In this highly optimized episode of WordPress Weekly, I interviewed Michael Torbert who is more commonly known as hallsofmontezuma throughout the WordPress community. He is now the developer of the most popular plugin in the plugin repository, theAll In One SEO pack. We discuss what it’s like to maintain an insanely popular plugin, how difficult it has been to work with the WordPress code, thoughts on SEO in general, and the question of the night went to David Peralty for asking if SEO could be damaged by mis configuring the plugin. You’ll have to listen to the show to get the answer. On top of that, I give my plugin pick of the week, the WordPress job of the week and much more on episode 24 of WordPress weekly.
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WordPress Weekly is brought to you buy the fine advertisers on WeblogToolsCollection.com. Without their continued support, this show would not be possible. I would also like to personally thank each and every one of you who download and listen to this show. Your continued support is greatly appreciated. If you are interested in advertising on WordPress Weekly, please contact Mark Ghosh via this contact form.
News:
WordPress 2.7 is nearing feature freeze. Once that happens, we should start to see announcements in the dashboard regarding beta releases. Based on everything I have read, 2.7 is on schedule to be released on November 10th. If something major is discovered during the beta trials, the date of release will obviously be changed.
Didn’t get the chance to mention this on the show but I wanted to pass along a happy birthday to HackWordPress.com as they have turned 1 year old.
Feedback:
I cover feedback related to last weeks episode. We encourage any feedback you may have with regards to the show. You can either email me via jeffro at jeffro2pt0.com or you can simply leave us a comment on the blog.
Plugin Of The Week:
Jeff - Exclude Pages – This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus). Pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. (An alert in the editing screen, underneath the “include” checkbox allows you to track down which ancestor page is affecting child pages in this way.) You could do this just as easily by adding exclusion arguments to the WP_LIST_PAGES function but this plugin takes those steps out of the process.
WordPress Job Of The Week:
This job was published on October 10th on the WeblogToolsCollection.com Job board. Sure Foods Living is looking for someone who can upgrade WordPress 2.1 to the current version. The individual at one point had someone to help them customize their site but that person is no longer available. Also, because of the upgrade, this person needs to change templates since the current one is not compatible with the latest version of WordPress. The potential client is asking for people who are qualified and for quotes on how much this project would cost. If you are interested in this job, please contact alison at surefoodsliving.com
Announcements:
Jane Wells who works for Automattic in the user experience/usability department will be our special one hour guest on Halloween night. That is Friday, October 31st, 2008. So if you’re interested in talking usability in WordPress, definitely mark this date on your calendar.
WPWeekly Meta:
Next Episode: Friday October 17th, 2008 8P.M. EST
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Length Of Episode: 58 Minutes
Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode24.mp3
Listen To Episode #24:
While not broadly advertised, I happened to catch Brian Gardner for about an hour to discuss his announcement regarding going open source. During the interview, we discuss topics such as the grey area of the GPL, his new business model, his new approach to themes, how similar his business model is to the WordPress.com model, the state of themes in WordPress and much more.
Listen To The Brian Gardner Interview:
Tags: plugin, release, seo, skin, template, templates, test, Wordpress, wpWeblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 10/10
106 Views Published 3 months ago in WordpressNew Plugins
Adds a Lib Dig box to WordPress posts and pages
This plugin for WordPress allows you to show Scrnshots.com captures on your sites
This plugin for Wordpress allows you to download backups of your Uploads, Themes and Plugin directories. It also allows you to download the entire wp-content directory. Not suitable for WPMU without alteration, or for large sites.
This plugin enables a simple method of displaying an Entrecard Widget on your Blog and will also display a “U Drop I follow” Image below it for members of the U Drop I Follow Moment
Updated Plugins
The avh-amazon WordPress plugin gives you the ability to add a widget which will display a random item from your Amazon wish list, baby registry and/or wedding registry.
Display related posts based on their category. (Page in German)
Displays statistics about your posts and post frequency on the WordPress Dashboard
Manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar.
Alt Link Text adds “Alternative Link Text” and “Alternative Title Attribute” fields to the Write Page and Manage Page screens.
Pods is a Wordpress plugin that adds CMS abilities to blog posts.
Drain Hole is a centralized download manager with full monitoring, statistics, versioning, SVN support, and proper SEO download URLs
Tags: google, manage, plugin, release, seo, Wordpress, wp, writeThe next installation in the bbPress 1.0 alpha series has been released. bbPress 1.0 alpha 2 introduces new features and fixes most of the issues raised by testers from the previous release.
A lot of the features were covered in a previous post. You can view the changes in bbPress between 1.0-alpha-1 and 1.0-alpha-2, as well [...]
Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 10/08
155 Views Published 3 months ago in WordpressZdMultilang is a Multilingual plugin for Wordpress allowing you to blog in more than one language. You can define multiple languages and translate posts/tags/categories using the interface that will be added to your blog’s administration panel.
Gravatar recent comments is a plugin allowing you to display recent comments using Gravatar instead of just the name of the user.
This plugin displays functional ovulation and due date predictor. It can be used from women to check their future fertile time and due date.
Remove ‘Howdy’ and restructure the ‘Howdy’ line.
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.
Display the list of revisions for a post, without having to go through the admin interface
This plugin was written do allow usage of different themes for logged in users. It is intended for theme developers who want to test their themes on live sites without breaking things for visitors.
Wp2BB integrates your WordPress blog and your phpBB forum. It automatically creates new topics in the forum for every new post in your blog.
This plug-in adds up to six buttons at the end (or the top) of every comments to automatically insert Comments Navigation, Reply and Quote functions
Zina is a graphical interface to your MP3 collection, a personal jukebox, an MP3 streamer.
Tags: comments, phpBB, plugin, release, test, Wordpress, wpWP Super Cache version 0.8.3 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.
Double Caching
This releases fixes a long standing compression bug. In older versions of the plugin, the cached page was compressed twice. Once to display to the current visitor, and once again for the cached files stored on the server. This has now been fixed and there’s a noticeable speed increase for anonymous visitors. Unfortunately as a side effect, it’s not possible to display the “super cache gz” html comment now. To verify that html pages are being served from the supercache directory you’ll have to add an error_log() somewhere and check that visits aren’t logged.
The plugin now uses fopen() instead of gzopen() which according to a comment on the gzopen() manual page is unreliable under high load.
IE7 Fixes
Apparently IE7 has problems when gzipped files are served as “x-gzip” files, under certain circumstances. This is an obscure bug but this has been fixed. If you’re upgrading, either remove wp-content/cache/.htaccess and visit the admin page and that file will be regenerated, or edit that file and change “x-gzip” to “gzip”.
A number of smaller bugs were also fixed. Check the changelog for further info.
Related Posts
Tags: plugin, release, server, test, Wordpress, wpOne of the things I’ve noticed since using WordPress is that after you install a number of plugins, it becomes clear that there is no standard for where to place the plugin configuration link. Sometimes, the configuration link for a plugin shows up in the dashboard while other times, the link appears within the Manage panel. To top things off, many of the plugins provide links to their specific settings in the Settings panel. How much time do you think you have wasted so far by always searching for a particular plugins settings page?
Over the weekend, I happened to come across a post written by Andrew Rickmann which showcased an idea to create a configure link next next to the usual Activate/Deactivate Edit links found within the Plugin Management panel.
Andrew’s point of view is that, instead of adding top level menu items to the WordPress administration panels, it would be far easier to click on a configure link that would open up a sliding panel which would present anywhere from 1-5 configurable settings. Not only does this idea make configuring plugins faster, but it makes browsing the WordPress administration panel much easier as the top level navigation system is not filled with links. On top of that, the configure link makes complete sense to be located next to the Deactivate/Edit links. In doing so, configuration options are in a predictable location.
In my opinion, here are a couple of reasons why we are not seeing something like this already being used. Number one, WordPress is open source meaning anytime you try to implement anything close to a standard, it probably won’t work. People will come up with their own solutions to the problem which is one of the beauties of Open Source but can also be a contributing problem. Secondly, this was brought up over two years ago. You can see the initial forum thread here and the post on the WP-Hackers Mailing List from Owen here. Considering we have gone two years without any move towards a solution such as the one Andrew suggested, perhaps we will always be at the mercy as to where plugin authors place their configuration links.
Plugin authors can bring up the fact that they provide directions within their readme files that indicate where to find the configuration page. While they may help in the short term, that doesn’t solve the root of the overall problem. Andrew’s idea is something that can be implemented by plugin authors right now. In terms of something like this being added to the core, according to Andrew, the process is so simple, it probably doesn’t need to be added.
Where do you stand on this issue? Would you like to see more plugin authors implement Andrew’s idea into their own plugin or is there a better alternative?
Tags: manage, options, plugin, Wordpress, wpvBSEO.com down for 1 hour earlier today
86 Views Published 3 months ago in vBSEO, vBSEO Announcements(I had intended to get this posted early last week, but pushing all of the meetings, etc. from the week prior to WordCamp Utah to last week torpedoed that pretty effectively.)
WordCamp Utah was a great event - well organized by Joseph Scott (thanks Joseph!), well attended and with some very good speakers.
I gave a presentation about WordPress plugins. This was a challenging talk because of the vastness of the topic combined with the variety of the interest and technical background of the audience. Here are the slides.
Some folks seemed upset that I didn’t give a technical demo of how to build a plugin. However, I chose to keep the talk at a high level based on the make-up of the audience.
Instead of getting into the code, I talked about techniques and approaches, and different kinds of plugins. My intent was to give people an idea of what they can do with plugins; and a little start on how to approach writing one. We may change this at WordCamp Denver and have some technical presentations.
I also announced a couple of goodies at the end of the talk. We pulled an all-nighter on Friday getting everything ready for release. My presentation might have suffered a bit as a result.
We’ve released some development tools for other WordPress developers to use. These are things we’ve had to build over the years, and thought others could make good use of.
- WordPress Install (SVN Checkout) Script - a shell script will walk you through a checkout of multiple versions of WordPress from SVN and set up the requisite config file and database structure. This makes it easy to create a series of installs for testing purposes.
- WordPress Compatibility Plugin - sets some constants and some other little things that provide backward compatibility for older versions of WordPress.
- Quality Assurance (QA) Checklists - checklists to help guide plugin and theme testing. Includes considerations such as WordPress version, theme compatibility, browser type, WordPress settings, etc.
The biggest announcement - and the one I’m most excited about - was the Carrington theme, but I’ll have a follow-up post about that as there is just too much to cover here.
Thanks again to everyone who made WordCamp Utah a success.
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Tags: comments, database, plugin, release, test, testing, Wordpress, wpplugin : members group by colour in forumhome
123 Views Published 3 months ago in vBulletin 3.7 Add-ons, vBulletin Add-onsWeblog Tools Collection: WordPress Plugin Releases for 10/06
110 Views Published 3 months ago in WordpressRaven’s antispam is a WordPress plugin, powerful and invisible fighter against comment spam.
This plugin shows you all active WP cronjobs (scheduled tasks) of your weblog in the “Site Admin” area and if you want, you can stop the cronjob(s)
FTP Plugin for WP Database Backup Plugin
This plugin adds a fourth way to save the database backup files of the WP Database Backup plugin. With the standard WP Database Backup plugin you can save the database tables of your weblog a file. This backup file can stored on the server of your weblog, send to an email account or saved (manually) to your local hard disk.
When you move WordPress to a new domain or directory, the permalinks are not updated. This plugin updates all permalinks. In addition, it also gives the user the option to update any links within posts and pages.
Allow your visitors to add articles to the sidebar or anywhere else. Complete with moderation panel and a settings page, you can sit back while you have full control about the look and articles that being posted.
Caption Disabler is a WordPress plugin that removes and disables captions feature in WordPress so that all caption shortcode is not been parsed or translated, and no and HTML entities are automatically added while editing or writing.
Add “reply” and “quote” features on each comment list.
Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have.
WP Double Opt-In List Management
This WordPress email list management plugin allows the visitors of your blog subscribe to your mailing list using a double opt-in method. The signup form (Email, Name and other fields) is placed on the WordPress blog sidebar. After a user fills in the form and clicks “Subscribe”, WP double opt-in plugin sends an email with the subscription confirmation link to the user.
Tags: database, features, manage, plugin, release, server, Wordpress, wpWeblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 10/05
75 Views Published 3 months ago in WordpressToday we are proud to release our very first freebie Crafty Cart – a free theme for your WordPress e-Commerce store. It’s a fresh flavoured retro style for selling t-shirts and handmade items, designed to be a starting point for your online shop.

Fixed width, three columns, widget ready green and yellow theme
Two column, fixed width, widget ready theme
Tags: plugin, release, Wordpress, wpSearch
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