How to create a Simple Directory in Wordpress using Grandparent, Parent, and Child Pages

I wanted to create a simple directory of non-profit organizations. To do so,  I wanted to use pages for the directory, rather than posts so that I could separate the static directory listings from the dynamic blog posts. I didn’t want to have to exclude tons of categories from feedburner and the main loop.

So, I started exploring the whole family in Wordpress – grandparents, parents, and children. Translation for those not yet used to seeing Wordpress analagous to the family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding: Pages, sub-pages, and sub-sub pages

Simple Directory Setup

• Directory Page (grandparent): Displays list of Non-Profit Organization Categories (ex. social, environment, health, etc.)
• Category Page (parent): Show title and excerpt of each Organization within a category (ex. Environment Organizations)
• Single Organization Page (child/current): Show content about a single organization(ex. SaveTheEarth – made up org for this example)

Here’s how to do it

1. Create a Page Called Directory. This will be the Directory Page (grandparent)
2. Find the Page ID. Let’s say the Page ID = 5. Depending on how you want to display the category info, you can
3. Manually add the name of each category, a short description and a link
4. Open up page.php so we can setup The Category Page (Parent Page). We want to show title and excerpts of each organization for each category.
5. Add this code to page.php – Checks if we’re on a sub page / child page of the Directory (Page ID =10) and if so, list the pages in alphabetical order with excerpts. For the excerpt, I’m using the plugin Limit Posts since it didn’t work with The Excerpt Reloaded.<?php
   $current = $post->ID;
   $parent = $post->post_parent;
   $grandparent_get = get_post($parent);
   $grandparent = $grandparent_get->post_parent;
   ?>

   <?php if ( $post->post_parent==”10″   ){ ?>
   <?php $pageChildren = $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT *    FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_parent = “.$post->ID.”    AND post_type = ‘page’ ORDER BY post_title ASC”, ‘OBJECT’);    ?>

   <h2 class=”titles”><a href=”<? php echo get_permalink($pageChild->ID);  ?>”> <? php echo $pageChild->post_title;  ?></a></h2>

   <?php the_content_limit(280, “”); ?><div class=”readmore”><a href=”<?php echo get_permalink($pageChild->ID); ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <? php echo $pageChild->post_title;   ?>”>Read More &raquo;</a></div>

   (make sure to delete the space between <? and php -  I had to to do that so it wouldn’t execute in this post)

6. Single Organization Page (Child Page) On page.php, after the code you added in step 5, add this code that will check to see if we’re on the grandchild page. This will be the actual organization’s page. In our example, the SaveTheEarth Page. This is very helpful information in case you want to add a different style or add special items in the sidebar, etc.
   <?php if ( $pageChildren ) : foreach ( $pageChildren as $pageChild ) : setup_postdata( $pageChild ); ?>

7. Set up how the rest of the pages on your site will look:

On page.php, after the code in step 6, add this code which instructs every other page in the site to act normally and display the content

<?php endforeach; ?>
<?php else : ?>

<?php the_content(); ?>
<?php  endif; ?>

You can see the full page.php code here

You can see the directory in action here

I figured this out using the following helpful posts:

* http://wordpress.org/support/topic/186206
* http://wpguru.co.za/page/display-title-excerpt-of-child-page

10 Comments | Posted in » Code Snippets | Tags: child, directory, grandparent, Pages, parent, wordpress

Canonical URLs to help Wordpress duplicate content issue

Fancy words aside, a canonical URL is Google’s way of identifying a “preferred” URL for your posts to avoid duplicate content. Duplicate content is generally defined as “separate web pages with substantially the same content, which may attract a penalty from search engines.”

Wordpress is often criticized for having duplicate content since new posts appear on many pages including category pages, archive pages, feeds, and trackbacks.  While this helps visitors find the content they are looking for, it confuses search engines, forcing them to “choose” which URL to serve in search results.

And so… Google (Yahoo and Microsoft too)  recently came out with a new link tag to help with the duplicate content issue which can be added to the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

But honestly, who can be bothered to go into the <head> for every post. Luckily, there are 2 Wordpress plugins that are here to help:

Yoast adds rel=”canonical” links to your blogs <head> section

SEO No duplicate – This simple plugin helps you easily tell the search engine bots the preferred version of a page by specifying the canonical properly within your head tag.

For more information, read the official announcement from Google.

7 Comments | Posted in » News & Views | Tags: canonical urls, duplicate content, Google, wordpress

Wordpress Plugins Directory Search no longer “sucks”

I just received an email from Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, letting me know that the “Plugin search no longer sucks”.  I was so excited that I didn’t even notice the typo he later reported on Twitter.

According to the official Wordpress site, Wordpress Plugins directory search is no longer a big mess, and can actually help you find the plugin you’re looking for. Last week I think I did a search for “video” and got results like contact form, social bookmarking, etc. and had to resort to a Google search. But now the search brings up much better results and is a great resource.

Wordpress improved the search using Sphinx (a “free open-source SQL full-text search engine”) to power the search from the plugins directory and from your blog’s admin area (Plugins>add new)

All I can say, is, give it another chance and you may just find a great plugin from the 4,245 available.

No Comments | Posted in » News & Views | Tags: directory, Plugins, search, wordpress

WordCamp Israel 2008 part 2: my presentations on WordPress.com and Social Media

As you may have seen, Rebecca already wrote up a great review of Sunday’s 2nd WordCamp Israel event. I was privileged to present two short presentations at the event, which I have finally uploaded for all to see. Note that the images and titles of plugins or sites are all links, and you can click on them to get to the actual sites in question.

Setting up a blog with good foundations for the future on WordPress.com or Blogli

Many people prefer to start their blogging career on free sites like WordPress.com, or the Israeli version called Blogli. These sites take away the headache involved in installing the software and managing technical issues. They also allow for a soft start with little financial investment.

However, if you are serious about blogging, then you will want to see your blog grow. As it grows, you may find that it outgrows the limitations of WordPress.com, where you can’t upload plugins or completely customize the appearance of your blog. So while using WordPress.com for your blog is a great choice, you should make sure to implement a few things to ensure that if you do decide to move to a self-hosted blog in the future, it’s not too painful. The most important thing, in my opinion, is to use your own domain name from the start on WordPress.com by upgrading your account. It costs about $10 a month, and is worth it.

Automating your blogging and social media activity

A site or blog is no longer enough if you want to create a web presence that really works for you. It is important to integrate social media into your online strategy so that people can find you off your site as well. But we all know that managing a blog takes tons of time; how in the world do we find time to also manage social media profiles?

This presentation shows you plugins and online apps that will help you automate many of your social media/blogging activities to save you time, and make sure you can still have a bit of life offline too.

And finally, here are links to some other people who wrote about WordCamp Israel 2008 both before and after the event:

WordCamp Israel Has 560 Registrants

Photos and Links from Wordcamp Israel 2008

??????? ????? 2008 – ???? ????? ??? ???? ?????

WordCamp – Raanan Bar-Cohen – Tips for “virtual” company

WordCamp Israel

9 Comments | Posted in » News & Views | Tags: blogging, social media, Wordcamp Israel 2008, wordpress.com

How to rename widgetized sidebars in Wordpress

You can manage multiple sidebar widgets in WordPress. To do so, you go to the Widgets page in the Admin, and select the Sidebar you want to manage. If you have 1 widgetized sidebar, the name “Sidebar 1″ is not a big deal for managing it. But what if you have 5 or more, and they’re named Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2, etc. Ah yes, now what was that wily sidebar 3 for?

Why would someone have so many sidebars to begin with? Well, remember that you can also add widget-ready sidebars to Wordpress footers or anywhere in your design, to give extra content management options to clients.

Recently, we had a client with way too many widgetized sidebars to keep track of, so we had to find a new solution to change the standard widget sidebar names like “sidebar 1″ or “sidebar 2″ to something more meaningful like “Left sidebar” and “Right sidebar” in the admin area. I dug around the web and found 2 very helpful posts:

• How to use widgets with more than one sidebar on your WordPress blog
• How to design a variable sidebar WordPress theme with widgets (by guest blogger Daria Black)

Here’s what I learned:

1. Go into your themes’s function.php file, or if it doesn’t exist, create it.

Add the following code:

<?php

if (function_exists(’register_sidebar’))

{

register_sidebar(array(

‘before_widget’ => ‘<li>’,

‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,

‘before_title’ => ‘<h4>’,

‘after_title’ => ‘</h4>’,

‘name’ => ‘Left sidebar’

));

register_sidebar(array(

‘before_widget’ => ‘<li>’,

‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,

‘before_title’ => ‘<h4>’,

‘after_title’ => ‘</h4>’,

‘name’ => ‘Right sidebar’

));

}

?>

2a. Add a widgetized sidebar to your theme. Open up your theme’s sidebar file (for exampe, l_sidebar.php) and look for the first <ul> or <ul id=”sidebar”> or something similar, and add the following code:

<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(’Left sidebar’) ) : ?>

2b. If your sidebar is already widgetized, find the following code

<?php if ( function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : else : ?>

and replace it with

<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(’Left sidebar’) ) : ?>

Then, find the closing </ul> at the very bottom of the file, and immediately before that, place

<?php endif; ?>

3. Now, if you go into your admin panel, under Design>Widgets, you’ll see the new names like in the image below.

Now you can easily manage your Widgets without trying to guess which one is which.

1 Comment | Posted in » Code Snippets, WordPress as CMS | Tags: functions, names, sidebar, widgetized sidebar, widgets

Review of Wordcamp Israel 2008

Being that Wordcamp Israel was a bloggers conference in Tel Aviv, I’m sure there will be tons of people writing up their reviews in Hebrew. But maybe not quite as many in English, so here goes. This year’s Wordcamp was in the ZOA house in the middle of Tel Aviv, a schlep for Jerusalemites, but a great location for everybody else.

The Shmoozing

And they’re off, let the shmoozing begin. Instead of sitting in a corner, hoping someone would come talk to me, I started standing and sitting strategically next to people who looked friendly. The first guy I met was Eyal Sela, who plans to write about productivity on his brand new Wordpress blog, still in its Kubrick diapers. Throughout the rest of the day, I met Itzik Edri of Wikimedia(trying to get more people to use Wikipedia), Eyal Gura, CEO of PicApp (a legal image solution for bloggers), Eyal Beit-On, of Suntrader (online marketing consultant), and Amir Uval(new Hebrew blogger at Geek in the Kitchen). Are you keeping track? So far, that’s 3 Eyals. I also got to hang out with the founders of Nuconomy, Eran Kampf and Yossi Taguri. Toward the end, I sat with Ezra Butler, (of Twitter fame), Charlie Kalech,  Debby Benstein, Eyal Gonen, Idan Gazit(new Twitter friend), and Ido Shacham. If you’re counting, out of 13 people that I met, 4 happened to be named Eyal.

The Organizers

The conference officially started with co-organizers Tal Galili (who cut his hair) and Noa Danzig(who may or may not have cut her hair) welcoming everyone and telling us that they planned the conference in less than 2 months, and worked extra hard to include non-profits by creating an additional track of sessions.

The Sessions

I didn’t get a chance to go to every session, so I would love if people added their comments about the sessions they went to. You can see the full schedule here.

Session: Blogs built on Wordpress.com / Miriam Schwab

From what I heard, Miriam gave a great presentation on the features and limitations of Wordpress.com, and its viability only in the short term. Presentation slides will be posted here shortly.

Session: 70 unusual uses for Wordpress / Sarit Amar and Tomer Lichtish

While it was hard to decide which sessions to go to, I ventured for the “70 unusual uses for Wordpress”. But, according to my desktop scientific calculator, only 4 were mentioned:

1. Contact Manager – Using a special template, you can enter each name as the link the a post which contains someone’s contact details.  You can also find people through the tag cloud.
2. e-Commerce/store
3. Portfolio – using thumbnails as links to each piece in the portfolio.
4. Lifestreaming – updates from Twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, etc. to represent your “online” life. A way to bring the focus back to the blog.

This session was a little basic for me and could have used specific links to themes and plugins that help you create these special Wordpress sites. I’m hoping there’s a link online to the other 66 interesting uses.

Session: Blogging with Video / Ron Yekuteal, Kaltura

Kaltura is the first open source video platform, and they have a plugin for Wordpress. Ron said that Kaltura is free, flexible, and most importantly, open source. This plugin supposedly offers a lot of functionality and I’m looking forward to trying it out.

Session: Social Media Marketing / Miriam Schwab

Since I couldn’t clone myself and be at Miriam’s talk, even though I wanted to, I listened to other people’s reviews. People said Miriam encouraged quality content on your blog, your home base, and to be a part of the conversation on social media sites by contributing and helping others, since that’s where your audience is. She also listed Wordpress plugins that can boost your ’social proof’ on your website by displaying your activity around the web. Presentation slides will be posted here shortly.

Session: Statistics / Zvika Jervy of Statistics Web Control and Yosi Taguri of Nuconomy.

Zvika spoke about the basics of Google Analytics to check number of visitors, referrers, time spent on the site, and top content, Technorati to check incoming links/authority, and Feedburner to check feed count.

Yosi spoke about Nuconomy’s plugin for Wordpress which offers statistics beyond pages, such as clicks on video and Ajax. It also lets you see stats on commenters and compare lots of different data sets for a bigger picture of stats and user interaction with your site.

Session: Virtual Collaboration, Raanan Bar-Cohen, Automattic

Originally from Israel, Raanan now lives in California working for Automattic (the company who created Wordpress), and playing Adam Sandler roles on the side (Miriam pointed this out, and I have to say, I agree, they do have a striking similarity). And, to my delight, Raanan delivered his presentation in English, a welcome treat for my Hebrew overloaded brain.  Raanan was a really great speaker and offered some tips on running a virtual company, since Automattic has 30 employees scattered around the globe in every possible time zone.

1. Empower your team – everyone should have ownerships of their projects, and set their own hours.
2. Go real time – yay for searchable, storable group chats and boo to email
3. Go semi real time – use internal blogs and  Prologue (group twitter)
4. Get together – coordinate conferences and meetups for real, in-person get togethers
5. Open Source – more opportunities to get help and gain insights from others
6. Metrics -  compare many different tracking services and data points
7. Go bite size – ticket tracking, break down a project into small pieces

He also gave a sneak peek into Prologue Groups, Wordpress’s project tracker, plus Twitter-like chat, which launchesin 2 weeks at Wordcamp Australia. And finally, he gave a heads up that BuddyPress, Wordpress’s Social Networking Platform will be available in December.

Session: Panel with Knesset Member Miki Eitan with host Jonathon Klinger

Set up like a late night talk show, Jonathon Klinger played host to Likud MK Miki Eitan and 3 other guys. I apologize, but I didn’t see their names in the program or online. Please feel free to comment with their names and organizations. [Update: Other panelists were Yoav Lerman from a blog about the renewal of Tel Aviv, Zvika Bashur from CityDov blog, and Yochai Ilam from Black Labor blog.]

MK Eitan was invited to be on the panel because he started a blog built on Wordpress. When asked why he chose Wordpress, he said, “it was the  cheapest option”. Other memorable quotes (probably not exact) included “You don’t need to be a Likudnik to believe in Miki Eitan”, a subtle plug, and “As you can see by my ability to choose a low-cost solution for my blogging, I also know how to create a balanced budget for the country”. As the wise Miriam pointed out, Miki is trying to take Obama’s strategy by creating a trendy site and a new slogan that translates roughly to: “To prove that things can be different”. What Mr. Eitan didn’t cover exactly was what those changes would be and how he would implement them. Sheesh, people, who can be bothered with details?!

When asked if Mr. Eitan writes his own posts, he said yes! Can you believe it?! Haha, Just kidding. He’s a politician who doesn’t see the ROI in blogging himself and therefore asked his assistant, hiding in the corner, how much time he invests in the blog. The assistant responded by saying 1 hour a day.

I’m sorry, but a Likud MK showing up at a bloggers convention reminds me of a similar situation (((Twilight Zone music here))) when Bibi Netanyahu showed up at the JBloggers Convention.  Why does every blogger convention end with a  rally for Likud? Am I missing something here? Have we finally caught on to their sly little plan?

Session: Introduction to Wordpress Plugins / Ziv Perry

This session was very high level, and I think should have been publicized as such. Ziv showed how to create a basic Wordpress plugin, but If you don’t already have a solid grasp of PHP or the guts of Wordpress, then this session was probably way over your head.

Session: Home, sweet Jerusalem

Sorry to say, I didn’t make it to the very last sessions, but Kol Hakavod to the organizers, and to meeting and seeing lots of fellow Wordpress junkies, er.. people. My recommendation for next year’s Wordcamp would be to have 2 tracks, one for beginners and one for advanced Wordpress users.

And last, but not least, I got a hilarious sticker that says “Lo Nachon” (Not true), and the purpose being that if you ever see a bumper sticker you disagree with, you can discredit it by placing your “not true” sticker next to it. Oh, people, you are so witty, how did you know that is exactly my type of humor?!

9 Comments | Posted in » News & Views | Tags: Automattic, Wordcamp Israel 2008

Is there an alternative to Feedburner?

We all use Feedburner to track our RSS subscribers. It’s not just to feed that egotistical need to know how many people are hanging onto our every word, but the number of RSS feed subscribers you have is an important metric for indicating the success (or failure) of your blog. It seems that the number of subscribers has a connection with the number of visitors to a site since I’ve found that the number of people visiting a site seems to rise in relation to the number of feed subscribers, but this metric also indicates the stickiness of your content.

But recently Feedburner has not been behaving. We have one client whose feed consistently showed a page that said something like “Kraaak bork, your Feedburner feed is not working,” a stressful site to say the least for a guy who wants to make sure his feed subscribers are getting his content. Many people have been complaining about problems with Feedburner in the last while: ReadWriteWeb reported that Feedburner was slow on pinging feeds, and over here at WordPress Garage I had the pleasure of watching our readers plunge from 1030 to 380. The next day the number went back up, and I can’t imagine it’s because 700 of you unsubscribed and then regretted your decision and resubscribed.

(And may I just take this opportunity to thank all our subscribers for sticking with us. We love you. You rock.)

Anyways, this situation is yet another example of the scariness of a) The Google monopoly (Google bought Feedburner) and b) The problem with allowing services to “own” your content. This is similar to the problem with hosting your blog on WordPress.com, which I’ve discussed here in the past. In the case of Feedburner, your are at their mercy if they have trouble with the service, or if for some reason they decide to cancel your account, in which case  you lose all your preciously collected subscribers.

So…the question is: is there an alternative to Feedburner? After doing a bit of searching, I found the following alternative ways for measuring feed subscribers:

1. Check how many people are subscribed to your blog on feed reader services that offer these types of stats, like Bloglines and Google Reader. See this post for instructions on how to see the number of subscribers on each service. This solutions would allow you to see general trends, like if the number of subscribers is going up or down, and you could even calculate percentage growth or decline. However, you would not get a good indication of the total number of subscribers on all feed readers.
2. (The following methods were all described on this post on the Free Marketing Zone.) Access logs: Use server logs to track how many times your feed page was accessed. This apparently does not give accurate results.
3. Images: Put a 1px by 1px image in your feed, which will be accessed every time your feed is opened in a reader. However, this only tells you how many people are reading your RSS, not how many are subscribed.
4. RSS Buttons: track the number of clicks of your image button that leads to an RSS feed. This is also not accurate since some people may just click and then not subscribe, and many people subscribe to an RSS feed without clicking on a button on your site; they use the RSS access in their browsers address bar, or simply enter your site’s URL in their feed reader, and the reader detects the URL automatically.
5. Tracking URL: Create a unique URL for every click to access the feed, so that whenever a person clicks the button, a unique URL is assigned, like the following: http://domain.com/feed.xml?uniqueurl_countvisitors. But I don’t know about that option – it sounds a bit much to create so many new URLs for a site.

As you can see, these options are ok, but not great. So if anyone knows of another service that provides feed subscription stat services, please let us know. And if there isn’t another option, please can someone create one? It would do all of us a great service.

28 Comments | Posted in » News & Views | Tags: FeedBurner, feeds

Revolution themes enters next evolution

You’ve probably heard the news, but I’m going to join the echo chamber anyways: Brian Gardner has taken his “Revolution” into a new Open Source evolution over at Revolution Two. Now he has a bunch of partners, and the themes are released under Open GPL license, which pretty much means you can use them any way you like and for any (legal) purposes. The business model is that people can buy membership packages which gives them access to advice and guidance related to the themes, as well as custom design services and hosting .

The premium Revolution themes will be available until tomorrow, and at midnight they will turn into a pumpkin. But no worries – the new themes look fantastic, and really add to the WordPress community.

No Comments | Posted in » Themes | Tags: free themes, magazine themes, premium themes, Wordpress themes

Best 4 Wordpress Calendar plugins

Here’s a review of 4 of the most comprehensive calendar plugins that Wordpress has to offer. I tried out each one and tracked the features, pros, and cons.  Which calendar are you using? Send a link so we can see some more examples.  For a full list Wordpress calendar plugins, click here.

Still in search of a perfect calendar…

I still have hopes and dreams that the perfect calendar is out there somewhere, but I can’t seem to find The One. I’m looking for a Wordpress compatible calendar that can do the following:

• recurring events – monthly, weekly, bi-weekly
• month view
• list view with option to see 15 results for upcoming events and then to click “Next” to see next results
• import a csv file of ongoing events
• Advanced search functionality to do the following. For example, search for Events in New York City on December 1. Or to search by venue, city, topic, and other categories.
• RSS events feed
• user level management – a way for different organizations to submit and manage their own events
• Email notifications when someone has added or edited an event

Event Calendar 3 by Alex Tingle

Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar.

Features

• iCal feed subscription
• sidebar widget – monthly & list view
• easy admin to add events from Write>Post
• links to a post for more details

Cons

• no recurring events
• no RSS event feed
• no large view calendar
• no categories
• no fields within events such as location, contact person
• no user level management

Calendar by Kieran O’Shea

A simple calendar plugin for WordPress that allows you to manage your events and display them in list or month format.

Features

• Monthly view of events
• Mouse-over details for each event
• Events can have a timestamp (optional)
• Events can display their author (optional)
• Events can span more than one day
• Multiple events per day possible
• Events can repeat on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis
• Repeats can occur indefinitely or a limited number of times
• Easy to use events manager in admin dashboard
• Sidebar function/Widget to show todays events
• Sidebar function/Widget to show upcoming events
• Comprehensive options panel for admin
• Modifiable CSS using the options panel
• Optional drop down boxes to quickly change month and year
• User groups other than admin can be permitted to manage events
• Events can be placed into categories
• Categories system can be switched on or off
• Pop up javascript calendars help the choosing of dates
• Events can be links pointing to a location of your choice

Cons

• no events feed
• no fields within events such as location, contact person
• no search feature
• no bi-weekly recurring events
• no way to import a csv of recurring events

Gigs Calendar by Dan Coulter

This plugin is designed for bands touring but can be used for any events.

Features

• list view
• amazing options in the admin panel – arrange table view of events, link to Google maps, etc.
• events feed
• fields for city, venue, start time, contact details
• once you select a venue, the contact details appear automatically! Big time saver.
• each event links to the details
• user level management

Cons

• no month calendar view
• no recurring events
• no way to search/sort by month, venue, city, date

Gigpress by Derek Hogue

Another plugin designed for bands touring but can be used for any events.

Features

• list view
• user level management
• events feed
• fields for venue, venue website, address, country, etc.
• connects to posts with a link that says “related post” [I think it should say "More details"]

Cons

• no month calendar view
• no recurring events
• doesn’t connect to a post – all the info needs to be written in the table which isn’t good if you have a lot of text
  
• no way to search/sort by month, venue, city, date

Easy PHP Calendar Plugin

EasyPHPCalendar is a script you can buy for $20. To integrate it into the Wordpress admin, you can use the Wordpress plugin. This is by far the most comprehensive calendar you can use in conjunction with Wordpress. It has tons of features, template options, and display options. Just beware of the clunky setup which may take a few hours to do properly. Also, there are certain features which can’t  be modified because they’re encrypted by the Calendar developers. Luckily, the support forum on the site is pretty active.

Features

• mySQL database support
• Flat-file database support – No mySQL server required!
• Single events, recurring events and floating events plus multiple categories
• Complete and easy event and setup administration
• Mouse-over and pop-up event details
• Customizable categories and multiple event administrators
• Rich event descriptions including font sizes/colors and images
• different templates for list view and month view
• active support forum and RSS feed for latest entries in forum
• See more details

Cons

• complex setup
• weak search and filtering
• no easy way to import a CSV of recurring events
• no events feed
• some encrypted code which may leave you helpless if you want to modify certain functionality

[Update ]

WP-Events by Arnan de Gans

The plugin features a straightforward user interface in the Wordpress dashboard to add/edit and delete events and set some options. Events allows you to list Events on a seperate page or in the sidebar, or both. Here you can list Old (archived) events future events and if you want, events happening today. When you create or edit an event you can set it to be archived. So that it remains listed. Optionally non-archived events are automatically deleted one day (24 hours) after they expire. Many more options are available and Events is completely customizable to your theme in an easy and flexible manner.

Features:

• Widget for themes that support it
• non-widget option: Code to put into templates
• Separate page for events
• Completely customizable layout
• Multi language
• Link events to pages/posts
• Set a start and end time (duration) for events
• Set locations for events
• Show events in your sidebar
• Archive events
• Edit existing events
• Auto remove old, non-archived events
• Unlimited dateformats to show events dates
• Options page
• Set a date and time to the minute
• Set a message to show before and another one to show after the event occurs
• User level restriction
• Management page
• Set amount of events to show in the sidebar

Cons:

Since the events in this plugin are separate from posts,  the integration with linking and feeds is not so great. Other than that, I really like all the options and customization available. Definitely worth trying out.

• No events feed – I wanted to offer my readers a way to get the events feed but because the events are entries rather than posts, I couldn’t figure out an easy way to do it.
• Page/post relationship links – You can add a post and then create a link from the event to the post, but this seems like double the work and not so intuitive.. I guess I could link events to the main events page for more info, but then there is no direct event link to send your friends or refer back to it.
• Date format – the date shows up as March 04, 2009 at 04:00pm and I couldn’t figure out a way to get rid of those initial 0’s. who needs ‘em?

36 Comments | Posted in » Plugins | Tags: calendar, Plugins, upcoming events, wordpress

How to set up Wordpress on a Wampserver

Recently, someone asked me how to set up a local Wamp server on their computer so they can test Wordpress sites locally before uploading and editing online. MakeUseOf nicely explained what a Wamp server is and how to set it up. I wanted to expand their explanation to include setting up Wordpress.

What is this Wamp business?

According to MakeUseOf, WAMP stands for Windows Apache, MySQL and PHP.

A great majority of websites are run by a trio of services – Apache, MySQL and PHP. Apache is the web server, which handles browser requests and sends the information across the internet to your browser. PHP is the programming language that many sites are written in – this creates dynamic content which in turn is sent to Apache, which sends the data to your browser. And finally, MySQL is the database which stores the information for programs. PHP is used to access this database.

How to Set up a Wamp Server

Step 1

Download the WampServer.

Step 2

Run the installer, using the default options provided.

Step 3

Double click the Wamp icon on your desktop .

On your taskbar, near the time in the bottom right corner of your desktop, left click on the semicircle button and Click “Put online”.

How to set up Wordpress on your Wamp

Step 1

Download Wordpress. Extract the files.

Left click on the semicircle on your taskbar.

Open up the www directory.

Drag the Wordpress folder into the www directory.

Step 2

1.  Open PHPmyadmin from your wamp menu

2. Create a new Database (’wordpress‘ or ‘blog‘ are good). Leave Collation. Click Create.

3.  Click the Home icon in the upper left to return to the main page, then click Privileges. If a user relating to WordPress does not already exist in the list of users, create one:

1. Click Add a new User.
2. Chose a username for WordPress (’admin’ is good) and enter it in the User name field. (Be sure Use text field: is selected from the dropdown.)
3. For Host, select Local and type in localhost
4. Choose a difficult-to-guess password and enter it in the Password field. (Be sure Use text field: is selected from the dropdown.) Re-enter the password in the Re-type field.
5. Write down the username and password you chose.
6. Leave all options under Global privileges at their defaults.
7. Click Go.

4. Return to the Privileges screen and click the Check privileges icon on the user you’ve just created for WordPress. In the Database-specific privileges section, select the database you’ve just created for WordPress under the Add privileges to the following database dropdown. The page will refresh with privileges for that database. Click Check All to select all privileges, and click Go.

5. On the resulting page, make note of the host name listed after Server: at the top of the page. (This will usually be localhost.)

6. Returning to where you extracted the WordPress package, rename the file wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php.

7. Open the renamed wp-config.php file in your favorite text editor. Here’s a screenshot of how the wp-config.php is set up.

8. Fill in the following information

DB_NAME
The name of the database you created for WordPress. (ex. Wordpress)
DB_USER
The username you created for WordPress (ex. admin)
DB_PASSWORD
The password you chose for the WordPress username.
DB_HOST
The hostname you determined  (usually localhost)

9. Save the file.

10.  Run the install scrip by copying and pasting this URL into your browser http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

Step 3

Hooray! Hopefully all went according to plan.

Treat yourself to a nice cold beer.

22 Comments | Posted in » Good Blogging Practice, Tips | Tags: localhost, server, Wamp, wordpress