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Posts Tagged ‘Wordpress’

Tumblr Now Has More Blogs Than WordPress.com

15 Jun


According to their respective websites, 4-year-old microblogging platform Tumblr now hosts more blogs than 8-year-old WordPress.com.

In January, Tumblr had more than 7 million individual blogs. At the time of this writing, the total blog ticker on its site read about three times that at 20,873,182 — beating out WordPress.com’s current count by about 85,000 blogs.

WordPress.com’s count doesn’t include sites that people host themselves with the open source software via WordPress.org, but given that the hosted service had about a four-year headstart, surpassing it in number is still an impressive feat for Tumblr.

Clearly a flood of individuals have been signing up for Tumblr lately. But top companies in entertainment and news and fashion have also recently launched Tumblr blogs. They’re using the platform in a very different way than they use WordPress.com.

WordPress.com has long hosted the main sites of top brands such as the National Football League, CNN and TED. Most Tumblr blogs function much more like another social media presence — something like a cross between websites and Facebook profiles.

More About: trending, tumblr, WordPress

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WordPress.com Drops Support for IE6

19 May

WordPress Dashboard

As the Internet Explorer 6 Deathwatch continues, another web service — WordPress.com — has announced that it is ending support of the nearly decade-old web browser.

Citing “increasingly complex code trickery to make the WordPress dashboard work,” the company announced an end to IE6 support.

The dashboard will still load for IE6 users, it just won’t function very well. IE6 users will be alerted that their browser is outdated and given direct links to browser updates or to download an alternative browser via the Browse Happy website.

In addition to dropping IE6 support, WordPress.com has also rolled out some new features, including a revamped and redesigned dashboard and a new distraction-free writing mode.

These features — as well as the end-of-life for IE6 support — will make their way to self-hosted WordPress installs with WordPress 3.2. The beta version of WordPress 3.2 is available for download now and the final version is expected to land sometime in June.

WordPress.com, which hosts millions of websites, joins a long list of providers that have officially decided that enough is enough in regards to IE6. In March, Microsoft launched its own global campaign calling for the end of the browser.

More About: IE6, internet explorer, WordPress.com

For more Dev & Design coverage:


 
 

Why You Shouldn’t Use Facebook Comments… Yet

17 Mar

Earlier this month, Facebook announced some significant upgrades to its commenting system for bloggers and other website owners.

The system is designed to compete with services like Disqus and Intense Debate by adding a Facebook-hosted commenting system to your site, one that can either replace or supplement your existing comment system.

To their credit, Facebook has given a lot of reasons to like the system. It’s clean, easy to look at, has good moderation tools, great stat reporting and is virtually spam-free since users have to have a Facebook account to comment.

Because of this, many sites, including TechCrunch, have begun either using or experimenting with Facebook comments.

However, this system is far from a match made in heaven and you won’t see it on my site, at least not in its current incarnation. Where it might be for some, it isn’t for mine and I will do my best to explain exactly why.

Problem 1: Out of Sync

With Disqus, which is what I currently use, and Intense Debate comments posted to your blog get put both in their database and yours. This means that, should you decide Disqus/ID is no longer right for you or if the company closes for some reason, you still have your comments.

With Facebook, the comments are simply stored in Facebook’s database and are served via an embed. If you ditch Facebook, you lose your comments, that simple.

Problem 2: JavaScript and SEO

For many sites, the comments is a significant percentage of the content on their page. However, Facebook displays that content in an embedded JavaScript that is not readable or indexable by search engines. This means you get no SEO benefit from your community.

Facebook comments is not SEO friendly and this is a problem both Disuqus and ID deal with gracefully, but putting the comments in your site in cleartext.

Problem 3: Limited Audience

It may be a surprise, but not everyone has a Facebook account and, those who do, not everyone is comfortable using their account to post comments on random sites. In short, you’re limiting your potential commenting pool to only those with Facebook accounts that trust you enough to use it on your site.

TechCrunch noted that, while Facebook Comments did help keep the trolls at bay and raise the level of discourse, the number of comments has fallen and this is on a very tech-savvy site where nearly every visitor will have a Facebook account.

Problem 4: Technical Difficulties

I attempted to set up Facebook Comments on my site temporarily to see it in action but failed completely. Even using a WordPress Plugin dedicated to the cause, I had no luck in getting it to work, even after disabling every other Facebook-related thing on my site.

Facebook Comments simply doesn’t play nice with a lot of other features and it seems others have had struggles with it as well.

Problem 5: Lack of Customization

Don’t like the way Disqus looks? Customize it. Don’t like the way Facebook Comments look? Tough.

Though the Facebook commenting system is far from ugly, if it doesn’t fit your theme you’re pretty much out of luck. You get what Facebook gives you and, apart from a few subtle changes you can make, there isn’t much anyone can do with it.

Bottom Line

To be clear, there is a lot that I do like about Facebook Comments and I have a lot of reason to want to play with it. But, right now, there are simply too many problems with it for me to consider using it, at least as my exclusive commenting system.

Obviously, I don’t need all of these above problems fixed (customization is not a major issue for me) but I would like to see better SEO handling and synchronization with my local database. Without those two things, Facebook and Facebook alone reaps the benefit of my comments section, leaving me with nothing.

It seems, however, that much of this comes from Facbeook’s tight control over everything that passes through it Facebook doesn’t like to share the information it gets with other domains, even when it comes from another site, and likes to be the sole determiner of how the information it gets is used, often to the chagrin of its members.

In short, until Facebook’s approach to commenting is a little more balanced. I don’t think I’ll be using it on my site, at least not as my main comment form.


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Essential Plugins for Every WordPress Installation

05 Mar

One of the reasons why people gravitate toward WordPress is the seemingly unlimited numbers of open source plugins available. Today, I’d like to go over a few plugins that I think absolutely warrant your attention. I’m sure I’ve missed some, though, so make sure to chime in within the comments! Hopefully, this article will morph into an absolute monster of a list that can act as a reference for fellow WordPress developers.


Jump to a Category


Comments


Akismet

Tutorial Image

Akismet is quite possibly the perfect spam management solution. It’s unobstrusive, manages to catch 99% of spam and is quite easy to get started. An absolute must have!.


Disqus Comments

Tutorial Image

Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community. It features the niceties you’d expect like Gravatars, feeds, rating and threading.


SEO


All in One SEO Pack

Tutorial Image

An exceedingly powerful solution to optimize your website for search engines. It automatically generates meta tags, lets you override a page’s title and description among a slew of other features. More importantly, you can pretty much make it work out of the box with minimal tweaking.


SEO Smart Links

Tutorial Image

Interlinking within your site is one of the most basic tenets of SEO. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs.


HeadSpace2 SEO

Tutorial Image

HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. It lets you control almost every aspect of your site’s meta-data, including advanced tagging and analytics.


Google XML Sitemaps

Tutorial Image

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.


Performance


WP Super Cache

Tutorial Image

Once you get beyond a certain size, WordPress can act really slow. Caching your content, as always, is a great solution. This plugin does exactly that. It create static versions of your content which is served instead. Works wonders specially when you’re heavily trafficked.


CDN Sync Tool

Tutorial Image

Uploads/syncs your static files to a Content Deilvery Network (CDN) with push CDNs such as Amazon S3 / CloudFront and CloudFiles aswell as Origin Pull CDNs such as MaxCDN / NetDNA. You can choose files from your media library, theme directory, WordPress’s wp-include directory and plugin directories aswell as new media library uploads.


WP Smush.it

Tutorial Image

An excellent plugin that automatically processes any image in the blog through the smush.it service, without requiring any user intervention reducing file sizes and improving performance.


WP Minify

Tutorial Image

WP Minify grabs JS/CSS files in your generated WordPress page and passes that list to the Minify engine. The Minify engine then returns a consolidated, minified, and compressed script or style for WP Minify to reference in the WordPress header.


WP-Optimize

Tutorial Image

This simple but effective plugin allows you to clean up your WordPress database and optimize it without phpMyAdmin. Also renames any username.


Social


Socialize

Tutorial Image

This provides an easy way to selectively add actionable social bookmarks to your posts content or below the post in a ‘Call To Action’ box. You can add bookmarks either inside the content or in a box below the content.


AddToAny

Tutorial Image

This WordPress plugin to help people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more sharing and social bookmarking sites.


Media


Scissors Continued

Tutorial Image

Scissors Continued adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to WordPress’ image upload and management dialogs. Scissors also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images.


NextGEN Gallery

Tutorial Image

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option. It is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with dozens of options and features which provides a simple administration system at the back end which can also handle multiple galleries.


Monetization


Advertising Manager

Tutorial Image

This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Other ad networks can be used as well.


Ad Injection

Tutorial Image

Ad Injection injects any kind of advert (e.g. Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, ClickBank, TradeDoubler, etc) into the existing content of your WordPress posts and pages. You can control the number of adverts based on the post length, and it can restrict who sees adverts by post age, visitor referrer and IP address.


Backup


WP-DB-Backup

Tutorial Image

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.


EZPZ One Click Backup

Tutorial Image

EZPZ One Click Backup is a very easy way to do a complete backup of your entire WordPress site. In fact it’s so easy to use there are no required user settings, everything is automatic. Just one click and presto, you’ll have a complete backup stored on your server. One more click and you can download the entire backup to your own computer.


Analytics


Google Analyticator

Tutorial Image

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.


WP-Stats-Dashboard

Tutorial Image

Display your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard. See how you’re ranking on Alexa, check out your Technorati authority, monitor your ranking across multiple sites and much more.


Utilities


Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Tutorial Image

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.


Organize Series

Tutorial Image

The Organize Series WordPress Plugin helps with the organization and presentation of articles/posts you write as part of a series. It helps make it easier for readers of your blog to discover all the series you’ve written and also to easily find post that are part of the same series.


Simple URL Shortener

Tutorial Image

Simple URL Shortener is the simplest, yet most powerful URL shortening plugin available, with over 100 shortening services available.


Wrapping Up

As you may have noticed, I’ve chosen to stick to free plugins. There are, however, plenty of killer paid options to consider — CodeCanyon, for instance, is the web’s largest marketplace for premium WordPress plugins, amongst other sorts of scripts and components.

We’ve, of course, only merely scratched the surface here. Chime in below with the plugins you use and love on a daily basis, and I’ll make sure to keep this list updated weekly. Thank you so much for reading!

 
 

Essential Plugins for Every WordPress Installation

05 Mar

One of the reasons why people gravitate toward WordPress is the seemingly unlimited numbers of open source plugins available. Today, I’d like to go over a few plugins that I think absolutely warrant your attention. I’m sure I’ve missed some, though, so make sure to chime in within the comments! Hopefully, this article will morph into an absolute monster of a list that can act as a reference for fellow WordPress developers.


Jump to a Category


Comments


Akismet

Tutorial Image

Akismet is quite possibly the perfect spam management solution. It’s unobstrusive, manages to catch 99% of spam and is quite easy to get started. An absolute must have!.


Disqus Comments

Tutorial Image

Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community. It features the niceties you’d expect like Gravatars, feeds, rating and threading.


SEO


All in One SEO Pack

Tutorial Image

An exceedingly powerful solution to optimize your website for search engines. It automatically generates meta tags, lets you override a page’s title and description among a slew of other features. More importantly, you can pretty much make it work out of the box with minimal tweaking.


SEO Smart Links

Tutorial Image

Interlinking within your site is one of the most basic tenets of SEO. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs.


HeadSpace2 SEO

Tutorial Image

HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. It lets you control almost every aspect of your site’s meta-data, including advanced tagging and analytics.


Google XML Sitemaps

Tutorial Image

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.


Performance


WP Super Cache

Tutorial Image

Once you get beyond a certain size, WordPress can act really slow. Caching your content, as always, is a great solution. This plugin does exactly that. It create static versions of your content which is served instead. Works wonders specially when you’re heavily trafficked.


CDN Sync Tool

Tutorial Image

Uploads/syncs your static files to a Content Deilvery Network (CDN) with push CDNs such as Amazon S3 / CloudFront and CloudFiles aswell as Origin Pull CDNs such as MaxCDN / NetDNA. You can choose files from your media library, theme directory, WordPress’s wp-include directory and plugin directories aswell as new media library uploads.


WP Smush.it

Tutorial Image

An excellent plugin that automatically processes any image in the blog through the smush.it service, without requiring any user intervention reducing file sizes and improving performance.


WP Minify

Tutorial Image

WP Minify grabs JS/CSS files in your generated WordPress page and passes that list to the Minify engine. The Minify engine then returns a consolidated, minified, and compressed script or style for WP Minify to reference in the WordPress header.


WP-Optimize

Tutorial Image

This simple but effective plugin allows you to clean up your WordPress database and optimize it without phpMyAdmin. Also renames any username.


Social


Socialize

Tutorial Image

This provides an easy way to selectively add actionable social bookmarks to your posts content or below the post in a ‘Call To Action’ box. You can add bookmarks either inside the content or in a box below the content.


AddToAny

Tutorial Image

This WordPress plugin to help people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more sharing and social bookmarking sites.


Media


Scissors Continued

Tutorial Image

Scissors Continued adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to WordPress’ image upload and management dialogs. Scissors also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images.


NextGEN Gallery

Tutorial Image

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option. It is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with dozens of options and features which provides a simple administration system at the back end which can also handle multiple galleries.


Monetization


Advertising Manager

Tutorial Image

This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Other ad networks can be used as well.


Ad Injection

Tutorial Image

Ad Injection injects any kind of advert (e.g. Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, ClickBank, TradeDoubler, etc) into the existing content of your WordPress posts and pages. You can control the number of adverts based on the post length, and it can restrict who sees adverts by post age, visitor referrer and IP address.


Backup


WP-DB-Backup

Tutorial Image

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.


EZPZ One Click Backup

Tutorial Image

EZPZ One Click Backup is a very easy way to do a complete backup of your entire WordPress site. In fact it’s so easy to use there are no required user settings, everything is automatic. Just one click and presto, you’ll have a complete backup stored on your server. One more click and you can download the entire backup to your own computer.


Analytics


Google Analyticator

Tutorial Image

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.


WP-Stats-Dashboard

Tutorial Image

Display your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard. See how you’re ranking on Alexa, check out your Technorati authority, monitor your ranking across multiple sites and much more.


Utilities


Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Tutorial Image

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.


Organize Series

Tutorial Image

The Organize Series WordPress Plugin helps with the organization and presentation of articles/posts you write as part of a series. It helps make it easier for readers of your blog to discover all the series you’ve written and also to easily find post that are part of the same series.


Simple URL Shortener

Tutorial Image

Simple URL Shortener is the simplest, yet most powerful URL shortening plugin available, with over 100 shortening services available.


Wrapping Up

As you may have noticed, I’ve chosen to stick to free plugins. There are, however, plenty of killer paid options to consider — CodeCanyon, for instance, is the web’s largest marketplace for premium WordPress plugins, amongst other sorts of scripts and components.

We’ve, of course, only merely scratched the surface here. Chime in below with the plugins you use and love on a daily basis, and I’ll make sure to keep this list updated weekly. Thank you so much for reading!

 
 

8 Excellent WordPress SEO Plugins

17 Feb

8 Excellent WordPress SEO Plugins

WordPress is one the most popular tools for publishing content on the web. Everything from e-commerce websites to blogs can be developed using WordPress. Additionally, the WordPress community has built up a huge offering of free themes and plugins to make it easy for newcomers to get content published on the web quickly and easily.

However, just posting content on the web isn’t enough for many; attracting people to your site is part science, part art — and many WordPress plugins help you do just that. This is a listing of top-notch WordPress plugins for SEO to improve your WordPress site’s search engine rankings.

1. SEO Rank Reporter

SEO Rank Reporter

This WordPress SEO plugin allows you to track certain keywords in your site, and then issues you a report every 3 days (with all sorts of pretty graphs to boot). The plugin will also notify you via email whenever certain keywords experience major changes in search engine ranking.

2. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack

Any basic research on SEO plugins for WordPress will lead you to All in One SEO Pack. It is the most popular solution for your WordPress site’s search engine optimization. This plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress site for search engines by generating meta tags and helping you optimize web page titles. Advanced users are given the ability to customize post titles, descriptions, URL structures and tags for each post.

3. SEO Ultimate

SEO Ultimate

SEO Ultimate is a suite of tools for, well, ultimate SEO. It has a feature called Canonicalizer, which extends WordPress’s native canonical features to ensure that web spiders are pointed to the primary post in the case of web pages with the same content, but different URLs. It has a built-in robot.txt editor (one of the five web files that will enhance your site) that will allow you to easily set up this file for optimal search engine indexing. It works well with All in One SEO Pack, allowing you to import meta-data from it if you wanted to switch to SEO Ultimate.

4. SEO Content Control

SEO Content Control

This nifty plugin helps you identify weak content in your site. For example, many WordPress owners forget to include descriptions of their categories, which is a potential point of improvement for enhancing your search engine rankings. SEO Content Control helps you easily identify these potentially troublesome areas.

5. SEO Friendly Image

SEO Friendly Image

Optimizing images for search engines is often neglected; but when done right, you increase their semantic value, accessibility, and search engine indexability, especially for image searches. This WordPress SEO plugin automatically updates your images with alt and title attributes.

6. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links is a WordPress SEO plugin that automatically links keywords and phrases in your blog posts based on previous pages and posts. SEO Smart Links gives you the ability to set up your own unique keywords and sets of matching URLs. It also allows you to set nofollow attributes and open links in new browser windows or browser tabs. A very convenient way to save time, learn a bit about SEO best practices and interlink blog posts.

7. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps

This WordPress plugin is able to generate an XML sitemap that will assist search engine spiders in crawling and indexing your WordPress site. XML Sitemaps reveals the structure of your site’s content in a transparent way for search engines. Google XML Sitemaps also includes support for Bing, Yahoo!, Ask.com, and MSN, notifying them every time you create a post.

8. Platinum SEO Pack

Platinum SEO Pack

This SEO plugin for WordPress is loaded with plenty of features, including automatically generating meta tags, helping you optimize page and post titles for search engines, and aiding you in avoiding duplicate content (one of the ways to improve SEO of sites you design).

Conclusion

These WordPress plugins will give your WordPress site a complete SEO overhaul. Installing them and getting to understand each plugin’s inner workings may take some time, but it is worth it to know how each plugin can benefit your site. When used correctly, your content will be more visible, potentially attracting additional traffic consisting of your target audience.

Related Content

About the Author

Matt Krautstrunk is an expert writer on document management software based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as payroll services at Resource Nation. You can follow him on Twitter @Mattbill.

 
 

How to (fully) integrate WordPress with Facebook

03 Jan

There are a number of Facebook tutorials, including my own offering examples of FBML to add additional functionality to a Facebook fan page.

However, on many occasions these tutorials fall short of the mark, with no server side functionality currently available via FBML, connecting to databases, or consuming information from other sources is difficult.Third party services fill the gap, but are often expensive, or cumbersome to implement.

One of the most common questions I get asked regarding FBML is how to integrate a WordPress blog, or blog posts on a Facebook fan page tab. This tutorial takes you through the steps of doing just that, with no third party application required.

For my own Facebook page, I have opted to offer exclusive content (not available on my main blog) via Facebook. In addition to that, fans and non fans see a different opening tab, giving them incentive to ‘Like’ the page.

Here’s what we are going to end up with:

1). A tease and reveal tab created via a Facebook application
2). Exclusive content which is only available to Facebook fans
3). Some added spice in the form of Facebook Javascript (FBJS) to cycle the posts elegantly.

Here’s what the final result looks like:

See the example live here. (Obviously) you’ll have to fan this page to see the posts.

Step by Step

Here’s what we need to do. Step by Step.

1). Create a new WordPress category to house the exclusive content
2)
Find the new category ID
3).
Exclude the category ID from your RSS feed and main blog
4). Obtain a Facebook application key and application secret
5). Download the latest Facebook libraries.
6). Setup a directory in the root of your WordPress install
7). Ammend and upload the required files
8). Change Facebook application settings to point to your new files.

Step 1. Create the new category

A relatively simple process, creating a new category in WordPress is as simple as going to the category section and adding the details. Further information (for those who need it) can be found on the codex.

Doesn’t really matter what you call this. The important part of the process, is working out what the unique “category ID” for the newly created category is.

Step 2. Find the new category ID

The category ID can be found simply from within the WordPress admin section. When you have created the new category simply hover over its name, and you’ll see this in the toolbar..

wpcat

Unsurprisingly, cat_ID represents the new category ID. Keep this handy, as you are going to need it to exclude the category from your main blog.

Step 3. Exclude the category

There are three places we are going to remove this category. One is the sidebar of your WordPress blog, the other is inside the main blog loop – and finally the third is your RSS feed.

1) Removing from the sidebar

See Under ‘ Hiding the category for the sidebar‘ in this post, which uses a very similar technique to create a custom newsletter using WordPress.

2 & 3) Removing from the main loop and RSS

I’ve used a custom plugin that I’ve created to handle this. You can download it here, but please remember to set the $category_id_to_remove variable at the top of the plugin prior to upload. It looks something like this for you code junkies curious.

add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');

function exclude_category($query) {

//HEY YOU! - REMEMBER TO SUBSTITUTE THIS VARIABLE NOTICES THE MINUS SIGN TOO.

$category_id_to_remove = '-1127'; // this should be changed to the catID

$query->set('cat', $category_id_to_remove);
return $query;
}
?>

Ammend,  upload and install in the usual way that plugins are installed. To test that you have successfully excluded the category, simply create a post and assign it to that category. It shouldn’t appear in either your RSS feed, or your main blog. Sorted.

Step 4. Facebook app keys

To obtain Facebook application keys, you’ll have to create an application first. Visit this URL to begin the setup of a fresh application.  You can call this whatever you like. Accept the terms and click next, you may be required to fill in a captcha prior to moving on. You’ll be presented with a number of options, which we will have to fill in later. Right now, the only tab you are interested in is the “Facebook integration” option. You should be able to click on that to obtain both the ‘application secret’ and ‘application key’. Save these as you’ll need them for later steps.

Step 5. Facebook API Libraries

Facebook don’t make things terribly easy for developers, as there’s a fair bit of hunting around before finding the API libraries for PHP. They do however make life much easier for getting the information out of the Graph API.

These are currently housed at Githubs, and are available via this download link.

Download and extract the class (facebook.php). (As this file may change / get updated). I have however included this at time of writing in the main demo download below.

Bear in mind that this is the new Graph API – and not the old Restful API.

Step 6. Setup a directory

You can do this locally, prior to installation. You’ll need a directory for images, and the main code files which I’ve already written for you.

Download the full zip folder here.

These connect through to WordPress etc . Should look something like this.

Facebook.php – The main API class downloaded earlier
incfunctions.php – Any additional PHP functions (I’ve used a trimming function to shorten my posts)
Index.php – The main FBML page used by Facebook
tinthumber.php – A generic image resize PHP script, makes things pretty.

Step 7. Ammend the files

The only file that you will have to deal with is “index.php” everything else should be fine as is. The following are the sections of code that may need tweaked.

Lines 7 & 8:

$appapikey = ‘YOUR API KEY HERE”;
$appsecret = ‘YOUR APP SECRET HERE’;

refer to Step 4 if you can’t remember what these are.

Line 9:

$main_app_location_http = ‘http://www.yourdomain.com/facebook/’;

Change this to whatever server domain you’ve installed on. Will be the same as the domain for your WordPress install, inside a sub directory.

Line 48:

$number_of_posts = 5;

Change this to determine the number of WordPress posts that will be shown / cycled through inside your FBML application.

Line 54: IMPORTANT

AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id IN(1127)

Change 1127 to be the same category ID that you determined in Step 2.

Line 110:

Determines what image / HTML to show to visitors who aren’t currently fans of your page..

Save the file with your settings, and upload it. At this point viewing the URL in the browser (http://www.yourdomain.com/facebook/) should show you the content shown at line 110.

Step 8. Change Facebook settings

Now that your application has been created, and uploaded, all that is left to do is to perform a few tweaks to the application page to set it all up. Log back into Facebook and follow these steps:

To set the app settings

1) Visit the following Developer Apps URL
2) Select the application name that you set in step 4 and click edit settings.
3) Click Facebook Integration
4) Set the canvas page name to anything you want
5) Set the canvas URL to the HTTP location you uploaded everything to. (Will be the same as the variable $main_app_location_http used earlier.
6) Set canvas type to FBML
7) Set tab name to ‘Extra content’
8) Set tab URL to ‘index.php’

Save changes and click ‘Back to My Apps’ at the top of the page.

To add the application to your fan page


1) Click Application Profile Page
2) Click ‘Add to my Page’ – if you an admin of several fan page, select the appropriate one.
3) Visit your fan page
4) Click the + icon beside your tabs, and select ‘Extra Content’

Voila! That should be you up and running now, having created your first Facebook FBML application. Simples!

You should be able to expand upon the code that I’ve provided, and I’ll be adding to my own offering as I now have a fair idea how things work. Next stage will be to perhaps syndicate some RSS, or integrate my Twitter account.

Articles which proved to be useful:

Facebook JS slider – I’ve used a large proportion of this code to give the sliding left and right effect.

How to detect fan of a Facebook page. – Hooray for the REQUEST object giving additional information from Facebook. var_dump to the rescue.

Some things developers need to know when developing for Facebook

JQuery isn’t supported, Facebook don’t allow you to link to external scripts when creating a canvas application. Instead a JS library called FBJS is used. That said – an open source project to mirror JQuery functionality inside Facebook looks promising.

Body tag’s are not allowed inside FBML canvas.

When creating an application for a tab, some functionality will be restricted, particularly user auth calls as tabs can’t redirect.

$is_fan = $_REQUEST['fb_sig_is_fan']; this code works out if the current user session is a fan of the page or not without needing to find the user ID. The above paragraph explains why userId can’t be fetched normally.

Facebook tab widths for designs are 520px.

Finally..

You can of course change the images which are used, and the surrounding HTML to create your own custom FBML app. Standard WordPress programming can be used because of the inclusion of the core libraries at the top of the script, so those of you familiar with writing plugins or custom code should be right at home. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

How to (fully) integrate WordPress with Facebook is a post from: Webdistortion

 
 

Useful Collection of Cheat-Sheet Desktop Wallpaper for Web Designers

07 Oct

Typical cheatsheets tend to be over-sized documents, far too large to be viewed in its entirety on a desktop and not too handy for the super-fast reference that is needed. To get the full benefit of any cheatsheat, your only real option is to print it out and keep it close at hand. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an easier way, a quicker way. Of course there is – what good be handier than having a cheatsheet set as your desktop wallpaper? Always there for quick reference, no need to print it out and no need to scroll through an over-long document.

In this post we have rounded up a selection of cheatsheet wallpapers, in various sizes, covering various technologies, like CSS, HTML5, WordPress, Javascript and many more.

WordPress Help Sheet Wallpaper

WordPress Help Sheet Wallpaper
The WordPress Help Sheet Wallpaper is a simple desktop wallpaper listing Basic Template Files, PHP Snippets for the Header, PHP Snippets for the Templates, Extra Stuff for WordPress, based on the WPCandy WordPress Help Sheet.
Download: 2560x1600px.

Drupal Cheat Sheet Desktop Wallpaper

Drupal Cheat Sheet Desktop Wallpaper
The Drupal Cheat Sheet Desktop Wallpaper is a desktop wallpaper that features the most popular variables of the open source content management system Drupal.
Download: 1024x768px – 1280x800px – 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.

HTML5 Canvas Cheat Sheet

HTML5 Canvas Cheat Sheet
The information on this wallpaper is pretty much just a copy of what is found in the WHATWG specs, just condensed and a little bit easier to read. There are virtually no explanations, and no examples other than some graphics for compositing values. It's basically just a listing of the attributes and methods of the canvas element and the 2d drawing context.
Download: 1388x1027px.

CSS Cheat Sheet Wallpaper in Helvetica

CSS Cheat Sheet Wallpaper in Helvetica
This is the very popular CSS cheat sheet in Helvetica from styl.eti.me. Simplistic in appearance, but very useful for quick referencing. Unfortunately we can not find a working download link for this cool wallpaper, but the good news is they do have a PSD version available. So download it and resize.
Download: CSS Cheat Sheet Wallpaper in Helvetica.

TextMate Shortcuts Wallpaper

TextMate Shortcuts Wallpaper
Here is a TextMate wallpaper that will guide you through some of its powerful features and help you get a handle on all of the keyboard shortcuts. The PSD file is also available.
Download: 1280x800px – 1920x1200px.

Yahoo! UI (YUI) Cheat Sheets as Wallpaper

Yahoo! UI (YUI) Cheat Sheets as Wallpaper
Yahoo! provides a number of cheat sheets for their YUI library widgets however these are all in PDF format and not usable as wallpaper. However, here you will find all of those cheatsheets converted to PNG images of various sizes all for your desktop.
There are wallpapers available for Animation, Calendar, Connection Manager, Dom Collection, Drag & Drop Event, Utility & Custom Event Logger, Slider and TreeView. And all are available in the following desktop sizes: 1400x1050px, 1280x960px, 1165x900px and 1024x768px.
Download: Yahoo! UI (YUI) Cheat Sheets as Wallpaper.

jQuery 1.3 Cheat Sheet Wallpaper

jQuery 1.3 Cheat Sheet Wallpaper
Download: 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.

Prototype Dissected Wallpaper

Prototype Dissected Wallpaper
If you need a little help in getting to know Prototype a little better and some help in understanding how the code works, then this is the wallpaper for you. You have a choice of either a dark or white wallpaper, and are available in these sizes: 1280x960px and 1440x900px.
Download: 1280x960px (Dark) – 1440x900px (Dark) – 1280x960px (White) – 1440x900px (White).

Git Cheat Sheet Wallpaper

Git Cheat Sheet Wallpaper
Download: 1100x850px – 3300x2550px.

A Themer's Cheatsheet Wallpaper

A Themer's Cheatsheet Wallpaper
A Themer's Cheatsheet Wallpaper is a quick refresher of web design fundamentals directly on your desktop. It is available for download in several different colors and the original SVG has been released to the Public Domain.
Download: 1280x800px (Blue) – 1280x800px (Red) – 1280x800px (Black) – 1280x800px (Green).

Font Anatomy Wallpaper

Font Anatomy Wallpaper
Download: 1920x1200px.

SEO Wallpapers

SEO Wallpapers
Think of it as a desk reference checklist that is always at your fingertips. From pre-campaign to reporting, the basics (and more) are right here for you to put directly on your desktop.
Download: 1024x768px – 1280x960px – 1280x1024px – 1440x900px.

Periodic Table of Typefaces

Periodic Table of Typefaces
Download: 1024x768px – 1280x800px – 1280x1024px – 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.

Color Theory Quick Reference Poster

Color Theory Quick Reference Poster
The Color Theory Quick Reference Poster for Designers has all of the basics of color theory contained in one place – specifically, a cool infographic-esque poster. This way, you can quickly reference things that may have slipped to the back of your mind since design school.
Download: 1280x800px – 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.

Web Designer Wallpaper

Web Designer Wallpaper
Download: 1280x1024px (White) – 1280x1024px (Dark) – 1680x10050px (Dark) – 1280x1024px (White).

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10 WordPress Plugins Your Blog Probably Needs

30 Sep

At the time this article was published, WordPress.org states that there are over 3,000 plugins on the site that have been downloaded nearly 13,000,000 (yep, 13 million) times. This does not include the hundreds or thousands of plugins that are not listed at the official site. Wading through so many plugins can be difficult, inefficient and annoying so we’ve selected 10 of our favorites for you and will itemize why you’ll probably want to use them.

All in One SEO Pack

Ranking (Wordpress.org): 4/5
Ease of Initial Setup: 3/5
Ease of Use After Setup: 5/5
More Info | Download

This plugin is a difference maker. Installing this plugin can drastically improve your search engine rankings and can bring in more targetted traffic. Here’s a look at some of what this plugin offers:

  • Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
  • Generates META tags automatically
  • Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
  • It works out-of-the-box. Just install.
  • You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
  • You can fine-tune everything

WP Super Cache

Ranking (Wordpress.org): 4/5
Ease of Initial Setup: 5/5
Ease of Use After Setup: 5/5
More Info | Download

Technically, this plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress files. After a HTML file is generated, your server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more resource-intensive WordPress PHP scripts. In real-world terms, this plugin can be a life-saver if your blog is getting close to outgrowing it’s server because it is a ‘greener’ solution and is able to conserver precious server resources. Donncha Caoimh, the plugin’s author also claims that most sites will become “digg-proof” with Super-caching enabled. Though it will probably help, the only way to “digg-proof” most sites is to have a kickin’ server that can handle that kind of load.

Google XML Sitemaps

Ranking (Wordpress.org): 4/5
Ease of Initial Setup: 3/5
Ease of Use After Setup: 5/5
More Info | Download

Google XML Sitemaps creates a Google-Sitemaps-compliant XML sitemap of your blog. The plugin is intelligent enough to grab all of your posts and pages even if they’re not linked to from other pages (unless you don’t want that). Every time you modify or create a post (or page), the XML sitemap is automatically updated and sends an update to the major search engines. ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO are all notified about the update and will re-crawl your site to grab the new content.

Post Templates

Ranking (Wordpress.org): 5/5
Ease of Initial Setup: 5/5
Ease of Use After Setup: 3/5
More Info | Download

This plugin seems to be a relative newcomer to the WordPress plugin scene. Averaging less than 300 downloads a week, most of you probably haven’t discovered what an insanely valuable plugin this can be. Author Vincent Prat outlines it’s use well: (paraphrased)

It happens quite often that a blogger publishes posts or pages on a regular basis that have similar structures. Think about, for example, a “picture of the day” post. With WordPress’s unaltered setup, we need to spend a lot of time doing copy/paste between posts instead of actually writing content… I have developed a plugin to maintain post templates and allow simple writing of templated posts.

The only downfall is that it is not as easy to create a new post from a template as one would expect. However. after having used the plugin for a few days, you’ll realize the benefits far outweigh the negatives.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

Ranking (Wordpress.org): 4/5
Ease of Initial Setup: 5/5
Ease of Use After Setup: 5/5
More Info | Download

Updating WordPress can be a hassle. Frankly, it’s annoying to deactivate all the plugins, download and upload the new files, etc. This gem does all the tough work for you. As the name implies, WordPress Automatic Upgrade automatically upgrades WP by completing the following steps:

  1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
  2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
  3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
  4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
  5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
  6. Upgrades WordPress files.
  7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
  8. Re-activates the plugins.

You’d be hard-pressed to find an easier solution for upgrading… Unless you opt for the built-in automated mode that doesn’t even require you to click a link to complete the upgrade. It is important to note though that WAU could potentially overwrite files you didn’t want to have overwritten. If you’ve customized any of the core WP files, you should proceed with caution or continue to upgrade to new releases manually.

Maintenance Mode

Ranking (Wordpress.org): 4/5
Ease of Initial Setup: 3/5
Ease of Use After Setup: 5/5
More Info | Download

Are you sick of embarrassing errors popping up while you perform maintenance on your blog? You should check out Maintenance Mode. This one temporarily replaces your content with a customizable splash page. This lets visitors know that your blog is down for maintenance. The real beauty is that logged-in administrators still get full access to the blog and can view the site as if it were live to the public.

By default, visitors will see the following message: “Maintenance Mode - [SITE-TITLE] is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Please try back in [X] minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

[SITE-TITLE] will automatically be replaced with your site’s name and [X] number of minutes can be quickly set in the plugin’s settings panel.

WP-DB-Backup

Ranking (Wordpress.org): 4/5
Ease of Initial Setup: 4/5
Ease of Use After Setup: 4/5
More Info | Download

There’s not a whole lot to discuss regarding this plugin. It simply creates an easier way for users to backup the database that contains the WordPress installation. This can save a few minutes for experts and novices alike.

WP Easy Uploader

Ranking (Wordpress.org): 4/5
Ease of Initial Setup: 3/5
Ease of Use After Setup: 4/5
More Info | Download

Here’s an interesting extension of a capability that is already built-in to WordPress 2.6 and higher. If you’re using 2.6 or better, you’ve likely noticed that you can now upload media (pictures, audio, video, etc) right into your new post. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), there are plenty of bloggers who want to upload and use other forms of media in posts or need to upload files to the server for other reasons.

WP Easy Uploader allows admins to add plugins, themes, and any type of file to WordPress directly from inside WordPress. You can completely bypass loading up an FTP client just to upload simple plugins or to upload a text document for people to download. Additionally, you can select to have archives automatically extracted to their destination. This means that plugin and theme extractions can be taken care of for you, and WPEU also allows you to zip up a large set of files and upload them quickly into a folder on your site. Currently supported formats include: zip, tar, gz, tar.gz, tgz, and tar.bz2 archives.

Sociable

Ranking (Wordpress.org): 4/5
Ease of Initial Setup: 4/5
Ease of Use After Setup: 5/5
More Info | Download

Like plenty of WP plugins out there, this one adds links to social networking sites to your posts and pages. Unlike plenty of others, Sociable actually seems to have some grasp of how simple a plugin of this nature should be. The plugin is nearly ready to go out-of-the-box but still offers plenty of customization.

Search Everything

Ranking (Wordpress.org): 4/5
Ease of Initial Setup: 5/5
Ease of Use After Setup: 5/5
More Info | Download

Rounding out our list is another simple plugin. Search Everything increases the ability of the default Wordpress Search. At your discretion, you can have users’ searches rifle through the usual posts and such AND the following options:

  • Search Every Page
  • Search Every Tag
  • Search Every Category
  • Search non-password protected pages only
  • Search Every Comment
  • Search only approved comments
  • Search Every Draft
  • Search Every Excerpt
  • Search Every Attachment
  • Search Every Custom Field (metadata)
  • Exclude Posts from search
  • Exclude Categories from search
 
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