I was reading a Joe Vitale book today, where he talks about the power of fear in selling.

No better example is in WordPress security products.

Depending on who you talk to, WordPress is either doing fantastic, or the single biggest scourge of online software that ever existed (and only one step above a virus or worm). Or something somewhere in between.

The fact is, WordPress is a tool – and a very good one.

BUT…

…I’m going to let you in on a secret that few people will discuss: …

With the hacked WordPress 2.6.4 recently, a few people have been questioning if they can or can’t do that same thing – offer another WordPress version.

The answer is Yes – mostly.

Because WordPress is Open Source (GPL) license, all source code must be made available to others. Permission is given for anyone to rework that code and offer it themselves – in effect, cloning WordPress and offering it as their own (copyrights need to be included of course).

So why there aren’t there WordPress-enhanced products out there (say …

Awhile back, WordPress had a bug – drafts and future articles could be read if you knew what to look for.

For example, if you used the ?p=NNN parameter (as I mentioned in my article on shorter email links for WordPress), you could view this article with the link:

http://ActiveBlogging.com/?p=211

Whether it was a future post, draft, or visible.

WordPress has since fixed that, but there still is a small gap in the feature. If you guess right, the value MAY return the permalink for the future post, even if …

Some people install WordPress in a subdirectory, so they can point to their blog from their main site.

The initial impulse usually seems to be to name the directory /blog/

This is often not a good idea, for a couple of reasons:

Keywords in the URL are valuable. This is prime real estate in your Search Engine Optimization efforts, and shouldn’t be ignored. For example, if you’re doing a blog on dog training, which do you think benefits you more:

http://egwebsite.com/dog-training/index.php

http://egwebsite.com/blog/index.php

Install your blog in a subdirectory called …

Sometimes the most obvious questions are overlooked – like what are WordPress themes?

For those of us working with WordPress constantly, it’s old hat – but for people setting up a new blog, the concept is not simple.

In fact, the WordPress theme system is unlike anything I’ve worked with before, an unusual pastiche of files and code that combine into a web page.

Let’s say your blog has the default theme active (as set in the Presentation menu of your WordPress Admin). Even though you physically load a page …