This week’s WordPress Podcast with Charles Stricklin and Jonathan Bailey is asking listeners to email them their top 10 favorite, can’t-live-without WordPress Plugins.

WordPress Plugins are invaluable tools and extensions that help you do more with your WordPress blog. There are a lot I couldn’t live without, but that list changes over time as Plugins come and go, evolve and improve.

Plugins help you add video and multimedia easier to your blog. They help you list most recent posts, most recent comments, translate your post content, offer polls and surveys, add design and template functions, add contact forms and mailing lists, and improve how WordPress works in general. Did you know that there are three Plugins that will help you ensure you spell WordPress right, with the “P” capitalized, just in case you forget in your blog posts?

Right now, Weblog Tools Collection’s annual WordPress Plugin Competition is on and every year, when I think there are no new ideas for WordPress Plugins, I’m stunned at the fantastic Plugins people come up with, Plugins that soon become invaluable on our blogs. The imagination and possibilities of WordPress Plugins astounds me constantly. I worship the ground Plugin authors float over as they find a problem or challenge in WordPress and come up with a creative solution.

I feature WordPress Plugins every Wednesday on the Blog Herald as part of my weekly WordPress Wednesday News reports, helping you find unusual and interesting Plugins to help you blog better.

Last year, I spent a few months researching what WordPress users have published as their favorite WordPress Plugins, and then featured the Plugins on the top of those lists in What Are Your Favorite WordPress Plugins as part of a month honoring WordPress Plugins on this blog. For the next month, I wrote a blog post a day, sometimes two, about all the different types of WordPress Plugins I’d found, and still I only showcased the tip of the ice berg.

Why not help highlight your favorite WordPress Plugins by emailing Charles and Jonathan of the WordPress Podcast at comments@wordpresspodcast.org and help them put together a list of users’ favorite WordPress Plugins.

Related Articles

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• February: 30 Days of WordPress Plugins
• A Month of WordPress Plugins
• Where to Find WordPress Plugins
• Lists of Your Favorite WordPress Plugins
• What Are Your Favorite WordPress Plugins?
• WordPress Plugins Battling Evil
• Translation and Multilingual WordPress Plugins
• A Love Letter to WordPress Plugin Authors
• WordPress Plugins for Images, Photographs, and Graphics
• WordPress Administration Panel WordPress Plugins
• Helping WordPress Search With WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Plugins That Play With Paper and Documents
• Counting WordPress: Statistics WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Widgets: The Next Generation of WordPress Plugins<
• Customizable Post Listings WordPress Plugin
• Testing Readers: Survey, Polling, Rating, Testing, and Reviewing WordPress Plugins
• Subscribe, Email Mailing List, Blog Update Alerts, and Newsletter WordPress Plugins
• Video, Music, Podcasts, Audio, and Multimedia WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Plugins To Help You Administer Your Blog
• Blog Navigation WordPress Plugins: Related, Recent, Most Popular Posts and More
• Connecting Articles in Series: In Series WordPress Plugin
• Which WordPress Plugins Does Lorelle on WordPress Use?
• WordPress Plugins That Help You Write Code
• Post Meta Data WordPress Plugins
• Monetizing WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Plugins for Comments
• Contact Form WordPress Plugins
• Random WordPress Plugins: Rotating Banners, Header Art, Images, Quotes, and Content on Your Blog
• WordPress Plugins for Feeds
• WordPress Plugins for Blog Layout, Formating, and CSS Designs
• WordPress Plugins for Multiple Blogger Blogs
• Odds and Ends WordPress Plugins You Must Know About
• Wanted: WordPress Plugins for Me
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• How to Write a Simple WordPress Plugin
• One Year Anniversary Review: WordPress Plugins

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

Get ready to go naked. On April 9th, 2008, hundreds, possibly thousands, of blogs and websites will go naked in honor of CSS Naked Day. Join fellow WordPress bloggers in honoring web designers and WordPress Theme builders by going naked.

This is the third year of the annual CSS Naked Day which honors web design and designers around the world who help make our websites and blogs look “pretty” to the eye while still being totally functional under the hood. Dustin Diaz wanted to give the web world an opportunity to remind everyone of the benefits of CSS web page design. By removing the stylesheet for the day, the world would see naked web pages, giving a little more appreciation for the skills of web page designers.

As explained yesterday in the Blog Herald announcement of CSS Naked Day, this is also an opportunity to showcase how usable and accessible your web page structure is even without the pretty, reminding the world that it is the law that your website must accessible by everyone using any method to access your blog.

Make Your WordPress Blog Naked

Going naked is easy for WordPress blogs. In Lorelle is Naked, I explained the various options last year on how to turn off your blog’s stylesheet using WordPress Plugins with WordPress Naked Day Plugin for all WordPress versions, CSS Naked Day WordPress Plugin for pre-WordPress 2x blogs, the Naked Day PHP Function script for non-WordPress and PHP driven blogs, do it manually by renaming your blog’s stylesheet for the day, or removing the stylesheet temporarily on WordPress.com blogs.

Recent versions of WordPress will automatically reset to the Default WordPress Theme if no Theme is detected, which means changing the style.css file will revert your Theme to the Default/Kubrick style. To override this redirection, you must use the WordPress Naked Day Plugin or create a separate Theme that has no styles in the stylesheet, which I’ve prepared just for this event.

I have stripped down the styles in the Default WordPress Theme for current versions of WordPress and pre-WordPress 2.1 versions which changed some of the sidebar tags.

1. Unzip and upload the Theme version of choice to your themes directory.
   • Default Blank WordPress Theme for current versions of WordPress for CSS Naked Day (zip)
   • Default Blank WordPress Theme for CSS Naked Day (Pre-WordPress 2.1) (zip)
2. Activate the Theme through the Presentation or Design panel.
3. Switch back to your regularly scheduled WordPress Theme on April 10.

For those on WordPress.com, you can also participate if you are using the Sandbox WordPress Theme with the WordPress.com CSS Extra feature.

1. From the WordPress Administration Panels, go to Presentation > Edit CSS.
2. Cut ALL of the styles from your custom stylesheet and paste them into a text file. Save it with a name you will remember in a very safe place, leaving a blank stylesheet.
3. Choose the option: Start from scratch and just use this to create a blank stylesheet.
4. Click Save Stylesheet.
5. View your WordPress.com blog and all the design elements will be gone. The layout structure will remain but it will be “naked”.

Reverse the process to restore your Sandbox Theme on April 10.

Be sure and sign up for the CSS Naked Day so your blog will be celebrated as one of those honoring web design and designers. Last year, almost 2,000 sites signed up for CSS Naked Day. So far, the list is over 400. Let your naked stance join with others on April 9.

Related Articles

• Blog Herald - Strip Down: Naked CSS Day Instructions
• Bloggers Share Step-by-Step Tips for Increasing Blog Usability
• One Year Anniversary Review: Accessibility and Usability
• How Do You Know If a Blog Has Integrity?
• Creative Usability with WordPress.com Blogs
• Website Accessibility is Now Getting Serious in the USA
• Usability Isn’t Expensive. It’s Practical. Usability is Useful.
• Beauty is Only Skin Deep: Designing Blogs For Feeds, Search Engines and Audience
• Accessibility: For Everyone, Including the Colorblind
• Accessibility Wins SEO Plus Plus
• Image Replacement Techniques
• Accessibility Doesn’t Have to Be Boring
• Validate an Entire Website
• CSS and Web Standard Feeds in One Place
• CSS Switching Styles for the Low Vision User
• More Than You Want to Know - Search Engine Articles, Information, and Resources
• Step-By-Step Website Development - Check List
• CSS Maintainability - Serious Style Sheets
• CSS and Web Page Design List of Resources
• Website Development - International Standards and Languages
• Validating the Code Behind the Page
• Meet Them: Benefits of Compliance with Web Standards
• Blogging About Disabilities
• WordPress in Your Language

Site Search Tags: css naked day, naked css, css, web design, blog event, wordpress news, turn off stylesheets, accessibility, usability, honor web designers

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

In March of 2005, Scott Reilly of Coffee2Code shook up the WordPress Community with 7 Days of Plugins. During that week, Scott created and released:

• Easy Post-to-Post Links WordPress Plugin: A shortcut code for referencing onsite blog posts by id or post slug name.
• Obfuscate E-mail WordPress Plugin: Automatically disguise emails within blog posts and Pages.
• Never Moderate Admin or Post Author WordPress Plugin: Prevents moderation or marking as spam any comments by the site administrator, post author, or a registered user above a specified user level, no matter how spammy the comment.
• Sync Draft Slug and Title WordPress Plugin: While the post is still in draft mode, it keeps the post slug in sync with any changes to the post title, no longer necessary with current versions of WordPress, but critical then.
• Author Image(s) WordPress Plugin: Offers the feature to add an author image to the blog post.
• Preserve Code Formatting WordPress Plugin: Writing code in a WordPress blog continues to be painful, and Scott Reilly brought out one of the first code specific Plugins that preserves the formatting for text within <code> and <pre> tags to make writing code easier.
• Notification Disabler WordPress Plugin: Disabled email notifications about new and/or moderated comments, pingbacks, and/or trackbacks en masse or on an individual author basis, allowing customization of the email notification feature in WordPress.
• Dynamic Text Replace WordPress Plugin: Allows custom dynamic text replacement which allows you to pre-define text replacement strings which are converted to their full text value when the post is saved. For instance, if you frequently link to the WordPress Codex, you can use a shortcut for the link which will convert to the full text in a link when the post saves, saving you some keystrokes.
• No Duplicate Comments WordPress Plugin: This was one of the first Plugins to battle against human and machine comment spammers by preventing duplicate comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks.
• Customizable Post Listings WordPress Plugin: I consider this Plugin a ground breaker. Customizable Post Listings revolutionized the ways WordPress users display post and comment content on their blogs. Post and Comment information can be displayed as recent posts, related posts, by author, category, and so many ways, I had to write the Customizable Post Listings WordPress Plugin guide, highlighting a few of the dozens of ways to use it.

This was a major undertaking, and the WordPress Community loved these useful and powerful Plugins. Customizable Post Listings, though, became Scott’s most powerful and most desirable Plugin over the past three plus years, surviving all WordPress upgrades until just recently.

Starting Monday, March 31, 2008, Scott began a double version of his 2005 success with 14 Days of WordPress Plugins, which began with the release of the new version of Customizable Post Listings v3.0.

Some of the new features in this amazingly versatile Plugin are:

• Works with WordPress 2.5 and most past versions.
• 36 ways of displaying posts and comments.
• Display by Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Most Recent Comments, Random Posts, Recently Modified Posts…
• Sorting by category, author, post status, date, and more by title and/or excerpt.
• 54 different and more dynamic percent-substitution tags.
• Queries the taxonomy tables for relationships.
• Improved Administration Panel interface and added customization.

But the fun doesn’t stop with the update of Customizable Post Listings. In the past week, Scott has released numerous posts, updated old Plugins, and released new ones. Here are some highlights.

• Customizable Post Listings v3.0: The newest version of this powerful and flexible Plugin for displaying posts and comments and more.
• Safe Function Call v1.0: Offers the ability to safely call functions not normally available from within a template, such as calling a function provided by a deactivated WordPress Plugin - great for intermediate to advanced WordPress users who like pushing the envelop with their WordPress blogs.
• wpuntexturize v1.0: Prevents WordPress from displaying those annoying “smart quotes” in a blog post, those curly alternatives to straight quotes and apostrophes.
• Custom Admin Post Listing v1.1: Adds a feature to configure the post listing fields show in the Manage > Posts Administration Panel by removing existing columns or adding columns for custom field data, giving you more functionality for custom fields.
• Obfuscate E-mail v2.0: The updated version of Scott’s very popular Plugin to hide email addresses from harvesters and evil-doers.
• Auto-hyperlink URLs WordPress Plugin: Automatically converts text hyperlinks (URLs) and email addresses that appear as plain text into links in post content and comments, if WordPress fails to convert them.
• If File Exists WordPress Plugin: Checks the existence of a file and returns a simple boolean state or displays an HTML snippet with information about the file.
• No Update Nag WordPress Plugin: Provides the option to remove the WordPress update nag which appears at the top of all Administration Panels when a new version of WordPress is released. While most users shouldn’t remove the nag, if you are a web designer, developer, or manager and you track WordPress updates and don’t need to remind your clients of when WordPress requires updates (so they don’t nag you), this is an easy way to prevent the warning from showing on those blogs.
• Get Custom Field Values v2.5: This updates Scott’s popular Plugin for WordPress 2.5 and recent versions to retrieve and control the display of custom field values and meta data for posts inside or outside of the WordPress Loop. Most custom fields must appear within the WordPress Loop, and this Plugin helps break the barriers, giving a WordPress Theme designer or blog owner more options on what content goes where.
• Custom Post Limits WordPress Plugin: Custom Post Limits WordPress Plugin allows customization and control of the number of posts that appear on the front page, search results, author, category, tags, archives, and more on your blog. You can customize how many posts to appear on each type of pageview.

So far, a week into the 14 day WordPress Plugin party, Scott has released five new Plugins and updated four older ones. A few of his Plugins have been deprecated, as their features are no longer needed in current WordPress versions, but the 5 new Plugins and the ones to come over the next 7 days will definitely make up for the loss of the old ones.

Scott Reilly is one of the most innovative WordPress Plugin authors within the WordPress Community. He goes for usefulness rather than showy Plugins, improving how WordPress works for you and not against you. He may be taking requests, so if you have an idea for a great Plugin for WordPress, stop by Coffee2Code and offer your suggests.

If you don’t have a new idea for a WordPress Plugin, stop by anyway and cheer on this exhausting two week project of giving back to the WordPress Community.

Scott, good luck and thank you for all the hard work you do to help us blog better with WordPress.

Site Search Tags: wordpress plugins, wordpress news, scott reilly, coffee2code, week of wordpress plugins, two weeks of wordpress plugins, customizable post listings, wordpress plugin news, wordpress plugin releases, plugins

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

I’m rarely totally and completely blown away by anything, and yesterday at WordCamp Dallas, John Pozadzides blew the whole crowd away with his new blog statistics program, Woopra.

John is a blogger, author of the popular One Man’s Blog, and an experienced web user, web company owner and business man. He understands the importance blog statistics play in determining how to best serve your readers. Like me, he wasn’t happy with what was currently available. He and his partners, Elie Khoury and Jad Younan, decided to break all the rules, revolutionizing the way we think and use blog statistics. He totally blew us all away with the demo at WordCamp.

Woopra is a live statistics program. It tells you what is happening on your blog right now, this very second. When he showed it the crowd at WordCamp Dallas, I logged onto his blog, and there on the screen, the audience saw my name pop up in Woopra. The cookie created when I commented on his blog passed on my site information, information I had already provided freely when I left a comment. Those who have not commented or registered are just shown as anonymous visitors.

It features counts of how many are on your blog at that moment, which adjusted as we watched the screen and other audience members jumped on board. We all watched the number go from 48 to over 60 and kept growing as more and more signed on.

There is a listing of the basic information provided by your browser like where you are arriving from, the browser you are using, screen size, and so on, but much more. There is a live action map that shows the countries with white dots that flash like a radar signal to show the geographical location from where the visitors are on the map. When we switched to the map, we saw flashing signals from Australia, Alaska, Europe, but the collection of radar rings radiating from Dallas, Texas, was huge, showing all of us on his blog.

While we watched, John clicked on my name on the list of visitors in Woopra and initiated a conversation with me. On my laptop, a tiny window popped up inviting me to start a conversation with him. I did not have the program installed on my computer. I agreed, and the audience watched as I responded and we “chatted” live via Woopra.

This program could revolutionize the way we gather information about our visitors and interact with them. Imagine being able to communicate with your visitors without any extra software or hardware. Imagine getting information you need in a way you can really use it to focus your blog’s content to better server your readership. The possibilities are endless.

It works on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Once you site up with a Woopra account, the admin panels allow you to add your sites and download an optional WordPress Plugin to make the process of adding the Javascript to your blog easier from the Administration Panels. If you cannot add a Plugin to your blog, or want to add the Javascript manually in a text widget or other fashion, you can choose the Manual Installation method.

I could go on and on about all the features of this amazing and revolutionary product. I’m still learning so much about it and as I learn more, you’ll hear about it. Hosted by Layered Technologies, Woopra is currently in beta testing and only available by invitation. There is still some testing and sorting that has to happen, but at it stands right now, it knocked my socks off.

It also knocked the socks off of Cali and Neal of GeekBrief.TV who videoed Woopra in action, then blogged about it with glee with an indepth interview and video with John. Techcrunch jumped on this new blog stats toy and went nuts with it, as did Mashable, all within a few hours. It’s been so exciting to watch!

No Woopra for WordPress.com Users…Yet

I want to use Woopra desperately here on Lorelle on WordPress, but I’m frustrated. WordPress.com does not allow Javascripts on the site. John has told me that there are already over 5,000 invitations from WordPress.com users, and the number is growing as we watched, but he can’t hand out the demo invitations to WordPress.com users.

Matt Mullenweg and the Automattic team were there and appeared to be seriously impressed, so maybe we can do a little nudging to get access via WordPress.com.

To help you nudge, I’ve added adding Woopra to WordPress.com to the WordPress Ideas and a post on the WordPress.com Forum on the subject for you to comment on and offer your opinions.

Please, don’t ask me for invitations. Sign up for Woopra and register your blog, even if you are on WordPress.com. They will send you an invitation when they can. Remember, this is still in testing, so it’s first come first serve. They will add new users as fast as they can. WordPress.com users will be the first in line to get access, if WordPress.com opens the door.

Site Search Tags: woopra, john Pozadzides, blog stats, blog statistics, statistics, wordcampdallas2008, wordcamp

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

I just published WordPress 2.5 Plugins Beware: Automatic Plugin Upgrade Problems on the Blog Herald and recommend that you check it out before using the new Automatic Plugin Upgrade feature in the just released Release Candidate 1 for WordPress 2.5 for beta-testers only.

The issue with the new Automatic Plugin Upgrade feature is explained by Darren of Unfolding Neurons in Be Careful Using The Automatic Plugins Upgrades In WordPress 2.5.

WordPress 2.5 is anticipated to be ready by its original Roadmap due date of March 24, give or take. Rumors are flying that it should be released just before WordCamp Dallas March 29-30, 2008.

While the issues with the Plugin Upgrade are not blog-threatening issues, especially if you avoid using the Automatic Plugin Upgrade feature until reassured it has been fixed and all Plugins comply with the new standards, a broken blog due to a poorly installed WordPress Plugin is still broken and not to be taken lightly.

If you are currently using WordPress 2.5, the article offers tips on upgrading Plugins - the old fashioned way.

More News on WordPress 2.5

While, the first beta testing, release candidate for WordPress 2.5 has just been issued for testers only, you can keep up with what’s going on with the upcoming release of WordPress 2.5 and prepare for the upgrade through these articles:

• WordPress Upgrade Preparation Checklist
• Are You Ready for WordPress 2.5?
• WordPress 2.5 Due March 17, Administration Plugins May Break, Tons of Plugins Updated, Add Buttons to Toolbar, WordPress Dallas and Now Milan!
• Codex: WordPress 2.5
• Prepare For WP 2.5
• WordPress 2.5 Plugin Settings Pages Style Guide
• WordPress 2.5 Revealed and Compared to Version 2.3.x
• Mashable - WordPress 2.5 Preview
• Dougal Gunters - WordPress 2.5 RC1
• WordPress 2.5 - Get a Sneak Peek Before Launch
• Weblog Tools Collection - WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate Released

WARNING: Beware announcing to the world which version of WordPress you are using, even the new version. There are hackers aware of version specific security vulnerabilities and they are looking for your blog. Also note that installing WordPress 2.5 prior to the official release is at your own risk. Even those testing WordPress for development and bug fixing purposes test it on test blogs, and rarely risk their main sites during the development stage.

Site Search Tags: wordpress tips, wordpress news, wordpress 2.5, wordpress release, wordpress plugins, automatic plugin upgrade, upgrade plugins, plugin upgrades, wordpress bugs, wordpress development

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

The In Series WordPress Plugin by Remstate has been updated recently. The Plugin makes writing article series and connecting them together in a series simple and easy, adding a link list of the articles in the series to each post within the series.

I’m a major fan of the popular, In Series WordPress Plugin, especially as the original author, Scott Merrill (Skippy), wrote it just for me. I’m so spoiled. Travis of REM State has taken it over, thankfully, and totally rewritten the entire WordPress Plugin so it is better than ever. And now it has been updated.

It works with WordPress 2.3 and now includes multi-lingual support and more flexibility. The next version, In Series 3.1.0 Beta 1 is available for those who want to help improve this popular Plugin.

Remstate is also looking for translation volunteers to help create and improve the languages of the Plugin, which currently includes French, German, and Polish.

Gone is the need to write up table of contents and next and previous links in each post in your article series. The In Series WordPress Plugin works without interaction with the WordPress Theme template files now. Just set the new controls added to the Write Post panel to designate which series the post is within. It allows re-ordering the posts within the series, or even removing it from the series without losing the post. All kinds of links such as navigational links, tables of content, next and previous links, and more are added to each post to connect them in the series.

The latest version also adds a “Series” panel under Options in the WordPress Administration Panel for controlling how In Series displays its content of links and navigation aids within your blog posts.

I wish WordPress.com would add this powerful article series Plugin to its arsenal, but if you have a full version WordPress blog, and you like writing articles in series, then this is the perfect WordPress Plugin.

For more information on writing articles in a series, see:

• Technical Tips for Publishing a Series of Articles on Your Blog
• Connecting Articles in Series: In Series WordPress Plugin

Site Search Tags: articles, wordpress tips, wordpress plugins, in series, in series wordpress plugin, remstate, plugin for article series, article series plugin, writing article series, writing blog post series, writing post series
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

The implementation of the new WordPress 2.3 built-in tag system has not come without some joy and pain. Here are some bits of news and tips to help you with the new WordPress tags.

What is the Difference Between Tags and Categories?

A category is a table of contents for your blog posts, segregating your posts with grouped like-content.

A tag is an index word that helps you micro-categorize your blog posts. Tags are also keywords and search terms people use to search for the content and subject matter of your post. They are specific to the post content but can be used repeatedly to micro-categorize your blog post content.

To learn more about the differences between a tag and category, see:

• Tags and Tagging in WordPress
• Tags Are Not Categories - Got It?
• Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags
• The Problems With Tags and Tagging
• Tagging With Emotions Not Common Sense
• Keywords Versus Tags
• Blog Post Category Trauma: How To Help Bloggers With Useless Categories
• Blog Post Category Trauma: Suggestions for Useless Categories
• Blog Post Category Trauma: Fixing Those Useless Categories
• Blog Post Category Trauma: Changing Your Categories in WordPress
• Categories versus Tags - What’s the Difference and Which One?
• An Interesting Use of Category Tags in wordpress.com
• Are You Abusing and Misusing Tags?

WordPress 2.3 Tag Features

By default, WordPress 2.3 tags are added to your blog posts via the Write Post panel in a tag input form below the post edit area. The tag words and phrases are linked to the blog post.

On full version WordPress 2.3 blogs, the tag links link to a tag page, similar to a category pageview, of posts on your blog.

Currently, without a WordPress Plugin, tags are edited and managed on a per post basis. You will have to edit that post to change its tags. There is no tag management panel or method, nor a panel to view all your tags or get tag suggestions.

On WordPress.com blogs, the tag links currently link to WordPress.com blogs using the same tag on some WordPress Themes, and to blog content on other WordPress Themes. There is a lot of discussion on why do some themes have local tags instead of global tags and turning off global tags and how to let users know tags are not local. The best fix would be to give WordPress.com bloggers an option on where they want their tags to link to, but right now, it’s everywhere.

For WordPress.com bloggers who want tags, but want to control where they link, you can not use the built-in tag feature and use something like the Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com blogs.

WordPress 2.3 Tag WordPress Plugins

UPDATE: Simple Tags WordPress Plugin is getting a lot of attention and respect as a well-rounded Plugin for managing the new native tagging in WordPress. Called the successor to the popular Simple Tagging Plugin, Simple Tags features “type-ahead” input tags, auto suggestion, tag management, listing no-tagged content, mass editing of tags, tags for Pages, tag related content, a possibility of adding related posts inside feeds, tag clouds, header tags, embedded tags, and a lot more.

The following are WordPress Plugins that are designed to work with the native tagging in WordPress 2.3:

• Simple Tags WordPress Plugin
• Recommended Tags WordPress Plugin
• Flash Tag Cloud WordPress Plugin
• Advanced Tag Entry WordPress Plugin
• Structured Tag Library WordPress Plugin
• WordPress 2.3 Configurable Tag Cloud Widget
• WordPress 2.3 Related Posts WordPress Plugin
• All In One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin
• WordPress Selectable Tag List WordPress Plugin
• Embedded Tag Thing WordPress Plugin
• Tag Managing Thing WordPress Plugin
• Tag Suggest Thing WordPress Plugin
• Click Tags WordPress Plugin

How Do I Put WordPress Tags in My WordPress Theme?

The WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users, describes the WordPress Template Tag tags for use within your WordPress Themes, if you enjoy doing things manually and taking full advantage of the power of WordPress template tags.

For an indepth look at the structure and specific template tags and handling of tags in WordPress, Ryan Boren has written a “Taxonomy Schema” with all the details.

Nathan Rice covers how to make your WordPress Theme backwards compatible to accommodate the new tags, and how to customize WordPress Tag tags on Themes. You can find more helpful tips and information on WordPress Tags in:

• Aaron Brazell - 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.3
• Ryan Boren - WordPress 2.3 Database schema changes
• Ryan Boren - WordPress 2.3 Taxonomy Schema
• How To Add WordPress 2.3 Tags To Your Current Theme by Rich Gilchrest
• WPDesigner - WordPress 2.3 Beta Review and Checklist (tips for including tags in your Themes)

What About Ultimate Tag Warrior and Other Tagging WordPress Plugins?

The Ultimate Tag Warrior by Christine Davis has been discontinued and will not work in WordPress 2.3. Do not fret. Christine has created the now popular WordPress 2.3 Plugins: Embedded Tag Thing WordPress Plugin, Tag Managing Thing WordPress Plugin, and Tag Suggest Thing WordPress Plugin.

UTW, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, Bunny’s Technorati Tags, and other tagging Plugins can have their tags imported into the new built-in tag feature through the Importer panel.

More on Tags in WordPress and Tagging Your Blog Posts

I’ve written a lot about tags and tagging over the past three years. Here are a few articles to help you learn more about how tags work, and how to make them work in your WordPress blogs.

• Tags Arrive on WordPress.com Blogs
• A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users
• The Problems With Tags and Tagging
• Playing Tag With WordPress
• What Do You Blog About? Check Your Tags
• 2005 - The Year of the Tag
• Tidying Up Tags - A Technical Review
• Blog Post Category Trauma: How To Help Bloggers With Useless Categories
• Blog Post Category Trauma: Suggestions for Useless Categories
• Blog Post Category Trauma: Fixing Those Useless Categories
• Blog Post Category Trauma: Changing Your Categories in WordPress
• Link Referrals - Linking to Site Search Tags
• Abuse: Keyword Spamming versus Tag Spamming
• Tags and Tagging in WordPress
• One Year Anniversary Review: Tags, Tagging, and Categories
• Happy Taggiversary to Technorati
• Are You Abusing and Misusing Tags?

Site Search Tags: wordpress tips, wordpress tags, tags, tagging, post tags, wordpress 2.3, wordpress news, wordpress tag help, wordpress categories, category, wordpress post categories
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

by engtech of Internet Duct Tape

As a reader of Lorelle On WordPress you might already know there is more than one type of WordPress blogging software, but most people who know what WordPress is have no idea there are different flavours of it.

1. WordPress
   • also called self-hosted WordPress, or WordPress.org
   • has one blog that you have full control over
   • you have to find somewhere to host it yourself
2. WordPress MU
   • also called WordPress Multi-user, it’s what WordPress.com, edublogs.org, blogsome.com run
   • is a very limited multi-blog platform (more than one person has a blog on it)
   • it’s much easier to sign up for an account, but you have fewer options for customization
3. WordPress.com VIP
   • WordPress blogs hosted on WordPress.com for higher than average hosting fees
   • (Confused yet?)
   • they have the similar customization options to self-hosted WordPress (I think — I’ve never had one )

Creating a plugin for WordPress is usually done with PHP code that gets installed with the blog software. Adding a widget is a matter of inserting some Javascript or an embedded Flash object. I’m one of the very few people who create plugins and widgets that work with WordPress Multi-user blogs and self-hosted WordPress blogs. Creating plugins and widgets that work with WordPress Multi-user sites like WordPress.com is a Hack with a capital H and smart people don’t do it.

This post won’t explain how to do things step by step. My intention is to make people aware of some of the black magic voodoo that is at your disposal if you want to write a custom plugin or widget for WordPress.com. The intended audience is people who already have programming skills, because things can get hairy.

Understanding the Constraints

Creating a plugin or widget for WordPress.com is much different than creating a plugin for self-hosted WordPress because of all of the things that are restricted on WordPress Multi-user blogs.

• Can’t modify blog theme
• Can’t modify PHP code
• Can’t add Javascript code
• Can’t embed other pages using the IFrame tag
• Can’t embed Flash
• Can’t embed CSS styles (need to buy the CSS upgrade)

You’re beginning to see why there aren’t more people writing plugins or widgets for WordPress.com. Any sane person would look at that list of restrictions and realize that all the easy and clean ways of customization are removed. I’m too stubborn to take the easy way out, or else this blog post wouldn’t exist.

Voodoo Trick #1: The RSS Widget and Yahoo Pipes

The only way to put dynamic information into a sidebar widget is using RSS. Building your own application to create an RSS feed can be complicated (plus you’d need your own server — so why are you using WordPress.com?) Thankfully, Yahoo provides a service called Yahoo Pipes that let you merge, mash, filter, and combine other RSS feeds into a new feed. It even has the ability to use XML / JSON responses as inputs so you can use APIs from other sites. The interface is GUI based and it has support for regular expressions.

Here are a few pipes I’ve created that might be of general interest:

• Create a Digest Post
  
• Switch title and description in any RSS feed
• Remove older results from a feed
• Get a list of post titles and links (no description) from a Google Reader shared items feed
• Get your Technorati Rank as an RSS feed with a link to Add to Favorites
  • You will need your Technorati API key
• Filtered Technorati Recent Mentions - shows the blog urls of the recent links to your blog

Here is a complete list of all of my pipes.

This trick can also be used to build a blog maintenance start page on RSS homepage sites like Netvibes.

Voodoo Trick #2: Creating Custom Images

This one only works if you have a webpage where you can host the image files. The image file will dynamically change independently of your WordPress.com blog.

I haven’t tried this myself, but this is how MyBlogLog supports WordPress.com.

Voodoo Trick #3: Firefox and Greasemonkey

Firefox is your best friend if you want to customize web pages on the fly. Greasemonkey is an extension that lets you include any one of thousands of custom scripts people have created for interacting with websites. I’ve written a great guide on how to install a Firefox extension and another guide on why you would want to use Greasemonkey and how to install it. I really recommend reading the Greasemonkey guide — I am quite proud of it.

This is one of the most userfriendly ways to create plugins for WordPress.com because they run in the Firefox web browser. It’s also trivial to create a script that will work with WordPress.com *and* self-hosted WordPress. Knowledge of Javascript, CSS, XPath and Firebug are essential for creating Greasemonkey scripts.

(they are plugins for the user’s web browser, not for the blog server software)

Examples of WordPress.com “plugins” using Greasemonkey:

• Akismet Auntie Spam
• WordPress Comment Ninja
• WordPress Category Resizer
• WordPress.com Stats for Pages
• Random WordPress.com Blogs

A complete list of all of my Greasemonkey scripts

Voodoo Trick #4: XML-RPC

WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress both have an interface for creating blog posts called XML-RPC. As a matter of fact, XML-RPC even works with other blog platforms like MoveableType. Blog editing programs like Windows Live Writer use XML-RPC to interact with your blog.

I have used XML-RPC to do things like turn off comments on all posts older than two months. If you do write XML-RPC based programs, be sure to created a copy of your blog for development since they usually involve editing posts.

• More information on XML-RPC on Wikipedia
• XML-RPC docs for MovableType (best API docs I could find)
• Using Perl to post to a WordPress blog via XML-RPC
• XPL-RPC API for Blogger

Voodoo Trick #5: Webscraping

Now that you know that you can use RSS feeds as a widget, and you can automatically post to your blog using the XML-RPC interface, I hope you begin to see the possibilities. The next technique in your bag of tricks is webscraping. The idea is that you can write a script that retrieves a web page, pulls information out of it, and then puts that information up on your blog using XML-RPC or RSS.

I like to use Perl with WWW::Mechanize for web scraping. I’ve written a few programs using it for interacting with web sites:

• Tag Cloud Generator - build tag clouds or heat maps (this was before there was a tag cloud sidebar widget)
• Technorati Favorite Your Fans - Add everyone who has favorited you on Technorati to your list of favorites

Instead of being a program that runs on the server, these are programs people run on their computers.

Summary

Writing plugins and widgets for WordPress.com can be more trouble than it is worth because you have both hands tied behind your back, you are blindfolded and there’s someone standing in front of your getting ready to trip you. But there are ways to do it with Greasemonkey, RSS and XML-RPC. What I hope you take from this post is that it is possible. Then maybe there will be another crazy sucker out there doing it.

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By John Pozadzides (Apollo XVIII Astronaut.)

So, in the past 2 weeks I’ve had 3 articles hit the front page of Digg. Let me just tell you, the onslaught of traffic can bring a server to it’s knees. Over the last many months I’ve learned a thing or two about tweaking WordPress, and while this is not meant to be an exhaustive tutorial on how to survive a Digg, it will give you some tips that can definitely improve your blog’s performance for all of your visitors.

By the way, this mostly applys to stand alone WordPress installations, because the boys over at WordPress.com keep those sites buzzing on 300 dedicated, load-balanced servers. Barry Abrahamson and Matt Mullenweg gave a lecture all about it here.

There are three main things which will slow down your site for visitors:

• Executing PHP commands
• Pulling information from the database
• Downloading graphics, javascript and other embedded elements

Remove Unnecessary PHP Executions and DB Access

Those wonderful themes that we all choose are often loaded with PHP bloat. Some theme’s such as my own Rapid Access were designed specifically for speed. But others are designed mainly for looks (I’m not going to name any names). But all of them have some very generic code in them to allow them to be easily installed on any blog.

This generic PHP code can be replaced with some static HTML in order to save CPU processing time and database queries, and under load this can make a big performance difference.

The way to fix this is quite simple. If you examine your theme’s Header.php file in your Presentation > Theme Editor tab in the control panel you will find some lines that look somewhat like the following: