Tag Archives: WordPress

Don’t Like WordPress 2.7’s Vertical Navigation?

Dec 21, 2008 by Matt | Posted in WordPress One Comment

If you’re not comfortable with the new vertical navigation in WordPress 2.7, rest assured that there is an alternative. Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menu plugin, has been updated to bring horizontal dropdown navigation to WordPress 2.7.

When WordPress 2.7 and its new and optimized user interface came, I thought there was still room for improvements: a horizontal menu gave the admin area more of a “desktop application” feel, and I think it’s superior to a vertical menu. So I updated the Worpdress Admin Drop Down Menu.

One cool feature is a color picker that allows you to customize the colorization of the menu bar. I’m not a huge fan of the gradient that’s auto-applied, which looks too exaggerated, but that’s probably nitpicking a little, I suppose.

The plugin works in most modern browsers, and Internet Explorer too. (I kid, I kid…)

Anyway, if you don’t like the vertical nav, this plugin is for you.

IntenseDebate: The Solution We’ve Been Waiting For?

Dec 16, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Blogging 9 Comments

Automattic, the company backing the WordPress blog platform, recently purchased the hosted commenting system IntenseDebate. Like they did with Gravatar, they will likely make it ridiculously easy to make the service work with your WordPress blog, while keeping it open to other platforms. Gravatar had a big leap in usage after Automattic purchased the service, perhaps we’ll see a similar effect with IntenseDebate?

Now why is this important?

If you create an account with IntenseDebate (totally optional when you comment on IntenseDebate-equipped blogs), you are given a profile that keeps track of your comments. This means that you can easily see where you’ve commented, allowing you to go back and read followup comments.

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Poll: Are You Running WordPress 2.7 Yet?

Dec 15, 2008 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 2 Comments

WordPress 2.7 was released on the evening of December 10th, as you probably know. Interestingly, it was the first time that Twitter alerted me to the finalization of a WordPress release, rather than other means, such as the Dashboard.

WP 2.7 seems to be the quickest-adopted release that I’ve seen so far. People pounced on it the moment it came out, and a few people who have previously been a little cautious in updating have jumped right in and upgraded.

Are you running 2.7 yet? Please take a moment to answer the poll below, if you’re a WordPress user. (You will have to click through if you’re reading this in an RSS aggregator.)

Have you upgraded to WordPress 2.7 yet?

  • Yes (67%, 22 Votes)
  • I've been planning on doing it, but I've been busy... (21%, 7 Votes)
  • No (9%, 3 Votes)
  • No, I'm still waiting for a plugin to be updated (3%, 1 Votes)

Total Voters: 33

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I updated Webmaster-Source to 2.7 within an hour of it’s release, and I have beeen slowly working on upgrading my other installations. So far I like it. The new admin is great, though a couple things bother me about it. I don’t like the change of “Manage Posts,” to “Edit Posts,” for example. It’s a minor annoyance, but it just doesn’t sound as good.

Also, if you’re a user of WP125 or GoCodes, be sure to update them, along with any other plugins you have installed, when you upgrade.

An Interesting Use for WP125

Dec 7, 2008 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 4 Comments

Dave Rigotti has found an interesting new use for my WP125 plugin. It came to my attention recently while I was checking my Technorati link feed.

He is using the plugin, which is usually for displaying 125×125 advertisements in your blog sidebar, to count how many times his RSS button is clicked. So coupled with the Feedburner subscriber count, he has a metric of how many people actually subscribe to the feed after clicking the icon.

If you’re curious, approximately 21% people subscribe to this blog after clicking the big button to the right.

Interesting idea, Dave. I never would of thought of using an ad plugin to test links’ conversion rates. I suppose it’s not too huge stretch, but it’s quite creative.

It’s kind of fun seeing people use my plugins for things I never intended for originally.

WordPress Theme of the Month: Annexation

Dec 1, 2008 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

This month’s featured WordPress theme is Annexation, released by Six Revisions and created by Chris Wallace.

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How To: Integrate Non-WordPress Pages in WordPress

Nov 26, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Featured, WordPress 18 Comments

Have you ever put together a cool script or page on your own, and then wanted to integrate it into WordPress so it would have the same look and feel as the rest of your site?

Maybe you have a custom survey you put together with PHP, or a web directory, a Job Board, or some other thing that you can’t really do inside WordPress.

Here’s a bit of code that will help integrate your script with your theme, and will also make other internal WordPress functions available to your script:

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Full Posts or Excerpts? How About Both?

Nov 24, 2008 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Should you display full posts on your WordPress blog’s index, or excerpts? Normally I fall into the camp that says you shouldn’t display ten full posts on your main page, since you end up with more duplicate content, and it takes longer to scroll through the posts.

How about having the best of both options? Have one full post, and the rest can be excerpts.

To set this up, find the Loop in your theme’s index.php file. It should look something like this:

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Prelovac’s WordPress Optimization Guide

Nov 23, 2008 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Vladimir Prelovac has an excellent article on optimizing WordPress for speed available now. It covers plenty of bases, such as

  • Caching using WP Super Cache
  • MySQL Caching
  • Checking plugins for slowdowns
  • Optimizing tables

If you ever experienced slow WordPress admin panel, “MySQL server has gone away” message, pages taking forever to load or you want to prepare your site for a major increase in traffic (for example Digg front page) this is the guide for you.

It’s not an all-encompasing guide, of course. There are plenty of little tweaks you can do that can shave precious milliseconds off your loading times, such as cutting out unnecessary template tags, such as bloginfo() tags, and replacing them with the values they output.

And of course there are plenty of other things to tweak. PHP, Apache, and MySQL can all be configured carefully for maximum speed, assuming you have root access to your server. You can optimize your templates to decrease loading and rendering times. Yahoo has a few tips.

Performance optimization is always a good idea, especially if your blog is on a shared hosting account, or if you have a very high traffic blog (I’m talking to you, TechCrunch and Mashable!).

10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.7

Nov 21, 2008 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Technosailer has a new post up titled 10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.7. It covers some of the biggest changes coming in the new version of WordPress that’s just around the corner, and gives some good commentary on then. It tells a little bit about each, why it’s important, and what you need to know about it.

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WP Greet Box

Nov 18, 2008 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 7 Comments

Have you ever opened up your website stats application, Google Analytics for example, and looked at the “referring sites” section? There you are shown the websites that people come from to visit your site the most.

Now wouldn’t it be useful if you could detect where a user is coming from when they visit your WordPress blog, and display a customized message to them? Perhaps a reminder to subscribe to your RSS feed, or to Stumble your post.

WP Greet Box does just that. After dropping the plugin into your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and activating it, you just have to add a <?php wp_greet_box() ?> template tag where you want the messages to appear in your theme.

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