Managing even a handful of WordPress websites can be a pain, for example 10 websites means 10 different login accounts that you must access each time you want to write an article, update plugins or change theme settings. While you could give WordPress Multi-Site a chance that system can be confusing and time consuming for non-Wordpress experts. ManageWP however takes care of multi-site management by installing a simple plugin on each of your WordPress blogs which then allows them to be controlled by a single user login interface found at ManageWP.com

Once you have signed up for a free trial account you simply install the sites plugin on each of your websites. This plugin essentially gives you access to your blogs from within the ManageWP administration panel.

After the system has been installed you will be asked to add websites to your panel, those websites will then be accessible via the ManageWP login panel. Once installed the system then provides many useful features.

For example you can choose to add and upgrade themes for all of your websites from one screen, removing the need to log into various accounts.  The system also allows users to be bulk added for login purposes.

If you run a network in which posts are added to more than one website at a time ManageWP also provides a “Bulk Add” option for posts and pages. I personally found the “Add New Page” option helpful when creating privacy and copyright polices for various websites. read more

Automattic, the parent company of the WordPress platform and WordPress.com announced on Wednesday that they have teamed up with ad professionals Federated Media to provide ad placement on users blogs.

The announcement was made at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco and according to both company’s the program will allow brands and advertisers to target participating WordPress.com site owners to reach relevant audiences based on relevant site content.

Speaking about the partnership Federated Media CEO Deanna Brown said the new system is built on “relevance of scale” since an advertiser can choose to work with several thousand or several million websites all at one time.  read more

WordPress, one of the largest Blogging platforms on the web, has announced that 18 million of its self-hosted Blogs will be iPad friendly. Frankly, iPad users everywhere should be excited.

Automattic which owns WordPress.com, flipped the switch on its iPad optimized interface allowing Bloggers to create a custom mobile experience that doesn’t sacrifice content and formatting because a mobile device is accessing the Blog.

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WordPress.com, the host of many popular WordPress powered Blogs including TechCrunch, has been hit with a massive DDOS attack taking down the service. Blog owners are reporting slowness when logging in or loading their WordPress powered sites.

Graham Cluley, Senior technology consultant for Sophos Tweeted an email sent to VIP customers such as TechCrunch:

WordPress is currently being targeted by a extremely large Distributed Denial of Service attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases. The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second.

We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult. At this time, everything should be back to normal as the attack has subsided, but we are actively working with our upstream providers on measures to prevent such attacks from affecting connectivity going forward.

We will be making our VIP sites a priority in this endeavor, and as always, you can contact us [REDACTED] for the latest update. We will also update this post with more information as it becomes available.

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For those of you not squeamish with the idea of hosting your own social network, you’ll be glad to hear that BuddyPress has released a new update which should make the DIY social network compatible with WordPress 3.1.

This release backports a few important fixes from the currently in-development 1.3 version of BuddyPress to play nicely with the new and very much improved WordPress network administration interface. We’ve also updated the bundled version of bbPress from 1.0.2 to 1.0.3, which addresses a few issues that do not effect BuddyPress directly.

Every effort has been put into supporting both WordPress 3.0 and 3.1 with this release to make updating your sites as painless as possible, so this should be another worry-free update! (Official BuddyPress Blog)

For those of you unfamiliar with BuddyPress, it’s basically a DIY social networking software that empowers you to host and build your own community without having to hire a developer to build one from scratch.

WordPress fans can easily activate BuddyPress by installing the official plugin, and users desiring to customize their social network further have hundreds of BuddPress plugins at their disposal (not to mention the option of creating more).

Do you use BuddyPress? If so, what are your favorite features and (more importantly) what features should the BuddyPress team add to improve it?

WordPress is a widely used content management system that is typically associated with Blogs but can power any kind of setup from a portfolio to an e-commerce site. Whether you’re a Blogger, novice developer or avid web designer, understanding WordPress can greatly benefit your work. Here’s 3 tools to get a grip on WordPress.

Smashing Magazine

I was first turned on to Smashing Magazine by a teacher and have pored through every nook and cranny of the site and its network since. Smashing Magazine, its collection of Blogs and well-written books are a tremendous source of knowledge and inspiration. The tutorials, collection of WordPress themes and books on development and design will help you master WordPress.

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It looks like those of us using the WordPress for iOS app will soon be able to respond back to comments without having to install CommentPush.

Push notifications are coming along nicely! [...]

We’re also considering push notifications for Likes as well. What do you guys think? What else would you want to have notifications for? (via Chris Boyd on Making WordPress for iOS)

According to Chris Boyd users would be able to visit the exact comment posted upon your blog from within your app which is similar to how Twitter for iOS sends users to the exact Tweet reply instead of merely opening the app.

This will make it not only much easier to reply back to comments in a timely fashion, but also help weed out human spam much faster.

As far as push notifications for likes goes, hopefully WordPress has a setting where users can turn this specific feature off as some blogs may receive hundreds of likes in a post (note: push notifications for likes is only available for WP.com sites).

This future update should also help WordPress stay competative against rivals, especially Squarespace (the latter which has boasted push notifications for several months now).

Note: Yes I know the WordPress app icon is upside down, but that was apparently done so the team could distinguish between the test app and the one approved by Steve Jobs app tribunal.

Once again it looks like my Android friends will have yet another reason to boast about their DROID, Evo or Samsung Galaxy smartphones after WordPress recently updated the app with a feature that is perfect for both smartphones and feature phones.

A big thanks to contributor Christof Dorner, who added support for QuickPress shortcuts on the Android home screen. Just long press on the home screen, select ‘Shortcuts->QuickPress’ and then select the blog that you would like to use. You will then have an icon on your home screen that takes you directly to the new post screen to start blogging straight away! (WordPress for Android)

For those of you unfamiliar with WordPress, QuickPress is a feature that allows a blogger to quickly jot down thoughts without being distracted by other post settings (i.e. formatting, categories, image/video layout).

Although the feature is now baked into every WordPress install, QuickPress is not yet available upon WordPress for Blackberry, iOS, Nokia or even Windows Phone 7.

Even though users can easily get by without utilizing QuickPress (as WordPress for iOS’s layout is very basic compared to its WP brethren), it would be a great feature to have for those of us who enjoy blogging on the go.

Despite rumors proclaiming the contrary, WordPress is actually a very secure CMS platform utilized by millions of users around the world.

Unfortunately its immense popularity makes the software a prime target for hackers, similar to how Facebook and Twitter are prime targets since “everyone” is using them.

While there are more advanced measures that users should take when securing your WordPress site, here are the 3 most common habits I see practiced by some WordPress users that may set ones blog up to be hacked. read more

After teasing us with a secret update, it looks like Akismet (an anti-spam service by Auttomattic) has revealed that they are forsaking flash dashboards to the joy of millions of iOS users everywhere.

We’ve redesigned the Akismet stats page to bring it in line visually with the rest of the WordPress admin. There are new view options: the last two months, the last six months, the last year, or all time.

Not only does the page look better, it also loads faster thanks to flot.js.  Flot is a great little open source chart library for jQuery.  Flot give us complete flexibility over how we display stats, and it allows you to view stats on any device that supports JS. (Official Akismet Blog)

Previously Automattic made a similar move regarding their WP.com Stats feature which embraced Flot in September of 2010.

Users can quickly view not only how many spam messages were caught by Akismet each day, but also false positives as well (which the company humerously refers to as “ham”).

The new layout should also be much friendlier for iOS devices, although users may want to view their Akismet stats on the iPad instead of the iPhone (due to the latter’s tiny screen).