TurboTax released a plugin to put a income-tax refund calculator in any post/page: TaxCaster.

Property Tax Calculator helps visitors figure out what their property tax should be and what percentage goes to what.

First, it’s unlikely that you’re going to loose your files as part of the WordPress upgrade. They’re just being extra cautious. You can do a full backup through the hosting admin area (usually cPanel), or just login with an FTP client and download all your files. But if you use a reliable hosting company who backs up files on a regular basis, that’s not so much of a worry. However, it is possible that your database (where all the text, organization, etc. of your site is stored) could be damaged. An even more likely possibility is that the newest version of WordPress may not work with an older plugin you have, that has not been updated by it’s author. If it provides some functionality that’s vital to your site/blog, having a backup of the database, makes it much easier to roll everything back to a previous version of WordPress.

So I looked for a quick solution that would allow me to download the database of a site. I found a great plugin called WP-DB-Backup, which does exactly that. It allows you to quickly download a copy of the database, right from the WordPress admin. It also allows you to schedule regular backups that can then be emailed to you. It’s very easy to use: just go to Tools>Backup, check or uncheck a few things you may or may not want backed up, and click the “Backup now!” button. After a few seconds (usually), it will download the database backup to your computer. Then you can safely go to Dashboard>Updates and update WordPress.

Of course in my search, and testing, I also found some other great alternatives, if you’re looking for more database functionality, or a full site backup:

• WP-DBManager: an extensive plugin that lets you do a lot of common things you would normally do from phpMyAdmin, but right in the WordPress admin. It will let you optimize, repair, backup, restore, and delete backups, of the database. Plus  drop/empty tables and run selected queries. It also does backup scheduling.
• XCloner – Backup and Restore: a full-featured backup plugin. It allows you to backup and restore your entire WordPress website, including both files and your database. It also does backup scheduling, but is quite an advanced plugin, and not for newbies.

The first thing you’ll notice is the Admin interface looks different. No more “title bar” at the top of the screen, and the various settings/options down the left now appear “docked” to the side of the page, much like Chrome’s tabs when you use sidetabs (see screenshot below). Another great feature is the new “distraction free” writing/posting interface. It’s super clean and simple and pops-down a bar with basic controls when you move your mouse to the top. It really takes away all the typical “clutter” of the WordPress post interface, and let’s you focus only on writing. This is an excellent feature for the real “writers” out there.

1. I setup the new WordPress install on a new account at Hostgator. But I wanted the blog to continue functioning on Typepad until everything was ready to go on the new site. So we didn’t change the nameservers for the domain at his current registrar.
2. But you need a way to work with the WP site, so I used these instructions from Hostgator on how to change your hosts file, so that my computer would go to the new WordPress site, when I typed the domain in the browser. Also, 1 thing that is not on there: you’ll also want to include the ftp variation: “ftp.domain.com” after the “www.domain.com” one so you can login via ftp. As you’re going along, if you need to access your site at Typepad through your domain, all you have to do is take that line back out of the hosts file and save it again. I kept the hosts file open throughout this process so I could switch back and forth as needed.
3. Now use this article from Typepad’s site to export your blog, then import it into the new WordPress site. It doesn’t include an additional step that more recent versions of WordPress require, which is where you’re prompted to install a plugin to import from Typepad. It’ll pretty much walk you through the process.
4. Now, if you won’t want to loose any SEO “juice” (aka ranking), you’ll want to setup the permalink structure, just like it was on Typepad. My friend’s blog had the folder “my-blog” after the domain, so I used this permalink structure in WordPress under Settings>Permalinks: /my-blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
5. Step 3 imports all the text and embedded videos, etc. But it won’t move the images over for you. I found this article from FolioVision that tells you how to download all the images. You’ll want to skip down and just do step 7 & maybe 9 (there doesn’t appear to be an 8). But ignore the rest, because they did it the hard way. Since we’ve exactly mimicked the original permalink structure, a lot of the stuff they say to do is frivolous.
6. Once you’ve downloaded the images, you can go 2 routes: 1) try to closely mimic the image paths as well, or 2) just relocate them entirely. Neither option will keep the links on Google image search intact, because Typepad does not include the image extension (eg. “image.jpg” is just “image” on Typepad), but the actual files have the extension so WordPress doesn’t sees the URL, but can’t find the file. That article from FolioVision tells you how to do #2 in step 9. I opted to try to mimic the current link structure, hoping the links would still work, which they didn’t, but it did make the redirects and such more simple, since I didn’t have to change the location of the file plus add the appropriate extension on the end.
7. So the next step is to upload the images. I found them inside the folder I had created to download the site to in step 5, then inside these subfolders: \www.domain.com\.a\ – this reflects where Typepad stored them. So to most closely mimic Typepad, I just created a folder called “.a” in the public_html root of the site then uploaded them all there. FTP is easiest and works normally if you’ve included it in your hosts file, as mentioned before. This means that WordPress will have their location correct (because it’s the same as it was on Typepad), once you switch the domain over, except that they need the image extension added.
8. From there is was just a matter of adding the appropriate extension to each image. I did this by copying the filename from each image on my hard drive, then pasting them into both the the “Search Pattern” and “Replace Pattern” fields of the plugin Search Regex. Then I’d remove the file extension (.jpg, .gif, or .png) from the first field, then click the “Replace & Save” button. What this does is find that image name in the WordPress database where every thing is stored, then replaces it with the exact same name, but with the proper image extension on the end.
9. Luckily there weren’t too many images, so it didn’t take particularly long. Just to check, you can search for the folder (“/.a/” in my case) then scan through the results to make sure all the image files have the image file extension on the end, but not more than one. If you hit the “Replace & Save” button twice, they’ll have 2 extensions like “.jpg.jpg” on the end. You’ll need to correct that doing another replace and save where the search is “.jpg.jpg” and the replacement is “.jpg”.
10. Lastly, if you do want those images to show up on Google, you’ll need to setup some redirects with a plugin like Redirection. It’s fairly similar to Search Regex, except instead of replacing stuff in the database, you’re just telling Google and the browsers of users who click the old links to the images, where to go now, since the old images aren’t there anymore. So you’ll just put something like: “http://www.domain.com/.a/6a0133ee46600d970b01538dd8808d970b-pi” in the “Source URL” field, and “http://www.domain.com/.a/6a0133ee46600d970b01538dd8808d970b-pi.png” in the “Target URL” field then click “Add Redirection.” You’ll need to do this for each image. But again this is only so people clicking Google/Bing image search results will still get to your images, so it may not even be worth doing.

That’s it! And step 10 is pretty optional. From there it’s just a matter of getting the right theme, and adding the plugins you want/need to add social networking, etc. to your old blog that has been given a new lease on life with WordPress world’s greatest blogging, and general web platform!

We can’t tell you what yet, but we’re working on some big changes and updates to Start WordPress (both the class and other things). So stay tuned, and look out for more announcements, right here on our blog.

WordPress on AppSumo

We’ve noticed that the web deals site AppSumo has been giving away (free) or having great deals on lots of WordPress stuff. AppSumo is kinda like Groupon, but they give great deals on web services, software, etc.

Yesterday, they gave a super good deal on a WordPress plugin called “WP Auctions” which lets you add ebay-style item listing and bidding to your WordPress website. In the weeks before that they’ve offered a WordPress eStore plugin for a good price, some excellent WordPress themes from ThemeFuse (which we loved and got the deal), and even an eBook titled Digging into WordPress.

So make sure to head over to AppSumo and sign up for updates. In addition to these deals, they also give away free stuff on Fridays! Today they’re giving away some free user testing, so you can find out how good your website or blog is from a useability standpoint, for free. Let us know what you think.

We’ve almost always used one of two plugins: Shadowbox JS, which is our favorite, but requires that you pay to get a license for the original Shadowbox.js code, if you’re using it for commercial purposes, and has a dark theme; or Lightbox 2, which works great and looks just like the most common lightboxes you see. Unfortunately Lightbox 2 plugin has not been updated to work well with the last several versions of WordPress. So after some searching, we found the excellent WP jQuery Lightbox plugin, which looks the same as Lightbox 2, but is updated and works with WordPress 3+.

We just installed it, disabled Lightbox 2, then enabled WP jQuery Lightbox. It has a couple settings if you want to set them, but basically just works great as is. A great drop-in replacement for Lightbox 2!

UPDATE: Ping.fm won’t even work in Chrome now. I get a “This webpage has a redirect loop.” error. The pingbot in my Gmail chat (which I use to update my status the most) isn’t working either.

UPDATE 2: after receiving Yama’s comment below, I messed with my cookies in Chrome and am now able to access Ping.fm.

The Resulting Dashboard

So, unlike normal people who register for their site, we decided to let the client person see the dashboard, but we wanted to customize the experience, so they wouldn’t see all the default WordPress widgets and get confused. The first step (something I wish Adminimize would just include) was to get a plugin to hide widgets in the dashboard. Two seemed to stand out:

• Dashboard Widget Remover – very straightforward, simply check which user levels you’d like to hide the various widgets from.
• Dashboard Commander – much the same, but with more advanced permissions levels to select from. Also, it can control some dynamically generated dashboard widgets (but not WordPress.com stats). So if you’re wanting to hide some that have been created by a plugin, this one is better.

We got rid of all widgets except “Right Now.” Then we thought, “while we’re at it, why not just customize it further with some FiddlerStudios stuff as well?”

So we added a widget of our own: this can easily be done by adding a little code to your theme’s (or child theme’s, preferably) functions.php file. Check out this article at wpbeginner.com for the specific details. We customized that code to encourage clients to email us if they had problems or feedback.

So we added some more code to change the default “W” WordPress logo out in the top-left corner of the admin. We put our FiddlerStudios “F” with an f-hole logo, there and it looks great! Again, there’s a great tutorial at wpbeginner.com.

Finally, we wanted to let them view the stats for their family website. So we installed WordPress.com Stats plugin, and it adds its own widget to the dashboard to display stats. We also learned (through the WordPress.org forums) that the WordPress.com Stats widget only shows up on the dashboard for anyone with the manage_options permission set. So using the User Role Editor plugin we already had installed, we just added that permission to the “Editor” user role (which we assign to the paying client).

The result: very clean, simple dashboard that shouldn’t scare anyone and give the client just enough information, without overwhelming them.

If you find yourself wanting it removed, or to manipulate it in other ways, here are 3 great plugins I found to do exactly that:

• Global Hide/Remove Admin Bar Plugin – this one is dead simple, with only 2 options: disable the bar, and disable the options under user’s profile, where they can turn the admin bar on and off.
• WP Custom Admin Bar – this one’s a step more advanced than the previous, allowing you to enable/disable the admin bar based on the user roles (eg. subscriber, editor, etc.).
• Admin Bar Disabler – this plugin gives basically the same capabilities as the previous one, but is built by a different developer, and lists full multi-site capabilities.

I am using the 1st one on some sites where I don’t want the bar there at all. So far it works great!

As a quick sidenote: WordPress.com is where Automattic makes some of it’s money through hosting blogs for other people who don’t want to setup their own WordPress-based site or blog, like we teach you to do here at Start WordPress.

While Jetpack combines these previously available features, it also adds new ones, with promises of more to come. Here’s a list of what Jetpack can do for your site (from the WordPress.org plugin repository):

• Simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server. (previously WordPress.com stats)
• The WP.me URL shortener.
• Hovercard popups for your commenters via Gravatar.
• Easily embedded media from popular sites like YouTube, Digg, and Vimeo.
• A simple way to include beautiful mathematical expressions on your site.
• A widget for displaying recent tweets. (previously Wickett Twitter Widget)
• Your readers can easily share your posts via email or their favorite social networks. (previously ShareDaddy)
• An artificial intelligence based spell, style, and grammar checker. (previously After the Deadline)

You can get it for your self-hosted website or blog from the WordPress.org repository, or just search “Jetpack” from the Plugins>Add New are in the WordPress admin.