Matt Mullenweg, WordPress and WP-Plugins

Who is Matt Mullenweg and what exactly is WordPress?

Matt Mullenweg is from Houston Texas and is an American Entrepreneur best known for his open source content management system, software WordPress. WordPress is built using PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) language and is paired with a MySQL Database, or MariaDB database. Matt must have spent his early childhood life on a computer developing his heart out to end up coming to terms with a May 27, 2003 release date of his founding development when he was just 19 years old. One of his catch phrases in his WordPress development was and may still be “Code is Poetry”. WordPress simplifies a website that has content being updated daily. More than that, it has endless functionality with an open directory for various themes and plugins that add functionality and endless style. Simply put, you may change the entire look and feel of your website with a click of a button. Or, if you understand code, namely HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, PHP and MYSQL, and many others languages that could be referenced, you can make any style theme you want and plug it into your WordPress CMS, and quickly build with button clicks. For the sake of this post I don’t want to outsmart my common sense. After all I am a real estate professional with passion for beautiful presented content! WordPress can help you build an online presentation, an online eCommerce store; it can literally do anything you want it to do. However, on the downside of WordPress, it can be a very heavy website, often times loading your server down if you don’t properly configure each new functionality you add to your WordPress website carefully. You have to understand the mechanism called caching to understand how to make WordPress powerful as it is. The Great State of Tennessee website for Realtors is developed using WordPress at www.tnrealtors.com.

How does WordPress work?

As previously mentioned, WordPress functions with core PHP files all found here for free www.wordpress.org You can simply download your copy of WordPress for free, read through the installation instructions and find yourself strong web hosting provider who’ll get you up and running. The best hosting out there uses CPanel because it’s really the best way to manage your website and toggle among many different features that will enable your website safe, spam free, and even has SSL/TLS functionality built right in. Also creating a MYSQL Database, a User for that database, and associating that user with a password to said database is a piece of cake. Once you create your DB, you simply add configuration steps in a config.php file using a text editor and then upload it back to the server and, Viola!, you are signing into your new CMS/CRM…Whoa! I know many of you reading are like what the heck? The greatest thing of all is you can literally use a one click install button featured in most hosting platforms, including Iword Hosting, but I always opt to do things the hard way.. There are some steps a good hosting provider will walk you through so that you can have your website sending spam free mail, and indexed with a high ranking SEO score. In the future Iword Hosting will offer a very strong hosting platform that will power any web development and aim to provide WordPress developers fueled up resources to enable all the web hosting power they need to have endless scalability.

Now what is a WordPress plugin?

A wordpress plug-in is something that adds to your website. Take for example the plugin I just made a couple weeks back that does no more than return a value from true to false where the new WordPress Image Threshold is concerned. So by adding a simple line of code to a PHP file, add_filter( ‘big_image_size_threshold’, ‘__return_false’ ); you fix it. Then putting that file into a directory with the exact same name, uploading into your websites “Plugins” directory, you can simply log into the backend of your website and activate that plugin. That code will supersede what has been previously written. In other words, you can make WordPress do whatever you want it to do with very little limitations if any at all. As I promised in a facebook post to friends and family I am going to provide with-in this post a couple of WordPress Plugins that do just what I needed them to do. They may work for you also. I am going to extend this post just a little to talk about how difficult it is in this day to send email that wont go to a spam folder when you are sending your own mail with your own domain names for example (realtor@philipwiley.com) and IP’s (Internet Provider).

How I made it to 9.98/10 for an email score

Ok so it has been brought to my attention how unbelievably hard it is to send mail that wont go to spam. However, using this simple tester tool at the following website: www.mail-tester.comyou can get a score, and instructions that follow to help you reach a better score. Warning, when you receive these instructions you may fall over trying to resolve all of the issues. I went from a 4.5/10 to a 9.98/10 and finally have made it out of the spam folder. I am going to fix the rest and reach a 10/10 but for now I want to send my clients clean email and show them anyway I can how passionate I am about doing a thoroughly wonderful job for them. The biggest issue I had to battle with was fixing a what’s called a MIME_TYPE_ERROR. This error justmeans that when you send an email template that looks nice it should include a plain/text version only, so that people can view just what you have to say and not fuss with anything else where style and design in concerned. This simple little error costs 1 point and a half. That’s a big deal. Another seemingly small job to resolve called adding a DEMARC was a headache to say the least. So in this email I will include a plugin that resolves the plain text email issue so that you can get closer to sending clean emails from your website server mail.