Posts Tagged ‘Wordpress’

MyWordPress Housekeeping

Decided to spend a couple of hours this morning cleaning up MyWordPress .

Have created a new category Deactivated-No Longer Used to move  articles into that are no longer relevant to the current installation.

Deactivated and deleted plugins and themes that I no longer use ,this should help speed up the site.

Then the big one is to try and find out why over the last couple of weeks the amount of comment spam hitting MyWordPress as gone through the roof.

Page with NO Sidebars

Custom page template for Wordpress

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AmazonFeed Plugin

I have just installed the Amazonfeed Plugin by Warkensoft Publications .

This is what the Author has to say

This plugin will allow you to turn your WordPress website or blog into a money making machine while at the same time offering valuable additional related materials to your visitors. It will automatically search for and display products from Amazon.com which are specifically related to the topics you write about. Once you install the plugin, you simply have to decide if you want to show products related to your Categories or Tags and the plugin can do the rest. All you have to do is continue writing about your favorite subjects and the plugin will offer related products to your visitors.

The Amazon links are automatically generated at the bottom of the posts by the Amazon Feed plugin.

A really neat way of generating some revenue with very little effort.

I have asked the author if it is possible to have a choice of what Amazon country to use rather the default Amazon.Com. 

I have hacked his code so for this site it picks up Amazon.co.uk time will tell if this works.

The author as added the ability to select locale and also that links can be opened in new window.

WordPress 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 Upgrade

I upgraded today and really wish I had not bothered.

Problem after problem ,cannot post,cannot edit existing posts the whole admin area screwed up,plugins that worked fine befoe the upgrade stopped working.

Do NOT upgrade until the problems are sorted.

Another WordPress Upgrade

Well several minutes ago I applied the latest Wordpess update ,currently 2.6.3 .

I had updated another site of mine a few days ago and there seemed to be no issues so applied the update here also.

My WordPress Upgraded to 2.6

Well having tested out Wordpres 2.6 on www.ituneit.co.uk I have upgraded this site to WordPress 2.6.

I have not noticed any issues so far with either the install or any of the plugins that are used on this site.

As always it looks like a easy no problem upgrade lets hope it stays that way.

WordPress 2.6 Upgrade

Well after giving it some thought I have upgraded www.ituneit.co.ukto WordPress 2.6 ,this is another Shifter Themed site that I own.

I am currently testing the plugins to make sure there are no issues.

If all is well I will upgrade this site later in the week.I will keep this post updated if I discover any issues.

Site now upgraded with no apparent issues.

WordPress 2.6

So the latest version of WordPress is here.I am waiting a few weeks before I upgrade this Shifter site just to ensure there are no major bugs.

From the WordPress team
I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Here’s a more textual overview of what’s hawt in 2.6:

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

With the power of modern computers, it’s silly that we still use save and editing metaphors from the time when the most common method of storage was floppy disks. WordPress has always respected the importance of your writing with auto-save, and now we’re taking that to another level by allowing you to view who made what changes when to any post or page through a super-easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.

This is handy on any blog in case you make a mistake and want to go back to an older version of a post, and it’s super handy for multi-author blogs where you can see every change tracked by person.

Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

A few months ago on my blog we started a conversation about the posting bookmarklet in WordPress and which systems we should look to for inspiration, like Flock, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and Delicious. From these suggestions and the Quick Post plugin by Josh Kenzer, we developed a Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog:

For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post. On my blog I’ve been experimenting with using different categories and the in_category() function — such as video, quote, aside, et cetera — to create a more tumblelog-like format.

Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging

Gears is an open source browser extension project started by Google that developers like us can use to give you features we wouldn’t normally be able to. There are a lot of things we can do with Gears in the future, but in this release we’ve stuck to using what’s called a “Local Server” to cache or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds (they just pop right up!). You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending. WordPress works just fine without it, you just get a little extra juice when you have it installed.

Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing mistakes development.

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

Developer Notes

WordPress.org had over 75 people contributing code to WordPress 2.6. In addition to the core commit team we had contributions from Dion Hulse, Austin Matzko, Otto42, Benedict Eastaugh, and pishmishy. AaronCampbell and Marco Zehe provided more than a few patches. Back among the top code contributors is Jacob Santos. Alex Concha continues to have WordPress’ back. Joining bug reporting and gardening elite are hakre, Simon Wheatley, mtekk, and Matty Rob. Finally, congratulations to our Peter Westwood on your recent wedding! I’m also proud to announce we’re adding a new core committer to the team: Andrew Ozz (azaozz) has been a huge help to the core team this year, particularly around TinyMCE and making the WYSIWYG something that works for you, not against you.

Because of the new capabilities to make WordPress a clean SVN checkout, plugin and theme authors should do their best to handle forms and posts through WP rather than trying to post to their files directly, here’s a quick Codex article about how to do it using our forward-compatible APIs.

Upgrading

2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade. Our standard 3-step upgrade instructions apply to this release. There were at least 1,984,047 downloads of the 2.5 series, the fastest growing release we’ve ever had, and I think all of those people will find 2.6 adds a level of polish that really makes WP a pleasure to use every day. (At least I do. )

Easter Egg

There have been rumors and allegations that there was a so-called “easter egg” added to 2.6 early in its development. These rumors and allegations are completely false!

P.S. If you’re a fan of WordPress, consider joining our fan page on Facebook.

WordPress Plugins used on My WordPress

Active Plugins

  AdRotate 2.6.1
» Arnan de Gans (url)
Make making money easy with AdRotate. Add advanced banners to your website using the simplest interface available!

  Akismet 2.4.0
» Automattic (url)
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need an API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.

  aLinks 1.0rc2
» Sean Hickey (url)
A WordPress plugin that automatically links keywords in your blog post.

  All in One SEO Pack 1.6.12.1
» Michael Torbert (url)
Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. Options configuration panel | Upgrade to Pro Version | Donate | Support | Amazon Wishlist

  AVH Extended Categories Widgets 3.2.1
» Peter van der Does (url)
Replacement of the category widget to allow for greater customization of the category widget.

  Category Posts Widget 3.1
» James Lao (url)
Adds a widget that can display posts from a single category.

  Exclude Pages from Navigation 1.51
» Simon Wheatley (url)
Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.

  FollowMe 2.0.4
» WPburn.com (url)
WP FollowMe is a wordpress plugin that allow you to add a twitter Follow me badge on your wordpress blog.

  Google XML Sitemaps 3.2.4
» Arne Brachhold (url)
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

  Link Juice Keeper 1.2.2
» Daniel Frużyński (url)
This plugin helps you to keep the link juice by redirecting all non-existing URLs which normally return a 404 error to the front blog page using 301 redirect.

  LJ Longtail SEO 1.7
» Jon Smith (url)
LJ Longtail SEO is a tool that detects search engine visits and uses this information to display a list of links based on second page search results

  Open in New Window Plugin 1.6
» Keith P. Graham (url)
Opens external links in a new window, keeping your blog page in the browser so you don’t lose surfers to another site.

  Post-Plugin Library 2.6.2.1
» Rob Marsh, SJ (url)
Does nothing by itself but supplies common code for the Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins. Make sure you have the latest version of this plugin.

  Really Simple Sitemap 1.2
» Dominic Foster (url)
Adds a really simple sitemap to your Wordpress blog. Add to any page or post and the site map will be added there. Use Options->RS Sitemap to set options.

  Recent Posts 2.6.2.0
» Rob Marsh, SJ (url)
Displays a highly configurable list of the most recent posts. Instructions and help online. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.

  SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam 2.6.2
» Mike Challis (url)
Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. This prevents spam from automated bots. Also is WPMU and BuddyPress compatible. Settings | Donate

  Sociable 3.5.2
» Blogplay (url)
Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.

  Theme Switch 0.9.0.3
» Nicolas Kuttler (url)
Use a different wordpress theme for logged in user. Nice for theme development.

  TS Custom Widgets 2.0
» ThaSlayer (url)
This plugin enables you to select which widgets appear on specific posts, pages, categories,author’s posts and tag pages. By default, all widgets appear wherever the sidebar is loaded within your theme. With this plugin, you can configure where widgets are displayed on a per post or per WP Template(Using conditional Tags) basis.

  Twitter Tools 2.4
» Crowd Favorite (url)
A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Show your tweets in your sidebar, and post tweets from your WordPress admin.

  Visitor Maps and Who's Online 1.5.2
» Mike Challis (url)
Displays Visitor Maps with location pins, city, and country. Includes a Who’s Online Sidebar to show how many users are online. Includes a Who’s Online admin dashboard to view visitor details. The visitor details include: what page the visitor is on, IP address, host lookup, online time, city, state, country, geolocation maps and more. No API key needed. Settings | Donate

  WordPress.com Stats 1.7.3
» Andy Skelton (url)
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

  Wordpress Popular Posts 2.1.4
» Héctor Cabrera (url)
Showcases your most popular posts to your visitors on your blog’s sidebar. Use Wordpress Popular Posts as a widget or place it anywhere on your theme using <?php wpp_get_mostpopular(); ?>

  WP-dTree 3.5
» Ulf Benjaminsson (url)
A fork of Christopher Hwang’s WP-dTree, improving performance and adding useful features.

  WP-PluginsUsed 1.50
» Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan (url)
Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page.

  WP-Table Reloaded 1.8
» Tobias Bäthge (url)
This plugin allows you to create and easily manage tables in the admin-area of WordPress. A comfortable backend allows an easy manipulation of table data. You can then include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML.

  WP Hide Post 1.1.9
» Robert Mahfoud (url)
Enables a user to control the visibility of items on the blog by making posts and pages selectively hidden in different views throughout the blog, such as on the front page, category pages, search results, etc… The hidden item remains otherwise accessible directly using permalinks, and also visible to search engines as part of the sitemap (at least). This plugin enables new SEO possibilities for authors since it enables them to create new posts and pages without being forced to display them on their front and in feeds.

Inactive Plugins

  Events 2.2.1
» Arnan de Gans (url)
Enables you to show a list of events with a static countdown to date. Sidebar widget and page template options. And more…

  Extreme SEO 1.3.4
» Stephen Madison (url)
By activating this plugin in your wordpress software, you join a network of sites with the plugin installed. The plugin automatically finds posts in th network related to your posts and creates non reciprocal links between the posts of network members. The links are one way, dofollow, and are filtered so that no “spammy” posts are allowed. This provides quality inbound links for SEO purposes to the post pages of all of our network member’s sites. The inbound links also provide cross site traffic to increase your readership. This is an effortless way to link building and climb the search engine ranks while also increasing your Google Page Rank.

  SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 1.35
» Purwedi Kurniawan (url)
The purpose of this plugin is to strengthen our On Page SEO by adding new internal linking to the blog post using the most popular keywords used by search engine visitors to find the blog post from a search engine ( incoming search terms ).

  Twitter Tools - Bit.ly URLs 2.4
» Crowd Favorite (url)
Use Bit.ly for URL shortening with Twitter Tools. This plugin relies on Twitter Tools, configure it on the Twitter Tools settings page.

  Twitter Tools - Exclude Category 2.4
» Crowd Favorite (url)
Exclude posts in certain categories from being tweeted by Twitter Tools. This plugin relies on Twitter Tools, configure it on the Twitter Tools settings page.

  Twitter Tools - Hashtags 2.4
» Crowd Favorite (url)
Set #hashtags for blog post tweets sent by Twitter Tools. This plugin relies on Twitter Tools, configure it on the Twitter Tools settings page.

  UMapper 3.1.5
» Victor Farazdagi (url)
Universal mapping platform. [Configuration Page]

  WP-SNAP! 0.9.4
» Nathan Olsen (url)
WP-SNAP! (WordPress System for Navigating Alphabetized Posts) creates an user interface for navigating alphabetized post titles.

  WP-UserOnline 2.73
» Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan & scribu (url)
Enable you to display how many users are online on your Wordpress site

WordPress 2.5

I have been playing around with WordPress 2.5 on a local installation to see if I want to upgrade this site.

I have not come across any problems so far so I think I might upgrade later today once I have done a back up.