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Tutorial : how to create a featured article section

I’ve been craving for a hack or plug-in that could create a featured article on my blog, a sticky kind of article that would show up on every of my pages, above the rest of all posts and stand out a little - all this without too much hassle. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a plug-in that would do the dirty work for me, so I had to improvise - after a bit of digging I ended up on Maxpower blog, reading an article wrote by deepthought.

After wrestling a little with the code, I found another article wrote by Solostream , but that wasn’t too helpful either - so I knew I had to take the matter into my own hands.

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Free Page Peel Banner Script

Since I first saw it on JonhChow’s blog I knew I must have this feature on my blog. The creator of the Peel Away Ad says the ad is non intrusive and super effective because it makes people want to peel the ad to see what’s hiding behind it.

The Peel Away Ads script was created by Richard Osterude and Harris Fellman. The script normally sells for $127 but if you buy it right now, you can have it for only $37.00 (ya I know, classic sales page).

Well, if it used to cost $127, $97 , $37 why not get it for $0 right here ?

Installation of the script is pretty simple. You need to edit to URL to reflect your site, change the banner image and destination URL, then upload to your server and it should work. There are step-by-step video tutorials for those who need extra help.

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The perfect place for Wordpress freelancers

As of the start of the past month, a new site was born, a perfect place for Wordpress lovers - both webmasters and developers. This site is called WordpressFreelance and from the looks of it, there are already several people interested in getting custom Wordpress work done.

The kind of projects you’re going to find on this site, range from one time jobs to full time. Although this is a fairly new site, I’m more than sure it will soon start to grow in popularity. Since starting this blog, and even before, I can’t even remember how many people have asked for Wordpress custom work. May it have been a banner change, or they messed the layout, or didn’t know how to change the font of a title or anything else - now there are professionals willing to do that work for you.

So, next time your looking for a WordPress programmer or designer, or if your a programmer/designer looking for a job I suggest you stop by WordPressFreelance.com

bbPress 0.9 has been released

As of today, bbPress 0.9 has been released. For those of you that didn’t knew, bbPress is a forum solution created by the Wordpress development crew, which blends in nicely with Wordpress.

Improvements and changes include:

• New installer:
  • Creates your bb-config.php file for you when possible.
  • Allows for setting up integration with WordPress at install time.
  • Supports languages other than English when language translations are available.
  • Looks pretty.
• Additional RSS feeds for views.
• A “new topics” RSS feed, available on the front-page and on each forum. This feed only returns the first post from each new topic as it is created, instead of all posts.
• More configurable <title> tag available to themes.
• More secure authentication cookies which are compatible with WordPress 2.5
• Passwords now stored using “phpass” hashing library instead of md5.

For a complete list of features, check this page : bbPress feature page

Tutorial : How to update to Wordpress 2.5 in just four steps

To get you started, I’d suggest getting all of the below plug-ins to make sure everything will run smoothly.

1) Maintenance Mode

When you’re going to upgrade your Wordpress installation, your visitors will see a 404 Error page not found. By using this plug-in, you’re making sure they’ll not see that message, but a custom one defined by you.

2) WP-DBmanager

Before even starting to upgrade your installation, remember to back-up everything you need. This is just a safety precaution you should take, for the sake of your data.

3) Wordpress Upgrade Preflight Check

It does a quick check to see if your current plug-ins could create any incompatibility issues with your upgraded installation. If you get an error message for a specific plug-in, contact the author of the plug-in directly to make sure everything is fine. If the plug-in is not that important, simply deactivate it.

4) The Instant Upgrade plugin for WordPress

Install and activate the plug-in, deactive all the rest ( remember though to keep activated the maintenance mode plug-in). Run Instant Upgrade, set-it up correctly. If you don’t know, just ask here. The upgrade should be done in a minute or two, maybe less.

There’s not much you could do from this point on, just sit back and relax. You should have a working Wordpress installation in a matter of minutes.

P.S : If you’re upgrading with this method, and your hosting uses cPanel ( most hosts do ), and you’re not sure what to put into the FTP path to WordPress box, try completing it with /www/ or /public_html/ ,that is if your blog is installed in the main directory. If not, it’s /www/yourblog/ or /public_html/yourblog/ - remember to replace yourblog with your folder name, where you installed Wordpress.

Tutorial : How to optimize your title tag

While not many people pay as much attention to this as they should, I’ve been really keen on optimizing my post, category, archives and front-page titles. Why ? It’s good for SEO, and not only. I’ve developed sites over the past 3 years, and usually most of my traffic came from Search Engines. Why ? Because I paid attention to all the details, and tried to optimize my blog as best as I could for SE.

One of the things I paid special attention, was the the title tag of my blogs. Usually, the title of your blog looks something like :

<title><?php wp_title(' '); ?> <?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' : '; } ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>

Unfortunately, this is not the best way to code your titles, in an ideal situation you’d want a more search engine friendly way to display your title. To achieve this, you’d ultimately want to use the following code bellow :

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo('name'); } elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo('name'); } elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();} elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title();} else { wp_title('',true); } ?></title>

For a more into depth optimization of your title tag, I suggest visiting this link : Ardamis, title tag optimization.

If you have any thoughts or ideas, please share them below.