Weblog Tools Collection

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WordPress 2.5 was just released a few months ago and WordPress 2.6 has been in development for some time to be released very soon. Not only does WordPress 2.6 add more zing to a platform that has already won hearts and made blogging a wonderful experience, there are few features in WordPress 2.6 that many have requested and some that caused a little controversy.

Let’s get to know a few things about WordPress 2.6 that will definitely raise few eyebrows albeit a few of them in the wrong way.

Post Revisioning

I have been a Software developer for quite long now and know how important CVS or SVN is to maintaining different versions of a file. WordPress 2.6 brings the same functionality to posts where you can have different revisions for posts.

In lay terms this means that no matter how many times you make changes to the post, you will never have the “Oops, I did something wrong to the post” effect since you can always go back to a older revision of the post, and, let me add you have a cool feature where you can actually differentiate between your revisions to see what changes you made. (think wiki-like post revisions)

Tumble Your Posts

The one thing I have loved about Tumblr is the simplicity and ease of access. I simply select a link or a image and tumble it to my micro blog at Tumblr without having to go through a series of steps to actually post my content.

WordPress 2.6 is taking a new approach and adds in bookmarklets that will allow you to quickly post links and image ala Tumblr. (think “Press This”)

Speed Up of Admin Interface

There has never been a reason not to use the admin interface but that said with the versatility and flexibility of WordPress many people have taken advantage and built softwares that resist you from doing so.

To be quite frank, I hardly use the Admin interface except for approving and replying to comments and managing plugins and themes, but in doing that, I am definitely missing so many of the features that WordPress posting interface provides me with.

WordPress 2.6 makes use of Google Gears when available to speedup and cache static files that are loaded every time you visit your WordPress admin panel.

XML-RPC access now requires Admin Permission

XML-RPC for WordPress can be used by many software applications that allow you to post content to your blog without having to visit the admin panel. The most notable one I can point out to you is Windows Live Writer.

With WordPress 2.6, in new installations, the access to XML-RPC will be unavailable by default. This in short means that every user will have to go and manually enable XML-RPC to allow external applications to post to your blog. Dougal wrote a post about this recently. From his post on the APIs:

• The APIs will not be automatically disabled for sites upgrading from older versions. Since the APIs have previously been ‘on’ by default, they will continue to function.
• For new installs of WordPress 2.6 and later, there will be an option presented at install-time to enable the APIs. Or not. They seem to have removed that between Beta 1 and Beta 2.
• There will be options in the Write settings to enable or disable XML-RPC posting and Atom API posting individually.

Though this might appear to be a problem to som, personally I do not think that it is a inconvenience. Since users who want to use external applications will be able to do so with just a minor change in the settings and for the millions others who do not require it would never even bother with it. I definitely see this as a move to allow users the flexibility to do what they want to with their blogs without forcing them.

Activate Multiple Plugins at Once and Delete Plugins in Bulk

The one thing that went over my head with the earlier revisions of WordPress was that they allowed you to deactivate all the plugins but never allowed you to activate them at once.

Also deleting plugins was never a piece of cake as users had to manually login to their FTP to delete them. I did get around to writing a plugin that would allowed users to delete plugins they no longer used from the admin panel but never released it. With WordPress 2.6 both of the concerns are answered as it will not only allow you to activate bulk plugins but also provide you with the ability to delete plugins you no longer use.

I would love to see a feature where they allow users to deactivate plugins and keep a history of it and then allow users to reactivate the same plugins once again. I did end up writing a plugin for myself that kept a history of the the plugins it deactivated and then activated them while skipping those that caused a problem due to a newer version of WordPress version.

Move Your Config File to a Different Directory

Your WordPress config file contains information about things that are critical to your blog including access to your WordPress database. Though there are no known security issues with having your wp-config file in your root directory, WordPress 2.6 does allow you to move it to another directory.

Other Features

There are several other features to grab your attention and the few I talked about does not end the features you will get in the next major revision, here are some of the other things you should know about too;

• You can move your content directory from wp-content to any other place you want it to be. (This definitely will mean there are shorter links to your downloadable content or images)
• Better Theme Previewing.
• External JavaScript upgrades to TinyMCE, jQuery and jQuery UI.
• Customizable default avatars.

Well hopefully this should be the best ever version yet of WordPress, though I still look forward to getting more. Let me know your views and opinions about the latest and probably greatest version of WordPress.

Afterthought: Aaron Brazell over at Technosailor goes into greater details on some of items on the WordPress 2.6 list of changes and updates, including

• Shift Click selection of multiple checkboxes in the wp-admin
• More avatar options
• Page Templates of XML-RPC
• More “Press This” features
• Integrated Theme Preview
• Many other illustrated examples

Semi-manual Breadcrumb Navigation

This plugin allows you to add breadcrumb navigation to your Wordpress installation. Unlike other Wordpress breadcrumb plugins, this one allows you to manually control the breadcrumb structure. At the same time it takes care of a few things automatically, hence the name.

WordPress Exploit Scanner

This plugin searches the files and database of your website for signs of suspicious activity. It will not stop someone hacking into your site, but it may help you find any uploaded or compromised files left by the hacker. When a website is compromised, hackers leave behind scripts and modified content that can be found by manually searching through all the files on a site. Some of the methods used to hide their code or spam links are obvious, like using CSS to hide text, and we can search for those strings.

Drop Caps

Adds mark-up to your posts and pages which allows you to create wicked drop cap.

WP-Menus

Allows to include user menus via sidebar widgets or in themes.

Microkid’s Related Posts

This Wordpress plugin lets you manually select related posts using a nifty AJAX powered search utility.

Related Posts WordPress Plugin

The ‘Related Posts’ wordpress plug-in can be used to link other relevant posts with our own anchor text.

Feed Subscriber Stats

The plugin uses FeedBurner’s Awareness API to get your feed subscriber stats directly from FeedBurner.

Inline Google Docs

This plugin allows the user to embed Google Document/Spreadsheet content in posts and pages using shortcode.

WordPress Announcement

Allows you to inform your visitors about any new updates to your site.

There appears to be a WordPress meme going around (started by John at WordPress Expert) where members throughout the community are tagging other blogs along with mentioning three plugins which they feel are under rated. Although I don’t have access to the plugins used here on WLTC, I would like to bring about three under rated plugins I use on my own blog.

1. DiggThis - This plugin was written by Aviran Mordod This by far my favorite DiggThis plugin because it only displays on posts which have been submitted to Digg. My opinion, which is shared by many others is that, it’s better to show a DiggThis button when the article has been submitted to Digg rather than showing a Digg button next to every article. Unless you are ReadWriteWeb or some other mainstream blog, those buttons will show 0 diggs and will possibly hint to the content not being up to snuff. I suppose its one of those psychological things.
2. Highlight Author Comments - This plugin written by Rob Marsh, SJ. makes following comments written by the blog author a cinch. After installing and then activating the plugin, you can style what blog authors comments will look like, giving you the ability to distinguish your comments versus all other comments.
3. No Self Pings - No one has been able to tell me what the purpose is behind WordPress sending pings and tackbacks to itself if you link to an article located in your archive. I’ve found myself always deleting these pingbacks. Thanks this this plugin written by Michael D. Adams. this is no longer an issue for me. Now, I can easily link to myself without having to deal with those pingbacks giving me that much more free time to do other things.

These are three plugins which I feel are under rated that I use on my own blog. I invite you to partake in this meme and highlight three plugins you are using on your own blog that you feel are under rated.

One Column Theme

Grunge Superstar

Grunge Superstar is a simple one column theme. The theme uses dark colors and you can add in additional information in the footer area.

Linquist

Linquist is a simple one column theme which can be used to display portfolios. The theme comes in light and dark styles and has built-in lightbox and gravatar support.

Two Column Themes

Brightness

Brightness is a magazine style 2 column widget-ready theme. You can control the layout of the theme using settings in the Admin Panel.

WP Pixels

WP Pixels is a two column widget-ready theme. The home page has no sidebars and uses loops for three different categories.

Three Column Themes

Voodoo Empire

Voodoo Empire is a three column widget ready theme. The theme makes use of dark colors. Both the sidebars are to the right of the content.

Elements of SEO

Elements of SEO is a 3 column widget-ready theme. The theme has two sidebars to the right of the content.

So how much would you pay for an installation of WordPress? This question was raised by Damien Mulley of mully.net. In his post (Wanted: People to install WordPress without robbing others blind), Damien mentions that he is building a list of people with reasonable prices who will perform default WordPress installations. According to Damien, there are a few people who are charging anywhere from €550 to €1500 (Euros). This equates to $857.00 to $2,338.33. I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind who would pay that amount to have WordPress installed for them. However, when I stop to think about those who are brand new to blogging or to WordPress in general, those are the ones that when offered these prices, may believe this to be normal when in fact, it’s not.

The conversation about this topic was handled pretty well within the comments. Most people commented that they would charge $50.00. Others said they wouldn’t charge a dime while others wouldn’t mind having a beer purchased for them.

You know, if someone wants you to install WordPress and turn it into a CMS or do some sort of customization that doesn’t exist out of the box, I can understand the price. However, for default installations, there is no reason why the install should be over $50.00 maximum.

For those of you wanting to install WordPress for free, be sure to read this article in the Codex entitled, Installing WordPress for Free. Or read the other aspects of the article to figure out how you can install WordPress on your own without emptying your pockets.

Kym Huynh is a songwriter and is writing a song about WordPress (just for fun I have been told) and has offered to write a song and record it professionally in a studio for the winner of the WordPress Plugin Competition! What an amazing prize! I love it when WordPress Samaritans offer their thanks in their own way. It has been added to the growing list of prizes for the competition. Thank you Kym!

For those that have not noticed, we have eleven plugins entered/announced for the plugin competition already, with many more in the works. Have you signed up yet?

Increase Sociability

Increase Sociability shows customized messages to users who visit your site through StumbleUpon, Digg. The messages enhances your chances to gain better traffic from social networking sites.

Hoard Hunter

Hoard Hunter is an online treasure map game designed and developed for people who would like an easy (and fun) method of fund raising online.

Nofollow Links in Posts

Nofollow Links in Posts plugin enables you to add the nofollow attribute into links in a post within a specified category.

Newspaper Style Posts

Newspaper Style Posts is a simple plugin that splits your post into two columns, as you find in newspaper articles.

SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags.

Platinum SEO

Platinum SEO offers all the features of All in One SEO plugin plus more. You can import your settings from All in One SEO to Platinum SEO.

Category Search

Category Search allows you to add category names to your search results.

Not too long ago, I published a post which dove into the controversial subject of comment ownership and I must say, you guys and gals came up with quite a bit of discussion points. In that post, here is how I described my position on the matter:

I don’t believe a commenting bill of rights needs to be created in which all blogs should follow. However, I do think that each blogger should create and make publicly accessible a commenting policy. This policy should clearly explain what you as the blog author will do with comments posted on your site, who retains ownership of those comments and explain circumstances which would require you to edit an end user’s comment.

For those of you that agree, I’d like to draw your attention to Alex King’s Comment License WordPress plugin. This plugin makes it as easy as 1 2 3 to add a commenting policy to your blog.

After downloading, uploading, then activating the plugin, browse to ADMIN-SETTINGS-COMMENT LICENSE. You should see something similar to this:

Click anywhere inside of the text field and then create your own comment license. Once you click on the UPDATE COMMENT LICENSE button, the text will be saved and displayed just above your commenting form on your blog.

If you notice that the license is not being displayed on your theme, it may be because your comments.php template is missing ‘comment_form‘. In order to add this functionality, read the readme.txt file included with the plugin download package as that contains the line of code that will need to be placed within your comments.php template file.

So far, there are two excellent performance enhancing caching solutions available for WordPress, WP-Cache and WP-SuperCache. Both do an awesome job of caching posts/pages to help keep your website from falling off the map in the middle of a Digg effect. Now, there is a new entrant in the caching arena called Batcache which was created by Andy Skelton.

This plugin is meant to be used in situations where file-based caching is either not practical, or is not desired. According to Andy, development testing showed a 40x reduction in the time it took to generate pages. Pages that were generated in 200ms ended up being served from the cache in only 5ms.

Batcache uses Memcached to store and serve rendered pages. It’s not as fast as Donncha’s WP-Super-Cache but it can be used where file-based caching is not practical or not desired.

The basic premise of the plugin works similar to the other caching plugins that are available:

Batcache is aimed at preventing a flood of traffic from breaking your site. It does this by serving old pages to new users. This reduces the demand on the web server CPU and the database. It also means some people may see a page that is a few minutes old. However this only applies to people who have not interacted with your web site before. Once they have logged in or left a comment they will always get fresh pages.

Andy has also noted that the following features could be implemented in future versions of the plugin:

• Comments, edits, and new posts will trigger cache regeneration
• Online installation assistance
• Configuration page
• Stats

So if WP-Cache or WP-SuperCache is not helping your situation, give Batcache a try and please, let us know how it works for you in the comments.

Two Column Themes

Natural Power

Natural Power is a two column theme, widget ready, that comes with four different colored header graphics that can easily be changed in the options panel included with the theme.

Blue Block

Blue Block is a two column widget-ready theme. The theme comes build in with banner ad integration. The content are is quite smaller compared to other two column themes.

CheckMate

CheckMate is a two column theme with 10 widgetized areas. The themes comes with 7 color options.

Out of the Box

Out of the Box is a two column widget ready theme. The theme has a widgetized sidebar and footer area along with Gravatar support for WordPress 2.5 and above.

TechJunkie

TechJunkie is a two column widget-ready theme with 4 widgetized areas including 3 in the footer. The theme comes built in with Gravatar support.

Whisky Air

Whisky Air is a two column widget-ready theme which does not make use of any images. The them uses simple dotted grey lines, justified paragraphs, easy-for-the-eye headings and titles.

Three Column Themes

Wolf

Wolf is a 3 column black and gray theme featuring wolf photos in header and footer. The theme is widget-ready and supports Gravatars.

Reader John writes in:

How does one use paging with an offset? Doing so breaks the navigation controls.

The problem with using an offset in a query is that WordPress ignores any reference to paging. In other words, you can use an offset and paging, but not both together.

This can be solved by tapping into the post_limits filter.

Step 1: Add the ‘my_post_limit’ Function

The my_post_limit function is what the post_limits filter will use to update the standard loop query.

We’ll use the function to use paging and offsets together. This function should be placed in your theme’s functions.php file.

function my_post_limit($limit) {
	global $paged, $myOffset;
	if (empty($paged)) {
			$paged = 1;
	}
	$postperpage = intval(get_option('posts_per_page'));
	$pgstrt = ((intval($paged) -1) * $postperpage) + $myOffset . ', ';
	$limit = 'LIMIT '.$pgstrt.$postperpage;
	return $limit;
} //end function my_post_limit

Step 2: Add the Filter Reference

<?php add_filter('post_limits', 'my_post_limit'); ?>
<div id="recent">
<h3>Recent Articles</h3>

In the above code, I add a filter for post_limits, which will call the my_post_limit function mentioned in Step 1.

Step 3: Start Your Loop

In this loop, we’ll be declaring a global variable called $myOffset. This will be the offset we’d like to have and is used by the my_post_limit function.

<ul>
<?php
global $myOffset;
$myOffset = 1;
$temp = $wp_query;
$wp_query= null;
$wp_query = new WP_Query();
$wp_query->query('offset='.$myOffset.'&showposts=5'.'&paged='.$paged);
?>
<?php while ($wp_query->have_posts()) : $wp_query->the_post(); ?>
        <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

Step 4: Enable Navigation

We’re just adding the standard next/previous links at the end of the loop.

<div class="navigation">
  <div class="alignleft"><?php previous_posts_link('&laquo; Previous') ?></div>
  <div class="alignright"><?php next_posts_link('More &raquo;') ?></div>
</div>
</div>

Step 5: Remove the Filter

In this step, we’ll be removing the post_limits filter and assigning the query back to its original value thanks to a temporary placeholder.

<?php $wp_query = null; $wp_query = $temp;?>
<?php remove_filter('post_limits', 'my_post_limit'); ?>

Step 6: You’re done!

Using the above code, you should now be able to use offsets and paging together.

Here is a downloadable file of all the code mentioned in this post.

Thank you John for asking such a great question.

One Column Themes

WP Pix

WP Pix is a one column theme with no sidebars. The theme can be use by photo bloggers. The theme comes in with two different page templates one for displaying a blog and another for displaying portfolios.

Two Column Themes

Happy Cyclope

Happy Cyclope is a 2 column widget-ready theme. The theme is easy-to-customize, and displays the category pages and archives as lists.

Big Brain

Big Brain is a two column widget-ready theme. As the name suggests there is image of big brain in the header. The theme also uses bigger fonts for post titles and content.

Ndomche Summary

Ndomche Summary is a two column theme. The theme has a grid based style and has only been tested with WordPress 2.5 and above.

Aurora

Aurora is a two column widget-ready colors. The theme makes use of dark colors.

Elegant

Elegant is a pleasant looking two column theme. The theme is widget-ready and is made up of different flavors of the blue color.