Simple hack to make the avatars displayed as part of the comment to link to the site of the comment author.
Requirements: wordpress 2.5+
Installation: Download it, unzip and upload it to your plugins directory and activate it. No configuration is needed.
License: Do with it whatever you want, just don’t blame me…
Wordpress 2.5 has a native support for comment avatars via the gravatar service. When a theme which supports avatar is used, for each comment a small image retrieved from the gravatar service is added to the comment whenever the commentor (based on his e-mail) has a configured image with the service. For commentors which do not have such an image a standard image was displayed.
This week the gravatar guys had announced that they have integrated the functionality of three wordpress plugins, which created a random avatar for commentors without an gravatar, into their service.
The aim of this plugin is to expose this new functionality. You can configure it to use one of three methods to generate random avatar - wavatars (kind of faces), monsters, and geometric shapes.
When using the monster algorithm the comment section might look like this
You can select which random avatar type to use in under the Settings >> Default gravatar type window
Requirements:
Wordpress 2.5
Installation:
Download this file, unzip it, and upload the defaultgravatars directory into the plugins directory of your blog. Now go to the plugin management panel, and activate it. Next go to the Settings >> Default gravatar type window and select the type of random avatar you wish to use.
License: BSD.
The wordpress text widget is wrongly named as it is actually an HTML widget, capable of hosting not only plain text, but also HTML markup.
People who know basic html can easily use it in the text widget, but the advice given to the casual user was “write what you want in the post editor, go to the HTML tab, and copy the HTML to the widget”. For those people this plugin brings the editor right into the text widget.
As the image above indicates, the fancy editor allows you to change the foreground and background color of a text, its size, make text bold, italic, underlined or with a strike through, and lets you insert links and images.
Since the plugin do not make any change in the text you enter, you can turn off the plugin at any point in time without losing your data. After turning the plugin off you will simply see the raw HTML when editing the widget.
Requirements:
Wordpress 2.5
Installation:
Download this file, unzip it, and upload the fancytextwidget directory into the plugins directory of your blog. Now go to the plugin management panel, and activate it.
License: BSD.
If you are using a good non trivial password for your wordpress blog, then it is very likely that at some point in time you will forget it. This is not a real issue as long as you can go to your login page and request that a new password will be generated and sent to your e-mail account, but sometimes you either don’t have access to your mail, or the server is not configured to send mails. If you are in this unfortunate situation you need a method to bypass the normal wordpress password administration procedures.
For pre-2.5 wordpress versions, all you needed is an access to your server’s phpmyadmin, and you could follow the simple instructions at devlounge to reset your password. Since the 2.5 the method in which passwords are being hashed when stored at the database had changed, and the hashing is no longer a simple MD5. More then that, the hashing function is now pluggable (can be overridden by a plugin) which means that there is no more a uniform way to calculate the hash results as was described at the devlounge article.
The following script pass-calc solves this problem by calculating a password hash using the relevant functions from your wordpress installation. All you have to do is download the script, install it at your wordpress root directory, and run it by navigating to {your wordpress url}/calc-pass.php.
The script will ask you to enter the new password, and will generate an hash code for it. This hash code should be stored at your database by following the same instructions described in the devlounge article.
The script intentionally does only the calculation and do not update the database as this can be a security breach.
The reason for having style information on top and javascript at the bottom has nothing to do with wordpress but everything to do with the way browsers are rendering the HTML page and the resulting user experience.
The browser tries to show activity as early as possible, and starts to draw the page almost immediately after the page was loaded. The drawing is based on the styling information available at the the time the element is being drawn. If a style information is read after the drawing process has started, the browser has to find all of the elements which might be affected by the new style and redraw them. The best thing to do is to give the style information a head start, and put it as close to the top of the page.
In terms of the wordpress plugin API it means that style information should be inserted at the wp_hook
function style() {
echo " <style>p {color:red}</style>";
}
add_action('wp_head','style');
Javascript code may alter the structure of the page while it is being loaded (with the document.write function for example), but since the changes can have a bigger impact, the browser actually stop everything it does while a javascript code is being parsed and executed. If this happens while the page content is being rendered, for the user it feels like the page is loading slower. When the javascript is at the bottom of the file, it still takes the same amount of time for the page to load and the rendering to be completed, but since the page is rendered earlier the user feels as if the page was loaded faster, even if the progress indicator on the browser’s status bar had not reached its “complete” status.
In terms of the wordpress plugin API it means that javascript should be inserted at the wp_footer
function js() {
echo " <script>var author="mark";</script>";
}
add_action('wp_footer','js');
Based on information from yslow related articles.
The reason for the bug is that the kubric theme generates list bullets by using a property (”before”) which is part of the CSS 2.1 standard which is not implemented by the IE 6 and IE 7 browsers.
One way to fix this problem is by specifying a different source for the bullet and using the IE conditional comments feature to specify it only for the IE browsers.
This is the code I’m using
<!–[if lte IE 7]>
<style type=”text/css” media=”screen”>
html > body .entry ul {
list-style: circle;
}
#sidebar ul li.page_item {
list-style: circle inside;
}
</style>
<![endif]–>
It seems like many people which are considering the use of wordpress mu for their own purposes are looking for a localized version and don’t find one. This is probably a testament to the huge world wide popularity of wordpress and the free nature of it and its associated products (thems, plugins, localizations) that people have become used to expect that everything which is related to the wordpress brand name will be available and free.
So what are the reasons it is hard to find wordpress mu localizations although there are several wordpress mu based site all over the world?
I am sure that as MU becomes a more mature product, and gain more installers those reasons will go away, but what do you care about the future when you need the translation now, so here an explanation on what is quickest way to translate it by your self.
When search engine display relevant results from your blog, they usually display only the highest ranked page matching the search terms. People coming from the search engine, take a look at the page, and if they do not find what they are looking for, they might leave without ever having any clue that your blog contains more information which is relevant to to what he is searching for.
The original landing sites plugin by the undersigned offered a way to show to the visitor referred by a search engine a list of post which might be of an interest to him. Landingsites++ is a rewrite of that plugin with added administration functionality and some changes in its operation.
How does it work:
When a visitor enters the site, the plugin inspects the URL of the page which had referred him to the site. If the URL contains a parameter which resembles a google search (contains a “q” parameter) then the plugin displays in a configurable place a list of posts which have an exact match with the search terms used by the visitor. If there are more relevant post results then the plugin is configured to show, it can be configured to offer a full internal search for the search term.
Configuration options:
The configuration option are accessible from the admin window under the options/landing sites++/
Deficiencies:
How to manually change the theme to support the plugin functionality
The easiest way is to place the following line
<?php mk_landingsites_startloop(); ?>
wherever you want the list of links to appear.
If you need more control then that, you may use the following functions:
Installation:
Download this file, and upload it to your wordpress plugins directory (or even better create an mk_landingsites directory under the plugins directory and upload the file to there).
In the administration window change the plugin setting and activate it.
License:
Free for use, and modification for personal and not for profit usage.
You may not redistribute the code.
The DieOnSpam anti spam wordpress plugin blocks comments spam based on the language in which the comment is written, with any comment in english being treated by default as spam. For the full rational behind this plugin please read the initial version page.
Version 2.0 provides the following enhancments over the original version:
Intallation instructions:
Save this file, and upload it to your plugins directory. In your blog admin panel, enter the options/dieonspam window, configure the error message to be displayed for comments detected to be spam, and whether english comments without links are to be considered to be spam, and finally activate the plugin.
Upgrading from previous version:
Nothing special to do, just upload the file and check the new option.
The aim of this plugin is to try and give an accurate account of how actual people are using the site, to a count of people which read the site (by using an aggressive method to exclude all of the bots), which article they have read, and from where they had been referred to the site. Logged-in users, which are usually the blog owner and writers, are excluded as well.
The GUI supplies information on which pages were read, with a clear identification of posts, home page, empty and non existing pages, category pages, author pages, and archive pages. For each page there is information the referrer to the page when the information is known. Other information made available is the external referrers to the site (an aggregate of the per page information), the type of bots reading the site, and the type of browsers being used to read the site.
Instead of the traditional way of identifying bots and browsers by their user-agent string, a method which required having a list of all the user-agents in the world which should be updated any time a new bot or browser is introduced, the plugin identifies bots by their behavior. Bots are usually not “interested” in styling information and therefore if a page load session loads a styling CSS file, it is probably a browser otherwise its a bot. This method is not 100% accurate since there are browsers like lynx which are text only browser, but their use is insignificant.
License: Free for personal use, and for non-profit organizations. Redistribution of this software is not allowed.
Installation: Download this zip file. Extract its content, and transfer the “pageviews” directory and its content to the wp-content/plugins directory of your wordpress installation. Now go to the plugins page in your wordpress administration section, and activate the plugin.
Usage: To view the statistics, go to the administration section, select the dashboard menu and the “page views” sub-menu. The default view shows the most popular pages at the last 24 hours, you can change this settings whenever you need to.
To do in the next releases: