Google Sitemap Generator
This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. If you have any intention of using the webmaster tools – you should get this plugin so you can keep your sitemaps current & prevent any hold ups from your site not being current with current tags/etc…

Digg-Digg
This is another program that gives your blog visitor’s the opportunity to make it accessible to share a post in a network that can potentially drive more traffic to your site. The integrate “Digg Button” , “Reddit Me Button” , “Dzone Button” and “Yahoo Buzz Button” Into WordPress Content. Setup screen provided to let user choose where user want to display Digg , Reddit , Dzone and Yahoo Buzz buttons.

Awesomepixgallery
Let’s face it… there isn’t a perfect gallery out there. If it looks good, it’s slow – if it’s ugly is fast and no one wants it anyway. APG is a good compromise between all the features out there. APG does have a superior intergration interface (after you upload pics you have quite a bit of control immediately to place/shape the image).

Email-Users
A plugin for wordpress which allows you to send an email to the registered blog users. Users can send personal emails to each other. Power users can email groups of users and even notify group of users of posts. The best part about this plugin is that you can specify mailing by group, so you only hit the publishers, subscribers/etc…

All in One SEO Pack

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

http://semperfiwebdesign.com/ I keep going back between this and the headspace2 plugin, both have their advantages. Even though I’m currently on headspace, this is still worth checking out.

Simpler-Contact-Page
Are you tired of all the “bells and whistles” of most WordPress contact forms? Are you exhausted from modifying CSS for hours just to get a contact plugin to display with your theme?
WP-Cache

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to, supposedly, less than a millisecond.
Google Analytic Plugin

• Google Analyticator supports the following features:
• Standard Google Analytics tracking support
• Provides a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
• External link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
• Download link tracking
• Support for hiding Administrator visits without effecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
• Support for any advanced tracking code Google provides
• Easily installable only requiring the user knows their UID
• Allows code to be placed in the footer to ensure faster load times
• Complete control over options; disable any feature if needed

Socialble Bookmarking Plugin
Social bookmarking sites allow your blog visitors to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find on your website. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts – making each post as accessible as possible. I’m currently using Digg Digg, but it doesn’t hurt to stay familiar with updates to the social networking sites. Sometimes what one plugin misses – the other will catch.

*Edited on 01October 2010:

A must see plugin for WordPress:

After the Deadline, you will wonder how you’ve lived without it (seriously)… it’s not just a real-time spell checker, it checks language specific usage, grammer and language syntax (comparative dynamics).

Don’t believe me? Give it a try now!

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A site like this one would be a good place to start to get the feel of how to use a template before experimenting with a more complex css templates like the ones found here.   Swapping around your look & feel gets easier once you get used to how CSS and xhtml are laid out. You’ll soon find that most of the templates start to look alike other than color choices, graphic style and flavor (size of object/text/etc…).

 The template resources are virtually endless. This google search  produced over 500,000 pages of free css templates sites.  Like anything else, just because it’s free doesn’t mean it is good or ‘what you should use’.  So if you have any choice dilema’s while browsing templates, remember to try to pick simple to start with until you get used to the designers layout style. 

If you have a good design, but need to spruce it up a little, there are a lot of resources on the web for creating cutting edge menu navigation,  editing/creating graphics, and a mind boggling 16 milion sites waiting to give you ideas for gadgets & widgets to add to your site. 

There is no crime in asking for advice either… There is a seemingly endless line of patient people waiting to help you. Just a word of advice, try to examine the work of the person you’re about to ask advice of – they may not share your same goals, taste or style.  If you’re not sure how to view their work – ask them.  They will usually have several samples they will be proud to show you.  If they don’t – move on to another web design advice forum.

There are some complete solutions out there – just in case you are at your wits end – and just want to be free to focus on the content.  Don’t forget blogs (in the rare case you’re delima can be solved with one of these type of solutions). Likewise, there is usually some really good design support for some of the bigger solutions like Joomla or WordPress.

Reference used for this post:

http://www.splashup.com/

http://www.joomla.org/

http://wordpress.org/

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en

http://www.alistapart.com/

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The very first thing that you should always do is keep your WordPress blog upgraded to the latest version. Some people say don’t do this because plugins won’t work, etc. But my advice is this: plugins are a dime a dozen. It is far more important that you have the most recent tweaks to WordPress. A lot of time, WordPress upgrades are to fix security vulnerabilities.

Another thing you should do is install this WordPress plugin: Secure WordPress. What this does is hide the WordPress version number in your blog’s header, installs a blank index.html file in your plugins directory so people can’t snoop, and various other tweaks to prevent hackers from getting in easily.

It goes without saying that your password is another part of the equation when it comes to security. Create a good password that’s at least a 6 in password strength, and don’t write it down anywhere-memorize it! It’s a good idea to change your passwords on a regular basis, as well.

A lot of people make money from their WordPress blogs. Offline you would have security cameras, excellent locks, etc, installed in your business location, wouldn’t you? So it makes sense that you need to take the same precautions online.

The great thing about security online is that a lot of the time you don’t need to spend very much money. There is enough freely-available information and lots and lots of good people who create open source software. A lot of the time the software is superb. Wouldn’t you say WordPress itself is superb? You bet!

So just make sure you are vigilant. Implement the above procedures quickly and then you can spend the rest of your time building your blog with quality content and making money from it without worrying about security issues.

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I created a special package of 70 eye-catching header graphics to be used on your websites, blogs, or other projects. 20 of the header graphics are specifically to replace the Kubrick header on the WordPress default theme.

The price of the package is just $5 and I’m donating $2.50 of each sale to The Salvation Army. On December 24, I plan on issuing a cheque to The Salvation Army for the amount I’ve raised up to that point.

Your support is greatly appreciated. If you would like more information, please visit:
http://karenblundell.com/headers.php

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I have found an easy way to get around this (my site is hosted on an IIS server) and thought it would only be fair to share it with the world.

Before you begin you need to be able to choose a custom 404 error message as all URL requests are routed through this page as the file does not actually exist.

Download this file by right clicking and choosing “save target as” then filing it somewhere safe. Rename the file to a .php extension, put it in the root of your wordpress site and set your custom 404 error page to that file.

You can now set the permalink structure on your site e.g. “/%category%/%postname%/” – the custom file you have downloaded looks up the content and displays it!

If you need help implementing this contact me and I will do my best to help.

Original article.

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The Top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems:

1. Drupal
2. WordPress
3. Joomla
4. Media Wiki
5. Liferay
6. TYPO3
7. Moodle
8. Dolphin
9. Pligg
10. Movable Type

Honorable Mention:
Xoops, Geeklog, e107, Mambo, Nucleus

We gave the top spot to Drupal because of its ease of use, vast number of modules, great user, developer, and support community. WordPress is really a close second, but is best for single blog websites and personal publishing, lacking many of the social networking functions, ecommerce facilities, forums, wikis, etc. used on more expansive sites. Joomla has one of the largest user communities of any CMS, and everything you need to develop social networks, ecommerce, & archive sites, but includes too many commercial products for Open Source development, and is more difficult to learn than the top two.

After the top three, the list includes more specialized CMS platforms, like Media Wiki for collaborative document authoring, Moodle for education, and Pligg for social bookmarking. TYPO3, Dolphin, and Liferay all offer unique feature sets and a distinct design that sets them apart from other platforms. Movable Type is a questionable choice for the last spot, and will face strong competition from other blog platforms such as XOOPS, Geeklog, and Nucleus.

For more information or to see the full review and discuss the rankings, visit webdevnews.net.

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First I touched on the topic in my first impressions of WordPress 2.5. Then I whined a little about the tickets relating to them, and eventually I released my Google Maps Plugin that uses them. In the end, WordPress’s new shortcodes are really nice.

What are they?

First of all, a shortcode called “mycode” can look like any of these:
[mycode]
[mycode foo="bar" id="123" color="red" something="data"]
[mycode]Some Content[/mycode]
[mycode]<p><a href="http://example.com/">HTML Content</a></p>[/mycode]
[mycode]Content [another-shotcode] more content[/mycode]
[mycode foo="bar" id="123"]Some Content[/mycode]

As you can see, shortcodes allow a user to put a code into a post or page, and a plugin can then easily handle those codes. They can be nested, contain content (including HTML), attributes, etc.

How can I use them?

First of all, you need to add your shortcode:
add_shortcode('mycode', 'yourFunction');
Your function should take two arguments and return the content that you want to replace the shortcode with. The first argument will be an associative array of attributes (keys will be the attribute names, and the value will be the corresponding attribute value), and the second will be the content between the tags.

To handle default attributes, you can use shortcode_atts($defaultsArray, $attributesArray):

function yourFunction ($attr, $content) {
    $attr = shortcode_atts(array('foo' => 'bar', 'id' => '','color' => 'blue'), $attr);
    return '<h2>Attributes</h2><pre>' . print_r($attr, true) . '</pre><h2>content</h2>' . $content;
}

That’s it! That’s why they are so great, it takes next to nothing to handle! However, maybe you’re thinking about a relatively complex way to use these, and you want to take it to the next level.

The Next Level

Maybe you’re worried that you’re users won’t grasp the intricacies of your shortcodes, or will be plagued by typos. It’s a valid concern. For example, I don’t want to assume that my users will be able to create a Google map by flawlessly entering:
[googleMap width="100%" height="400" name="Aero Rental - Phoenix" directions_to="true" directions_from="true"]3432 W. Clarendon, 85017[/googleMap]

The solution is to create a way for your users to generate the shortcodes and have them sent to the editor, but where to start? First, you need to add a meta box to the writing/editing pages (these are the dropdown boxes below the editor, such as Tags, Categories, etc). To do this, create a function that you will use to display the form used to generate your shortcode. Then you need to hook into the admin_menu action, and use it to create the metaboxes.

View the complete solution to complex shortcodes in WordPress 2.5.

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Writing Posts

The first thing that stuck out to me (and that I had been waiting for) was the tag suggest feature. Simply start typing a tag, and an auto-suggest feature will give you a dropdown of existing tags to choose from. Before, it was too easy to end up with tags like “web development” and “webdevelopment” since you had to remember them (no one actually looks them up).

This brings me to the new way media is managed/added. I haven’t had the need to add videos or sounds to my site, so I’ll stick to the images. In the end, I like the new way it works. The Flash uploader is nice, and the addition of a medium option for each image (thumbnail, medium, full size) is a welcome change.

However, nice as it is, there is one thing about it that is REALLY annoying. Full size isn’t actually full size. It’s 500px wide! What’s the point of calling it “full size” and then not making it “full size!” If they want small, medium, and large, they should call it that (although I still think there should be a full size option). There is however a simple solution. You can set $content_width inside your theme’s functions.php file, and it will use that instead of 500 for the max width. I set mine to 1024:

$content_width = 1024;
Unfortunately, this isn’t a standard that was in place, so themes do not have this. It’s a hack, and it’s shouldn’t be needed.

The last thing I wanted to mention, which is very minor, but annoyed me, is that you can’t resize the editor window when in HTML mode. I almost always use HTML mode, and I thought they had removed the ability to resize the text area. as it turns out, you need to switch to the visual editor, resize it, and switch back.

Admin Layout

I don’t like static width layouts. Have dual screens that both run at 1680×1050, and I run my browser full-screen because that’s the way I like it. My laptop runs at 1920×1200, and I even run full-screen on that. Instead of having more room to work, I am rewarded with more than 40% of my screen wasted as blank white space. Having said this, I’ve seen far worse layouts, and it’s fairly intuitive. You can expect plenty of plugins to fix this. Right now (as I’m typing this), what I have done is use firebug to inspect the HTML, found div#wrap, and altered the style by removing max-width:980px;. This seems to work fine for me.

Plugin API

For me, this is the most exciting change. I love the new shortCodes. They are a little rough around the edges, but they are extremely handy. As a matter of fact, I just finished a Google Maps Plugin that uses the shortCodes. It generates a shortCode based on the settings a user chooses, and inserts it into the editor. It later handles those shortCodes by changing them out for a Google Map. Unfortunately it relies on the ticket referenced above, so I’ll release it once that gets figured out.

Summary

WordPress 2.5 is definitely a big step forward. It has some small inconsistencies, which I expect to be easily fixed in upcoming minor releases, but nothing that should keep you from upgrading. Go try it and tell me what you think.

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After all, I had the hosting in place, web hosts offer so much nowadays that you can’t use more than a small percent of it. Not to mention he had a chance to make some real money off his own hard work.

It sounded rather simple in my mind:

1. Buy domain
2. Setup said domain on my web host
3. Install WordPress on the new site
4. Configure settings
5. Themes, plug ins, etc
6. Export WordPress XML from WordPress.com blog
7. Import into the new setup

Looking back, that was a rather nice fantasy. If only it was that easy, I’d not be posting this right now.

What happened in summary was this:

1. Bought domain
2. Setup said domain on my web host
3. Installed WordPress on the new site
4. Configured settings
5. Themes, plug ins, etc
6. Exported WordPress XML from WordPress.com blog

And then the fun nightmare started.

Let’s see what all issues cropped up as I intended to simply Import the XML file into the fresh install of WordPress on my host, keeping in mind, this is an XML generated by WordPress.com in their own special layout and destined for import into their own WordPress product, the only difference being its not hosted by them.

• Opened Import page within new WordPress Dashboard, Manage–>Import–>WordPress (there are a nice selection of Import choices)
• My host seems to have configured the php.ini file on their end to max the upload file size to 2MB, whereas WordPress had generated a 4.7MB file for me to upload. Normally this file wouldn’t be so big, but the blog had many, many images that were uploaded to WordPress.com
• That started my search on how to change the limit in PHP. I ended up contacting my host and starting a thread on WordPress.org’s support forum. After much back and forth and a lot of reading on my own, I had worked out I needed a script to fetch the web hosts php.ini file, make changes to it via that script and write it to my /home/ directory. In my case I’d need to only do this once as all I wanted was a temporary increase in the upload limit, whereas those wanting that limit to remain would need to create a cron job running the script daily, so as to keep abreast of any changes made to the web hosts php.ini file pre-adding their own changes.
• With that done, I was finally able to upload the XML file into the new WordPress installation…yay! NOT.
• This is where it got really bad, because the file was so large, after uploading the file it would import all the posts, comments, pages, etc into the new setup, and this was done in real time displaying the details on the web page, coincidentally if a php process takes more than 30seconds, my web hosts php.ini file says that it should kill the process, ding…Houtson we have a problem!
• So I go back, remake my new php.ini file to make sure the time limit is raised to a decent 300seconds and re-do the upload/import process. By now I have 5% of the posts and pages in the blog and it’s looking a right mess. That’s ok really, because after about half a dozen tries, and the import process not stopping half-way it finally reached the end. Breathe.
• What WordPress decides to do is tag every image that was ever uploaded into the WordPress.com blog (Note: The images would have to be moved over manually…more work, eh) was tagged with an ID and placed in the Manage–>Upload section (pic). It also decides to link to the now non-existent image files all on its own (pic).
• Not content having to re-upload every image from the WordPress.com blog over to the new host, editing every page and post for image links, we now had a huge amount of ‘dead’ files under the Upload section, which as I said, didn’t exist. I also think this is why the exported XML file was so big to begin with.

After much debate, we’ve decided to either ask the kind people at WordPress.com to delete all the images off the original blog and thus save us the hassle of exporting it incorrectly.

Either that or follow a very good idea by muhtar on WordPress.org’s support forum, where his suggestion is simple, yet ingenious.
Run a php/db server on your home machine, easy and free.

1. Import the XML file into a fresh WordPress install (again on the home machine acting like a server, running Windows XP if you like), this is way better than to a hosted server, because at home its all instant and no lag to a far off server.
2. Export it to a common format, i.e. SQL and import it into your self-hosted WordPress install (the new domain).

OK, so it’s not easy…but way less error-prone and hair-pulling this way. I guess many have had no issues, the moral here is, don’t assume it’s gonna be so easy to move over.

Better yet, make a good choice to begin with

Originally posted at techzonline.net

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It has been my experience and that of several of my clients who use WordPress that this visual editor can really mess your post up.

It can screw up your perfectly valid code and there is a better way to view your posts prior to publishing.

First, you will want to disable the visual editor. Log into your WordPress admin area. Click on Users.

Next, click on Your Profile. Under Personal Options, make sure the box in front of “Use the visual editor when writing” is un-checked.

Now, when you write a post you will see an editor with just a minimum of tags to use. You can add any XHTML code manually.

After writing your post click “Save and Continue Editing“. Now you will see a “Preview” link to the right of the allowable tags.

That’s right, even though you haven’t clicked “Publish” yet, WordPress creates a draft of your post, but it won’t be saved completely until you actually click “Save“.

You can click “Save” when you want to save your draft permanently to work on it later, and then click “Publish” when you are satisfied with your post.

Happy posting!

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