Review Horizon

Today, fiddling with some settings in the WordPress dashboard, I noticed that WordPress prompted me to update to version 3.0 called Thelonius. I have to admit, I completely forgot that today, June 17th is the launch day for the new version. Anyway, after the mandatory (due to best practices, nobody requires it) database update, I pushed update, even if this is a live website. The update process literally took  seconds and everything was good to go. I performed a quick check to see if my WordPress plug-ins still perform as expected and everything seems OK. There are no visible differences on the outside, but WordPress 3.0 comes with a plethora of updates, bug fixes and improvements. For the complete list of changes, check the WordPress website.

Top new features:

• WordPress and WordPress MU have merged – you can now manage multiple websites from one install
• New default theme “Twenty Ten” – however I still prefer Atahualpa
• New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.

As a side note, I noticed when I wanted to set the thumbnail for this post that the text “Use as thumbnail” changed to “Use as featured image”

As I mentioned in the first part of this article, I created a website for my wife, The Fantastic Mom. In the first part I explained what WordPress plug-ins I used to improve the navigation when the WordPress is used as a CMS and has several thousand entries in a certain category. In the second part I will continue to describe in detail what plug-ins I used to create the look and feel of the website.

1. Categories

If you have a lot of categories, and in a CMS website you most probably will, with the default category widget in Atahualpa theme, things won’t look very good. I found this very nice widget called Collapsing Categories that uses JavaScript to collapse or expand various categories to show their content. The plug-in is highly configurable, you can set what categories are expanded by default and can use cookies to store the latest state, you can also sort the categories and the posts, group posts, etc.

Read More…

Recently, I created a website called The Fantastic Mom for my wife. She wanted the parents to have a place where to add/read reviews for various children related business reviews, food recipes for kids, interesting deals, also parents or kids related, in a word, everything. She also wanted a simple interface and to give everybody the capability to add their own posts. Since I already had some experience with WordPress (Review Horizon uses it) I decided to go ahead and see if I can do what she needed only by using WordPress and available plug-ins. In the next several articles, I’ll detail step by step how I built The Fantastic Mom, in the hope somebody will find the information useful.

1. Introduction

The Fantastic Mom is basically a combination between a blog and a CMS (Content Management System). The CMS part consists from a number of children related business info covering everything from party planners, martial arts, private and public schools and day care, entertainment parks and arcades. We filled the information manually since everything had to be accurate and we used various Chamber of Commerce organizations to gather the data for SoCal. Let’s take it step by step… Read More…

My blog is fairly new, low traffic and several days I noticed a significant increase in access time. I keep changing the installed plug-ins to tweak its appearance, I also played with accordion-style menus and, at some point, it became very slow. I started to look around for some tools to measure how fast it loads and test it against comparable blogs. The best tool I found is from Pingdom Tools.

The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars. This tool helped me to double the loading speed by pointing me towards some code that I though I removed, but apparently I didn’t do a very good job at removing all the references to it and the server spent about 4.9 precious seconds looking for it. Read More…

I just added a contact form to my blog’s Contact page and I wanted to share the experience in the interest of saving time. One of the best WordPress plug-ins I found to accomplish this task is Fast and Secure Contact Form. The plug-in is highly customizable and allows your users to communicate safely with you, without disclosing your e-mail address and without worrying about spam (CAPTCHA feature is included). Also, the plugin supports 4(or more) different customizable forms in case you need more than one.

Trick: Let’s assume you want an extra field in your contact form called Category. In that field, you want the user to be able select from an existing list of options. In this case, you need to follow these steps:

1. Set Category: as a label for the extra Field 1

Read More…

I was looking around for an easy solution to automatically back-up the database that powers my blog and I stumbled on this very useful plug-in called WP-DBManager. The plug-in allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. the current version (2.50) runs without any issues on my WordPress blog version 2.9.2. One of the features I like the most is that it can automatically back-up your database regularly at scheduled moments in time and e-mail the backup at a e-mail address of your choice. Very handy!

Usually in order for a website to look good on a small screen device, it should be either optimized for it, or the content should be fed into a dedicated  application. However, I discovered a WordPress gem plug-in called WPtouch iPhone Theme which does the work for you, and the results are nothing short of amazing.

From the author’s page:

With a single click, WPtouch transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with Ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device.

and more

More than just a plugin, WPtouch^TM is a mobile theme for your WordPress website. Modelled after Apple’s app store design specs, WPtouch loads lightning fast and shows your content beautifully, without interfering with your regular site theme.

Please check the following screen-shots of this blog on my iPhone:

It is very easy to build a blog nowadays and everybody seems to build one. However, beside the content, obviously, there is other important quality of a blog: Its appearance.

I happen to think that my blog looks reasonable, even if it slowly makes its first steps in terms of traffic and content, so I will explain in detail how I customized it, step by step.

1. I purchased a hosting plan from iPage (disk space / traffic unlimited and a new domain name included) for $42/year ($3.50/mo). The speed looks reasonable, we’ll see how it will behave if the traffic takes off.

2. I looked around for a free blog software, and iPage happened to have WordPress available for easy installing. It is not the latest version though, which at the time when this article is written is 2.9.2.  So I went ahead and update it. Be aware that the option to install the blog software is hidden somewhere on the bottom, under Additional Services/Scripting and Add-ons. It actually took me longer to find the option than to install it.

3. The default look of WordPress is rather bland, so I looked to see if I can find some nice theme to make it look better. At this point, I like Atahualpa by BytesForAll the most. Atahualpa theme has support for multiple columns and it is very easy to configure.

4. The new versions of WordPress support widgets. You can place them in various positions (although I recommend the sidebars) and they are an easy way to expand the blog appearance and functionality.

5. Plugins are a very powerful way to add new features to your blog. There is a huge number of WordPress plugins available, from slideshows to placing ads, from polls to filtering spam.

Personally, I am using the following plugins:

Akismet  - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

Easy AdSense – Easiest way to show AdSense and make money from your blog

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.

Page Links To – Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.

Shashin – A plugin for integrating Picasa photos in WordPress. This is how I displayed all the images on this blog.

WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

You can search by available plug-ins on the plug-in page. As of the last version, WordPress will install them automatically for you.

6. My other half wants to blog about food and children, so I created another blog, The Fantastic Mom for her. I used Page Links To plugin to make a page from this blog point automatically to the other blog and back. That is a very easy way to host and connect multiple blogs. If you click on “Fantastic Mom” page, it will take you to “Fantastic Mom” blog. Clicking on Gadgets page will take you back here.

7. I added a forum plug-in to my blog. The plug-in is called Simple:Press and offers a very simple integration inside WordPress, using the user names defined in the blog.