This led to a big dilemma since I wanted 3 things:

• Start a Micro Blog and post quick content on it.
• Make sure that Google Indexes the micro blog content as it does with the other content.
• Create separate feeds for the Micro Blog and the rest of the content.

Well, i was able to do all of these things without having to add new plugins or create a new blog. Here are the steps I followed to do it. Hopefully many of you will find this useful, and in turn also understand how powerful WordPress is when you want to customize it the way you want it to be.

Create Categories & Modify Loops to Segregate Content

The first few steps include creating a separate category for the Microblog and segregating content accordingly.

Create Category for your Microblog

The first thing I wanted to do was to segregate the main content from the micro blog content on the home page, so I went ahead and created a new category called “Microblog”, where I post all the Microblog content.

Exclude Microblog Content from Main Loop

After creating a separate category, I needed the content from this category to be displayed separately on the site and not with the regular loop. To do that, you will have to edit your template file for the home page, usually index.php in your WordPress theme directory.

To do that you will need to add the code given below before checking if posts exist.

   1: query_posts($query_string . '&cat=-123'); //excludes micro blog category

   2: //continue regular WP loop

   3: if (have_posts()) : 

   4:   while (have_posts()) : the_post();

   5:       //display posts 

   6:   endwhile:

   7: else : 

   8:     //show errors 

   9: endif;

The code query_posts… instructs WordPress to ignore categories which have an id 123.  Please not that you need to provide the minus(-) symbol before the category id. You will need to specify comma separated values to skip multiple categories.

Only Display Microblog Content in The Loop

Since I wanted Google to index the content from the Microblog, I wanted to display in on the home page, for this I needed to run another loop, which only displays content from the Microblog.

For that you need to add the following code:

   1: query_posts('category_name=microblog&posts_per_page=5'); //only display microblog posts

   2: if(have_posts()) :

   3:     while(haveposts()) : the_post();

   4:         //show posts

   5:     endwhile;

   6: else:

   7:     //show errors

   8: endif;

In this case, the query_posts only fetched posts from a particular category we specified as the category_name and skipped the rest of it.

Using the above tricks you now have different sections on your blog home page which segregates content based on categories. You can find more information about skipping and querying certain categories by visiting the WordPress Codex entries for The Loop.

Creating Different Feeds for Main and Microblog

Now that you have been able to separate content from your main blog and the microblog, it is now time to create separate feeds for them. This is much more simpler than segregating content above and only requires few changes in your feed URL.

For example if your main feed URL is http://example.com/feed you will have to change it to http://example.com/feed?cat=-123. Similar to the skip rule in the query above, -123 will ignore posts from the category you specify.

Creating a separate feed for your Microblog is much more simpler, all you need to do is use the current URL for the Microblog category and add /feed to it. Your Microblog feed will be http://example.com/microblog/feed.

Since you are offering multiple feeds, you might also want to add them to your header.php, so browsers with automatic feed discovery can discover all your feeds. To that, remove the regular feed/RSS link tags from your header and add this. Replace the feed URLs with your own.

   1: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Techie Buzz RSS Feed" href="http://feeds.techie-buzz.com/techiebuzz" /> 

   2: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Techie Buzz Microblog" href="http://feeds.techie-buzz.com/tbmicroblog" />

Doing this will ensure that whenever a user tries to subscribe to you feeds, they will see multiple options as shown above.

Posting Quickly to Your Microblog

Now that you have your Microblog setup and ready to go, it would be more appropriate that you can quickly post content to it.

To do that change your default category for posting to “Microblog” and then drag the Quick Press bookmarklet from your Tools menu to your browser bookmarks bar and start posting. Watch the video below to see how you can use Quick Press to quickly post content to your site.

The above tricks will not create a real Microblog, but it will eventually help you to segregate content and run multiple smaller blogs within your major blog and offer them to subscribers. I would still prefer to use the P2 theme for the above task, however customizing it to match the look and feel is a lengthy process and hopefully it should be quicker in the future.

The above tricks might be good or they might not be that good. Do give me your feedback on what you think about it and whether or not your found it helpful.

The new P2 has also been reworked from the ground up so that it can be used as a parent theme and then extended with child themes. Andy Peatling says:

This will allow theme designers to create awesome new theme designs without having to duplicate all of the existing P2 features. We’ve streamlined the HTML of the theme so that it is much more flexible for creating new designs using CSS.

Although it’s not shown in the screenshots, I was told that the new P2 will contain media uploading so that images can be added to posts. This is something that was heavily requested after the first version of P2 was released. For more screenshots and to read Andy’s write up, check out this post on the WordPress.com blog and keep an eye out for the release of the new P2 on the theme repository.

A free magazine style WordPress theme to show your content on a smooth layout.

BrandNew Folio

Two column, fixed width theme with support for gravatars, widgets and a customizable homepage.

wpClassifieds

wpClassifieds is a free Wordpress theme that transform your wordpress blog into a classified ads site similar to Craigslist or OLX.

5 Travel-Inspired WordPress Themes

Five single column and multiple column themes inspired with some things travel.

Bold Life

Bold Life is 2 columns light, widget ready WordPress theme.

MiniCard

MiniCard is a social network/business card Wordpress theme inspired by Tim Van Damme’s website. The theme lets you add links to all the social networking sites you may be a member of, and post useful information such as bio’s and contact details. It also has built in hCard support and (optionally) lets you offer a vCard for visitors to download your contact information.

We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.

Three cheers to the most wonderful platform I have ever used, and will continue to use, thanks to the innovations and continued development of WordPress by the Automattic team.

What do you think about this award? Feel free to let your congratulations and thoughts flow through the comments form.

Update: WordPress was also named the first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS Software. Read Matt Mullenweg’s Official announcement here.

When I interviewed Matt at WordCamp New York, one of the things I asked him to address is the notion that Automattic commercially benefits from those who work for free. This indeed happens but on the flip side, Automattic gives a ton back to the project and to the community. For example, I think there is a lot that can be said for the progression of WordPress thanks to the resources that Automattic has been able to provide due to their funding. It’s also worth mentioning that Automattic pays a couple of folks to work on WordPress the majority of their time such as Ryan Boren who is always slaving away committing code and Jane Wells who works on the usability front.

It’s not like Automattic hoards the contributions to the project and gives nothing back. Matt said something during the interview that really stuck a chord with me and that is “Automattic is just one member of the WordPress community. We are a huge contributor. Myself, Jane everyone involved tries to give as much back to the WordPress community as possible.” So far, I can’t see anything that portrays the individuals or the company as evil.

Throughout the history of Automattic, they have developed and released a number of WordPress plugins to the community. They have also taken some of their paid offerings such as VideoPress and released those to the public as well. The entire VideoPress framework to be exact. They don’t have to do this but they do so because Matt wants Automattic to be an excellent example of an Open Source based company. Not everything is open because hosted services do not have to abide by the GPL since there is no distribution taking place. It’s also worth noting that Automattic has a system in place now so that when they build in a cool new feature for WordPress.com such as Geotagging they also build a plugin to release for the WordPress.org side of things granted, the release isn’t always immediate.

Verdict:

It’s my opinion that neither Matt Mullenweg or Automattic is evil. They don’t have evil tendencies and they are not out to screw people. If that were the case, I can’t see how WordPress could become the piece of software it is today. So my question to you is, do you think either is evil and if so, why?

I think I’ll kick off the series with a couple simple ones…

• Why isn’t this plugin working with my theme?

  This is probably one of the most common issues I read about regarding WordPress. Sometimes even more experienced WPers can get this one wrong. Now, I’m not saying this is the solution to all problems between plugins and themes. Its just that this little bugger is often the culprit.

  Try ensuring that your theme has <?php wp_head() ?> somewhere inside the <head> section of the document. Also, for that matter, make sure it has <?php wp_footer() ?> somewhere in the foot of the document; Before the </body> tag.

  If your theme lacks these function calls many plugins that manipulate your theme will not be able to hook into the required areas. This can cause many headaches.

  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you may be better off having a coder buddy take a look at the theme for you. Or you can also contact the theme author, if the theme you use was created by someone else.

• How come my URLs are yucky?

  Or, “How come my URLs look like www.mysite.com?p=123 instead of www​.mysite.​com​/my-​sample-​post/?”

  This one is right up there with the previous question. I see it all the time. However, more and more web hosts these days support the “nice” URLs by default without requiring any extra effort. So, its just a matter of going into the WordPress control panel, changing your Permalink Settings and then saving. Unfortunately, we’re not all this lucky…

  The first thing to try would be to contact your web host support and make sure they have whats known as mod_rewrite (or similar functionality) enabled on your account. If such functionality is not available on your web host, and you really need this feature, you may need to upgrade to a new host that does support it.

  If your host does support it and has it enabled on your account, but it still doesn’t work, you can check that WordPress is able to write to the .htaccess file (which is where all the “nice” URL magic happens).

  For WordPress, on Unix-based systems, the htaccess file should be “CHMODed” to at least 666. On Windows-based systems the procedure is a bit different. It can be different depending on your particular setup so I won’t go into that.

  Basically, as was the case with the previous question, you may need to seek help to figure this out. If you don’t have a code buddy, get one! They are really great to have around. Just make sure you buy them a nice gift for their trouble.

• Can I have a link to login to WordPress somewhere in my theme?

  Sure! It’s actually easier than you might think…

  Some themes have a link for that already. But, there are also some that seem to lack this obvious and simple feature. You can easily add this to any theme yourself. No need for any programming knowledge. Simply add <?php wp_loginout() ?> somewhere in your theme and you’re done. Easy right?

  Another nice function along the same lines is <?php wp_register() ?>, which will show a link to your registration page (if your settings allow users to register), or a link to the WordPress control panel if you are already logged in.

  Do note though that by default the link will be output wrapped inside <li> tags. This is so you can include the link in a list of other links, like a “meta” section. If, however, that is not how you want it to be output you can use the function like <?php wp_register('', '') ?>. That will simply output the link and nothing else.

  An example of how to customize that is something like <?php wp_register('<p>', '</p>') ?>, which will output the link wrapped in its own paragraph. Just change the opening and closing tags in the function to make it output how you want. Dead simple!

That’s all for now… I hope it helps!

Do you have a question about WordPress? Want to see it answered here on Weblog Tools Collection? If so, please send us an E-Mail or drop a comment here. Your question just might be featured in the series!

URL Redirector

URL Redirector allows you to create shorter URL’s and keeps track of how many times a link has been clicked. It’s useful for managing downloads, keeping track of outbound links and for masking URL’s.

Query Multiple Taxonomies

A WordPress plugin that allows you to filter posts through multiple custom taxonomies

Checkfront Online Booking Plugin

Checkfront is an online availability, reservation and booking engine. This plugin connects your Wordpress site to your Checkfront, and provides a powerful embedded booking interface within your site.

This plugin requires a Checkfront account (available for free).

Updated Plugins

WP Archive-Sitemap Generator

WP Archive-Sitemap Generator plugin generates simple Archives/Sitemap based on your sites/blogs posts and pages. This is not another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a nice sitemap generator.

Twitter Goodies

Twitter Goodies plugin will show your tweets under Sidebar Area (Widget), Post and/or Pages. REFRESH AUTOMATICALLY and you have 5 different Color Option.

Table of Contents Creator

Table of Contents Creator automatically generates a complete table of contents for your site, including pages, posts and forum comments. The table of contents is generated each time the page is displayed therefore ensuring it is always up to date.

Merge Tags

A simple WordPress plugin that allows you to combine tags easily.

Delicatessen

A plug-in for finding out who has bookmarked your posts and pages in delicious.com, as well as the tags they used and the notes they wrote about your pages (if there are notes!).

WordPress 2.9 is still in beta, you can use it to test it and report bugs back to WordPress development team. However, do not use it on a production blog yet.

Author Info Section

How to Create an Author Info Section in WordPress: Chris has put together a nice tutorial on how to create an author info section on your WordPress blog. I am sure you have seen these in the past on multi-author blogs. They normally tend to be displayed at thebottom of single posts and Chris provides details, code and styling for various features that can be added to this section. I also think this would make for a very nice and simple plugin. So if you would like to set one of these up for your own blog and increase visitor stickiness, head over to the tutorial.

Simple two column theme with shades of blue that you can use to customize your site

Martial Arts Lover

A nice, clean, dark and simple wordpress theme with one right sidebar.

5 Girl-Inspired Free WordPress Themes

Set of five two column, widget ready themes

WP Commerce Flex

It features a variety of options, solid SEO-friendly CSS layout that is easily customizable, and built for seamless integration with PHPbay and PHPZon.

Polka Dots

It’s widget-ready, adsense-ready, and 3-columns.  Colors: brown, white, aqua, green, chartreuse, yellow, orange, red.

If you have any feedback, let him know in the comments!

Because of a lack of WiFi and bandwidth at WordCamp New York, there will be no live audio or video streams.

*UPDATE* Just found out that WordCamp Victoria in Canada is also this weekend.

Custom Coming Soon Pages

Custom Coming Soon Pages WordPress Plugin allows you to display a Customized Coming Soon Page or Under Construction page to normal visitors or regular members of your WordPress based website or Blog – while the Site Administrators see the fully functional website with the applied theme and active plugins as well as a fully functional Dashboard.

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved allows you to easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without loosing it’s formatting or making any manual changes.

WP Answers

Using a comments vote system you can order the comments by votes getting the focus to the most voted comment by the users. Page in Spanish

ImageMation

ImageMation lets you put a set of sliding images with captions on any of your webpage. Moving images interact with the direction of mouse movement.

Updated Plugins

Ajax Edit Comments

The most powerful comment editing solution for WordPress. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments. Check out the video demonstrating the new admin features.

Comment Autogrow

A WordPress plugin that makes the comment textarea expand in height automatically

Subscription Options

It adds 4 subscription options for readers with related feed icons for an RSS feed URL; a FeedBurner Email Service URL, a Twitter Stream URL and now, by popular demand, a Facebook Page URL. It’s totally user-defined, looks cool and it’s very simple.

Wp-Thumbie

Wp-thumbie is wordpress plugin to display thumbnail related posts. You can select the number of posts to be display in your content / feed.

Smart Archives Reloaded

Gives you an elegant and easy way to present your posts. See a demo on the author’s site.

BuddyPress-Kaltura

This BuddyPress-Kaltura media component adds features like photos, videos and audio upload to BuddyPress. These features are essential for building a social network around BuddyPress.

Two column, fixed width theme with support for the WP Pagenavi plugin. This theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, clean look and simplicity.

Coffee Lite

Coffee Lite Theme is a minimalist blogging theme modded from the popular premium theme Coffee Break from WooThemes.

New York

Two column, fixed width, widget ready theme with inbuilt support for Twitter and 125×125 ads with a theme options page

Greenxi

Two columns, flexible width, base colors green and white, custom gravatar, widget ready (sidebar and footer)

Now, I don’t mean plugins, or themes, or anything external like that. I mean the core of WordPress itself. Sometimes it seems WordPress just comes up short. It can be anything from a simple little inconvenience to a total show-stopper.

I think hearing peoples gripes about WordPress would be a nice contrast to the almost constant good things you hear about it. It might also help to get more attention on the issues. Don’t forget that someone may come across this post, read a gripe, and possibly provide a solution. We can all help each other!

So, lets get it started…

One of the issues I always seem to run into has to do with the way some core functions output their code. A lot of the functions in WordPress provide a method for either outputting the code (echo) or returning it for you to handle and probably eventually echo yourself.

Unfortunately not all functions currently in WordPress are like this. Some only allow for echoing the code. This can be quite the inconvenience for some of us. The only way to usually get around this is to capture the output with a buffering function (ick!) or to copy what the function does into a function of our own to do what we need. However, this is less than ideal. What if the core version of that function changes some time in the future? That leaves us in a situation where we have to also update our version of the function. That’s not very nice…

An easy fix? Probably… Will it be addressed in future versions of WordPress? I hope so! Is it a critical issue? No. But, not all WordPress gripes are. This is just one of those things that has bugged me for some time.

So, how about you? What bugs you about WordPress?

Ecwid Shopping Cart

Ecwid is free full-fledged shopping cart that can be easily add to any blog. It offers the performance and flexibility you need, with none of the hassles you don’t.

Let it Snow

Display falling snow on your blog

Checkfront Booking

A plugin that connects your Wordpress blog to the Checkfront™ Booking platform.

Twitter Goodies Widgets

Uses the twitter goodies widgets API to create offical twitter widgets (profiles, lists, faves and search) straight from your control panel.

WP-TTFGen

TTFGen allows you to embed fonts on your website by generating static images from your own CSS parameters. TTFGen is 100% cross browser compatible.

Google-News-Sitemap

Automatically generate sitemap for inclusion in Google News. Page not in English

Post Ordering

With this plugin you can sort and order posts under a category manually.

Updated Plugins

WP-Orphanage

Users who have not been assigned any Roles or Capabilities are called “orphans”. When using the shared users table trick to link up multiple WordPress installations, users who register on one of your blogs, are not given any privileges on the other blogs in the network. WP-Orphanage is a plugin that automatically adopts your orphan users by promoting them to the Role of your choosing.

K2 Style Switcher

This plugin includes a style picker widget that allows site visitors to choose the K2 style that is applied during their visit. The list of available styles, type of widget and default style and footer can all be customised. The plugin also allows for certain base styles to be applied in all cases, these save the administrator copying the same CSS snippets into each selectable K2 style.

Custom Admin Branding

The Custom Admin Branding Plugin allows you to brand and customize the WordPress administration area for clients or for personal use. You can display custom images and styles for the login screen, admin header and footer.

Comment Autogrow

A small plugin that makes the comment textarea expand in height automatically. Version 1.1 fixes problems with IE.

Front-end Editor

Enables “edit in place” functionality on your site. Edit posts, text widgets etc. without going to the admin area.

Google Transliteration

A plug-in that implements Google Transliteration API for wordpress.

WordPress is a complex web application that comprises more than 200 .php files. When you open any page, WordPress loads index.php which, in turn, loads many other .php files using the require() function. WordPress admin interface also relies on multiple .php files. In all cases, WordPress loads wp-config.php file which contains database credentials and other important information required for normal operation.

So what happens if both index.php and wp-config.php are infected with the gumblar backdoor scripts? Since Gumblar injects identical backdoor scripts into files on the same site, they’ll have declarations of identically named functions, which PHP doesn’t allow. Hence the “cannot redeclare zsmh() …” error.

One thing not mentioned in the Unmasked Parasites post is information regarding which specific versions of WordPress are at risk or are safe to use. I’ve left a comment on the blog post to try and get an answer but until then, Denis Sinegubko provides detection and removal instructions while also suggesting the use of the WordPress Exploit Scanner which scans for WordPress files for signs of suspicious activity.

Based on the reports of infection, this does not appear to be a WordPress centric issue pointing to a problem with the software.

1. Drain Hole
   I’ve been using Drain Hole on my personal site to serve up my files for a couple years now. So far it is the best download manager plugin I’ve been able to find. It does everything it advertises and does it well. I’ve not yet had any issues with this plugin. I highly recommend it!
2. WP-DownloadManager
   Before I found Drain Hole I used WP-DownloadManager exclusively. It did what I wanted and didn’t seem to have many problems. It has the features most would expect in such a plugin. It also has some you might not. Such things as custom templates, categories, RSS feeds, and more.
3. WP-Filebase
   I actually just recently learned of WP-Filebase. I can’t speak from personal experience but from the research I’ve done on it I think it would be one of the best options. It has the obvious features you expect from a download manager. Some of the highlights are quick tags, top downloads widget, extensive file details, and even download pausing.
4. Wordpress Download Monitor
   I really like the interface of Wordpress Download Monitor. It’s simple yet complete. It does its job as a download manager and keeps it simple at the same time. Some of the attraction points of this plugin are: simple custom download URLs, custom error pages, download mirrors, and even custom fields for all files.
5. Simple Download Monitor
   What’s great about Simple Download Monitor is right in its name. It’s simple! To quote the author of the plugin “…I wanted to monitor the number of downloads of my files without having to maintain any kind of database or making any special download links. I just wanted to upload a file to a designated directory using FTP, provide a direct link to it and once in a while check the number of downloads“. This plugin also allows advanced logging.

What I think is especially nice is that all these plugins seem to be compatible with the upcoming WordPress 2.9. That means that they are future-proof for at least the foreseeable future. I took time to test each one of these plugins during the writing of this post. But, feel free to let me know if you have experienced anything to the contrary with any of them.

Well, that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed the post and I hope you might be able to get something useful out of this list.

Do you have a good idea for the next article in the Best-Of series? Drop a comment here or contact us and your idea just might be next in the series!