Entries Tagged 'Wordpress' ↓

Here’s the deal with WordPress plugins: there are a lot of plugins, and they are not all equally good. Some of them don’t do what you need. More plugins are not better. Sometimes having multiple plugins means that none of them work, or there may be unpredictable results.

When deciding to get a plugin, search on what you need to see what is available. Look at several to see which one seems to fit your needs the best before deciding to download. Read how to use it on the plugin site. After you install and activate it, look for a settings or configuration panel to see if you need to configure it. Then check to see if it is doing what you needed it to do. If you don’t like the plugin, you can deactivate it and try a different one.

Seo, keywords, description, etc.

The most effective SEO comes from having different keywords and description for each post, as well as a unique description and keywords for your homepage. If you have the exact same description and keywords for every page, you won’t get any more mojo from google than if you had none at all.

By the way, your pages will still get indexed if you don’t have these, but it is probably more efficient to have them.

robots.txt file

A robots.txt file tells bots what to index and what not to index. Without a robots.txt file, the bots will generally just index everything. You can exclude certain bots if you know you don’t want them on your site. You can also exclude certain pages from being indexed and links from being followed. If you really have no preferences, the following code will permit all bots and spiders to index your site:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

That’s it.

I was a little worried, shall we say, since I had read of difficulty of fixing broken templates and bizarre lost functionality. I was also concerned, remembering how long it took to get used to the new dashboard style when WordPress upgraded to 2.5, and how little there was to show for it.

This is different. They have redone the admin area to add all kinds of cool jquery javascript functionality. All the menus you need are in the sidebars now. Dropdowns appear with a click. No more multiple menus across the top of the page or waiting for pages to reload so you can get to the menu you need. No more scrolling down below the post to look for the menu you need or forgetting to put tags or categories because, out of sight, out of mind.

It’s just very intuitive. Even the menus that are below the post are all dropdowns.

And they even got rid of that nasty default color scheme.

Just check your posts when you update. I have found that about half of mine had their permalinks reset to the default format, not anything I wanted.

Some screenshots:

First of all, WordPress will not recognize a local file. So you will have to edit the html embed code to put the absolute path to your .swf file, wherever you have put it on your site (or elsewhere). Two different places in the code you will see a reference to “myfilename.swf”. You will have to edit it to make the full url, such as “http://mywebhost.com/swfs/myfilename.swf”.

WordPress has a sucky visual editor. They were supposed to fix it in the 2.5 release, but it’s even worse now than ever. It used to be I could just disable the visual editor, but now it mangles code in the disabled mode, too. And one of the things it totally mangles is the html code you use to embed your flash.

So first, you need to disable the editor. Go to users and select your profile. The top option on the page is the “Visual Editor/Use the visual editor when writing” checkbox. Uncheck it.

Now WordPress is still going to mangle our code, because unlike in regular html, WordPress thinks that line breaks and spaces mean something important. And it thinks they mean something different each time it sees them. If your embed code is full of line breaks and spaces, as SWISHmax 2-exported code is, WordPress is going to look at each line, decide what it really wants to turn it into, and then go ahead and do it. By the time it gets done you will just have some gibberish on the page that doesn’t resemble your embed code.

So what can you do? Open up Notepad. Make sure that Word Wrap is turned off (Format => Word Wrap). Open your html file that SWISHmax 2 put the embed code in. The part you need starts with <object> and ends with </object>. Start with that first <object> tag, hit the “End” key on your keyboard, then press the delete key until you have deleted all the spaces between that and the next. Leave a space between words and phrases within a bracket; leave no spaces between one tag and the next. What you should end up with is your entire embed code on one line. Now just copy and paste it into your blog.

Looking to learn a lot more?

Got some time on your hands and want to learn it inside and out, even though you may be a beginner to coding? Have I found some tutorials for you!

Build your own WordPress theme. These tutorials explain to you what you’re doing as you build your theme line by line. Learn some xhtml, css, and php in the process, as you complete the day-by-day tutorials.