It’s easy to miss things with how big the internet is these days. For example, one of the quickest and easiest ways to get basic answers on Wordpress questions is to go to their support forum area . In general unless your question is super specific to one plugin, or is so open ended as to be impossible to answer, you’ll usually get some feedback pretty quickly–at least enough to get an idea of where to keep looking for the answer. I have to admit their search function isn’t that great there though.

On the reverse side, It’s funny how I have to go looking sometimes for people looking to get answers to questions about my plugins hosted here. I usually look around every few days and answer things there If I find them, but it’s actually easiest to use my contact form on this site, or go to Harknell.com and post if you want answers about any of the AWSOM plugins. I’m pretty open to contact on things and try to answer as quickly as I can. Plus the feedback helps in future development.

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Much like my previous post on setting up a forum site, I also think it’s best to separate a store function from the rest of your main site. The highest prize in hacking is really things like credit card records or other money oriented information–so to reduce the chances of all of your stuff getting destroyed in one shot you want to keep things separated as much as possible.

There are many stand alone store website packages out there. Quite a few are based on the grand daddy of open source commerce: OsCommerce. Zencart is an adaption of OsCommerce to be a bit easier to set up than the original. It honestly used to be somewhat hard to find a open source shopping cart program, but with the explosion in open source development it’s now actually difficult to figure out the reverse: which of the millions are actually any good.

I actually like a surprising choice: X-cart, which is NOT open source. But it has almost every benefit. It’s very inexpensive ($200), they give you the source code, allow you to make mods, and provide support and free upgrades forever (and have actually been producing many). It also has one of the best things I’ve ever seen in ANY website development software: Webmaster Mode. This is an Ajax sort of thing that once activated lets the admin literally click any text element of the site–which opens an editor box and allows instant editing of the content. You can speed through setting up your site in record time.

Of course the absolute easiest choice is to set up a Paypal or Amazon store, but those make you look kinda crappy in the long run. Whatever your choice, remember you need to always be on the watch for security updates, and always upgrade if there is a security issue.

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I just wanted to give you guys an idea of how things are going on the next release of the AWSOM Pixgallery Wordpress plugin 4.4.0. This release will be very large with tons of new usability features and caoabilities. Based on user feedback the new version will have a cache creation and default gallery creation system, as well as a code generator for the proper code to add to your posts to embed a gallery.

Galleries can now be defined and new image elements can be defined (such as custom name and tags). Overall view and engine updates have been added as well as support for the coming theme system in 4.5.0 The last element is an image uploader system, which is the last addition before code freeze.

No target release date yet due to extensive testing requirements, but it should be within a week. Grab our RSS feed to get the release news as soon as it happens.

BTW, thanks to everyone who’s written in and posted feedback, it really helps. Oh, and any donations to help fund development are always appreciated :)

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At some point down the line most webcomic websites realize it would be a good idea to set up a forum for their readers. It keeps them talking and interested in your stuff on days you don’t have a post going up, and allows your readers to connect to each other to form a stronger community. Plus it’s just fun to see what will be posted and what kind of feedback you will get.

I have seen many attempts to make a forum plugin for Wordpress, but surprisingly I think it’s a bad idea.

Why? Because most hack attempts on sites originate from privilege escalation, where a regular user can somehow trick the site into thinking they’re an administrator. Most of the big content management systems that also work as forums (phpnuke, drupal, joombla, mambo) have had security issues related to this. I think it’s best to separate things like a forum, store, and other visitor login stuff from your main site to reduce the chances this can happen.

I like and use phpbb, but there are many others out there. The main differences come down to how they look, what features you can add (and how easy it is to do this), and how easy they are to administer. Phpbb for me sort of hits the middle spot for all of these. Whatever you do though, keep up on any updates or security patches that come out and add them as soon as you can–no one wants to see some porn spam as their main page of their site after getting hacked.

While I don’t really post much about phpbb here, I’ll definitely monitor it and post about updates and such to it also.

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The Developers of the ComicPress theme for Wordpress are looking for feedback about what features people want for the next version of the theme. If you are using this theme or are considering it you should let them know what you want.

link: http://mindfaucet.com/comicpress/2007/06/03/comicpress-21-development/

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