My post Why I Hate WordPress 2.5, about the newly released version, touched a nerve. If I'm not mistaken, there were more people that disagreed with me than agreed, though most disagreers seemed to admit they were not power users. (Am I mistaken?). One person, whose very short comment was deleted, signed themselves "Fah Q". (Pronounce it quietly, in case you're at work.)

Obviously, some people took exception to my views, but I'd like to point out a few things: (1) The post wasn't called "Why WordPress Sucks"; (2) I'm entitled to my opinion, and I did invite others to respond; (3) I still love WordPress. In fact, here are some of the reasons why I love WordPress, and will continue to love it over any other CMS/ blog platform:

1. It's open source.
2. There is a lot of online documentation at the WordPress Codex.
3. There is community support through the WordPress forums.
4. There is additional peer support, thanks to all the bloggers who write tutorials. What other platform have you seen dozens of blogs spring up around? Maybe I haven't looked for it, but in four calendar years, I haven't stumbled across any slice of the blogosphere as dedicated to another platform.
5. WP is flexible and its use goes beyond just blogs, as per 48 Ways to Use WordPress.
6. You can implement advanced features, particularly via Custom Fields.
7. There is a plugin architecture and lots of third-party free and paid plugins. You can learn a great deal about creating your own plugins by studying what's out there. This is a fast-track method over spending months poring over documentation.
8. There are literally hundreds (thousands?) of free themes. There are also many premium professional themes (some free), that make your site look like a magazine rather than a blog.
9. There seem to be far more designers online who can build a custom WP theme for you.
10. WP has true future-dating in the timestamp. (Though possibly not in V2.5, as I had difficulty with this version.)
11. Overall, WP has an architecture that you can very easily contribute to, learn from, and even making a living from, all the while enjoying warm community support.

Sure, other platforms have many of these features/ factors, but collectively, WordPress seems to be the only one that has them all. That's why I picked WP and spent the last three years learning how to customize installations, and writing about some of my findings. (I've been posting numerous "WordPress Hacks" tips here at Performancing and will continue to do so. I'll also be releasing some research-supporting WP themes.)

So do you use WordPress (self-hosted), and if so, what made you choose WP over other blog platforms? If you have a love for something other than WP, what is it, and why do you think your choice is better than WP?

WordPress users might be wondering whether they should upgrade to the new WP 2.5 release candidate. There are lots of assessments so far, and most seem to be either neutral or negative. I used it early this week at one client's site, who immediately did an upgrade. First impression: dislike the admin panel. Then just to test, I installed WP 2.5 on one of my own sites this afternoon. I've spent the past few hours tonight, screaming with disappointment, scaring my cat. Here's why:

Specific Issues

These are some specific WP 2.5 issues that I've encountered tonight, while testing an installation.

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I'm sure there are many people out there like me who started off displaying the default number of tags on their WordPress 2.3+ blogs. After a month or so of posting, you maybe have starting realizing that tags are like cats; uncontrolled, they can just keep multiplying over time and crowding out the spaces where they live;-)

The default setting for the wp_tag_cloud function is 45 tags. But for many WordPress themes, this number is too large for the space allocated to your tag cloud. The good news is that there is an easy way to trim down the total number of tags that get shown.

Here's the code to display the 30 most popular tags on your blog, with the smallest font size at 8 and the largest font size at 22:

<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=22&number=30'); ?>

If you want to show more or less tags, just change the number 30 to whatever you want. If you want the most popular tags to look bigger, just increase the number 22 to whatever you want. If you want the least popular tags to look smaller, just change the 8 (but don't go too small or else no one will be able to read).

So all you need to do to contain tag sprawl, is to spay or neuter your wp_tag_cloud function with the "number" variable.

By default, most WordPress themes come out of the gate with really boring Category and Tag pages. Most of the time they are just bland lists of posts in temporal order.

Over at PopCrunch, thanks to the prodding of my good friend Ahmed Bilal, I've decided to spice up the category pages a bit to make them look more professional and presentable (yes, Ahmed, the new site design is coming soon;-)

So some of my friends noticed that the category pages over at PopCrunch were ranking for very popular search terms like "Britney Spears" but that the page that visitors were presented with was butt ugly and completely non-sticky. In other words, people might find the page, but there was nothing captivating about it at all to make people stay.

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WordPress 2.5 was just released, and if you read Matt Mullenweg's post, you'll see that it has lots of great new features. I'm simply summarizing here.

User Features

Here are features that a user with access to the admin panel will see:

1. Cleaner dashboard.
2. Dashboard widgets, including statistics.
3. Multiple simultaneous file uploading, with progress bars.
4. EXIF extraction for camera metadata.
5. Search that includes both posts and pages. (Previously, search was post-only.)
6. Tag management without plugins.
7. Password strength meter.
8. Edit protection, so that two or more authors cannot simultaneously edit a post or page.
9. Minimized plugin upgrading. This is host-dependent, but WP 2.5 can download and install plugin upgrades for you.
10. Non-desctructive WYSIWYG (visual) editor. The old visual editor mangles your HTML code after saving. The new one uses TinyMCE v3.0 to avoid this issue.
11. Built-in photo galleries.

Developer Features

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Thinking about publishing an e-book?

I found an e-book example which IMHO looks like an e-book project template for e-book beginners.

Caroline Middlebrook has published (and maintained!) an e-book about 'How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress' (link below). Her e-book is not only an e-book but a whole e-book project! Three arguments why I like this specific e-book:

1. What makes this e-book so outstanding in my eyes is that the e-book shows a very concrete and practical approach instead of hammering out philosophic statements.
2. The great bookmark and navigation structure which makes it absolutely easy to pick out essential single items.
3. The e-book is accompanied by a live website. You can always go there and see live how the website looks. Creating a live website for an e-book is pretty outstanding.

What I don't like: Her approach to create a static website with the blog CMS WordPress. Reading my blog entries you will know that I do not recommend to use the blog CMS WordPress for static pages. For this task I would always use Textpattern which is not only a good blog CMS but handles static pages much better (Performancing.com: Tag Textpattern, Search Textpattern).

The reason for choosing WordPress is clear though. The goal is to get as many e-book downloads as possible. Why? The monetization aspect of the free e-book is to make money from the many affiliate links. Is that goal worth to choose the IMHO wrong CMS platform? From an affiliate point of view the approach is at least understandable.

Having said that here are some details about her e-book project...

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A running testsite for Wordpress 2.5 is online. Username is admin and password is demo.

When I started blogging three years ago, or is it four? Wordpress was still in version 1. Nowadays, with 2.5 just around the corner, it's becoming an increasingly powerful and versatile CMS system.

1. Inviduals use it (of course);
2. Companies use it (for their blog AND their website); and
3. Newspapers are using it, too.

But today, I was visiting a website that offers Wordpress as a contact database manager by tweaking part of its inbuilt structure. A contact form is integrated into WordPress as a kind of contact database. It retains the functionality of entering information into posts but a contact db is installed over the top.

Very imaginative. It’s fussy to install, not for the faint of heart, but it works!

Kenneth
InvestorBlogger dot com
Showing YOU “The Road to Wealth” in 2008!

Since I'm using a self-hosted Wordpress, I'm really happy because this fine masterpiece of code fulfills my blogger-needs almost completely.

But if someone would ask me "What do you really miss?" I would answer "A really cool and easy-to-use but without any limitations Design-Tool for Wordpress!"

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Michael Gray has an excellent post about optimizing your Wordpress page titles, post titles, and page slugs.

He gives his reasons for taking these titles and this slug

Page Title: Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant
Post Title: Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant
Page Slug: jamie-lynn-spears-is-pregnant

and changing them to these titles and this slug

Page Title: Jamie Lynn Spears is Pregnant and Having a Baby
Post Title: Britney Spears 16 Year Old Sister Jamie Lynn Has a Baby Bump
Page Slug: jamie-lynn-spears-baby-pregnant

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Check out my new journal done with a lot more professional content,same quirky girl, but I clean up good, I promise! http://nectarfizz.wordpress.com/

I was just reading a fantastic interview with Matt Cutts over at Stone Temple Consulting.

Everyone even remotely interested in SEO and Google search should read that interview. It's got priceless information, most of which is what I refer to as "2nd order quality indicators". Quality indicators are on- and off-page factors that Google looks at when evaluating the value of your website.

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The BlogNetworking plugin combines two simple but necessary components of any blog network: the ability to automatically create a blogroll in the sidebar and to show the latest headlines from across the blog network.

You can see the BlogNetworking plugin live in action at the bottom of the Soccerlens.com sidebar (under 'Network Headlines').

The plugin uses a central feed of network sites to pull headlines and display them on your site. The easiest way to do this is to use the blogroll opml of any one site in your network (http://yourblog.com/wp-links-opml.php) ideally the network hub (remember to add the RSS feed link for each site in the blogroll).

There's a lot that can be done with this plugin, and I'd be interested in hearing your suggestions for improving it.

Much thanks to Damian for putting this plugin together (and Chris for the inspiration) - you can catch the installation instructions on his blog here.

Download the BlogNetworking Plugin here.

Abstract: SEO: SERP CTR optimization + three plugins for WordPress.

How-To get a nice click through rate (CTR) on search engine result pages (SERPs) and how to achieve a better listing. This article is meant for everybody who likes to optimize his website/blog for better search engine results. Additionally I will list three plugins for WordPress to achieve that goal. Senior SEO hobbyists may skip this article :-)

I will explain those SEO basics on a more general level and not specifically for one platform only.

Individual page titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords

From my previous comment about page dependent header meta description:

The whole subject with descriptions showing up in SERPs is IMPORTANT for every single URL on a site. In my experience it is one of the biggest SEO and CTR success stories if you are able to create a strong individual description and title for every single page.

The goal is to have individual meta descriptions and page titles for all pages including tag search result pages, full text search result pages and category lists. Advanced feature: Use search variables to trigger Amazon searches (Examples: Tag video, Search Hamburg).

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Despite the fact that Rupert Murdoch and News Corp seem to think that Google is dangerous, I've come to the conclusion that the evidence suggests otherwise.

In fact, despite personally getting a real butt-whipping over the last month or so, I think the evidence shows that, objectively, Google ultimately wants to fight trash and reward art.

So, my new operating principle going forward is to clean-house by throwing away the trash. And instead, focus on building art. In the short term, I'm taking a major financial hit. But if I'm right about Google's long term plans, then my decision should be a massively successful investment over the next 24 months.

That leads me to the content of this post. It occurred to me recently that a WordPress blog is not well-suited out of the box for giving the search user, via Google SERPS, a clear, lasting, authoritative description of your site.

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