If you’re looking for an easier and quicker way to do this, you’re in luck! There’s now a WordPress plugin called Search Regex that can help you do these tasks quickly and easily.

Here’s a little background info on the Search Regex WordPress plugin:

Search Regex adds a powerful set of search and replace functions to WordPress. These go beyond the standard searching capabilities, and allow you to search and replace almost any data stored on your site. In addition to simple searches you have the full power of PHP’s regular expressions at your disposal.

Features:

• Simple search and replace
• Advanced regular expression search and replaces, back references and capture groups
• Search previews with inline replacing
• Perform searches in post & page content, excerpt, titles, URL, and meta-data, as well as comment content and author data
• Full support for WordPress roles. You can only search and replace in posts you have access to
• Fully localized

Screenshots:
Search Options

Search Results

The plugin author – John Godley, created the Search Regex plugin primarily for helping WordPress users with blog migration and upgrading. This WordPress plugin comes in very handy when you’re changing the image directory for your post images or URL paths to your posts, like if your changing your domain name or moving from a free blogging service like Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress. This plugin can also be used to edit/remove WordPress plugin tags or correct misspelt words. With Search Regex’s search and replace pattern, you can perform these tasks easily and quickly. Saving you lots of time and the hassle of manually editing each post.

For more information regarding the installation, usage, search options and examples regarding the Search Regex plugin, make sure you visit the official Search Regex plugin homepage.

The Search Regex plugin is a very powerful, useful and helpful WordPress plugin. I wish this plugin or something like it was developed earlier. But anyways, I’m just glad that someone came up with the idea of creating a plugin like this so that WordPress users won’t have a hard time and won’t waste too much time editing URL paths or image directory paths. Thanks John and more power to you!

IMPORTANT: To those who plan to use the Search Regex plugin, first thing you should do is create a backup of your WordPress database before making any changes. Also, make sure that you always use the “Search & Replace” preview before saving it to the database.

Check out the Search Regex WordPress plugin.

Copyright © 2010 JaypeeOnline.net. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me so I can take legal action immediately.

Looking to make extra income from your blog by selling your knowledge, articles, your own products, or plr (private label rights) items like e-books or software? You can do all that by charging your visitors for accessing your special blog posts and product pages with this free WordPress plugin I’m sharing with you today.

LockPress is a free WordPress plugin, created by a small company called Two Enough that lets you “lock” certain areas of your blog like posts and pages, and charge users for access to those areas. Here’s a short introduction from the LockPress product page:

Free WordPress plugin to charge your visitors for accessing blog posts and pages. With LockPress you can easily earn side income by selling articles, your knowledge, your own products or MRR/PLR items (ebooks, software, etc) and even run a membership site. The possibilities are endless. You will get the payments directly to your PayPal account and you can set the flat or recurring fee items.

Features

• “Lock” a post or a page (or a part of it) in WordPress blog. To see that item your visitor will have to pay a fee you set.
• You can charge visitors with a flat or recurring fee.
• Easy templates edit – change the appearance of the locked post, purchase page etc.
• Your visitors will pay directly to your PayPal account – you will only need to put your PayPal-attached email to the install settings.
• Lock-code generator will help you to create a code to put to your posts/pages so they are unavailable before a fee is payed.
• You can create item groups – by generating specific code and putting it to multiple posts/pages of your install you can charge your visitor once and allow access to all the items of a group. For example you can lock a whole category this way – once any post is payed rest items of the group will be unlocked for the user.

Screenshots:
Settings

Lock Combination Generator

Templates

Messages

My Take:
LockPress is a useful plugin if you want to earn extra income from your blog by selling some of your “special” articles or some products from your blog. Unlike most plugins that offer the same type of features, LockPress is FREE and lets you receive payments conveniently via PayPal.

From what I’ve read from the product page and manual, LockPress is pretty easy to setup and configure, the process usually takes less than 5 minutes. All you need to do is download the plugin, upload it to your wp-content/plugins folder, activate the plugin from your WordPress dashboard. To activate LockPress, you’ll have to fill out a form from the Two Enough site. Once you’re done with it, you will receive an activation code on your email address, use that code to activate the plugin.

For further details on how lock a post/page or how to customize your install, visit the LockPress manual page.

I haven’t tried LockPress myself because I don’t have any products to sell yet but it might come in handy one of these days so I’m keeping it for future use.

Find out more about the LockPress WordPress Plugin.

Copyright © 2010 JaypeeOnline.net. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me so I can take legal action immediately.

For this Christmas season aside from the falling snow, I’ve added some extra stuff and modified my blog header to add some Christmas graphics – Christmas tree, decor, gift and a snowman. Nevertheless, I have more people commenting and inquiring about the falling snow effect. In the past couple of years, I used a custom javascript that I got from Matt Mullenweg’s blog. However, when I tried to install this year, it didn’t work.

So I searched the web for an alternative falling snow javascript and guess what? It turns out that there’s already a WordPress plugin called Let It Snow!, which was released back in 2007 by Aen Tan.

Here’s a little introduction from the plugin’s page:

It’s the time of the year. Why not dress up your WordPress blog with some fancy falling snow flakes? Let It Snow is a WordPress plugin I wrote back in 2007, just before Christmas and it is currently one of the more popular plugins in the WordPress plugin directory. Since Christmas is coming, I thought I should just give this plugin a little refresh and move it to the COMA blog from where it originally was, on the Widgeo.us blog. I am no longer working at Widgeo.us and since this was initially a little pet project of mine anyway, I should just house it somewhere close.

Installing the Let It Snow! is easy and simple. Just download the zip file, extract and upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory. Next, activate it via the Plugins menu in your WordPress dashboard. In this new version, you can customize the snowfall via the Let It Snow! settings page.

Let It Snow! settings page

Options include choosing whether the snow should stick to the bottom of the window or should the snow follow mouse movement. You can adjust the settings according to your own preference. Just enter a value/pick an option and click on Save Changes.

So there you go! Now you guys know how I made the falling snow effect here on JaypeeOnline. Now you can also have it on your WordPress-powered blog and install it now or for next Christmas. Btw, this plugin works best if your blog has a dark background or else, the snow would be invisible or hard to see on a light background. Thanks to Aen Tan, we can always have a white Christmas on our blogs every year!

Download the Let It Snow WordPress plugin

Copyright © 2010 JaypeeOnline.net. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me so I can take legal action immediately.

A couple years back, there were two instances where I warned Joomla users and WordPress users about their theme sources or where they downloaded their themes from. This was because some sites who redistribute free WordPress themes are hijacking and repackaging these themes and inserting malicious codes into the functions.php or footer.php files. If undetected, these codes can compromise your blog or make it link to unfriendly sites and can get your blog banned by Google.

Because of these incidents, the guys from builtBackwards saw a need for something to solve this issue and decided to create a plugin that can check and scan theme files for potentially malicious or unwanted code.

TAC stands for Theme Authenticity Checker. Currently, TAC searches the source files of every installed theme for signs of malicious code. If such code is found, TAC displays the path to the theme file, the line number, and a small snippet of the suspect code. As of v1.3 TAC also searches for and displays static links.

Installing the Theme Authenticity Checker plugin is easy as A-B-C. Just download the zip file, extract it, upload the tac folder into your wp-content/plugins folder on your web server and activate the plugin via the WP dashboard. Once its activated, you can access the Theme Authenticity Checker plugin via Appearance > TAC.

Screenshot:

How it works:
The Theme Authenticity Checker plugin is simple and straightforward. Once this plugin is installed, it automatically checks your theme files for potentially malicious or unwanted code. If it detects any types of those codes, it will display the path to the theme file, the line number and a short snippet of the suspicious code. Making it fast and easy for the user to trace and remove those pieces of code.

If you install the Theme Authenticity Checker plugin and it detects some suspicious or unwanted code on your theme files, first thing you need to do is contact the theme author about it and ask if that piece of code is supposed to be there. In most cases, that piece of code wasn’t put there by the author but in some cases like “sponsored” WordPress themes, the code is purposely placed by the theme authors themselves. Sometimes, removing the piece of “code” can cause your theme to crash or stop working so you’re better off changing your theme to a different one.

I’ve installed it here on my blog and it works great. Unfortunately, after I installed it I found out that one of the free WordPress themes that I’ve recently reviewed contains hidden code in its footer.php file. I’m talking about the Milano theme. I’ve disabled the download link from that review and posted an update, suggesting users who’ve downloaded and installed the theme to remove/uninstall it and replace their theme with a different one.

I love the Theme Authenticity Checker plugin and I wish I found out about it sooner. Its a very handy tool when I do my WordPress Theme reviews, because I can check the theme first before I do my review and make sure that the theme I’m sharing is safe for my readers and its users. This type of plugin is not only useful for blog authors who use WordPress but also for people who deal with a lot of WordPress themes and build WordPress blogs for their clients.

A word of warning, always make sure that you only download WordPress themes from reliable sources or only direct from the theme author’s site. If you really want to try out a new WordPress theme from a new or unreliable source, then you can use the Theme Authenticity Checker plugin to check the theme.

I strongly recommend the Theme Authenticity Checker plugin to anyone who runs a WordPress-powered blog. This is one of those must-have plugins for any WordPress blog.

Have you experienced downloading and installing a WordPress theme with suspicious code in it? Anyone else using or have tried the Theme Authenticity Checker plugin? What other features would like to see added to it? Please share your thoughts.

Copyright © 2010 JaypeeOnline.net. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me so I can take legal action immediately.

Some of the most popular posts here on JaypeeOnline are the ones that were part of the Pimp My WP Dashboard series. I’m sure those of you who have been long time readers are familiar with these posts. In that series, I’ve featured and reviewed four different WordPress admin themes – WP Tiger Admin, Spot Milk, Nice Admin and the WordTunes Terminal.

When WordPress 2.5 was released, all these admin themes became obsolete because of the changes done to the WordPress dashboard design and layout. Fortunately for me and those who use admin themes, a new compatible theme was released by Dean J Robinson, called the Fluency Admin. Since then, I’ve been using it as my WP dashboard theme.

I’ve been wanting to do a review of this awesome theme/plugin for a long time now but somehow, I’ve always put it on hold. A few days back, I decided to sit down and start writing the review. Then a couple days later, I found out that Dean released a newer version of the Fluency Admin and that motivated me to finish this review.

Here are the new features found in Fluency Admin 2.1:

• Fluency Admin Options page
• Disable/Enable Fluency style on login page
• Use custom logo on login page
• Classic/Blue color scheme
• Collapsible menu
• Better hover menu

Screenshots:

Standard Menu

Minimized Menu

New Hover Menu (items are now split into 2 columns)

New Classic/Blue color scheme

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• All menus have to be expanded before activating the Fluency Admin theme.
• Does not support Internet Explorer 6
• Color scheme depends on the scheme selected on your user profile

*To change between the grey or blue color scheme, go to Users > Authors & Users. Click Edit on your profile and look for it under Admin Color Scheme options.

The Fluency Admin theme is a neat plugin. It is not something that you really need to have or install on your WordPress blog, but if you like a better looking dashboard and want to have easier and quicker access to sub-menus, then you should give it a try. Fluency Admin is now hosted in the WordPress plugins directory which means that you can use WordPress’ built-in plugin installer and auto-update feature whenever a new version is released.

I’ve been using the grey-based theme for a long time so for a change, I’ve switched to the Classic/Blue scheme. I really like how the new hover menu splits multiple items into 2 columns, which solves the issue when you have lots of items in the Settings page. I had that problem with the previous version where I couldn’t access some items because they were way up too high or too low and become hidden. I also like that Dean included support for minimizing the menu. I’m glad that Dean is continuing support for this plugin and I hope he doesn’t get tired of it. As far as I know, Fluency Admin is the only admin theme that’s compatible to the latest versions of WordPress.

If you want to switch from the standard menu to the minimized menu or vice versa, just click on the “Hide Menu” icon found at the left side, below the other icons. Btw, the Fluency Admin Options page lets you configure whether you want to enable or disable the Fluency style on the login page and whether you want to use a custom logo on the login page.

Check out or Download the latest version of Fluency Admin theme for WordPress.

Anyone currently using or have tried the Fluency Admin theme? What other admin themes have you tried before? Do you know of any admin themes that work with newer versions of WordPress?

Copyright © 2010 JaypeeOnline.net. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me so I can take legal action immediately.

WordPress.com blogs have a built-in blog stats page but self-hosted WordPress blogs have to rely on third party web analytics like Google Analytics, Mint, Woopra, Reinvigorate, etc. some of which are commercial and some are free. There are also some WordPress plugins that keep track of blog statistics or analytics like the WordPress.com Stats plugin, Blog Stats by W3Counter and Firestats. The other day, I came across another blog statistics/analytics WordPress plugin called Cystats.

Cystats is statistics/analytics plugin created by Michael Weingaertner, that has a lot of features and is integrated in the WordPress dashboard or admin area. Although it hasn’t been updated since October of 2008, it still works on the latest version of WordPress which is 2.8.4. Below is the list of features or statistics that Cystats provide:

• Bounce rate, ignore-by-cookie, ignore-by-ip/post-id/user_agent lists
• hits, visits for day/week/month/year – human or robots
• Top referring pages
• Most read categories and tags
• Most read, most commented posts
• Most read feeds, number of feed visits today
• Internal/external search words
• Operating systems
• Daily, weekly, monthly and yearly statistics
• 404 error requests
• Browsers/clients/tools/…, w/o. version numbers
• Template tags for most read posts, user count,…
• Optional IP-anonymizing
• Multi language support (currently English, German supported).
• Optional tracking of admin area visits

Screenshots:
The Cystats page is divided into several areas. Index, Blog, Clients, Referer, Robots/Tools, Pages, Time and Options.

Index page displays Hits and Visits, Pages and Comments, Referrers and Search Words.

Blog – recently commented posts, most active comment authors, Tags, Categories and Database statistics.

Clients – Browsers, Browser versions, Operating systems and Tools & Scripts.

Referer – Referer today, Referer yesterday, External referer and Search Engine referer.

Robot/Tools – Search Engines, Email/Feed reader, Tools & Scripts and Unknown user agents.

Pages – Most visited blog pages today, Most visited blog pages, Entry pages, 404 error pages and Page types.

Time – Visits per day, Hits per day, Visits per hour, Visits per weekday, Visits per week, Hits per week, Visits per month, Hits per month, Visits per year and Hits per year.

Options brings you to the page found in Settings > Cystats.

My Take:
I’ve installed Cystats here on my blog to check it out and see how it performs. I can say that I like it alot and that it also provides accurate blog statistics. It provides alot of data and metrics like Google Analytics, Woopra, Reinvigorate and Firestats. If you’re looking for a different blog statistics plugin or web analytics service that’s built-in to your WordPress dashboard, then you should definitely give Cystats a try. It’s easy to install and user-friendly, just upload to your wp-content/plugins directory, activate and you’re good to go. It also has an Options page located in Settings > Cystats, where you can configure some of the plugin, database and tracking settings.

The advantage of using a WordPress plugin like Cystats is that you don’t have to login to a different site just to check your blog stats. The disadvantage of using it is that all the data gathered and kept by Cystats makes your WordPress database bigger and this can be a problem if you have limited disk space in your web hosting. As much as I like the Cystats plugin, I don’t plan to keep it because I like to keep my WordPress database as small as I can, which is also the reason why I stopped using the Firestats plugin. But then I might just change my mind.

Learn more or Download the Cystats WordPress plugin.

Anyone else tried the Cystats plugin? If not, what plugin or third party web analytics service are you using to keep track of your blog stats?

Copyright © 2010 JaypeeOnline.net. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me so I can take legal action immediately.

I really like the comment info feature of Firestats and find it very useful that I searched for a plugin that specifically did that job. I wasn’t sure if such a WordPress plugin existed but I kept looking and finally found one. The Comment Info Detector plugin is created to help bloggers know where their readers or commentators come from (country of origin based on IP address), what web browser they’re using – Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and what OS (Operating System) they have installed on their computer.

This is a plugin for WordPress 2.6+ that can help you know where your commenters come from, which type of web browser and OS they used when they left a comment on your blog. It provides two functions that take IP and User Agent as parameters and then return HTML string contains country flag, web browser and OS icons. You can put these icons anywhere you like in each comment.

In fact, this plugin is a combination of two plugins: WordPress Browser Detection Plugin and Easy IP2Country that I have intergrated as a built-in plugin for my premium theme before, see this page for example, but now I decide to separate it as a new plugin with some enhancements and share it for everyone.

Screenshot:

Comment Info Detector displays commentator’s country flag, web browser and OS.

Features:

• Detects and shows commenter’s country flag, web browser and operating system
• Supports many web browsers and operating systems: major desktop browsers, antiquated browsers, blogging software (for trackbacks and pingbacks), text based browsers, various PDAs and cell phones.
• Uses a binary file for IP to country resolution and supports database sources from Webhosting.info – Software77.net
• The returned string can be configured as a template to suite your theme

Comment Info Detector isn’t one of those must-have WordPress plugins but very useful if you want to know more about your readers/commentators and can be handy at times. It
can also help you come up with what to blog about especially if your blog is about technology and other tech related stuff. Like for example, if you see that most of your readers/commentators use Firefox as their web browser, you can blog about a new Firefox addon/extension or a list of useful Firefox addons/extensions, get what I mean? I’m sure there are also other ways that the Comment Info Detector plugin can be useful for you and your blog.

It’s not that hard to install, it just requires you to insert a line of code into your theme’s comment.php file. To make sure that you do it right, don’t forget to read the installation and usage instructions found at the plugin homepage.

Anyone heard, tried or are using the Comment Info Detector WordPress plugin? What do you think of this plugin? If you haven’t tried it yet, would you consider using it on your blog? Please share your thoughts.

For more information, installation and usage instructions, visit the official Comment Info Detector WordPress plugin page. You can also download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Copyright © 2010 JaypeeOnline.net. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me so I can take legal action immediately.

In my last blog update post, I listed the new WordPress plugins that I installed here on JaypeeOnline. I also mentioned that I would do a review of those plugins so you guys would have an idea on how they work and how I use them here.

Today, I’ll be sharing with you the Google Syntax Highlighter WordPress plugin created by Peter Ryan. It integrates the Google Syntax Highlighter by Alex Gorbatchev to any WordPress-powered blog. This is the plugin I use to display codes which you might have noticed in my recent articles like HowTo: Allow Google Reader Access To Hotlink-Protected Images and HowTo: Widgetize a WordPress Theme.

Features:

• 100% client side, no server dependency
• Multiple languages support
• Wide browser support
• Very lightweight

Languages Supported:

• C++ (cpp, c, c++)
• C# (c#, c-sharp, csharp)
• CSS (css)
• Delphi (delphi, pascal)
• Java (java)
• Java Script (js, jscript, javascript)
• PHP (php)
• Python (py, python)
• Ruby (rb, ruby, rails, ror)
• Sql (sql)
• VB (vb, vb.net)
• XML/HTML (xml, html, xhtml, xslt)

Screenshots:

.htaccess file

WordPress theme sidebar

Previously, when I wanted to display a piece of code within my post I would have to copy and paste the code into a text editor, take a screenshot, edit it and insert the image into my post. It was a tedious and very time consuming task.

WordPress has a built-in tag called “code” that lets you display and specify a certain line of text as code. So why am I not using it? The problem with this is that it doesn’t recognize HTML tags and in order for it to work you’ll have to use character entities or extended characters. One alternative is to use the “pre” tag which is the one used by the Google Syntax Highlighter plugin. The “pre” tag like the “code” tag displays the tagged text as monospaced type but the difference between the two is that the “pre” tag exactly reproduces everything inside the “pre” tags.

What makes Google Syntax Highlighter cool is that it displays the code the way advanced text editors do. The parameters are color coded and there are line numbers that makes it easy to find a specific line of code. Aside from that, the Google Syntax Highlighter plugin also gives the user an option to see the code in plain text and to copy the code into the computer’s clipboard. This plugin lets you implement the “pre” tag and display the code in style easily without having to worry about messing with the WordPress stylesheet.

So how do you use the Google Syntax Highlighter plugin? All you need to do is download, install and activate the plugin and make sure you read the Usage Directions. Then you can start using it. Just specify the code snippet in your blog post/page and you’re good to go.

Here’s a sample of how I was able to display the code for screenshot #2 or the code for the WordPress theme sidebar.

<pre name="code" class="php">
<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>',
));
?>
</pre>

Copy the piece of code that you want to display and paste it between the line highlighted in red. Replace the value of “class” to the specific language that the code is written in. In the example, I put php because I needed to display a piece of php code.

The Google Syntax Highlighter WordPress plugin is very easy to install and doesn’t use much resources. Its very useful if you want to display codes within your post.

Check out the Google Syntax Highlighter WordPress plugin.

What do you think of the Google Syntax Highlighter WordPress plugin? Are you already using it or have tried it before on your blog? Do you know of other WordPress plugins that have the same functionality? Please share your thoughts. Thanks for your time!

Copyright © 2010 JaypeeOnline.net. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me so I can take legal action immediately.

If you’ve noticed in this new theme, I also have a custom greet box but I didn’t make it myself, its powered by a WordPress plugin called WP Greet Box, created by Thaya Kareeson of OmniNoggin.

With this plugin, I can have a custom greet box any time and in any theme I use. What makes the WP Greet Box even better than a custom built greet box is that it displays different customized greet boxes to your readers/visitors depending on their referrer URL.

This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. Another example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Features:

• Show a different greeting message to your visitor depending on the referrer URL. You can add/edit/delete/disable these greeting messages as you choose.
• Greeting messages automatically get inserted into the top of your posts upon activation. There is no need to modify theme files.
• Ability to auto-insert greeting message to the top or bottom of the post.
• Greeting messages can be user closeable or not.
• Ability to detect the visitor’s search keywords from major search engines and automatically display related posts under the greeting message.
• Show a default greeting message even if the vistor does not match any of your configured referrer URL.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not have javascript enabled.
• AJAX greeting message in the frontend makes it compatible with caching plugins (such as WP Super Cache) and WPMU.
• AJAX administrative interface that uses nonce verification to discourage hackers.
• Ability to set a timeout to forget a visitor so we do not keep nagging them with greeting messages.
• Ablity to set rules to exclude some referrer URLs from seeing greeting messages. Regular expressions is also supported (but not required!).
• Ultra customizeable greeting message box (with CSS) allowing you to prepend/append HTML around the greeting message box.

Other Greet Boxes:

WP Greet Box not only helps you promote your RSS feed and increase your RSS feed readers but having these targeted suggestions on your blog increases your blog exposure and loyal readership. Aside from promoting your RSS feed, encouraging social network bookmarking and article submission, WP Greet Box also displays related posts to the current post which leads to more pageviews and helps reduce bounce rate. From the WP Greet Box settings, you can specify how many related posts to display and how many words the post excerpt displays.

WP Greet Box is very easy to install, it doesn’t require any special configuration. Just upload it to your wp-content/plugins folder, install and activate. In case you prefer a different greeting message than the preset ones, you can go to Settings > WP Greet Box and change it. There’s one thing I noticed though, sometimes the greet box takes a while to load that the whole page has already finished loading and it would take 2-3 seconds before the greet box to show up. I hope the plugin author takes a look at this and makes some changes.

What are you waiting for, give WP Greet Box a try and increase your blog’s RSS subscribers, pageviews and exposure.

Have you tried or are currently using WP Greet Box? What has been your experience with it so far? What do you like/dislike about it? Has it helped you increase your blog’s RSS subscribers, visitor loyalty or pageviews? What other features would you like to see added to WP Greet Box?

[via Weblog Tools Collection]

Copyright © 2010 JaypeeOnline.net. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me so I can take legal action immediately.

DISCLAIMER: The following is not a paid review and completely my own honest opinion regarding the product.

Some of you might remember WP Member as one of the sponsors of my recent Christmas Giveaway and provided the licenses for the WP Member WordPress plugin as prizes. A couple months before the Christmas Giveaway, Dave of WP Member contacted me and asked me to do a review of WP-Member WordPress Plugin.

What exactly is WP-Member?

WP-Member is an advanced membership, subscription & content management plugin for wordpress. It is highly configurable, but yet so easy to use that you will never have to know any code. Unlike other membership plugins that lock down your entire site, wp-Member provides you with a multi layered membership system within your blog. However, WP-Member also provides you with the option to lock down your site and only allow access to members.

Features:

• Hide content from unregistered members
• Protect entire posts, pages & categories
• Setup unlimited user access levels
• Setup unlimited subscriptions for each user access level
• Select which posts, pages & categories can be seen by each user access level
• All user subscriptions are automatically managed & renewed via Paypal IPN
• Charge users a recurring subscription or one off payment for access

Screenshots:
General Settings

Simple Newsletter

Messages

Registration Customization

Prices
1 Site License: €19.99 per year (Approx: £15.75 / $31.32)
5 Site License: €32.99 per year (Approx: £25.99 / $51.70)
10 Site License: €49.99 per year (Approx: £39.40 / $78.34)

My Take:
First of all, WP Member is not for everyone. This premium WordPress plugin was designed basically for blogs that have registered members or subscribers like forums, blogs that provide premium content on a subscription basis or any blog that wishes to keep some of its content private to the public and only available for registered users or members.

The WP Member section in the WordPress dashboard is divided into 7 sections. First is the Members section which shows the list of registered users or members and their account details. Next is the Simple Newsletter which lets the administrator/blog owner send newsletters or any message to subscribers. In General Settings, the administrator can specify the main email address, mailer, SMTP server, username and password. In this section, the blog can also be configured to be available to registered users or to the public. Next section is the Subscription Settings where the membership levels can be created and customized. The Messages section is where the welcome message and terms & conditions are generated. Gateways is where the PayPal options are configured. The last section, Registration Customization is where the registration fields are created, edited and organized.

Although WP Member is an advance membership, subscription & content management plugin, it doesn’t require HTML, CSS or PHP coding skills/knowledge. With WP Member you can hide/protect posts, pages and categories and make them available only to your members or registered users. If you have several levels of membership or subscription, you can also select which level of membership can view certain content. With the use of a simple code, you can even hide portions of a post and make it as a teaser for unregistered users. WP-Member was created to work closely with WordPress code to ensure maximum compatibility with other WordPress plugins that the blog may use.

Overall, WP Member is a very good membership,subscription and content management plugin. The user interface is user friendly and straight forward, its also integrated into the WordPress dashboard so WordPress users won’t have much of an issue with it. However, there’s one thing that can be an issue for most users and that is the installation. Installing WP Member is a little bit complicated because it requires IonCube, a PHP extension used to decode encrypted PHP files. Its not that difficult to install but most users aren’t familiar with it and I’m not sure if all hosting providers support it. So make sure to check with your hosting provider first before purchasing WP Member. You can also ask your hosting provider if IonCube is available in your hosting package or ask them to install it for you.

If you decide to use/purchase WP Member, the people from Smart Media Pro (company behind WP Member) will be more than willing to help you with the installation or any issues you might have with setting up and configuration of the WP Member plugin.

To learn more about WP Member Plugin, you can visit the WP Member website or their interactive FAQ page.

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