One of the main new features will be available in the new wordpress version is the merging with Wordpress Multi user platform, it will be called Wordpress Multi Sites or Network. here are some steps you need to take in order to enable the network feature.

1. first you need to add this line to your wp-config.php file:

define(’WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

after that you will see a new option under Tools, it will be called Network.

Now you need to follow the regular Wordpress Mu steps and then press the install button.

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Buddypress is gaining more and more popularity each day, latest versions are more friendly and there are much less bugs in it. here’s a list of very useful and helpful buddypress plugins:

Buddypress-Ajax-Chat

This plugin will extend Buddypress to have an Ajax Chat client that works with Buddypress groups,
as well as all Wordpress users. As of version 1.1.8 Buddypress Ajax Chat works with both
Wordpress MU and Wordpress Single User.
URL

BuddyPress Classifieds

A Classifieds ad components that’s fully integrated into BuddyPress.

Features :

Write your ad directly from the frontend, WYSIWYG
Allow/disallow moderation
Browse by category, tags, …
Breadcrumbs
Add to favorites (”follow)
Upload pictures with your classified
Link classifieds to groups
Define a map (Google map) to locate your classified (powered by BuddyPress Maps)
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Sometimes you find yourself in need for maps in your blog. here’s a list of the top wordpress and google maps plugins:

Google Maps for WordPress

This plugin allows you to easily insert Google Maps into your blog, making use of the new shortCode system in WordPress 2.5. The maps can be configured to offer directions to or from the location, show or hide the zoom/pan controls, show/hide map type (street view, satellite, etc), activate zoom using mouse wheel, and more. PHP5 Required.

URL

XML Google Maps

This plugin allows you to easily insert Google Map or Google Earth Plugin Maps into your blog. You just have to add a link to your self defined Map from My Google Maps, Picasa Webalbum Picture Map, any geoRSS Feed (like Flickr), your uploaded Google Earth file (kmz, kml) or any other dynamic or static Google Earth file (umapper.com, flickr.com, etc.)

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On the last two months we’ve been working on a huge wordpress website, soon i will be able to share it with you, it’s an old website, written in asp.net and one of the main targets was to transfer the CMS to wordpress while saving all the features from the old website. the main features were classifieds area, articles, not a complex but different registration from the one we familiar with in wordpress.

After two months I  can honestly say, each problem had a plugin to solve it. here is a list of the main plugins i used so far:

my first choice to handle the classifieds area on the website was to use Another Wordpress Classifieds Plugin, it turned out to be an excellent choice, very easy to manage and lots of features.

I had to add some extra fields to the user registration and some of the authors, i did it using the awesome plugin Cimy User Extra Fields, the option “can only be modified by admin” is very important if you want to add some hidden fields to the user. and to solve the captcha fields which Cimy User extra fields doesn’t have i used WP-reCAPTCHA.

I had to allow the users to login with their email and not UserName as wordpress always ask, for this i found Email-Login it lets the users login with username and email too. and just to make all the login / register pages more pleasant and well designed i used InsiteLogin.

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Here are some great links and news from the wordpressphera this week.

a very clever way to use widgets for text areas or text blocks in wordpress, let’s say you want to display some text in your sidebar, footer or CMS website homepage, you can do it like this: look-ma-editable-text-regions. until i read it I used to open category called, let’s say, “textareas” and to add posts to that category. and then pell the data with a single post plugin, like this one, Get A Post plugin.

A new movie called “phobidilia” is going to show on the toronto international film festival, as many films does, they promote themselves with a trailer and downloads website, this one used wordpress to do that. very nice work.

If we talk about speed, uptime and other issues on the minds of wordpress bloggers, here are some tips and plugins to keep your website optimized all the time.

Caching

wp-cache – WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

wp-super-cache – This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

W3 Total Cache – W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by caching frequent operations, reducing the weight of various theme files and providing transparent content delivery network integration. The goal is to improve the user experience for the readers of your blog without having to change WordPress, your theme, your plugins or how you produce your content. When fully utilized, your blog will be able to sustain extremely high traffic spikes without requiring hardware upgrades or removing features or functionality from your theme.

Performance

HyperDB – HyperDB is a very advanced database class that replaces WP’s built-in DB functions.

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http://jobs.wordpress.net/ – The official Wordpress jobs website, Post or browse jobs requiring experience with WordPress development.

http://jobs.wpfeed.com – Our newest service for developers, designers, bloggers or any other people looking for wordpress jobs, for freelancers and full time jobs also. come find the one.

http://www.wordpressfreelance.com/ – Wordpress Freelance is a “ONE STOP” full service site where a “Webmaster” can post a project for FREE and have one of our highly skilled “Freelancer’s” competitively bid on your projects.

http://www.indeed.com/q-Wordpress-jobs.html – A wordpress search query in the popular job board Indeed.

Every blogger and developers should know that immediately after installing wordpress activating some SEO plugins is necessary.

Wordpress by itself already doing 50% of the SEO work a website should have or do, most of the themes are very well coded, the system is very popular for its tags and categories and google tend to really like it.  the rest is on you.  Here’s a list of the top SEO plugins for Wordpress:

SEO Slugs

The SEO Slugs Wordpress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

For example, when you publish a post with a title like this:

“What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings”,

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Display status in your blog became very useful when you write often and want to update your readers what you do and where you are.

here are some great Status Bar plugins to add to your blog:

mystatus

This one is the easiest one to use, simply lets you add a status, divided to two parts, title (bold) and a text. great!!!

This plugin allows you to create a number of fields specifying your current status and easily insert them into your templates.

URL | DOWNLOAD

wp_twptter

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From time to time you need to change some things from the Wordpress default. One of the easiest hacks to do is creating double posts columns.

all you need is a bit PHP and some Css tweaking, here is the example:

CSS

.row {clear:both;}
.col1 {width:300px;float:left;padding:10px;}
.col2 {width:300px;float:right;padding:10px;}

* change the width of the columns according to what you need.

in your index.php (in the theme folder) look for the posts loop and before that paste this:

<?php $col = 1; ?>

after the loop begins add this:

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