The FeedBurner plugin has got a new name and a new owner. Steve Smith from OrderedList.com handed off the plugin to the FeedBuner crew. It wasn’t a multi-million dollar deal like you hear with internet companies these days, but FeedBurner did rename the plugin in Steve’s honor. It’s now the FeedSmith plugin.

If you’re not familular with the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin, what it does is automatically reidrects your Wordpress’ feeds to the FeedBurner version. You don’t need to update your template or give out your FeedBurner URL, just update the setting via your Wordpress admin and it’ll do the rest. Quite handy and works well.  It’s a must install on my list.

Congrats to Steve!

[tags]FeedBurner,FeedSmith[/tags]

Having recently moved a few Wordpress blogs from one host to another, I thought I’d write up a quick ho-to. It’s actually quite painless.

The first thing you need to know is that you are moving your blog, not re-installing it. Don’t attempt to re-install Wordpress as that may cause more issues.

Step 1 - Backup
It’s very important to backup your files and database. Files can be gotten via a FTP client and here are instructions on backing up your blog posts.

Step2 - Upload Files
When uploading your files to the new host, make sure to either upload the files you backed up, or upload the exact same version of Wordpress you are running on the old host. You can get your Wordpress version number at the bottom of any admin page.

Step 3 - Upload Database
Most web hosts come with a control panel area that gives the user access to phpMyAdmin for managing databases. Other hosts give instructions on how to connect to your database from a desktop application. Either way, connect to your new database. If you feel lost on this step, contact your web host for details on how to connect to your database.

Now that you are searching everything on your blog, it’d be a good idea to know what others are searhing for. If you are running Wordpress, this is easy enough to do with the Search Meter plugin.

Search Meter’s job is to capture anything put into the search box. This information is then displayed on the admin side of Wordpress. It also comes with the functionality to output it on the public side of your blog if you’d like to.

Knowing what your visitors are searching for is important as it’s a clue to how they are using the site. You may find out that everyone is searching for information on a certain topic. If it’s not something you post on often, it may be a good idea to post on it more often. Or maybe you’ve created a tutorial or plugin that isn’t easily accessible from your main navigation. If everyone’s searching for it, it’d be a good idea to modify your navigation so it was easier to find.

By default, Wordpress is setup to search every post. What they don’t tell you is that doesn’t include pages. However, with the Search Everything plugin, you can search pages, posts and more.

No only will Search Everything allow you to include pages in your Wordpress search, but also comments, drafts, attachments and custom meta fields. You get to choose what extra fields you want to include which is good as I have no idea why you’d want to include drafts or un-approved comments.

This is really handy for those that use Wordpress as their website content management system. I’ve used Wordpress not as a blogging platform, but as an easy content management source. Some sites have more pages than posts and searching proves problematic.

Even if you use Wordpress for blogging, like most do, there is probably a good chance that you’ve created some pages. Maybe an about page, content, resources or one of many options. And, all those pages deserve to be part of the internal search.

By installing the Search Everything plugin, not only will the search box look though posts, but pages also and give your visitors better results.

[tags]search-everything,search[/tags]

Post slugs are one item that is commonly overlooked when setting up and writing to a blog. Either they are forgotten about all together, or they aren’t customized for usability sake. Optimized post slugs are not just for search engines, but people too.

The first thing we will talk about is search engines. Post slugs can also be referred to as permalinks. They are basically the URL that makes up the individual post page.

By default, Wordpress atomically uses IDs and not words. Here is an example: http://example.com/?p=52. Now it’s short and simple, but gives no indication of what the page is. What we want to do is turn on custom permalinks.

To enable custom permalinks, log in to the admin area of your Wordpress blog and go to Options -> Permalinks. Then go down to Custom and insert /%post_id%/%postname%/. Granted, you can use one of many different operators to define your post slugs, but I prefer the ID followed by the post name.

The second thing you need to consider is your users. Now that your post slugs are automatically generating URLs that contain words, you should to one step further and customize them per post.

I’m tossing this question out to all visitors to see if I can get a bit of concrete information. Ultimate Tag Warrior’s compatibility with Wordpress 2.1 is still in question to me. I’ve got a few blogs that I’m waiting on upgrading as UTW is an important plugin and I’m not willing to chance it. I don’t see any documentation that all the bugs have been worked out, but then again I may have missed it.

Does anyone know if Ultimate Tag Warrior & Wordpress 2.1 work well together? Are you using them together with no issues?  Let me know.

Following up on my last post/rant on the official Wordpress Plugin directory, I thought I’d share a few places to find Wordpress plugins.

• Wp-Plugins.net - The biggest and best listing if you ask me.
• LearningWordpress.com - This one is newer and looks pretty nice so far.
  
• Wordpress.com - The official directory. Fewer plugins, but it’s growing.
• A Google or Yahoo search always works well too as there are many that are not listed in the directories above.
• Internal searches on blogging sites like ProBlogger.net or BloggingPro.com can also uncover some new and interesting plugins.

Where do you go when you want to find new or useful blog plugins?

When I first read last week that Wordpress had launched an official plugins directory I was excited. There are lots of good plugins out there that are not in any sort of searchable database other than a search engine. However, the Wordpress plugin directory isn’t living up to my excitations yet.

The directory holds less than 150 plugins out of the thousands out there. What is there seems to be organized well and has a nice star rating scale, installation information, screenshots, a FAQ and even download stats for the plugin.

I then tried to add the FB StandardStats plugin and that’s where my excitement died.

Signing up for an account and submitting the basic plugin info was easy. A couple hours later I got notification that a SVN area was setup for my plugin and the URL took me to a page with no GUI, no instructions and no clues as to what to do next. A quick email back to support and they said it was easy, just get a SVN client and they sent me here.

A client asked me today for more control in their Wordpress control panel. Specifically, when posting they wanted to control the font sizes, colors and do a bit more. As a designer I always freak at that question as I think the code is going to be filled with massive amounts of font tags and out of order strong tags and ohhh the madness. But, then again, maybe I’m overreacting.

So, I did some researching and came up with one possible idea, Xinha4WP. It’s a Wordpress plugin that replaces the default text editor with a much more advanced version. It also needs the Text Control plugin to work so you need to install that too.

Xinha4WP gives bloggers many features including all font control (sizes and colors), tables, additional smilies, special characters and few more items. The coolest thing is the maximize button that lets you make the editor the size if your browser window.

The downside is that it is a rather large plugin weighing in at 5.5mb. It is also showing up above the built in Wordpress editor widow. This is not ideal to have two editor windows especially since the default Wordpress one is ignored. This could be a conflict with the video pugin they using too. Not sure.

One of the annoyances of Wordpress is that when a new version comes out, you have to take the time to upgrade. Sure, it may be just re-uploading everything, but that still takes a few minutes per blog and I think that’s why a lot of people tend not to do it. To work around this, the InstantUpgrade plugin was created. Good idea, but is it ready for primetime yet?

The plugin explains that it can automatically update to the latest version of Wordpress for you, or you can tell it when to update the files for you. It does all the work and you get to sit back and relax.

The first red flag is how many files you need to make writable by the server. The privileges 777 mean that the files are writable by everyone. This sounds like a hackers dream to me but maybe I’m wrong.

It also concerns me that every time there is a Wordpress upgrade, some plugins must be updated too. Thus, if it upgrades when you aren’t around, and a plugin breaks, how long will it take you to find out and will your blog be down?