WordPress die-hards everywhere are anxiously awaiting the official release of WordPress 2.7, which should be very soon now. A few days ago, WordPress 2.7 RC 1 was announced, and this Friday, Automattic will roll out the latest code on wordpress.com to help flush out any remaining issues that need to be addressed. I’ve been running the new code here for about a month, and I love how much more professional the backend interface looks now.

There are a lot of changes in this version, and I have run into one plugin that needs modification to run in WP 2.7 (Drain Hole). Some of the less adventurous among you might want to put in the time to set up a test install before upgrading your production sites, just to be sure that your themes and plugins run as expected. But I figure that one malfunctioning plugin out of fourty is a pretty good ratio, so chances are good that your sites will be fine with the upgrade. There is a page on the Codex to track WordPress 2.7 Plugin Compatibility that you can check to find about some specific plugins.

Have you been testing WP 2.7? What do you think — what are the things like like/dislike the most?

I would like to take this opportunity to point out the WordPress project entry on Freshmeat. Freshmeat is a site which tracks the latest versions of various open source projects. By registering on the site, you can subscribe to your favorite projects, and receive updates by email whenever a new release is announced. While you’re there, don’t forget to rate your favorite projects (via either the rating dropdown on the project page, or the project toolbar icon that looks like a speedometer on the main page project listing).

As a followup to my review of the book WordPress for Business Bloggers, I am able to make a sample chapter available to my readers. This is chapter 5, “Content is King.” This chapter shows that while the book does focus on business blogging, much of the advice is applicable to any type of blog.

This section covers suggestions on writing good headlines, post length and frequency, using categories and tags, creating an “About” page, and backing up your site (among other things). This chapter is a pretty good representative sample of the book. It contains general advice and suggestions, along with technical information about how to perform certain functions in WordPress, an example of using a third-party plugin (Configurable Tag Cloud), and information about how to backup and restore your database using phpMyAdmin.

My thanks to Packt Publishing for providing the sample chapter for my readers to check out!

I recently received a copy of the book WordPress for Business Bloggers, by Paul Thewlis, published by Packt Publishing. The preface states, “WordPress for Business Bloggers provides advanced strategies and techniques to take your WordPress business blog from average to extraordinary. Whether you already have a blog, or are still in the planning stages, this book will show you how to use WordPress to create a highly successful blog for your business.” Read on to see how it stacks up.

First of all, as the title and the preface say, this book focuses on business blogging. Also, it assumes that you are already familiar with the basics of setting up a stand-alone WordPress blog. That said, it does guide you through some basic concepts of setting up WordPress, themes, and plugins.

Thewlis begins with an introduction to blogging, and how various companies have used business blogs as a tool to reach out to their customer base. He discusses various goals of a business blog, such as: Increasing Sales, Adding Value, Showing Expertise, and Customer Service, among others. He also discusses what he calls the “WordPress Arsenal” — the features that make WordPress a good platform choice for building your business blog.

Next, the author introduces a fictitious case study for an “expert blog” to be used for examples throughout the book. For this case study, we imagine someone who is an expert on chili peppers. He will establish an “expert blog” to show case his deep knowledge on the subject, and to promote sales of his books, speaking engagements, and sell products.

Along the way, Thewlis discusses design, content, SEO, promotion, monetization, and using analytics to measure traffic, study search keywords, and study where visitors come from. Each of these topics is covered with enough detail to give the reader a good sense of how to apply what they’ve learned to their own site. There are good pointers on various plugins which will help add features to your blog, and information about how to configure them to your needs. Among these are the All In One SEO Pack, Feedburner Feedsmith, NextGEN Gallery, EasyTube, cforms II, Adsense Manager, WP Super Cache, and others. He also shows how to use built in features of WordPress, such as text and RSS widgets. And where appropriate, he even discusses how to add CSS to style added content to match your overall design.

Generally, when I see the words “business” and “blogging” together, especially when it comes to books or other commercial products, my skeptic shields go up. This was the case when I started looking at WordPress for Business Bloggers. But I have to say that Thewlis has done an excellent job. He helps you become familiar with the goals of a business blog, guides you though making a plan, and then shows you how you can set up a WordPress site to accomplish those goals. But even though he focuses on WordPress, the general advice he gives is well thought out, and applicable to just about any web site.

If you need to create a web site to promote your products, services, or personal brand, or if you need to improve an existing site, I highly recommend WordPress for Business Bloggers!

Do you use WordPress? Do you have an iPhone? Or do you just like beta testing cool apps? You could help beta-test the upcoming WordPress for iPhone 1.2 release.

The catch is, you can’t test unreleased apps on an actual iPhone. Instead, you have to download the (free) SDK, and run the code in the iPhone simulator. A lot of work to go through, to be sure, but if you’ve got time on your hands, and like playing with the latest toys, there ya go.

For this week’s WordPress Wednesday installment, let’s look at a few changes I’ve made here on this site in the past few weeks. As mentioned previously, there were several areas that I knew I wanted to go ahead and improve in the short term, as interim measures until I put a whole new theme in place. One of my primary goals here is gain and retain readers. I want to make the site “sticky” by providing several ways for visitors to keep up with my updates, and to spread my links to other potential readers.

Of course, the first part of gaining readership is to provide quality content. I hope that people already think I’m doing that. Beyond that, I need to highlight the various ways that readers can subscribe to my updates, and ways for them to spread the word. Let’s take a look at my first-cut efforts.

The biggest change I’ve made recently was to upgrade my site to WordPress 2.7, which is nearing release as I write this article. How does this help improve the site for my readers? Because doing so allowed me to enable threaded comments. You can now reply to individual comments left by other visitors. This should make it easier to keep track of conversation threads that follow a particular train of thought, and I hope encourage more participation in general.

Right now, my implementation is still crude. I haven’t had time to style the links and such, and it’s not displaying the link text I specified. But I will continue to make improvements as time allows.

I followed Otto’s notes on WordPress 2.7 Comments Enhancements. I took advantage of the new enhanced child theme templates at the same time by making my changes in a local copy of the comments.php template. I also enabled comment pagination and AJAX features, as mentioned in Otto’s article.

Another change I made was to move my feed subscription links closer to the top of my sidebar, and added standard feed icons to help them stand out. I plan to also add a form there for email notifications, but I’ll need to write some custom widget code for that.

A new addition is the Social Homes widget. This sidebar widget displays icons for various other services that I use. Things like my Delicious bookmarks, Twitter updates, Flickr photos, etc. These services help give a wider view of my activities, and ways to see other possible common interests that might not be evident in my blog.

Another new feature is the “Stumble It” button on single post views. StumbleUpon is a pretty good way to discover and share popular web sites and articles. The last few times I’ve posted items here that were more popular than usual, I’ve noticed spikes in visitors referred by StumbleUpon, so giving those users an easy reminder to share my links can’t hurt.

I’m also using a FeedBurner feature to insert links to Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and Delicious at the end of each post. The StumbleUpon link is redundant, so I might take that one out. Again, I haven’t added any styling to these, but I probably will at some point, so that they stand out from the other content.

Lastly, I also have the Increase Sociability plugin installed. This plugin displays a custom greeting to visitors who arrive via links from either Digg or StumbleUpon. Again, this is a good way to encourage those visitors to vote up your links, so that they can gain more exposure.

So, those are some of the changes I’ve made in the last few weeks. Obviously, I’m still not done, but what do you think so far? What would you change?

This is the article that I had originally intended to post last week, before I suffered a self-induced glitch which caused me to lose my work-in-progress. Thanks to my friend Geof Morris who prompted me to double-check my database for saved revisions. As it turns out, there was indeed a revision stored there which did not show up in the list of revisions given in the editor. That copy contained a fair amount of the original post — enough to give me a good head-start on recreating it.

This week, we’re going to take a quick look at some WordPress themes that have caught my eye recently. In particular, these are themes that don’t just look pretty, they have some muscle under the hood that a web developer like me can sink his teeth into. I won’t go into too much detail, but I’ll try to point out what it is about each theme that might make it attractive to a developer using WordPress as a site platform.

Sandbox

I’ve mentioned Sandbox numerous times before, and it is the current underpinning for this site. Unlike the other themes mentioned below, Sandbox is not designed to be pretty out-of-the-box — you have to add your own design work.While it does come with some sample stylesheets which demonstrate placing sidebars on the left, right, or one on either side, it’s up to you to touch it up with graphics, colors, typography, etc.

What Sandbox does is to provide a semantically rich framework to hang your own visual design on. Sandbox’s class generation functions have become the inspiration for many other themes that followed. It also gives you hAtom and hContact microformats, which can be consumed by web tools like the Flock browser or Yahoo’s SearchMonkey.

PrimePress

PrimePress has strong semantic underpinnings, but also pays a lot of attention to the design and typography of the site. One interesting feature is that it lets you create your own custom.css file for overriding its styles. Just put your own rules in there, and the theme will automatically load them up.

This theme supports rotating header images, and there is an article on the site explaining how to modify the theme to support per-page custom header images.

Thematic

Thematic is a highly adaptable, SEO-friendly theme, which was based on Sandbox. It comes with a nice visual style, and some stylesheet variations which give you different sidebar configuations. The sample themes are based on the 960px grid system which is becoming more and more popular. What’s particularly interesting about this theme is that it gives you 13 separate widget containers to work with.

There also some child themes available for Thematic which show off how you can really change the layout of a site with nothing more than a new stylesheet: Monochromatic, Blamatic, Junction

Agregado

This one isn’t as generically useful as the others, but is still quite interesting. Agregado is geared towards highlighting your “lifestream”, an aggregated view of your activity on a variety of social networking sites. It can collect your updates from Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Last.fm, Facebook, and a ton of other sites, displaying them prominently in the sidebar next to your blog posts. And it’s wrapped up in a pretty design, to boot. You might not use it much for client work, but it’s a heck of an interesting starting point for a personal site.

Carrington

Carrington is a new uber theme framework from my buddies at CrowdFavorite. This theme takes the existing flexibility of the WordPress theme system to a new order of magnitude. The normal WordPress theme API lets you customize the look of the site based on view types like “home page”, “single post”, “date archives”, “author archives”, etc.

With Carringon, things break down even further, with definable sub-templates for your post and comment loops, among other things. Plus, it also defines “contexts” which let you use more specific views for certain special circumstances like “single post by Joe Smith”, posts by guest authors, and the like. It also lets you easily use different headers/footers/sidebars depending on category, or for specific pages.

I think Carrington is going to define the next generation of WordPress themes. Particularly when combined with the new template file overrides for child themes, coming in WordPress 2.7 next month.

Just a few

As I said earlier, these are just a few of the themes that I have noticed recently. There are many other excellent themes available which are great starting points for theme customization. Of course, every project is different, and no one theme is going to be absolutely perfect for all possible sites, so you have to look at the features to find the best fit for your purposes.

If you have done custom theme work before, what themes have you used, and why?

See, I had originally planned to pick up from my previous post, and write about progress in working on this site. Except that last week went kaboom, and the first couple of days of this week weren’t all roses and bon-bons, either. So, I had started writing a post about some of the niftier WordPress themes that I’ve seen lately. And I had made pretty good progress on it, too.

Until my fingers accidentally brushed the keyboard in a fatal manner. I somehow managed to hit CMD-A (which does “select all”, followed by a few other random keys. So my post content was selected, then replaced by the other keys I had hit. And in an instant, before I really realized it happened, the WordPress auto-save function kicked in. When I tried to Undo the edit, it was to no avail, it only undid the last couple of keystrokes.

I had made the fatal error of not explicitly saving my post content along the way, so I had no post revisions to fall back on. Only the last auto-save, which contained the less than inspirational content of “kvx”. I didn’t think that “kvx” would be of much interest to my readers, and I don’t have time to recreate my original post right now. So instead, you get this hard-lesson-learned advice to always save your work-in-progress, even when there’s an auto-save function in your app.

As soon as time allows, I will re-write my post about WordPress themes for developers. Until then, please learn from my failure, and click “Save” frequently!

This is the first installment of “WordPress Wednesday”, which I mentioned in my previous post about making changes to my site. This first one is going to be a little long, and I’ve been editing the draft off-and-on for over a week. Future articles will probably be shorter, in general, and focus on a particular subject. But let’s start out by looking at the current state of this website. We’ll examine what is good, what I think needs changing, and I’ll point out some recent changes I’ve already made, and why.

In later installments, I will begin making changes to the site, and we can examine how and why those changes were made. I hope that by following along, you will be able to learn a little something that might help you see ways to improve your own site. Below, I’ll lay out some of the topics that I will be touching on. If there is something in particular you’d like me to address, let me know, and maybe I can add it to the list.

Where we are now

Currently, the base theme for the site is Sandbox, which is a great “bare-bones” template to implement a CSS design around. Sandbox has good SEO (Search Engine Optimization)  features, well-structured semantic HTML, microformat generation, and an excellent system of contextually generated class attributes which let you style your site using CSS based on a wide variety of factors for the page a visitor is currently viewing. Which is a complicated way of saying that it generates lots of classes in the HTML that you can use to do fancy things in your stylesheets.

I’ve also been using several plugins to add minor improvements here and there. Some of the main plugins are:

• Search Everything — extends the default WordPress search to include pages and comments
• Easy Gravatars — my own plugin, adds Gravatars to comments without modifying the theme files
• ShareThis — allows visitors to easily share my links on popular social networking sites like Delicious and Reddit
• Simple Tags — extra tag management features, tag cloud
• Subscribe to Comments — allow visitors to subscribe to post comments via email
• Twitter Tools — display my latest Twitter updates in my sidebar
• Flickr Badge Widget — display random photos from my Flickr photo stream

As you can see, some of these plugins are “decorative” in nature (Easy Gravatars, Twitter Tools, Flickr Badge). Others are to improve the site’s usability to visitors (Search Everything), others are to encourage “stickiness” (Subscribe to Comments, ShareThis). And there are plugins to make things easier for me, the site owner (Simple Tags).

I use many more plugins than those listed above (nearly 40 all together), but that list will give you an idea of some of the more visible ones, and why I use them.

A few personal touches

For some features, I either couldn’t find an existing plugin that worked like I wanted, or the plugins I found were overkill for my purposes. I wanted to avoid modifying template files in the same way that you want to avoid modifying core WordPress files. So one thing I’ve done is to create a special plugin called “My Local Customizations”.

This plugin handles several things that are specific to my site, but not tied down to whatever theme I might be using. For example, it is responsible for adding in the scripts for Google Analytics and other traffic metric services, adds extra metadata to my pages, adds a “related posts” section (aided by the Simple Tags plugin), and it defines a customized “nice_excerpt” function that some of my archive pages use. I’ll probably give more details about nice excerpts in a future article.

Room for improvement

For some time now, I’ve been using the “Rockem Sockem Robots” image for my “branding”. There was no particular reason for choosing it, other than I had taken the photo, and wanted to use it for something. In a long-ago redesign of my site, I stuck it in my header, and began using the robot image as my avatar shortly afterwards. The robot branding is fun and fine for small-scale personal usage, but if I ever want to have personal branding that I could use for business purposes, I would start running up against trademark issues. As a result, I am planning to phase out the robot images, but I haven’t settled on a definite replacement yet.

In the earlier days of my site, I generally assumed that most of my visitors were pretty tech-savvy, and could find ways to keep up-to-date with my site on their own, if they wanted to. However, the blogosphere has changed since then, and I can’t always assume that someone who wishes to subscribe to my site knows how to let their tools find my syndication feeds, or knows to look around for a “subscribe by email” link. I need to do some work to bring these subscription options in front of people’s eyeballs, make them easy to find, so that I can make it easier for visitors to subscribe to, and revisit my site. Expect to see prominent subscription icons appear soon.

I’ve got several stand-alone pages such as “About This Site“, “Contact“, “Donate“, and “Tag Cloud“. The About page has some information about me and this site, but I’m really not very happy with its current state. Likewise with the Contact and Donate pages: they are very basic, sometimes cluttered, and not terribly interesting. I’ll be touching those up somewhere along the way in this series of articles.

Though I’ve created several plugins for WordPress, I haven’t done a lot to promote them, beyond announcing them and making occasional updates. There are several improvements I can make to help improve the visibility of those projects. For one thing, I will move them from posts to pages. Then I will create a special page template which will automatically include download links, a “call to action” for donations, and changelog information. I will also create a consolidated “projects” page which will list all of the projects, to make them easier to find.

My sidebar is a cluttered, badly-organized mess. There are too many links, several of which are probably out of date. Many of the external links should be removed from the sidebar, and moved to a separate “resources” page. The sidebar will be reduced to primarily contain links with more information about myself, this site, and a few key external resources which are important to me (likely in the form of some kind of lifestream). I will also make context-sensitive sidebars, so that different sections will appear depending on whether you are viewing the home page, a single blog post, a plugin project page, archive pages, etc.

My categories are also in a state of disarray. Back before we had real tag support in WordPress, I began using categories as tags. After we got tags in the core system, I began to regret that decision. As I’ve posted before, there are valid reasons to use both categories and tags, for separate organizational purposes. I plan to slim down to a very small set of broad categories, with tags providing supplemental keyword metadata. In order to preserve any existing category URL pointers, this will require me to create some sort of redirection from the old categories to new tag archive URLs. This will likely be done in a custom 404 handler in the new theme, when I reach that stage of my redesign. Once I finish reaping the categories, I plan to give posts in each category a unique visual identity, by means of a standard icon for each one, and possibly a unique color scheme variation. This will make it easier for visitors to pick out the topics that interest them the most when skimming the site.

Currently, I am using a very standard blog format — a header, sidebar, and a main content area containing ten posts. In the long  term, I plan to switch to a format more closely resembling an online magazine. The main content area will call more attention to just the most recent few articles, with just linked headlines to some of the less recent ones. I will probably switch from Sandbox to some other base theme, and modify it  to my needs. More on that later, when I make more decisions about how I want to arrange things.

Most recent changes

Even though change here has been slow, I have made a few improvements and additions recently. For example, I set up my feeds with FeedBurner and installed the FeedSmith plugin. For one thing, this finally gives me some idea about how many RSS/Atom subscribers I have, about 500 — more than I thought, not as many as I would like. I will be doing more with this, such as using FeedBurner’s Email Subscription service so that visitors can receive site updates by email. I also installed the All in One SEO Pack plugin, which makes several good SEO improvements right out of the box. I installed the Increase Sociability plugin, which recognizes when a visitor arrives from Digg or StumbleUpon, and gives them an additional “call to action” to help share my site with others. And I began trying out the Drain Hole plugin (on my post about the XCache object-cache plugin), which is a precursor to the plugin page improvements I mentioned above.

Stay tuned…

So there is my “State of the Blog” update, and a rough plan for how I know I can improve my site. I’m no designer, but I’ll do my best to make the site not only function better, but to look better. Again, I hope that some of you will learn something as I progress, and if you have your own ideas that you think will improve the site, feel free to toss them into the pot!

Starting Real Soon Now, you will start seeing some improvements around here. For one thing, I’m going to start posting more frequently. My current plan is to post at least once per week, with a new series called “WordPress Wednesday”. Every Wednesday, I will be posting something WordPress-related. It might be something short, like a pointer to some other article worth looking at, it might be a long article of my own, it might be an update to one of my plugins, and it may often be notes about changes I’m making to this site. I’m also thinking that I might occasionally have “Fun Friday” and “Media Monday” posts. I had originally considered “Music Monday”, but “media” is more general, and lets me cover movies, television, books, etc. I probably won’t do those every week, but expect to see them from time to time.

Also, as I just mentioned, I’m going to start making site design changes. I will probably continue to work on a completely new theme in the background, for launch in the indefinite future. But in the meantime, I will make improvements to the current theme. I want to give more prominence to features like feed and email subscriptions, my WordPress plugins and other projects, and “lifestream” features like my delicious bookmarks, Flickr photos, and Twitter messages. I will also make more subtle design changes, like tweaks to fonts, text size, colors, etc., as well.

While I will probably continue to post the occasional personal item, but I will focus mostly on more technical, web development topics. I think that these changes will make this site more useful to you, my readers. Of course, I’m open to suggestions, so if you have an idea that you think would improve this site, or a topic that you would like me to write about, contact me, and I’ll put it in my idea box!