The Staff Lounge

Matt: Chic & Geek Interview

Matt — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:40:04 +0000

On the new Chic & Geek website (no relation to Chic Meets Geek events) I was invited to do a “Questionnaire de Proust” style interview which has just been published in French. Lots of little tidbits that I’ve never talked about before. (Translation here.)

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Donncha: Tweet Tweet dives into the past

Donncha — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:25:07 +0000

I overhauled my Tweet Tweet plugin for WordPress yesterday so it would work with the new Twitter OAuth mechanism. This morning I made it possible to download your older tweets, up to the max limit of 3,200 tweets that Twitter allows.

It’s still a work in progress but I want to get a new release out as soon as I can for current users who are using the basic auth that doesn’t work any more. If you’re feeling adventurous give the development version on the download page a go and tell me what you think!

99% of the OAuth code was ripped from Alex King’s Twitter Tools which in turn uses Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth.php library and OAuth.php from oauth.net. Thank you all for doing the heavy lifting required!

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Weblog Tools Collection: Lorelle’s Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins

James Huff — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:00:40 +0000

Lorelle VanFossen has published a recap of her Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins session given on August 29th at OpenCamp in Addison, TX.

To Lorelle, “a mind blowing WordPress Plugin is one that breaks the rules. It is unique and original in its implementation, and pushes WordPress. It might not be a Plugin that everyone must have on their site. It might not be a Plugin that even interests you. What these will do is to get you to look at the incredible diversity of Plugins available.”

Her recap not only briefly covers the topics discussed during her session, but she also lists all of the plugins that were featured, and that list is well worth exploring. Even if you think your blog couldn’t possibly use any more plugins, you might find something that you (or rather your blog) just can’t live without.

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Mark Jaquith: Upcoming WordPress Events

Mark Jaquith — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 06:39:57 +0000

On September 8th, I’ll be at the Tampa Bay WordPress meetup to talk about WordPress custom post types. If you’re a WordPress developer or themer in the area, you should stop by! The meetup is at 7pm at CDB’s Southside in South Tampa.

WordCamp Portland is on September 18th and 19th at Webtrends. My talk is called “Swan Dive! …into the Best WordPress of your Life,” and it’s all about using WordPress to its fullest. Everything from hosting to scaling and everything from upgrades to insider ninja moves will be covered.

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Publisher Blog: WordPress Top Demanded Skill on Elance

Lloyd Budd — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:18:17 +0000

Since last year when we wrote about “WordPress in Demand on Elance“, WordPress has surged into the top ten, and now is the sixth most in demand skill on Elance!

Online publishing dominates this list. It’s exciting that the ever evolving WordPress, built on it’s PHP, MySQL, and CSS stack, continues to be the web development platform in demand.

Elance’s 2010 Q2 Online Employment Report also includes a single profile, that of Ron Z Zvagelsky, highlighting his success as a WordPress Expert on Elance. Represent!

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Matt: Upcoming WordCamps

Matt — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:44:44 +0000

I really enjoyed attending WordCamps in Houston, Savannah, and Salt Lake City the past few weeks. You can always find upcoming WordCamps here, and I’m currently planning on attending Jerusalem (this Sunday), Portland (September 18-19), and Philippines (October 2). I’m looking forward to meeting more of the WordPress community and also answering your questions in the Town Hall sessions.

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Dougal Campbell: WordPress Care Package

Dougal — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:35:46 +0000

Around the time of the Thesis GPL debates, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg made an offer to send people free t-shirts. When I talked to him at WordCamp Savannah, he said that he had gotten about 300 requests. I got my care package right after I returned from the WordCamp. In addition to the shirt, it included some Gravatar and WordPress stickers, and a nice certificate, proclaiming that I am “One of the Three Most Important People in WordPress”. Of course, so are the other 300 people who got a certificate in their care packages. Awesomesauce.

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Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 09/01

James Huff — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:00:58 +0000

New plugins

Facebook Like for Tags converts a standard Facebook Like button from a one-time sharing feature to a one-on-one relationship for ongoing updates and sharing based on tags (keywords) or categories defined by you, the blogger/author.

LBAK Google Checkout is aimed mainly at small projects that just want to sell a few things on their blog through Google Checkout and don’t want too much else apart from ease of use.

Pingdom Status lets you display your Pingdom monitoring data on your WordPress site, essentially creating a status page for whatever it is you are monitoring.

WP Tweetbox adds a highly customizable Tweetbox at the end of blog posts and pages.

Updated plugins

Relevanssi replaces the basic WordPress search with a partial-match search that sorts the results based on relevance.

WP-reCAPTCHA integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam methods with WordPress including comment, registration, and email spam protection.

WP-SimpleViewer allows you to easily create SimpleViewer galleries with WordPress.

WP-Stats-Dashboard displays your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard.

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WordPress Podcast: Listen to Liz Strauss: “Treat Your Blog Like a Business!”

joost@pressthis.com (Joost de Valk & Frederick Townes) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:59:30 +0000

Liz Strauss gave a masterclass tonight; at least, that’s how it felt to both Frederick and myself. We talked about communicating with your audience, and Liz shared some experiences about open comment nights. We discussed positioning yourself and your blog, and how important personal branding can be.

She told us about feedback loops, and how to use them to listen to your users / clients / audience. She tought us to build our network before we need it, and why and how you should be treating your blog like a business, even if it’s just a hobby. Aren’t you curious yet? Start listening then. You’ll be a wiser man or woman for it at the end of this.

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Lorelle on WP: Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:11:56 +0000

In Dallas, August 29, 2010, at OpenCamp I presented “Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins.” Here are the WordPress Plugins and more features during my presentation. Let me first define what my qualifications for a “mind blowing WordPress Plugin” were, as I had to sift through thousands of Plugins and then filter down to include the following [...]No tag for this post.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Mobile Apps for Android and BlackBerry Updated

James Huff — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:00:59 +0000

The WordPress mobile apps for Android and BlackBerry have both been updated with some shiny new features, like a new comment notification system and improved VideoPress integration.

There’s no word yet on an update to the iOS mobile app, but the team still has its eyes set on making this one a major bug-fixing release.

These recent updates would not have been possible without your feedback and beta testing skills, so keep doing whatever you can to make each release better than the last!

Do you use any of the WordPress mobile apps? I use the iOS mobile app and can honestly say that it has certainly simplified my life when it comes to moderating comments and making last-minute post corrections. How about you? Have the WordPress mobile apps added to or detracted from your WordPress blogging experience?

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Support policy for vB4 Forum Classic Product owners

IB Adrian — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:02:06 +0000

Everyone, this is a notice to inform everyone about a change to our vBulletin 4 Classic Forum product's Support.

As part of the vBulletin 4 Forum Only package, we publicly state that technical support via our ticket system is not included (outside of the initial 1 month period after purchase of the product), and to receive ticket support you need to purchase either ticket or phone support for the product. Until now this is a policy we have not enforced, in an effort to provide additional support to customers following the release of vBulletin 4.

This is a notice that we will start enforcing the policy from 00:01 PDT (GMT -7 hours), October 1st 2010 for anyone on a vBulletin 4 Forum Classic license. Until October 1st, we will continue to honor this grace period for ticket support for vBulletin 4 Forum Classic Licenses.

If you purchased ticket support, you are welcome to contact us via our support ticket system for a pro-rated extension to your support contract.

Please note: vBulletin Suite includes unlimited ticket support for the life of the product, and subsequently Suite customers will not be affected by the enactment of this policy.

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What’s To Come For vBulletin – Part II

Fabian Schonholz — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:39:56 +0000

As promised, here is a follow on to my previous post.

In this post I would like to highlight how we are proceeding with the 4.X series and what we are expecting to introduce as part of the series. Please, note that these are not ordered in terms of priorities, but provided as a target list. And of course, as denoted in my previous post, 4.1 will include the top 4 items in this list.

As previously mentioned, we are also working in a re-factoring. The first element to be re-factored is the editor. There will be a common editor across the product. This will improve usability, as users will have a common experience for posting and editing with the added bonus that it also supports WebKit. As a note, not all of our re-factoring efforts will have a visual component, however, with each release we will let you know what was re-factored.

And also as previously mentioned, we will be also working on issues. The target is that each release will have a good mix of features, enhancements and bug fixes. It is very important to us that just as we deal with the challenges; we also further the product and what the product offers.

I do want to make a special note on one of the features included in this list as it pertains to some question from the previous post: Custom Content Type Builder. Some of you asked about the “review” content type. The Custom Content Type Builder will have a few primitives from which we all can build new content types. In theory, and as it has been specified, you should be able to build a review content type with the tool.

Without further ado:

Member Profile Customization
Overhauled StyleVars
Improved and integrated upgrade Process
URL Mapping (CMS in root etc.)
Improved CMS editor
Google Auth + Twitter
Mobile Skin (m.vbulletin.com)
Updated style
UTF-8 Further Development
Revised Search
Activity Stream
Custom Content Type Builder
Photo Gallery with Photo Tagging
Sharing Tools
Mobile API
Custom Content Type Builder
Updated CMS Permissions
Improved use of Memcached and File Cache
Member Newsletter Feature (Text + HTML)
Header Menu Manager Customization (completed spec)
Unified Moderation and Notifications System
Unifying widgets and blocks
Enable Community Moderation (vote up/down content)
Additional Login Options (Google, Twitter, OpenID, Email Registration, etc)
Subscription Option: Google Checkout
Improved Asset Manager
Updated email management/ and templates to prevent blacklisting
PostgreSQL support (this will assist and be a part of refactoring our database structure)
CMS Workflow (change author, draft, approved, unpub date)
Inline Style/Theme Customization (Inline UI to edit StyleVars)
Invite Friends Features
Find Friend Features (via Address Book: Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL, etc)
User can self-delete their profile/account
Ad Management for Blogs and CMS (and more advanced Forum integration)
Groups UI/UX
Calendar UI/UX (also integrate with iCal)
Expose Developer Documentation (dev.vbulletin.com)
Official 3rd Party Developer API
Review content type
CMS Widget: Tag Cloud

As always, comments and suggestions are welcomed.

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Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 08/30

James Huff — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:00:39 +0000

Bombax is a nicely crafted theme with 5 different color schemes and configurable options such as right or left or holy grail or no sidebar, magazine style or traditional style, custom header, and custom background.

Lukoo is a simple and stylish theme based around the color green.

Modernist is a beautifully built yet transparent theme. It was designed with a focus on optimal typography in order to better showcase your content.

Twist of Ten is a simple clean CMS style theme.

Us and Them is a modern, clean, blog-style, 960 – 1200 px grid-based, smooth WordPress theme and features some cool jQuery plugins just out of the box as some neat tool-tips and accordions.

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Matt: Hiking in Alta, UT

sheri — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 02:38:25 +0000

A short hike up to Cecret Lake and along Sugarloaf peak in Little Cottonwood Canyon near Alta, UT. The Wasatch Mountains are a great place to be outdoors. Guest photographer: Sheri Bigelow.

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Intermittent Problems with Members Area Downloads

Steve Machol — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:43:24 +0000

This is to let everyone know that some customers are having problems downloading vB fromt he members area. We do have people looking into this, but because this only happens with some customers and not others, this is difficult to troubleshoot.

If you do experience this problem, please try switching to a different browser. Also make sure you do not have a firewall or download manager running, since those can sometimes interfere with downloads.

If you still have this problem after that, please fill out a support ticket with all the relevant details:

http://members.vbulletin.com/members...ontactform.php

We are sorry for an inconvenience and are working hard to understand and fix this problem.

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UseBB 1.0.10 RSS feeds security issue

Dietrich Moerman — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:17:36 +0000

Very recently, a security issue has been discovered in UseBB 1.0.10 with per forum and topic RSS feeds in combination with restricted forum access permissions.

UseBB 1.0.10 uses the "view" forum permission to enable or disable per forum and topic feeds. This way, if a forum has e.g. "view" set to guests but "read" to members, a guest gets access to the contents of the first posts through the forum feed and all the posts of a topic through its topic feed. With expected behaviour, UseBB should instead use the "read" permission setting to show or hide first posts' contents in the forum feeds and the topic feeds in their entirety.

Anyone having a restricted "read" permission set but NOT an equal or more restricted "view" one is prone to this issue and should either disable per forum/topic feeds, adjust the "view" permission to be equal to the "read" one or fix their UseBB setup.

Fixing UseBB 1.0.10 is done through uploading (overwriting) a new rss.php or applying the patch. rss.php can be found in the top directory of your UseBB setup.

* New rss.php: http://usebb.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/usebb/UseBB/rss.php?revision=1.20
* Patch file: http://usebb.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/usebb/UseBB/rss.php?r1=1.18&r2=1.20&view=patch

UseBB 1.0.11, including more changes and bug fixes to be released after testing, will have this issue fixed as well.

For questions and support, please ask at http://www.usebb.net/community/.

Apologies for any inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.

UseBB Project
http://www.usebb.net

PS: If you encounter PHP (5.3) errors concerning deprecated functions, this is a different (and harmless) issue that can be fixed easily too: http://www.usebb.net/community/topic-post9792.html#post9792.No tag for this post.

Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress and the Fatal Memory Error

James Huff — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 13:00:06 +0000

Remember the old days when your computer would crash because you were running too many applications simultaneously? Well, you might be surprised to know that WordPress can fall victim to the very same thing.

You see, your server may be packed with 4 GB of RAM, but that doesn’t mean that all 4 GB have been allocated to PHP on your account. In fact, most decent hosting providers only allocate 32 MB to PHP under each account. Now, most WordPress installations with a good amount of plugins will run fine under 32 MB, but there’s always a chance that one more plugin or one seemingly innocent admin panel task (like exporting or importing posts) may put you over the edge, and you’ll see either a blank screen or the infamous error which starts off something like “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted.”

If you see a blank screen, refer to WordPress and the White Screen of Death before continuing.

Update: Thanks to Big Dave Zatz for reminding me that if you see this error either suddenly (no specific task was done to cause the error) or frequently, try deactivating all plugins to rule-out a plugin-specific issue and try switching themes to rule-out a theme-specific issue.

If you see the infamous fatal memory error, there are three things that you can do before asking your hosting provider for assistance. Which method you use depends entirely on your server configuration. If one method doesn’t work, try the next. Keep in mind that most hosting providers closely monitor memory overrides and don’t take too kindly to frequent use.

1. If you’re using WordPress 2.9.2 or lower, try adding define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M'); to your wp-config.php file. If you’re using WordPress 3.0 or higher, WordPress automatically does this for a variety of tasks, so there’s really no reason to try it in this case.

2. If you can edit or override the system php.ini file, increase the memory limit. For example, memory_limit = 256M

3. If you cannot edit or override the system php.ini file, add php_value memory_limit 256M to your .htaccess file.

If neither of these work, it’s time to ask your hosting provider to temporarily increase PHP’s memory allocation on your account. Keep in mind that most decent hosting providers allocate 32 MB to PHP under each account, and most decent hosting providers allow users to temporarily increase the memory allocation. If your hosting provider won’t accommodate you, perhaps it’s time to find a new hosting provider.

As always, if you need further assistance, the volunteers in the WordPress Support Forums will be more than happy to help you.

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Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 08/28

James Huff — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 13:00:48 +0000

New plugins

Custom sidebars allows you to create your own widgetized areas and custom sidebars, and select what sidebars to use for each post or page.

LBAK User Tracking is a fully featured, page by page tracking plugin for your blog.

Simple SEO lets you optimize your web site or blog by changing the title and menu output for any page or post.

Term Management Tools allows you to merge terms and change the category hierarchy more easily.

UserAgent Theme Switcher lets you change the theme to be displayed according to the detected browser.

Updated plugins

The AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

BackWPup allows you to backup your WordPress blog database and files.

eShop is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with various features.

User Avatar provides a thumbnail area in Your Profile, for users to upload and crop new images in an overlay to be saved and stored to their profile.

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm mobile devices.

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Weblog Tools Collection: Should You Remove Post Dates from Your WordPress Blog?

Gilberto Perera — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:24:12 +0000

You may be wondering why anyone would want to do this. Think about it, you probably have hundreds of articles that you wrote years ago and when those same articles appear on Google search engine results, the dates appear next to the description. You might think that this is great, users searching the web should be able to see when an article originally published, but research shows that users discriminate against older content just because it is old. An article that may be valuable despite its age would be subject to a user completely ignoring it and would click on the newer article, just because it was newer.

As you can see in the image above, the search results page lists the post date for the article followed by the description.

Do not confuse the intent here, if you are running a news site or writing about topics whose value is short lived then the adequate thing to do is to continue using dates. However if your traffic from search engines is suffering from users who refuse to visit an old article (and your topics are timeless) then you might want to consider removing the post date from your articles.

So how would you go about removing dates in WordPress?

Google is smart about locating dates on posts so you have to be aware of all the dates present on your WordPress site. Based on discussions on the web it appears that Google uses the post date when listed on a page and when the post date is missing, Google uses dates in comments and even within the post itself. So removing dates will take some cunning.

In order to remove the post date from the posts on your WordPress site you will have to remove the post date from your theme’s template file. In terms of indexing the post date, it appears that Google uses the post date from the single post and not the archive, so for the sake of users and simplicity we are only going to remove the post date from the “single.php” template file.

WARNING! Before proceeding with the modification of any template files, please make sure that you back up your files.

Remove date from single posts

1. Open the single.php file located in the theme directory in WordPress (usually server//wordpress/wp-content/themes/your theme name).

2. Locate the following line of code and remove it (or comment it out) from the template;

Note: The code used by the theme developer may vary from theme to theme and location so make sure you look for the within the single.php template to be sure.

3. Save the changes and refresh your website to see the modification. If the changes don’t appear right away make sure to clear the cache if you are using a plugin like WP-Supercache.

Remove date from comments

In order to make sure that Google cannot find a date on your blog post we will also need to remove the dates associated with comments. This can be a bit frustrating for users who want to follow a comment thread so it is entirely up to you.

1. Open the comments.php file located in the theme directory in WordPress (usually server//wordpress/wp-content/themes/your theme name).

2. Locate the following line of code and remove it (or comment it out) from the template;

Note: The code used by the theme developer may vary from theme to theme and location so make sure you look for the within the comments.php template to be sure.

3. Save the changes and refresh your website to see the modification. If the changes don’t appear right away make sure to clear the cache if you are using a plugin like WP-Supercache.

When removing these PHP functions make sure that you take into account the formatting of your posts and comments to ensure that the removal of this element doesn’t interfere with your theme’s design or break the code.

After these changes are made you will need to wait a couple of hours or days in order for Google’s index to reflect those changes. The variance in time is due to your site’s crawl rate so if your site is very popular and is crawled frequently you may see the update in hours. If your site still appears in the search results with the date, make sure you visit the page and search for the date, remember even dates within the content (originally published on [date]) will be used by Google to stamp a date on the site.

Other solutions for the removal of comments and post dates

If you use a commenting system like Disqus or IntenseDebate that is based on JavaScript then there is no concern for the removal of the date from the comments template. If you are using an older version of WordPress or you feel a bit adventurous you could download the Date Exclusion SEO Plugin from the WordPress plugin directory, just keep in mind that the plugin hasn’t been updated in over 500 days and it’s officially compatible up to 2.71.

Will You Remove Dates from Your Posts?

I’ve mentioned some of the Pro’s related to removal of post and comment dates on your blog:

Users searching for content on search engines are more likely to click on your link compared to others with older dates.

Visitors arriving from search engines will not discriminate the age of the content and will instead focus on the content itself, which should increase readership, time on site, etc.

Of course, as with anything as radical as this there can be some repercussions:

If you employ this “hack” and you run a news site, visitors will arrive, but will quickly realize that the content is dated and leave the site.

Some users like to know when an article was published and may get frustrated if there is no publish date.

If you decide to stay away from Disqus or IntenseDebate to manange your comments and remove the dates from the comments, users may be confused and frustrated because they can’t follow a comment thread or identify when it a particular comment was posted. In which case they respond by leaving the site or by leaving a nice comment.

If the content on your blog is timeless and you could increase the amount of traffic coming to your blog from search engines, would you remove the post and comment dates?
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