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 accessibilities 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.

  

So as a sequel, here’s another 30+ Wordpress tricks and hack. If you are wondering how some bloggers add those cool functions, mods or displays on their Wordpress blog, be sure to run through our list. You might just find the solution in here.

More Wordpress related articles we’ve previously written:

• Most Wanted Wordpress tricks and hacks
• 49 Most downloaded Wordpress themes
• Wordpress themes for Video Blogging
• 16 Wordpress premium themes that don’t suck
• 20 Desktop blogging clients
• You’ve Installed Wordpress, So What’s Next?

Full list after jump.

1. Apple Flashy Accordion Sidebar

   Use the Accordion plugin in jQuery UI to create an Apple-alike Wordpress sidebar.

   

2. Adding Tabs to Sidebar

   Creating tabs on Wordpress sidebar with Yahoo! UI Library

   

3. Sidebar With Dynamic Contents

   Every blog visitor has different habits, but many tend to ignore sidebars because they are always the same. Mixing things up and keeping the contents of the sidebar relevant to the post can make them a bit more likely to be noticed.

4. Allow Users To Submit Blog Post

   This plugin allows you to add highly customisable forms to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (also configurable) to submit posts.

   

5. Paginated Comments

   Give you the ability to break your comments into a number of search engine optimized pages.

   

6. Image Caption

   Extracts the title or alt attribute from images within your blog post and generates a neat caption directly underneath those images. Supports custom CSS styling for captions.

   

7. Random Redirect

   Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.

8. Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress

   Easily integrates the Google Syntax Highlighter by Alex Gorbatchev into WordPress. Image below show how codes look like in Wordpress with Google Syntax Highlighter.

   

9. Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR) for Wordpress

   FLIR allows you to convert text and title into images (better display quality) on the fly without hassle. Now this FLIR Wordpress plugin make things even easier for bloggers.

10. del.icio.us for WordPress

    del.icio.us for WordPress displays your latest del.icio.us bookmarks in your WordPress blog.

11. Create Your Own PopURLs Within Wordpress

    Like the way how PopURL display contents? Now you can create similar inside Wordpress.

    

12. Exclude certain categories from being displayed

    2 ways to hide posts from certain categories to be displayed on the blog. You can either put this code inside the loop

    <?php
    if ( have_posts() ) : query_posts($query_string .'&cat=-1,-2'); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
    ?>
        

    or you can use Advanced Category Excluder.

13. Another Date Image Hack
    

14. Create a calendar view of your article post date.

    

15. Styling Individual Posts

    Styling one post a little different from the rest with the use of the_ID.

16. How To Avoid Duplicate Posts

    Duplicated contents are pretty bad and they somehow affects how search engine weights your site. Here’s how you can avoid getting duplicated contents on your blog.

17. Wordpress ‘Page Redirect‘ template

    This template lets you specify a single URL as the page content, then as the page loads, the template automatically redirects the page to this new location, and that includes category or any tag pages you specify.

18. Delicious Save Buttons

    Add badges that encourage people to bookmark your website or blog

19. DesignFloat Buttons, Website & Blog Integration

    Give your website or blog visitors the option to submit your stories to Design Float and "Float" them

    

    <script type="text/javascript">submit_url = 'Your URL Here';</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.designfloat.com/evb/button.php"></script>
        

    

    <script type="text/javascript">submit_url = 'Your URL Here';</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.designfloat.com/evb2/button.php"></script>
        

    Read here for more.

20. StumbleUpon Buttons & Tools

    Add a Stumble It! button to your site to make it easy for your visitors to submit your content to StumbleUpon.

    

21. Dynamic Highlight Menu

    This allows you to theme/style and control the currently selected menu tab in CSS by adding a class="current" on it.

    <ul id="nav">
      <li<?php if ( is_home() || is_category() || is_archive() || is_search() || is_single() || is_date() ) { echo ' class="current"'; } ?>><a href="#">Gallery</a></li>
      <li<?php if ( is_page('about') ) { echo ' class="current"'; } ?>><a href="#">About</a></li>
      <li<?php if ( is_page('submit') ) { echo ' class="current"'; } ?>><a href="#">Submit</a></li>
    </ul>    

    Line 2:

    If Home, or Category, or Archive, or Search or Single page is selected, class="current" will be included in <li>

    Line 3,4:

    If Page with page slug about or submit is highlighted, class="current" is added.

    If you are looking at putting categories as menu tabs, here’s how to make the menu dynamic:

    <ul id="nav">
      <li<?php if ( is_category('css') ) { echo ' class="current"'; } ?>><a href="#">CSS</a></li>
      <li<?php if ( is_category(showcase) ) { echo ' class="current"'; } ?>><a href="#">Showcase</a></li>
    </ul>

    Line 2,3

    If category with category slug of css or showcase, class="current" is added.

22. DZone Buttons

    Let your website’s users vote for our links on DZone without leaving your site.

    

    <script type="text/javascript">var dzone_url = '[url]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_title = '[title]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_blurb = '[description]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_style = '1';</script><script language="javascript" src="http://widgets.dzone.com/widgets/zoneit.js"></script>
        

    

    <script type="text/javascript">var dzone_url = '[url]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_title = '[title]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_blurb = '[description]';</script><script type="text/javascript">var dzone_style = '2';</script><script language="javascript" src="http://widgets.dzone.com/widgets/zoneit.js"></script>
        

    More on DZone Buttons, Tools and Widgets

23. Reddit Buttons

    Similar to the rest, place a reddit button on your site to promote blog post.

    

    <script type='text/javascript'>reddit_url='[URL]'</script><script type='text/javascript'>reddit_title='[TITLE]'</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.reddit.com/button.js?t=1"></script>

    

    <script type='text/javascript'>reddit_url='[URL]'</script><script type='text/javascript'>reddit_title='[TITLE]'</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.reddit.com/button.js?t=2"></script>

    

    <script type='text/javascript'>reddit_url='[URL]'</script><script type='text/javascript'>reddit_title='[TITLE]'</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.reddit.com/button.js?t=3"></script>

    Source.

24. Archive that works

    Noura of Noupe.com shows various ways you can style your Wordpress Archive page. Techniques and guides includes:

    • Listing all Posts
    • Display monthly or Yearly Archive
    • Archives Ordered By Category

    Read this entry.

25. Add Breadcrumbs to Your WordPress Blog

    Breadcrumb trails are a good supplementary navigation system that aid in site usability. This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.

    

26. Landing Sites / Pages

    When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, they are definitely looking for something specific – often they just roughly check the page they land on and then closes the window if what they are looking for isn’t there. Why not help them by showing them related posts to their search on your blog?

27. WordPress Exploit Scanner

    This WordPress plugin searches the files on your site for a few known strings sometimes used by hackers, and lists them with code fragments taken from the files. It also makes a few checks of the database, looking at the active_plugins blog option, the comments table, and the posts table.

28. Buy Me a Beer

    Allows your readers to donate money to you via PayPal. Not something new, but worth knowing.

    

29. Display Feedburner Subscriber Count In Text

    How to display feedburner subscriber count in text instead of using chiklets.

    

30. Notifixious – Notify Users via IM

    This plugin allows you to notify your readers on their Instant Messaging (AIM, MSN, GTalk, ICQ…), Email or SMS when you publish new posts.

31. Installing Xampp and WordPress

    Guide to setup Xampp and run Wordpress locally on your machine. You can also install plugins, upgrade to the latest nightly and virtually anything else confident in the knowledge that if it goes wrong, there is no impact on your actual site.

    

32. Create an Ajax-based Auto-completing Search Field

    Why not helping your visitors to find what they’re looking for on your blog, by using a cool auto-completion on your search field?

    

More Resources

• WordPress Theme Hacks | Web Designer Wall
• 4 Simple Ways To Speed Up WordPress | WPCandy
• Reset your lost WordPress administrator password | village-idiot

  

• Optimize Your WordPress Title | hackwordpress.com
• Huge Compilation of WordPress Code | hackwordpress.com
• Backing Up WordPress | Lorelle
• Buttons, Bows and Badges for Your Blog | Lorelle
• Optimizing Wordpress and LAMP to survive the Digg effect | vallery.net
• 5 Golden Tips For WordPress Performance Optimization | taragana

I believe you’ve seen websites and blogs that uses the text-based Feedburner subscriber count instead of the chicklet. I hope you are not getting the idea the these guys update their feed count manually. Instead, it can be done easily with scripts, and the reason why you want to do is – it gives you total flexibility in terms of design, styling and display.

Step 1

Copy paste the following code into your template, replace feedburner-id with your Feedbuner username. This script will grab you the feed count in numbers.

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id";

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);

//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);

//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
//end get cool feedburner count

Step 2

Paste this anywhere you want and it’ll display a Feedburner subscriber count in text.

echo $fb;

To style it nicely with your website or blog’s theme, add <p> or <div> and tweak the CSS accordingly.

via 45n5

You’ve heard how good Wordpress is in terms of expandability, customization and you decided to give it a try. Installing a basic copy of Wordpress won’t take too long; but if you are looking for more stability, traffics, search engine optimization, etc, here’s few of my recommendation – The things you should do after installing Wordpress.

1. Get WordPress.com API Key, Activate Akismet

   

   Where: Settings -> Akismet Configuration

   In short, Akismet is a plugin (comes with Wordpress) that will intelligently get rid of all the unnecessary comment and trackback spams. In order for Akismet to work, you’ll need a Wordpress.com API Key. The key is free, but you’ll need to request for one and apply it on the Akismet plugin.

   Sign up with Wordpress, get Akismet Key.

2. Implement Permalinks

   

   Where: Settings -> Permalinks

   Referring to the image above, ‘Default’ is each how your blog post URL will look like. The ‘?=’ and numeric blog post ID does not make any sense to the search engine, so it’s better to change them to something more readable. Personally I’ll suggest Custom Structure and insert ‘/%postname%/‘. Here’s how your blog post URL will look like:

   http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/2008/06/25/sample-post/

3. Burn your feed with Feedburner

   

   Feedburner combines all different type of feeds into one, so your subscribers can subscribe to one regardless of it’s type. Feedburner also comes with a chiklet, allowing you to show off subscribers figures as well as promote subscription.

   Sign up with Feedburner

4. Read/Subscribe to WLTC

   

   weblogtoolscollection.com (WLTC) is where you should keep an eye on if you are particular about your Wordpress blog. These guys have the latest updates in terms of themes, plugins, tips and Wordpress News. There’s perhaps no where better to get everything about Wordpress on one website.

   Visit WLTC | Subscribe WLTC

5. Plugin – Related Content

   

   Related content plugin plays important role in helping you as the blogger, recommending what your readers should also be reading apart of the article they are on. You probably don’t need it now, but it’ll comes in handy when there’s more blog post. A plugin worth mention.

   Download Wordpress Related Content plugin

6. Plugin – Google XML Sitemap

   This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

   Download Google XML Sitemap

7. Add blog to Google Webmasters Tool

   Google Webmasters is a free Google service that allows you to:

   • Manage, view site statistics
   • Bot crawling activity
   • Diagnose site
   • Submit Sitemap
   • Monitor Google indexing

   In short, it allows you to manage the ‘health’ of your blog.

   Go to Google Webmaster Tool

8. Add About/Contact Page

   This allow your readers to understand more about who’s behind the writing. It helps increase trust worthy of a site.

You see those yellow stripe ad on the header of some blogs/websites? We’ve mentioned how you can get one yourself previously in one of our article – 40+ Most Wanted Wordpress Tricks and Hacks. However, that one we mentioned, you are required to pay to get rid of the author’s message. If you are not ready to pay but want a clean yellow stripe with nothing but your text ad, it’s still possible.

Check out these 2 tutorial links, little HTML/CSS knowledge required.

• How to create your own stripe-ad
• Create Your Own Stripe Ad For Your Blog Or Website

Have you ever came across a Wordpress blog, saw something you liked, and questions like ‘how they did that‘, ‘is that a plugin or hack?‘, ‘where can I get those cool mods‘ begin to pop? Well, it’s really pretty normal because most of us did the same thing. For this article we’ve spent time with some 14 Wordpress bloggers, finding out what kinda hacks and plugins they are really looking for to enhance their blog in any aspect. Here’s our outcome, 40+ most wanted Wordpress tips and hacks, including those you don’t even knew the keywords to search for.

While you are at it, here’s few more Wordpress related articles we’ve previously written:

• 49 Most downloaded Wordpress themes
• Wordpress themes for Video Blogging
• 20 Desktop blogging clients
• 16 Wordpress premium themes that don’t suck

1. Display categories in horizontal Drop-Down menu

   Instead of using your categories in sidebar, you can put them up on the navigation bar, dropping down the sub categories in second-level drop down.

   

2. Add Gravatar for post author

   How about adding Gravatar to your post titles to highlight the comment author?

   

3. Using custom page as homepage

   Instead of showing recent entries as main page on your blog, customize it!

   

4. Add author bio on every blog post

   For multi-authored blogs, adding the bio info of each author at the bottom of their respective posts is a good way to give props to the author as well as providing information to the readers as to who that person is without having to refer to an about me page.

   

5. Display recent post from specific category

   Control recent post of any categories you want to display.

6. Highlight author’s comments

   This helps differenciate the author’s comments away from the rest. Useful for commentators to spot which are comments made by the author.

   

7. Create thumbnails for each blog post and displays them

   How to create thumbnails for each blog post, use them anywhere you want, make your post more interesting.

   

8. Create and show categories image

   How to add some simple PHP code to your Wordpress template and make linked images appear instead of text for your categories in posts.

9. Format images for feed readers

   Get your blog content to display properly, even in feeds.

   

10. Create really cool Wordpress date button

    Display your blot post’s date in the form of button.

    

11. Hiding Advertisements For Single Posts

    Quick and easy way to hide advertisements for any particular post by making some minor changes to your theme.

12. Creating a dynamic sticky

    There are some news you just want them to stay on top.

13. Customize Error 404 page

    Create a new Error 404 page of your own.

14. Protect CSS Mods for ANY WordPress Theme

    Implementing a custom stylesheet that simply overrides the styles defined in the theme’s original stylesheet

15. Make your blog Digg proof

    Tweaks and settings to add to your blog to take the Digg effect.

16. Using Wordpress as Membership Directory

    Create a moderated membership directory that showcases your member’s information.

    

17. 4 Ways to speed up your wordpress blog

    Some quick tips on how to speed up your self-hosted WordPress site.

18. Create mobile version of your blog

    Create a mobile version of the website within clicks with Mofuse.

    

19. Open links in new windows (by default)

    Title’s pretty self-explainatory, make all links open in new window.

20. Turn Wordpress blog into CMS (Content Management System)

    Your Wordpress blog don’t have to look like a typical blog display. It can be something more fun.

    

21. WordPress Thumbnail Size Limit Hack

    Don’t like the default thumbnail JPEG quality? Change it.

22. Automatically post Del.icio.us daily link to Wordpress

    Get more daily post on blog, from del.icio.us

    

23. Create a peel away effect on blog

    Very effective way to market products and bring more attention to pages you want visitors to focus.

    

24. Seperate Comments from Trackbacks/Pingbacks

    Get a clear view on what are comments, what’s not.

    

25. Blog Alone or Together with Writely

    Writely is one of my favorte Web 2.0 apps. It’s a full-fledged web-based word processor that you can access from anywhere. Think of it as Microsoft Word for the Web.

    

26. Embed Google Ad in first wordpress post

    The leading SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sites will tell you that placing an ad after the first post in your blog’s home page is particularly effective.

27. Creating multiple single posts for different categories

    Fast and simple way to assign a specific stylesheet for only one category of blog posts in a WordPress blog.

28. Using WordPress Custom Fields

    You can do pretty much anything you want with custom fields. Your imagination is your limit.

29. Creating an Archive Index

    Create single page with links to all your archived entries, arranged just so to form the main gateway into your blog’s past.

30. Wicked WordPress Archives in One Easy Step

    Provide specialized archive views that place a premium on scannability.

31. Place a login form in the sidebar

    Put a login on the front page of your Wordpress blog.

    

32. Protect Wordpress post against hot-linking

    Plugin for Wordpress that helps prevent image hotlinking as easy as installing and activating it.

    

33. Moving a Static HTML Site to WordPress

    how you retain the old URLs after moving static HTML to Wordpress.

34. Build a Techmeme River of News Clone

    Building something similar to Techmeme with Wordpress.

    

35. Custom login page

    This is more significant for multi author blogs, or sites you have set up for clients.

    

36. How to Put Your Best Content Forward

    Don’t let your best content get lost in the archives.

37. Display Twitter messages in Wordpress

    Customize the Twitter message display on your Wordpress blog.

    

38. Add Stripe Ad to boost response / earnings

    A new non-obtrusive way of displaying a single line of advertising message, a special note or other information right at the top of your blog

    

39. How to Display Facebook Statuses on Wordpress Blog

    Put your Facebook statuses directly on your wordpress blog. Works for both self-host Wordpress and Wordpress.com bloggers.

    

40. Post text and image count

    Counts and display number of words and images (leaving the default Wordpress smilies out)

41. Place content only in RSS Feed

    Ever wonder how some bloggers control some content to be shown only in RSS feed but not the blog. Here’s the plugin to do that – RSS Footer.

    

Read also: More Wordpress Related Articles

If you want to show your Facebook Statuses and you are hosting on a Wordpress.com blog that restricts you from installing plugins, try this. The following method make use of Facebook status feed and Wordpress RSS widget. It will also work for self-host Wordpress blogs, but you guys who self-host can use better plugins for that.

Step 1

Login into Facebook. Under Profile, look for Mini Feed column, click on See All.

Step 2

Under Mini Feed, click on ‘Status Stories‘ on the right column. Scroll all the way to the bottom, look for ‘My Status‘

Step 3

Copy the link of My Status, and we are about to use this in Wordpress blog. Your link will look something like the following:

Step 4 (Wordpress)

Under Wordpress admin, Navigate to Design -> Widget. Look for RSS Widget, add it to your side bar.

Step 5

Paste the copied URL inside, give it a name, save and your Facebook statuses (or status depends on how many you display) will now appear on your Wordpress blog.

Most wordpress themes out there (by default) combine both comments and trackbacks / pingbacks together and display under the same list. But why bother separating them? Simply to make things looks more organize so your blog commenters have a clearer picture what are the comments, what’s not. Doing it is not hard, but you need toe be using independent Wordpress blog (not the wordpress.com), provided with access to change comments.php. Prepare your favorite editor, and here we go.

You will be adding and editing you comments.php. So do a backup of that file before you start amending it.

Step 1

Look for:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

Paste after:

<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
<?php if($comment_type == 'comment') { ?>

Step 2

Look for:

<?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

Paste before:

<?php } else { $trackback = true; } /* End of is_comment statement */ ?>

Step 3

Look for:

<?php else : // this is displayed if there are no comments so far ?>

Paste before:

<?php if ($trackback == true) { ?>
  <h3>Trackbacks</h3>
  <ol>
  <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
  <?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
  <?php if($comment_type != 'comment') { ?>
  <li><?php comment_author_link() ?></li>
  <?php } ?>
  <?php endforeach; ?>
  </ol>
<?php } ?>

That’s it. Update your blog and you’ll notice Trackbacks have been pulled out from comments and displayed underneath. If you want to display Trackbacks before comments. the easiest way is adding <div> to both and control the style via CSS. Have fun.

Read also: 40+ Most Wanted Wordpress Tricks and Hacks

• If you try to back up your database, you’ll be thrown with this error message – wp_comments is marked as crashed and should be repaired when using LOCK TABLES
• Recent comments widget appears blank.
• Top commenter widget appears blank.
• Comment posted will not be written into DB, therefore will not be shown.
• Comments section in WP Admin appears to have zero records.

After searching the Internet high and low in hoping to find similar cases to help me identify and fix the problem, I end up with nothing. So I tried it my way and luckily enough, I managed to solved it. I thought writing the entry out will not only help those who suffered the same, also keep myself reminded just in case I hit on this error again in the future.

The fix / Solution

To fix this, you must have access to the wordpress database, either via PhpMyAdmin or Secure Shell (SSH). Most shared hosting account comes with phpMyAdmin, but either option you should be extremely careful because you dealing with the database. Any wrong move will cause more data lost.

PhpMyAdmin

In PhpMyadmin, select the Wordpress database and look for the error table. In my case, the ‘wp_comments‘ table. Check it, and scroll all the way down and look for ‘With selected‘ drop-down box. Select Repair table and things should be alright.

Secure Shell

1. Login to your shell
2. Enter ‘mysql -u username -p database_name‘ to access databases
3. Enter ’show databases;’ to view all databases
4. Enter ‘use database_name;‘ to engage the database
5. Enter ‘show tables;‘ to show all tables within the database
6. Enter ‘check table wordpress_table_name‘ to verify this is the corrupted table
7. Fix it with ‘repair table wordpress_table_name‘
8. Enter ‘check table wordpress_table_name‘ again to make sure it’s fixed

Step 3 and 5 are not necessary if you are familiar with your databases and tables. Hope this helps.

AntiLeech is the Wordpress plugin you are looking for. It helps prevents splogger bots form stealing your contents. Here’s how it works – AntiLeech dont block these scrappers away, instead it turns the table around by giving them useless content with a link back to your site (as well as plugin author’s site).

AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you’ve turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.

So when the splogs sends a link-back / trackback ping to you, you’ll notice it under the Wordpress comments section. You can then grab the IP and add it to Block list under AntiLeech in your Wordpress.

Download AntiLeech for Wordpress.

The new Wordpress 2.5 is great, especially it’s new approached used to handle images upload. However some Wordpress users might encounter problems uploading images, getting stucked with error messages similar to the following:

• HTTP error
• An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later.

If you fail to upload images with the error messages above, here’s a fix for it. Prepare your favorite text editor, FTP program (or shell terminal) and following these following steps:

Step 1

Using FTP, or shell terminal navigate to the root of your WP folders. Download .htaccess and open it with text editor. If there isnt any .htaccess file, create one.

Step 2

Insert the following script into .htaccess.

    <IfModule mod_security.c>
    <Files async-upload.php>
    SecFilterEngine Off
    SecFilterScanPOST Off
    </Files>
    </IfModule>

If there’s existing script inside your .htaccess, just put the code above below it.

Step 3

Save, and upload to replace your current .htaccess. Go to Wordpress admin, you should be able to upload your image now.

Wanna know what’s in store for Wordpress 2.5? You got it! Head over to wp.chrisjohnston.orgbecause there is a Wordpress 2.5 installed, up and running. You can even login to the wp-admin (username:admin, password:demo) and check out the new stuff that will comes with Wordpress 2.5. Demo site will be refreshed every hour.

Getting bored of your blue color Wordpress login page? Here’s something for a change. You can now replace the blue color wordpress login page, give it a fresh new look with one of these colorful skins; comes in purple, cyan, green, red, orange and pink.

Download these skins now.

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

Sometimes situations like the following leave you no choice but to undergo a find and replace to fix the problem.

• Weird characters in blog entries after upgrade. After performing a wordpress upgrade, some characters will appear as "” Â", "’", "??"
• 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.
• More?

Here’s few methods I’ve been using to mass find and replace in Wordpress blog entries. And like always, please backup any files that you intent to change to avoid data lose.

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.

MySQL Search and Replace with 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‘.

Yesterday I was helping a reader solving his Wordpress error, so I thought I might as well write an entry, just in case we all encounter this in the future. If you ever run across this error (or warning) in your Wordpress with the message saying:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at //home/htdocs/wordpress/wp-config.php:1) in /home/htdocs/wordpress/wp-login.php on line 12

or something similar, chances are you have messed up your wp-config.php leaving some unnecessary spaces inside.

Solution

1. Download your wp-config.php down via FTP (Edit directly if you have SSH access)
2. Open wp-config with your favourite editor, and remove all spaces before "<?php" and after "?>"

   

   

3. Upload and replace.

You are adviced to make backup of any files you edited.

Here’s a quick heads up for those of you who encounter this error when you upgrade your wordpress (especially for those who upgrade to Wordpress 2.3.1). If you see this error after replacing the old wordpress files with the new ones:

Call to undefined function: _make_cat_compat() in /home/hongkiat/public/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php

This is probably caused by the file category-template.php. Try re-upload the category-template.php file, and it should be fine.

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.

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

Who else are implementing similar concept

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

Check out Ross McKillop 23 steps post installation guide. I’ll list in point forms here, full list back at its origin.

1. Create blog title, add email address
2. Change your password
3. Disable visual rich editor
4. Add users
5. Change the tagline
6. Edit Membership permissions
7. Set a date and time format
8. Modify Reading and Writing settings
9. Edit Discussion settings
10. Modify Permalinks structure
11. Pick a theme
12. Customize your theme
13. Write down CSS info
14. Change title format
15. Edit blogroll
16. Edit the About page
17. Add some categories
18. Edit the example post for testing
19. Install plugins
20. Check blog and test plugins
21. Create a favicon.ico
22. Create a shortcut to the Dashboard / setup WordPress client
23. Start posting