Weblog Tools Collection

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First on the list is a large collection of WordPress video tutorials, tips and tricks ranging from the very basic to the very advanced from SpeckyBoy. This list also includes our very own Weblog Tools Videos which lists various WordPress and blogging videos, tips, tutorials and reviews.

Noupe has listed 11 new “Most Wanted” hacks for WordPress in a nice illustrated list. The new hacks include protecting your pictures from hotlinking and Custom Google Search for WordPress.

WPMU has received 37 nominations for their WordPress MU awards for 2008 and are looking for people to help choose the winners. View the nominations and vote for them.

Michael Kubler has written up a tutorial to make WordPress captioned images work as expected on your WordPress theme. Captioned images were introduced in WordPress 2.6 (I believe). This blog had the same problem till we managed to wrangle the extra CSS code for it to work.

Download Squad is linking to a Firefox add-on that allows a blogger to post screenshots/screengrabs directly to a WordPress blog. This can be very useful if you do a lot of reviews and such where you post screengrabs. Be wary of bugs.

Help test the new version of WordPress for iPhone using the iPhone simulator by downloading the latest 1.2beta1 code from the WordPress trac. Details about the features of the new version and the download links are available from the WordPress for iPhone blog. Thank TUAW and The Blog Herald.

A nice roundup of photoblogging themes and plugins available for WordPress was published by WPCandy. Many of the links are collections themselves. Definitely worth a looksee if you are looking for a nice photoblog.

Nathan Rice posted a Definitive guide to Sticky posts in WordPress 2.7 complete with screenshots, style suggestions, code examples and custom loop suggestions. He even outlines a method to ignore stickies completely.

Intense Debate, recently acquired by Automattic, is back with a stronger product and a much more integerated and user friendly WordPress plugin that makes the task of switching back and forth from ID easier and less painful. Let us know if you switched and how it went. Thanks to RWW and a bunch of other sources.

To round off this news round up, we have 8 Common Sense Tips for Writing Clean WordPress Blog Posts. Lots of well illustrated tips on cleaning up your blog posts and making them more presentable for both humans and machines. I think this would be one of those must have bookmarks for people just starting off in blogging with WordPress.

I receive a lot of comments, emails and questions on WordPress and we try to answer them all as succinctly and as quickly as possible. However, there is one question that I receive over and over again that I do did not have a quick and painless answer for. Professional designers and web developers who help small businesses and individuals with their custom WordPress needs have been telling me that some of their clients are worried about the new WordPress 2.7 and the hype surrounding it. The completely new WordPress 2.7 admin interface scares some of their clients to the point that they are worried about switching. They are worried that the backend will continue to change and become unfamliar and different with every new release and their blogging lives will be made more difficult with each future upgrade. I have tried to allay the fears in my replies with examples of how blogging tasks will get easier in 2.7 with screenshots and writeups on various blogs and review sites. What they really needed was a quick, simple and effective way to communicate how much better this new admin interface really is and what has been done to make bloggers’ lives simpler and WordPress easier and more fun to use. What they needed was a WordPress 2.7 trailer.

The Automattic team (thanks Jane!), has posted just that on the WordPress.com blog. This time, it’s personal has a nice and short video to answer those questions and alleviate the FUD. I love the trailer-like commentary on the video. If you are one of those that have received such questions and/or concerns from your clients, I suggest you use the video well and use it often.

I cannot wait for the WordPress 2.7 release! My dad is an avid blogger on WordPress but is not very technically inclined at all. He loved the new 2.7 interface when I showed it to him and it seemed so intuitive to him that he found everything he had used in the past without any fumbling at all.

Are you or one of your clients in this boat? Do you have any other material that can help reduce the fear of upgrading to WordPress 2.7?

[EDIT] For those that are looking for more detailed information on the thinking and design process that went into WordPress 2.7, here are a few links to blog posts, videos and walkthroughs from the past months. If you have other links to share, please leave and comment and we will add them to this list.

Usability Testing Report: 2.5 and CrazyHorse
The New 2.7 Dashboard
The Visual Design of 2.7
WordPress 2.7 wireframes
Comprehensive Codex Article on WordPress 2.7
WordPress Development Updates from Jane Wells
WordPress Usability Testing in New York
WordPress 2.7 UI Configurability from Ryan Boren
Customizable Post Editing Screen from Mark Jaquith
WordPress 2.7 Navigation Survey from Jane Wells
Shortcuts/Favorites Menu from Jane Wells
CrazyHorse Presentation at WordCamp SF
WordPress 2.7 Walkthrough by Matt
WordPress 2.7 and beyond from Matt at WordCamp Utah

Many sites across the blogosphere are reporting a fake website that is distributing a backdoored version of WordPress. Though these are few and far between, it behooves all users to be careful when downloading any kind of code to run on their blog. The Register report contains an update from Peter Westwood (a WordPress lead dev) about the code being distributed and his suggestions on how to avoid being duped. Though the fake site is down now and If you believe that you might have been the victim of this site, please download a fresh copy of WordPress from WordPress.org and upgrade your blog to be safe.

I personally follow a few simple rules to make sure that I never fall for a social engineering or covert code trap on my blogs.

• Always download core WordPress code from http://WordPress.org. Type the link into your browser address bar rather than following a link from another blog or site. This includes updates and security fixes. If your web host offers one click installs or upgrades through their control panel, they are probably safe (they are safe if they are on a current version). I still suggest either installing a fresh copy from WordPress.org or using WordPress.com, but I do understand that one click installs are convenient.
• Try to download plugins and themes only from the official WordPress Extend. There are way too many themes and plugins (though much less plugins) that contain convert code and new WordPress theme download sites seem to be popping up everyday. We have covered shady themes many times on this blog.
• Never download “hacks” or “patches” to WordPress from anywhere. If you are unfamiliar with PHP, I would suggest that you ask people in the WordPress forums for help or contact us through our form on this blog for help. Always download official patches, updates and installs from the WordPress.org site.
• If you find a cool new trick, theme, plugin or hack for WordPress via a Google search, please be careful. I know the following is a cliche’, but if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Do you have any suggestions for our other readers? Have you found strange code on your blog or theme?

Making your theme’s comments compatible with WordPress 2.7 and earlier versions.: If you are a theme designer or author, you need to know that your legacy theme’s comments page will not be compatible with WordPress 2.7 Justin Tadlock has written up a simple (and clean) procedure to make the comments page compatible with WordPress 2.7 and still be backwards compatible with slightly older version of WordPress.

While we are on the subject of comments and WordPress 2.7, Otto has also written a detailed post on the new comment enhancements in WordPress 2.7. Judging from the comments and reading through the article, it is a very well written peice and should answer most questions on the new features.

[EDIT] As astutely pointed out in the comments, all themes should continue to work fine with original functionality. However to use the newly introduced commenting features of WordPress 2.7, older themes will have to be modified.

WordPress 2.7 Keyboard Shortcuts in the WordPress Codex is a nice page to figure out the neat little tricks to make your job of administering a blog easier and more user friendly. WordPress 2.7 adds the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to browse and moderate comments. These keyboard shortcuts are designed to save time by allowing you to rapidly navigate and perform actions on comments. If your blog receives a lot of comments for moderation and/or spam, these shortcuts might come handy.

Speaking of new features added to WordPress 2.7, Demetris has written a post on the Ten New Features in WordPress 2.7 that strikes him as the most useful. I really like his illustrated style of writing. It is worthy of note that some of the features he mentions are dependant on compatibility with your theme.

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?

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.

WordPress Helper Firefox Extension.: An extension for Firefox that adds a bunch of automated and manual features to the right click contextual menu in Firefox.

Available features include the following:

• Categorized Access to WordPress Help pages (WordPress Codex)
• Search for highlighted text strings on websites
• One-Click-switch to a website’s WordPress backend
• Update Notification on new WordPress versions
• Website Profiles
• Custom Shortcuts
• Various preference settings

There has been active development on this extension since April of this year with good documentation of progress and the author is taking suggestions from users for future uses/features of the extension. Although many of these actions can be performed with shortcuts or other tools within Firefox, this extension puts it all into one place at easy reach of the Firefox user. The original developers’ page is in German but the linked page should be the English version.

[EDIT] Sorry, link fixed. Thanks for the heads up.

Tutorial: Creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress.: A fantastic, detailed and quite useful tutorial on creating custom write panels for the WordPress Write Post page. I had written something similar for the WordPress Jobs site and it turned out to be a fantastic tool to quickly get to and add/modify Custom Fields in posts. Custom write panels are most useful for customized installations of WordPress and could be used to add many different types of information into a post both easily and quickly. The image below shows a couple of examples of custom panels and I am sure there are hundreds more.

This tutorial makes use of Custom Fields in WordPress using the various functions that help manage Custom Fields (I keep typing customer), and is a shining example of how useful and flexible Custom Fields can be in developing a full CMS with WordPress.

Since the final code is included in the tutorial, if you were to put together a Custom Write Panel for your blog with the help of the tutorial, what would you use it for? I would love to use it to add updates to posts, which would then be displayed with some extra styling and markup to denote the change in status of the item in the post.

Automattic Acquires PollDaddy.: From their recent bi-yearly assembly of Automattic folks, this time at Breckenridge Colorado, Matt announced that the PollDaddy service is the most recent member of the Automattic family and WordPress.com users will now be able to add polls to their WordPress blogs. He also said that the team is working on many features and customizations of polls to make the polls have the same look and feel as the blogs. There is a WordPress.org plugin for PollDaddy and Matt posts about the PollDaddy acquisition on his blog.

From the sound of things, a few cool projects might be announced and introduced in the few weeks following this Automattic meeting.

Free links to your site: I admit that the title of this post is a little sensational but that is how Matt Cutts puts it. In the post linked above, he talks about the newly introduced feature of Google Webmaster Portal that allows users to find the pages that link to 404 pages on your site. In his words (emphasis his) “Some of the easiest links you’ll ever get are when people tried to link to you and just messed up.”

What was most useful for me in that post was a link to another post on the Google Webmaster Portal that helps you create better 404 pages using an experimental widget. Now I am sure there are ways to incorporate a Custom Search within the 404 without using the widget but I stuck with it because the output looked useful. Quick Online Tips had a post on the Google Custom 404 widget a couple of months ago that also talks about this widget.

This link to a fictitious “hotmail” page is an example of the output that our 404.php (in the theme folder) at weblogtoolscollection.com generates. We still need to fix the footer and the sidebars but it works for now.