Here are some features to look out for in Wordpress 3.0:

- Wordpress Mu and Wordpress have merged which is great news for people like me who run a dozen websites on wordpress. All I need to do is have one Wordpress installation and run multiple websites off of it.
- Say goodbye to the old default themes, we have Twenty Ten theme now.
- New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
- You no longer have to rely on the default admin username. You can set whatever you want, and also the password during installation.
- Tiny links such as tinyurl and bit.ly are natively supported.
- The admin section has changed, for good.

I am yet to upgrade to the new Wordpress 3.0. I just need to ensure that all the plugins I use and the theme that I employ go well with the upgrade. I suggest you do the same as well.

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Right, I know some coding and I struggled to put a header leaderboard ad on Go! Zines. Long story short, I did it finally, and it took me quite a few bullish hours to understand the system and to implement it.

Here’s how it happened (I am an Adrian Monk fan :)):

1. Go to custom file editor under Thesis options in your Wordpress backend.
2. Select the file custom_functions.php to edit.
3. After the <?php, insert:
function my_header_ad() { ?>
<div id="leaderboard_ad" style="display:block;float:right" >
YOUR GOOGLE ADSENSE HERE!
</div>
<?php }
add_action(‘thesis_hook_before_title’, ‘my_header_ad’);
4. Hit the big ass save button and you are done!
5. Buy The Thesis Theme for WordPress. It’s really worth it…

The solution was easy, but the process to it was arduous. Here are some resources that I found particularly useful:

1. Thesis Hook Reference List
2. How to Customize Thesis Theme like a Pro

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For starters, we have over a million blogs and users find a new blog for the unique information they may need. So, the question of loyalty withers, and so does the connection between the blogger and the reader. Even some of the top blogs, including social engines such as Digg is losing commentators fairly regularly. I am an avid reader of Digg and there used to be a time, say 4 years back when comments used to run into several hundreds, and today, the case has completely turned around.

Secondly, spamming has taken the sheen out of blog commenting. A lot of spammers, in order to get backlinks back to their site, comment on blog posts, placing links of their staked websites. This spam has brought in control measures, which avoids spammers, and at the same time some of genuine bloggers, who would like to share their websites through your website.

Google and other search engines recognize the tag no-follow, which basically tells the search engine spiders that these links need not be followed. Wordpress, the world’s most popular blogging engine has enabled no-follow tags for all its comments. So, for spammers, blogs that run on Wordpress don’t benefit much. And, as I said earlier, some genuine commentators who would like to have a reciprocate with a comment to a link onto their website are turned away as well.

To encourage comments on Tech Pedia, I have decided to do away with no-follow tags for all comments. With this, I would like to invite all blog commentators to read the available articles here and leave your feedback, and get a backlink to your website. That being said, there is a certain standard that we maintain here. The comment should compliment or supplement the blog post, and add value. If otherwise, I will not hesitate to dump it.

To remove the no-follow tag on Wordpress, I have leveraged on Dofollow plugin by Denis de Bernardy. It is a nice little plugin which does the job for you. I would recommend other bloggers to follow suit and revive the art of commenting.

Related posts:

1. Benefits of Having a Blog
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But, to my surprise, the blank page persisted. Huh! I had no idea what to do next, so I deleted all the Wordpress files and re-uploaded them, hoping that it would just fix the problem, sans wp-content and wp-config.php. Problem still continued. So, I decided to do away with wp-content and replaced it with Wordpress default. Still, no change and I did the same with wp-config.php as well, vis-a-vis.

I was close to my wits end and finally I started to think logically not before carrying out some illogical troubleshooting steps. How does wordpress know that I have changed a template? It cannot be in one of the files on the server as I have not given write access to Wordpress on my server to any of the files. So, it had to be the database. Something must have gone terribly wrong with my database.

So, I started searching online to understand where Wordpress stores template information on the database. To my horror, I could not find a single, I mean a single resource that contained this information. I found this post which was on the same lines but did not cover my problem.

Well, it was time for me to put in some solid hours to troubleshoot the issue at hand. I went into my database and started peeking around hoping to find an entry that reminded me of a template. Alas! nothing even close. As I studied the table structure, the only table that came close to carrying this information was wp_options.

Before I did anything crazy, I went ahead and created a new database and checked if Wordpress installation screen shows up. Bingo! It did. I was certain that it was my database that had gone bonkers.

This is what I did to fix the problem, and it did. I dropped the wp-options table from my original database and replaced it with wp_options from the default Wordpress installation. This did the trick but I do not know yet, what other damage it has done in the process. But, I am glad that all my posts, comments, tags and categories are still around.

This was my closest shave to losing all my effort that was built over the past few years. I believe that there is still a whole lot of ambiguity about Wordpress. That being said, it is still manageable, I say it because a person like me who is a non-programmer could get into the code and change stuff and could look into the database and understand the ambiguity of code-dom. Surely, code must be poetry for these folks.

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Well, the purpose of this post is not to whine and grind about the frequency of updates but to proclaim the Eureka that I stumbled upon.

After upgrading to version 2.8, I recently noticed that a number of my plugins’ settings pages started throwing up an error message that said – you do not have sufficient permissions to access this page. I did what most of us would do by pasting the error appended by the name of the plugin in Google.

Several search pages opened up with numerous solutions. One such post mentioned about the possibility of such errors when a database is imported; not my case. Another one talked about the database prefixes that are set to anything other than wp_; not my case yet again.

To make the long story short, I found a longish fix which worked for me. I followed the same route by googling and finding fixes for my other plugins.

In the exhausted state of mine, I did manage to light a spark and found a common denominator between all the fixes. Although all the recommended fixes were lengthy, there was just one keyword that connected each one of them.

I did some little testing and found out that the fix was far more simple than what was presented.

Here it goes

1. Most plugins these days don’t come as one file anymore, that makes things a little complicated. Identify all the .php files in your plugin.
2. Open each one of them (I would start with the obvious one like the name_of_the_plugin.php) and search for admin_head.
3. After you locate it, replace it with admin_menu.
4. Voila!!!!!! The error vanishes and your plugin’s settings page is back to work.

Honest to God, I don’t know what it means or what it does, but it works. I have never bragged about me being a hacker nor do I have any high level programming skills. But, I am glad I figured this out and a few more earlier.

I am interested to know what it actually does, if anybody has even a slightest clue, bring me out of my misery.

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With Wordpress, you primarily have just one option. You enter your email address or your username to have a password reset link mailed to your email address. Activating the mailed link in a browser will initiate another email from Wordpress which carries your password.

This option may not work all the time. There are times when your server might not support SMTP service that is required for the email to be dispatched.

We have alternate ways of achieving a password resets, but through the backend. Duh! not the Wordpress backend but your MySQL database backend.

Log into your database backend, you should see something similar to the one below depending on the version that you use.

Click on wp_users table and then hit browse.

You should see something similar to the image shown below. I have disfigured my database’s personal information and in it’s place, you should see some real text. Click on the icon that is marked by a big black arrow. Excuse my graphic design skills, it isn’t too pleasing to anybody’s eyes. :)

An editor where you can change the values of your username and password is open. Note that you will not be able to enter real text as the strings in this database are encrypted by MD5. Go over to a website which converts real strings to MD5 strings. Enter the password of a choice and upon encrypting, you will get your password in MD5 format. For example, if you chose your password as ’superman’, your MD5 string would be ‘84d961568a65073a3bcf0eb216b2a576′. Enter this MD5 string, in your db backend against user_pass field. Hit Go/Save and this should do the trick.

If you have problems in carrying this out, let me know.

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• RSS Feeds integration

• Number of plug-ins supported

• Ready-to-use

• Extendable

• Quick Assistance from Developer Community, due to presence of number of forums

• Quick Search

• Number of widgets supported

• Easily customizable

• Negligible Cost

• Extensive Documentation


You may further read about the Top 10 Open Source CMS Available in the market here.

More can find more details on web content management systems here

To find code snippets in Java, HTML, PHP, MySQL, PL/SQL and forms of Free Online Programming Tutorials Click Here

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I had written an article earlier stating that Akismet does not work as it supposed to. I was referring to the intelligence factor in the linked article while today, I emphasize that Akismet alone is not sufficient for bloggers. Akismet can handle limited number of spam and nowhere close to comprehensiveness.

Here’s some history : I am regularly getting spammed by the same set of spamming robots and no help is being offered by the world’s most popular anti-spam comment plugin.

It’s time for me to look elsewhere and provide a holistic view of the situation and review some of the spam preventing plugins.

The first plugin I am planning on experimenting with, is the Math Comment Spam Protection. It is a simple plugin that asks the user to perform basic addition of two numbers and provide the answer. Sounds simple! Installation is simple and involves adding code into your template, and the plugin works as it’s supposed to (at least with the addition).

The plugin is installed on this blog on a pilot basis and here are my two concerns:

- What if the spamming robots are developed to perform addition?
- What if a user cannot perform simple addition (using a calculator is an option though)

Results matter the most and the best judge is time and I expect some good amount of spam to hit me in the next 7 days. Too sad, I wouldn’t know if the plugin actually prevented spam or not. Either way, if I don’t get spammed over a period of time, then the plugin is worth it; at least for now.

I will update this post probably within a week with my results. If you have found a better workable solution, let us know. If you have a plugin which you would like us to test, do let us know.

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1. Open your FTP application and browse to the theme files. Locate either index.php or home.php depending on the theme and open them.
2. Find this code in the file : <?php endwhile; ?> or one of its variants such as <?php endwhile; else: ?>.
3. Just before the endwhile code, insert this code:
<?php if(!$show_ads){ ?>
YOUR ADSENSE/AD GOES HERE
<?php $show_ads = 1; } ?>
4. Save the file and upload.
5. That’s it!

Piece of cake isn’t it. If you have any further clarifications, let me know…

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After an exhausted search through several forums, I ran into one on the Joomla forum and the poster claimed to have successfully transferred posts but not comments. Here’s a brief of the operation:

I tried various way to import Wordpress through Joomblog, but kept getting the message “no installation of Wordpress could be found.” But once I installed JD-Wordpress, imported a backup of my Wordpress database, and categorized each post, Joomlblog imported correctly!

Here are the steps:

1. Backup everything in your Wordpress site (Manage -> Backup) and save it on your computer. (If you haven’t backed anything up before, you may need to activate the plugin in Wordpress.)
2. Install Joomblog in Joomla! (1 com, 1 bot, and 2 mods)
*** If you’ve been using JD-Wordpress in Joomla!, then skip to step 6. ***
3. Install JD-Wordpress in Joomla!
4. In phpMyAdmin, import the Wordpress backup (from step 1) into the database that Joomla! is using.
5. Under Components -> JD-Wordpress, go to Manage -> Categories, and make sure they’re in a category. If it says “Uncategorized” but is not linked to a category called Uncategorized, then it’s not categorized. If this is the case, Manage -> Categories and make sure you have categories created. Then, Edit each post, select a category, and Save. There’s probably a script that could be written for phpMyadmin, but I’m not that savvy.
6. Under Components -> Joomblog, select Import, and click on Import Wordpress. *
7. Once this is complete, look in Content By Section -> Wordpress_Joomblog and you should find your articles.
8. Now is the fun time of placing the imported content in the right Joomla category and editing each one to clean up any mess the switch left behind.

* Joomblog won’t duplicate your posts if you try this process more than once.

I plan on performing these activities on a blog of mine this weekend. I will post updates and hopefully, will try to find a way to import comments as well.

If you have a better approach, do share it with us.

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