Weblog Tools Collection

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Happy Halloween to everyone! At this All Hallows Eve, I would like to talk about Scary WordPress Moments. Since I have been working with WordPress for some time, I have had quite a few scary moments with WordPress. One stands out in recent memory.

WordPress Pumpkin by Eric Martin Displayed with permission

Let me start by saying that I am a huge proponent of backing up my blog. I put together the original WP-DB-Backup which has been enhanced and fixed through the years and is a fantastic plugin. I use it religiously combined with a couple of tricks I picked up from readers along the way. I have the plugin backup my databases everyday and email them to a “backup” gmail account. I also have filters setup in the gmail account to delete daily backups as they come in, thus managing space (gmail keeps deleted emails for 30 days). So I have a rolling 30 day backup of all my blog and all of it is automattic.

That being said, about two WordPress point releases ago, I had sat down to backup, upgrade and fix Weblog Tools Collection after the release of the major upgrade. This blog is not that big or popular but it is my baby. It has taken on a life of its own and I have mangled and modified the code in many places to do things my way. Even though the code is fun to play with, the modifications cause me huge headaches when upgrading (my own fault). So my obsession for the blog and the custom modifications combined with a large database and a complex theme structure makes upgrades harrowing to say the least. Heck Matt has goaded me to upgrade this blog many times in the past after I had failed to do so for many weeks after a release. So I have an established and documented procedure to upgrade this blog which I keep up to date with all the changes required to counter and/or fix the modified code. However, during this one upgrade, I somehow missed a crucial step. You see this blog uses a table prefix from the Cafelog days and I had forgotten to change it in the config file before uploading it. Some reader managed to run the “new” setup for the blog between me uploading the files and then going over to the admin panel to upgrade it.

I thought I had somehow lost my blog and that the original tables with my precious data in it had been replaced with fresh new ones. I remember my blood running cold and panic starting to set in. I know WordPress quite well and I know how it works. I had made a backup before I started upgrading and I had followed all the steps for the upgrade. But for a brief few minutes that Saturday morning, I was truly sweating bullets. What bothers me now is that I did not recognize the problem soon enough. It took me almost five minutes to realize what had happened and take steps to fix it. As a reminder of that day, i never deleted that set of tables and have left them intact.

What Scary Moments have you had with WordPress? What did you learn from them?

New Plugins

MagpieRSS Hotfix for Enclosures

This hotfix adds support for RSS enclosures to MagpieRSS, the RSS feed parser behind the fetch_rss() function in WordPress.

Tylr Slidr

This is a WordPress plugin that makes the process of adding a Flickr slideshow to your site much easier.

Upload RapidShare

Upload your file to Rapidshare

IE Warning

Shows nice and simple splash to your visitors with Internet Explorer

WP Unique Article Header Image

Allows you to add/associate unique header image with each single post/page.So you can spice your blog to have a unique header image per post/page.

LinkShare Link Locator (L3) Description

LinkShare Link Lookup (L3) is designed to make it easy for you to integrate LinkShare links in your posts, right from the actual write post page! Simply click the red arrows on the top right of the posting page and start earning today.

New User Approve

New User Approve is a Wordpress plugin that allows a blog administrator to approve a user before they are able to access and login to the blog.

Simple Post Template

Allows you to define a post template for all new posts.

Random Tags Cloud Widget

Random Tags Cloud displays your tags by selecting randomly. Of course, you can customize other tag cloud’s settings.

iPhone Control Panel

Configure how iPhones and iPod touches see your site. Add custom css, a home screen bookmark icon, change the viewport, or redirect to another url.

Updated Plugins

All in One Video Pack

Easily add full video capabilities to your blog.

My TrustedOnes Recommendations

The plugin shows your TrustedOnes recommendations, according to topics and wisdom of your choice.

Shantz Wordpress Prefix Suffix

Shantz WP Prefix Suffix is a light plugin to quickly add text/htm/css before and/or after your posts and/or pages.

eShop

An accessible Paypal Shopping Cart plugin.

YouTube with Style

The YouTube with style plugin allows WordPress users to easily embed a YouTube video without the default YouTube player.

Paginated Comments

Breaks down comments into a number of search engine optimized pages.

WP-Cumulus

WP-Cumulus displays your tags and/or categories in 3D by placing them on a rotating sphere.

Scissors

This plugin adds cropping and resizing functionality to Wordpress’ image upload and management dialogs.

Contender

Contender is a three column, fixed width, adsense ready theme.

NeeWee

Fixed width, three column, gravatar and widget ready theme.

Pink Orchid

A clean simple SEO optimized three column template in soft pink colors. The theme has two widget ready sidebars, gravatar support and is ad ready. The theme features a bio box that can be edited independently of the side bars and is unaffected by the use of widgets.

Grey Matter

Grey Matter is an two column, gravatar & widget ready, free and easy to use WordPress theme.

New Plugins

Flexi Quote Rotator

Add the quotations to your site using a shortcode or php snippet in template. You can use this plugin to display quotes or testimonials or other rotating snippets of content on your web site.

Moderator

Moderator is a WordPress Plugin and associated desktop application, built using Adobe AIR, that allows you to view and moderate comments from your desktop.

Font Burner Control Panel

The Font Burner Plugin allows you to easily add Font Burner Fonts to your WordPress theme.

WP-RTL

Adds two buttons to the TinyMCE editor to enable writing text in Left to Right (LTR) and Right to Left (RTL) directions.

PHPInclusion

PHP File Inclusion in posts & pages using require, include or similar statements.

Glassy

An automatic glassy effect for all your post’s images.

Tags 2 Meta Generator

Generates META tags automatically from your post tags!

Updated Plugins

IndicIME

This plugin enables user to write into 9 Indian scripts (Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Devnagari, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu) within post, page, comment, searchbox and on every page where user can write.

Download Counter

This plugin will keep track of the amount of downloads for specific files. It will also store the last time the file was downloaded.

HeadSpace2

Controls almost every aspect of your site’s meta-data, including advanced tagging, Analytics, and dozens of plugins.

Duck’s Timestamp Inserter

Allows the current UNIX Timestamp to be used in Wordpress Content, without the possible security risks associated with PHP ‘eval’ plugins.

SocioFluid

SocioFluid is a Social Bookmarking Plugin, displaying small icons, which grows when the mouse is moved over, similar to mac effect.

MyADManager

Manages 125×125 ADs.Automatic activation and deactivation of ads.Ads can bought directly,accepts payments via Paypal.

Fluid Blogging

Fluid Blogging is a very light weight theme, with less than 36KB. It uses almost no images and is fully optimized to make your blog fly like the wind. Fluid width, works fine in resolutions from 800×600 up to 1024×768 pixels, two columns, widget ready, gravatar ready, Adsense ready.

Retro

Back to a time when mainframes ruled the computing world and amber and green CRT’s were the only access to these beasts. Retro is based on the Sandbox theme with the Blueprint CSS framework added to give it a grid design if one chooses to modify the theme to their liking.

Pemuda

Two column, fixed width, widget and gravatar ready theme with inbuilt space for ads.

Aapna Theme

Fixed width, three column theme best for Personal Blog with Dynamically Rotating Album Pictures.

Ozh has written up a nice article on the new WordPress 2.7 Favorite Actions menu and puts out the call to developers to write a plugin that would automagically determine the favorite actions of a particular blogger and populate that menu with those options. That would be a truly useful plugin and I would love to see it. Now that we are talking about the Favorite Actions menu and we know that actions can be removed, is there going to be competition/confusion between plugin authors who want to add a link to their plugin’s admin page to the top of that menu? Anyone plan on writing such a plugin?

I recently talked about a tutorial on creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress and thanks to WPCandy, have now found a pretty slick plugin that mimics that feature and adds a lot more. Flutter lets your modify your write page and post screens to your liking and adds the ability to add custom content types and write panels to these screens. From WP Candy’s review and from the Flutter documentation, it appears that the plugin is not only under active development and quite complex and mature, it also has a lot of potential for the future. For those that are planning to use Flutter, please remember that it is still in beta and there are lots of broken features and options. Upgrades and uninstallations seem to be the most fraught with issues.

Searching through my feeds today, I came across a very cool plugin/application combo. It’s called Moderator and was written by Daniel Dura. Moderator is a combination of a WordPress plugin and an Adobe Air Application. With the Adobe AIR app, you can:

• Viewing unmoderated comments.
• Dock and system tray notifications of the number of unmoderated comments.
• Accept, delete, and spam comments from within the desktop client.
• Close application window, or minimize it to the system tray while running.
• Shows the Gravatar icons for the user who posted the comment.

After installing and then activating the plugin, I installed the application. Installation went smoothly and now I have access to my comment moderation queue right from my desktop. An additional touch is that, my Windows taskbar now has an icon that mimics the comment moderation bubble graphic with a number that represents the amount of comments in the moderation queue. Pretty cool stuff.

For those of you that have hundreds of comments in your moderation queue, you may see some performance issues. However, Daniel explains that those will be fixed in the next version. Daniel will also modify the theme of the application to align it’s design with the WordPress 2.7 backend. Last but not least, as soon as 2.7 is released, the application will support the comment moderation methods that will be included. This should allow the App to run without installing a plugin.

Emails were covered for privacy reasons.

Considering the WordPress team is working on a comment API, I imagine that in the future, we’ll be able to reply to comments as well as moderating them from the desktop with this application. It will be interesting to see if Moderator evolves into something more than just a Moderation app.

New Plugins

Google Maps Geocoder

WPGMG will create a custom fields on any post containing custom fields of street, city, state, zip and will add two new custom fields to the post: lat & lng. lat being latitude. lng being longitude.

WordPress Carbon Footprint

WordPress Carbon Footprint is a simple plugin for WordPress which works out and displays the carbon footprint of your blog. It works out how many words and images are on your blog and then calculates how many sheets of paper it would take to print a copy of your blog.

ConveyThis Language Translation Plugin

Allows your users to translate your blog into many different languages. The button is added to the bottom of every post.

Updated Plugins

Side Content

It enables you to define a set of widgets which are effectively placeholders. Each one is empty until you assign content to it when editing a page. This enables you to extend the content of the page into the sidebar.

Bookmark Me

Bookmark Me is a plugin to add bookmark buttons (even non english bookmark sites) to your post or page.

SlideshowPro Director Connector

This WordPress plugin helps you to add pictures and albums from SlideshowPro Director to your WordPress blog by either choosing them from the media tab or by inserting some shortcode directly into your post.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Events

Create a list with events/appointments/concerts/future happenings and show them on your site. Includes optional widget and advanced page options.

WP Ajax Edit Comments

Allows users and admins to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.

In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Keith and I dissect the news of the week. We discuss why commenter’s and bloggers should use Gravatar, our thoughts and opinions on the new 2.7 dashboard mock up, Akismet 2.2.1 with stats and much more. We try to solve a problem which was submitted to us by Nicolas and before the end of the show, we give you our plugin picks of the week along with the job of the week. Don’t forget that next Friday, (Halloween) our special one hour guest will be Jane Wells who works for Automattic in the usability/experience department. As you can imagine, we’ll be focusing the conversation on WordPress and usability.

Ad Copy:

WordPress Weekly is brought to you by the fine advertisers on WeblogToolsCollection.com. Without their continued support, this show would not be possible. Those of you who continue to download the show and share it with friends, your continued support is appreciated. If you are interested in advertising on WordPress Weekly, please contact Mark Ghosh via this contact form.

Stories Discussed:

Why commenters and bloggers should use Gravatar

The New 2.7 Dashboard

Akismet 2.2.1 With Stats

WordPress Ranked #33

Alex King Releases Carrington

Feedback:

Tune in to see if your comment or email made it on the air!

We encourage any feedback you might have whether it be a question, a suggestion or a rant. You can either email us at feedback@jeffro2pt0.com or you can simply leave us a comment on the blog.

Plugin Of The Week:

Jeff - Slayers Custom Widgets – Slayers custom widgets enables users to select which widgets appear on specific posts, pages, categories, and tag pages. By default, all widgets appear wherever the sidebar is loaded within your theme. With this plugin, you can configure where widgets are displayed on a per post basis. I’d like to see the ability to control which widgets appear on which template such as configuring a widget to appear on pages that utilize the single.php template while hiding that same widget from other templates.

Keith - Pluginstaller - This plugin allows you to control all aspects of plugin management far more effectively than the default behaviour in WP. It allows for the installation and management of plugins directly from the admin interface with no need for FTP or SSH access to your server’s file system. This is the kind of plugin I use on and off. When I’m installing a new WP instance and have a whole bunch of plugins to configure, I’ll use pluginstaller to handle the download, unzip and activate processes, and then sometimes I’ll turn it off. Pluginstaller also organizes the interface in a much more aesthetically pleasing way.

WordPress Job Of The Week:

Job was posted on October 22nd, 2008 by a company called Zidalgo. The job description is as follows:

I am in need of altering my loop display options on my index.php file. I currently have everything laid out the way I want it, but the page navigation does not work properly, since I’m utilizing multiple loops. I want four posts normally displayed, then four under them (hopefully in the same loop) that have different layouts. I want the page navigation to work according to all 8 posts.

More details await.

Project should be relatively easy for a PHP/WP experienced coder. Please contact asap for job. Thank you

If you’re interested you can contact numethod at gmail.com

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Friday October 31st, 2008 8P.M. EST

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Length Of Episode: 59 Minutes

Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode26.mp3

Listen To Episode #26:

New Plugins

Hangman

Allows you to add the popular game Hangman to your blog

Slayer’s Custom Widgets

This plugin will make your widgetized sidebars so flexible that you will almost think that your running a more advanced CMS system and not WordPress.

WordPress Referrers

WordPress Referrers is a fully automated, self running referral tracking script.

Mini RSS Reader

Just like the plugin Twitter for WordPress, this plugin reads an RSS feed and displays the time, title and trimmed description.

Landing sites

When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, the plugin is showing them related posts to their search on your blog.

WP-Donators

Wp-Donators provides a smart donation function to autoleave the sponsor information in a container after payment. People can donate and submit name/URL or TextLink ad. The information of the latest donors are displayed in the cloud.

Updated Plugins

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

wpSleep

WordPress already offers naturally a comfortable possibility to publish articles delayed. The advantages of this convenient function are obvious: Posts can be created in advance and will automatically be published a few days later or on midnight - even if you are not at the pc. wpSLEEP is based on the same thought and actuate parts of a post as the author likes them to.

Applied Language Solutions Free Translation Plugin

Translation widget that appears in your blog’s side bar. Readers can translate your blog into 10 different languages, automatically in one click.

WP Widget Cache

Cache the output of your blog widgets. Usually it will significantly reduce the SQL queries to your database and speed up your site.

MobilePress

MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that will render your WordPress blog on mobile handsets, with the ability to use customized themes. The plugin also allows specific themes for specific devices / mobile browsers, such as iPhone, Opera Mini, Windows CE Mobile and other generic handset browsers.

htmltidy for WordPress

Runs htmltidy over the complete output of the blog (excluding feeds), not just the post content.

Independence Day

Simple three column theme with the colors of Independence.

Small Business SEO

Blue and gray combined to create a professional-looking SEO-optimized theme perfect for small businesses. Supports rotating 125×125 sidebar ads, widgets, gravatars, and microformats. Valid XHTML and CSS. Based on Sandbox. Includes an SEO options panel.

Colorful Fruits

Colorful Fruits is an 3-Column, fixed width, widget ready WordPress theme

Upstart Blogger Swiss

Swiss is a free minimalist magazine style Wordpress theme in the international typographic style. Easy to modify, no plugins required.

Comscore recently released their monthly analysis of the top web properties for September. Thanks to the volatile economic conditions across the globe during the month of September, business/finance sites as well as news/research sites saw a substantial rise in visitation. However, despite all of that, WordPress came in at number 33 in the list of top 50 web properties for the month. The numbers were comprised of total U.S. (home, work, and university locations). According to Comscore, WordPress saw 23,125,000 visits during the month of September. Although Comscore says WordPress, I am inclined to think that they are discussing WordPress.com and not .org.

Congrats to Automattic and team for continuing to operate one of the webs top properties, month after month.

RSS Link Tagger for Google Analytics

Modifies RSS permalinks to include utm query parameters, used by Google Analytics to track non-adwords advertising campaigns.

login required

Permit access to your blog only to the logged in users

J Post Slider

Show your post in fancy jQuery box, rotating images, with show-up text box with post description.

WP Hide Dashboard

WP Hide Dashboard is a simple plugin that removes the dashboard link and prevents dashboard access to users assigned to the Subscriber role. This is useful if you want to allow your subscribers to edit their own profiles, but don’t want them wandering around the rest of your WordPress admin section.

Wikipedia Autolink

Link automatically all the highlighted words with the syntax [w:{term}] on the definition from Wikipedia.

Backlinks

A simple function to show blog posts linking back to any article, similar to Google Backlinks

Admin-only Category

This simple plugin allow you to hide certain category from all but Admin.