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Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

WordPress offers a fascinatingly wide range of options: thanks to the power and the creativity of the open source community, the world’s most popular CMS has developed from a “blog-only” product into a multifaceted platform. Hundreds of plugins are waiting to cater almost every web publisher’s needs. These days, two new plugins take WordPress to the next level by integrated elaborate social network features. BuddyPress is now available at version 1.2 which plays along well with standard WP-installations; the previous version required WP multiuser edition. And then there’s Mingle, a new brilliant extension by Blair Williams, author of the (genius!) PrettyLink plugin.

Even though both plugins offer similar functionalities, they take a completely different approach at turning WordPress into a social network. While BuddyPress aims at running a stand-alone social network site, Mingle extends the community capabilities of nay existing blog. I installed it here on datadirt yesterday. Curious for a test-drive? Just click the new link Profile in the main menu! In the following posting I’ll explain why extending a blog with social network features is generally a smart idea. Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress 2.9 is still quite fresh, but today the team released a new version including some minor bug fixes. WordPress 2.9.1 fixes scheduling-errors which occurred on some hosts. The update can either be triggered via the admin or you can upload the files via ftp, no database update necessary this time.

But there’s another plugin-related issue: since the upgrade to 2.9, many WordPress bloggers miss Simple Tags: the tag management plugin just stopped to work, but worry not: it’s just a hard-coded version check, a simple hack makes the plugin work again. Read the rest of this entry »

This posting is also available in German.

Just before I took off to Andalusia I got mail from Mihaela, asking if I wanted to attend the World Blogging Forum 2009 in Romania as a VIP guest. Yes of course! Flight and hotel room are already booked and I’m looking forward to a conference a lot! The guest- and speaker-list contains a lot of popular bloggers who I’m glad to meet face to face, plus it’s the first time I’m going to visit Bucharest. The organizers have invited the most successful bloggers from 30 countries to Romania to discuss the “ideas for a better digital world”:

The most influential bloggers in the world: The event brings together some of the most influential persons in the online media all around the world, in conferences and workshops aiming to establish clear parameters of the development of the online media.

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Yesterday the WordPress Team released the official roadmap version 2.8, named after Jazz musician Chet Baker. Thanks to the update engine most webmasters should be able to do the update via CMS – but of course it’s always a good idea to start with a complete Backups. The Highlights of the new version are the improved widget- and template-interfaces, plus there’s syntax highlighting for editing templates via the backend. Read the rest of this entry »

Usually, I don’t get too excited about new ad networks – but since Contenture has been developed by the team behind Clicky, I’m quite sure that this service deserves a closer look. The idea is simple: by paying a monthly flat fee to Contenture, users help webmaster make their sites sustainable. Via a JavaScript-Snippet, the Contenture networks measures users’ visits to participating sites and spreads the money accordingly. Read the rest of this entry »

Widget-enabled themes are a good thing, Martha Stewart would probably say – and rightfully so. Configuring one’s sidebar directly via CMS and drag-and-drop is doubtlessly a nifty feature we bloggers don’t want to miss. To kick things up a notch, WordPress allows for an infinite number of different Sidebars. This comes in very handy for putting different sidebar contents on the blog homepage, the single postings and the static pages. But most bloggers who start experimenting with multiple sidebars experience a major draw-back: most plugins can only be used in one sidebar exclusively. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks for your patience, I finally found time yesterday to finish my new blog-template. To me, this is much more than just some graphical brush-up: my aim was to closely integrate my “non-datadirt” social web activities, to unclutter the design and to build a lean, xhmtl-valid and fast-loading template suitable for videos as well as for longer essays. The result you’re browsing now is far from finished, there are still some details which await tweaking. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not too big a fan of mixing personal twitter accounts with automated postings, so I set up a dedicated twitter account for this task. If you prefer to receive datadirt postings via tweet, just follow @datadirtrss. Of course I’ll continue to use my personal acccount @datadirt for manual updates, while the frog-bot will send out automated updates via the new account. Read the rest of this entry »

One week ago, Automattic launched a brand-new WordPress-centered video site: WordPress.tv features various screen casts, presentations and tutorial videos on the world’s leading blog content management system. The available clips are bound to water the mouths of beginners and pros, as they range from basic explanations like “How to post a blog entry” to all the advanced presentations held during last year’s WordCamp. Read the rest of this entry »

Main bloggerilla topic of the week: the new WordPress aka 2.7. Matt and his team change a lot in the backend – it’s like Obama said: “Change, we can do it!” What O did not mention though was the fact that change makes most folks rather uncomfortable. In that respect, it’s more like TLC sang-rapped: “Don’t go chasin’ waterfalls / listen to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.” In other words, I’ve heard a lot of user complaining about a so-called uglification of the CMS. My five cents: so far I’ve only updated half of my blogs, and I really dig the new look and all the new features. Read the rest of this entry »

Another week bites the dust: and much ado is going on about something that hardly anybody understands: the global financial crisis is spilling over from bankruptcy-filing banks to the car industry and plenty other businesses. Neither Obama nor the new Austrian government (if this comparison sounds strange to you: I live in Austria) will have an easy job: and while the EU is planning coordinated measures, I keep asking myself one question that nobody could answer so far: The governments deem giving cheap credits to banks appropriate. Why don’t they hand out those credits – on the same terms – directly to needy companies? Read the rest of this entry »