For everyone who attended this year’s WordCamp, thank you for helping to make it a huge success! For those who weren’t able to make it to WordCamp Raleigh 2010, we had an amazing lineup of speakers, over 260 attendees, and tons of fun and exciting times for all. Check out our first batch of WordCamp photos. (More will be coming soon.)

We’ve already started planning WordCamp Raleigh 2011, so if you’re interested in next year’s amazing North Carolina WordPress event, make sure you subscribe to the WordCamp RSS feed and to the WordCamp twitter.

Michael Torbert, Dan Milward, and Craig Tuller at WordCamp Raleigh 2010

For those of you who haven’t heard, WordCamp is coming to Raleigh in May. The inaugural event of WordCamp Raleigh has been scheduled for Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd May and will be held at the Raleigh Sheraton Hotel in downtown Raleigh. We are very excited to be involved in this event and we expect it to be among the best WordCamp’s this year. There are some great speakers already lined up such as Aaron Brazell the author of the WordPress Bible, Brad Williams of WebDevStudios.com, Dan Milward the creator of WP e-Commerce, and many more.

You can read more about WordCamp Raleigh on the web site.  You can also follow the event on Twitter, the official hash tag is #WCRaleigh.  If you haven’t bought your tickets yet then visit the Registration page.  If you’re coming in from out of town you can reserve accommodation at the Raleigh Sheraton Hotel for a discounted group rate, visit the Location page for details.

We hope to see you at the event!

All in One SEO Pack currently supports quite a number of older versions of WordPress.  This isn’t necessarily a pain to keep up, but does require extra code as well as additional testing.  Potentially even more significant are the security implications.  Justin Tadlock wrote an insightful post about whether plugins and theme authors should force users to upgrade.  It would be helpful if Automattic would release stats of which versions of which plugins are running on which versions of WordPress.  Short of that, I only know from experience of seeing All in One SEO Pack installed on older versions occasionally, and sometimes even on extremely old versions.

What are your thoughts?  Should All in One SEO Pack continue to support outdated versions of WordPress for people who don’t upgrade for whatever reason?  Should explicit support be dropped, in favor of better functionality, less development time, lighter code?

Vote your opinion and voice your opinion on the linked forum thread.

Earlier today, or a few weeks ago, depending on the Media Temple representative you talk to, it’s become known that someone hacked Media Temple.  They’ve tried blaming it on WordPress, old passwords, outdated/inadequate security measures…

In the meantime, you may want to think about switching to a real WordPress web hosting company.

Plugin developers always have to contend with questions that start with “why.” It’s no different here, with All In One SEO Pack, and I’m here to give everyone a small peek into the decision-making process that goes into why the plugin behaves the way it does. We’re familiar with the complaint: “Another update? Now I have to go spend fifteen seconds of my precious time to re-enable the plugin in the configuration screen… Again?” But has anyone bothered to ask, “why?” I won’t wait. Here’s why:

A few months ago, an update to AIO was released. By then WordPress had one-click plugin upgrades available, so a blogger from Quick Online Tips did so. They attributed a dip to their pagerank to the upgrade, and wrote about it on their blog. The culprit, they claimed, was that the “Use Canonical URLs” option which was a new option that was checked by default. (Let’s set aside the veracity of that claim as we know that their dip in PR has nothing to do with that setting being turned on.)

The developers of All in One SEO Pack decided that the best way to avoid this kind of problem is to force the users to review their settings after upgrading the plugin instead of being automatically implemented. This is no different from having to review your lease agreement with your landlord should you renew your lease for another year. That way, whatever happens to a site’s rankings after the admin clicks the “enable” radio button and the “save changes” button is entirely the site admin’s responsibility.

So if you are ever left wondering why AIO needs to be re-enabled with every update, it’s so you get a chance to review everything before committing to any (if any) changes.

Our users of All in One SEO Pack spoke, and we listened.  Some users send emails commenting that updates are released too often, and some remark that the new features, bugfixes, etc aren’t released soon enough.  Let us know what you think!

At the start of the weekend, we released the 1.6.x version of All in One SEO Pack.  This is a major upgrade, with numerous improvements, bugfixes, feature enhancements, and increased functionality.  This version is months in the making, with the last month or so dedicated almost completely to testing, with dozens of volunteers from around the world participating.  Thank you to all the beta testers.

So far (three days), All in One SEO Pack 1.6.x has been downloaded approximately 55,000 times.  Of these, almost all of the upgrades/installs have gone flawlessly.  A few people have had questions about exactly what to do for this upgrade.  When you first activate the new version, you’ll see a message to let you know that All in One SEO Pack Must be Configured.  Don’t worry, this is normal.  Everyone sees this.  When you activate the plugin from the plugin management page in WordPress, you’ll see this message, letting you know to go to the All in One SEO Pack options page.  When you go to the options page for the SEO plugin, configure the plugin however you like (or leave the default or old options) and select the enable radio button option.  Then click the update settings button.

If you are upgrading from an earlier version, you’ll see one or two more buttons.  What’s happening here is that the data that AIOSEOP has created in your database needs to be migrated.  Version 1.6 and above use a more efficient method of storing and retrieving data.  We could of course just had this migration script run automatically, and saved your the trouble of clicking two buttons, but we felt that this way gave you complete control, and gives you another opportunity to back up your database (just in case).

The first button refers to the All in One SEO Pack meta data (title, description, keywords, etc) for your posts/pages.  If you’ve never set any of this data, you won’t see the button.  If you don’t click the button, the data remains untouched and readable by only older versions of the plugin.  No non-AIOSEOP WordPress data will be touched at all by clicking this button.

The second button refers to your All in One SEO Pack configuration options on its settings page.  Just like with the previous button, if you don’t click it, the data remains untouched, and readable only by previous versions of the plugin.  Clicking the button migrates this data into the new format.

A lot of time and effort has gone into developing this plugin, including this huge upgrade.  If you’ve enjoyed using All in One SEO Pack or any of my other plugins, please consider making a donation.  If you’d like to keep up with my updates, subscribe to the RSS feed for Semper Fi Web Design, MichaelTorbert.com, and follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/michaeltorbert/.

Thanks to onefinejay for his great tutorial and the use of his images.

As many of you know, WordPress is no longer just a tool for blogging. It’s a great solution to use as a Content Management System. If you’re a webmaster who wants all of the easy of use of WordPress and control abilities, but require a CMS solution, WordPress is a great option.

When you want to use WordPress as a CMS, navigate to SETTINGS->READING. Select the option to have your front page display a static page. This will be your “home page”. Now select a page to be your “posts” page.

All in One SEO Pack now supports multiple methods of utilizing the CMS features in WordPress. Whether you use a PHP custom page template for your home and/or static page, a custom loop, or any other method, All in One SEO Pack now supports all of these configurations and customizations.

For your posts page, All in One SEO Pack now has an option to control the keywords shown. You can either set the keywords manually in the page editor in the All in One SEO Pack section

or else you can use the new Dynamic Keyword Generator now built into All in One SEO Pack.

With this option, all the keywords (and optionally tags as well) of whichever posts are currently showing on the posts page, well be automatically used as META keywords on your page for posts.

We’ll now be providing support for All in One SEO Pack, WP Security Scan, and SMS Text Message on our new Support Forums.  This can also be a place to discuss general WordPress topics, SEO issues, etc.  We feel that this will provide an even higher level of support to the users of our plugins, so that everyone can benefit from each others’ questions and answers.  Registration is currently free.  I look forward to seeing you there!

Make sure you’re up to date with the latest version of All in One SEO Pack.  Lately we’ve added some bug fixes, security updates, performance enhancements, and support for CMS-style WordPress installations.  Thanks to Jared Ritchey for working with us on this issue.  Be sure to check out their plugins as well.

One major feature of interest is that you’ll now be able to use the built-in functionality with WordPress to have a static home page and an alternate posts page (settings->reading).  

Make sure you keep up to date by following us on twitter.