The days turn into weeks, and then the weeks turn into months. Blogging become a chore. You realize that you are spending most of your time trying to format your posts so that they look professionally done.

Then you hire a writer, and then two. Soon, you have a team of writers sending you posts every week, and you’re now spending all of your time editing and formatting those posts to look the way that you want them to look on the blog that has become a labor of love.

The problem is that all of this editing and formatting has taken away all of the time that you used to have for what you loved to do the most – write.

WordPress is a brilliant invention, and has made it possible for more and more people to have amazing websites, with beautiful themes. However, there is still the matter of the content area, which still needs to be formatted for pictures, ads and well-spaced content.

Formatting Your WordPress Content with a Template

A while back, I described to you how you could automatically insert an ad into every single post using the In-Post Template Add-on for WordPress.

This works brilliantly if you are starting with a new blog – but if you’ve already been inserting ads into your posts, it’ll go back and re-insert a new ad and completely mess up all of your old posts.

Don’t worry – there is another solution that is even better. By simply editing one of your standard WordPress PHP files, and then creating a style sheet, you can create your very own carefully formatted content template that will appear every time you click “Add New” in WordPress. All your old content will remain untouched.

Here’s a sample of all of the formatting work that I have going on in my own blog.

I’ve got a header image that needs to be carefully sized, with padding around it and left justified. I’ve got the “more” break, followed by my in-post Google Ad. Then, throughout each post I have additional images that are sized to suit and right justified. For the most part, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve been doing all of this manually – including all articles that my writers send in.

Here’s what such a post looks like when it’s published.

As you can see, the formatting is a little tricky because in one area I have the image left justified, and in the next section I have the ad right-justified. Then all additional images are right-justified as well. I like this setup for my own blog because it’s easier on the eyes and flows well. You may have your own preference for your particular WordPress blog.

The first step to create your template is to back-up your functions.php file (you’ll find it in the root directory of your theme), and then open it for editing.

You’ll see a bunch of code in here – all functions currently used by your current blog theme. You’re going to insert a new section between those functions. Find the end of the first function, and then insert the code that I’m going to detail next.

Now, I have to give credit where credit is due – I actually got this idea from David Hansen over at Smashing Magazine, who wrote an article on this back in October. In this case I’m going to expand on his idea by showing you how to tweak that template for things like ads and pictures.

add_filter('default_content','custom_editor_content');
add_editor_style('editor-style.css');
 
function custom_editor_content( $content ) {
 
$content = '
 
    <div class="content-col-side">
 
<img class="alignleft size-full " style="margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px;" title="placeholder" src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/imageplaceholder.png" alt="content template" />
 
 
     &nbsp;
 
     </div>    
 
    <div class="content-col-main">
 
    Insert your introduction here
 
    &nbsp;
 
    </div>
 
    <div class="content-google-ad">
 
    <span id="more-98442"></span>
    <div style="float: right;">
    Enter Google Script Here
    &nbsp;
    </div>
    </div>
 
   <div class="content-section-two">
    Here is second section content
    &nbsp;
    </div>
 
    <div class="content-image-three">
<img class="alignright size-full " style="margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px;" title="placeholder" src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/imageplaceholder.png" alt="content template" />
    &nbsp;
    </div>
 
    <div class="content-section-three">
    Here is third section content
    &nbsp; 
    </div>
 
    <div class="content-image-four">
<img class="alignright size-full " style="margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px;" title="placeholder" src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/imageplaceholder.png" alt="placeholder" /></a>
    &nbsp;
    </div>
 
    <div class="content-section-four">
    Here is third section content
    &nbsp;
     </div>
   ';
   return $content;
}

Notice how the alignment actually works best using the image alignment built into your theme style, and in the case of the Google Ad, you should use the second div with the style attribute to align where you’d like it to go. It just works best. However, as far as sizing, padding and placement, you’ll need to create the css file.

Here’s the styling for each section defined above.

body {
   background: #f5f5f5;
}
 
.content-col-main {
float:right;
width:70%;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
.content-col-side {
float:left;
width:210px;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
.content-google-ad {
float:right;
width:20%;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
.content-section-two {
float:left;
width:70%;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
.content-image-three {
float:right;
width:210px;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
.content-section-three {
float:left;
width:70%;
padding:1%;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
background: #fff;
}
 
img { /* Makes sure your images stay within their columns */
   max-width: 100%;
   width: auto;
   height: auto;
}

You can use either percentages or pixels for sizing. I prefer pixels for images, but it really comes down to preference. If there’s too much space between the pictures and text, just tweak the content percentages a bit until it looks good.

After you’ve saved your .css file, open up a new post and you’ll see that your perfectly formatted content template is already in place for you.

All you have to do is click on the image and upload the one you want to use, and then fill in all of the content areas. It really is as easy as that. Everything is automatically aligned and placed where they need to go.

All right-justified Google Code or images are already there – all you have to do is update the content. The time it will take you to put together a post with all of this already done for you will drop by a huge factor, guaranteed.

Updating all of the images on the template is as simple uploading the pictures that you want to use to your blog using the media upload tool, and then clicking on the image and pasting the URL to those images in the “Source” field.

Of course you’ll want to update the title and alt tags as well. As you can see here in my test article, writing an article is now just a matter of filling in each of the content areas. I can’t tell you how sweet it is to be able to just concentrate on writing, knowing that all of the proper formatting is already in place to make the article look its absolute best.

The final result? Here is my first test article using the new WordPress content template. All images and ad code is inserted, aligned and spaced perfectly.

If you didn’t know any better, you would think that nothing at all has changed on the blog. The formatting looks identical to the way it looked when I slaved over them for an hour or more. Now, all of that effort and trial-and-error formatting is already inserted right into the WordPress content template.
So now all that’s left is sitting back and doing what you’ve always loved to do – writing.
Does this WordPress Content template lessen the load on your own blog? Do you have any other formatting tips that people can use in their own templates? Share your thoughts and insights in the comments section below.
Image Credit: Shutterstock

Admin Bar

The new look admin bar has been streamlined to focus on updates and comment moderation, along with a quick post button.

The admin menu was a greatly heralded addition to the WordPress 3.2 release, but a lot of the more extraneous buttons have now been removed. Some of the more useful menu items, like widgets or menus, have been moved to a sub menu item when you hover over the blog name (but these are only accessible when viewing the blog, not when in the admin dashboard).

Speaking of the admin dashboard, fairly big changes there too. The side menus no longer drop down, but rather pull out instead upon hover. To be quite honest, I hate them. I find myself clicking more than I’d like and the behavior is sporadic.

Tablet users needn’t despair though, as the entire admin interface has also been given a touchable overhaul to make the admin experience on tablet input devices a more pleasant experience.

Tooltips

With an overhauled API for plugins too, WordPress now allows you to create tooltip-like popups to display messages or provide walkthrough tours. It’s an interesting addition that should make using the more complicated plugins more accessible to everyone. Here’s hoping developers don’t get overzealous with them.

Drag and Drop Uploading and Single Media Insert Button:

Before you get all excited, the drag and drop uploading doesn’t work in the basic visual editor. Instead, you still have to open up the insert media dialog box, then drag and drop into there. This is a limitation of HTML5 though, so we can hardly blame WordPress.

Where there were previously 4 buttons for inserting various types of media, there’s now only one, and the uploaded auto detects the filetype. 90% of users won’t care about this, since most of us only ever used the insert picture button. Still, it’s nice to have less clutter.

Other than that, drag and drop uploading works well, and saves having navigate through a laborious Select File dialog. A welcome addition, and possibly worth upgrading for that alone if it means shaving a few seconds off of every image upload.

New Help Screens:

Following on the theme of accessibility for new users, the help screens have been given an overhaul. Now they’re actually helpful – which is obviously a good thing for help screens to be. The dashboard also gets a unique set of welcome messages when performing a new install, again designed to help new users get familiar with the system.

Other stuff … Tumblr importer anyone?

As well as a long list of bug fixes (though none security critical) and performance updates (new version of jQuery!), 3.3 also brings a Tumblr importer, which some of you might have been on the edge of your seats waiting for if you wanted to graduate from Tumblr to your own real blog. I’ll give this a go at some point in the future, as I’m currently running a single Tumblr blog purely to upload a stream of images to. For those of you ready to switch, may I suggest my free guide that covers everything from WordPress hosting considerations to SEO tactics and monetization?

Incompatibilities

As is inevitable with such major updates, some plugins and themes will have minor errors, and some will cease to function entirely or break when you blog. There is a master list over at the WordPress forums of known issues, but the most significant ones as far as I can see:

• Atuhualpa breaks because of updated jQuery
• WooThemes broke the new media uploaded (refresh your cache to fix)
• Intense Debate shows mismatch of pending comments
• Improved Page Permalinks causes new pages to give 404 error
• Adblockers mess with the new visual editor (you shouldn’t be running them anyway)
• Dodgy styles occurring in admin dashboard due to plugins using print_styles hook instead of enqueue_scripts hook.

So as always, I would strong suggest you perform a full backup of both files and database before performing this upgrade, and be ready to revert if you have problems. Upgrade any plugins you can first, then upgrade your core WordPress.

The critical question I guess is should you upgrade yet? I’d certainly take a close look at your plugins – if you’re running ten or more you’re bound to have trouble with at least one of them. Upgrade where possible, backup, and just give it a go. The new features are certainly a worthy addition – even though the majority are aimed at new users – but who doesn’t appreciate performance increases and bug fixes? A few seconds saved uploading images? Yes, please.

Have you upgraded yet? What do you think, are you liking it? Did you have any random errors from your plugins? Let us know in the comments!

“Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads. We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense.”

Not all blogs will be eligible for the program. Blogs must be publicly visible and have a custom domain name to take part. If you would like to apply for the program, check out the sign up page on the official WordPress site. You must already have the custom domain name and blog set up to even apply for entry.

Source: TechCrunch

Not sure where to get started, though? You should read “Set Up Your Blog With WordPress: Your Ultimate Guide” by author James Bruce. This manual outlines everything you need to know in order to set up a blog and turn it into a real success.

We try to only outline tools we think are useful. MakeUseOf itself runs on WordPress, so you know it’s a tool we believe in. We’re sharing a few of our secrets in this manual, so it’s absolutely not one you want to miss.

DOWNLOAD Set Up Your Blog With WordPress: Your Ultimate Guide

The guide is free but password-protected. Gain access to the password by:

1- subscribing to our newsletter (you may do this on the download page itself, link above). Existing subscribers will receive the guide via email in the next couple of hours.

OR

2 – Simply join our Facebook page. Quick and easy.

This ultimate guide will teach you:

• What WordPress is, and why you should use it.
• Where to find hosting for your WordPress website.
• Key concepts in WordPress.
• Finding the theme that’s right for you.
• Blogging and editing content on your new blog.
• Basic WordPress SEO tips and tricks.
• Promoting your blog and finding readers.
• Making money from your blog.
• Backing up and recovering your WordPress site.
• Optimizing and scaling your site for high traffic.

DOWNLOAD Set Up Your Blog With WordPress: Your Ultimate Guide

The guide is free but password-protected. Gain access to the password by:

1- subscribing to our newsletter (you may do this on the download page itself, link above). Existing subscribers will receive the guide via email in the next couple of hours.

OR

2 – Simply join our Facebook page. Quick and easy.

I will be explaining how to create a brand new WordPress blog on your Linux server using Subversion (SVN) as well as how to convert a “traditional” installation to an SVN-type installation, as most people who will want to do this probably already have a blog going. This is possible because Automattic (the creators of WordPress) operate a SVN repository that allows this functionality. Without this repository, none of this would work.

Before you start, you’ll probably need to install the Subversion version control software onto your server. For Ubuntu and Debian servers, use

sudo apt-get install subversion

while Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS users should use

sudo yum install subversion

Creating A New Blog

In order to create a new SVN-controlled WordPress instance, log into your server using a program such as PuTTY, using :

cd /path/to/a/folder

so you can use

mkdir blog

to create a new folder named blog in your current location. Then use

cd blog

to go into the new folder, and run

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.2.1 .

to download and install WordPress into the current folder. If there is a newer version, replace 3.2.1 with the latest version. Also, don’t forget to include that lonesome period (.) at the end of the command as that is needed for the command to run correctly. Wait for the process to complete, then you can go ahead and enter in the correct URL to begin the installation script.

Converting From “Traditional” To SVN

Converting your blog to be controlled by SVN will require a few new steps. Essentially, this will create a new blog that is SVN-controlled, and move all your content and settings over to that new blog. This isn’t as invasive as it sounds, and shouldn’t mess up anything that you currently have on your blog.

To get started, use “cd” to go to where your blog folder is located (don’t actually go into the blog folder). Here we are going to assume that your old blog is in a folder named “blog” and your temporary new blog is going to be in a folder named “blog-new“. Go ahead and run

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.2.1 blog-new

which will create the new “blog-new” folder and download the necessary files into it. Please make sure that you download the same version as the one you are currently using. So if you’re not running the latest version, don’t choose the latest version in this process.

Next we’re going to go into the old blog folder by running

cd ../blog

and then copy the main config file as well as the htaccess file by running

cp -p wp-config.php .htaccess ../blog-new

so that these important files are in the new blog folder.

Now we’re going to copy over the actual content of your blog to the new folder, including plugins, themes, and whatnot. To do this, run

cp -rpfu wp-content/* ../blog-new/wp-content

and let that take a couple seconds or more, depending on how large your blog is. WordPress-provided plugins shouldn’t be affected, but you can double-check to make sure everything is running smoothly by running

svn status ../blog-new/wp-content

.

Any files that were modified will have an “M” next to them and need to be reverted by using

svn revert ../blog-new/wp-content/some/file

.

Any custom files or directories can also be copied by running

cp -rp images wp-digest ../blog-new

You can check that everything is copied over correctly and good to go by running

diff -rq blog/ blog-new/ | grep -v svn

(This is an example after I intentionally removed some files)

We’re almost done! We’re now going to move out to the big folder containing the two blog folders by running

cd ..

and then renaming them to make the final switch-a-roo by running

mv blog blog-old; mv blog-new blog

.

Congrats! Your SVN-controlled blog should now be up and running! If not, you may have forgotten to copy something from the old blog (now located in the renamed folder “blog-old”). You can now go ahead and update to the latest version if needed.

Updating Your Blog

To update your SVN-controlled WordPress blog, you’ll need to go into the directory of your blog using the “cd” command and then run :

svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.2.1/ .

which will switch your blog to the newest version. Remember to replace 3.2.1 with the latest version available.

Conclusion

For those that support it, Subversion version control is a great version tracking tool that is highly effective, relatively easy to use, and very fast. It’s a great thing that WordPress can be controlled via SVN, increasing the flexibility of the already-flexible WordPress platform. No wonder it’s one of the most used frameworks for sites today.

What do you think about WordPress and SVN working together? Have you even known that this was possible? Let us know in the comments!

1. Good Quality Content Is Always The Best Tactic

I can’t tell you how sick I am of hearing people announce their blog when it has less than 5 posts on it and/or consists of nothing more than YouTube videos and re-posted pictures with a one-sentence commentary. If that’s all you have to say, get a Twitter account or use Tumblr.

Make sure you have, at the very least, 10 quality posts, but aim for around 30 ideally. By “quality“, I mean 400 words or more of your own original content. Never copy content from elsewhere, like these mountains of autoblogs do with our MakeUseOf content…

Keep your articles focused, grammatically correct and spell checked. If you speak like a valley-girl or have a tendency to write in txtspk, do your best to hide it and take remedial English classes – no one wants to read that, even your best friends.

2. Get A Domain

Spend a whole $10 on a unique, short as you can, relevant domain name – even if you’re hosting your blog on a free WordPress.com or Blogger account. Get this right from the beginning and you will save yourself a world of hurt later.

Don’t be tempted to make up a “cool” domain unless you have a rock-solid web service and a VC investment to the tune of a million dollars to market it; and absolutely don’t get a free domain like .cc

3. Establish A Good Permalink Structure

Don’t promote your blog if your URLs still look like mydomain.com/blog?id=1324. Take a minute to go the permalink options in your WordPress settings. Something like mydomain.com/my-article is great.

You might also want to consider installing an SEO slugs type plugin, which reduces the length of your permalink URLs by removing common words such as a, the, or. Shorter URLs are better.

4. Change The Tagline

It’s just embarrassing to find a blog that still has “Just another WordPress blog” in the title or on the theme. You can change it from Settings -> General to something more relevant to your site. Apart from the fact that many themes feature the tagline prominently in the header, it’s also often used in the meta-titles of your homepage and therefore shown to everyone who finds your site through Google.

5. Set Up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free traffic report for your website. But what’s the point of installing Analytics if you don’t actually have any traffic yet?

Well firstly, motivation. If you have accurate feedback that shows a clear, progressive growth in traffic then you are far less likely to give up. Don’t wait until you think you have some traffic – get real feedback, right now.

The second reason – to find out exactly what’s popular on your blog; exactly which keywords bring in the most traffic; and make adjustments based on this. Try not to get too caught up in the numbers game yet, but if you find people are coming to your page for a particular topic and leaving quickly, perhaps try to write another post on that topic that’s more in-depth or targeted more specifically.

My favourite plugin in this area is Analyticator, as it connects to your Analytics account and lets you choose the profile from a drop down list, avoiding the need to copy and paste any fiddly codes. If you have no idea how to read all your Analytics data yet, just start collecting it anyway and I’ll go over the major features in a later article.

6. Google Sitemaps Plugin

This isn’t essential, but as far I’m concerned any helping hand you can give Google to index your blog is a good thing. Get a sitemap generator such as this, set it up correctly to automatically generate whenever you post something, and you’re halfway sorted.

7. Webmaster Tools

This is a useful, free set of tools from Google. It has a number of functions, one of which involves submitting sitemaps to be indexed. It also keeps a track of 404 errors, and alerts you to malware security issues and even if WordPress updates are available. You could get by without it, but it’s a nice tool to have under your belt.

8. SEO Friendly Images

The power of image search should absolutely not be underestimated. Put simply, this plugin will add ALT and TITLE tags to your images. You can do this using the WordPress image uploader, but I don’t know many people who actually bother to do that – so this plugin does it automatically. By adding these to your image tags, you may find a huge influx of traffic from Google Image search.

9. Join A Forum

Find a forum related to your particular topic and establish a presence there. Introduce yourself, make some good quality comments or advice on other threads, help some people out. After that, change your signature to include a link to your website, and repeat. This should give you a small trickle of visitors.

10. Social Networks

Be sure to announce your articles on your own social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and StumbleUpon – but don’t fall into the trap of promoting absolutely everything you write. Pick one or two of your best posts to promote, and you’ll be far more likely to get a good response and not piss people off in the process.

Done all that? Awesome, you should start seeing results soon. Got any other essential first steps or WordPress plugins you always install? Let us know in the comments!

Image credit: Shutterstock

To export your StumbleUpon blog into WordPress, you need to log into your account and then point your browser to the export tool. This will automatically export your entire blog into a file which you can save on your computer. StumbleUpon recommends that you create a new WordPress blog before you import your data and not import it into an existing blog. In the WordPress dashboard, you would need to go to Tools – > Import.

If you want the export file to contain videos, go to your StumbleUpon account settings and check the “Embed videos into your blog” box prior to creating the export file.

To import groups, you need to log into your StumbleUpon account, go to the group page and click the “Export Group” link. You should do this before October 24th, after which you will not be able to use groups anymore.

To learn more about exporting from StumbleUpon, visit the blog export guide and the group export guide.

What do you think of StumbleUpon’s recent moves? How will this affect the way you use StumbleUpon? Let us know in the comments.

E-Commerce – Your Own Online Shop

You might be surprised to learn that you can run an entire online store from WordPress, and more importantly you can do it for free.

WP eCommerce has been the standard for a long time and powers some really impressive sites like Icon Dock. With a free core feature set and premium upgrades (additional payment processors, affiliate managers, etc), it’s the choice of developers with easy to customise templates.

In terms of out-of-the-box ease of setup for non-technical users though, my favourite is JigoShop, with which you can have an attractive and fully functional shop up in minutes, fully compatible with the default twenty-eleven WordPress theme. Nice!

Classifieds & Job Listings

For local sites especially, providing classified ads can be a great resource, as can a jobs site. Be aware that with any systems like these though, you really need a strong initial boost of activity and new users to prevent the site becoming stale. It may be best to create the community first, instead of creating a classifieds or job site from scratch and expecting the users to naturally come.

For classifieds, the best contender by far is Classipress, a premium theme for $99 but feature rich and mature with full support. The same developers also make Jobroller, a respected job listing theme at a similar premium price.

On the free side, Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin is an impressive alternative with a good selection of basic features – including the ability to charge users for listings using Google Checkout or Paypal.

For free job listings, WordPress Job Manager does an admirable job, and the developer is always active in the support communities and project development. It integrates well, and has fantastic reviews on the plugin repository. If you’re looking to integrate it into your existing design and have the power to easily customise, Job Manager might be a better solution than a costly premium plugin.

Membership Subscriptions

It’s hard to believe that anyone would subscribe to a website in this age of physical newspapers sales declining and sentiment against paywalls running at an all-time high – but if you’ve got niche knowledge on a topic that doesn’t have the traffic pull for you to make money through regular forms of advertising, then a subscription model may be the way to go.

Membership is a well developed free plugin to handle every aspect of running a members-only site, compatible with the latest WordPress and a favourite of many.

On the premium front, Wishlist Member is widely regarded as the best there is by those who make a living out of this – but at $99 for a single domain you’d better be certain of a subscriber base. Luckily, a 30-day free trial lets you decide if it’s right for you. With a full set of training videos, sequential content delivery and integration with a number of payment processors, it really has an expansive feature set.

A Reviews Site

My own iPad Board Games site is a collaborative reviews site running on WordPress, and uses the fantastic (and free) GD Star Ratings plugin at the core allowing anyone to vote on the games. It is quite a complex plugin with various rating types – posts, comments, multi-rating blocks, stars or thumb-up/down – and to get the best of it you really need to read up on the vast templating options. Certainly worth the time involved though, I’m sure you’ll agree.

On the premium side, it hard to fault wpreviewsite in anything but price – $97 for a single site license, though it is feature rich and works well out of the box for those of you in a hurry.

ReviewIt is a significantly cheaper theme option at $40 and supports the community plugin BuddyPress as well, but I’m not a fan of fixed theme options as they tend to look quite cookie-cutter.

Discussion Forum

Simple:Press is my choice for any sites that need a fully integrated and WordPress-centric discussion forum. It works right into your existing theme and looks great even without customising it, featuring the full gamut of forum features you’d expect. A full WordPress integration, user accounts remain managed by WordPress, so for tying it to other parts of your site you couldn’t ask for more.

I hope you can see just how powerful WordPress is for rapid website development of a variety of site types – not just blogs – and perhaps even gained a little inspiration in the process.

Many of the plugins mentioned today are featured on our freshly published Best WordPress Plugins page, but be sure to check out the full archives of WordPress tutorials too for lots more general blogging tips and in-depth theme-customization tutorials.

Image Credit: ShutterStock

Need a forum on your blog? Need to sell stuff? Want a better way to handle user comments? We guarantee that there’s at least a few plugins that you’ll find handy on our brand new Best Of: WordPress Plugins page!

We’ve skimmed through the internet and found 40 of the best WordPress plugins and compiled them onto the Best Of: WordPress Plugins page for your convenience. Bookmark the Best Of: WordPress Plugins page and go back for more!

If we’ve left out your favourite plugin, please do let us know in the comments section.

Share the page with your friends using the social sharing buttons right there on the page itself.

Still, it made me realize just how dangerous it is to make such infrequent backups. It also made me realize the extent of the damage that could have occurred if the database itself had got hacked – I could have lost over a month’s worth of blog posts.

Protecting Yourself With Automated WordPress Site Backups

The problem is I just don’t have time to go in every day, week, or even month, and back up my blog. I’m sure most of you reading this feel the same way. There really isn’t a nicely streamlined, automated solution that allows you to schedule a full backup of your files and database, and get the exported backup somewhere off the web server. Aibek listed some online tools that may help, but in those cases you are dependent on some outside service or website to make it all work.

Configuring Automatic Backups

I decided to spend half of my Sunday putting together a solution. The following setup makes use of two scheduling WordPress plugins, WordPress Backup and DB Manager.  The first backs up your files, and the second backs up your database – both on a schedule. In the last part of the article, I’ll show you how to automate the FTP transfer of those files onto a remote server or PC.

Your first step is to install the WordPress Backup plugin, taking careful note of the installation instructions and implementing the .htaccess file where required. Then go to the configuration area for it. Here is where you can tell the plugin how often to do a backup of your wordpress uploaded images, theme files and plugins.

Make note of the backup directory, you’re going to need this later. The three files stored there will be plugins.zip, uploads.zip and themes.zip.

Next, install the DB Manager plugin. You could also use something like the database plugin Dean described. Pay attent to the .htaccess configuration instructions. Don’t skip the instructions or the backup won’t work properly. Go to the Database Options in your WordPress menu and make a note of the backup path.

There will be multiple files up to the backup archive you define. To FTP these files we’ll have to use wildcards (I’ll show you how).

Set up your database backup on a schedule by changing the Automatic Scheduling settings.

Now that your WordPress files and database will be backed up locally to a location on your web server, it’s time to schedule an FTP job to get those files off the server and onto your local PC.

Scheduling An FTP Transfer

A scheduled FTP transfer is not easy to come by. Most FTP clients that can do it want you to pay for their premium product to do so. To get around this, you need FTP scripting commands that you can schedule, and that’s exactly what WinSCP allows you to do.

Download and run the interactive WinSCP app. Once you’ve established an FTP connection, click on “Session” and save the session.

Once you’ve saved the session details, you can close the application and then open up a text file. Call it anything you like, but remember the name. You will want to type something similar to the following (replace the paths with the paths above that you’ve noted as you set up each plugin).

I created a folder on my local server under D:\backup\TSW_Files where I want to FTP all of those files. Under D:\backup\, I placed the following script file called myfile.txt:

option batch on
option confirm off
open topsecretwriters
get public_html/wp-content/xxxxx/themes.zip d:\backup\TSW_Files\
get public_html/wp-content/xxxxx/uploads.zip d:\backup\TSW_Files\
get public_html/wp-content/xxxxx/plugins.zip d:\backup\TSW_Files\
get public_html/wp-content/xxxxxxx-db/*topsec6_topwp.sql.gz d:\backup\TSW_Files\
exit

The first path in the “get” command is your remote web server path, and the second path is your local backup PC/server path. Next, create a text batch job called backupWP.bat and store it in the c:\program files\WinSCP\ folder. That text file should have the following lines:

@echo off
winscp.com /script=d:\backup\myfile.txt

The myfile.txt script can really be stored anywhere, so long as you keep the path listed in the batch job accurate.

Now, whenever the batch job launches, it will call WinSCP.com, which will in turn run the FTP script commands you defined in your txt file. All you have to do now is schedule backupWP.bat to run using Windows Scheduler (All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Windows Scheduler).

Now, you’ve basically set up a system where your WordPress block takes regular backups of important WordPress files and the WordPress database to folders on your web server, and you can FTP those backed-up files off your server to a remote location using your daily FTP script.

So, there you have it. Once you’ve set up the system above, you never have to give backing up your blog another thought. Automating the entire process will free you up to do more important things, like writing your first novel, or playing with your kids. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

Try the setup above with your own blog and let us know if you were able to make any improvements in the setup, or if you know of any plugins that work as well as these two for a WordPress site backup. Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Gualtiero Boffi