Just a quick and easy one this month and being the month of Christmas I’d thought I’d go with the Christmas theme.

Xmas Snow adds a nice looking animated Christmas Snow to the top of your site.

Sorry for the delay in this one but here we are.

bbPress is a forum software designed to intergrate seemlessly into any wordpress website.

We’re keeping things as small and light as possible while still allowing for great add-on features through WordPress’s extensive plugin system. What does all that mean? bbPress is lean, mean, and ready to take on any job you throw at it.

bbPress has been downloaded well over 400,000 times and when im designing a site that needs tight integration with community focus i choose bbPress.

This month in our WordPress Plugin Spotlight we are looking a plugin developed by Securenext Softwares WP.

Google Drive for WordPress is a plugin designed to backup WordPress files and Databases to Google Drive.

This plugin used to Make backups of your WordPress files and Mysql DB with Google Drive. Google Drive for WordPress is a plugin that provides backup capabilities for WordPress. Backups are ‘zip’ archives created locally and uploaded to a folder of your choosing on Google Drive.

WPTH.NET have written up a lovely how-to to get it installed and running on a WordPress installation.

Colour branded cooling pipes and surely the most well built datacentres in the world.

More here: http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech/1

The latest version of Google’s tracking code, along with browser support allows ‘asynchronous tracking’ – Whats that? REAL TIME analytic stats about your site. 

• -How many people are currently browsing.
• -What page is each user looking at.
• -Are they new or returning.
• -Top sourcing showing where users came from
• -Even the current top viewed pages

All wrapped into Google’s new (still BETA) Analytics Dashboard which is simple to use and understand. Get real time tracking on your site and get detail on how, what and when users browse your site.

Contact us today and get tracking.

Some very interesting facts about downtime of online services and the effect it can have. How badly would you be effected if you lost access to email and online services?

Source: link

**NOTE: IF YOU ARE HAVING ISSUES WITH TELECOM DNS, PROPAGATION, EMAIL, OR WEBSITE ACCESS IN NZ PLEASE CONTACT US DIRECTLY ON INFO@DEVFX.CO.NZ  FOR SUPPORT**

What is DNS?

DNS is the fabric that joins the internet together. DNS is what tells a computer or server the location of the website or the email server.

Why is it so important?

When someone sends you an email or tries to access your website, their computer looks up your DNS records, then goes to the location it gives them.

Why should you consider how its done for company?

Do you have DNS redundancy…? if not, whats going to happen if your DNS fails – No email and no website?

Whats it got to do with DevFX?

Stable – reliable – redundant service! Originally DevFX was structured around providing web design services and hosting of websites. How? with a team and a dedicated web server. The more we host and the larger we became, we began to pickup more services as demanded by the clients.

We grew our services! Instead of providing only web design and hosting. We started to provide support and services for domain name services, and cloud-based email hosting solutions

What does this mean?

The more clients we worked with the more me noticed a lack of (industry) standard causing them email, hosting and DNS issues.What issues? DOS Attacks. Server demand and overloading. ISP issues. Email issues… and a lot of it going unnoticed.

What can this cause to your company?

Web services to fail, emails to bounce back, extremely slow website load times, it can even effect your ranking within Google.

What is DevFX doing about it to stay ahead of the game?

Providing a restructured hosting infrastructure to ensure all areas of service are market leading by:

• -Implementation of 4 segregated cloud-based name servers for NS and DNS hosting
• -Increased server space, including tripling processing power
• -Cloud based solutions for segregated email hosting with Google Apps – Unlimited users and domains

Where do you sign up?

Just contact us info@devfx.co.nz

So after seeing a recent increase in hacking attempts on WordPress sites I thought I would start a WordPress Plugin Spotlight and what better way to start this segment than with a security plugin.

Better WP Security

Currently at version 3.4.4 BWPS offers many features to make thing harder for hackers to attack your site. BWPS is very easy and friendly to use and can be setup in as little as 10min. Admittedly some parts do require knowledge of MySQL and how to edit .htaccess files, how to’s for these can be found online. Most WordPress attacks are a result of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software.

Some of the key features of BWPS include

• Change the urls for WordPress dashboard including login, admin and more
• Change the WordPress database table prefix
• Turn off the ability to login for a given time
• Scan your site to instantly tell where vulnerabilities are and fix them in seconds
• Detect and block numerous attacks to your filesystem and database
• Detect bots and other attempts to search for vulnerabilities
• Works on multi-site (network) and single site installations
• Plus many more

If you are worried about the security of your site or just want that extra protection then Better WP Security is the plugin for you.

Creattica have released some new wordpress themplates – check them out here

Check out our WordPress tutorial showcase by Craig on how to add or edit posts and pages within your WordPress CMS.