I was messing with a new WordPress site today and found a link on the WordPress forums to this page about SOPA/PIPA and how it is being pushed through in the USA as a new form of legislation.

I have been watching and reading the news about this strange piece of legislation and was roughly aware of its content and the overall proposal, but until I read this page I haven´t had the inclination to actually pipe up and say anything about it as I honestly believed that such a ridiculous piece of crap would never see the light of day as real law.

But it’s still here and it’s still being considered, so, about time I said my piece.

Simply put, this piece of legislation is a complete load of shite.

Take a few minutes and watch this explanation of what this proposal means.  If it has the same effect on you as it did on me then I am hoping that you will step up and do what needs to be done to make it absolutely clear to your local politicians, business people, family and friends that you will not accept such lopsided ”fat cat” favoritism that this proposal entails.

Its detrimental to us all and will only serve a tiny minority of individuals who are adamant about maintaining the status quo, have no clue what the internet can offer them and who are to lazy to go and try or learn something new.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Straight of the wordpress page, heres how our American firends can make themselves heard:

We are not a small group. More than 60 million people use WordPress — it’s said to power about 15% of the web. We can make an impact, and you can be an agent of change. Go to Stop American Censorship for more information and a bunch of ways you can take action quickly, easily, and painlessly. The Senate votes in two weeks, and we need to help at least 41 more senators see reason before then. Please. Make your voice heard.

Lets ge with the program guys and girls. Go make it happen.

• Will it make life harder or easier
• How much harder or easier
• Can I do it myself without paying vast sums of money?

The answer is…maybe. But if it is difficult this rather cool wordpress plugin will help. Called the FaceBook Tab Manager it allows you to configure a tab for Facebook in WordPress and then copy and paste it into Facebook.  This should allow WordPress lovers a much more familiar and convenient way of managing a Facebook page (we hope!)

Heres how it looks :

And heres the official description:

The Facebook Tab Manager allows you to create landing pages and other types of content to be displayed within Facebook, particularly within the tabs that appear on Facebook business pages and pages for other types of organizations. This provides a way of putting more interesting layouts and functionality into your Facebook pages, without the need to get too deep into fancy programming.

The Facebook Tab Manager was specifically designed to take advantage of a recent Facebook page redesign that added support for iframe tabs on Facebook pages. Optionally, you can now also specify content to be displayed on an associated canvas page.

Tab content can include any WordPress content, including output from Shortcodes and other plugin functions.

Nice one!

It just takes someone a little creative to think up a smart idea and spend some time presenting it well. Spencerfinnell (@spenncerfinnell on twitter) has done just that with this free WordPress theme that can be used as a quality control or ticket system. Hes purposely kept it light to allow for user customisation and with a nice design and layout it means it can be integrated or branded as required.  It may have some bugs that still need ironed out but Spenncer realises that and is continuing to support it so expect those to be dealt with in due course (if there are any!)

Well done Spencer, great job and nice work.

WordPress GPL

WordPress, developed by Matt Mullenweg has a General Public License (GPL) which means that it is distributed freely to all and as such it has allowed development from 1000′s of people who are part of the user base and community. With 11.4 million users out there hosted on WordPress and an estimated 12 million more on self hosted solutions it has established itself as one of the top platforms to use for a blog or website.

Thesis Theme

The Thesis Theme by Chris Pearson has been developed and sold as a separate entity (164 dollars for an unlimited license) but it is based on the WordPress platform. It has an estimated 27,000 users and is NOT under GPL (apparently it is as of recently but I’m still seeking confirmation on this.)

Chris as a business person is arguing that he isnt beheld to WordPress, the license and is resisting the GPL. Have a listen to the debate, arranged by Andrew Warner in the vid and see how you feel on the two sides to the story.

Personally I think Matt came across as more convincing and with a stronger basis for the “correct” thing to do in this particular situation. What do you think?

Some of the features I’m quite interested in seeing are:

Highlights

• WordPress and WordPress MU have merged, allowing the management of multiple sites (called Multisite) from one WordPress installation.
• New default theme “Twenty Ten” takes full advantage of the current features of WordPress.
• New custom menu management feature, allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets.
• Custom header and background APIs.
• A lighter admin color scheme to increase accessibility and put the focus more squarely on your content.

User Features

General

• New WordPress logo for admin header
• Place “Search Engines Blocked” mini-alert in the wp-admin header to prevent people from accidentally delisting themselves
• Revised administration menu icons
• Revised Gray Admin Color Scheme

Dashboard

• Add link so user can visit Dashboard after core upgrade
• Move Tools->Upgrade menu option to Dashboard->Updates and overhaul of user interface so themes, plugins, and core upgrades under one panel
• New menu management (navigation) via Menus option under Appearances Menu (#11817)
• Password nag for newly registered users
• Split Right Now widget into Content | Discussion

Posts

• Allow for removing all tags in quick edit
• Improved revision comparison user interface

Links

• Order link categories by name, not count, on Add New/Edit Link page

Comments

• Add additional columns to the Posts Comments view
• Allow configuration of number of comments to display Recent Comments dashboard module
• Block comments for future posts and password protected posts (when password not provided)
• Change to comments UI to show when a comment is replying to another, and link to the parent comment

Plugins

• Add Details and Install Now action links under each plugin listed in Install Plugins
• Allow Tab indenting, Shift-Tab (outdenting), and multi-line tabbing, in plugin editor
• Upgrade plugins in bulk from the Plugins->Installed panel (#11542)
• When deleting plugins, check for uninstall hooks, and warn of data deletion

Users

• Allow “No role for this blog” to be chosen in Users->Add New panel

Settings

• Removed Settings->Miscellaneous admin menu, moved uploads settings to Settings->Media panel
• Revise Settings->General panel, change “Blog” reference to “Site”
• Revise Gray Admin Color Scheme

Multisite

• New Tools->Network panel to ‘install’ mulitsite/network ability, and is available only if WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE is defined in wp-config.php
• New Super Admin menu with Admin, Sites, Users, Themes, Options, Update, sub-menus (available only if is_multisite() && is_super_admin() )
• New Dashboard->My Sites panel
• New Tools->Delete Site panel
• Configure a Network (multisite/WPMU) using wp-config.php file
• Terminology changes regarding Sites, Blogs, Networks (see Andrew Nacin’s explanation)

…and that’s just a taste of what the new version has!  now just have to hope that nothing breaks…

I did some searching for a plugin and did see one called One Click Plug-in Updater and decided against it as it required permissions to be changed (my perception was that it would be to difficult for non tekkies to sort out) so I asked around on Twitter and Rob McGuire came back to me and recommend I try that plugin out, so I did.  And it worked a treat!

Grab the One Click Plug-in Updater and try it yourself (hopefully you wont have to mess around with permissions on the server to make it work!).

But wait! Theres more!

This might be surprising to regular users of WordPress as it certinaly surprised me.  Seems it slipped though the cracks at one point in all the new upgrade notes.

Have you noticed that when you upgrade WordPress Core to a new version that there was an option to select all plugins and upgrade them simultaneously but you never knew why that option wasn’t available on the plugins page?  Well check this out.

Glenn Murray from Divine Write saw me asking on twitter about this one click upgrade and he referred my question to Paul Cunningham from Blogging Teacher who suggested I do this.

When you see a plugin or a series of plugins need to be upgraded try this

• On the left sidebar go to Tools
• Select Upgrade
• Select all plugins
• Click upgrade

Well dont I feel like a right idiot now?  It was there all along and I just never noticed it. Maybe you didnt notice it either but, hey! Now you know. A big thanks to all mentioned who helped me figure this small, but really rather precious nugget out.

Turns out that their is an easier way to make posts or pages (or even Tags and Category pages) display a custom sidebar, or at least a custom set of widgets in the preconfigured sidebar set via a WordPress plugin called Shiba.

The usual method of installation is used with the plugin added to the WordPress plugins folder and activated via the admin panel and once this is done the admin of the widgets is quite simple.  Indeed, reading through the Shiba Sidebar Plugin site the plans for future development are quite interesting with widget exports and better widget management options that will no doubt come in very handy in the future.

Word of warning at the time of writing, the developer says that the current version is fine for WP 2.9.2 but if your playing on WP3.0 hes aware of bugs and issues and is working on a fix. Thanks ShibaShake and keep up the good work.

You can custom grab the WordPress custom sidebar plugin here.

Once it is installed it works automatically in the background and basically its aim is to remove unnecessary data from images and reduce them to the smallest file size possible while still retaining the quality. Recommend by Yahoo itself in the Yahoo exceptional performance series this plugin is a must have.

It works by stripping out small, if not minute, pieces of code in the images that have no real need to be there or which are unused and also may suggest converting the images to gifs, if required, although caution should be taken here incase quality is unintentionally affected.

Author: Dialect

Download the Smushit Plugin for WordPress.

Author: Jaimie Sirovich

Download the WordPress SEO Pager plugin

This isn’t good for two reasons.

Firstly, it won’t help search engines find the pages on your site because they are set in series by this method, therefore to get to the earliest posts the search engine spiders will have to follow and scan, follow and scan follow and scan in this method.  Cumbersome and not very friendly. Secondly, visitors will work in the same way.  They have no desire o cycle though 12 pages one at a time to reach a desired post.

What WP Page Numbers does is add a line of numbers (surprise surprise!) in one of 5 styles you can choose from, to the bottom of the page allowing spiders to reach all the following pages from one place, effectively opening up the site in a friendly manner and allowing them to search and scan in parallel rather than in series.

This is the same for visitors.

They can simply click the page numbers and skip to that page immediately rather than being forced to cycle through all the irrelevant content they have no interest in.

Not all themes will need this plugin, but if you realise that you do, it will require a little editing in the theme code in order to work so you may need som help to sort this out. Definately worht it on a search engine level and a usability level.

Author: Jens Törnell

Download the WordPress Page Numbers Plugin.