WordPress has become so popular that I’m 90% sure that you have at least heard about the name. WordPress is in reality a blogger-like application that can be installed onto your own web hosting account.

With it you can even create your own community of bloggers, each person with his/her own blog, or you can have multiple authors on a single blog as well. Everything was thought of.

WordPress isn’t only this though. In essence yes. But it can be more, much more.

Many people, including myself use WordPress for more then just blogging. On my particular case, it’s the only CMS and it’s actually the platform that delivers all my website’s content to visitors. Everything dynamically!

In fact, I predict WordPress will turn into a full Content Management System such as Joomla, phpNuke or Post-Nuke. It really has the power for it. Actually it’s way more powerful and it can be much more secure then the ones I just mentioned. It’s all about patience and time to secure it.

Don’t worry, it isn’t insecure. But just like every other popular application, vulnerabilities are found more easily, and unfortunately they also become public from night to day. Again, a few tweaks here and there will kept your site secure from all the threats.

One of the things I’ve done on mine was to promptly restrict admin access to my IP only. Even if you have a dynamic IP and cannot do this, you can always restrict the IP range to your ISP. This is done by using rewrite rules.

More information on this can be found at:
http://blogsecurity.net/wordpress/article-210607/

Having this covered, WordPress can be your best pal on content management. Especially with the new tool from Microsoft: Windows Live Writer.

So with WordPress you’ll be able to submit new articles and update existing ones without even having to open a browser window.

What else could we ask for?

Plus with so many themes and plugins being developed for it, you can even sell cars through it. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? WordPress can do everything, really. Like I said it’s just a matter of putting time and effort into it, and it will become the perfect CMS for you, guaranteed.

Some interesting links:
Installation guide by Jess Coburn (Appliedi.net)
WordPress’ official plugin directory
WordPress’ official theme directory
Wordpress compatible Hosting

Applied Innovations is pleased to announce we’re not only fully compatible for WordPress Hosting but we now offer WordPress as a One-Click install through our powerful, yet easy to use control panel. We’ll explore WordPress and demonstrate how easy it is to get WordPress running on our webservers.

Why Wordpress, and Why WordPress on Windows?

WordPress is a freely distributed, standards-compliant, fast, light and free personal publishing platform. Based on PHP and MySQL wordpress is very powerful and extensible. Wordpress is also one of the most widely adopted and used blogging engines today and powers the very blog you’re reading.

As a Windows hosting provider we support PHP and MySQL on all of our hosting servers and Wordpress is just one of the many applications we host that is built around PHP and MySQL and we’ve extended our hosting platform to make your PHP/MySQL hosting as easy and powerful as it is on any hosting platform. One of the additions you’ll find on our hosting platform is helicon-tech.com’s Isapi-Rewrite. Isapi-Rewrite 3.0 is a mod-rewrite compatible isapi filter that brings full mod-rewrite compatibility to your Windows hosting account. For wordpress this means you’ll be able to make full use of permalinks and search engine friendly URLs without any extra work! In addition we support the latest builds of PHP with Windows optimized binaries for maximum performance and compatibility.

Installing WordPress at AppliedI.net

1. Selecting the WordPress application pack

Within your domain settings of our control panel you’ll find an option for Application Packs.

The Application Packs are a series of common web applications that we support as one-click installable apps. By using the application packs you’ll be able to install some of the most requested and commonly hosted applications without having to upload anything, without having to edit any files and with minimum effort on your part. This makes installing applications like wordpress even easier than they already.

2. Entering basic configuration settings

Once you select the wordpress application pack you’ll need to enter a few settings. You’ll want to decide what folder you’ll install it in and enter that folder, if it’s not the root folder. You’ll want to either select an existing MySQL database or create a new database and if creating a new database you’ll want to enter the database and login credentials you’ll use. By default wordpress prepends wp_ to all of it’s tables so if you already have a MySQL database for another web application you can share that information here.

3. You’re done, almost!

Once you click the install button on the configuration page the control panel copies over the wordpress files and edits the configuration files for you, next step is to execute the web based installer within wordpress. Easiest way to do that is to open the url:

http://YOURDOMAIN/wp-admin/index.php (where YOURDOMAIN is your domain name)

or you can just go directly to http://YOURDOMAIN/ but you may notice the CSS isn’t quite right and some of the images may not display correctly but don’t be alarmed it will still install fine.

Once you open the install page you just need to make a few basic settings and we’re done.

4. Setting Wordpress Email & Title

As with any WordPress install, you’ll want to enter your blog’s title, your email address (make sure you use your real email address because it will email you your username and password to this address) and click the install button.

5. Now you just need to log in.

Once you click the install button, you’ll wait a few minutes for a screen like:

That’s it your blog is now installed and you’ll be able to login and finish configuring the blog.

What’s next after it’s installed?

After you’ve installed your blog you’re all set and can begin blogging immediately. You’ll log into the admin interface at:

http://YOURDOMAIN/wp-admin (where YOURDOMAIN is your actual domain)

and begin configuring it. You’ll be able to enable new plug-ins and themes. We’ve taken the liberty to enable a couple extra themes for you (about 6 actually) so you’ll have a few more choices and we’ve installed some of the most common plug-ins for you that you can enable if you like.

Look for a future blog posting on advanced wordpress on windows tips and tricks that will help you extend wordpress even further.

Last month we announced blogengine.net hosting and introduced you to blogengine.net a new ASP.NET based blogging engine.  Over the weekend, version 1.2 was released and brought with it many new features:

• BlogML import/export
• Extension model
• Code syntax highlighting
• ASP.NET SiteMap provider for static pages
• Support for a static page to be the front page
• Full comment RSS/ATOM feed
• Intelligent error 404 page
• E-mail notifications for future comments
• Role provider
• Extended in-site search capabilities
• SLUG – the URL doesn’t change with the title
• User control injection
• Attachments on the contact page
• Comment moderation
• Much better Mono support

You can also check out the complete feature list. The team also extended the list of supported languages to 26! Here’s a quick list of them:

1. Albanian by Besnik Belegu
2. Arabic by Talal Asubaie
3. Brazilian Portuguese by Luciano Evaristo Guerche
4. Bulgarian by Todor Ivanov
5. Chinese by AlphaWu
6. Czech by Pavel
7. Danish by Mads Kristensen
8. Dutch by Jochem Bokkers
9. English by Mads Kristensen
10. Finish by Petri Roponen
11. Flemish by oVan
12. French by Jacques Philip
13. German by Andreas Kraus
14. Greek by George Chatzimanolis
15. Icelandic by Sturla Þorvaldsson + Anna Rosenberg
16. Italian by Stefano Malcangi
17. Norwegian by Håkon
18. Persian by Mahdi Taghizadeh
19. Russian by Aleksey Samuleenkov
20. Slovak by fruzicka
21. Slovenian by Ales Vozelj
22. Spanish by Claudio M. E. Bastos Iorio
23. Swedish by Mattias Lindahl
24. Thai by m3rLinEz
25. Turkish by Gokhan Demir
26. Vietnamese by Tinhoc

You can learn more about blogengine.net at the blogengine.net website. You can stay on top of the latest news related to blogengine at the blogengine forums and ofcourse if you’re looking for a host to support your blogengine.net based website, Applied Innovations fully supports blogengine.net hosting on all hosting plans.

Applied Innovations is pleased to announced we have partnered with DotNetInvoice, makers of the ASP.NET billing and invoicing system, DotNetInvoice to offer dotnetinvoice hosting.

DotNetInvoice is a comprehensive ASP.NET based invoice and billing system that allows all types of organizations to offer online invoicing and real-time payment processing. Today DotNetInvoice is commonly used by webhosting companies, web design firms,  web developers and consultants of all types.

Professional ASP.NET Invoicing software features

DotNetInvoice includes a large number of features that can be found on their features page and some of the features that really stand out for us include:

• ASP.NET 2.0 Application Integration - DotNetInvoice uses the standard ASP.NET 2.0 membership and roles providers so it can easily be integrated with your existing ASP.NET 2.0 based web application for seemless integration.
  
• Automated Hands-Free Recurring Invoicing - DotNetInvoice supports the ability to setup recurring invoicing on any period of time you wish, days, months or years and then will automatically email your clients their invoice when it comes due.
  
• Support for PayPal Website Payments Pro, Paypal and Authorize.net - Real-time online payments for your invoices, no phone calls, no checks to deposit just setup the site, email your clients and let the payments get submitted and best of all since it’s online your clients can submit payments at anytime, night or day, that’s convenient for them.
  
• Globalization - Out of the box, DotNetInvoice supports the following countries and currencies: Australia (AUD), Canada (CAD), China (CNY), Great Britain (GBP), India (INR), Ireland (EUR), Japan (JPY), New Zealand (NZD), USA (USD).
  
• Graphical reporting - A pictures is worth a thousand words:
  

These are just a few of the features we found most useful in DotNetInvoice and we believe our hosting partners will enjoy. We recommend you visit the DotNetInvoice site and the DotNetInvoice Demo to experience all of the power of this great application.

Special Offering: $40 Off Coupon for DotNetInvoice

DotNetInvoice is compatible with all of our hosting plans but we recommend the VS-1 Small Business hosting plan since it includes 250MB of SQL database spac, full support for ASP.NET 2.0, the ability to run your own SSL certificate (which you’ll need if you’re taking credit card information over the Internet) and starts at just $22.50/month. 

In addition, DotNetInvoice is making a special offering to all Applied Innovations hosted customers and offering $40 off their normal price. Deploying DotNetInvoice will save you time and money and with $40 off you’re already ahead. To access this special offer and any of our other great offers, remember to log into your control panel and select the Marketplace icon.