WordPressGarage.com

Changing where WordPress saves your uploaded images and files

In my previous post on using thumbnails with WordPress’ custom fields feature, I explained a way to change where WordPress saves images and files you upload from the Write Post/Page page. Generally, any images or files you upload while writing a post are saved on your server under wp-content/uploads in folders that are organized by month and year, i.e. wp-content/uploads/2007/03.

Uploading files on Write > Page in WordPress admin:

I explained that you could use a plugin called Filosofo Old-Style Upload Plugin to change where files are saved on your server.

Well, Ryan Hellyer pointed something out that I can’t believe I never noticed: you can change where and how files are saved in WordPress!

Many of you are probably saying “Duh!” But I really never noticed this, so please humor me.

To change where your uploaded files are saved on the server:

1. Go to Option > Miscellaneous in your WordPress admin
2. Under Store uploads in this folder, enter the file structure that you want. For example, wp-content/themes/themename/images.
3. Where it says “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”, you can unselect the check box so that all images will be saved in the one folder you specified in step 2.
4. Click on Update Options to save your new setup.

I can’t really see any advantage to saving the images in folders according to year and date, so I would make this change right from the beginning of any WordPress blog.

[By the way, did you notice my snazzy new screenshots? Until now I've always hesitated to add screenshots because I was using a free but not-very-efficient screen capture tool. But now I'm using the free and amazing SnagIt from TechSmith. If you haven't heard, TechSmith is offering older versions of their SnagIt and Camtasia Studio software for free! If you want to upload to their most recent version, it's only half price once you've downloaded these older versions!

They are both so great, that you really should download them, even if you don't think you'll have any use for them right now. Go to Quick Online Tips for information on how to download and get the license keys.]

Posted in Tips | Tags: admin, file management, Images, uploads | 1 Comment »

Make managing your WordPress dashboard easier with Admin Drop Down Menus plugin

If you’re a WordPress blogger who posts one new post every few days, you might not mind the default navigation menu in the admin/dashboard. But once your blogging volume increases, and you’re writing posts, pages, and managing comments and plugins, it becomes annoying that the most common actions, like writing a new post, take two clicks: one on Write, and another on Write Post.

I’ve tried a few plugins that change the WordPress admin, but all of them had one problem or another. Thanks to Tal Galili, I’ve found what seems to the be the perfect solution: Admin Drop Down Menus from Yellow Swordfish.

This plugin changes the default navigation into a drop-down menu, so you can easily select the option you want without clicking multiple times. It has two limitations:

• It needs Javascript to work - not so serious.
• You won’t be able to see who’s subscribed to comments if you use the Subscribe to Comments plugin - it’s not this plugin’s fault, but the fault of the Subscribe to Comments plugin. This is explained in the Read Me file.

Despite the above, it seems to be worth it - this can save you tons of time and annoying clicks-and-waits.I don’t know if I’ll ever go back.

Admin Drop Down Menus»

Update: Hannit at Achi Dakar has Hebraicized this plugin for users of the Hebrew WordPress installation.

Posted in Plugins | Tags: admin, dashboard | 7 Comments »

Things I do to optimize and secure every WordPress site and blog

(Updated Sept. 9, 2007)

I have compiled a to-do list of plugins that I install and steps that I take to optimize and secure every WordPress site or blog that I create. This list will be updated with new developments or plugins and tips that I discover, so make sure to check back.

Must haves:

• Feedsmith - redirect all your feed subscribers to FeedBurner so that you can track your feed stats. Now FeedBurner allows you to keep your domain name in the feed address. This means that instead of your feed address becoming something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/WordpressGarage, it can be http://wordpressgarage.com/rss2 or whatever the feed address is for your site.
• Add FeedBurner feed flares to feed - make it easy for your RSS subscribers to bookmark or email your posts with Feed Flares
• Change permalink structure - use pretty permalinks for better search engine optimization. I always use the following custom permalink structure:
  /%category%/%postname%/
• Google (XML) Sitemaps - important for search engine optimization. This is not for your readers, but for the search engine crawlers that visit your site.
• Ultimate Google Analytics - this is an easy way to install Google Analytics on your site. There is another plugin that does this, but this one is “ultimate” because it also tracks outgoing links and links to downloads.
• Simple Tagging - tags are important for search engines and for Technorati. I tried all the other tagging plugins, and this is the easiest to use, and with it you can easily create a tag cloud and add related posts to each entry. Creating a tag cloud with Simple Tagging.
• Full Text Feed plugin - if you want your RSS subscribers to be able to see full text feeds, and you plan on using the More tag in your posts to create excerpts, you need this plugin.
• WordPress Database Backup - if you value your work, install this! It will send a backup file of your database to your email on a regular basis.
• WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition - easy to use, functional contact form.
• Search Everything - if you have Pages on your site (i.e. not posts) with important information, they should show up in search results on your site. By default, WordPress excludes Pages from search results.
• Wordpress Dashboard Editor - this allows you to easily get rid of all the incoming WordPress feeds that appear on your dashboard. I don’t find that they add any value for me, and I know that they would just confuse my clients, so I use this to get rid of them.
• DoFollow - if someone comments on your site, why not give them the gift of a link back to their site? Since I set up every site so that first comments from a commenter must be approved, I’m not worried about spammers getting links back to them.
• WP-Cache 2.0 - since you never know when you’re going to write that amazing post that the whole world will digg, install this so that when that day arrives, your servers(hopefully) won’t crash.
• Subscribe to Comments 2.1 - blogs are communities. Allow your commenters to follow comment threads by subcribing to comments.
• Add comments feed to header for more subscribers - this is a way to increase your comment feed subscribers by adding the Comments Feed to the list of feeds that are displayed when a user clicks on the RSS link in the browser.
• Hacked Antisocial (hacked version of Sociable) - you need to give your users an easy way to bookmark your posts. This plugin does this, while not diminishing your “link juice” - or WP Plugin: Gregarious - this is an efficient and customizable plugin that adds a little green icon at the end of posts, with wording of your choice (like “Bookmark this”), and when clicked opens a drop-down menu with a list of social sites for bookmarking, plus the option to email the post.
  
• ST Visualize Advanced Features or Advanced TinyMCE Editor - the default WYSIWYG editor in WordPress is painfully simple. A little known secret is that there are more buttons available, but they are hidden. The ST Visualize Advanced Features plugin adds a button to the toolbar that, when clicked, opens up another row of formatting buttons. The Advanced TinyMCE Editor plugin turns the toolbar into a full-fledged WYSIWYG with 60 functions!
• WP-PageNavi - puts nice pagination at the bottom of every page. This just increases usability and tells the user how many pages there are on the site, and where they are in the scheme of things.
• Yes-www - make sure that all pages are either with the “www” or without, depending on your preference. The advantage of this plugin is that it also deals with index.php requests, and redirects them accordingly.
• All in One SEO pack - optimizes titles, makes sure Google doesn’t spider duplicate content - or the SEO_Wordpress plugin - both prevent duplicate content spidering and generally improve the site for search engines. Now I use All in One SEO Pack only- it does everything, including meta keywords and descriptions, title optimization (list the post name first, and then the name of your blog, for SEO - like this: How to protect your WordPress site >> wordpressgarage.com. In the default installation, these elements appear with the blog name first, and then the post name).
• Viper’s Video Quicktags - the best solution for easily adding videos to posts - adds simple buttons to the advanced WYSIWYG editor for easily inserting all types of media formats in your posts and pages.
• Setting up pinging - you can enter ping addresses under Options>Writing in the admin. Here is a list of ping addresses that you can copy and paste into that box. Alternately, you can use an online pinging service, like King Ping. If you enter your blog URI on the King Ping site, it will ping 53 sites every time you post. These sites have been manually reviewed for suitability and quality.
• Submit site to Google, Technorati, Yahoo, Dmoz
• Secure the site - follow this list of directions to add greater security to your WordPress blog or site.
• Enrich RSS feed by adding copyright notice, comments and related posts

Nice to haves:

• Comment Email Responder Plugin - easily email commenters and post a comment in response in one shot
• Simple Spam Filter - more spam protection. Works in conjunction with Akismet
• Admin Themer - make modifications to the admin in a separate CSS file so they are preserved even when you upgrade.
• Landing Sites - when people come to your site from a search engine, show them other possible posts they may be interested in based on their search query
• WP-Chunk - shortens long URLs in comments so they don’t mess the layout
• WP - ©Feed - add copyright notice, related posts and comments to feed to stop sploggers and extend the reach of your feed
• Digg This - adds Digg button when your posts are digged/dugg
• Custom Query String - allows you to set how many posts will appear on different pages like Home, Search, Category
• No self pings plugin - if you link to another post in your own blog, it appears as a trackback. I don’t like these trackbacks, and delete them. This plugin stops self-pings automatically.
• Slug Trimmer - if you use pretty permalinks, they are formed from the titles of your posts. Sometimes the titles are long, and then you end up with a really long URL. This plugin trims the URLs automatically.
• SRG Clean Archives - this allows you to create a useful archive page, where the posts are divided up into months and years.
• Separate pingbacks and trackbacks from comments - makes the comments section more organized. This is not a plugin, but a hack to the template files. The TrackbackList Plugin v1.3 does this too.
• Optimize DB - Your WordPress database can get clogged with junk. This plugin optimizes your database simply and efficiently.
• Author Highlight - this highlights comments by the author of a post, making them stand out visually from the other comments. It is possible to do this by coding the template files and CSS too.
• OneClick - no more unzipping and then FTPing themes and plugins. OneClick allows you to upload plugin or theme files from the Admin panel, or right-clicking in Firefox. All you have to do is browse for the zip file and click “upload” and the plugin does the rest.

Useful:

• Sticky Menu - Sticky Menu lets you define an unlimited number of menus, in which you list the exact number of menu items you want to appear. Menu items can link to any pages, posts, etc., in your site or any URLs exterior to your site. You can define a class name for each menu item.
• Fancy pull-quotes plugin - instead of creating a style for pull-quotes, you can use this plugin to make it easier.
• TinyMCE Comments - this makes it easy for commenters to format their comment. It seemed to slow down my site a lot.
• cforms - the easies, most flexible form builder I have ever seen. You can have multiple forms on one site, add as many fields as you want, divide your form into sections, validate, style it, have email autoresponders, track submissions, and more!

Tips:

• 52 of the Best Ways to Promote your Blog and your Business

Posted in Good Blogging Practice | Tags: admin, optimization, security | 7 Comments »

Fantastico now offers WordPress 2.2. upgrade and install

Fantastico has now been set up to allow upgrades and installations of WordPress 2.2. So I took the plunge and upgraded almost all of the sites that I manage. Each site took about five minutes, and so far I haven’t noticed any problems.

I want to take this opportunity to laud the praises of Fantastico, and recommend that you choose your hosting based on whether they offer Fantastico or not. Installation with Fantastico takes about five minutes, as opposed to having to upload the entire WordPress directory via FTP on hosting providers that don’t offer Fantastico, a process which can take almost an hour if your FTP connection fails too many times. Especially if you are running a WordPress site, Fantastico can make your life a lot easier since new versions of WordPress are released relatively frequently.

Upgrading with Fantastico is also really simple, and involves the following steps:

1. Backup your WordPress files. I use WordPress’ export feature, which is available under Manage, and I use the WordPress Database Backup plugin from Il Filosofo and save the backup file.
2. Deactivate all plugins. A little tedious, but not too complicated or time-consuming.
3. Log into your cPanel. Click on Fantastico. Click on WordPress in left-hand column. Click on upgrade next to the relevant installation.
4. You will receive a warning before the upgrade takes place. Click upgrade and in a few seconds the upgrade is complete.
5. Log in to your WordPress site. Re-activate all the plugins.
6. Take a look around and make sure things are ok.

That’s it! So now WordPressGarage is running on WordPress 2.2. If you see anything weird, please let me know.

For more information on Fantastico:

• Wikipedia entry on Fantastico
• Fantastico site
• List of applications available on Fantastico

Posted in News & Views | Tags: admin, Fantastico, upgrades | 1 Comment »

Increase PHP memory to fix issues with WordPress plugins

Bloggerdesign.com has suggested a solution for WordPress blogs where the plugins are working one minute, and the next minute they are not, or where generally strange things are happening.

The suggestion, that worked for them, is to increase your PHP memory. This is why:

PHP is what is used to run Wordpress. It’s usually allowed a certain amount of memory to run scripts and do its thing. If your blog is big enough, or if your scripts are complex enough, it may reach it’s memory limit and quit the script. That’s what was happening in my case.

How do you fix it?

Well just email the host and ask them to increase the PHP memory. You can run the phpinfo function and find out how much memory your site has. The server that was having the issue had 8Mb of PHP memory. I asked the host to increase it to 20Mb and then everything worked great.

I haven’t experienced such problems yet, but I’m going to keep this tip filed away in case I need it!

Fix Wordpress Plugin Issues With Memory>>

Posted in Tips | Tags: admin, optimization | No Comments »

Getting bored of how your dashboard looks? Try WordPress NiceAdmin

We bloggers spend a lot of time in the admin section of our WordPress blogs. It can get kind of boring looking at the same blue chunky lettering and design after a while. I decided to install the WordPress NiceAdmin plugin to add some variety to the same ‘ol same ‘ol.

It is so pretty! Gradients, a nicer font, details like pointers pointing at the upper-level of your admin that you are using. This is also useful if you plan on building sites for clients based on WordPress - they get a prettier backend, and it looks like it wouldn’t be that hard to customize it. Hurray! (Note to self: get a life).

WordPress NiceAdmin>>

Posted in Plugins, WordPress as CMS | Tags: admin, dashboard | 2 Comments »

Replace WordPress default dashboard with custom feeds

I never really look at the main page of my WordPress admin section. It is full of all sorts of stuff that I didn’t ask to see, so I just ignore it. But why not put information there that you are interested in, or that helps you with your blogging?

Previously I posted about the WordPress Dashboard Editor: a plugin that allows you to add whatever you want to the Dashboard through PHP and HTML. KQF is another plugin that allows you replace the dashboard with custom feeds that you specify. You can also customize the look and behavior of feeds, and has a polling feature that will check for feed freshness at predetermined intervals.

I have just one question: why is this plugin called KQF?

KQF>> 

Posted in Plugins | Tags: admin, dashboard, feeds, RSS | 4 Comments »

Wordpress Plugin: WP Admin Bar Reloaded

This seems like a really useful plugin that I plan to install soon. The WP Admin Bar Reloaded displays links to the Administration Panel at the top of a blog’s page - but only for users who are logged in and have permission to view the given functions. This is similar to the bar that appears for Wordpress.com users.

Wordpress Plugin: WP Admin Bar Reloaded>>

Posted in Plugins | Tags: admin | No Comments »

Learning WordPress - a new plugins repository

It seems that Learning Wordpress was launched only a few days ago, but it’s really worth checking out. It is (potentially) a well organized database of WordPress plugins. There are main plugin categories, with subcategories listed underneath. Since this is a really new site, many of the categories have nothing listed under them yet. The goal seems to be to make this a community site where registered users can submit plugins to be added to the database. It has a lot of potential, and if people start submitting plugins, in a month or two this site could really be useful. And I think that the design is noteworthy.

The site’s name, “Learning WordPress,” seems to indicate that the site will be about WordPress in general, and not just about plugins. Will this guy/gal be adding more topics in the future?

Learning WordPress>>

Posted in Plugins | Tags: admin | 1 Comment »

New plugins directory on WordPress.org

WordPress has set up a new directory for plugins. Plugins can now be hosted on the WordPress.org site, and are tagged for easier categorization. Plugin authors can see how many times a plugin was downloaded, allows people to leave comments, and has a rating system. From first glance I would say that their tagging system is a little weak, and could use some tags that are related to signficant aspects of WordPress, like Pages (of course I like the tagging system I use here…)

I set up WordPressGarage to help me manage plugins and other WordPress-related stuff out there on the web. So has it now become defunct/extinct/unneeded? Not for me, and hopefully not for some of you either. WordPressGarage is about more than just plugins - it is meant to be a comprehensive repository of truly useful and inspiring WordPress resources that have been reviewed. I do not just upload anything - I have tested many of the plugins, and only upload information that I feel is really useful.

WordPress Plugin Directory>>

Posted in Plugins | Tags: admin | No Comments »