Tag Archives: WordPress

WordPress 2.9 is Now Available: Backup and Upgrade!

Dec 21, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 3 Comments

The new version includes plenty of new features on both the user and developer sides, including a global “trash can” for posts and comments, basic image editor, rel=canonical support, native support for post thumbnails (should your theme activate the feature) and an updated new Press This bookmarklet.

TechnoSailor has a 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9 guide, which covers some of the more interesting features.

So take five minutes to upgrade your WordPress installation. Be sure to make a backup of your database first, since 80% of you probably don’t do it on a daily basis like I do.

What Fun Geeky Things Are Coming in WordPress 2.9?

Dec 3, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Yoast has a post up discussing some of the Geeky bits in WordPress 2.9.

Thanks to Peter Westwoord’s WordPress Beta Tester plugin, this blog is on the 2.9 development track again, after having been off trunk for a couple of months. That plugin makes it really easy to switch any WordPress install to the development branch, either for the next “point” release (eg. 2.8.6), or the next major version, in this case, 2.9.

It sounds like some interesting features are coming, including native post thumbnail support as well as support for canonical URL tags and the ability to cache wp_remote_get requests.

Preventing the Caching of Dynamic Functions in WP Super Cache

Nov 19, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress One Comment

WP Super Cache is commonly used to speed up WordPress blogs and reduce server load. In essence, it stores static HTML copies of pages on your blog so they will load faster the next time they are accessed. It works fairly well, but with one caveat that may be frustrating at times: The pages don’t change until the cache expires (every 30-60 minutes or so) and the static page is updated. That makes it hard to do some things where you need to process information unique to each user, such as checking HTTP referrer headers and serving ads to visitors coming from search engines.

Fortunately, there is a way around it in some cases. If you have a function in your template, you can do something like this:

<!--mfunc function_name( 'parameter', 'another_parameter' ) -->
 <?php function_name( 'parameter', 'another_parameter' ) ?>
 <!--/mfunc-->

You take a function call and surround it by the “mfunc” comments, in which the first contains a duplicate of the function. This will (somehow) instruct WP Super Cache to allow the function to execute, even in the static cached version of the page.

How to Secure Your WordPress Installation

Nov 18, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Digging into WordPress has recently published a new article on securing WordPress. It covers setting up optimal database privileges, adjustments you can make to your wp-config.php file, changing the table prefix, changing the default admin username, and a couple other things.

Of course, when it comes to the security of your WordPress site, these techniques are merely the beginning. As you continue in your WordPress travels, you will discover many, many more ways to increase the security of your site. By implementing the methods presented in this article during the setup process, you will be strengthening the security of your site’s foundation, providing yourself a solid platform on which to build.

Definitely worth a read if you haven’t already looked into the techniques.

How to Secure Your New WordPress Installation [Digging into WordPress]

WordPress Theme of the Month: Glassical

Nov 16, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

This month’s featured WordPress theme is Glassical, once again brought to you by Smashing Magazine.

Glassical WordPress Theme

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WP Plugins: The WordPress App Store

Nov 13, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Collis Ta’eed, of Envato fame, posted an interesting link to Twitter recently. A new website called WP Plugins that is trying to be “The WordPress App Store.”

What exactly are they doing? They’ve set up a site reminiscent of the WordPress.org plugin repository, but for commercial plugins. As a customer, you can browse potentially useful plugins, and pay a flat fee (which the author chooses) to download the files. You can also opt to pay a subscription fee to gain access to an exclusive support forum, and instant access to upgrades to the plugin. (Those who pay the one-time fee instead of subscribing have to pay for the upgrades.) The plugins are all GPL, as WP Plugins requires it of all submissions.

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SubHeading Plugin for WordPress

Oct 21, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 3 Comments

Have you ever wished for an easy way to add a smaller secondary title, a subheading, under your blog posts’ main titles? That’s exactly what the SubHeading plugin does. It adds a subheading field to the Write screen in the WordPress Admin, and a template tag to put in your theme where you want them displayed.

Subheadings in WordPress

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WordPress’s WPDB Class

Oct 19, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

WordPress has a class, $wpdb, that contains several useful functions for manipulating the database. (The $wpdb object is a global variable that WordPress automatically creates.) This is used throughout the core, and by plugin and theme developers to easily run custom MySQL operations. It even has functions for building and executing prepared statements.

You can find a nice introduction and examples at WP Engineer. Here’s a sample of how you would go about changing the title of a post with a certain ID:

$wpdb->update( $wpdb->posts, array( 'post_title' => $new_post_title ),
 array( 'ID' => $the_post_id ) );

That’s just scratching the surface, but it gives a good idea of how the database functions work.

For even more in-depth reading, there’s a good Codex page on the subject as well.

Beyond Super Cache: W3 Total Cache

Oct 15, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 3 Comments

Donncha O Caoimh’s WP Super Cache plugin has become very popular in the WordPress community, especially with bloggers with medium-traffic blogs on shared hosting plans.

But what if you’re running on your own server, be it VPS, dedicated, or something else along those lines? What can you do to squeeze some extra performance out of your high-traffic blog?

Enter W3 Total Cache, a plugin that the infamously slow-loading blog Noupe has recently started using to combat the sluggishness that their constant social media hits cause. It can do a lot of things, including:

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Support Freeware Developers With #DonateFriday

Oct 8, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

If you’ve been using Twitter for any length of time, you’ve likely run into the phenomenon known as “Follow Friday,” where people tweet a list of users worth following, along with a #followfriday hashtag.

In the past few months something new and interesting started up: Donate Friday. The idea is you’re probably using several free WordPress plugins that take someone’s time and effort to develop. So on Donate Friday you pick one, donate any sum of money, however much you think the plugin is worth to you, and then you tweet about it with the #donatefriday hashtag.

The original post about Donate Friday suggested doing this not only for plugin developers, but theme creators, or anyone else contributing to the WordPress community.

Why not take it a little further? WordPress isn’t the only conglomeration of freeware developers. You probably use some free software (GPL or otherwise) every day that you find essential. Why not give them a little too? You could send a few dollars along to the people behind CyberDuck, Ubuntu, whatever software you like. Pick one every week or two and send them a (non-Starbucks) coffee.

Tag Archives: WordPress

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