In working with clients on WordPress projects, I routinely run across people who forget their WordPress username and password. Fortunately, if you still remember the FTP username and password, just upload this “emergency.php” script from Yoast to your root directory, go to http://yoursite.com/emergency.php, and voila, you can change your WordPress username and password. You may need to download the wp-config.php file to grab the database password, but that’s it.

Yesterday a couple of people asked me how to embed videos into WordPress posts. Rather than copying the entire embed code that youtube provides, you can actually just insert the link to the video into your post. WordPress will then pull the video in. This is a feature called auto-embed.

Last month I gave a webinar on WordPress to the STC CIC SIG, which is the Independent Contracting and Consulting Special Interest Group of the Society for Technical Communication. I recorded the webinar and am allowed now to make it available for free on my site.

The recording plays my voice only, and the whole webinar lasts about 75 minutes. You can view the recording in two sizes. If you want small dimensions (about 1000 pixels in width), which will fit on most computer screens, view this recording. The clarity is a little fuzzy because I resized it to be smaller.

If you have a larger monitor or higher resolution, view this recording. The dimensions are larger, with a 1440 pixel width, but the clarity is perfect, since it isn’t resized at all.

Since it’s a huge file, wait patiently for the screencast to load. Also, this is a long time to sit down and watch a tutorial, so you may want to view this during lunch.

By the way, if you don’t already know, I do WordPress consulting, so if you need to hire me to help you get started with a project, let me know.

Recording of WordPress Webinar

Before WordPress 3.0, one of the frustrations with WordPress was configuring the navigation menu when you wanted to combine pages, categories, and URLs. The new navigation system in WordPress 3.0 solves this problem, because it allows you to create a menu by dragging and dropping almost any type of link. But just upgrading WordPress to 3.0 won’t automatically give you the new navigation system. You have to modify your theme with the new navigation template tags. I’ll walk you through this in this tutorial.

1. First, register the new menu in your theme functions file.

a. If you have just one navigation menu in your theme, copy the first registration snippet in the tutorial notes.

Registration code snippet 1:

add_action( 'init', 'register_my_menu' );
function register_my_menu() {
register_nav_menu( 'primary-menu', __( 'Primary Menu' ) );
}

If you have two navigation menus, copy the second registration code snippet.

Registration code snippet 2:

add_action( 'init', 'register_my_menus' );
 
function register_my_menus() {
	register_nav_menus(
		array(
			'upper-menu' => __( 'Upper Menu' ),
			'lower-menu' => __( 'Lower Menu' ),
		)
	);
}

b. Now go to Appearance > Editor and click the Theme Functions (functions.php) file. Insert the code near the bottom, right before the closing ?> tag. Then click Update File.

2. Now you need to replace your old menu template tag with the new one.

a. Your navigation menu is usually in your header.php file. Look for wp_list_pages or wp_list_cats. Either delete it or comment it out.

b. If you have just one menu, add the first navigation menu template tag in the tutorial notes.

Navigation menu template tag 1:

<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'primary-menu' ) ); ?>

If you have multiple menus, add the second navigation menu template tag in the tutorial notes.

Navigation menu template tag 2:

<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'upper-menu' ) ); ?>
and
<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'lower-menu' ) ); ?>

c. Then click Update File.

3. Now navigate to Appearance > Menus in your theme and create the menus you want.

You can see that the theme location we specified appears in the upper left corner, in the Theme Locations section.

a. To create a new menu, type a new menu name and click Create Menu. When finished, click Save Menu.

b. Now select that menu in the Theme Locations section and save it.

c. Now refresh your theme to see the changes.

Additional References

For the full function reference in the WordPress Codex, see wp_nav_menu.

For an excellent description of the new navigation template tag, see Goodbye, headaches, Hello, menus! from Justin Tadlock.

Lavacon is a yearly conference Jack Molisani puts together on professional development for technical communicators. This year’s conference focuses on social media. You can’t run a conference on social media without having a cool-looking social media driven website, right? So Jack contacted me to help make the Lavacon conference site more of a web 2.0 / social-media-driven experience.

Lavacon's conference website incorporates a number of social media features

Working on the Lavacon conference website has been the most interesting WordPress project I’ve ever done. Here are the main features on the Lavacon conference website that make it social:

• Lots of pictures of presenters. Every presenter has a headshot, and when you group these headshots together, the result is that you see . .. a lot of people. It’s a social looking experience. You don’t just have presentation titles. You have actual people grouped together. I forefronted the speaker’s images to centralize this idea.
• You can comment on each speaker’s session. Because each session description is its own post, you can add your own comments, questions, or feedback on each session. Prior to the session, you can ask questions; during the session, you can add comments; and afterwards, you can ask follow-up questions all through the session’s page. Here’s an example.
• You can like or dislike other people’s comments. If you want to second someone’s comment, you can express your like or dislike by clicking the thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon next to the person’s comment  The most liked comments are aggregated on the Program page, but they also receive a count next to the thumb icon for the number of likes.
• Rate your interest in the session. Through the stars below each presenter’s name, you can rate the session. You can use the ratings in a variety of ways. Jack is using the rating system to gauge interest in the topics to determine room sizes (to start with). The highest rated sessions are grouped together on the program page.
• View current activity on the Live page. The Live page shows a map of the latest visitors for the past month. It also collects the latest tweets that have the word lavacon, and it shows all mentions of the word lavacon conference in the blogsophere.

I’m interested to see how this conference plays out as people start adding comments and ratings and other information. In other words, the site isn’t finished — it has only begun.

This comprehensive post by Justin Tadlock, Goodbye, headaches. Hello, menus!, covers the new menu system in WordPress 3.0 in depth. I’ve been using the new menu system on some WordPress 3.0 sites, and I have to say it looks like one of the best new features in 3.0. You can drag and drop categories, pages, and external URLs directly onto a navigation bar.

As an example, I upgraded the navigation on intermountain-stc.org to 3.0.  It combines static pages, such as About and Contact, with categories, such as Blog, Jobs, and Events. The menu links are generated dynamically rather than coded statically, which allows you to make custom styles for the active link. Previously, about the only way to do this was by creating page templates and then inserting post code (the loop) in them, which always screwed up the next/previous navigation for me.

With 3.0, you can make as many navigation bars as you want, and place them wherever you want. For example, you can make a side menu that differs from the main menu, and you can add that to your sidebar. Add this new navigation with the Widget Logic plugin, and you can easily conditionalize the appearance of that side navigation so that it only appears on certain pages, categories, or posts.

I sent out this tip in my last WordPress newsletter. You can subscribe to my WordPress newsletter here.

One of the many advantages of WordPress over other blog platforms is the number of plugins available. Plugins are scripts that you can add to WordPress to increase the functionality in some way. For example, a contact form plugin gives you an easy way to drop in a contact form into your site.

If you use Firefox, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “extensions.” Plugins is WordPress’s term for the same concept — a little bit of code that adds functionality to your site in some way. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I’ve been receiving a lot of comment spam, more than I should be getting, so I contacted Akismet to see what I could do. They shared a tip with me that turned out to be quite helpful.

Here’s the key insight: spam is attracted to spam. Let’s say a spam comment sneaks by you and remains on one of your posts. That spam somehow attracts more spam on that same post. It’s like the spam algorithms look for posts that already have spam comments.

The first step in reducing spam, then, is to clean out all spam from your blog. But what if you have more than 1,000 posts and no time to do this? Don’t worry. Rather than moving post by post from the beginning, try this instead:

1. When a new spam comment appears on your blog, don’t just immediately remove it. Go to the Comments section in the WordPress admin area and click the talk bubble that appears to the right of the comment. This shows you all the comments for that post.

Talk bubble

2. Remove all the spam comments from that post.

That’s it. Now that post will be less likely to attract new spam. In the week that I’ve been trying this, I’ve noticed a decrease in the number of spam comments that sneak through.

I have a lot of events coming up, so I’ve been trying to coordinate and manage my schedule in a more efficient way. I use Google Calendar, with various calendars that I toggle on or off based on what I want to see. Lately I decided to integrate some of the event information from my Google calendar into my WordPress blog.

I have two new buttons on the top: My Calendar and Presentations. Using the ICS Calendar plugin for WordPress, I integrated the events into my blog by plugging the ICAL feeds for the calendars into the ICS plugin’s settings.

The plugin works pretty well. It automatically pulls the event information from the feed without requiring you to do anything in WordPress. You can specify the format for the event details using the tags in the plugin’s settings page. My custom format looks like this:

<h3>%event-title%</h3>
<div class="icalmeta">%date-time%<br/>
%location%</div>
<p>%description%</p>

It’s a little snazzier than the basic page I had previously used. And I only have to enter event information into one place.

It’s always hard to tell exactly why or how a site gets hacked. One of the WordPress sites I created for a client kept getting hacked. I took more extreme security measures, changing the database table prefix, adding an htaccess file to wp-admin that filtered IP addresses, adding a plugin to encrypt logins, adding a firewall, moving wp-config to another directory, and other measures. I thought the problem was with WordPress.

Then last weekend, I checked the site, and it was totally gone. Completely? Yeah, completely. I logged into cPanel and the entire database had been deleted. Previous hacks had just deleted all posts, pages, and users tables in the database. Now the hacker turned it up a level and deleted the entire database.  Read the rest of this entry »