What I didn’t write about was “membership levels”. That is, where you have different fees for different levels of membership. Frankly, it didn’t occur to me until a client asked for it.

For single-level membership…

For single-level membership, you can (if you’re patient) go with a free system, using a mixture of these plugins:

• WP-e-Commerce – the e-Commerce solution you can use to handle the transaction and send through an invitation code to your new member.
• WP-Invites – which generates an invitation code that can be sent to someone who wants to belong to your site.
• Registered Users Only - which integrates with WP-Invites and provides a field for the new member to enter the above-mentioned code.
• Peters Login Redirect – which gives you a way to redirect a new user login with a specific user role, and creates the new roles for you.
• Members Access – to set specific posts and pages to be only visible to registered users of the site

Once these are installed, you do the following:

• Create an open-ended invitation code in WP-Invites (by entering 3650 in the appropriate field).
• Generate the code.
• Add the code to a standalone text file on your computer.
• Add a new product to your WP-e-Commerce system which will, upon a successful exchange of money for membership, send out an email containing the aforementioned standalone text file to the user in question.
• Using Peters Login Redirect, you choose the landing page for users with a specific user role (in this case, let’s choose “subscriber” which is a standard Wordpress user role)
• Using the Wordpress Settings and General page, set New user default role to “Subscriber” and untick Membership Anyone can register.
• Using Members Access set up the pages and posts which only registered members of the site can see.

The net result is that the new user receives the text file, opens it, and creates a new user registration for themselves using the invitation code. When they login for the first time, they’re a subscriber role and are redirected to a specific landing page. Finally, they can now see the pages marked members only.

Time-consuming, yes, but free!

But what about multi-level membership?

Glad you asked. After two and a half hours of fiddling with a number of very good plugins, all of which ALMOST did the job, including the ones above, I have come to the following conclusion:

Just buy one

I’m a BIG advocate of free software, open-source and other online merriment. But this is an insoluble problem.

Of the plugins I saw, I’m going to try out the WP eMember Plugin (packaged with the Wp e-Store Plugin) for a measley $45US.

The others I saw during my travels to find the now sadly nonexistent magical membership plugin, were either too expensive or too complicated. This one looks nice and clean and (dare I say) simple.

I like simple. Especially after two and a half hours of fiddling against the odds. I feel like Nero, except without the smell of something perhaps burning in the near vicinity…

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/to/your/favicon.ico" />

where /path/to/your/favicon.ico is a real set of folders. In many cases you won’t need that part anyway, just the favicon.ico.

The Apple website favicon

It’s a neat idea, that’s supported by all the browsers and goes a little way to making your website look a little more “professional”

There are several sites where you can create your own and even upload your images.

A couple of online generators are:

• Dynamic Drive Favicon generator
• Favicon.cc

The problem with these is that they’re a little hit-and-miss with the resolutuon (that is, they look blocky when you do it).

If you’ve got Photoshop, then you can create better favicons, with a little help from the open source community.

Here’s instructions on how to create favicons in Photoshop, at Photoshop support

Here is where you download and instructions to install the Photoshop ico file format plugin at telegraphics

The story here is ultimately when you’re dealing with graphics, design big, then make it smaller! The higher the DPI (Dots Per Inch) the better!

PCs are good if you’re a computer tech. Macs are good if you want to get work done

But what happens if you lose (or have stolen) your precious hardware?

Orbicule software offers some rather good software to help you find stolen macs or iphones.

• Find your lost or stolen mac with Undercover for Mac
• Find your lost or stolen iphone with Undercover for iPhone

They also offer the Found iphone app, which works with the underdover app (if installed) or on its own. Read about Found on the Orbicule website.

Alternatively, there’s always Apple’s MobileMe which has the Back to My Mac feature, which will help you get your precious things back.

At $119AU it’s somewhat more expensive than the above mentioned software, but does offer a whole lot more: syncing all your important data and giving you 10GB of off-side backup storage for two.

Try out MobileMe for 60 days free of charge on the MobileMe website.

But what if it’s a page that doesn’t really fit within the browse sequence, an error page for example.

Most themes come with a 404 error page by default. For the uninitiated, a 404 error is where a page you were looking for no-longer exists. If it doesn’t exist, the browser needs to be told about it — with an appropriate error page (and if it’s clever, a 10 second delay before it redirects the visitor to the home page) — or it just displays a rather basic plain text page that says it couldn’t find the page.

But if you need a landing page for specific reasons — say you’re running a membership-only site which does a redirect to a specific landing page in the case where a visitor is trying to view something hidden away — then you need the Exclude Pages plugin.

All Exclude-Pages does is add a checkbox in the page editor which, is ticked by default. A tick means the page can be viewed in the menu. Untick the box and it’s hidden. Simple and easy!

You can install the Exclude-Pages plugin by clicking Plugins and Add New. Then search on Exclude-Pages and then click Install.

The technically enabled can download the plugin from the wordpress Exclude-Pages page.

Thanks to Simon Wheatley for this lovely lightweight plugin!

It’s actually rather simple to get a neat icon for your website to appear on the iPhone, and it looks great for potential customers too!

All you need to do is create an image in your favourite image editing programme, say Photoshop, Gimp, Image editor or whatever you happen to use.

You create it to the following dimensions:

width: 45px

height: 45px

Then you save it as a Portable Network Graphic (PNG) with the following name:

apple-touch-icon.png

Once you’ve done that, upload the file with FTP or any other file transfer programme to the root folder of your website. This will be called something like html or your website name.

And that’s it! When someone chooses to add your website to the home screen (in the Safari browser, click the + and select Add to Home Screen), there will be your neat icon waiting there for them! You don’t have to do anything but create your icon, the iPhone makes the corners curved and gives it the 3d effect!

All you need in advance is a PayPal account and a little patience and, of course, the WP E-Commerce plugin from Instinct Entertainment of New Zealand.

Wp E-Commerce is an all-inclusive plugin which handles everything from stock control, to the addition of your products to the site, right up to securely linking to PayPal or other online services (some of which aren’t yet available in Australia, such as Google Shopping Cart). If you want something easy, secure and with a minimum of fuss, this is the plugin for you!

They also sell several add-ons to change the look and feel of the system, together with adding other options some might want. But for the small business owner selling things online, this is a simple solution to all your needs.

You can install WP E-Commerce by clicking Plugins and Add New, then searching for WP E-Commerce. Then click Install and you’re off!

Advanced users might choose to download then install the plugin by hand. You can do that from the plugin site on Wordpress.

Configuring the plugin is easy, and support is available from the Instinct website.

Add your Paypal details by clicking the Products panel, then Settings.

Then click the checkbox for the payment option you want to use — in most cases this will be PayPal, click Update, then choose it from the Payment Gateway list on the right and fill-in the details. Always click Update when you’re done!

To start adding products, click the Products panel, then Products. Fill in the details on the right and click Update

You can also categorise your products by clicking the Products panel and Categories.

Thanks to Instinct Entertainment for this wholly useful plugin!

First place to look is at a handy table of what all the odd symbols mean and their corresponding keyboard button. You can see that here on techblog.

Here’s a selection of mac keyboard shortcuts for you:

• tab between open applications: ⌘ tab
• display crosshairs to take a screenshot: ⌘ shift 4
• open a new tab in safari (or other browsers): ⌘ t

And here’s the complete list of mac keyboard shortcuts, found on the Apple support page. Some in here I didn’t even know about, so it’s a learning process for all of us!

What it does is filter comments that are made to your website as compared to a master system on the akismet servers. This will catch the vast majority of comment form SPAM. You can read more about the Akismet service on their website.

To get it working, go to the Plugins panel and Installed. There at the top of the list is Akismet. Just click Activate.

Next, you need a key, which you can get from wordpress.com by creating a new wordpress account here. At this point, it’s unlikely you need a blog, so click just a username please at the bottom!

You’ll be sent an email with the API Key for Akismet, which you enter by clicking Plugins and Akismet Configuration, and pasting the code into the field near the top and clicking Update Options. If all goes well, everything will go green!

Thanks to the wonderful Akismet people for this great system.

TinyMCE gives a bunch of additional functions to the post and page editor toolbar (otherwise known as The Kitchen Sink, which is accessible by clicking ).

Things like creating a table would ordinarily involve clicking the HTML tab and using a lot of Table tags, TR for table row and TD for table content.

You can install the TinyMCE plugin by clicking Plugins and Add New, then searching on TinyMCE Advanced. Then click Install and you’re off!

Alternatively you can download a copy from the TinyMCE Advanced wordpress page.

Once installed, go to the Settings panel and TinyMCE Advanced where a complete list of possible new functions are available. Just drag and drop the boxes to the toolbar above and click Save Changes. The next time you’re creating or editing a page or post, you’ll find the new functions available to you in the toolbars.

Thanks to the plugin developer, Andrew Ozz for this really useful plugin!

Contact form 7 has a major advantage because you can make alterations to the form without resorting to nasty back-end code (which for some of us is fine, but for the less experienced is not). It allows for you to construct a contact form with selections from a drop-down list and by dragging and dropping the form parts around without problem.

Then you just paste the form identifier into the right place and you’re off. A form is a great idea because it means your precious email address is obscured from the spammers.

You can install Contact Form 7 by clicking Plugins and Add New, then searching for Contact Form 7, then clicking install.

Similarly, search for and install Really Simple Captcha by the same means, just searching on “Really Simple Captcha” instead.

The more advanced users out there can download and install Contact Form 7 here and download Really Simple Captcha here on the Wordpress Plugins page.

There’s also a support forum and FAQ to help you learn how to use it available on the contact form 7 website.

Thanks to the plugin developer, Takayuki Miyoshi for these great plugins!