To keep your WordPress blog secure and up-to-date, you want to apply the latest updates. When there’s an update available, you see it at the top of your Dashboard area. To upgrade WordPress: 1. First back up your files. You should already have an automated backup strategy in place. Two backup plugins I like to use are WP-dbmanager and WordPress Database Backup. To install one … more »

The winner of the latest WordPress plugin competition is the Section Widget by Godfrey Chan. I was exploring it yesterday, and I’ve got to say, it’s one super cool widget. Look in the lower-right corner of my sidebar to see it in action. The Section Widget provides a tabbed widget, first of all. On each of the tabs, you can type your own text or … more »

WordPress’s threaded comments feature is not entirely now; it’s been around since 2.7 (the current version of WordPress is 2.7.1). But even though under Settings > Discussion you see the ability to activate threaded comments and indicate how many levels deep you want it to be, you have to actually make some changes to your theme for threaded comments to work. The following screenshot shows … more »

When choosing a blog platform, you have a variety of options: Drupal, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, Joomla, Expression Engine, WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress, and others. But when you start researching the options, WordPress seems to have at least 10 main strengths over its competitors:

WordPress plugin that allows you to expand or collapse page hierarchies. Okay, this is a WordPress plugin that is going to be essential if you import DITA content into WordPress, because you’ll have a huge hierarchy of pages that you’ll want to expand and collapse. This is the plugin that will do it for you.

My WordPress consulting side business has been getting a lot of attention lately. In fact, I’ve been struggling to keep up. (I do this, by the way, mainly on the weekends.) Over the last several projects, I’ve noticed a common trend of questions about WordPress and blogging. Here’s what everyone asks. I already have a site. How can I add a WordPress blog to it? … more »

WordPress Plugin Competition Blog.

Upgrading WordPress is a pain — backing up your database, downloading the latest zip file, deactivating plugins, deleting old files, uploading new files, running update scripts, reactivating plugins, etc. That’s why when non-major releases like 2.3.1 come around, I often look to see if upgrading is actually worthwhile. All that has changed now. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin performs all of the steps automatically, allowing … more »

If you use WordPress and want to streamline the process for responding to comments, check out the Better Comments Manager plugin. You can respond to all your comments directly from your admin console interface, rather than responding in the comments section below each post. This is one of the more useful plugins out there. Here’s a screenshot of the Better Comments Manager interface:

I’ve been waiting for tags to come out for a while. Now that WordPress 2.3 (Dexter) is here, I’m trying to integrate them into my site to the fullest extent. The following image shows the new Tag field that appears below posts. Tags vs. Categories First, to get the concept of tags right, think of tags as index words, and categories more like chapter headings. … more »

The OneClick installer plugin from Anirudh Sanjeev won the recent WordPress plugin competition. It may seem hard to believe, but after you install the plugin and its associated Firefox extension, installing a plugin only requires you to right-click the plugin’s download link and select OneClick Install > Plugin. Then voila, OneClick automatically installs the plugin and only needs activation from your plugin page. It works … more »

WordPress plugins are scripts you install to extend the functionality of your WordPress blog. For example, one common plugin is Subscribe to Comments. When added, it allows readers to keep track of responses to their comments. When someone responds to a reader’s comment, the reader receives an e-mail. WordPress doesn’t ship with this feature already included — you must install it via a plugin. The … more »