Wordpress

WordPress Weekly Reminder

Just wanted to remind you that there will indeed be an episode three of WordPress Weekly this Friday evening at 9PM EST on Talkshoe.com In between episodes 2 and 3, Talkshoe has launched a redesigned website along with a web based client. The web based client loads in a new window within your browser and gives you access to the Talkcast chatroom along with being able to listen to the show live. What does this all mean? Now you don’t need to install anything if you want to listen or participate on the show. I’ve checked out the web app and it seems to perform better than the actual client. The text now scrolls from the top to the bottom which is the conventional means of chatting. The show information is displayed on the bottom where it is easily located. The only thing I don’t like about this web app version of Talkshoe is the lack of a reply link next to everyone’s message. It’s hard to maintain and keep up with conversations with individual people.

At any rate, be sure to tune into WordPress Weekly this Friday evening. If you are interested in WordPress and keep up with the news and also want to be on the show, send me an email via the contact form which can be found by clicking the contact link at the top of the blog. If you are usually a guest host on WW please send me an email asap letting me know if you’ll be able to make it.

Add Buttons To Visual Editor

Adding Custom Icons

Using the visual editor in WordPress when writing a blog post is great. However, don’t you sometimes wish that you could add custom buttons to the editor to perform specific functions that are either lacking or hard to navigate to? There is great news in that, you can add custom buttons to your visual text editor by editing the quicktags.js file. (back this file up before you actually edit anything).

WPCandy has an awesome tutorial online which takes you through the motions of creating and then adding your own custom button to the text editor. For instance, when I want to use the H2 tag, I have to click on the button which brings down the advanced options and then select H2 Heading from the drop down box. Using this tutorial, I have created a button specifically for H2 so I no longer need to browse through the advanced buttons area.

The tutorial is not at all difficult so give it a try. Let me know what sort of options you end up adding to your existing toolbar.

Another Gift For WP.com Users

Wordpress.com Logo

Well, Christmas may be done and over with but Matt Mullenweg and company are apparently still in a giving mood. Starting today, every registered user of WordPress.com will see their upload space go from 50mb to 3,000mb. This is 60 times more storage than what was offered previously. According to Matt, if you were to get half that amount over at Typepad, you would have to pay at least $300.00 per year. The great thing about this change is that it’s free. No charge to current or future users of WordPress.com

Thanks to the hard work and behind the scenes efforts put forth by the Automattic team, you’ll no longer need to worry about how many kilobytes of data you have left on your storage limit. Also, for those who purchased a storage upgrade in the past to 1GB, that 1GB will be increased to 5GB at no extra charge.

Hows that for a late present?

WordPress Meetup In New York

Looks like there will be a WordPress meetup in the New York City area on Saturday, February 16th 2008 at 4:00 PM. The date and where the event is taking place is subject to change so be sure to keep an eye on the official event page for more information.

Other WordPress related conferences/meetups are as follows:

Simply Basic Releases WP Plugin

Simply Basic Logo

Blogging buddy John Kolbert has released his very first WordPress plugin called Admin Favicon. Not long ago, John published an article on his blog that explained how to give your WordPress admin area it’s own favicon so that you could easily discern the WP Admin tab in your browser from all of the other tabs. As it turns out, each time you upgrade WordPress, the hack disappears. That problem is solved with this plugin.

When you install the plugin, a new entry is created within the OPTIONS page of your administrative backend. Click on Admin Favicon and you should see a box where you can type in a custom URL where your favicon will be stored.

Favicon Setup

After setting the URL to your icon, click OK. It might require you to restart your browser before the icon is detected but usually, all you’ll need to do is browse a few pages in your Admin area until the icon is detected.

This is another example of how open the WordPress code is. A simple problem solved with a simple solution. And thanks to John releasing this plugin, other people who have noticed this similar problem, now have a solution in which to use. Thanks John.

For support or inquiries regarding the plugin, check out Admin Favicon.

Proposed WP Plugin Standards

WordPress.orgLogoWow. Someone has come through and put together a list of proposed standards that plugin authors should abide by. This person goes by the name of Weathervane and considering this fella has downloaded 530 plus plugins, I tend to think he knows what he’s talking about. A little warning, the list of proposed standards is a bit long but it’s definitely a worthy read.

Weathervane makes a ton of proposals that I agree with. But there is one thing he didn’t mention that I think would solve many of the problems that are mentioned. That being, the use of the Official WordPress Plugin Database. Weathervane takes the approach of plugins being available on the authors main website. I take the stance that any and all plugins should be submitted and stored in the WP Plugin Database. This provides a central location for all types of plugins, provides the hosting necessary for plugin authors if need be, provides the ability to have a discussion/support area for each individual plugin, and something I feel that is really important. Automatic notification that a plugin has been updated.

Of course, my view on the proposed standards for WordPress Plugins requires that we start off at the top of the food chain. This would be the WP Plugin Database. Once a series of guidelines were established at the top, the rest of the job becomes easy. Think of the advantages of having a central repository for WP Plugins. As end users, we wouldn’t need to Google Search or bookmark tons of seperate web pages that housed plugins. We would automatically be notified of updates within the plugin page in our WordPress back end. Depending on the coding guidelines that allow plugins to be entered into the repository, as end users, we would have that much more confidence that the plugin actually works and won’t do any hanky panky.

It’s awesome that I think weathervane put in the time and effort into his proposal and I believe a lot of his guidelines would be great to use for WP plugin database. Now that we have someone who has put together a base of their own proposals, it’s time we put our thinking caps on and contributed to the list.

Turning Categories Into Feeds

Out of the box, WordPress generates a number of RSS feeds for you automatically. These include feeds for comments, posts, and believe it or not, categories. I had previously thought that a plugin was required in order to turn categories into RSS feeds but that is not the case. Check this out.

WordPress supports a number of different syndication specifications, those of which are listed below along side their respected WordPress generated URL.

RSS Spec / WordPress URL

RSS 0.92 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed-rss

RDF RSS 1.0 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php or http://www.yourdomain.com?feed=rdf

RSS 2.0 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed=rss2

Atom Feed / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-atom.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed=atom

Comments RSS Feed / http://yourdomain.com/?feed=rss&p=50 where p stands for post and 50 is the post id.

Now here is the feed link which I found interesting.

Category RSS Feed / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=50 where cat stands for category and 50 is the category ID.

Finding the ID number for a category is easy if the blog your browsing is not using pretty permalinks. However, if the blog IS using permalinks, you can type in the following URLs to access their RSS Subscription Links.

http://www.domain.com/feed – Main RSS Feed

http://www.domain.com/comments/feed – Comments RSS Feed

http://www.domain.com/category/category-name/feed – RSS Feed For That Category

Why would you want to know this information? Now, if you come across a site that publishes articles within only a category or two of interest, you can subscribe directly to those categories instead of the entire blog making your RSS reader that much more efficient. For instance, I occasionally publish jokes or perhaps something out of my personal life when all you really care about, are reviews or news.

WordPress Premium Theme – Reviewed

I don’t think I’ve ever done a review of a WordPress theme before, so this ought to be interesting. However, ever since I laid eyes on the WordPress theme called WordPress Premium, I’ve been wanting to review it.

WordPress Premium Logo

WordPress Premium was designed by R. Bhavesh and comes with 3 different color styles. Black, Soft-Red and Brown. In the screenshot up above, that is actually the Soft-Red version. At first, I didn’t like the color scheme. But after I altered the brightness settings on my LCD monitor, the color scheme has grown on me and I actually think it’s soft on the eyes.

First Things First:

WordPress Premium Subscription Area

One of the things you’ll notice first is the RSS button that is predominantly located at the top of the design. What I like about this particular section of the theme is the beautiful integration of a subscribe via email form, right next to the RSS button. This allows your readers to easily choose between which method works best as far as keeping up with your posts. Believe it or not, there are still a large number of users who subscribe to websites via email. In fact, there are at least 5 individuals who have subscribed to this blog via email, not including myself. Another nice aesthetic is the rounded corners presented all across the design. Despite what critics have said, I believe rounded corners to be easier on the eyes than 90 degree corners. Of course, my own blog design is filled with hard edges. I get a ton of emails from readers complaining about being cut from the blog. At any rate, the rounded corners just add to the smoothness of the overall design.

Advertising Strategy:

WordPress Premium Advertisement Spaces

As for advertising placements, WordPress Premium comes preloaded with three advertisement squares that are built into the sidebar. These are 100X100 squares that typically hold advertisement images similar to the ones found on WeblogToolsCollection.com

3 In 1 Module:

WordPressPremium 3in1 Widget

Other highlights worth noticing is the multi use, tabbed search box. This tabbed widget serves three purposes. A search box, an archive displayer, and a list of categories. I believe this to be an excellent use of space and wouldn’t mind having something like that for my own design.

The Sidebar Effect:

The sidebar for WordPress Premium takes special notice from me. It’s hard to come across a blog with what I call a 2 in 1 sidebar. That is, a wide sidebar built into two smaller sidebars. That way, you can put those big widgets in the bigger sidebar, while putting smaller width items in the skinnier sidebars. That is the kind of side bar I wanted for this blog, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. With WordPress Premium, this kind of sidebar is built in, and should serve as an excellent area for those third party widgets to reside in.

Content Is King:

WordPress Premium Content

As for the display of content, the content background is white while the foreground text is a dark gray. I think the dark gray text provides a smoother contrast when compared with the black on white. Out of the box, displaying images either on the left or right side of the post looks good as they have the appropriate padding attributes so that the text is not squashed up against the image. As a nice touch, the comment notifier is displayed in the top right hand corner of each post. This little gem displays the number of comments per blog entry and links to the comment section of that post.

Conclusion:

To download and see this theme in action, click here.

Before the new year started, I browsed around for hours, checking out numerous WordPress themes along with template designs on Templatemonster.com, looking for inspiration for the redesign. As you can see, I merely rearranged my current theme and elected not to go for a completely new look. However, had I changed the blog to a completely new theme, this is the one that I most likely would of chose.

Actually, while I might still have your attention, do you think the color scheme or some of the elements from WordPress Premium would look good on Jeffro2pt0? There are a few things I wouldn’t mind trying to implement from that theme into this one. But I figured I’d ask first.

Revver Updates WP Plugin

Revver WordPress Logo

Revver has updated their WordPress plugin today. The plugin mostly consists of more customization and greater support to users.

The plugin has always required that your host allow cURL access. Unfortunately for some users, certain hosting providers such as GoDaddy required additional configuration settings that would have required updating the plugin code. To remedy this, we added a field in the “Revver Configuration” tab where you can add a proxy server that does support cURL (sounds a little mumbo jumbo-y, but all you need to do is copy and paste a URL and you’re good).

Instructions for installing for the first time or upgrading an existing install can be found on the quickstart guide page.

Telligent Lacks Intelligents

Telligent.com Logo

Charles Stricklin has published an article today that shows off Grafiti essentially slamming WordPress. According to Charles, Telligent has purchased the keyword WordPressPodcast from Google Adwords. Upon clicking on the promotional landing page, you discover that the Grafiti CMS is THE alternative for WordPress. Telligent claims that Grafiti has a 2 minute install time when compared with the 5 minute install time for WordPress. Some notable differences between the two: Grafiti is based on Microsoft.NET and IIS technology and costs $199.00 which by the way, is a limited time price, so who knows what the final price may end up being.

The final verdict? Grafiti seems to be taking some pretty sharp jabs towards WordPress which don’t even make sense. Although they have a pretty aggressive advertising campaign going on, what they are offering with Grafiti isn’t even close to what you receive with WordPress. I don’t know who they are trying to kid, but who in their right mind would pay at least $199.00 for this stuff?

As Charles mentions on his blog, the major downfall Grafiti has going against their software is that it’s proprietary. This means you have to lean on Telligents shoulders and hope to god they never go out of business. In retrospect, WordPress is an open-source project filed under the GPL. This means, even if the major developers stepped away from the project, nothing stops you from picking up where they left off.

Ever hear of the phrase, You Get What You Pay For? Generally, it’s true. In this case however, you get $199.00 worth of crap. Enjoy.