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Steps To Add Bulk Images To Easing Slider Word Press Plugin

By Samkit Shah

Video Summary

The video displays a tutorial from Brett Bumeter on how to add bulk images to the easing slider WordPress plugin.

Brett walks through a step-by-step approach to achieve this –

  • Remove existing images by selecting source links and deleting them and then press save
  • Click Upload Image button, and browse to the folder that holds the images you want to upload
  • Once all the files are uploaded 100%, update the image settings by inserting title of the image as an alternative text
  • Capture each file name and paste it onto a notepad as a precautionary measure
  • Save all changes
  • Edit the Image Path as per your requirement

Brett also goes through troubleshooting an error that he made while saving the URL incorrectly. Ensure the URL is correct or the images would not display as expected.

Tips To Reduce CPU Resource Issues on a VPS

By Samkit Shah

 

Video Summary

This video from Brett Bumeter addresses Warren Whitlock’s concern about having his server going over limits in terms of usage and discusses a solution to solve that. Brett mentions he had the same experience with Hostgator and goes on to describe how he overcame this issue.

Brett indicates that turning off mail services on the server will really bring that usage down significantly and save users a lot of trouble of having to end up getting their CPU resources occupied in great amounts. He describes what happens in the online world –

  • Users get hit by spammers who either spoof off their email addresses or create mock up email addresses from the user’s domain.
  • The spammers then go on to mass email people with spam content.
  • The spam checker gets hit with this spam emails and debates whether this is a real account or not.
  • And every time this happens, it pings back to the user’s server thus creating a spike in traffic and occupying resources on the server.

So in order to avoid these issues, Brett suggests shutting down email services on your host service provider. Instead, one should use Google to run mail on your account and that shall save a lot of agony and pain of having to free up resources on the server, whether or not you have an active email account.

Gravity Forms – Over 40 Plugins and Add-ons to Put Gravity Forms on Steroids

By Brett Bumeter

In our weekly WordPress Meetup we dove into Gravity Forms.

Below you will find all the plugins referenced along with links to those plugins.

They all require Gravity Forms to work. They do not work independent of Gravity Forms.

You can review Gravity Forms Pricing Plans from Rocket Genius here.

Gravity Forms Basic Add Ons – Comes with $99 Business Version

  • AWeber Add-On v1.4 – Easily integrate your online forms with your AWeber mailing lists and start gathering more email marketing leads.
  • Campaign Monitor Add -On v2.1 – Easily integrate your online forms with your Campaign Monitor mailing lists and start gathering more email marketing leads.
  • MailChimp Add-On v2.1 - Our MailChimp Add-On makes integrating your online forms with your MailChimp mailing lists quick, easy and pain free.
  • Picatcha Add-On v1.2 – Fight spam with the image-based CAPTCHA service Picatcha which makes it easy for humans to read but harder for bots to crack.

Gravity Forms Advanced Add-Ons – comes with Developer $199 license

  • Authorize.Net Add-On v1.3 – Create order forms and process credit card payments with Authorize.Net and Gravity Forms.
  • FreshBooks Add-On v1.4 – Integrate your online forms with your FreshBooks account to quickly create clients, invoices and estimates on the fly.
  • PayPal Payments Standard Add-On v1.7 – Put Gravity Forms to work processing your Order Forms and collecting payments with PayPal Payments Standard.
  • PayPal Pro Add-On v1.0 – Integrate Gravity Forms with PayPal Pro for collecting online payments with Gravity Forms. IMPORTANT NOTE: This Add-On is for PayPal’s legacy PayPal Pro API and is not compatible with PayPal’s new PayPal Payments Pro accounts.
  • Polls Add-On v1.2 – The Gravity Forms Polls Add-On allows you to quickly and easily deploy Polls on your web site using the power of Gravity Forms.
  • Quiz Add-On v1.0 Beta 2 – The Gravity Forms QuizAdd-On allows you to quickly create Quizzes on any form using Gravity Forms. This is a beta test release and as such, install at your own risk.
  • Signature Add-On v1.3 – Quickly and easily integrate signature capabilities into your forms.
  • Twilio SMS Add-On v1.0 – Integrate Gravity Forms with Twilio to enable SMS notification of form submissions.
  • User Registration Add-On v1.5 – Integrate Gravity Forms with your WordPress site to easily register new users.

Plugins – Free to Download from WordPress Plugins Directory, Requires Gravity Forms basic license or higher

Payment Processors

  • Gravity Forms + Stripe – Easy and secure credit card payments on your WordPress site with Stripe and Gravity Forms!
  • Gravity Forms Paystation (3 Party Hosted)
  • Gravity Forms DPS PxPay – Integrate Gravity Forms with the DPS Payment Express PxPay credit card payment gateway
  • Gravity Forms eWAY – Add a credit card payment gateway for eWAY to the Gravity Forms plugin
  • Authorize.Net Add-On v1.3 –
    Create order forms and process credit card payments with Authorize.Net and Gravity Forms.
  • PayPal Payments Standard Add-On v1.7 –
    Put Gravity Forms to work processing your Order Forms and collecting payments with PayPal Payments Standard.
  • PayPal Pro Add-On v1.0 – Integrate Gravity Forms with PayPal Pro for collecting online payments with Gravity Forms. IMPORTANT NOTE: This Add-On is for PayPal’s legacy PayPal Pro API and is not compatible with PayPal’s new PayPal Payments Pro accounts.
  • Gravity Forms Fat Zebra Add-On – Adds functionality to Gravity Forms to support online payments within your forms via Fat Zebra, an Australian Internet Payment Gateway.

CRM and Marketing Plugins

  • Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-on – Integrate the remarkable Gravity Forms plugin with Salesforce.
  • Gravity Forms HubSpot Add-on – Gravity Forms HubSpot Add-On uses the HubSpot Lead API to allow you to send your Gravity Forms based landing pages to send lead information to HubSpot
  • Gravity Forms ExactTarget Add-on – Integrate the remarkable Gravity Forms plugin with ExactTarget.
  • Gravity Forms Highrise Add-on – Gravity Forms is the best form plugin for WordPress. Highrise is the best web-based CRM. http://highrisehq.com/
  • Campaign Monitor Add-On v2.1 –
    Easily integrate your online forms with your Campaign Monitor mailing lists and start gathering more email marketing leads.
  • Infusionsoft Gravity Forms Add-on – Easily add contacts into Infusionsoft when users submit a Gravity Forms form. Map your Gravity Forms form fields to Infusionsoft data, and have contacts automatically updated if the contact already exists.
  • Gravity Forms iContact Add-on – Integrate your Gravity Forms forms so that when users submit a form entry, the entries get added to iContact. Link any field type with iContact, including custom fields.
  • ProGo Gravity Forms To Office AutoPilot Contact Builder – This plugin is an add-on for the Gravity Forms plugin (http://www.gravityforms.com/). It give you the ability to map a gravity form to your Office AutoPilot (http://officeautopilot.com/) account. This plugin will create a new contact record if the email address in the gravity form submission is unique. If the contact exists the record is updated.
  • Sugar Events Calendar – Gravity Forms Add-On – Sugar Event Calendar ( http://pippinsplugins.com/sugar-event-calendar ) is a a simple, elegant Event Calendar plugin for WordPress that keeps event management incredibly simply. This is an add-on plugin for Sugar Event Calendar that lets you easily display a Gravity Forms form on the event details page.
  • Gravity Forms Convio Add-on

Emailers Services that connect via Gravity Forms

  • Gravity Forms Mad Mimi Add-on – Integrate the Gravity Forms contact form plugin with Mad Mimi.
  • AWeber Add-On v1.4 –
    Easily integrate your online forms with your AWeber mailing lists and start gathering more email marketing leads.
  • MailChimp Add-On v2.1 –
    Our MailChimp Add-On makes integrating your online forms with your MailChimp mailing lists quick, easy and pain free.
  • Gravity Forms Constant Contact Add-on – Add contacts to your Constant Contact mailing list when they submit a Gravity Forms form.
  • Gravity Forms YMLP Add-on – Integrate the Gravity Forms contact form plugin with YMLP (YourMailingListProvider), a newsletter mailing list solution.

Put Gravity Forms on Steroids

  • Gravity Forms Subscriptions Add-On – Adds two buttons to the Gravity Forms form editor that add a drop-down menu or radio button selection with Paypal payment subscription options.
  • Gravity Forms Directory - Add directory capabilities and other functionality to the great Gravity Forms plugin.
  • Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types - Easily map your forms that create posts to a custom post type. Also map dropdown select, radio buttons list and checkboxes lists to a custom taxonomy.
  • infoGeniuz Advanced Form Analytics for Gravity Forms - Add number of visits & pageviews, browser & geolocation data to all your Gravity Forms email notifications & entries table.
  • Gravity Forms Mass Import - Allows for mass import of gravity forms entries from a CSV file. This plugin was created for users who wish to use Gravity Forms as an online database/data entry option and wish to import data from a previous system.
  • Aviary Image Editor Add-on For Gravity Forms – Allow your users to upload and edit photos before submitting them in your Gravity Forms.
  • Gravity Forms Data Persistence Add-On – a) Your site uses multipage Gravity Forms. b) Your user logs in to the site and starts filling up a 5-step form. c) During the 3rd step, the user leaves without completely finishing the form. d) Some days later, the user comes back and logs in to see that his inputs are all gone!http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gravity-forms-data-persistence-add-on/
  • Google Analytics Tracking For Forms – This plugin grabs that data and allows you to add it to a form in your site using hidden fields. The information includes:
    • Source: where the visitor was referred from (search engine, email list, CPC ad, banner ad etc),
    • Search term – what they actually typed into the search engine
    • Type: Whether the visitor is considered Paid or Organic
    • Campaign: you can identify specific campaigns and referring URL (use the Google URL builder)
  • WordPress Advanced Ticket System – Wats is a ticket system. Wats stands for WordPress Advanced Ticket System.
  • WP Email Template – WP Email Template does just 2 things – beautifully. Applies a responsive, customizable, optimized html email template to every email sent from your WordPress site including plugin generated emails. Easy to use visual editor allows you to customize the style and header, footer content of your WP Email Template to match your site.
  • Contact Form 7 Gravity Forms Importer – Convert Contact Form 7 forms into Gravity Forms forms.
  • Gravity Forms Duplicate Prevention – The goal is to prevent Gravity Forms from creating multiple entries when an impatient user double-, triple, or full-on secret-combo-move-clicks his/her mouse when submitting a form. No modifications to your forms is necessary, it just works.

Anti-Spam

  • PixCaptcha Image Captcha for Gravity Forms -
    This plugin adds the ease of use and security of Picatcha’s Pix-Captcha to your Gravity Forms in WordPress.
  • Picatcha Add-On v1.2 – Fight spam with the image-based CAPTCHA service Picatcha which makes it easy for humans to read but harder for bots to crack.

SMS

  • Gravity Forms SMS Add-on -
    This plugin enables users to receive text messages (SMS) via email each time a Gravity Form is submitted.
  • Gravity Forms – Clockwork SMS – Works with the Gravity Forms plugin to send SMS notifications when somebody submits your contact form, using the Clockwork API.
  • Twilio SMS Add-On v1.0 –
    Integrate Gravity Forms with Twilio to enable SMS notification of form submissions.

Cloud Storage

Styling Forms



How to Delete a Blog from WordPress.com Permanently

By Brett Bumeter

Video Tutorial Deleting a Blog from WordPress.com

How to Delete a Site from WordPress.com Video Transcripts

Here’s how to permanently delete a blog on WordPress.com.

Go to Tools> Choose Delete Site

The drop down menu provides several options.

These options are very useful in some situations, situations that might include the reason why, you wish to delete your site.

The options are:

  • -changing your site’s address
  • -transfering ownership of a site to another wordpress.com user
  • -Moving the site to another host
  • -Emptying the site of all content
  • -Free up the site address so someone else can use that address

and of course

  • -Permanently deleting my site’s address and ALL its content.

In this case, I will choose the last option deleting everything!

Choosing this option results in a 3 step verification process

First you check the box to confirm
Second you state why you want to delete the site, in my case I am deleting a test site.  Click the button to proceed and that triggers a verification email.

Third, the verification email is sent to the email address for the user that owns the WordPress.com site.
The owner must open the email, and click on the enclosed link to confirm the deletion. (Don’t click if you do not want to confirm!)

Tip!  Give WordPress.com a minute or two to delete your site!

It might take a minute or two after clicking that link. After that if you refresh your
list of sites, or the site itself you will see that it is gone, deleted forever.

Advantages of Premium WordPress Themes over Free Themes

By Brett Bumeter

Video Summary

The video showcases Brett Bumeter address Warren Whitlock’s query about why WordPress Premium Themes are more preferable over Free Themes. Brett provides many advantages of using a paid premium theme while creating your website or blog, rather than opting for one of the hundreds of free theme designs available online.

Brett mentions he started off using free themes himself some years back, but then moved on to using the paid theme designs due to some major advantages which standout such as –

  • A paid premium theme has a framework behind it which one can use to change the skin and yet expect no surprises later on
  • One most important advantage to using a premium theme goes along the fact that these designs have been developed by paid designers. So you can expect them to be updated too whenever WordPress updates.
  • As WordPress shall evolve and continue to grow, these paid themes shall be tuned and updated to reflect that too, as compared to free themes where chances of getting an update are slimmer.
  • Free themes face a major update issue, due to the possibility of it being developed by multiple people, spread across different continents with language barriers, and who patched pieces of code together to create the theme.

Brett goes on to give the analogy of tagging the WordPress as a paper doll, whereas the theme is the clothing that you can choose to change the look, style and feel of the site. Themes could be swapped easily. With free themes, i.e. free doll clothing, one is not sure whether it shall fit your content or your version of WordPress. Add to it, there are plugins and applications which might not integrate correctly and function properly with a free theme. Premium themes take care of these issues since people are being paid to develop and maintain them.

How Can Video FAQ’s put your site on steroids?

By Brett Bumeter

Show Summary

FAQs are referred to as frequently asked questions. These are questions that you usually see on websites. The FAQs section will help you answer simple inquiries about the website or other things. You also have the ability to expand the answers to these questions to know more and for a deeper understanding.

Using videos in FAQ sections will help the user/viewer to better understand the answer to their inquiries. These allow the user to engage more in this section for the user/viewer will not only see text but also graphs, images and audio as well.

Embedding it in the FAQ section will make it easy for your user/viewer for they will just hit the “play” button. Video embedded has a title of its own; it may come from youtube.com, you can see related videos and will help you strengthen the page. Searching in Google and Google zero will be easy as 1-2-3 and will surely answer the question that you are looking for.

How to get more Twitter Followers by Being Follow Worthy

By Brett Bumeter

Show Summary

Twitter.com is social media website that allows users to follow and be followed. The amount of followers does not really matter what matters most is to be “follow worthy” and know how to listen. The effectiveness to be followed is (1) to listen and (2) love.

Love in a sense that you love your fellow human beings like your friend and treating them with respect.

Listening is trying to pay attention and understand their needs and situation. Being a better listener makes you provide what people are looking for like on what to buy, like, know and trust. Making your post interesting makes it interesting. It’s not about liking and following but it’s about caring for somebody.

To be follow-worthy means to make your post interesting and to like other people. Helping and caring for other people will surely give a huge amount of followers.

Responding and engaging with other people is easy with Twitter for it offers tools that filters and create human connection like the category geographical location and more.

Building connection, caring and making your post interesting, unique and extraordinary will sure make your post “follow-worthy”.

How to consolidate multiple websites in one WordPress CMS – Theory

By Brett Bumeter

Video Summary

In this video, Brett Bumeter presents a brief theoretical outline in response to Warren Whitlock’s query about how to consolidate multiple websites and blogs into a single word press website.

Brett mentions that people like to start and create their presence online through new websites and blogs as and when they come across new ideas and thoughts. Over a period of time some of these ideas shape up nicely to take form of a well maintained online website whereas some of these whims might just phase away.

People sometimes find it difficult to maintain and keep the websites or their blogs going in spite of not being able to contribute to it. But they also do not want to lose some of the interesting, valuable, informative and legacy articles, blog posts, discussion forums and much more that has already been posted on their website or blogs. So they go ahead and want to close it down.

But Brett further goes on to explain, not in details, but in general, that instead of shutting the entity down completely, one always has an option to consolidate their different ventures like – a blog, a website, maybe a tumblr site and much more – bring them all together under a common roof, and thus have the ease of maintaining and most importantly preserving its contents.

Some of the basic consolidation steps he describes are –

  • Start by importing each of the entity into word press.
  • Once you bring the file in, set it up under its own defined category.
  • One can name the categories relevant to the old website or blog names

This way, one can easily maintain and salvage the evergreen content from their non-functional websites and blogs under a common umbrella.

WordPress Tips for Book Authors on Newbie Writer’s Podcast

By Brett Bumeter

Newbie Writers Podcast Interview Brett Bumeter

The Newbies Writers Podcast hosts Catherine Bramkamp (@cbramkamp) and Damien Boath (@newbiewriters )will be interviewing me interviewed me this evening on their show.  We talked  about some WordPress Tips for Authors.  That is the types of authors that write books as opposed to blogs or news stories or technical materials or greeting cards or haikus on twitter.

Question what is the English version of Haiku in the plural form?

I met Catherine myself at the Podcast Awards during New Media Expo in Las Vegas in January 2013.  The Newbie Writers Podcast was nominated for an award (competing against Grammar Girl I believe).  I’ve been a subscriber and listener of their podcast ever since.  I typically listen to it and Twit and Twit’s This Week in Ipad show while I’m getting some exercise riding my bike around the neighborhood.  It’s a very entertaining show and the tips have definitely helped me.

Update

After the show, I had a bit of an epiphany and figured out how my own murder mystery fiction book (Peter3d Out) could be tied together.  It’s something I’ve been a little stuck on for months, but now see how ‘the murder was committed” and think I see a path forward to help the detective solve said mystery.  We talk a bit about my book and my background in the early part of the show and get into some WordPress tips and more towards the latter half of the show.

Checkout the show here, it was the March 23, 2013 episode 76: WordPress it with Brett Bumeter.

 

Great Articles for Book Authors using WordPress

Before I get into my unique tips, I do want to say that WPMU has some amazingly detailed tips and plugins and setup ideas for writers of books.  Frankly, I wish I had found these myself two years ago, but didn’t find them until I was prepping for this interview.

  1. How to Organize an Online Book in WordPress (Novel or Non-Fiction)
  2. Essential WordPress Plugins for Book Authors Building a Platform

Some Essential WordPress Plugins, tools and Services for a Book Author’s Blog

WordPress Plugins for Book Authors on WordPress

  1. Powerpress
  2. Inbound Writer - Free version is probably enough although heavy writers or bloggers may benefit from the premium version
  3. Inline Editor – This functionality might be coming to standard WordPress soon.  This plugin has not been updated in years and may be a little buggy so exercise with caution.
  4. Genesis Single Post Navigation - This is just for people running a theme from StudioPress on the Genesis Framework (highly recommend).  You may also need this little code added in your functions.php file depending on how you structure your writing, chapters, sections etc in WordPress
    1. /** * Genesis Single Post Navigation: Reverse link direction */ define( ‘GSPN_REVERSE_LINK_DIRECTION’, TRUE );
  5. Facebook Comments for WordPress - if possible it’s always better to have your visitors comment and talk with you and about your book in front of their friends!
  6. After the Deadline (only available now in the Jetpack Plugin)
  7. Don’t miss the Really Simple Series plugin and the Post Series Plugin both mentioned in the WPMU.org articles above!

Hosting for Book Authors running WordPress

I’m recommending something called ‘Managed Hosting’ which is also known as premium WordPress hosting.  Basically, they take care of optimizing your WordPress installation, protecting it, backing it up, keeping plugins up to date and more.

Think of it as paying a little extra so that you never have to worry about your website.  You just want to write and not become a server administrator right?

Well these services can help!

 

On a book writing note, also check out Damien and Catherine’s sites at

That last link includes a page where Catherine provides a Start Your Book Kit For Newbie Writers Kit for free!

(click the image to go check it out or send her an email direct)

Catharine Bramkamp YourBookStartsHere.com - Start Your Book Kit For Newbie Writers

 

Conference Networking Do’s and Don’ts

By Brett Bumeter

This video encompasses some of the tips, suggestions, the dos and don’ts to consider when you think about networking with people or companies at conference events and meets.

Brett Bumeter and Warren Whitlock share their experiences and approaches about how one should go about the business of interacting with people, making connections and most importantly adding value to conversations while networking at events.

Brett’s Inputs:

-          Brett recommends one to go from table to table, learn about the company, interact with the person behind the table, share your bios and profiles and identify if there are any business opportunities, or connections worth making.

-          He talks about the idea of speed dating that he experienced and its advantages versus the disadvantages.

-          He shares his experiences about the NMX event that he attended where online software was used to collect info on attendees and the info on companies, which in turn helped people do their homework and find out beforehand about potential interesting companies or attendees that they would like to meet.

-          But he also mentions that this new school method might have been responsible for a low attendance since the software might have been too technical for people to understand and adapt to it.

-          As per him, it’s better off going the old school way of networking.

Warren’s Inputs:

-          Warren suggests preparing for the events by learning and researching about the companies that are of interest.

-          He mentions about going to as many events as you can to broaden your horizon.

-          He recommends going prepared, finding out about speakers who you want to connect with and that helps you shape your conversation effectively.

-          Warren also strongly suggests paying a second visit since that gives a strong impression of your interest in the company or the speaker.

-          One should find out about the attendees, read up on them find reasons to talk to them by adding value to your conversation.

Overall both discuss the nuances of old school versus the new school method of interaction and networking sharing practical experiences as examples.