TwiBadge is a WordPress plugin, in a widget format that resides on your WordPress blog sidebar. It displays all your Tweets and replies, basically what you see on twitter.com/home. TwiBadge also comes with a follow button that allow any interested visitors to easily add themselves as followers.

The plugin currently supports WordPress 2.7, running on PHP5 only. I sure hope the developer will start catering for the lower versions as not everyone is running 2.7 yet, as far as I know. Looking at how Twitter, the mini-blogging web service has been strongly influencing the social network and blogosphere, any tools and services that can potentially help increase Twitter followers is definitely worth knowing and checking out.

TwiBadge is available for download here.

Inviting other bloggers and writers to become co-authors is one great way to expand one’s blog. Assuming the recruiting of writers part is being taken care of, the next big problem you could be facing is management. Managing multiple authors for a blog is never an easy task. It’s often a challenge to keep co-authors in control, getting them to write quality content on schedule, making sure they did not miss anything before hitting the publish button, etc. Also sometimes you might also want to give different authors different level of accessibility and controls, depending on their performances.

Luckily there are lots of WordPress plugins and resources out there to help owners and administrators to manage co-authors. If you are planning to turn your blog into a multi-author blog, here’s 35 Tips Tricks To Manage and Handle Multi-Author Blogs you might want to check out.

More WordPress related blog post:

• Most Wanted WordPress Tips, Tricks and Hacks – Part I
• Most Wanted WordPress Tips, Tricks and Hacks – Part II
• more..

Full list after jump.

Managing Blog Posts

If you have more than 5 authors on a particular blog, managing the daily published entries can be tedious especially when rules and checklists are not properly laid out. Even if they are, they might not be followed at the times. Dealing with situations like this, some plugins could be your life-savers, or at least making blog postings more efficient.

• Future Posts Calendar

  Adds a simple month-by-month calendar that shows all the months you have future posts for (and the current month no matter what), it highlights the days you have posts for, and as an added bonus if you click a day the Post Timestamp boxes change to that day, month and year. Pretty handy to organize and plan blog post for a multi authors blog. Also comes in form of widget.

  

  Image Credit.

• Pre-Publish Reminder

  A friendly checklist for you and your co-authors before they hit the publish button to place any blog article live on the main page.

  

  Similar plugins: Pre-Publish Reminders by Nick Ohrn, Category Remindr for those who forget inserting categories.

• Draft Notification

  This WordPress plugin automatically emails the admin when a new draft is saved. The email contains the post’s title, the author, and a link. There is no options page currently, because there is really nothing to configure. The plugin now supports the new ‘pending’ status.

  Similar Plugins: Draft Notifier

• Co-Authors

  Allows multiple authors to be associated with a post. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s posts page and feed. Additionally, co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is usual).

  

  Similar Plugins: Multi Authors

• Audit Trail Plugin

  Audit Trail is a plugin to keep track of what is going on inside your blog. It does this by recording certain actions (such as who logged in and when) and storing this information in the form of a log. Not only that but it records the full contents of posts (and pages) and allows you to restore a post to a previous version at any time.

  

• Report Posts

  This allows your user to report any post they find not appropriate. Think of it as seeking users help on quality control. Reported posts then appear in the manage section of the admin console.

• Gravatar plugin For Multiple Authors

  WordPress plugin that provides multi users to show their respective gravatars on their authored posts.

Managing Multi Authors

Sometimes you might want to give some authors a higher access over the others. By that we mean giving them the access to publish content without your moderation or perhaps access to sensitive areas you won’t share with the rest. These following plugins allow you to administrate your fellow authors the way you prefer.

• Role Manager

  Reworked from the previous version of Role Manager Plugin is written by David House and Owen Winkler. This plugin allows you to control roles and access for different authors on your blog.

  

  Similar plugins: Role Scoper

• Draft Control

  The WordPress Plugin "Draft Control" allows users above level 5 to view drafts in a nice row paging system.

• Hide Dashboard

  A pretty self-explanatory plugin. The reason why you would need this is when you have multiple authors on your blog and you want to hide (or customize) the dashboards.

• WP-Group Restriction

  Wp-group-restriction is a WordPress plugin that enhances the current user role feature, by allowing administrators to manage access to content (i.e., pages).

• Adminimize

  The plugin changes the administration backend and gives you the power to assign rights on certain parts. Admins can activate/deactivate every part of the menu and even parts of the submenu.

Authors Profiles

When co-authors write for your blog, the least you can do (if there’s no revenue sharing involved) is to publish a decent author’s profile as token of appreciation. Proper credits on authors are important, it shows how much you appreciate their work. Here are some plugins to place a decent Author’s Profile on blog post, or anywhere in the blog.

• Post Avatar

  Simplifies the process of including a picture when writing posts. Authors simply choose from a predefined list of images in the Write Post page to display an image in a post. A template tag displays the image with The Loop.

• User Photo

  Allows you to associate authors’ profile photos with their account under Your Profile , or any other pages with the use of tags like userphoto_the_author_photo(), userphoto_the_author_thumbnail() etc.

  

• Posts by Author Plugin

  This plugin will show the last X posts by the current author either at the bottom of every post, or where you manually specify in each post. Using the built-in options page, you can choose the number of posts to show, set the header text, choose to show the post dates, select the format of the date, and choose whether or not to include the current post in the list.

• Get Author Profile

  Allows you to access an author’s profile manually outside The Loop, such as for a sidebar intro of the blog owner or to list contributors to your blog.

• Userextra

  This plugin basically does two things. It adds the ability to associate extra information to users, and supports category access control where users are being control on which category they are allow to access and post article to.

  

• Author Exposed

  Simple WordPress plugin that allows your visitors easy and elegant way to see more details about the post author.

  

• List Author Widget

  Display a list of authors in your WordPress Sidebar Widgets linking to the authors.php page.

  

• Blog Matrix WordPress Plugin

  This plugin provides a suite of extended WordPress sidebar, navigation and blog info template tags that can be filtered by author and category.

• Author Comments

  Highlights author’s comments with customizable styles. Requires author to login.

Communication

Communication is perhaps the utmost important factor in any successful multi-author blogs. Not only it promotes sharing of ideas, getting each other mutually inspired, it also help prevent having 2 authors clasing on writing the same (or similar) blog topics.

• Share Notes on Dashboard

  If you blog with multiple persons, you can leave a message for the others. In the plugin file, you can determine, what capabilities a user must have to read the notes, and what capabilities he must have to write/modify them. By default, Authors and higher can write, and every registered user can read.

• Our Todo List

  A plugin allowing authors to get together to share ideas and tasks with a managable section in WordPress administration section.

  

• Send Private Email

  Allowing blog owners to send private emails to authors and users.

  

  Similar plugins: Email Users

• Multi Author Comment Notification

  Plugin that sends comment notification to not only the specific author of the post, but to other authors of the blog as well. Customisable via admin panel.

  

Revenue Sharing

Last but not least – the moolah factor, the thing that drives and motivates (most) co-authors. Here are some plugins to make revenue sharing fair and square, or at least automated.

• Author Advertising

  This plugin allows blog admins to create a revenue sharing program utilising one of the many advertising programs out there i.e Yahoo, Google Adsense, Amazon, Allposters etc. It can also be used as a banner manager, author photo/website widgets.

  Similar plugins: AdSense Revenue Sharing

Further Readings

• WordPress: Roles and Capabilities

  Indepth explanation on how blog owner can control the ability of assigning roles to a user.

• WordPress: Author Templates

  This article explains how to change what happens when the blog viewer is visiting one of your site’s author pages.

• Creating an "About this Author" for Multiple Authors

  How to insert About this Author at the end of every blog post.

  

Here’s an extremtly nice pluign I found mentioned in AdesBlog. This WordPress plugin turns your normal search string from:

http://www.domain.com/?s=search-term

into

http://www.domain.com/search/search-term

This plugin removes the unnecessary "?" and converts spaces (%20) into plus sign "+", making your wordpress search string more readable, and looks good for search engine optimization.

Click here to download this plugin.

via AdesBlog

Situations like these following leave you no choice but to undergo a mass find and replace to get the problem fixed.

• Weird characters in blog entries after upgrade. After performing a wordpress upgrade, some characters will appear as "”", "’", "??"
• Rename keyword1 to keyword2. You want to rename keyword1 in your entire database to keyword2, but opening the 100Mb database file with your text editor is not the smartest idea. After all, you’ll need to download a file as big as100Mb down before you can start changing, upload it before you can preview.
• You discovered a typo. You been using this phrase all the while and just realized it was wrongly spelled and want to search and replace all blog contents containing this typo.
• and so on…

Here are few methods I’ve come to know that allows one to mass find and replace in WordPress blog entries. And as always, please do a full database backup to avoid any data lost.

1. Search and Replace with WordPress Plugin

This plugin provides you with an interface in WP-Admin to search and replace text across all blog post. All you need to do is download, install the plugin and you are ready to go.

Download Search and Replace.

2. MySQL Search and Replace via PhpMyAdmin

This requires you to have access to your PhpMyAdmin. If you are using this method, I’m assuming you are pretty familiar with how PhpMyAdmin works; if you are not DO NOT USE THIS METHOD. Backup your database before proceed.

1. Open up your database in PhpMyAdmin.
2. Most of the time, you’ll want to change the contents so we’ll use "wp_post" table and "post_content" field as an example here. Click on the SQL tab.

   

3. Here’s the quote you should paste into the textarea.

   UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (
   post_content,
   'Item to replace here',
   'Replacement text here');
   	  

   Make sure all text are in between the quotes ”. Double check before you hit the GO button.

So when you hit the GO button, it will go through post_content field under wp_post table, looking for all/any ‘Item to replace here‘ and replace them with ‘Replacement text here‘.

I guess no bloggers like to see their images being hotlink in other spam blogs, forums, etc without their authorization. To fight against these image hotlinking, we can set rules in .htaccess but the drawback here is, it would also block images to appear in feeds. Although its solvable, but writing htaccess codes can look complex for any novice users.

Lim Dul of Bahn-spass wrote a plugin for WordPress that helps prevent image hotlinking as easy as installing and activating. It blocks image hotlinking by displaying this following image by default.

Download Hotlink Protection Plugin for WordPress.

Maxpower came out with a WordPress plug-in that allows you to keep notes inside the wp-admin dashboard. Located at the bottom right, it is only visible to the authorized ones. This is particularly useful for bloggers that like to keep note or reminder of what to write in their future post, or even keeping data for a compilation entry.

Download Dash-Note for WordPress.

Take a look at the bottom of your wordpress blog, you should see 2 hyperlink respectively “previous” and “next“. This 2 hyperlinks keep your neighboring content connected, thus making it easier for readers to navigate through your older entries.

It also helps bots crawl your content better, therefore the more comprehensive these links are they better.

Default WordPress Pagination

Many are not satisfied with just using default “previous” “next”, we want better pagination (page navigation) for our blog. Here’s a good pagination plugin – WP-PageNavi, created by Lester Chan.

WP-PageNavi WordPress Pagination

Examples of Content Pagination

New content comes in and old content will be kept in archives. If you have a lot of articles and you want to maximize the chances for exposure, this is definitely one good way. Here are few sites that are using similar pagination concept.

Digg.com

CSSRemix

Themes.Wordpress

Installing and Using WP-PageNavi Plugin

1. Download WP-PageNavi
2. Upload folder “pagenavi” under wp-contents/plugins
3. Activate the plugin
4. Add the following code into your current theme’s php file.

   <?php if(function_exists('wp_pagenavi')) { wp_pagenavi(); } ?>

5. Configure the settings under WP-Admin -> Options -> PageNavi
6. Click “Update Options” and you are done.

Most will prefer putting pagination at the bottom of the page (footer.php) but I’ve also seen some putting them on the top of the page (header.php), right before the entry title.

Editing Pagination Style and Design

To tweak and play with the pagination style, you edit this file:

/wp-content/plugins/pagenavi/pagenavi-css.css 

If you are are publisher of Nuffnang Ads, here’s a nice WordPress Plugin created by Zeo for your Nuffnang ad unit.

How Nuffnang plugin works?

This plugin basically helps you to insert the Nuffnang ads on the fly without the need to login into Nuffnang.com.my. It is drag-drop ready for widget sidebars, also helps to conveniently configure your Nuffnang rectangular ads after a content post.

Download Nuffnang WordPress Plugin

Landing sites are the immediate page you see after clicking in from a SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Here’s a better definition of Landing Sites.

Landing sites are well known from the eCommerce world – ever experience you searched google for "cheap colgate toothpaste" and found an online reseller, and the site you landed on from google was exactly about colgate toothpaste? What if we grabbed the google search string from the visitor, and made the front page listing a mix of related posts to what he searched for and the newest posts?

Whenever you do a query in any major search engines and you happened to clicked-in to a site with landing sites, you will be greeted with:

• Welcome messages
• Which search engines you’ve come from
• The keyword(s) you’ve searched
• More content related to keyword(s) you’ve searched

Why is landing sites necessary?

Imagine if a Google surfer queried; got it your site and saw an informative landing site that provides he/she more related content, you might just got yourself a regular reader. Landing sites can also prolong the duration a reader stay at your site, thus leading to more impressions and hits. Who knows, it could help some ads CTR too.

Installation

Installing landing sites plugin for WordPress is easy, but you might end up spending some tedious time customizing it to perfectly suit your blog design.

Download landing sites plugin for WordPress (theundersigned.net) | Read installation

You want to remove particular prefix (Dates, for example) in the URL on all your permalinks but you can’t bear the cost as your entries are either indexed by Google, hyperlink-ed by bloggers or bookmarked by other websites.

• (a) http://www.domain.com/blog/2007/01/11/name-of-your-entry/ (long url)
• (b) http://www.domain.com/blog/name-of-your-entry/ (short url)

Solution

Deanlee provides a WordPress Plugin replace your (a) with (b) and will not have any side effects, no losing of visitors.

There is a way to tell the search engines (and browsers) that the page has permenantly moved, and that the old address should be replaced by the new one . It’s called a “301 Redirect”, also known as a Permanent Redirect.When you do this, Search engines will update their indexes quickly and you won’t lose your pagerank.you will continue to receive traffic as though nothing had changed. This works for search engines, bookmarks, and links from other sites.

Implementation

1. Download the Permalinks Migration plugin
2. Upload to /wp-content/plugins/
3. (Admin Panel) Activate the plugin
4. (Admin Panel) Go Options -> PermalinksMigration. Set your old permalinks structure
5. (Admin Panel) Go Options -> Permalinks. Set your new permalinks structure
6. (Admin Panel) Go Options -> Permalinks. Click Update Permalinks Structure
7. Done!

Verifying

1. Go Google.com, type site:yourdomain.com. This list all your blog entries indexed by Google
2. Find a result that used one of the old permalinks.
3. Click it and you should be brought to the new URL with the same content.

Step 1

Look for functions.php (Create one if you don’t have). Insert the following code into it, save and close. We are done with functions.php. Basically what this codes does is – it register the sidebar as dynamic.

<?php
if ( function_exists(‘register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar();
?>

Step 2

Here’s how a typical sidebar.php will look like.

<div id="sidebar">
<h2>Search this site</h2>
<div id="searchdiv">
<form id="searchform" method="get" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>">
<input type="text" name="s" id="s" size="20"/>
<input name="sbutt" type="submit" value="Go" alt="Submit" />
</form>
</div>
<h2><?php _e(‘Archives’); ?></h2>
<ul><?php wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly’); ?></ul>
<h2><?php _e(‘Categories’); ?></h2>
<ul><?php list_cats() ?></ul>
<h2><?php _e(‘Meta’); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_register(); ?>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>">RSS</a></li>
<li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>
</ul>
<?php wp_meta(); ?>
</div>

What you need to do here is to enclose an an-if statement into sidebar.php. The addition of codes are in bold.

<div id="sidebar">
<h2>Search this site</h2>
<div id="searchdiv">
<form id="searchform" method="get" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>">
<input type="text" name="s" id="s" size="20"/>
<input name="sbutt" type="submit" value="Go" alt="Submit" />
</form>
</div>
//
<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’)
|| !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?> // added
//
<h2><?php _e(‘Archives’); ?></h2>
<ul><?php wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly’); ?></ul>
<h2><?php _e(‘Categories’); ?></h2>
<ul><?php list_cats() ?></ul>
<h2><?php _e(‘Meta’); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_register(); ?>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>">RSS</a></li>
<li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>
</ul>
<?php wp_meta(); ?>
//
<?php endif; ?> // added
//
</div>

That’s it. The theme now is now widgetized. You can now do the drag-drops like the widget themes. Here’s a goodWordPress widget resource. Thank you to Daniel who tipped me on this, I’ll share this on your behalf since you are not writing a tech blog :)

If you are still struggling on how to insert PHP Codes inside particular blog post, page or a widget sidebar for execution; the following tutorial is for you.

Executing PHP codes in WordPress Page/Post

Installation

1. Download phpexec.txt
2. Rename phpexec.txt to phpexec.php
3. Upload to /wp-content/plugins/ directory
4. Activate the plug-in from WordPress administration menu

Usage

Anywhere in your post/pages where you want to execute a PHP Codes, insert <phpcode> before your php codes and </phpcode> your php codes.

<phpcode>
	<?php
		echo "Current date and time: ";
		echo date("l dS of F Y h:i:s A");
	?>
</phpcode>

Security

If you are running a blog with multiple users, you need to determine who can run this plug-in. Alter the settings in your Administration Menu. Options -> PHPExec

Executing PHP codes in WordPress widget sidebar

Installation

1. Download the plugin.
2. Rename execphp.txt to execphp.php
3. Upload to /wp-content/plugins/ directory
4. Activate the plug-in from WordPress administration menu

Usage

This plug-in work like a normal text widget except that it allows execution of PHP Codes. You can create up to 9 instances of this widget.