Over the years I have tried and used a load of WordPress installers. Most of these products ahve not been very good. The best I found for a long time was from Mass Automation, WPInstaller, a product still being sold. I have found an alternative and at very low cost. Here it is: Desktop WordPress Mass Blog Installer & Manager This tool does a fine job of installing WordPress along with your choices of themes and plugins both of which can be activated automatically.
I really liked that I could add up to 10 pages to the site at setup so that I can have all my 'admin pages': About, Privacy, Disclaimers etc all ready to go saving quite a lot of time. In addition I can set up the inital post, the blogroll, categories etc etc.
The tool also functions as a WordPress blog manager and enables the webmaster to update versions, themes and plugins from the desktop and to multiple sites in one go.
If this tool included a blog poster that enabled me to submit content to my blogs without logging into the site then I'd be a very happy man. However coming soon is and Article Poster and Article Creator tool within the installer. If these actually show up then this will for the current price of just $29 be an absolute steal.
Take a look for yourself, there is a demo version available from the sales site: Check this!
Filed under Blog Setups, Blogging Tools, Install WordPress, Reviews by on Mar 18th, 2010. Comment.
When we were building lots of blogs for other people we discovered that the search engines seemed to particularly relish content on the static pages.
We would add content to static pages that defined the style and theme of the site and once the pages were indexed they'd often be among the best ranked pages on the sites we made.
There is a problem though – our basic promotion strategy was to syndicate the rss feeds from these sites to a network of rss directories and aggregators and, as you probably already know, WordPress does not include pages within the feeds it produces. This meant that the first pages to be indexed were rarely the best quality content for which we wanted the sites to be known.
The normal way round this is to make a short post that links to the page but this can be quite time consuming.
Today I came across a plugin that helps a lot. This plugin, when activated, adds pages to one's rss feeds. Rss Includes Pages is by Marios Alexandrou and works on Wordpress versions from 2.5 onward.
Here is a link to Marios' blog where there are user comments on the plugin.
One important point, if you want to use the plugin to publicise pages on a new site but do not want to continue having pages in your feeds then you simply deactivate the plugin and pages will no longer be shown. No muss, no fuss!
Filed under Blog Promotion, Blog Setups, Blogging Tools, Ideas and Tips, Install WordPress, Reviews by on Apr 17th, 2009. Comment.


Recent Comments