WordPress 2.9 Testing – Get Involved

Do you like to be involved in the development of your favourite open source software?  Are you a WordPress user?  The people at WordPress.org have made it easy to get involved with WordPress beta testing, so why not start now and help with the beta testing of WordPress 2.9?

When you install the plugin, you have two options – Point Release Nightlies, and Bleeding Edge Nightlies.

Installing the point release nightlies is a comparatively safe way to test, since they should be fairly stable – of course, there’s always some risk, so only beta test on a blog if you don’t mind it going down!

If you want to be a true pioneer, you can work with the bleeding edge nightlies – but be warned, you’re venturing into possibly unstable territory, so have backups at the ready!

WordPress 2.9 should be out by the end of this month, or early next month, and this is your chance to get a sneak peek, and also contribute to the stability of the release.  The features so far are looking very good.  I for one can’t wait for the image editor, and the custom post types – which should be a massive boon to anyone wanting to turn their WordPress site into something more CMS like.

Lucid Lynx – Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

So, after the Karmic Koala, we’ll have Lucid Lynx – a realease I’m very much looking forward to, since it will be LTS (Long Term Support).  I’m still running Intrepid on a few of my machines, and I think I’ll hold off on the upgrade until Lucid comes around.

They’re aiming for ’speed’ with Lucid Lynx – the boot times in Karmic are looking very good, from my brief testing (the only reason I removed it was because my wireless card simply wouldn’t work), so I wonder if they’ll make it to the ten second boot time barrier with Lucid.

Are you looking forward to Lucid?  Have you tested Karmic yet?  If so, what has your experience been like?

Social bookmarking links script

There are dozens of social bookmarking services.  If you tried to promote your site on all of them, you would probably end up spending more time on submitting pages to those sites than you would on producing new content.

Most of those sites are very sensitive to ’spam’, and are hostile towards people who are clearly shilling or promoting their own web sites.  So, if you have a strong community already, why not encourage your users to promote your site for you, rather than doing all the submission work yourself.

One effective way to do this is to place social bookmarking links at the bottom of each article.  These links take the user to the submission page of their favourite social bookmarking site, so all they have to do is enter a quick description, and submit.

One such script is available for download here.

This script was originally designed by Hugo Haas.  I have been using it on my web sites for quite some time, simply updating the social bookmarking links as necessary.

The script is ideal for use on any web site – whether it’s powered by WordPress-MU, Joomla, e107, or any other CMS.  It’s also useful for custom coded sites.  Just extract the folders, drop the Javascript into your pages, and you’re good to go.

Love This Site Awards :: Myth Games – DivineCaroline

“One of my sites has been nominated for a DivineCaroline ‘Love This Site’ award! If you’d like to show your support for the site, please vote Creating an account only takes a moment, and I’d be extremely grateful.”

No pressure or anything, but I think this site deserves to win a Love! This Site Award from DivineCaroline, so please, vote soon! You can also still nominate your favorite sites.

View >>

Hiding the WordPress-MU Dashboard

This post is intended to accompany Chapter 4 of my book, the WordPress-MU 2.7 Beginner’s Guide.

If you have a WordPress or WordPress-MU powered blog, then you’ve probably noticed the dashboard.  It’s the default ‘landing page’ when you log in to your admin panel.  The dashboard provides some useful information, such as the number of posts you’ve made, the number of comments that have been approved and the number that are awaiting moderation, and even a traffic stats graph.

However, the dashboard can take a long time to load.  This isn’t a problem for everyone – if you’re blessed with a nice fast cable or DSL connection it probably isn’t an issue for you.  But not everyone has a good connection.  I’m making this post via mobile broadband because my usual connection has failed. HSDPA isn’t reliable in this area, so I’m on 3G, and even a page as clean as Google’s is taking an irritating length of time to load.

You can remove some of the clutter from the Dashboard by using the ‘Screen Options’, but you will still land on the Dashboard page when you log in to the admin panel.Personally, I don’t mind the dashboard on my main blogs, but I have some niche blogs on various community sites, and my favourite sites are the ones that blur the line between ‘community’ and ‘blog’.  When you go to manage your blog, you are dumped straight on to the Write Post page – after all, the chances are that’s why you’re visiting the admin panel of your blog.

Sending your users straight to the ‘Write Post’ page will most likely be saving them a click or two.  If it turns out they wanted to do something else, then it hasn’t cost them much time.

If you want to hide the dashboard, then one way to do so is to use the ‘Hide Dashboard‘ Plugin created by Bavotasan.  This plugin will allow you to hide the dashboard for users with certain user levels.

The default version of the plugin hides the dashboard for users who are not admin.  If you would like to hide the dashboard for everyone, you can do that with a simple edit:

Just open the plugin file, and remove the following lines of code:

if (current_user_can(‘level_10′)) {

return;

} else {

Also remove the closing ‘}’ above the ‘add_action’ line near the end of the plugin file.

For your convenience, you can download the edited version of the plugin here.

Editing UserThemes Revisited

This post is designed to accompany Chapter 4 of my book, the WordPress-MU 2.7 Beginner’s Guide.

Would you like to allow users to edit their themes on your WordPress-MU blog?  One of the most common requests from users on WordPress-MU sites is the ability to edit the themes that are offered.  Giving users the ability to edit the PHP files that make up a WordPress-MU theme is a little risky, but it is possible to allow users to edit CSS files, which will give them some freedom to customize their site, and is much less risky from the site owner’s point of view.

If you want to allow your users to customize their WordPress-MU themes, the first thing you need is UserThemes Revisited.  You can download the plugin here.

Before you install the plugin, I would recommend making a few changes.  In it’s unedited state, the plugin allows your users to access both PHP and CSS files.  Offering unrestricted access to PHP files means that you are risking the possibility of malicious code being ran on your server.  Let’s block PHP files from being edited:

Open up /wp-admin/theme-editor.php – under the line that begins with $parent_file,  insert the following code:

if((get_option(‘ut_use_user_theme’) != 1) || (get_option(‘ut_enabled’) != 1))

{

wp_die(‘Either you have not been granted permission from the site administrator to access the theme editor OR you do not have a usertheme as your active theme, theme editor will die while a system theme is active.’);

}

ds_redirect_theme_editor();

Look for this line:

$allowed_files = array_merge($themes[$theme]['Stylesheet Files'], $themes[$theme]['Template Files']);

Comment it out, and insert this below:

array_merge($themes[$theme]['Stylesheet Files'],$themes[$theme]['Stylesheet Files']);

Next, open the file /wp-admin/includes/mu.php and comment out this line:

unset( $submenu['themes.php'][10] );

Now it’s safe to upload and install the UserThemes Revisited Plugin.  Your users should see a screen like this one, which allows them to create their own copy of a theme they want to edit.

Once they’ve made a copy of a theme, they can edit the CSS files using the theme editor.

For your convenience, you can download the edited versions of the core files here.

---

Simple Stats – Visitors Online

This post is designed to accompany Chapter 3 of my book, the WordPress-MU 2.7 Beginner’s Guide.

Would you like to show some simple stats in the sidebar of your WordPress-MU site?  Something like the stats in the screenshot below?

Visitor Stats

WordPress-MU makes it easy to pull information about the number of blogs and users that your site has, and display that information on the page, just use something similar to the following code.

<li id="Stats">
<h2>Site Stats</h2>
<ul>
<li><?php
$stats = get_sitestats();
echo "MYSITE.com currently has
<b>".$stats[ 'blogs' ]."
</b> blogs and
<b>".$stats[ 'users' ]."
</b> users."; ?></li>
</ul>

The above code will display the number of blogs that have been registered, and the number of user accounts that have been created.

If you’d like to show the number of visitors currently online, there are a number of ways you can do this.  The easiest is to use a simple visitor tracking script that will keep a count of recently active sessions.

Download this Simple visitor tracking script (right click and save as, then re-name the file to vonline.php).  This is a slightly edited version of a script that I’ve been using on my sites for a couple of years.  I did not write it, if anyone recognizes it, please let me know in the comments so I can give credit to the original author.

Upload the vonline.php file to your site (for simplicity, let’s pretend you put it in the same folder as your sidebar.php file – if you put it somewhere more central, then you will need to change the path used in the include statement to reflect that).

Then add the following line to the code listed above (place it just before the </ul> tag).

<li><?php include('vonline.php') ?></li>

Congratulations, now you have some visitor stats on your WordPress-MU blog home page!

LinkedIn Update – Fake Profile Removed

I’m finally back online, and I’m glad to report that LinkedIn have removed the faked LinkedIn profile that I mentioned last month.  To their credit, they actually removed it within 10 days of me making the support request – I simply didn’t spot the email telling me they’d done so, as I haven’t been able to get online much until recently.

I’m pleased they removed the profile, and I’m relieved that the creator of the fake profile didn’t do anything to damage the reputation of Myth Games, however I’d still love to know who made it, and why.

Win a trip to Alton Towers

Are you and the kids desperate to get out of the house for a while?   Are We Nearly There Yet Mummy? are doing a competition in association with Andrex Puppy Points which could be just the thing for you – assuming you’re from the UK.  This weeks’ “Win It Wednesday” gives you a chance to win a trip for two adults and two children to Alton Towers – along with a stay in a nice 4 star hotel.

The competition is easy to enter, just leave a comment on the post, and if you want an extra entry, follow their blog.

Good luck!

Well, so much for a post a day

Unfortunately, my plans for a post a day throughout this month have been thwarted by good old BT.  Currently, I’m paying for a net connection I can’t use because the phone line it’s attached to no longer exists.

I’m going to be offline for another week.  I’ve picked up a mobile broadband dongle, which I plan to use for checking email and doing a little surfing, but I’m rationing the usage of it, since I don’t want to have to top it up again.

Regular posting will resume in August.  I hope!