build apps. I think I might buy one for the tax offset and develop some new apps for it.

Does the iPad = biggest disappointment ever?

So the iPad looks to be the biggest disappointment, ever. I didn’t know what to expect, though with all the hype I was expecting a little more. I was thinking something si-fi where you could do so many cool screen flicking, resizing and all that sort of stuff. Something revolutionary was the expectation. What we got was a larger iPhone without phone.

It is basically an 10″ iPhone. It is meant to be the half way between the iPhone and MacBook but I think it is more towards the iPhone end of the spectrum. Apple is marketing at the crowd who own both a smart-phone (hopefully the iPhone) and a laptop (hopefully a MacBook). Hopefully it will be powerful enough and adequate to haul around all day instead of your laptop.

There doesn’t appear to be multitasking, which is a big annoyance with the iPhone. This would of made it more on the PC side of things.
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Connecting cPanel to GMail

GMail kicks the cPanel mail apps butt. So I always recommend that clients to use the free Google Apps to manage their email. This is a big bonus for clients as they get to use the simple GMail interface with their own domain.

The big benefits to using GMail is the:

• 7GB storage per a user,
• ability to access multiple email accounts from one GMail,
• easy to configure your iPhone to access it,
• looks really nice,
• plays nice with mail clients such as Apple Mail, and
• it is a lot easier for users to use. Read more

Outputing PHP to Excel

A few people have recently asked me about outputting data to Excel. This is a very simple thing to do from PHP with two lines of code.

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Upselling

I am of those people who hates to shop. When I do I like to get in and out of the shops as fast as possible. This normally means I am totally focus on I went in to get that I forget to get the other things that I may need.

For instance on the weekend I brought a new iPhone. I get home and the first thing I realise is that I need a protective case for it.

During shopping at the store the sales attendent tried to sell me Mobile Me and Apple care which I repeatedly said no to. This caused me to have bigger blinkers on as he tried to push harder to sell me these two services instead of something I wanted. Read more

WordPress just got better

So I just found another reason to love wordpress with the iPhone app for wordpress allowing me to post posts while out. This means that I can write posts in a lot of new places and give out a lot more random thoughts.

So I have to admit that it is not as easy to post on the iPhone as a normal keyboard. This means That the posts from the iPhone are more likely to be shorter or I just have to get better at it. Read more

A website is your number 1 sales person

A website needs to be thought of as a sales person who is always working, takes payments upfront, and costs significantly less (no holidays, no super, and no christmas party). As such your website does need to be treated as apart of the sales team, it should present the image of your company, be up-to-date on your offerings, provide advise, make cross and up sells, and most of all help your customers buy off you.

Biggest benefits

• Take orders 24×7
• Receive payments instantly
• Save on costs
• A website can provide as much or as little information as a customer wants
• No time is wasted on tire kickers

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Connecting your plugin to the WordPress Database

Connecting to the WordPress database is very simple. The $wpdb variable connects to the class which controls the access to the database meaning your plugin can easily use the database without having to write a connection script. The $wpdb class also contains routines which will make your life easier. This post details the $wpdb variable and the basic routines it supports. It is intended to help those building a plugin which needs a database and does not describe how to build a plugin.

Audience: WordPress Plugin Developers
Level: Beginner – Intermediate
Assumed Knowledge: You know how to build a WordPress Plugin and how to write queries in MySQL.

In this tutorial we are going to build a simple plugin which when a user visits a page in your WordPress environment their IP, the page visited, and time is stored in the database which the results will be shown in the admin section of WordPress. This plugin is going to be very basic yet you can easily imagine just how much analytics you could possibly do with the data captured.
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