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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.

Ad Copy:

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

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

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:

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The 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 [...]

vbDrupal is a fork from the Drupal CMS which integrates Drupal with the vBulletin forum software. All third party modules and themes for Drupal…

ZdMultilang

ZdMultilang 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 Comment

Gravatar recent comments is a plugin allowing you to display recent comments using Gravatar instead of just the name of the user.

Ovulation Predictor

This plugin displays functional ovulation and due date predictor. It can be used from women to check their future fertile time and due date.

Better Howdy

Remove ‘Howdy’ and restructure the ‘Howdy’ line.

WP Super Cache

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

Post Revision Display

Display the list of revisions for a post, without having to go through the admin interface

nkthemeswitch

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

Wp2BB integrates your WordPress blog and your phpBB forum. It automatically creates new topics in the forum for every new post in your blog.

Comment Toolbar

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

Zina is a graphical interface to your MP3 collection, a personal jukebox, an MP3 streamer.

WP 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

• Want to test super speed caching?
• WP Super Cache 0.6
• WP Super Cache 0.6.7

(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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I have been selling forum skins since 2002 and this is the “first” and only skin increase. I tried to be as fair as possible and only raised the price $5.00

* Reasons for small skin price increase (from $29.99 to $34.95):*

1. Operating Costs. As we all know the price of everything has…

Child themes are a trend which appears to be gaining traction everywhere you look. Theme authors such as Ian Stewart, Justin Tadlock and Darren Hoyt are just a few of the influential people pushing this concept. In order to try and grasp an understanding of child themes, I interviewed Ian Stewart of Themeshaper.com. His responses were so long, this interview will end up being published in two parts. Here is part 1.

1. First off, could you please explain what Child themes are in the simplest way possible?

A Child Theme is a WordPress theme that installs and activates just like any other WordPress theme—with 2 crucial differences. Firstly, it requires no PHP template files of it’s own to work. That’s because it uses the template files of a defined Parent Theme. The Parent Theme must be installed—but not activated—in your blog’s themes directory for the Child Theme to work.

Secondly, as of WordPress 2.7, template files located in your Child Theme folder will be used instead of the template file in your Parent Theme folder. Don’t like how the header is coded up for a particular theme you want to edit? Copy the header.php file from your Parent theme into your Child Theme folder and make the change there. WordPress, as of 2.7, will look for header.php (or any possible template file) in the Child Theme first and use the Child Theme template file instead. This new feature in WordPress 2.7 makes custom theming really exciting and even easier.

It’s really very simple to make your own Child Theme. So simple, I can tell you and your readers how to do it right here in four ridiculously easy steps. It’ll help you get your head around using a Child Theme if you follow along (with a test blog—this’ll be easy but our test theme isn’t going to be pretty).

1. Make a folder in your blog themes directory called “achildthemetest”.

2. Create a “style.css” file in that folder with the following code copy-pasted into that “style.css” file.

/*
Theme Name: A Child Theme Test
Theme URI:
Description: Trying out a Child Theme with the classic theme
Author:
Author URI:
Template: classic
Version:
*/

/*
For the sake of simplicity we're going to import
the classic stylesheet and override the styles.
You don't have to do this though. You can just
start fresh with new CSS or copy over large chunks of
the original styles and edit them here.
*/
@import url(../classic/style.css);

/*
Now, for a demonstration, let's make all the anchors red.
*/
a {
color:red;
}

3. Refresh your blog’s theme directory in the WordPress admin. You should see a theme called “A Child Theme Test”. It’s using the classic theme as a Parent Theme. If you look at the code above you should see a line that starts with “Template” it’s there that we defined that Parent Theme as “classic”, the folder name of our Parent Theme (which could be any installed theme).

4. Activate your new Child Theme and check out your blog. Are all the links in the main content area red? Congratulations. You just made a WordPress Child Theme. You can now edit your WordPress theme of choice—in this instance, the Classic theme—through CSS alone without having to modify any of the original template files. (If you’re a more advanced WordPress developer you can also include a functions.php file in your Child Theme that lets you interact with WordPress and your themes just like a plugin. But that’s another story altogether.)

2. What are some of the benefits that child themes offer versus stand alone themes?

There’s 2 main benefits for the end user when it comes to using a Child Theme versus editing a theme directly: Simplicity and Upgrade-readiness. To explain, I’ll tell you why I use a Child Theme of my own theme, Thematic, on ThemeShaper.com. That’s right, I’m not even editing my own theme directly on my own WordPress Theme blog.

Firstly, it really is just simpler. I currently have only 2 files in my Child Theme folder: style.css and functions.php. Everything else is coming from the same Thematic template files anyone can download and use. When I want to change the look of my theme, I do it in style.css. If I want to get really serious with theme changes, like, plugin-serious, I write some simple code in functions.php. I don’t think about my Parent Theme and, excepting the XHTML it eventually outputs and displays in my browser, I don’t even look at it. Except! Except when it comes time to upgrade.

When I need to upgrade Thematic, my Parent Theme, I can do so without worries. That’s because I haven’t touched the original template files. I haven’t edited the header. I haven’t edited the footer. I haven’t edited single.php. Or index.php. All my theme edits have been made in the stylesheet and functions file of my Child Theme.

Look at it this way: I have another blog I manage with a really fresh and distinctive design that I get compliments on all the time. Unfortunately, I made that design by hacking up and heavily modifying The Sandbox version 0.6. If I wanted to upgrade to a newer version of The Sandbox I’d have to recreate that design. That means I’d have to pull the theme apart, find all my changes, and reintegrate it with a newer version of the theme. If I’d made the modifications in a Child Theme upgrading would mean uploading a newer version of The Sandbox and, well, that’s it really. How long does it take to upload a theme? 10 seconds? When you’re using a Child Theme, upgrading turns from a day long affair into a 10 second chore that can be done while you’re reading weblogtoolscollection.com.

3. Based on what I’ve seen, the child theme trend is really starting to gain traction thanks in large part to you and other theme designers. How long has the ability to develop child themes been available for WordPress? If it’s been available to develop for some time now, why is it that we are only now starting to see heavy development in this area?

As far as I can tell, Child Themes have been available since version 2.1. But I first heard about Child Themes when I entered the Sandbox Designs Competition (http://sndbx.org/). Every entry there is a Child Theme that defines The Sandbox as it’s Parent Theme and modifies the theme with CSS alone. Consequently, I think a lot of the credit for popularizing Child Themes needs to go to Scott Wallick (http://www.plaintxt.org/), co-creator of The Sandbox and organizer of the Sandbox Designs Competition.

But that brings us to why I don’t think there’s been much talk about Child Themes: I think there’s sort of a lack of faith amongst theme authors and users when it comes to what you can actually do with CSS. WordPress developer and theme author Ben Eastaugh thinks that “one reason it hasn’t been more widely publicized is that [modifying Parent Themes with CSS] wasn’t, as it stood, terribly useful” (http://extralogical.net/2008/08/theme-inheritance/). I’d disagree with that in principle but that sort of sums up the feeling of theme authors that have been ignoring this feature.

And, by the way, if you don’t think Child Themes can really do anything with CSS alone make sure you check out the winning entries in The Sandbox Designs competition (http://sndbx.org/results/) or the oft-mentioned and linked to CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/).

But regardless of what you think you can do with CSS alone, now that WordPress 2.7 let’s you overwrite Parent template files from your Child Theme I expect we’ll be seeing more and more people using them.

Plus, there’s a few other WordPress developments in the works that’ll likely further popularize this method of theme modifying. Namely, the WordPress.com Themes Marketplace and allowing GPL Child Themes to be released through the WordPress Theme Directory.

4. Before we move on, could you explain what a theme framework is? Perhaps providing a few examples for the readers.

In my mind, a Theme Framework would be a theme that, at the very least, was made with clear intentions of being used to develop further themes. A starting point theme if you will. I think a good Theme Framework also shows consideration of, or planning for, what can be done with Child Themes, now and in WordPress 2.7+. And that’s because, really, you shouldn’t be touching a framework if you can help it.

Think of WordPress as a framework where the contents of the database are output in a controlled fashion by your theme. We don’t go in and tinker with the WordPress core in order to make our themes work better (well, some people do but that’s another story again). The same thing with a theme framework. We can modify the theme framework with our Child Themes and leave the framework pristine for easy, safe upgrades.

This concludes part 1 of the interview. Stay tuned for Part 2 which will be arriving shortly.

For those of you who have been downloading the nightly builds or contributing code to 2.7, you’ve noticed how quickly features are being added, small layout changes are gradually being implemented, and the application is morphing before your very eyes. For the most part, the response has been extremely positive, but even the people who love 2.7 have been wondering what it’s going to end up looking like. Though 2.7 is still a work in progress, we’ve put together a set of wireframes to illustrate how we think it will all turn out, so you can take a look under the hood of the design process, so to speak.

The PDF attached to this post outlines the navigation model, header elements, and important screens such as the dashboard, the new post screen, and list screens for posts, comments, and media.

Some things to bear in mind if you’re not used to looking at wireframes:

1. These are a guide, not a dictate. Changes may be made by developers and designers as needed for technical, aesthetic and/or usability reasons. When you have a team of superfast developers like we do, sometimes wireframes can become out of date quickly. In the two hours since these wireframes were approved, for example, already there are a few things that have moved and a menu change or two. Tweaks will continue to be made over the next week or two before freeze. This is Alpha software, not Beta, and it’s not static. That’s part of what makes it exciting, that every time it’s updated there’s something new.

2. These are all black/grey/white. That’s because we have a designer hard at work on visual styles for the new admin panel, including color palette, fonts, graphic elements, etc. When we have a new look to show off, we will. For now, the wireframes are “lookless” on purpose.

3. Not every screen is wireframed. We focused on creating wireframes for those screens that are undergoing the most change. For screens retaining largely the same functionality and layout, we have not included wireframes. In some cases, we’ll be updating screens but haven’t decided how to do it yet, so those aren’t included either.

4. Some elements apply directly to wordpress.com or wordpress.org, so don’t be alarmed if you see something that doesn’t seem to apply (like multiple dashboards).

One of the things I love best about WordPress is the vibrant community full of talented developers and designers who care about the application and want it to be the best it can be. Despite the overwhelmingly positive response we’ve gotten when showing 2.7 at WordCamps and from the majority of the community, there will always be people who would prefer it to be structured another way, which is why we love plugins! The decisions that went into 2.7 were based on a combination of usability testing results from 2.5 and Crazyhorse (both including laser eye tracking, official report to be released soon, but slides from WordCamp SF available in meantime), community feedback, personal and professional opinions, and some thinking about where the next couple of versions will be going in terms of new features, so that we will have a design that scales to accommodate some the features we hope to incorporate in the future.

So, I hope you enjoy getting an inside look at how we’ve been organizing our thoughts around 2.7, and that when the community feedback starts flowing everyone remembers that we all want the same thing: the best WordPress possible.

One of these days I’ll rename all my plugins and give them nice snappy titles.

Version 0.3.1 of the Sitewide Tags Pages plugin (for WordPress MU) has just been released. If you’ve been using this plugin you should probably update because this fixes a number of bugs including the problem with the Prologue Theme (and possibly Feedwordpress but I haven’t tested that.)
This release wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Thomas Schneider!

Main changes:

• Pages are now filtered out because they don’t really fit neatly anywhere in the global posts page.
• Prologue Theme problem with wp_insert_category() is fixed.
• Set comment and ping status of global posts to closed.
• Lots of translation work, including a German translation.
• Lots of fixes related to when blogs change status, or posts are edited.

Grab it from the download page.

Related Posts

• WordPress MU Sitewide Tags
• Sitewide tags pages for WordPress MU
• WordPress MU Domain Mapping 0.1

cPanel has updated their installer for YaBB to YaBB 2.2.3.  Upgrades from previous installations through cPanel should be seamless.  You must wait for your web host to upgrade to the latest version of the addon or cPanel for the upgrade/installer for 2.2.3 to appear.

cPanel is showing their love for Perl by supporting YaBB as the recommended forum system (BBS) and creating an installer within cPanel.  Information on cPanel can be found at http://www.cpanel.net.

The YaBB installer in cPanel has been in since cPanel version 10.8.2-RELEASE 83.  This will allow webmasters to install YaBB with the click of a button within their hosting control panel.  Multiple installs can be done, and upgrades will be available for all of those installs with the click of a button too!

Thanks go to Dan over at cPanel for this masterpiece.