WordPress Meetup Archive

July 2010 Meetup Notes: Choosing a Canon of Plugins

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – July 26, 2010
Questions & Answers
Marquee?

Susan started off by asking about putting a marquee (scrolling text) on her WP site as a placeholder for forthcoming content. Though none of us had used such a plugin, we found a few in the plugin repository and tested Marquee Plus on Sallie’s test blog.

Marquee Plus input

marquee plus options

The initial result was pretty bland, but what I didn’t notice during the test was that you can include HTML tags and style your text that way—or make links.

Marquee Plus first test

Enclosing the words in <h1> tags produced the following result:

Marquee Plus test 2

How do I keep a post on the top of the home page?

To keep a post at the top of your blog’s index page (index.php) even after you have posted more recent items, check the “make post sticky” option in publish. (You can also set this in the “Quick Edit” section.) This only works on the main index page, not on the archive or category pages.

Sticky Post in edit window

sticky post in quick edit

Image gallery that links to posts?

Mari asked how to create a gallery of images that linked to posts like the one at No Recipes.

post thumbnail gallery from no recipe

It appears to be a Random Posts widget of some kind. We took a look at the Advanced Random Posts plugin, which has an option to show post thumbnails, but no obvious way to leave out the titles. It’s probably worth doing some further searching and testing. Prizes for anyone who locates the best plugin.

Do you need a development server/test installation of WP?

It’s always a good idea to have a test site of some sort, either installed locally or online, where you can experiment with plugins and themes, particularly if the plugins are older and you don’t know whether they’ll work with your version of WordPress. But you can test them on a live site, too. The worst thing that’s likely to happen is that you’ll have to go into the plugin directory by FTP and delete the plugin if it breaks your site completely.

What’s the difference between WordPress.com widgets and WordPress.org Plugins?

WordPress.com gives you a set number of available widgets to add to your sidebar, and that’s it. On the plus side, they’re all guaranteed to work, and to work together. When you install a plugin on your WordPress.org site, there are many ways it can extend the site’s function. Sometimes that will be through a widget, but not always. The plugin could do something like back up the site, create a sitemap, add elements to posts and pages, etc.

Note that there are more than 10,000 plugins in the repository right now, and they don’t all play well together. No developer can test his/her plugin against all the others, never mind all the combinations.

Do widgets always have to be in the sidebar?

It’s up to your theme designer. Some themes also have widgetized footers or headers. If you’re designing a theme, you can put a widgetized area almost anyplace. But if you’re not comfortable editing the code to insert a widgetized region, you’re stuck with what the designer has provided, and should look for a theme that already has widgets where you want them. Note that widgets don’t always translate from theme to theme, so if you change themes, your widgets might end up in the “Inactive Widgets” section.

Is there a cross-platform offline blog editor?

Yes! You can use ScribeFire, the Firefox (and now Chrome and Safari) plugin to edit posts offline. I have no idea whether it stores local copies of those posts the way Ecto or Windows Live Writer does.

Can you post the same information to more than one WP site simultaneously? We want to keep the information on two sites updated in tandem.

You can use RSS to populate your site with content from elsewhere (if they’re posts), but you may need to do some tweaking. Talk to Anca about this; she’s working on it for a client.

How do I back up my blog?

There are dozens of plugins. The old standby is WP-DB-Backup, which backs up your database and mails it to you. There’s also Automatic WordPress Backup, which backs up your themes, plugins, uploads, and database to Amazon S3. Or you can use the amazing commercial BackupBuddy plugin, which makes restoring/moving sites easy. (With most other options, you need to do a manual restore.) Check for host compatibility before installing.

Your webhost may back up your site, but make sure the backups aren’t stored on the same server as the site itself.

Is there a gallery besides NextGEN that allows user uploads? NextGEN’s public uploader doesn’t give users the option to include a caption.

Uh…good question. If you have an answer, post it to the meetup mailing list!

Rotating Banners

Someone asked at the end about rotating banners. There are themes designed with this feature built in, but also plugins for it. One recent one that’s 3.0 compatible is Banner Rotator FX.

Plugins

We didn’t approach the plugin list comprehensively, and if we’d covered everything, it might have taken us until 5 PM. I’ve distributed the list separately and uploaded it to the meetup site.

The summary is that Sallie thinks every site should have:

Other plugins tend to vary depending on what you’re using the site for.

You can find Sallie’s Plugin Bookmarks on Delicious. There are 257 of them as I type this.

Mobile Plugins/Themes

Note that there are times when you will want a custom mobile theme, because your blog header and footer and sidebar don’t display normally (if at all) in WPTouch or WordPress Mobile Pack. But these themes can make navigation of your site much easier for users of smartphones. You should give users the options to choose to use the mobile theme or not through a theme switcher link.

WPTouch switcher link

WordPress Mobile Pack Switcher Link

You’ll need to create custom icons for your different pages in WPTouch. You can generate them using the Flavor Studios iPhone Icon Generator. Note that these may be overwritten if you update the plugin!

Announcements

Graham Bird won a copy of Beginning WordPress 3 by Stephanie Leary, donated by Apress. We look forward to reading Graham’s review. There’s another copy in the WordPress Meetup Lending Library at TechLiminal. If you leave a $10 deposit and sign the book out, you can take it home for a while.

New Sponsor

The Meetup has a new sponsor, WP Questions. If you’re a WP expert, you can make a few bucks answering questions. If you’re a WordPress newbie, you can get help for just a few bucks.

Future Meetups

We’ll hold our next meetup on August 22nd. The topic is BuddyPress. If you have a topic you’d like to present on, submit an idea or send me an e-mail.

June 2010 Handout: WordPress Security Basics

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – July 12, 2010

Sources for the Presentation

Sallie’s Security Bookmarks (updated regularly)

Protecting WordPress from the Inside Out (a brilliant presentation by Syed Balkhi)

Hardening WordPress (the original Codex article)

WordPress Security Presentation by Brad Williams (from WordCamp Montreal 2009)

Top 5 WordPress Security Tips You Probably Don’t Follow (WordPress Tavern Guest Post)

Keeping Your Self-Hosted WordPress Blog Secure (by Marcelo Lewin)

How to Improve Basic Security on a Fresh WordPress Install (Weblog Tools Collection)

More Plugins for Securing Your WordPress Install (Weblog Tools Collection)

WordPress Security Monitoring and Diagnosis (Weblog Tools Collection)

Latest WordPress Hacks: It’s Your Responsibility (Mark.Watero.us)

Security Plugins

AntiVirus (An A-V program just for WordPress)

Automatic WordPress Backup (Backs your WP files and DB to Amazon S3)

Secure WordPress (Conflicts with WordPress Firewall)

ServerBuddy by PluginBuddy (Checks for security flaws and plugin compatibility)

Theme Authenticity Checker (Checks for spam links in your themes)

WordPress Database Backup (Scheduled or manual backups of your WP database)

WordPress Exploit Scanner (Checks for signs that you’ve been hacked. Results can be confusing to non-geeks)

WordPress File Monitor (E-mails you every time a file has been changed)

WordPress Firewall (Blocks suspected attacks; conflicts with Secure WordPress)

WordPress Security Scan (Scans for file permissions; lets you change WP table prefix)

June 2010 Meetup Slides: WordPress Security Basics

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – June 20, 2010
Word press security basics

May 2010 Meetup Slides: WordPress 3.0 Feature Tour

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – May 23, 2010
WordPress 3.0 Feature Tour

March Meetup Slides: Theme Development from the Coding End

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – April 30, 2010
Theme Development from the Coding End

Eventually I will finish syncing this with the audio recording, and you’ll get a real slidecast.

April 2010 Meetup Notes: WordPress Q & A

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – April 19, 2010

Anet wants to carpool from the North Bay to WordCamp on May 1st. If you’re planning to drive down from that area, contact her at anetdunne [at] gmail [dot] com.

Sepehr wants to work on Hybrid theme framework – Linda Shum has experience with this and offers to talk to him after the meetup.

Darren asks about child themes. There’s a nice updated article in the Codex (http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes), but basically a child theme is a way to customize a theme without changing the original theme files, so when the theme is updated, you don’t lose your customizations. Lori’s presentation shows us a child theme of twentyten, the new default theme for WordPress 3.0.

Linda wants to know about using jQuery in WordPress; she’s had some trouble with it. Anca does too—Bill has a link from Digging into WordPress: http://digwp.com/2009/06/including-jquery-in-wordpress-the-right-way/, and adds that you should read the comments.

We talk a bit about security and about hosting, which are related topics right now because of the so-called Pharma Hack that’s going around. Sallie has a collection of bookmarks on WordPress security at http://delicious.com/authorizer/wordpress+security. Regarding this particular hack, you should check your file permissions. There’s a plugin to help you do this called ServerBuddy by PluginBuddy.com (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/serverbuddy-by-pluginbuddy/). It will check your file and folder permissions and will also (as a bonus) tell you whether the fabulous BackupBuddy plugin will run on your site. (You have to pay for that one, but if you’re a developer who has to migrate sites a lot, you’ll find it’s worth it.)

Speaking of hosts, good choices for WordPress hosting are Bluehost, HostGator, and Liquid Web. (Anca and Lori are both Liquid Web resellers.) There’s also a new service called Page.ly that will handle your backups and updates in addition to hosting your WP site, for $14.99/month.

We will hold a future meetup on the topic of security, and if we don’t find an expert to speak on the subject, Anca and Sallie (the backup expert) and Lou Anne will do it together. Meanwhile, if you want to know more about backup plugins for WordPress, see http://www.fileslinger.com/tags/wordpress/).

Sepehr asks about plugins for making your archives more interesting. Sallie suggests the Snazzy Archives plugin, which puts all of your archives on one page.

clip_image002

Darren asks about improvements to the Custom Fields interface; Trish says she knows of a good plugin, Custom Field Template.

The winner of this month’s book drawing (for Sams Teach Yourself WordPress in 10 Minutes) was Valerie Fahs-Thatcher. We’ll be keeping an eye out for your Amazon review, Valerie, and I hope the book is helpful.

Announcements

Anca’s WordPress class at TechLiminal starts Monday, April 19th. If you want to learn more about WordPress, sign up at http://techliminal.com/learn-2-wordpress/.

The WordPress Bay Area Foothills (that’s the South Bay) Meetup, run by Lou Anne McKeefery and Ann Zerega, meets this Wednesday evening at the Milpitas Library. The speaker is Alex King from the WP Help Center. RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/Wordpress-Bay-Area-CA-Foothills/. (This month you can attend by telephone.)

The Bay Area (meaning San Francisco) WordPress Meetup, in a fit of bad planning, also scheduled its meeting for Wednesday, April 21. They’re talking about “totally awesome plugins and themes.” You can RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/wordpress-sf/.

March 2010 Meetup Q & A

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – April 16, 2010
Q: How do you use WordPress, when do you use it, and why use WP instead of something like Dreamweaver?

Answers:

  • It automatically updates and changes things, so if the client wants to add a page about something, you just add the page and all the menus update. I don’t have to go in there and change every single page so that it has the new menu item on it. It saves time amazingly.
  • It’s very robust across browsers. Doing a straight HTML/XHTML website, it will look gorgeous in Firefox, wonderful in Safari—and then you open it up in IE and you have to do another whole set of conditions just to make sure it looks good in Internet Explorer. WordPress cuts your development time.
  • You can take this very easily and hand it over to the content producers. You don’t have to make all the changes because you know the secret code: they can go and do it themselves.
  • You can manage your content and your website through a web interface, so if someone steals your laptop, they’re not taking your website.
  • The fact that you keep your design and your content and your function separate means that if you want to give your website a new look, you can do that without ever changing any of the text. You just pick a new theme, activate it, and presto!
Q: What are the limitations of WordPress compared to other programs?

A: One of the limitations is that it’s not so easy to assign different sidebars to each page. (Sallie interrupts to say “There’s a plugin for that—it’s called Display Widgets and it lets you choose exactly which page to show a widget on. It’s a lifesaver because it saves you from having to make six different sidebar.php files.”)

Q: I love the idea of sending my clients off to make their own edits, but have you had trouble teaching your clients to use WordPress? How do you train them?

Answers:

  • They can use an offline editor (e.g. Windows Live Writer or Ecto) that works just like a word processor.
  • You can do a webinar or in-person tutorial.
  • Tell them it will save them money.
Q: What’s the best strategy for managing images?

Answers:

Q: Is there a plugin that will display multiple full-screen slideshows in one post/page?

A: Try SlidePress. It’s the WordPress plugin for SlideShow Pro. The plugin is free, but SlideShow Pro costs $29-$34.

Q: What’s a widget? Is there anything specific to the sidebar?

A: A widget is a little piece of code that runs in your sidebar that you can rearrange without having to hard-code your sidebar. Some people put widgets in their footers or other parts of their themes, but they have to define those areas as sidebars.

Q: Do you know of a plugin that would put a text box in my dashboard so I could update my clients/they could update me?

A: It’s hard to hear the precise wording of the question on the recording, but one of these might do what you want:

Q: How many people are using theme frameworks or premium themes versus building their own?

A: A handful of people are using Thesis. Diana recommends Thematic.

Q: Is Thesis as good as people say? How does it differ from other themes?

A: Ann says she found it early on, likes it, and stuck with it. She’ll show you the differences in her presentation. Anca points out that there’s a very long discussion on the value of Thesis on the WordPress LinkedIn Group.

These days more and more themes have theme options panels that let you customize some aspect of the appearance, but premium themes usually have more options.

After Ann’s presentation we took a look at the back end of Thematic and a child theme Diana had created based on it. (We’ll talk a bit about what child themes are at the April meetup.)

We then held our drawing for the two books. The winners were Diane Sangster and (I think) Anet Dunne.

Let me know of any corrections!

Creating Beautiful WordPress Sites with Ann Zerega

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – April 1, 2010
Creating Beautiful WordPress Sites

Meetup Members’ WordPress Websites

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – April 1, 2010
Meetup Member Sites – March 2010

Meetup Members’ Plugin Picks (June 2009 and Feb 2010)

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – March 25, 2010

Somehow the June Meetup notes with favorite plugins never got posted. There was another request for plugin recommendations in February. Here are two lists with some plugin suggestions from the two events.

June 2009

  • Google Analyticator for inserting your Google Analytics tracking code. It knows not to count your own visits if you’re logged in as administrator. (Still compatible with 2.9.2)
  • Calendar lets you insert a calendar for appointments using a shortcode. (Compatible up to 2.8; may or may not work with 2.9)
  • Bad Behavior helps keep out the spambots (and other malicious bots). (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • Contact Form 7 lets you build contact forms easily and insert them into posts and pages with a shortcode. Includes Akismet integration and captcha to keep you from getting overloaded with spam forms. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • FormBuilder is the plugin you want when you need forms beyond what Contact Form 7 can create. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • YSlow is a plugin for Firefox, not WordPress, and it’s actually an addition to the Firebug plugin, but you’re going to want both of them if you do any site development. They’ll help you figure out why your site (or someone else’s) is running slowly, and how to fix it.
  • All in One SEO Pack is still a favorite, though our SEO expert prefers Headspace 2 (see below). (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • Google XML Sitemaps makes it easier for Google to index your site. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • Shopp is a commercial (meaning you have to pay for it) e-commerce plugin to integrate a shopping cart and payment gateways into your WordPress installation. Many people prefer it to the free WP e-Commerce, which nevertheless has lots of features. (Both compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • WP Super Cache can help speed up your site and protect it from a sudden rush of visitors. (Compatible up to 2.9.2.)
  • WP Widget Cache does the same thing for your widgets. (Compatible up to 2.8.1)
  • WP Limit Posts Automatically gives you more control over where to use excerpts and how long they should be. (Compatible up to 2.3; I’d be surprised if it worked with 2.9, but you can always try.)
  • WordPress Mobile Edition automatically creates a mobile-friendly version of your site for smartphones. Last updated in June 2009 and largely superseded by other plugins; see my post on mobile plugins.

February 2010

  • Akismet. This goes without saying, or should, and comes installed with WordPress. Just don’t forget to activate it. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • Broken Link Checker monitors your blog for broken links. (Compatible up to 3.0 alpha.)
  • Headspace2 SEO has even more features than All in One. (Officially compatible up to 2.8.1, but works with later versions.)
  • Redirection is a lifesaver when 404 errors pop up or when you have to send someone from an old blog installation to a new one. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • Search Unleashed. Everyone knows the search engine is the worst feature of WordPress. This plugin helps. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • WordPress Database Backup is the first backup plugin I ever used and a good, solid, reliable one. I actually made a donation to the developer. On the other hand, it only backs up the database.
  • pageMash lets you arrange your static pages easily by dragging and dropping them. You can even hide pages. The new menu system in WP 3.0 might make it obsolete. (Officially compatible up to 2.7.1, but I’ve been using it on 2.9.2 with no troubles.)
  • Display Widgets lets you create custom sidebars for each page without having to create multiple sidebar.php files and multiple page templates. Amazing! (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • AnyFont lets you upload fonts and use them for headers. (It converts the text to images.) Not suitable for long blocks of text, but nice for those with typographic leanings, at least until CSS 3 is widely supported. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • BackupBuddy is a new commercial plugin. It doesn’t yet work on all web hosts, but when it works, it’s amazing. Read my review here. (Compatible up to 2.9.2; requires PHP5; new builds at least once a week.)

Pete Mall, a WordPress core developer, has volunteered to speak to the Meetup about plugin development. Stay tuned for details.

Postscript 3/27/10

Two things I forgot to mention. One is the new Plugin Picks series from the WordCast Network, where Dave and Kym discuss a different plugin each Monday and Wednesday. Another is the Find Replace plugin, which sounds like a candidate for the Most Valuable list, though I haven’t tried it yet.

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