Devlounge

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Archives for May 2006

Customizing WordPress: Plugins

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In our WordPress Customization Series, you’ve learned how to handle the header, make some basic layout changes, and most recently, go from html to a wordpress theme quickly and easily. Now, we want to review some of our favorite plugins which are essential to any WordPress installation.

Spam Protection

First and foremost, comment spam has to be stopped in it’s tracks. There are two plugins that combine to do an absolute excellent job at stopping comment spam.

Akismet – An included plugin with WordPress 2.0+, Akismet uses a globally managed blacklist to automatically detect comment spam. Akismet requires an API-Key obtained from WordPress.com, and running it afterwards is effortless.

Spam Karma 2 – Spam Karma 2 is another spam killer. SK2 uses a “karma” system to decide if comments are posting to many links and repeating to many words. SK does a great job at detecting what is and isn’t spam, and you can set various levels of intensity for it’s filters.

Spell Checking

Corrector – The most recent spell checker plugin I stumbled upon is by far the best I’ve seen. Corrector uses ajax to check and correct spelling, without even leaving the post. This plugin is quick and is essential in eliminating costly grammar mistakes in posts.

Recent Comments

Get Recent Comments – Get recent comments is a comment getter that can pull the x latest amount of comments without any other unnecessary features. Get Recent Comments only takes a line of php code to display comments wherever and however you want to anywhere on your blog.

Subscribe To Comments

Filosofo Enroll Comments – There are many similar plugins, by my personal favorite is Filosofo’s Enroll Comments. Enroll comments allows someone to automatically become a “subscriber” of a post that they comment on if they check off that they’d like to receive notification of followup posts. When the user is logged in, at the end of each comment form the user is allowed to manage their subscribed comments.

Gravatars

Gravatars – Gravatars allow your users commenting to have an avatar for themselves, as assigned by gravatar.com, which serves avatars all over the place (Globably Recognized Avatar). They are very easy to implant and can be customized using a small amount of css.

Tags

Ultimate Tag Warrior – UTC is the best system for tagging posts in wordpress. Tags allow your posts to be found much easily by searching, and it also indexes them on places like Technorati. UTC is a highly adapatable plugin that gives you many options in a simple, drop in plugin.

Conclusion

These are just some of the many WordPress Plugins available today, which allow you to take wordpress to the next level quickly and easily. This is only a short list, because we wanted to focus on plugins you really need to have, not list every great plugin in every category. All these plugins can be obtained from the WP Plugins database.

Coming up next week, the release of our anticipated Prebuilt theme for wordpress, with support for some of the best plugins right out of the box. Stay tuned for more information.

Choosing A Host

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More often then not, you find yourself looking for web hosts to house your own sites, blogs, and other projects. How much thought do you put into deciding what host to go with? Maybe you should put a little more into it.

The Shelter For Your Site

Choosing a host can be a daunting task, because every other site you see, and every other advertisement in most popular design communities are all for hosting, and all with different hosting companies. Each one offers different features, and all for different prices.

To start, choosing a host is not something to be taken lightly. When you host your site on another companies servers, you expect your data to be protected. By protected we mean safe from everything – crashes, attacks, and oh yeah, the hosting company just vanishing one morning.

Tip 1: Your Needs

The first thing to consider when choosing a host is your needs. How many sites do you plan to host on this one plan? What amount of space and bandwidth will you need? You always want to give yourself a little bit more room to work with than a little less. For example, you plan on only writing a blog, so you settle for a meager 25MB. You soon find you posted images in every entry, and you’ve loaded the server up with extra things – and now you’re out of room.

First things first, create a list of what you’re looking for in terms of features. Try answering some of these questions:

  • Cpanel or Plesk? – Both offers there own pros and cons. Take a look around if you’ve never worked with either of them before, and decide what control panel you’d rather have.
  • How much storage space am I looking for? – Come up with a rough estimate on how much space your site(s) may need, and try adding 5 to 10 extra megs, just in case your estimation was short. In most cases, you can cut down that extra space for a few dollars off your monthly bill.
  • How much bandwidth will I need? – Is your site original or has the potential to become very popular? Or are you running a small site or portfolio? These factors can help determine how much bandwidth you’ll need to handle your traffic. Most of time, it’s better to start off small, and buy more bandwidth as your traffic increases, because all sites start off slow, and an excessive amount of bandwidth would in turn be wasted in the first few months of a new site.
  • What features do I need support for? – Are you going to need Mysql databases and php support? It’s important to know ahead of time what extra features and things you need in order for your site to operate. While most hosts offer mysql databases and php by default, some may not, and there may be other features you need, such as support for Ruby On Rails, which not all hosts have.

New Rollouts Coming Soon

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As you may know, Devlounge was submitted to 9Rules yesterday. I have a few layout changes to roll out, including removing the “news” headline from the homepage entirely (they will find a new home as “Internal News”.), and adding two of the latest articles & interviews to the site, in the place of where the news headlines are now. The current location of “Latest Articles and Interviews” will be replaced with our featured review (of a product or service, say, Mint), and a special feature. This will most likely be images that will change frequently to redirect to certain things.

These roll outs are currently on hold, because we have no idea when 9Rules may be checking the site, and we don’t want to run into any code trouble during that time. Once the roll outs are complete (after we find out if we’re in or out), the homepage will show much greater focus on more of our content.

Stay tuned.

Customizing WordPress: Advanced

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On a day where more of the focus is on 9Rules, we’re back to finish the layouting elements of our WordPress Customization series.

In our last few articles, we’ve covered the importance of the WordPress Header file, and beginning layout changes, which were mostly minor code edits to accomplish certain things. Now we get to the heart of WordPress – taking advantage of it’s features to use it as much more than a blog.

Here We Go Again

Most beginners accept WordPress as what it is – a simple way for them to get their own ideas and opinions out by posting blog entries. Then there are the designers or more code-knowledgeable people who take WordPress to the next step, by adding there own graphics and customizing design elements in css files. Finally, there are those who understand everything wordpress is capable of, and they take advantage of all those features.

Multiple Post Queries

One great feature of WordPress is it’s ability to run multiple post queries. So, what does that mean in English? First, you must understand that WordPress knows what it’s doing by using a function called “The Loop“. The loop is how everything is done in WordPress, and it is used over and over again (hence, the loop ;)).

The loop decides how each post will be displayed, and what parameters go into certain functions. So what exactly is multiple queries? By default, WordPress themes tend to have a standard loop on their main index, which gathers all posts from every categories, and displays a certain amount as set in the options page. Sometimes by making small changes like indicated last week, the posts can be full or excerpts. Multiple queries allow you to layout posts from different categories in different areas of the site. For example, a three column layout with posts from one specific category in each.

In our case, we use multiple queries to display posts from our “Articles” and “Interviews” categories in their own columns, spacing them out from regular site news so they are more easily recognizable.

Devlounge - Multiple Post Queries Example

Let’s take a look at our code to see how we did this:

[php]

have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>

have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>

[/php]

The first thing we did was enclose both sets of code in their own css classes, allowing the posts to appear in two columns, rather than crammed together. As you can see in line 1, we start with a opening div class tag calling for “cusleft”. The tag is closed on line 10, before an opening tag for div class “cusright” is opened for the next column of posts.

Let’s take a closer look at lines 2-9, which contain the php code for displaying posts.

[php]have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>

[/php]

The php code starts off by stating that you’re starting a new WordPress query, then goes in to ask for category name and showposts. In our case, the category name we wanted to pull articles on the left for was called “articles”. We wanted to pull only one post, so our showposts number was one. Let’s say you had a category called “reviews”, and you wanted to show the last 10 posts from that category. Your php code would look like this:

[php]have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>

[/php]

Notice that the category name has been changed to “reviews”, and the showposts number has been increased from 1 to 10. The function continues, this time saying to itself, do not repeat the post (which eliminates the post showing more than once.) The next part of code determines how the post will be displayed. Let’s say you wanted the title to link to the full post content, and you wanted to display the whole post content. The code would look like this:

[php]

[/php]

Notice how we changed “php the_excerpt to php the_content. By wrapping the code in a div, we tell it to output each post the same way. In this way, you can define style elements to be applied to each post being displayed.

9Rules: The Link Pool

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So, only a few hours into 9Rules Round 4 of submissions, and it appears the staff are going to have their hands full for a while. So, what does this mean? It means 9Rules is getting a hefty amount of links, and what better way then to allow you to showcase your own sites here.

So go ahead, this is our own little 9Rules link pool, where you can let us know what site you submitted, and get some feedback on it from other Devlounge users.

Note: Due to spam filtering, please only submit one link in the post, even if you may have submitted multiple sites.

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