Toluu

Joost de Valk’s SEO Blog

Tweaking Websites

Plugins updates for 2.7 and moreDecember 15 2008

I've upgraded four plugins last night. Let me list them here one by one and what I've fixed:

• Google Analytics for WordPress
  Tested with 2.7 and changed the explanation about the account ID.
• Sociable
  Fixed an annoying custom field bug that would sometimes make duplicate custom field entries, and made sure the code was really working, so you can now disable sociable on a per post/page basis.
• Meta Robots WordPress plugin
  Fixed the widget for the admin that allowed you to change meta robots setting on a per page basis.
  Made sure the plugin worked correctly with is_front_page() as well as is_home().
• Blog Metrics
  Fixed two division by zero warnings that would occur when people installed blog metrics on an empty blog.
• Breadcrumbs
  Fixed the plugin to work on blogs where the front page and posts page had been defined differently, as well as blogs where WordPress is installed in a subdirectory.

Support for my plugins

I've also changed the way I'm going to handle plugin bug reports and support requests. From now on, each plugin page points to its own support tag page on the WordPress support forums.

WP 2.7 fun: complete hcardsDecember 12 2008

WordPress 2.7 has an awesome new thing: it turns the comments into hCards by default. An hCard is the microformat version of a vcard, which, with microformat extensions for your browser, you can then save the data of those commenters in your address book.

For instance, with the Safari microformats plugin, this looks like this:

If you use Firefox, you should check out Operator for the same functionality.

The only issue is, that the hCards don't contain email addresses. This is obviously good, as you wouldn't want to share everyone's email addresses on your blog, but as an admin or editor, you'd love for those to be included by default right?

Well, (you've guessed it) I've written a small plugin that does just that. If you're allowed to edit the current post, and thus the comments, the email addresses will be added to the comments section, invisibly. If you use the hCard though, they're there, so you can directly save them to your address book. The record will then contain name, website, email address and photo (gravatar in most cases) for the user. Cool huh?

Download the plugin

WordPress 2.7!December 12 2008

Ok I've bitten the bullet. Yoast.com is now running on WordPress 2.7, and threaded comments has been enabled. I've also updated my plugins that weren't working on 2.7, so all should work well now. If it doesn't, please let me know in the comments!

This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites. Want to make sure you're trying just as hard or harder as your competitors to rank in the search engines? Use this website auditing tool and you'll know!

WordPress 2.7!

WordPress functions to supercharge your Theme!December 2 2008

WordPress is well known for its plugins and themes, but not enough people know and love what you can do in your themes functions.php. Chris Pearson showed his love for them back in May, and he did a great job of explaining how you can bring your own functions.php file to each and every theme you use, so I'm not going to repeat that, just go read it.

Then Matt Varone started releasing a whole array of useful functions in three consecutive posts over the last couple of months:

1. Taking Advantage of Functions.php in Wordpress Themes
2. Useful custom functions for WordPress
3. is_subpage() - Custom Conditional Function

So I thought it was about time I started doing the same and started sharing a few of the custom functions & hacks I'm using in my functions.php.

Useful hacks

I'll start with the hacks, basically all of them have to do with disabling default functionality in WordPress that annoyed me. The first free are to

Disabling the update nagNovember 26 2008

WordPress' core update nag is quite the useful thing, I'll usually know before it shows that there's an update, but a lot of people won't. If you don't know what I mean with core update nag, it's this thing:

The issue is that this thing doesn't only show to you, it shows to all users of your blog. Now there's a plugin that will disable this for you, but it will disable it for everyone, yourself included.

A better thing to do, in my humble opinion, is either edit that plugin to have the following code, or add this code to your themes functions.php:

if ( !current_user_can( 'edit_users' ) ) { add_action( 'init', create_function( '$a', "remove_action( 'init', 'wp_version_check' );" ), 2 ); add_filter( 'pre_option_update_core', create_function( '$a', "return null;" ) ); }

This will sho