WordPress 3.0 is the thirteenth major release of this popular blogging software. The set of features introduced in this release have a significant impact on people who use WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS).

Here is the list of features that have been introduced in the 3.0 release

Custom Post Types

Prior to the release 3.0, the WordPress allowed you to publish two types of content by default: “Posts” and “Pages.” With the release of version 3.0, you can now define additional content types with their own attributes. For instance, if you’re running a WordPress site for a design agency, you may create a custom post type for displaying employee pages, another for portfolio items, and another for client testimonials. You may then customize your theme to better suit each individual post type.

Menu Management

Menu management offers you a complete control over your website’s navigation menus.  Offering easy drag and drop interface, it enables you to create menus that include any mixture of links to internal pages, external URLs, categories and any other field. You can then embed these custom menus as a widget wherever your theme allows.
Changing the order, titles, and destination of links is also an easy task with menu management in WordPress 3.0.

Custom Taxonomies

Custom taxonomies brings WordPress 3.0 closer to a true CMS. This feature enables you to create additional pieces of meta information.  For instance, if you have a real estate website, you might use additional categorizations to provide a list of specifications on each property like asking price, number of bedrooms, year built, etc in addition to photos and descriptions.

New Default Theme: “Twentyten”

Twentyten features a clean, yet bold design. It offers two features that are particularly useful if you’re new to WordPress and don’t have the coding skills to customize your theme.  These two features are:

Custom Header Image

This feature gives you the ability to easily change your site’s header image. Comprising eight interesting banner images to choose from, it also allows you to upload your own image.

Custom Background Image

This feature offers you the ability to upload your own background image for your site.  You can also set a solid background color if you want.  This feature is useful for those who don’t want to get their hands dirty and edit CSS.

Multi-site

With Multi-site, you can manage several different websites (with different domains and/or sub-domains) all with a single installation of WordPress.  What was previously known as WordPress MU (Multi-User) is now merged with the core WordPress system in 3.0.

Here are a few of the minor feature enhancements arriving in WordPress 3.0:

Get Shortlink (with your own domain)
This feature allows you to get a shortlink for your post based on your own domain name.

Author Templates
This feature is helpful for those who run multi-author blog and like to apply unique styles or layouts to individual author pages.

Select Username and Password During Installation

This feature allows you to define username and password during installation, saving you the hassle of changing them later.  It also adds a newlayer of security to your website.

If you are one of those who is looking to install WordPress in a hassle free manner, LimeDomains allows you to set up your WordPress application with just a single click.

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging applications that helps you connect with your global audience. To further enhance your blog’s users experience and reach, WordPress offers a wide range of mobile friendly plug-ins. These mobile friendly plug-ins help you in making all your previous postings become immediately mobile-accessible with a minimum effort on your part.

In this post, we offer you a wide range of WordPress plug-ins which make possible to view and moderate blogs on mobile.

MobilePress

This is a free open source WordPress plugin that enables you to turn your blog mobile friendly. MobilePress enables you to customize your mobile presence by creating your themes for specific mobile browsers (iPhone and generic devices) and also allowing you to decide when to display your mobile blog. MobilePress integrates with Aduity.com for ad serving and analytics. Just by clicking a few buttons, you can easily plug into the Aduity platform and start serving ads and tracking analytics. Also, it comes with a number of free themes optimized for normal handsets and one for iPhone.

WP-Audience

This plug-in does a lot more. It enables you to activate the comment toolbar to engage your audience with your site etc. The mobile site currently works only for iPhone. WP-audience also integrates with your social profiles and keeps them synced up with your mobile site. It facilitates blog posts, comments, tweets, replies, and all other features, without the hassle of writing a single line of code. Users are automatically re-directed to your mobile version without you having to install any other plug-in or change any other code.

Wordpress PDA & iPhone

This plug-in makes your WordPress blog viewable for PDA and iPhone browsers. Wordpress PDA & iPhone detects the browser agent and loads a simple theme on fly. It comes with a theme folder which acts like normal theme comprising of all the functionality of WordPress theme. Installing this plugin is simple and straight forward. All you need to do is extract the files in you WordPress plugins folder and activate the plug-in in the admin.

WPTap

This plug-in offers both free and paid themes that let you display a mobile friendly version of your blog on touch screen phones like the iPod Touch, iPhone, Blackberry and Android. This plug-in is compatible with other Wordpress plug-ins that can be used with older devices. It leaves your regular theme as is and displays the tap theme when a smartphone/touch phone user accesses the site.

Wapple Mobile Admin

This plug-in allows you to mobilize your blog in minutes. It detects every single mobile device and all aspects of your blog are tailored to the visiting handset. So, even if you view your blog with a brand new, it still works perfectly, giving you a consistent look and feel for each and every one of your visitors.

Kih is_mobile

This plug-in is used to detect whether a visitor visiting your website is using a web browser on a mobile devicevs. Also, this plug-in allows you to create additional profiles of mobile device web browsers that are not included in the default configuration of the plug-in. This helps you in setting up different stylesheets for different types of mobile browsers, enbling you to  customize the device or mobile phone user.

WPtouch

This plug-in makes your WordPress website load lightning fast on touch mobile devices. It displays your content in an attractive manner without interfering with your regular theme.

MoFuse

This plug-in enables you to make your blog mobile friendly for various devices like iPhone, Blackberry, Android and various others. This plug-in also allows you to automatically detect and redirect your mobile visitors to the mobile-friendly version of your blog.

WordPress Mobile Pack

The plug-in helps you mobilize your Wordpress site and blog. It includes a mobile switcher that enables you to select themes based on the type of user that is visiting the site, extra widgets, device adaptation and a mobile administration panel that allows users to edit the site or write new posts

Wetomo WordPress to Mobile

Wetomo (Web to Mobile) service allows publishers to display their content to users on mobile phones and other handheld devices. This plug-in detects when a user is on a mobile phone and automatically redirects them to Wetomo. Wetomo acts as a proxy between the mobile phone and the Wordpress site, adapting the web site content to the mobile phones.

Hope that these plug-ins will help you make your blog become mobile-accessible with a minimum effort. Please provide your suggestions and feedback on the same.

Network security tools provide physical and information security to all paths, links, and databases of your network. These tools thus help you protect and safeguard your network security from spams, viruses, and hacking.

Check out the following free tools available on the Internet that will help you in securing your network.

Encryption Software

Ddcrypt- This small and fast utility tool helps you in encrypting files and folders. It allows you to delete the files after the creation of the encrypted files. The files created by the software will create a file with an extension .ddc, that you can decrypt just by browsing.

EyeMage IIE- This tool enables you to securely encrypt any file or text into a bitmap image. Also, you can easily hide photos in photos, zip files in images and Word documents in diagrams by using this tool.

PGP – This tool provides basic PGP encryption capability for messages and files. It is a comprehensive data protection system that accurately reports to satisfy compliance needs.

Email Spam-Blocking Software

MailWasher- It is a powerful spam filter software that enables you to check and manage your e-mails before downloading them. MailWasher eliminates the spam by checking and stopping unwanted viruses and e-mails. This tool with Outlook Express, Outlook, Thunderbird, Incredimail, Windows Mail, Gmail, Hotmail and every other email program.

Spamihilator- This tool examines the emails before downloading from the servers and delete unnecessary messages. Spamihilator uses a Word-Filter that searches messages for known keywords. You

Anti-virus Software

McAfee Stinger – This tool helps in detecting and removing specific viruses. This tool is not a substitute for full anti-virus protection. It is a tool that assists administrators and users when dealing with an infected system.

Clam Antivirus –This tool features high detection rates for viruses and spyware, scanning scheduler, right-click menu integration to Microsoft Windows Explorer.  Clam Antivirus is a for Microsoft Windows NT/98/Me/2000/XP/2003.

Avast Home Edition- It is a free antivirus software for home noncommercial use. It scans for viruses, worms and Trojans on disk, CDs, in E-mail, IM and P2P. This small, fast and reliable tool offers you updates of virus database twice a week.

Port Scanner Software

SuperScan- It is a TCP port scanner that offers a variety of additional networking tools like HTTP HEAD, WHOIS, ping, trace route, etc. Some of its features include Windows host enumeration, banner grabbing,UDP scanning, TCP SYN scanning HTML reports, built-in port description database; etc.

Shields Up- This tool alerts you  whenever your ports is opened through their firewalls or through their NAT routers.

Hope you would utilize these tools to protect your network from all kinds of internal and external security threats. Please provide us your suggestions feedback on the same.

PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side scripting languages. It offers detailed documentation, a huge community, numerous ready-to-use scripts and well-supported frameworks, making it a perfect tool for development. Major Websites like Facebook, Digg and WordPress are indexed using PHP.

In this post, we present 15 useful PHP tools that can significantly improve your programming work flow.

Debugging Tools

•    Xdebug: It is one of the most popular debugging PHP extensions. This tool provides tons of useful data that enable you to quickly find bugs in your source code. The tool plugs into many of the most popular PHP applications, such as PHPEclipse and phpDesigner.

•    DBG: This is a robust PHP debugger that is used for local and remote PHP debugging. DBG can be used easily with the command line and also plugs into numerous PHP IDE’s.

•    MacGDBp: This live PHP debugger application is used for Mac OS. It offers features like the ability to step through your code and set breakpoints.

Documentation Tools

•    phpDocumentor: This is a documentation tool for your PHP source code. It possesses features like ability to produce output in HTML, PDF, CHM and XML DocBook formats, and has both a Web-based and command-line interface and source-code highlighting.

•    PHP DOX: This is an AJAX-powered PHP documentation search engine that allows you to search titles from all PHP documentation pages.

Testing and Optimization Tools

•    PHP_CodeSniffer: This PHP 5 script tool is used for maintaining uniform coding styles for large projects and teams.

•    PHPUnit: This tool helps you test your Web application’s stability and scalability.

•    dBug: This tool is used for producing data tables that contain information about classes and objects, arrays, database resources and XML resources, making it useful for debugging purposes.

Security Tools

•    Scavenger: This is an open-source, management tool that helps system administrators track vulnerability findings and review accepted and false-positive answered vulnerabilities.

•    Securimage: It is an open-source PHP CAPTCHA script that is useful for generating complex images and CAPTCHA codes, helping you protect the forms from spam and abuse.

•   Pixy: PHP Security Scanner: It is a Java program that performs automatic scans of PHP 4 source code. It is used for detecting XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities. Pixy takes a PHP program as input and creates a report that lists all the possible vulnerable points in the program.

Useful Extensions, Utilities and Classes

•    SimplePie: This is a PHP class that helps you work with RSS feeds.

•    TCPDF: This open-source PHP class is used for generating PDF documents.

•   phpMyAdmin: It is a Web-based tool for managing, building, importing, and exporting MySQL databases.

•    PHPExcel: It is a set of useful PHP classes that is used for working with Microsoft Excel files. PHPExcel enables you read Excel files and write to them.

We hope that these tools will enable you in enhancing your programming work flow. Please share your suggestions and feedback with us.