If you have (or somehow controlling) multiple websites built with WordPress, than you know the difficulty of managing all of them.

WordPress releases a new version regularly and websites built with it needs to be up-to-date to stay secure, the same goes with the plugins and the need to remember all passwords.

ManageWP is a hosted service that offers a platform for managing any number of WordPress blogs under the same admin interface.

About the giveaway: They are giving away 2 annual Business accounts to WRD readers and details can be found at the bottom of the post.

Besides the ability to switch between websites with a click, the service can bulk update the sites with the new WordPress versions, plugins and themes.

Also, it is possible to install new plugins or themes to multiple websites at the same time.

There is a good chance that each website gets a hosting switch every few years which is a time-consuming process. What if we need to move many WordPress blogs to this new account? Ouch! But, as you guess, ManageWP can also handle this; it can clone a website from one domain to another.

One of the best features is its integrated backup. You can schedule backups to make sure that all your websites have recent copies when needed. It also monitors the uptime of your websites via the integration with the free uptime monitoring service: Uptime Robot.

The service brings a similar beauty for the publishing part: you can post an entry to multiple sites, manage the blogroll links or add users, all in bulk.

ManageWP has a free plan that allow controlling up to 3 websites and bigger packages exist (which would be a good fit for anyone/web agency with many WP websites).

How to join the giveaway?

2 annual Business accounts are being given away and, in order to get a chance to win one:

• suggest a new feature for ManageWP in the comments
  

and winners will be selected by ManageWP from the 2 best entries on 17 Feb 2012 (8 days later).

Good luck to all.

As people who are designing/developing and/or managing web projects, we usually pay a lot of importance to metrics and their trends -website statistics, Twitter follower numbers, the number of sales of a product and so- to better analyze if things are performing as expected.

All these data are usually behind different applications/interfaces; Google Analytics keeps the stats, the number of comments are in the WordPress admin, leads can be viewed from SalesForce or invoices are in Freshbooks. And, there can be some others like the data in custom apps.

Logging into each of them to get a snapshot of everything usually takes a lot of time. And, this is what Cyfe is about.

Cyfe is a hosted dashboard with a simple and good-looking interface that allows us to view any data from a single place.

It has a pretty good number of ready-to-use widgets that can pull data from popular applications like Google products (Analytics, Adsense, FeedBurner, Gmail), MailChimp, Twitter, Facebook, SeoMOZ, Alexa, Zendesk, SalesForce and more.

Also, it has support for data from custom sources including a CSV file (hosted in a URL or uploaded directly), HTML, image or RSS.

Such an ability is so good as we can easily auto-generate CSV files with the data to be visualized using the scripting language we prefer (like "sales from the project x" and "new sign-ups from the project y") and let Cyfe grab + display the data. Or, we can provide the URL of the chart image generated in our own web application and it is displayed like an iframe.

The application has multiple charting options (line, area, bar, pie) so it is possible to view each custom metric with the one that fits the best.

Cyfe is not a single dashboard app and any number of tabs can be created which is handy for creating groups and collecting the widgets of each project under its own dashboard  which is good if you are viewing a pretty high number of widgets.

Widgets can be positioned by drag 'n' drops just like iGoogle to create the order we want. And, we can upload our own logo for a more custom look.

Also, the application can be reached from any device (desktop, tablet, mobile) and things will work smoothly.

It comes with a free plan that includes 5 widgets that will be enough for many and plans with more widgets exist.

WordPress, as most of us experience, is so strong and flexible. It is hard to think of a website that can't be brought to life with it.

Besides this power, it is still simple which is great. This simplicity sometimes ends up in some non-existing features which would actually be nice if they were available when needed -seems like the definition of plugins: )-.

As a designer/developer who spend lots of time with WordPress, I want to share a list of plugins which I use for almost every WordPress setup and they end up saving lots of time.

First of all, of course, I'll begin with a shameless self-promotion. The first plugin (Reporteur) is developed by me but I assure you that it fits the title of this post perfectly (else, I'm sure that the editor would probably remove it without even me knowing).

Oh, I'm also going to include the author's names, especially for avoiding mix-ups. There are many plugins so closely named but so far apart on features, usefulness and quality.

Reporteur

It is a simple Google Analytics reporting tool.

If you want to get your information right in the WordPress admin instead of going to the Google Analytics website, this is for you.

The plugin gives a basic information about your website (which were useful enough for my family and friends who forced and tortured me to create this plugin).
Author: stildv

Google Analytics for WordPress

This is a stable Google Analytics code including plugin.

We all know that, things work by just copy-pasting the Analytics code to the footer. Or was it better to the header? And how do we track outgoing link clicks or downloads?

Well, with this plugin, you don't need to worry about all that.
Author: Joost de Valk

Read the rest of this entry »

UIKit is a set of lightweight (4kb minified / gzipped), simple, functional and flexible UI components.

The components are built to work in modern browsers and, currently, there are dialog, confirmation, color picker, flipping cards, growl-like notifications and a context menu solutions in the pack.

Each component comes with multiple options like the dialog having a modal-like display option notifications having standard, warning and error modes.

Items are mostly styled to have structure-only rules which eases applying any custom styling to match our apps.

PHP Bug Lost is a free and open source script for debugging and monitoring PHP code.

It is a one-file-script, works by inserting a function inside web pages and displays the information in a console window right over the web page.

The script can present custom logs, SQL queries, variables, Ajax queries and measure loading times + CPU/memory usage.

PHP Bug Lost is not only built to be used in the development environment but it can also be set to auto-send e-mails when any of the monitored data is over or below the expected values.

syze is a standalone and tiny (<1kb) JavaScript-library for targeting web page designs by device or browser size very easily to build responsive websites.

The library allows us to define any number of breakpoints (as widths) with a single function and sets the class of <body> automatically on "window resize" or "change in orientation".

There are functions provided for collecting device + browser sizes and setting a custom debounce rate for making sure that no serious CPU load is created for the user's computer when syze is active.

syze also has a callback fired afte each event which is great for adding custom events to the mix.

Loading screens are a part of almost any application (softwares, games, etc.) since forever.

We also see them in HTML5 apps informing us that the resources to be used for the application is being downloaded and the status of the overall progress.

PxLoader is a JavaScript library, that is built for the popular Cut The Rope game's HTML5 version, for downloading images, sound files or any other resource before any defined action (like activating the whole app).

It enables us to monitor download status with the help of progress + completed events and also lets us to prioritize the order in which items are downloaded.

Such features make PxLoader not only a library to manage the download of resources but also a good fit for creating visual preloaders for HTML5 apps.

There is always a new challenge for web designers and developers.

One of the latest is definitely responsive web design; the art of serving the same web page to multiple devices which look good on all of them.

It is a getting-popular approach. As always, there are questioned parts (like the increasing number of screen sizes and the difficulty in setting breakpoints) but these are minor and creating a responsive website is nothing difficult.

Thanks to talented people out there that there are great resources simplifying development of such websites. Many tricky stuff can be handled easily with the right tools.

For jQuery users, there are a good number of responsive design plugins and here is a carefully collected and well-categorized list to bookmark and hit back when you are about to design responsively : ).

Layout & Tools

Response JS

The plugin has the mobile-first approach and enables us to dynamically arrange code blocks based on breakpoints + serve media progressively using HTML5 data attributes.

It also offers useful methods for easily testing screen properties that are important for creating responsive websites.

jquery responsive web

This plugin adds dynamic classes to the <body> depending on the operating system, browser and window size so that you can use a single CSS to change every aspect of your design.

When you resize the window, it automatically changes the window size related class. There are also two functions called, one on init, and the other on resize, so that you can make design manipulations accordingly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Q&A websites are a great way of sharing information with other users. Simple, focused and easy to use for everyone.

Qhub, a web application for quickly creating Q&A websites, is giving away 4 annual licenses (1*Deluxe and 3*Pro licenses) to WRD readers.

Joining the giveaway is pretty easy and details can be found at the bottom of this post.

What is Qhub?

Qhub is a hosted web application for having a question and answer website within minutes.

It is either a new community you are trying to create or a place to engage with your users and answer their questions, the application handles the requirements well.

Users can simply ask questions with adding tags to them and others can choose to answer and/or rate other answers. There is also a point system for motivating users to be more active.

The look and feel of the website can be completely customized (logo, background, colors, custom CSS, etc.) to match the main website.

Admin panel provided is feature-rich enough to control users, entries and any other system settings.

Various widgets (like Side Tab widget or Ask a Question widget) are offered for spreading the content into other websites. And, an API exists for integrating the data with 3rd party apps.

How to join the giveaway?

Qhub is giving away 1*Deluxe and 3*Pro licenses (all of them are annual) and in order to join the giveaway, you can choose one or both of the options below to increase chances of winning by:

• commenting to this post
• tweeting this giveaway (click to tweet easily)

The winners will be announced as an update to this post a week later (12 Jan 2012).

Good luck everyone.

The winners

Here they are:

• @ElDesperado381 (Deluxe account)
• Zack (comment #484588) (Pro account)
• Mosselman (comment #484813) (Pro account)
• @LOx3N (Proaccount)

Congratulations and thanks to everyone for joining the giveaway.

Sugar is a JavaScript library that aims to ease JS development by extending its native objects with new, helpful methods.

It brings lots of new featured for working with strings, numbers, dates, arrays, objects,regular expressions and functions.

As an example:

• capitalize would make the 1st letter capital
• isEven and isOdd helps finding if the given number is odd or even
• count would find how many times the given character exists in an array
• isFuture would return if any given date is bigger than today
• and so much more.

The library is very well-documented and it is a huge helper for JavaScript-heavy applications.