WordPress

In what I consider to be one of the coolest uses for the WordPress.org API yet, W-Shadow has published his findings regarding the WordPress plugin repository. The data includes a list of the top 10 WordPress plugin developers as ranked by the number of downloads a particular plugin has. It was no surprise to me that Lester ‘Gamerz’ Chan who has created a wide assortment of plugins for WordPress was near the top of the list at number three. Also no surprise was Michael Torbert who took over the development of the All In One SEO plugin to round off the number one spot. On top of those findings, here are a few more tidbits:

• Most plugins by a single author : Viper007Bond has 25 plugins hosted on wordpress.org.

• Highest version number : cforms II version 9.4 by Oliver Seidel. This plugin also has the highest number of user ratings – 419 votes.

• Longest plugin name : Sliding Post – Slides latest posts with Carousel effect (55 characters) by dasinfomedia

• Shortest plugin name : mu by Mark Bockenstedt. That’s not WordPress MU – “mu” is an obscure microblog updater plugin.

Please be sure to check out W-Shadows post and while you’re there, take a look at his compiled top 1000 plugin authors table to see where your favorite plugin developer shows up in the list.

I’m sad to report that my Related Posts plugin for WordPress which was created by W-A-S-A-B-I no longer fits the bill with WordPress 2.7. This means I had to replace an old favorite with a new plugin that provided related posts. Upon browsing through the plugin repository, I came across one that I’ve heard about throughout the community called YARPP or, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I found YARPP easy to configure and was happy to know that it comes bundled with a widget that I can place in my sidebar. YARPP has two critical elements. The first being that it limits the amount of related posts to display and the second, displays posts based on a relatedness score that is configurable. The relatedness score is what is called a match threshold. With various options, you can configure how tight or how loose that threshold score is by editing titles, bodies, tags, and categories.

Last but not least, you can also configure the output of the plugin by adding bits of html to the before and after sections of the related posts. As a bonus, YARPP also has a new option to display related posts in the RSS feed. If you’re not using a FeedBurner FeedFlare to provide this functionality, this plugin makes a nice substitute.

All in all, I think I can qualify this plugin as my new recommendation to others who are looking for a way to display related posts on their WordPress blog. How about you? Which related posts technique or plugin are you using?

Jean-Baptiste Jung has written a great little article for Smashing Magazine highlighting eight useful WordPress SQL Hacks. The article describes each hack, the code, and an explanation of what the code does. The most useful bit of information for me is the batch deletion of post revisions. Although post revisions are a nice thing to have, I’ve noticed I barely use them, if at all, and typically, writing a blog post in the editor can create upwards of 8 revisions. After mass deleting the revisions from my database, I noticed a sizable decrease in my overall database size.

Be wary of performing any of these hacks on a live website and please, back up all of your data before trying anything.

With the public release of WordPress 2.7, end users now have the ability to enable threaded conversations to take place on their blog. However, your theme must support this ability before you can turn them on. Within this article, I’ll highlight a few examples that can give you inspiration if you decide to style the way threaded comments appear on your site. Also, I’ll provide a few links as resources for more help on configuring threaded comments.

First up, Revolution 2. The following is a screenshot of the Revolution 2 Church Theme. This type of threaded comment design and layout has been applied to all of Brian’s themes.

One of the coolest implementations of threaded comments in WordPress 2.7 I have seen is on CDHarrison.com. By the way, he also has written a great post detailing the CSS classes that need to be added to a theme in order to style the way in which comments are displayed. Usually the Reply link is just that, a link. In this example, it’s more like a button.

Tarski is a free theme that now has support for threaded comments. This design is minimal in nature and also has a styled reply link.

Just Tadlock has announced that all of his themes now support comment threading with the exception of the Bliss theme. The following screenshot is how threaded comments look within the Hybrid Theme.

Maybe you’re looking for that white and gray look? Evening Sun by Spectacu.la should fit the bill.

Aeros 1.0.5 created by TheBuckMaker. A pretty extensible theme which now has threaded comment support.

The following screenshot is taken from the eVid theme which is part of the elegantthemes theme club. You can’t get it for free but you can be inspired by it.

Resources:

WordPress 2.7 Comment Enhancements
WordPress 2.7 Comment Style Starter 1
WordPress 2.7 Comment Style Starter 2
WordPress 2.7 Theme Enhancements Part 3 – Threaded Comments Edition
Make Threaded Comments Compatible With Versions Of WordPress Earlier Than 2.7

Conclusion:

While I had a really difficult time styling threaded comments on my own blog, the images shown within this post clearly demonstrate that it’s possible to control the look and feel of the way in which threaded comments are displayed. With more documentation being released and more people sharing their tips and strategies, I think I may go back in and give it another shot.

Will you be using threaded comments on your WordPress 2.7 installation? Know of any other great resources or design inspiration for threaded comments? Share them in the comments.

WordPress 2.7 which is due for release any day now introduces the ability to have threaded conversations or, threaded comments. However, not every theme available for WordPress is going to have support for this new feature built in meaning you might have to add in the necessary changes yourself. No worries though as Sarah from BloggingTips.com has crafted an excellent post that walks you through from beginning to end on how to add this support to your theme.

Note that you do not HAVE to add this support to your theme. This feature/tutorial is only for those looking to use the threaded comment feature in WordPress 2.7 but who are using a theme which doesn’t support the new functionality.

Ever find yourself in a situation where you need to publish a test blog post to see if something works or not but you’re afraid to thanks to the post being seen by your RSS subscribers? I have, but that is no longer an issue thanks to a WordPress plugin called Simply Exclude.

Simply Exclude enables you to configure whether or not to include/exclude categories, tags, pages, and authors from the WordPress RSS feed. In fact, this plugin provides an entire level of inclusions and exclusions which also means that using the plugin is a bit complex.

After the plugin is installed and activated, browse to the plugin settings page. At the top, you should see four distinct tabs. Manage Categories, Tags, Authors, and Pages.

The top four settings are WP Actions made up of Front, Archive, Search and Feed. For example, if you don’t want a certain category of posts to show up on the front page of your blog, you would select EXCLUDE from the top for the FRONT action name and then from the list of categories below that, you would find your category of choice and check mark the box for FRONT.

The plugins home page has a better explanation on how to configure this plugin but one things for sure, it provides a wealth of configurations for including or excluding specific content from displaying on multiple areas of your blog.

I love it when people send in questions to me and for this edition, Brian asks:

If I change from the date-based to just /%postname%/, will my old permalinks convert over to just postname?

The short answer is no. What ends up happening is that, all of the permalinks on your blog will be changed to represent the new configuration. This will cause all links that were created before the change to be broken. Also, any links that have been indexed in Google with the old permalink structure will be invalid and will need to be re indexed. If you really feel convinced to change your permalink structure, I recommend using the Permalinks Migration plugin. This plugin will generate a “301 Redirect” when users or spiders visit your site through old permalinks, and redirect them to the new permalinks of the same post. After that, I recommend using the Broken Link checker plugin to discover links on your site that are producing 404 errors.

If you are just starting out, take a good hard look at how you will be using your blog in the future. This will help you to determine which linking structure works for you. As far as am I concerned, setting up permalinks in WordPress to %postname% is all you need and this helps to keep the link short and sweet. I’ve been told that in order for links to be added into the Google News engine, a link needs to have at least 3-5 numbers within it. I don’t know if that is true or not but I’d rather just stick to postnames.

For more information regarding the configuration of permalinks, please read this post which goes into detail regarding the different ways in which to configure pretty permalinks in WordPress.