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Mobilize.js is a HTML5-JavaScript framework for creating mobile websites from any standard sites quickly and easily.

The idea behind the framework is; rather than serving a totally different mobile web page, loading and using only the needed parts and displaying them inside a mobile theme (jQuery Mobile's default theme).

Mobilize.js can be used on every website, however, for WordPress and Sphinx users, there are plug 'n' play solutions provided.

It is open source and can be hosted under the website or a free-to-use CDN-hosted version is offered too.

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1. Pods CMS

www.podscms.org

Just as the name suggests, Pods CMS is a content Management plugin for WordPress. Gone are the days of people using WordPress for your blog alone. It’s fast becoming one of the industry’s standard CMSs, and if you’re thinking about using it for this purpose, then this plugin is possibly the most powerful of all.

Pods lets you add and display your own content types, but unlike WP custom post types, each bit of content gets its own table. You can:

• Create Pods (tables)
• Create conventional CMS input forms within WP Admin
• Add custom menu items to WP Admin
• Easily loop though data
• Create detail pages
• Use custom code to query database

I use Pods on 90% of WP builds. It’s brilliant.

If, for example, you need a manageable page on your website which includes a list of team members with a photo and name, then there’s no choice other than to manage the page via a CMS. Features like this are standard in most CMSs, but getting a basic WordPress installation to do this right out of the box is no simple task. This is where Pods CMS comes into its element. Functions like this are so much more simple – you can even customise the WP admin menu and add quick links to your pods.

The level of support is excellent considering this plugin is completely free! Pods is well documented in the user guide and there are a number of tutorials by Jonathan Christopher. The Pods team also run and manage a Q&A forum.

If you currently use Pods, please help the team by making a donation: http://podsfoundation.org/donate/

2. Gravity Forms

www.gravityforms.com

Every websites needs a form. Well, almost. This might be a contact form, sign-up form, registration form, payment form – the list is endless. Gravity forms does it all, quickly and easily, and you don’t need to code a thing!

The range of features is amazing:

• You can quickly and easily create a form by dragging and dropping fields
• Use default styling or custom CSS
• Data stored in a database
• Email data – customise email content and format
• Segregate and export data
• Add-ons : Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Paypal etc (Push data to other services)

It isn’t free, but if you’re familiar with building forms then you’ll know that it can be a time consuming process. Gravity Forms does all the hard work for you, and with so many extra features the personal package is a bargain at $39 (£25).

However, if you just want a simple form then make sure you check out Contact Form 7. A free, more basic plugin for your WP site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

3. WordPress SEO by Yoast

www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

As it says on the tin, WordPress SEO is our recommend plugin for optimising and customising SEO on your website. Of course, to begin with you need to always make sure your site is structured and built correctly, but then you can use a plugin such as WordPress SEO to make sure all your posts and page titles are correct and meta descriptions are optimised.

Features list:

• Post titles and meta descriptions
• Robots Meta configuration
• Canonical
• Breadcrumbs
• Permalink clean up
• XML Sitemaps
• RSS enhancements
• Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
• Clean up head section

4. Google XML Sitemaps

www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

A simple but very effective plugin, Google XML sitemaps will generate an XML sitemap to help search engines to index your website or blog more effectively.

Sitemaps are useful for one simple reason: They make it much easier for a crawler (such as Google) to see the complete structure of your site, and in turn, allows them to find as much of the content as possible in order to rank your website fairly.

5. Google Analytics for WordPress

www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/

Tracking visits to your site can be extremely useful. Who wouldn’t want to know which sections are the most popular, how long visitors spend on your site, where they come from and what devices they are using? l’m sure I don’t need to detail out why you should have Google Analytics on your WP site, but if you’re still unsure, check out the video above to find out more on all the great features. Convinced? Well what are you waiting for? Install this plugin to quickly and easily manage Google Analytics from your admin panel.

6. WP Super Cache

www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

The speed of your website is very important but unfortunately it’s often something that’s overlooked, especially by the less experienced developers. Many people don’t realise that your Google ranking is actually effected by the speed of your site, so if that sends alarm bells ringing, then you can use this tool from Google to check how your website is currently doing: http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/

WP super cache works by creating static html versions of your dynamic pages. These are then served instead of more heaver (larger file size) and processor intensive files. These files will be served to users the majority of the time, increasing the speed of your WordPress site and improving the user experience.

The plugin is very simple to use; you simply install it and turn it on. This is great for the less technically minded, however you also have the option of editing the ‘advanced’ options to take full advantage of all the settings and features that WP Super Cache has on offer.

7. WP Minify

www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-minify/

This plugin also focuses around speeding up your website. It is recommend by WP Super Cache to work in tandem, but it can also be used on its own.

The plugin combines and compresses Javascript and CSS files to improve page load times. This is really important (especially if you have several plugins installed) because most WP plugins have their own CSS and JS files on top of all the ones you’re using for your basic pages. So as you can see, requests to these files could quickly get out of hand without you even realising it!

To be completely honest, this may not drastically improve the speed of your site for one single user, however if you have a more popular site it will certaintly improve the performance when delivering your pages to 100s of users at once.

8. Disqus

www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disqus-comment-system/

Disqus is a comment system that’s been designed and developed to improve and replace standard WordPress comments. It has a wide range of features – two of my favourites being threaded comments and the option to login with your Twitter or Facebook account.

More features include:

• Threaded comments and replies
• Notifications and reply by email
• Subscribe and RSS options
• Aggregated comments and social mentions
• Powerful moderation and admin tools
• Full spam filtering, blacklists and whitelists
• Support for Disqus community widgets
• Connected with a large discussion community
• Increased exposure and readership

Disqus is used by a wide range of websites, Mashable being one of the most famous.

Note: If you use any other comment plugins they will automatically be disabled if you use Disqu.

9. Custom Post Type UI

www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-post-type-ui/

Custom post types and taxonomies can be extremely useful if you have areas on your site where you want to be very specific with the types of data that you’re publishing. This plugin allows you to easily create and manage these areas though a simple UI which gives you options to label custom posts and add tabs to the sidebar based on the post type. If you’re still a little unsure and need a bit more info then check out this video which walks you through an example:

Alternatively, read this tutorial which details how to use Custom Post Type UI:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-use-custom-post-types/

10. BBpress

www.bbpress.org/

BBpress is forum / bulletin board software from WordPress that can be installed as a standalone application or as a plugin. It’s designed to be simple, light, and solid, and can also be extended with plugins just like the standard WordPress package.

Forums and discussion boards can be a great way to drive traffic to your website and increase return visits from users. If you want lots of features and tools you may need to install a number of plugins, however if you want a simple clean forum adding to your existising WordPress site then this is the perfect option.

We hope you’ve found some useful hints and tips here, but if there’s anything that you think we’ve missed off please leave your suggestions and comments below.

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Learn more about SocialCart.com in Dataopedia.com

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Have a business question? Ask Startups.com

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In this tutorial I’ll show you how we removed the dates, and set up an option to keep the dates in for ‘time-sensitive’ posts.

Why remove the date?

First things first, why would we want to remove the date from the SERP snippet at all?

As Ben explained in his article, if someone sees your post in the search results, but it is dated several years ago, they are much less likely to click through to the page, as they may assume that the information there will be out of date.

This is fair enough for searches that are ‘time-sensitive’, for example if you’re searching for recent news, you don’t want to read articles from last year. This is why we added an option to keep the date if desired (which I will explain later).

But certain types of post are ‘timeless’ and would be as relevant today as they were 5 years ago. For example Ben’s article about why you should code by hand. The article was written in 2006, but the message is still relevant today, therefore we would choose not to display the date on this post, in case people wrongly assume that the content will be out of date.

At the same time, if a search result shows a recent date, then this is more likely to encourage clickthroughs, which is why we only remove the date after the article is three months old.

Where does Google get the date from?

To remove the date from the SERPs, we need to know where Google gets it from in the first place. I read a number of different articles on the subject, which said that Google can find the date on a WordPress post from the the_date() function, or failing that, from the date of comments or the content of the post itself.

However, looking at the page source, I found that the only place the full date appeared was directly after the main heading, from the the_date() function, so I figured removing this should be sufficient.

How to keep the date

We decided that more often than not, we would want to hide the date, so we made that the default. But as I mentioned earlier, we wanted an option to keep the date on a post if we felt readers would benefit from knowing the date of publication.

We do this through a custom field, which I’ll call add-date. So if you want to keep the date, you add the add-date custom field, and give it a value (any value will do, as we will only check whether the field exists or not, but for the sake of consistency I use a Y as the value).

Note: If you prefer, you can add a meta box to the Edit Post page and make this custom field into a checkbox, as pictured below. If you don’t know how to code that, the Custom Fields plugin makes it very simple.

How our 'Add date' option appears in the post editor

Making it work

Now all we need is a bit of PHP to make it all work.

We start with the date function:

1

<?php the_date(); ?>

Then we add a conditional statement which only shows the date if the post is less than 90 days old:

1
2
3

<?php if(strtotime( get_the_date() ) > strtotime( "90 days ago" )) {
        the_date();
} ?>

And finally, we add another condition, so that if the post is less than 90 days old OR our add-date custom field exists, then the date is shown:

1
2
3

<?php if((get_post_meta($post->ID, 'add-date', true)) || strtotime( get_the_date() ) > strtotime( "90 days ago" )) {
        the_date();
} ?>

And that’s it! You can change the 90 days bit to whatever time period you prefer.

The verdict

So within about a week of implementing this, the dates had gone from all of our selected SERP snippets, and as shown in Ben’s article, our traffic is on the rise. Yay!

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While most of us use Google Apps, as well as social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, there’s so many other apps that it’s be impossible to make a poll that would include all of the web apps most of us use. So, instead of a normal poll, this week we’d love it if you could comment and let us know what web app you couldn’t live without. Google Apps and social networks would be high on anyone’s list, so to make it more interesting, why not tell us your favorite Email/Calendar solution, social network, and then the other web app you couldn’t live without.

I’m still trying to decide what my other app would be. I’d have to put down WordPress or Simplenote, or perhaps CloudApp … I’m still not sure. What would you pick? 

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WordPress is, without a doubt, a very powerful CMS application which makes creating and managing any type of website pretty easy.

Press2Flash is an open source AS3 framework that helps Flash developers to integrate their Flash-powered websites with the backend of this awesome CMS.

It uses XML for communicating with the WordPress API and there are no hacks or workarounds (so the system stays secure).

Besides creating, editing and deleting the contents, there is also support for other functions like featured images, tag cloud and more.

Special Downloads:
Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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• A new Quick Photo feature, soon to be the favorite of mobile photo bloggers everywhere, allows you to go from camera to post in one easy step.
• WordPress.com and Jetpack stats have finally be added to the app.
• The app has now been fully translated into ten languages.
• Over 75% of reported crashes have been fixed.

If you have struggled with the iOS app lately, it’s definitely time to update. What do you think of the new release?

BitNami Cloud Hosting makes it easy to install and run Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and dozens of other popular open source applications in the Amazon Cloud. Automatic monitoring of your servers and one-click backup and restore make running applications in the cloud a breeze.

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SnackTools is a suite of web applications designed to simplify the way you create and publish rich media widgets. Our goal is to enable you to easily create your own blog and website widgets, in a fun and effortless way.

Our apps work with most blog platforms, CMS and social websites like Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Joomla, Drupal, Webs, Weebly, Jimdo, Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Ning. Technically, anywhere you can post a YouTube video, you can post a SnackTools widget as well.

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So, let’s rock.

What is Multisite? Why it is so good? Why should I care?

With Multisite install you can create (and remove!) multiple blogs that can work together. They share the same DB, WP files and domain (but you can use it in multiple domains, see below).

It gives you a lot of power to build complex networks with a few clicks.

For example, let’s say that as a really good freelancer you have a lot of good customers (I hope so! ). If you use WordPress as your CMS, you have to install one blog for each one of them, right? No. If you set up a network, you just have to upload a new theme and create a new sub-blog for each one of them. Actually, you can have the same text, menus, and categories for all of them.

Advantages

Share info

You have some info that is easily shared between all blogs, so you don’t have to worry about:

• Common user data – Users who are added to your network will have subscriber access to all sites on your network. People don’t need to have an account for each blog in the same network.
• Posts – You can easily get posts (categories, meta-fields…) from any blog in your network and post it as if it were your own content.
• Themes & Plugins – Any theme or plugin set available to the super admin (network administrator) can be used for any blog. So you don’t have to install the same plugin in 300 blogs

Separate some info

As each blog has to be different from its sister blogs, you have some info that is still separated, like blog configurations, selected theme, and separate site administrators.

Examples

We have a lot of applications for it:

• User created blogs - WordPress.com
• Multi-Themed blogs – If you want to create a network like Tutsplus.com
• Groupon-like sites – So you can have one blog for each city, which has its own administrator.
• Freelancers – So you can have one blog for each customer, and can easily setup a preview for them.

How to activate multisite?

Since Worpdress’s Codex has a really well explained tutorial of How to Create a Network, we won’t cover this.

How to use your new admin panel

As any WordPress admin panel, the network admin panel is really easy to use. But it isn’t so easy to find. Here is where you can access it (after your network is created, of course):

From here you can do almost anything you need.

So if you want to create a new blog, just go to Sites > New site. Once created you have a lot of options for each site, use it carefully (don’t go just changing the permalink structure for each blog, for example, it may cause some errors).

If you want to set which plugin / theme will be available for each sub-blog, use this option:

Useful snippets

Talking about code, there is a few things you must pay attention to. When you activate your network, you change some functionality of wordpress, so some functions will not work as they used to (or as you thought they should). And you have some new functions that makes your work easier.

Here is a list with much more functions for your entertainment.

Switching between blogs – switch_to_blog() function

Let’s say, for example, you own wpmultisite.com and you have WordPress (Network install) there. Inside wpmultisite.com you have /phpblog and /cssblog. Your wordpress’s structure is:

• wpmultisite.com/ – The main site, because it was installed first. Its ID is always 1
• wpmultisite.com/phpblog – The second blog installed, so its ID is 2
• wpmultisite.com/cssblog – The third blog installed, so its ID is 3

When a page is requested in any of these blogs, your server executes it as if it was a single wordpress install, the only difference is that it will only get data from the current blog ID.

But you can change it when you use the switch_to_blog() function. It makes your blog get data as if it were other blog in your network. So if you want to make phpblog get cssblog’s data, you just have to set switch_to_blog(3). Note that it won’t work for plugins, which is only called when you really access a blog.

You must have been asking yourself now, “how can I make this STOP?“. Well, once you’ve finished you just have to call restore_current_blog() and make things go back to normal. If you called switch_to_blog() twice, each restore_current_blog() will just bring you to previous active blog. For example, if you have switch_to_blog(2) and INSIDE of it you do switch_to_blog(3) when you call restore_current_blog() it will bring you back to blog 2, and if you call restore_current_blog() again then you will be in your original blog.

Other important thing to notice is the $blog_id global variable, that stores the current rendering blog. It is useful, for example, if you have the same theme for multiple blogs inside your network.

A little example, how to get posts from phpblog if you are in root, from cssblog if you are in phpblog and from root if you are in cssblog

//gets active blog
	global $blog_id;

	switch($blog_id) {
		case 1:
			//we are in root, so we want to go to phpblog
			$goto = 2;
			break;
		case 2 :
			//we are in phpblog, so we want to go to cssblog
			$goto = 3;
			break;
		case 3 :
			//we are in cssblog, so we want to go to root
			$goto = 1;
			break;
	}

	switch_to_blog($goto); //magic!
		//I always indent code inside a switched block, it is easier to read after a few days (or months)
		$lastposts = get_posts('numberposts=-1');
		if (!empty($lastposts)) {
			foreach($lastposts as $post) :
				setup_postdata($post);
				//do some cool stuff in here
			endforeach;
		}
	restore_current_blog();
?>

Get posts from all blogs – get_last_updated()

What if you want to get some recent posts from last updated blogs, not only one blog? Then get_last_updated() is the function that will save your life!

It returns the last updated blogs as an array, so all you have to do is a foreach and you are done!

Let’s see a simple example that shows last post from last updated blogs:

$blogs = get_last_updated();
echo '
<h1>Last posts in network</h1>
';
foreach ($blogs AS $blog) {
	echo "
<h2>".$blog["domain"].$blog["path"]."</h2>
";
	switch_to_blog($blog["blog_id"]);
		$lastposts = get_posts('numberposts=1');
		foreach($lastposts as $post) :
			setup_postdata($post);
			the_title();
		endforeach;
	restore_current_blog();
}

Dynamically created blogs – wpmu_create_blog()

This is definitely my favorite. With wpmu_create_blog() you can do something similar to wordpress.com itself, where each user can create his own blog.

But before creating a blog you must create / choose the admin user. So, after you have user_id it is just call wpmu_create_blog() with its parameters. Pay attention in the “path” parameter, it must have “/” before it, or you blog will be created in an address that can’t be accessed (in our example, without “/” it would be wpmultisite.com1wd).

	$user_id = wp_create_user( $user, $pass, $mail );
	//params: wpmu_create_blog($domain, $path, $title, $user_id, $meta, $site_id)
	$id = wpmu_create_blog("www.wpmultisite.com";, "/1wd", "1WD inside wpmultisite", $user_id);
	echo $id;
?>

Are you hungry yet?

I hope you’re still hungry to learn more about creating a multisite blog. I’m sure you will use it for some great projects, you can read more about it  here:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Category:WPMU_Functions
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference#Multisite_functions

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• A common class, for stuff that is needed everywhere, for instance declaring a custom post type.
• An admin class, for all the admin related stuff, like my admin settings page.
• A frontend class, for all the stuff that is specific to the frontend, like loading a script or performing a shortcode.

You separate these by checking for two simple things:

if ( is_admin() )
	require 'class-admin.php';
else
	require 'class-frontend.php';

Easy enough right? Well you might want to take it even one step further. WordPress sets a constant for when you’re doing an AJAX request. This constant is DOING_AJAX. When WordPress is performing an AJAX request in the admin area, you probably won’t need to load the code for your admin settings pages, but you do need to load the code for your AJAX requests.

Separating.

So you’ll end up with code like this:

if ( is_admin() ) {
	if ( defined('DOING_AJAX') && DOING_AJAX )
		require 'class-admin-ajax.php';
	else
		require 'class-admin.php';
} else {
	require 'class-frontend.php';
}

This also means that the first snippet should be amended a bit, even when you’re not doing anything with AJAX, you should load it like this:

if ( is_admin() && ( !defined( 'DOING_AJAX' ) || !DOING_AJAX ) )
	require 'class-admin.php';
else
	require 'class-frontend.php';

By loading your code in a modular way like that, you’re making 100% sure your code has the lightest footprint possible and you’re not loading stuff that you (could) know upfront will never be used.

Separating frontend and admin code is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast – Tweaking Websites.

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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Not a member? Becoming an Access All Areas member gives you the ability to view exclusive members-only content just like this. The premium category is already packed full of discount codes and useful design resources, and there’s plenty more to come! Find out more about becoming a member, or take a peek at what’s available to premium members so far.

When just starting off writing the WordPress admin panel can be intimidating. There are some areas which do not relate to writing and other aspects which are just plain confusing. WordPress’ official website has much of this cleared up, but hands-on practice will go a long way.

Below I’ve gone over a few areas in WordPress keen to the eye of the writer. Blogging is pretty straightforward and can be a lot of fun if you enjoy writing. However, writing for the web appears much differently and offers a whole slew of advantages than physical pen and paper.

Opening WordPress

Assuming everything is installed and running properly writing becomes the next challenge. Upon first entering the admin panel you’ll notice all of the main links you need listed vertically along the left side. Posts should jump out towards the very top.

This area holds all of your post content, including drafts and publications you’re currently working on. All published articles will also be listed, but you can sort the lists based on the publication type. Articles are sorted chronologically by default which makes accessing your newest pieces a breeze.

By clicking the small arrow next to Posts or the link itself a new menu will be revealed. From here you can add and remove posts, categories, and tags. Each of the individual pages make up a great area for creativity. If you don’t enjoy creating such labels in advance WordPress allows you to add them on-the-fly when writing a post.

Examining the Writing Board

Try clicking the add new link underneath the Posts section. This will bring you to a new post page where you can add your own content into the site. The entire process is fairly straightforward – a heading and body input field are displayed in the center column. Between the two a URL will be created as an example of what your new post will look like.

On the right sidebar the Publish menu offers easy access to changing your article’s publication method. All posts are saved as drafts when you initially begin writing. Only by pressing the large blue Publish button will your posts go live.

In this same menu there are options for changing the article’s publication date and time. This can be useful if you want to put a large amount of articles live in a single day but don’t want to remove a certain post from the headline position.

Alternatively you may publish an article a few months back as your site will still rank well, assuming the article takes some notice and backlinks.

Categories and Tags

These two features often overlap and many WP users don’t use both. I find each offers a unique expression which the other cannot match. Although this method is not used everywhere, I find outlining the categories feature as primary and unique simplifies the whole process.

By this I mean each post is only set into a single category followed by numerous tags. This could be 3 or 30, honestly it depends on your blog and how well received your template is at holding large clusters of tags. Google and Bing may also ignore your tag links since each post would be seeded full of them.

Both will affect your page’s ranking and even your website when it comes to keywords found in search engine queries. This is why I argue tags, most notably in tag cloud format, offer a unique experience to the reader which newspapers and television just can’t offer. The even greater benefit here is how WordPress allows you to check the most used tags and categories directly from your post page. If you’re struggling for ideas just start typing a few letters and WP’s autosuggest feature will do the rest.

Writing Excerpts

Although this isn’t a requirement I find excerpts to be very useful for some styles of WordPress blogs. In more contemporary themes you’ll find custom functions written to trim down each article automatically and provide a preview on the home screen.

Excerpts are another option which gives the writer full control in manually editing this preview. WordPress posts may all have their own custom excerpt which is well documented in WordPress’ codex.

Additionally moving a bit down the page you’ll find some extended options. These can be used for larger blogs and digital magazines running a slew of posts and authors each day. You may disable comments from any given article if discussions are too heated or inappropriate. The Author segment allows you to easily update the current post’s author, which will still change even after the post has been published.

Writing in HTML View

If you are fairly knowledgeable with HTML and web standards I would highly recommend switching writing views. Initially after page load you may notice the body text has pre-determined styles applied.

These will affect all your post’s internal elements such as tables, paragraphs, headings, and hyperlinks. By default you are given the visual editor which is great for those who write articles in Microsoft Word or Google Docs and copy over formatting. But within the HTML tab you will find much more control in the code processing.

Adding images and page breaks can be a huge pain within the visual editor. It’s a clunky WYSIWYG textarea, which is great for the newbie writer! But in all honesty I’d even recommend the newbie pick up a few tutorials and learn how to write in straight HTML. The level of control is pristine and once you turn over it’s difficult going back.

Conclusion

Inspiration for writing may come from anywhere. In the blink of an eye you pick up on a fascinating idea and wish to take down notes. WordPress is easily the best system for saving drafts, notes, and ideas for publication at a later date.

This simple overview should give writers a detailed look inside how writing over WordPress works. If you’re just getting started writing the only true test of knowledge is practice and more practice. Ensure you’re writing about a topic you are truly passionate about. I find web design and user experience are fascinating topics – but truly any practice will dramatically improve your blogging skills in just a few weeks!

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20+ Powerful WordPress Security Plugins and Some Tips and Tricks →

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WARNING! If you’re hungry, you might not want to look at this post. Putting these website links together caused me to experience extreme hunger pains We’ve got 50 sweet & tasty website designs all inspired by or related to food, ranging from cupcake websites to restaurants, bakeries and more. I hope you enjoy the [...]

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   Design Trends: 25 Awesome iPhone…
   

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   Creative Tabbed Website…
   

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WARNING! If you’re hungry, you might not want to look at this post. Putting these website links together caused me to experience extreme hunger pains We’ve got 50 sweet & tasty website designs all inspired by or related to food, ranging from cupcake websites to restaurants, bakeries and more. I hope you enjoy the [...]

More Like This

1. 

   
   Design Trends: 25 Awesome iPhone…
   

2. 

   
   Best Designs: 100 WordPress…
   

3. 

   
   Creative Tabbed Website…
   

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One of the biggest CMS’ in the world is WordPress, and rightfully so. Today we’re going to cover some of the coolest and most creative WordPress powered websites, most of which you wouldn’t even believe could be powered by WordPress. In the past, WordPress was used for blogging only, but when you look over this [...]

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   50 Stunning Examples of Websites…
   

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Any restaurant site assembled using EZFoodie comes with an interactive menu, photos, and both social media and Open Table integration.

Read more

Learn more about EZFoodie.com in Dataopedia.com

Find out how much EZFoodie.com is worth with Stimator.com

Have a business question? Ask Startups.com

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For courses on Dreamweaver and WordPress, check out the Killersites Video Tutorial Library.

Note that all of our videos are in a higher quality when purchased from our Killer Video Store or by subscription to our Video Tutorial Library!

Thanks,

Jody
Killersites.com

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A while back, I wrote a guide on how to improve the WordPress Admin Panel as an exploration of how we can customize the user interface of WordPress for end-users. In this post, I’ll take you even further with some awesome tricks, techniques and snippets from my website, WP-Snippets.

In the previous post, we removed a lot of clutter and things that we didn’t need. Now we’ll focus on things that happen behind the scene that can enhance the user experience.

Before You Get Started

If you don’t know what a filter or hook is, make sure to look at my previous post to learn about them. Alternatively, you can visit the WordPress Codex documentation on filters and hooks.

Most of the code we’ll cover will go in functions.php, so you have to create one in your theme folder if you don’t have one. This is a file that WordPress automatically checks before your template is loaded, so all the code in it will be executed.

Some of the code we’ll cover will be placed in wp-config.php, which is found in the root folder of your WordPress installation.

Let’s get started!

1. Remove the Admin Bar

WordPress 3.1 introduced a new Twitter-like admin menu bar.

If you don’t like it, you can disable it by putting the following in functions.php:

add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );

2. Specify the Auto-save Interval

WordPress has an auto-save feature for when you are writing a new post or a page so that in case your web browser crashes or your computer shuts down unexpectedly, you don’t lose all of your work.

It’s a good feature, but personally, I think it auto-saves way too often, which might slightly affect a website’s performance. Alternatively, you might be thinking WordPress doesn’t auto-save frequently enough.

Whatever the case may be, there’s a way to specify the interval in which WordPress performs auto-saves.

To specify the interval that WordPress should auto-save, you just have to put a single line of code in wp-config.php:

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 600); // 60 * 10, auto-saves every 10 minutes

Note that the time unit is seconds. Above, it will save every 600 seconds (or every 10 minutes).

3. Disable Auto-save

Some people may prefer to disable the auto-save feature completely. This is done in functions.php by adding this action:

function no_autosave() {
  wp_deregister_script('autosave');
}

add_action( 'wp_print_scripts', 'no_autosave' );

4. Reduce or Disable Revisions

Post revisions are another great feature in WordPress. It saves different instances of your post so that you can revert to previous versions. However, this can easily get out of hand since WordPress doesn’t have any limit on how many revisions is allowed.

If WordPress creates revisions frequently, it can make it difficult to find the version you need. Most importantly, many versions of a post can occupy more space in your WordPress database than you need it to.

To limit the amount of post revisions (or to disable post revisions altogether), add the following to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5); // Maximum 5 revisions per post
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false); // Disable revisions

5. Empty Trash Automatically

The Trash feature was introduced in WordPress 2.7, and since then, WordPress content that you delete gets staged there. It’s great for fault-tolerance in case you accidentally delete something you didn’t mean to. The feature works similarly to the Recycling Bin feature on Windows or the Trash feature in Mac OS.

Once you empty the Trash in WordPress, it is permanently deleted from the database. It is therefore important to empty your Trash regularly to keep your database in clean, tip-top shape.

Though the Trash feature is a welcome addition to WordPress, just like in real life, taking out the trash is a burden, and it would be much more convenient if someone else did it for you. Luckily, WordPress doesn’t mind doing the heavy lifting for you.

Just add this line to wp-config.php and you’re done:

define('EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 5 ); // Empty trash every 5 days

6. Remove the Visual Editor

If you are a web developer like me, you are probably scared of the visual editor in WordPress. Enter it, and it may mess up your nice HTML markup, especially when you’re posting code.

I always disable the Visual Editor for my own websites, just to make sure I don’t accidentally switch over to it.

It’s possible to disable it conditionally for each WordPress user by going to Users > Your Profile. However, if you want to remove it completely, you can add the following filter:

add_filter('user_can_richedit' , create_function('' , 'return false;') , 50);

7. Edit the Help Dropdown Text

If you take a look at the top right of the WordPress Admin panels you’ll see a button that says "Help." When you click it, Help text slides down.

This is a great place to add your own custom Help text for a client. You can even customize it for different Admin panels. For example, you can add a different Help text for the Add New Post panel and another one for the Comments panel.

Here’s how you go about it:

add_action('load-page-new.php','custom_help_page');
add_action('load-page.php','custom_help_page');
function custom_help_page() {
  add_filter('contextual_help','custom_page_help');
}
function custom_page_help($help) {
  // echo $help; // Uncomment if you just want to append your custom Help text to the default Help text
  echo "<h5>Custom Help text</h5>";
  echo "<p> HTML goes here.</p>";
}

To find what file you should add the action to, just check the address bar in your browser and add the load- prefix right before the file name. For example, if you wanted to add the custom Help text to the Add New Post panel, which has a file name of post-new.php, then you would use load-post-new.php as the parameter of the add_action function shown above.

8. Change the Contact Info Form

In the User settings, there is a web form called Contact Info. It has input fields for the user’s AIM account, Yahoo IM account, and so on.

But how about Twitter? What about Facebook? Out of the box, the Contact Info panel doesn’t have these input fields.

If you have multiple users on your WordPress blog, you might want to add new fields and remove old ones.

This is how you do it:

function new_contactmethods( $contactmethods ) {
  $contactmethods['twitter'] = 'Twitter'; // Add Twitter
  $contactmethods['facebook'] = 'Facebook'; // Add Facebook
  unset($contactmethods['yim']); // Remove Yahoo IM
  unset($contactmethods['aim']); // Remove AIM
  unset($contactmethods['jabber']); // Remove Jabber

return $contactmethods;
}

add_filter('user_contactmethods','new_contactmethods',10,1);

WordPress automatically does all the database work for you.

9. Change Role Capabilities

This is a handy snippet if you have multiple contributors on your WordPress website. The following code snippet allows you to change what the different WordPress user roles can and can’t do.

$edit_contributor = get_role('contributor'); // Get the user role
$edit_contributor->add_cap('upload_files'); // Contributor can now upload media
$edit_contributor->remove_cap('delete_posts'); // Contributor can no longer delete posts

A full list of roles and capabilities you can add or remove can be found here.

Important: The capabilities are written to the database, so if you want to give back a capability to a user role, you have to use the add_cap function to reverse the removal (and, vice versa, use remove_cap if you want to remove a capability you added in this fashion).

10. Check User Capabilities

This is extremely useful when you want to allow certain user roles to see certain things depending on their capabilities. This is done with conditional tags.

if( !is_admin() ) {
  add_filter( 'pre_site_transient_update_core', create_function( '$a', "return null;" ) );
}

Using is_admin() is one way to do it, but there is also a function called current_user_can() that lets you specify what capability the user needs to possess in order to see whatever it is you’re conditionally hiding.

if( current_user_can('edit_pages') ) {
  // True if user can edit pages
}

if( !current_user_can('delete_private_posts') ) {
  // True if user can't delete private posts
}
if( current_user_can('activate_plugins') ) {
  // True if user can activate plugins
}

Related Content

• Beginning WordPress Development: A Look at Common Functions
• A Guide to WordPress Custom Taxonomy
• Enhancing WordPress Custom Fields with Search Filtering
• Related categories: WordPress and Web Development

About the Author

Filip Stefansson is a 20-year-old web developer from Sweden who is a WordPress fanatic. He runs WP-Snippets and Pixby. You can connect with Filip via Twitter.

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Before installing a plugin on your blog, the first thing to do is to localize theme strings. PHP and the Gettext tool (which allow easy string translation) have two functions: _e() and __().

The only difference between _e() and __() is that _e() echo a string while __() is used to assign a string to a variable.

Let’s say your theme have the following code:

<div class="content">
    <h1>Welcome to my site!</h1>
    <p>I hope you'll like it.</p>
</div><!-- #content -->

What you have to do is to wrap all strings into the _e() or __() functions, as shown in the example below:

<div class="content">
    <h1><?php _e("Welcome to my site!"); ?></h1>
    <p><?php _e("I hope you'll like it."); ?></p>
</div><!-- #content -->

Once done, your string will be recognized by the WPML plugin (we’re going to install it) as translatable strings.

2 – Install and configure the WPML plugin

Now that your theme is fully localized, the next step is to install the WPML plugin, which will make our blog multilingual. Install the plugin using your WordPress dashboard, or get it here. Activate the plugin, then you’ll see a “WPML” link on your WordPress dashboard. Click on it and add at least one language.

3 – Translate theme strings

Once done, you now have to translate your theme strings in French. To do so, click on the “Theme and plugins localization” link located under the “WPML” tab. On the “Theme and plugins localization” page (See screenshot below) choose the Translate the theme by WPML option, so you’ll be able to directly provide translations in your WordPress dashboard. Though, if your prefer using a .mo file, the WPML plugin allows it as well, so feel free to choose your favorite option.

4 – Translate site content

Now, you have to translate your site/blog content. WPML provide an easy way to do it: Simply edit one of your posts or pages and have a look at the right side of the screen: you’ll see a box where you can create a translation for each of your posts and pages.

Translating your site content can take a while if your site have lots of pages, but thanks to the WPML plugin it is pretty easy to do.

5 – Translating your site menu

Right now, almost all your site is fully multilingual. Though, you still have to translate your navigation menu. To do so, simply go to “Appearance”, “Menus” and select your current menu. As you can see on the screenshot below, WPML has added some new options to allow you to create a new menu per language. How cool is that?

Right now, you should have a fully multilingual website. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

Like CatsWhoCode? If yes, don’t hesitate to check my other blog CatsWhoBlog: It’s all about blogging!

Easily create multilingual sites with WordPress

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On Monday, we set up a custom post type in WordPress for listing events. We also added Event Tags to them, and created a template for showing off the individual events.

Today, we want to look at the overall Events page. We’re going to list events by the date they occur, and work back in our tags so users can get a list of only the events that apply to them.

In the demo, we’ll be listing some WordPress classes, and sorting them into Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced.

(We’re starting on blank files here, so if you just want to learn more about templates for taxonomies and post types, then read on! If you want to set this up on your site though, you’ll need to have done the steps in Events List with Custom Post Types first.)

1 – New Files for your Theme

We will be creating the archive page for showing all of our event posts together, and a similar page for showing the same list but with only the events that have our event tag on them.

That means we’ll need two new files in our theme folder, named in this format:

• archive-post_type.php – In our case, this means archive-events.php.
• taxonomy-tax_name.php – In our case, that will be taxonomy-event_tags.php.

However, our two templates are going to be extremely similar. Instead of duplicating our content between the two, let’s make it more efficient by using just the one file.

Create the taxonomy-event_tags.php file, and paste this into it:

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<?php include_once 'archive-events.php'; ?>

Now when WordPress loads our event tag pages, it will use the template we’re about to make for the events list. Simple.

2 – The Barebones Template

The first thing to do with the archive-events.php file is make it match the rest of your theme.

The best way to do this is to make a copy of your theme’s index.php file, and then strip out everything from to . You’ll then add our code in exactly the place where all of that code used to be.

With the default 2010 theme, that leaves us with this:

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<?php get_header(); ?>
 
<div id="container">
	<div id="content" role="main">
 
	<h1 class="page-title">
		Events
	</h1>
 
	<!-- OUR NEW CODE WILL GO HERE -->
 
	</div><!-- #content -->
</div><!-- #container -->
 
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

It may take a little fiddling to get this just right with your theme, but it’s important to get those
in there to make sure your page layouts stay the same.

3 – List Our Event Tags

If you look at the screenshot, you’ll see a box at the top of the page that lists the event tags. And if the user is already filtering by a tag, it adds in a link back to the full events list.

Paste the following into your file and we’ll take a look at what it’s doing right after.

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<?php
/**
 * List the Event Tags.
 */
 $tags = get_terms('event_tags', array(
 	'number' => 10,
 	'orderby' => 'name'
 ));
 
 // Build a comma-separated list of the tags.
 foreach($tags as $tag) :
 	$link = get_term_link($tag->slug, $tag->taxonomy);
 	$tagsText .= '<a href="'. $link .'">'. $tag->name .'</a>' . ', ';
 endforeach;
 
 // Strip out the ending ', '
 $tagsText = trim($tagsText, ', ');
?>

In this code, we get the tags dynamically (So no matter what tags you’re using, you can copy and paste the code above). If you had a huge number of event tags, you’d want to adjust the get_terms() line to get only the ones you’d like to display.

get_terms() gives us an array of tag objects. The foreach…endforeach; section loops through each one and adds it to a string (This is one of the times when our WordPress object cheat sheet comes in handy). The end result is a string like this:

Tag 1, Tag 2, Tag 3,

We then use PHP’s trim() function to take out that closing ‘, ‘.

So now we have all of our tags in a sentence in PHP. The next step is to output it.

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<p class="events-info">
	Sort events by type: <?php echo $tagsText; ?>.
	<?php if(is_tax('event_tags') ) { echo ' Or <a href="'. get_bloginfo('url') .'/events/">view all</a>.'; } ?>
</p>

As you can see, we’re putting this all in a paragraph with the class “events-info” so that we can style it later on. Line 2 then prints out our list of tags from above.

The important part is line 3. We use a conditional tag to check if we are on an event tag page, and if we are, we add the simple link back to the main events page.

Still with me? Cool. Because the PHP is the easy part. Time to query the database now.

4 – The New Database Query

This query will be quite long, so let’s just work out what we want it to do in plain English first.

1. Is this a taxonomy page? (i.e. being sorted by a tag)
2. If it is, grab all of WordPress’ taxonomy tables too. Then make sure our results have the tag in them.
3. Now carry on to grab only published Event posts with a Date field, and order them by that.

Here goes!

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<?php
/**
 * Do we need to filter by event tag?
 */
if(is_tax('event_tags') ) :
	$tag = strip_tags( get_query_var('event_tags') );
 
	$querystr = "
	    SELECT wposts.*
	    FROM $wpdb->posts wposts, $wpdb->postmeta wpostmeta, $wpdb->terms wterms, $wpdb->term_taxonomy wtax, $wpdb->term_relationships wrels
	    WHERE wposts.ID = wpostmeta.post_id
	    AND wterms.term_id = wtax.term_id
	    AND wtax.term_taxonomy_id = wrels.term_taxonomy_id
	    AND wrels.object_id = wposts.ID
	    AND wterms.slug = '$tag'
	    ";
 
else:
	$querystr = "
	    SELECT wposts.*
	    FROM $wpdb->posts wposts, $wpdb->postmeta wpostmeta
	    WHERE wposts.ID = wpostmeta.post_id";
endif;
 
// Build the rest of the query, i.e. only get events with dates, and order newest first.
$querystr .= "
    AND wpostmeta.meta_key = 'Date'
    AND STR_TO_DATE(wpostmeta.meta_value,'%m/%d/%Y') >= CURDATE()
    AND wposts.post_status = 'publish'
    AND wposts.post_type = 'events'
    ORDER BY STR_TO_DATE(wpostmeta.meta_value,'%m/%d/%Y') ASC
    LIMIT 20
    ";

Told you it was long.

What we are doing here is building up our query as a PHP string. We start out by checking if this is a tag page (Exactly the same as in step 3, by using the is_tax() function).

If it is, then line 6 will get the tag’s slug (Similar to its name) and save it in the $tag variable.

Lines 8-15 start out our query, grab the 5 tables we need, and tell the database how to match them up. Line 15 then uses the event tag with all of that.

Lines 18-22 are for when we aren’t filtering by a tag, so they’re much shorter.

The rest (25-33) are the same for both queries, and take care of ordering the events by the date of the event (Not the date the post was written). For a full explanation, check out the original post in this series.

5 – (Last Step!) Listing Events

Onto the final stretch! We now have our query ready, so all we still need to do is run it and print the results.

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$events = $wpdb->get_results($querystr, OBJECT);
 
if ($events):
	echo '<ul>';
 	foreach ($events as $post):
 		global $post;
 		setup_postdata($post);
 
 		// Get a friendlier version of the date.
 		$date = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'Date', true);
 		$date = date_create($date);
 		$date = date_format($date, 'jS F, Y');
 		?>
 
	 	<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> - <?php echo $date; ?></li>
 	<?php endforeach;
 	echo '</ul>';
endif; ?>

Line 1 runs the query. If we get a result, we then start creating a list (Line 4). The foreach loop will run through each post brought back and create a list item for it (the setup_postdata() line let’s us use all of the template tags we’re used to working with).

Lines 9-12 are the same as we used in the last post to display the date in a more friendly format. Line 15 is where we eventually send the whole thing to the screen.

And that’s it all done! Well done if you made it this far. You should now have a fairly robust event listing that you can take and tweak to your own needs.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the series so far. The next post is going to be about adding custom meta boxes to the admin panel (So you won’t need to use custom fields directly anymore here). Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to see though!

Since we love giving stuff away, our friends at WPWebhost offered their services as a giveaway. Three lucky winners will receive a “1 year Freedom Hosting Plan“. The freedom plan breaks down like this;

• 50GBs of web space
• 500GBs of monthly bandwidth
• FREE lifetime domain name
• FREE monthly 50GB CDN
• Host up to 50 domain names
• WordPress 1-Click Installer

If you need further details on the plan that we are giving away, please refer Freedom Plan.

Contest Details

As we usually do here at Inspiredology we are going to pick the winners from our Comment List.

COMMENTS: Just tell us the website that you would use the hosting for, super easy eh!

Contest closes Thursday March 31, 2011 at 5pm EST, we will announce the winners on the April 1st, edition of the Friday Fix!

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Simply put, Jetpack is a vehicle to bring some of the best WordPress.com features to your self-hosted WordPress blog, and it’s launching today with Gravatar Hovercards, WordPress.com Stats, the Twitter widget, a wealth of cool shortcodes, Shortlinks, LaTeX markup, Sharedaddy, and After the Deadline.

Of course, these features are just the launch set. There are plenty more on the way, and all you need to do is watch for them to magically appear in your Jetpack panel.

Have you tried Jetpack yet? What do you think of it so far?

Disclaimer: I work for Automattic, Inc.

On March 11, catch Matt Mullenweg on the Future of WordPress at 3:30 pm, followed by Making Money with WordPress on March 13 at 9:30am, and stop by the WordPress Genius Bar at booth 829 during the trade show for awesome swag and one-on-one support.

If you’re going, have a great time at SXSW, and bring us back a t-shirt or something!

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Just because you didn’t get to go to that awesome conference doesn’t mean that you can’t still watch the lectures! Each week, we feature one recommended web development lecture on Nettuts+.

This talk, presented by Envato’s very own developer extraordinaire, Ryan Allen, will detail some of the potential pitfalls and solutions when maintaining massive WordPress blogs, like Tuts+.

Presentation Links

• How to Build a Successful Blog Business
• ScalingWP.com
• @scalingwp

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First, there could have been a momentary glitch, so try re-saving your permalink structure at Settings/Permalinks in your admin panel. If WordPress cannot automatically edit the .htaccess file, it will provide manual instructions after saving.

If that doesn’t work, contact your hosting provider and find out if mod_rewite is installed and active on your server. If it isn’t, refer to this guide for some tips on using permalinks without mod_rewrite, or find yourself a nice Apache-based server with mod_rewrite.

Permalinks are a finicky thing. They’ll either work right away, if you re-save, and if you use a work-around, otherwise they just won’t work at all. If you’re still having trouble, contact the WordPress Support Forums for more assistance.

First, there could have been a momentary glitch, so try re-saving your permalink structure at Settings/Permalinks in your admin panel. If WordPress cannot automatically edit the .htaccess file, it will provide manual instructions after saving.

If that doesn’t work, contact your hosting provider and find out if mod_rewite is installed and active on your server. If it isn’t, refer to this guide for some tips on using permalinks without mod_rewrite, or find yourself a nice Apache-based server with mod_rewrite.

Permalinks are a finicky thing. They’ll either work right away, if you re-save, and if you use a work-around, otherwise they just won’t work at all. If you’re still having trouble, contact the WordPress Support Forums for more assistance.

First, there could have been a momentary glitch, so try re-saving your permalink structure at Settings/Permalinks in your admin panel. If WordPress cannot automatically edit the .htaccess file, it will provide manual instructions after saving.

If that doesn’t work, contact your hosting provider and find out if mod_rewite is installed and active on your server. If it isn’t, refer to this guide for some tips on using permalinks without mod_rewrite, or find yourself a nice Apache-based server with mod_rewrite.

Permalinks are a finicky thing. They’ll either work right away, if you re-save, and if you use a work-around, otherwise they just won’t work at all. If you’re still having trouble, contact the WordPress Support Forums for more assistance.

As core developer Andrew Nacin briefly explained at WordCamp Phoenix 2011, he has made plenty of mistakes too.

Plus, you just have to love the visual evidence proving the he really does sleep only an hour a week.

More than likely, there is an index.html or home.html file in the same directory as the WordPress index.php file. Remove the index.html or home.html file, either via FTP or your hosting provider’s file manager, and all should be fine.

If that didn’t help, your server isn’t configured to recognize index.php as a valid index file, which is thankfully very rare. Access your server via FTP and try adding this to the top of your .htaccess file with a plain text editor:

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm

Both of these should work to cure your generic home page woes, but if they do not, stop by the WordPress Support Forums for further assistance.

More than likely, there is an index.html or home.html file in the same directory as the WordPress index.php file. Remove the index.html or home.html file, either via FTP or your hosting provider’s file manager, and all should be fine.

If that didn’t help, your server isn’t configured to recognize index.php as a valid index file, which is thankfully very rare. Access your server via FTP and try adding this to the top of your .htaccess file with a plain text editor:

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm

Both of these should work to cure your generic home page woes, but if they do not, stop by the WordPress Support Forums for further assistance.

Up until today, there was really no direct way to find what has been trending on WordPress blogs the world over.

Read more

Learn more about PressTags.com in Dataopedia.com

Find out how much PressTags.com is worth with Stimator.com

Have a business question? Ask Startups.com

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In this post I’ll show several ways of customising the HTML of search forms, how to conditionally display a search form, and how to display more than one search form on the same page without breaking validation.

Read full post

Posted in WordPress.

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• WordPress for Android – Of course, you have to start off the list with this app, the official WordPress app from Automattic. “WordPress for Android is an Open Source app that empowers you to write new posts, edit content, and manage comments with built-in notifications.” Requires a self-hosted WordPress or a WordPress.com blog. (Android Market)
• PostBot – “PostBot is an open-source WordPress client and supports multiple images in a post with thumbnail previews, sharing of images directly from Camera and Picture apps, editing existing posts, saving drafts locally, adding categories to a blog, and multiple blogs.” Requires a self-hosted WordPress or a WordPress.com blog. (Android Market)
• WP Stats – “Wp Stats is an app for your Android device that helps you to access your WordPress traffic stats collected by the WordPress.com Stats plugin. It is much faster way of reading all important data about your traffic blog than opening it in a web browser.” Requires the WordPress.com Stats plugin or a WordPress.com blog. (Android Market)

As you can see, this list is rather short. I’ve been hunting for WordPress-related Android apps for the last four days, and besides some incredibly low-rated copies of WordPress for Android, this is it.

In other words, we need your help! Do you use an Android app with WordPress that we’ve neglected to list? If so, we’d love to hear about it!

Don’t worry, the video is in English, and it’s about forty minutes of both entertaining and educational content. Enjoy!

WCSF 2011 will feature Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” address, several well-known speakers, activities, summits, workshops, and other events. If you’re a northern Californian fan of WordPress, or you love to travel to great WordPress events, this is one WordCamp that you can’t miss!

Have you ever been to WCSF? Do you plan to go this year?

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20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress

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• Priority #1 is always to fix the issues you are reporting, so go ahead and download 2.6.4 and tell us your thoughts!
• The rare duplication of content bug (some of you have reported that new posts sometimes inherits details from previous posts). We got a good lead on this.
• Media uploader sometimes scales up small images if Original size is chosen.
• Managing Pages in WordPress for iOS is a really bad experience, which we want to improve overall.

If you run into any problems with 2.6.4, you’re encouraged to report them on the forums.

This version cures numerous bugs and has been tested especially carefully in two areas: Media Uploader and Post Write/Edit.

The team is already hard at work on 2.6.5, so don’t be a stranger to the support forums if you find any problems.

Do you use the WordPress for iOS mobile app? Do you think this release was an improvement over the last?

For many reasons I like my HTML tidy, without redundant class, id, and title attributes. I’ve found two different approaches to cleaning up the HTML created by the wp_list_pages function, and I’ll explain both here.

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We’ve already shared part 1 of our highlights from 2010, but what about you? What is your most memorable WordPress-related highlight from the year 2010? This could be anything from the first 3.1 release candidate to that time when you spent all night fixing your friend’s blog.

To start the ball rolling, I’d have to say that the hiring of Andrew Nacin as a full-time developer certainly stands out as my favorite WordPress moment of 2010. So, what’s yours?

Filtering By Role

Dynamic Widgets written by Qurl takes the widget system to the next level. If you have any familiarity with Joomla, you know that you can assign modules to various positions that can only be seen by a specific user group. Dynamic Widgets allows for this and a whole lot more. In a nutshell, the following variables can be configured for displaying a widget: Role, Date, Front Page, Single Posts, Pages, Author Pages, Category Pages, Archive Pages, Error Page and Search Page. After installing the plugin from the WordPress back-end, the settings link will show up next to the Deactivate and Edit links, something I wish more plugins would do. There is also an additional menu item added within the Appearance main menu labeled Dynamic Widgets. From here, you can see an overview of all the widgets available on the site with the inactive widgets on the left side of the screen and active widgets on the right side. However, while the inactive widgets is labeled, there is no indication where the active widgets are located. This is a minor UI mishap that can easily be corrected,

No Label For Active Widgets

As for the plugin itself, it works as advertised without any issues with my testbed of WordPress 3.0.3. The reason why plugins like Dynamic Widgets are so cool is because instead of having a special sidebar for a particular page that only shows the widgets in that sidebar, you can instead, use one sidebar but define when, where, and under what circumstances a widget will appear which is a much better approach in my opinion.

Single Post Configuration

Until now, my plugin of choice for accomplishing the same sort of functionality has been Widget Logic. Widget Logic is a no frills type of plugin that requires you to know a thing or two about Conditional Tags which control the display behaviour of widgets. However, Dynamic Widgets is much more user friendly and enables the typical end-user to tap into the strengths of conditional tags without knowing them.

• Fix for multisite login issue.
• Fix for crash when deleting media items.
• Fix for occasional “Communication Error” for WordPress.org sites.
• Fix for crash when selecting Pages tab after deleting a draft.
• Fix for crash when entering settings during blog setup.

If you upgrade to 2.6.3 and notice any recurring or new issues, please report them in the support forums or link to them via Twitter. I’ve been having an issue where after I successfully add a new website, it does not show up in the list. I’m hoping 2.6.3 solves this problem.

None of the people involved in the discussion is a lawyer so keep that in mind when reading through the ticket. However, a good alternative to the situation was published by NKuttler which replaced the lyrics of Hello Dolly with the Free Software Song. As noted by core contributor Mark Jaquith, Matt is aware of the situation and has good lawyers at his disposal for legal counsel on the issue if he wants to pursue that.

After reading the fair use doctrine and reading through the discussion within the ticket, let me know your thoughts in the comments.

My buddy Dave (who’s colleague posted a very nice review of my WordPress SEO Plugin yesterday btw) tweeted today about 9rules, a once well respected blog network I’ve tried to get into 2 times:

I didn’t know what he was on about but then Wiep, one of Holland’s best link builders, chimed in:

Ok, as you might guess, I was now overly curious as to what was going on. Wiep was kind enough to point it out to me in chat before I had to start search myself. It appears 9rules is openly selling links. It was doing so using a plugin that I’ve seen more blogs use to sell advertising, called OIO Publisher. The point? The links 9rules sells are not nofollowed.

Now, here’s the part where it got really interesting. You see that link where they’re selling links? It’s an interface of the OIO Publisher plugin. That’s what we tend to call a footprint. Let’s take some parts of the URL and use them in a nice Google query:

inurl:/oiopub-direct/purchase.php inurl:link

I ran the query and… Ouch… That’s a lot of results. Some of them turned out to be sites that were also selling text link ads, but they were nofollowed. Which led me to think it’s an option in the plugin. So I asked for a copy of the plugin on Twitter, went through the source and indeed: it is an option. Not just for links, but for the banner ads as well.

Here’s where it got really bad too: it has an option to charge a premium to remove the nofollow. Now if you’ve ever tried to tell Google that you didn’t know what you were doing while selling links, checking that box is the best way to make them never ever believe that. And it creates an even nicer footprint:

inurl:/oiopub-direct/purchase.php inurl:link "use nofollow"

All these sites charge you a premium to remove the nofollow tag from your link and deserve to be banned instantly for selling links knowingly.

So, to repeat it: don’t sell links without nofollow. If you do, don’t be stupid enough to get caught. The example above is a feast for Google. They’ll find plenty of link buyers & sellers while researching this footprint.

One more time: Selling links? Don’t be Stupid. is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast – Tweaking Websites.

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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