DesignWell

If you’ve been around WordPress for more than six months, most of the following plug-ins should be familiar to you. In case you haven’t heard of any them, I highly recommend all of them. I’m not a fan of widgets (too-limiting), since I create websites for a living. I’ve divided them into Anti-Spam, Category/Tag, and Additional Content. If you are not caching your blog, remember, don’t install too many plug-ins. (more…)

It’s been a hot debate over what to include in your blog’s RSS recently. I say you should include more than blog posts in your RSS feed IF (and this is a big if) you can editorialize what goes in. The following, explains how to change which tweets from Twitter get posted to your blog and into your RSS feed.

If you use Alex King’s Twitter Tools (version: 1.1b1), you will want to make the following two changes to his code. The first one will make your tweet-post URLs and title more beautiful and SEO friendly by not splitting words at the end. The second one will remove reply tweets (’@username’) from becoming posts in your blog, so that half-conversations do not get recorded. (more…)

On Saturday, February 9 at 11:30 am, I spoke at BarcampIndy 2008 on Graphic Web Design and Cascading Style Sheets. All presentations were broadcast on UStreamTV.

The premise of my presentation was to show an overview of the process between layout in Illustrator and PhotoShop to coding in HTML and CSS. I find that web design is often segmented between the coders and graphic designers. I propose that the best outcome can come from bridging that gap. I do this in my daily workplace and try to show tips and techniques for others to bridge that gap. The time slot was only a half hour, so I could not go into coding detail, but only point to tutorials via links. (more…)

I upgraded the poetry knook today from WordPress 2.1.3 to 2.3. Including backing up the database and user files, the process took about an hour. Be sure to follow the upgrade steps (in order!). I have heard that logging into administration during an upgrade can cause problems.

WordPress 2.3, which was released back in September, includes among other things: a native tag system, plug-in and platform upgrade notification, post management interface improvements, roll your own dashboard, and roll your own RSS libraries. Many of these items have been addressed by plug-ins. Tagging especially comes to mind. I love Ultimate Tag Warrior and use it on all my blogs.

But I have to say goodbye to Ultimate Tag Warrior (well, not really, I hear there’s a UTW hack compatible with WordPress 2.3), because, as in all platforms, the best third party features eventually get implemented by the parent company. I recommending reading, How to Switch from Ultimate Tag Warrior to WordPress 2.3 Tagging, if you currently use Ultimate Tag Warrior and are upgrading to 2.3. I still had errors and installed UTW Theme Compatibility Thing but it did not work for me in listed related posts. For my related posts, I installed WordPress 2.3 Related Posts Plugin, since I couldn’t get UTW’s related posts tag to work.

As for mass editing and management of tags in WP 2.3, I am liking the features of Simple Tags. I have not used their tag clouds and related posts features however.

I think it took about as long to install WP 2.3 as it did to write this post, so check your plug-ins’ compatibility and then upgrade!

CUSTOM THEME NOTES:

Sounds easy doesn’t it? Well, not exactly if you use a customized blog and do not just download an upgrade ready-to-wear theme. You will need to change out all your UTW tags to WordPress tags (at the time of posting, this wiki is incomplete). Below are specific items I had issues with when upgrading:

• Be sure to update your tags.php with the native WP tags instead of the UTW tags–although with the UTW Theme Compatibility Thing plug-in, you should be able get away with not changing these tags. There are no where near as many options with the native tags, so you may have to change the format of the tags in your blog.
• I have had problems with the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plug-in since the category database schema has changes. Update to the latest version to fix this.
• Unlike UTW’s use of the tag.php for listing posts filed under a tag. The native tagging system of WordPress 2.3 uses the archive.php (just like viewing a category). Takes a glance at the code of /wp-content/themes/default/archive.php in order to customize your “Posts Tagged with ????” pages. It took me a while to figure this out in my customized themes.
• I suggest creating a mod_rewrite entry in your .htaccess similar to “RewriteRule ^tag/(.+)$ http://www.example.com/archives/tag/$1/ [R=301,L]“, since tags will now be under the URL set for permalinks in the Options menu (e.g.- http://www.example.com/archives/tag/)
• According to the Wp 2.3 ChangeLog, there are deprecated functions you will need to update in your template. Template tag permalink_link() has been deprecated in favor of the_permalink(); permalink_single_rss() has been deprecated in favor of the_permalink_rss().
• I like to use variable font sizes (i.e.- ‘em’ instead of ‘pt’) for accessibility issues. The WordPress 2.3 tag, wp_tag_cloud, has problems with the unit, ‘em.’ Use ’smallest=1&largest=1.01&unit=em’ for the parameter to keep all the tags the same size.