May 16, 2008

Wordpress Plugins DB » WP-LightForm 0.2

Category: Comment Plugins >> Contact Form
Author: Alex Rogers
Description: This plugin is based on LightForm by Jeeremie, and utilises FormCheck for form validation and Niceforms for custom form elements.

To get a feel for what WP-LightForm is really about, try the interactive demo


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Wordpress Plugins DB » Commentag 0.2

Category: Comment Plugins
Author: AC
Description: Commentag is a Widget that helps your visitors catch up with any discussion easily:
* Get an overview of any discussion at a glance
* Filter comments by tags
* Don't replace your commenting system


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Jeffro2pt0 » wordpress » Jeffro On The Discovr Podcast

Discovr Podcast Logo

Special thanks to Chris Thomson and Michael Mistretta for inviting me onto the podcast. Discovr is a weekly podcast that allows you to rediscover technology. The latest episode goes in depth into the topic of WordPress. We discuss WP.com, WP.org and briefly touch on WPMU. We cover our favorite plugins, talk about what to do after installing WordPress and we share our own tweaking tips. I ended up giving out my list of sites that I am subscribed to within my FeedReader which enables me to stay on top of things within the WordPress community.

So please, head on over to the Discovr website and give Episode 2 a listen and give them or me some feedback. I had a good time on the show and since it was pre-recorded over skype, you may notice I sound different when compared to WordPress Weekly.

Wordpress Plugins DB » Admin CSS Designer 1.0

Category: Admin Tools >> Layout
Author: Ozh
Description: This plugin pulls colorful palettes from COLOURlovers, and lets you re-arrange, tweak and modify colors, then save them real time. No dirty hand CSS editing, everything is done simply visually


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Wordpress Plugins DB » Better Plugin Page 1.0

Category: Plugin Management
Author: Ozh
Description: Less clutter on the gManage Pluginsh page with tiny icons and quick action links, plus a filter to sort/display plugins. Useful if youfre running a lot of plugins.


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Wordpress Plugins DB » Absolute Comments 2.2

Category: Comment Plugins
Author: Ozh
Description: Managing comments, the way it was meant to be. Reply to comments from your gManage Commentsh page, or from the notification email, without having to visit the post page first. Supports threaded comments, and fully translated in several languages. A must-have for any blog with more than 10 comments.


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Wordpress Plugins DB » No Howdy 1.0

Category: Admin Tools >> Enhancements
Author: Ozh
Description: Some people don't like the fact that their blog says "Howdy" in the admin interface. This plugin takes care of them.


[Download] [Plugin Page]

CodeScheme » wordpress » WordPress Theme Design Contest

Lunarpages have their design contest up and running this year - the deal is, in return for your hard work, you do get some exposure and the few links - and you might even win something as well…

(more…)

May 15, 2008

Wordpress Plugins DB » AWSOM Plugin Uninstaller 1.2

Category: Admin Tools
Author: harknell
Description: The AWSOM Uninstaller plugin is designed to help the admin remove any database elements of any AWSOM plugin to allow for a full uninstall of the plugin. Only works with the AWSOM series of plugins available from the AWSOM.org website.


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Wordpress Plugins DB » AWSOM Pixgallery Art/Comic/Photo Gallery 4.54

Category: Media >> Graphic Files
Author: harknell
Description: AWSOM Pixgallery is an Image Gallery/Archive plugin designed to make it easier for Artists or Webcomic creators to set up a portfolio of their artwork. It features Automatic Watermarking, captioning, sorting, auto-thumbnailing, Comicpress theme support, Visual Editor input, Individual image commenting, and more. It is a Wordpress native Plugin and does not require any config or file changes or outside tool integration to work; just activate the plugin and add a line of text to any post or page and your Gallery of Images will appear. All options are handled through the regular Wordpress Admin interface. More features are in development now such as tagging, extensive theme control through Admin interface, per image commenting, and more.
Part of the www.AWSOM.org series of Wordpress Plugins developed by Harknell, webmaster of the Webcomic at www.onezumi.com


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Wordpress Plugins DB » munky-smile 1.0

Category: Comment Plugins
Author: Aziz Perdana
Description: This plugin created a monkey smiley from "Yoyo & Cici smileys" on your wordpress comments. It use javascript also. It is created by Ferdi


[Plugin Page]

May 14, 2008

Nathan Rice » Planet WordPress » Creating a “Blog Page” — With Paging

If there was one question I get asked the most about WordPress themes, it’s this one: how do I make a custom static homepage at the root of my blog’s address (e.g. http://example.com/) and have my blog posts go into a /blog section (http://example.com/blog)?

WordPress is becoming more and more usable as a Content Management System, so naturally the question comes up.

But they don’t want to abandon the idea of a blog either. Blogs can be an integral part of a business website, and it makes sense that businesses and individuals would want the site and the blog managed from the same WordPress installation.

The First Option

The idea is simple … create a category called “blog” and place every single post you create in this category by making it the default category. Make all other categories “children” of the blog category.

This is actually a pretty decent option for users with a fair amount of WordPress experience. It allows you to accomplish the desired effect, and also lets you create other top-level categories for other purposes than categorizing posts (for instance, using top level categories for things like setting feature posts, press releases, or like me … theme releases).

The Second Option

The second option is a little more complicated, but is certainly a viable option for theme developers releasing themes for mass distribution (this is the option we use at iThemes. See the iCompany theme as an example.).

Here’s a step-by-step:

  1. Copy your index.php file
  2. Create a new file called blog.php and populate it with the contents of the index.php file
  3. Make it a page template by pasting the necessary code at the top. (making sure to change the template name to “Blog” instead of “Bio”)
  4. Create a new WordPress “page” (Write > Page) from your Dashboard
  5. Don’t worry about content on the page, but make the title “Blog”
  6. Before you click publish, scroll down to the “Advanced Options” and expand the “Page Template” section.  Choose “Blog” from the drop down menu.
  7. Click Publish.

Now, you’re going to want to edit the blog.php file one last time. Find “the loop“. It should look something like this:

< ?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Replace that code with this:

< ?php
$temp = $wp_query;
$wp_query= null;
$wp_query = new WP_Query();
$wp_query->query('showposts=5'.'&paged='.$paged);
while ($wp_query->have_posts()) : $wp_query->the_post(); 
?>

You can change the “showposts=5″ to whatever number you want. It just depends on how many posts you want to be shown on a single page. Plus, but using ‘&paged=’.$paged we are able to keep paging intact … a problem that kept many people from using this method in the past.

Then, find the line of code that looks like this and remove it:

< ?php else : ?>

You’ll also probably want to remove any thing that has to do with not being able to find the page you were looking for. Hopefully you have a 404.php file that will take care of that for you.

Finally, after you’ve done the above, find the following code:

< ?php endif; ?>

and change it to:

< ?php $wp_query = null; $wp_query = $temp;?>

The Third Option

The final option is by far the easiest for the end user. It requires no code editing at all and accomplishes the same goal as the other 2 methods. The only problem is that it does screw up the “current_page_item” class for the home link and the blog link. Check out the possible solutions here.

Anyway, here’s how to do it.

The first thing you need to do is create a blog Page. Nothing fancy here, just write a new Page, title it “Blog”, and click “publish”. No need for any content.

Then, Assuming you’re still on the dashboard, click on Setting > Reading. Once there, you should see something that looks like this:

Default Reading Settings

Go ahead and click the radio button that says “A Static Page”. Then, you’re going to want to choose a page to use as your front page (any one of your pages will do), and you’re going to want to choose your “Blog Page” as the page to use for the posts.

Voila! You’re done! Save the settings and you should now be using one of your Pages as your homepage, and your blog Page is now housing all of your posts (and yes, paging does work with this method as well).

Conclusion

So there you go! Three different ways to accomplish the same general goal. If you have any suggestions for a better way of getting this done, feel free to leave a comment below and if it works well, then I’ll add it to the post.

Quick Online Tips » WordPress » Power Plugin to Customize Kontera Ad Links

Do you keep editing the Kontera code whenever you need to match it to your new site design? Do you wish to display Kontera ads only after the post is one day old? Do you want to display Kontera only on your numerous comments, and not the content? Its simple.

This degree of customization is possible now with the latest Kontera Wordpress Plugin which promises to customize Kontera to your liking. Some new features are -

* Add the ContentLink tag to all your pages in one click
* Block ContentLink ads from appearing on particular posts or categories
* Determine when ContentLink ads will begin appearing on new posts
* Display ContentLinks only on posts
* Display ContentLinks only on comments
* Change ContentLinks color

Download WordPress Plugin for WordPress 2.5 (.zip)

Now those are some amazing features and will help you better optimize Kontera to your site. Many regular readers find In-text advertising very obtrusive, but we still persist for earning those few dollars.

You can now disable Kontera on fresh posts and only get ads when articles get older, thus, not annoying regular readers who hate in-text advertising. If you get thousands of comments, you can now choose to get ads only on comments. And if you think high paying Google Adsense ads in your web hosting category pays well, simply disable ads in those categories…

Related
Single Underline Links in Kontera Ads
What Would Seth Godin Do : Cookies with Wordpress
Wordpress Plugins Directory : Find Most Popular Plugins
Readers Can Turn Off Snap Shots Previews on Websites
Insert Chitika Eminimalls Inside Wordpress Blog Posts

Copyright 2008. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.
Permalink | Add comment | Filed: Advertising, Blogging, Make+Money, WordPress

CodeScheme » wordpress » Deserta Free WordPress Theme

screenshot.pngDeserta is a fixed-width, 2 column theme with a right hand sidebar, enabled for widgets.

The comments are also gravatar-enabled and will work whether you’re using WP2.5 or lower. There’s also separation of user comments from pingbacks/trackbacks.
(more…)

Wordpress Plugins DB » AccessQontrol 0.21

Category: Admin Tools
Author: Arnan de Gans
Description: Easy to set up plugin to make a website/blog private. Disallow everyone but registered users. Or even those and make an exception list.

This plugin comes in handy for maintenance jobs or to make a site just a bit more private. And features a nice, easy to change, template which blends in with most themes to show people they cannot enter the site.

You'll need Wordpress 2.3 or newer. Using Wordpress 2.5 is strongly encouraged.


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Wordpress Plugins DB » Alternate comment form 1.0

Category: Comment Plugins
Author: Arnan de Gans
Description: n case you need 2 comment forms, for example an extra one for a bunch of custom pages. This plugin comes in handy. You could also use this plugin for powering your guestbook or the like.
With a small options panel to choose how to order the comments and the well known uninstaller it is, for now, quite a complete sollution.


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Wordpress Plugins DB » Events 0.94

Category: Weather, Time, Location >> Events
Author: Arnan de Gans
Description: Create a list with events/appointments/future happenings and show them on your site.
The plugin features a straightforward user interface in the wordpress control pages to add and delete events and set some options. Those options include: Date/time, description and a message when the event has passed.
Editing of events, mass delete and more...

Step by step installation instructions on my site.
http://www.sothq.net/projects/events-plugin/2/


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Wordpress Plugins DB » EasyBan 1.123

Category: Admin Tools >> Permissions
Author: Arnan de Gans
Description: For the paranoid, or restrictive people among us I've created a little plugin to keep people from coming onto your site.
Set some options as to where the person should be redirected and maybe a delay for the redirect. You can disable or enable the gbansh without actually de-activating the plugin. No need to edit your theme anymore.

Installation: http://www.sothq.net/projects/easyban-plugin/2/


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Wordpress Plugins DB » Blacklist HTML 1.0

Category: Post Plugins
Author: Matt Hopkins
Description: Using this plugin would replace any of your blacklisted HTML tags or words in your posts with the {censored} word.

The thing that makes this plugin especially useful is that it is designed to be distributed throughout a network of blogs which will all use the same list of blacklisted HTML tags or words. And of course there are no visible footprints to show that this plugin is in use.


[Download] [Plugin Page]

Wordpress Plugins DB » Post Version Control 1.0

Category: Admin Tools >> Enhancements
Author: Makis Tracend
Description: Posts can be grouped in many ways in Wordpress but there is no direct version control system. This plugin offers a lightweight solution if you want version control for a group of posts.

To make this work you define a keyword for each version control group you want to create. Then use that keyword as a prefix in the post name of each post in that group. The plugin will sort out the latest post automatically and label the rest as outdated.

It also let's you have a URL that will always point to the latest post of that version contol group. That way you can give out that URL to others and be sure that your visitors will always be viewing the most recent post.


[Download] [Plugin Page]

May 13, 2008

Nathan Rice » Planet WordPress » WordPress Single Post Templates

UPDATED:
Austin recommends using a filter in your functions.php file as an alternative to the method below. IMO, his suggestion is much simpler and quite elegant. Here’s the code to add to your theme’s functions.php file. (be sure you paste this code between <?php ?> tags):

add_filter('single_template', create_function('$t', 'foreach( (array) get_the_category() as $cat ) { if ( file_exists(TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php") ) return TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php"; } return $t;' ));

It helps solve the multiple categories issue since it cycles through all the categories in the array and checks to see which one of them has an associated post template. When it finds one, it uses the post template file, but if it doesn’t, then it falls back on the default single.php template.

So if you are used to placing posts in multiple categories, be sure to only create post templates for the categories you know won’t ever conflict.

Again, I highly recommend using this technique. It’s much simpler and works much better. If you care to, however, the original article is still below.
END UPDATE

A few months ago, I wrote a post over at the Blog Herald explaining how to set up and use WordPress Page Templates to control the way indivudual WordPress “Pages” appeared on your blog.  The process was pretty simple … create the page template, insert the necessary code at the top of the file, and upload it to your themes folder.

What what about blog posts?  As far as I could tell, there’s no way to do a similar thing with single posts without some manual code (see the “Unique Single Template” section).

Is it possible to have post templates like page templates???

Cory sent me this simple question a few days ago, and it got me thinking. So I started investigating.

The Setup

You’re going to need 3 things:

  1. A basic knowledge of WordPress Themes
  2. A single.php file
  3. Multiple single templates, named according to category ID

The Code

What we’re going to do is create single post templates according to the ID of the category the post is filed under.  In order to determine what category a post is filed under, we’re going to use the get_the_category template tag.  Then we’re going to pull out the first category the post is filed under. Insert the following code at the TOP of your single.php file in your theme folder:

< ?php
$category = get_the_category();
$currentcat = $category[0]->cat_ID;
?>

Be aware, if you file posts under multiple categories, chances are this method will not work as you intended.

Then, we’ll add a little PHP magic to pull in the template file you created for a particular category:

< ?php
$category = get_the_category();
$currentcat = $category[0]->cat_ID;
if (file_exists(TEMPLATEPATH."/single-$currentcat".".php")) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/single-$currentcat".".php");
} else {
?>

This code defines the first category the post is filed under, checks to see if a single post template exists for that category (template files look like this: single-1.php, single-2.php, single-3.php, etc.), and uses it if it does.

Finally, we need to put the following code at the very bottom of the single.php file, normally just below the wp_footer function:

< ?php } ?>

The reason we have to do this is to be able to use the default single.php code as fallback in case you haven’t created a template for a certain category.

After you’ve got the code in place, just find the ID of the category you want to create a template for, then create a new file called single-ID.php (be sure to replace ID with the category number). Just insert the code you want to use for any posts filed in that category and you’re good to go!

Limitations

Like I mentioned earlier, if you are in the habit of filing posts under multiple categories, this code probably won’t work as intended. Since we’re working with templates for use on single posts in single categories, posts in multiple categories may end up falling back to the default single.php template. You have been warned!

Sample Code Download

As always, I like to provide a sample file for you to look at yourself. In this instance, I’ve edited the single.php file for the WordPress Default theme to pull in single post templates, if they exist. Take a look at the code if you have any questions about how it should look in your theme’s single.php file. I’ve also commented the code quite thoroughly.

Download single.php

Mark on WordPress » wordpress » Bob Barr enters U.S. presidential race, powered by WordPress


Bob Barr, former Georgia Congressman, has announced a bid for the Libertarian nomination for president. He’s likely to receive it. Mr. Barr’s campaign blog is powered by WordPress. He even has open comments on his blog’s entries!

adii » Wordpress » Creating a YouTube Video Tabber

YouTube Video Tabber for WordPress

This tutorial is long overdue (I know), but better late than never, right!? In this quick tutorial, I’ll show you how I created the video tabber (using YouTube embedded videos - even though you can use any video embedding service) that can be seen on The Original Premium News Theme (one of the main selling points of the theme in my opinion).

When I coded this initially, I was very excited about it’s functionality; even though I realized that there’s superior coders out there, who’ll be able to custom-code something better. But the solution is pretty light-weight, slots into WP seamlessly and does the job beautifully. So let’s go…

Before we get started…

You’ve got to know that I’m not a great tutorial writer and this will be the first proper tutorial that I attempt to write. It will therefor not be perfect, but I will attempt to answer your questions in the comments. If I however don’t answer all the questions, it is because I’m busy… My aim with this tutorial is just to get your minds going and hopefully you can figure out the small bugs (if there’s any) on your own! :)

But bear with me… I will be posting more tutorials and they will get better!

The Start

The WordPress Loop

Okay first off, here’s a bit of a warning / notice if you’re keen on using this feature… The only way to get the data from the WordPress database, is to query it using The Loop. Since multiple WP loops in a template can clash, I’d suggest that you include this section after your main posts (i.e. either in the sidebar or footer), as it will drastically reduce your chances of conflict. That said, if you code it correctly, you shouldn’t experience any problems…

Setting up the category

The way I coded the video tabber, was to retrieve the 5 latest posts from a category that I created and simply called “Video” (you can call it anything you want). You will also need the ID of this category, as we will be using it later.

Tabbing

To get the tabbing functionality going, I used idTabs from Sean Catchpole. You will need to download that script and copy it to a folder called /js/ in your template directory (rename the .js file to tabs.js). To be able to access the idTabs functions, you will need to edit the header.php file and include the following line of code before the </body> tag:

Insert into header.php

I’m not going to cover the complexities of the tabbing script itself, as I don’t even know how to customize the script… But read Sean’s usage instructions should you run into any problems…

The Videos

Basics

Just so that you understand the logic behind the feature, I thought I’d just give you the basic ideas I used in creating the video tabber. Basically you need to use two similar WordPress loops to create two of the same lists of videos (one will be displayed as the list of all the videos and the other will be the video panel itself).

The tabber works by displaying a div layer with the corresponding ID of that of the link that is being displayed. So when I publish the code, I will show you how you can give both the link and the div layer the same ID by using two of the same WP loops.

(I’ve included a text version of the PHP for this section below.)

The Video Frame

When we get to the styling, you’ll see why I did this… But before you get started, you’ll just need an empty div layer with an ID of “video-frame” like this:

The Video Frame

The First Loop (Showing the list)

The first loop will display the list of 5 latest videos on the right-hand side of the video panel. This is what the code looks like:

The First Loop

This section of code will go into the “video-frame” div layer. Again, I’ve wrapped this section into a div layer (”video-right”) to make the styling a bit easier. Lines 3 & 4 are pretty self explanatory - so I won’t cover those… Then we have the first WP loop with a query post - note that you will need to jack your video category’s ID into the query_posts on Line 6.

If you are familiar with WordPress, you’ll be comfortable with the loop itself. All the loop does, is generate 5 list items (<li>) in an unordered list with the ID of “idTabs”. The hyperlink of each list item will link to the corresponding div layer to display the video.

The Second Loop (Showing the videos)

Now we will simply replicate the first loop, but the output will be different (by the way, this code goes into the “video-frame” div as well - right below the first loop)…

The Videos

For styling purposes, this section is wrapped in the div layer with the ID “video-left”. Instead of outputting the latest 5 videos in an unordered list, we’re just outputting them as separate div layers all with their own (unique!) ID that will correspond to the hyperlink in the list.

Download the Text Version of this section!

The Stylesheet

Video Dimensions

Since I’ve simply copied the code from the Original Premium News Template, I’ll stick to the video dimensions we used for the theme. Note however that you can resize it any way you please. The current dimensions in use is a max width of 350px, which means that the height is 292px (if YouTube videos are kept in the same aspect ratio).

The Style

This is the minimum style needed to make the tabber work (and not look too bad) - you can obviously add normal CSS to this section as you please:

The Style

All of the above styles are pretty self-explanatory I think… You’ll see that I didn’t include any CSS attributes for the last two elements (lines 35 - 40), but I suggest you just include an unique background for those images to differentiate the links you are hovering over or to show the video you are currently viewing.

Download the stylesheet here

And that’s it! Promise!

That should get you going on a pretty wicked new video tabber that you can add to your blog… If you have any questions, I will try answer them below in the comments…

Give back some of the love…

I’d really appreciate it, if you could Stumble, Digg or whatever this post…

Jeffro2pt0 » wordpress » Matt M To Be On WordPress Weekly

Matt Mullenweg Blog Logo

I have confirmed that Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame will be on Episode 17 of WordPress Weekly on May 23rd 2008 at 9PM EST. Matt will be hanging around for an hour and I have a wide ranging amount of questions for the guy. Here is what I plan on covering with my interview with Ma.tt:

  • WordPress Trademark Usage
  • Status Updates on all projects under the Automattic umbrella
  • The new hire along with the scaling of WordPress
  • The future of WordPress
  • I’ll have Matt explain how the new 2.5 administration design became a reality
  • I’ll ask him how the guy who doesn’t know PHP from their ABC can contribute to the development of WordPress

Those are some of the things I plan on getting Matt to cover, the rest of the time during the show will be dedicated to YOU. That means, call in with your questions and get the answer from the horses mouth so to speak.

This is going to be one hell of an episode and I invite all of you who are using or interested in WordPress to stop by and participate in the show. Oh yeah, tell everyone you know about this episode so that I feel like I’m under a bus load of pressure when I go on the air. Thanks!

Jeffro2pt0 » wordpress » Paying For WordPress

So, there are a number of articles being published discussing the fact that they would pay for WordPress if it came bundled with a price tag. Most of these articles have been started in response to Ryan’s article entitled 15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For Numerous people have claimed that WordPress is so good, they would pay for it. Would I pay for it? Maybe. But this question comes at a time where we actually have a bit of hindsight in which to make our decision. I liken this to the Butterfly Effect:

The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the ocurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. Of course the butterfly cannot literally cause a tornado. The kinetic energy in a tornado is enormously larger than the energy in the turbulence of a butterfly. The kinetic energy of a tornado is ultimately provided by the sun and the butterfly can only influence certain details of weather events in a chaotic manner.

If the WordPress.org project would of contained a price tag, I can practically guarantee you that the number of themes, plugins, tips and tricks would be far lower than what they are today, simply because of the pricetag. It wouldn’t even matter if the price was as low as $5.00, the bottom line is that their would be a price attached to the product.

I’ll be honest and tell you that WordPress is a great piece of publishing software. And the fact of the matter is, if WordPress in its current stated would switch to a paid platform, I would most likely pay for it. However, let’s not forget that Automattic is a privately held company which recently received a massive amount of funding from large venture firms. This company makes money through something known as WordPress.com. Therefor, if WP.org ended up with a price tag, I think you would see an implosion of the WP.org user base.

I mean, there are so many different avenues we can drive down in terms of what would happen if WP.org became something you have to pay for. The best thing WordPress.org could do is to remain a free, open source community based project. I realize the tone of this article makes it seem like WP.org is coming down the line with a price, but that isn’t true. It’s just that, so many people have claimed that they would pay for the software, it might inspire the folks involved with the project to attach a price tag to the software. but alas, Matt has said in the past that WP.org will remain as an open source project for the foreseeable future.

May 12, 2008

planetOzh » WordPress » Give your Admin Area Some Colorful Love

Two months ago, I wrote an article about per-user admin color schemes that WordPress 2.5 brought in its bag of new features. A few days laters, I received an email from COLOURlovers‘ chief lover, Darius, letting me know about the API they were about to release (and did released since, of course)

At this time, I had no spare time to work on it but the idea grew in my mind, and a few weeks ago I started coding something really fun. You might have seen the teasing earlier this month, and if not, skip it, my screencasting skills have dramatically improved since ;)

Here it goes: I’m pleased to introduce the Admin CSS Designer, a plugin that lets you design and tweak real time your admin color scheme. It fetches colorful palettes from COLOURlovers, make a CSS of it, then lets you edit and modify colors without coding anything or refreshing the page. Once you’re pleased with the result, save it as a standalone and reusable CSS.

I made a 3 minutes demonstration video along with a few sexy screenshots, so what are you waiting for? The Admin CSS Designer is waiting for your love!


© Ozh for planetOzh, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Who's linking ? Technorati

Konstruktors Notes » WordPress » Baltic Amber 1.32 — removed .youare section from your WordPress Dashboard

Baltic Amber 1.32 Dashboard: removed .youare section Version 1.31 1.32 applies display:none; to .youare <div> on the dashboard. The reasoning behind this move is the extensive user testing I conducted on myself — I had never touched that ‘Change Theme’ button since updating to 2.5., and the version of WordPress is visible in the footer of every administration section.

However, if you want to keep it, simply use Baltic Amber Themes & Schemes 1.3. If you would like to see this as an option (rather than by default), please leave a comment.

adii » Wordpress » Talking (about) WordPress (in Cape Town)

Seems like I’m in need of another great crowdsourced idea (I know, I know: I ask for a lot)…

On the 28th of this month, all of the WordPress fanboys & -girls in Cape Town (South Africa) will get together for our third WordPress Meetup this year (the idea is that we get together every two months). At these meetups, we just discuss a bunch of random, WP-related ideas and it is always a lot of fun actually speaking to real people about real ideas (instead of simply blogging about it).

Now, I’ve been asked to present any WP-related topic at the Meetup and I immediately figured that I’d do something like “WordPress as a CMS”, considering that I’d been doing a lot of development work in this regard in the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately Mark had already shotgunned that topic, so I need to come up with another idea…

Since you all know me so well through this blog, what topic would you have loved to see me present if you could attend a real presentation with me? Shoot away with your wishlists… :) I’ll even try hook you up with some video & slides after the meetup (if you help me out here!)…

(Image by ~owl-eyes)

WordPress Expert » Skribit: Blogging Widget to Help Writers’ Block

Every blogger, whether a WordPress user or not, will probably come up against a problem many bloggers face: writers’ block.

Skribit promises to alleviate that by providing widget code that you can add to Blogger, TypePad, self-hosted WordPress, or any other HTML webpage. This widget allows your readers to suggest new topics or ask for advice. The suggested topics can even be voted on social-media style.

This setup is a win-win, since the readers get to suggest and vote on content, while the blogger has an ideas list tailored to his or her blog.

As of this writing, you can find the Skribit widget on this blog’s sidebar — check out what it looks like, and feel free to leave a topic suggestion or two. :-)

[via Easy WordPress]

scompt.com » wordpress » ImmerStat 0.5 Released

ImmerStat is a plugin I wrote over the weekend after getting tired of the Flash applet that displays statistics for the WordPress.com Stats plugin. It’s overkill when I just want to get a general idea of where I’m sitting at the moment stats-wise. ImmerStat gets rid of the WordPress.com Stats widget from the Dashboard and replaces it with an ever-present .PNG in the top-right corner of the admin screen.

The statistics are pulled using the same functions that the WordPress.com Stats plugin uses and are cached for 5 minutes, as are all stats from the plugin. The graphic is created on the fly using the Google Charts API. The plugin just build the URL and sends it to the browser. Colors, timespan, and Google Charts parameters are all completely configurable using filter hooks.

WordPress 2.5 is the primary version supported. Previous versions should work, but have not been tested.

Download ImmerStat Version 0.5

May 11, 2008

Lorelle on WordPress » WordPress News » Learning from the Voices of WordCamp Dallas


WordPress NewsCharles Stricklin, the host of and has released The Voices of WordCamp Dallas, a collection of quick interviews and questions I asked during the event.

I was so amazed at how open everyone was, willing to share their thoughts on WordPress, WordCamp, blogging, and the magic of the web today. I talked to bloggers who had been blogging for years and newbies, with only a few weeks under their belts. It was a collection of the whose who and whose upcoming in the blogosphere and thank you to Charles for sharing the magic that his efforts brought together in one place.

Some of the interviews are excerpted and I hope to bring them to you in their entirety soon, so stay tuned. In the 30 minute set of The Voices of WordCamp Dallas, you will hear:

00.10 Bill Sholar of Webfratelli
00.37 Dan Bates
00.59 Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today
01.45 Ptah Dunbar
02.34 Bryan Lee
03:14 Cory Miller of iThemes Media
03:44 Henry Pugsley
04:07 Kerry Webster of WEBsmith internet consultants
04:44 Wendi McGowan of Wendistry, LLC and Scott Ellis of vsellis.com
05:36 Dave Curlee and Katherine Curlee of RealCookN.tv
06:28 DB Ferguson of No Fact Zone
07:48 Alexander Frison of Not a Niche
09:18 Tony Cecala of Holistic Networker
10:04 Mike Borschow of MetroQ.com
11:55 Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection
12:30 Dorian Karthauser of DK Enterprises (beginner blogger)
17:35 Charlene Mullenweg (sister of Matt Mullenweg)
23:15 Jim Halloran of AlcoholismDiseaseFree.com
24:13 Ryan Joy and Michelle Greer of Volusion and Michelle’s Blog
26:41 Kathleen Ratliff
27:14 William Addington of Williamedia
28:31 Doug Smith of smithsrus.com and Hide a Pod
29:25 Ronald Huereca of Readers Appreciation Project and Weblog Tools Collection
30:23 Dimitri (blog not public - biotech)

I look forward to repeating this fascinating dialog in future WordCamps and blogging events I travel to and speak at. It’s a humbling experience as I come to teach and come away learning more than I ever expected. Thank you to all for sharing your thoughts and passions with me!

Related Articles



Site Search Tags: , , , , , , ,

Feed on Lorelle on WordPress Subscribe Feedburner iconVia Feedburner Subscribe by Email Visit
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

planetOzh » WordPress » How to Find a WordPress Job

Photo by Daniel StarrasonIf you’re a WordPress freelancer, or if you are just looking for some pocket change earned thanks to your WordPress hacking skills, how are you supposed to get some homework to do? How to find your daily WordPress job?

The mandatory thing to do is to subscribe to the wp-pro mailing list. A few times a day, people are posting in there seeking for assistance in various fields (coding, theme designing, installing…)

The official WordPress Jobs covers also a wide variety of topics: you can post and look for job offers regarding Programming, Designing, or even Blogging.

WordPress Job is a website that WordPress freelancers are going to follow: it’s aggregating WordPress job offers (several every day) from the main freelancers’ sites such as ScriptLance, RentACoder, GetAFreeLancer. Be warned though, competition there is really harsh and bids outrageously low :)

General job listing sites can be efficient, too. Simply Hired returns quite some results when looking for “wordpress”, mostly coming from Elance and oDesk.

What else? Do you know or use another source for WordPress job offers?
(Photo credits: Daniel Starrason)


© Ozh for planetOzh, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us Who's linking ? Technorati

Viper007Bond.com » WordPress » Clean Archives Reloaded v3.0.0

For those that haven’t noticed, I released a new version of Clean Archives Reloaded yesterday. It’s a major reworking of the plugin and it now requires WordPress 2.5 (due to functions it uses).

It’s now faster than before (I saw page generation times drop by about 10% on my test blog), an options page to configure the plugin, and much, much more.

So, upgrade today! :)

All comments should be left on the plugin’s homepage.

May 15, 2007

PatchLog » wordpress » Stop playing with page titles

This is more like a reminder to me then an advice for others to follow. It reminds me that I should stop playing with page titles and get them right from the beginning.

Wordpress default post titles

When I first started this blog using wordpress the default template had something like "Patchlog ›› Blog Archive ›› Post name" for the post titles.

That's really not good for search engines. Having that "Patchlog ›› Blog Archive" in front of every post title is looking like all posts have the same title to a search engine because they only consider a small number of characters from the title when they index your pages, and because the part that makes them different is in the end it may not be considered or may not show up in results.

The first change and the imediat result
By the time I finally decided to change this, google had already indexed all my pages with the wrong titles. After I changed it google started to re-index everything because it thought that everything changed ( see how important the page title is ? :) )

That was all fine but because it started to re-index my posts were not showing anymore in google results for relevant keywords until it finished the re-index.So during that time the traffic decreased till my posts were back in it's database with the new titles.

The second change

The only problem is that I did not get the page titles right so I had to change them again after the site was already re-indexed and I'm back in the dark on google.

Take for example my post about making squid 2.6 transparent proxy to work if you are used to squid 2.5 config. That post got more then 400 visits from people searching for squid 2.6 transparent or phrases containing squid 2.6 or transparent or proxy last month. This month got around 100 and I think that was in the beginning of the month before I did the second round of changes to my page titles because I did not notice any increase on those numbers in the last week.

So if you want to change something as important as your page / post titles and you know it will affect all the pages on your site, think twice before applying the changes to make sure you get it right the first time.

May 13, 2007

DEAN LEE:/DEV/BLOG » wordpress » Howto:Configure Spell Check with FCKEditor Plugin for Wordpress

There is a good guide to configuring spell check with dean’s fckeditor plugin for wordpress at : blog.dotkam.com

Below "how to" will guide you step-by-step on integrating spell checking capabilities with FCKEditor. Here I used Ubuntu Linux OS as an example, but these instructions are good for any Linux distro just replace Ubuntu’s "apt-get install" with analog in your Linux OS….read more

The spell check is a nice feature from many different perspectives,I’m considering adding it to the future version.

many thanks for the author’s sharing.

May 12, 2007

DEAN LEE:/DEV/BLOG » wordpress » Update:dean’s fckeditor wordpress (v2.0)

dean’s fckeditor for wordpress has been totally rewritten, with some new features added.

New feautures provided in this version:

 

  • Create your own smiles
  • Skin selector
  • Toolbar selector

 

deanjrobinson.com » Plugin » modMunch 1.0 Plugin for Wordpress

modMunch Released

Last night I was working on my redesign, and I noticed a tweet from Matt Brett, he was looking for something that would replace the comment moderation email notification with a feed of some sort.

An idea popped into my head and I thought I’d give it a stab and see if I could come up with something to do the job. This is the end result of a couple of hours work, and I think it should suit nicely.

I’m surprised something like this isn’t already part of the Wordpress core, because I can imagine that some site that have lots and lots of traffic would be receiving dozens of emails each day. A single feed would be much nicer.

Theres not really much to modMunch.

  • Gives you an RSS feed with the comments that are awaiting moderation.
  • Access is restricted through the use of a personalised access code.
  • Privdes all the same information that the standard email notifications provide.
  • Removes the need for you to receive constant emails telling you to moderate comments. Multiple emails replaced by a single feed.

Here is an example of the modMunch feed being viewed in NewsFire.

Comment moderation rss style

For more details, and installation tips visit the modMunch homepage.

Downoad modMunch 1.0 Now!
Downloaded 858 times

modMunch Support Forum

Theme Porter - Wordpress Themes , Wordpress Templates » Zivl Green Wordpress Theme

Here comes our final release for this month. With rounded corners and designed in shades of green it is definitely a cool Web 2.0 Wordpress theme. What’s more it is widget compatible.

Screenshot:
Zivl Green WP Theme

Download Link: Click Here

Demo Link: Click Here

time saved
order viagra

Theme Porter - Wordpress Themes , Wordpress Templates » Zivl Red Wordpress Theme

This is one more wide 2 column red theme that we particularly liked this month so decided to port it. It is widget compatible

Screenshot:
Zivl Red WP Theme

Download Link: Click Here

Demo Link: Click Here

time saved
order viagra

Theme Porter - Wordpress Themes , Wordpress Templates » Lay of the Land Wordpress Theme

We found this template on opensourcewebdesign.org and loved every bit of it. It is now one of our favourite dark theme. Design wise it is a 2 column Wordpress theme in shades of black featuring right sidebar and widget friendly.

We continue to port designs made by Rambling Soul. This is another 2 column wordpress theme featuring right sidebar designed by 20 pirates this time. Its again a very clean and lovely theme to use for your blog. Do give it a try.

Screenshot:
Lay WP Theme

Download Link: Click Here

Demo Link: Click Here

time saved
order viagra

Theme Porter - Wordpress Themes , Wordpress Templates » Rambling Soul 4 Wordpress Theme

We continue to port designs made by Rambling Soul. This is another 2 column wordpress theme featuring right sidebar this time. Its again a very clean and lovely theme to use for your blog. Do give it a try.

Screenshot:
Rambling 4 WP Theme

Download Link: Click Here

Demo Link: Click Here

time saved
order viagra