Tag Archives: WordPress

Remember WP.com? Meet the WP.me URL Shortener

Aug 17, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Automattic has acquired another wicked-short domain name: WP.me. Not only is it a WordPress.com-specific URL shortener, but it is the only two-letter .me domain in the world, for the time being anyway.

There is now a “Get Shortlink” button next to your permalink when you edit or write a post, and when you click it you’ll get a popup with the beautiful link already highlighted for your copy and pasting pleasure.

If you’re logged in you can also get the shortlink for any page on WordPress.com, there’s a link under the “Blog Info” menu in your admin bar.

Every post on WordPress.com has a short URL assigned to it in the form of http://wp.me/p4P8c-gF7. The nine-letter key is a a bit longer than those of Bit.ly, Is.gd, or the now notorious Tr.im, but I imagine WordPress.com has a lot of content in their system, and more to come certainly. And you can be pretty sure that your WP.me short URLs will last as long as your WordPress.com blog does.

The domain is being used for WordPress.com sites only, and for WordPress blogs that run the WordPress.com Stats plugin.

WP.com Step 1: “Get WordPress”

Aug 13, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Automattic recently acquired WP.com for their WordPress.com hosted blog service, as you may remember. They still don’t seem to have quite decided what to do with it, aside from redirecting it to WordPress.com. Users seem to want their blogs to be available as subdomains of the new domain, and some want it to be used as a URL shortener for their posts.

It was recently discovered that there’s a new subdomain of WP.com now, get.wp.com, that was put up to help dispel the awful confusion surrounding WordPress. (i.e. WordPress vs. WordPress.com) The new microsite helps newbies differentiate between the two, albeit with a strong bias for WordPress.com.

So this is the first thing that WP.com is being put to use for. Nothing major still. Let’s hope that Automattic finds something useful to use it for. It’s a nice domain.

Get the Average Number of Comments Per Post in WordPress

Jul 28, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Comments are often a good metric of how engaged your readers are. The more comments you get per post, the better you are doing as a blogger. If you get a high average of comments per post, then your readers are interesting in your content, they’re reading it through, and they want to discuss the topic more.

Wouldn’t it be a neat trick if you could total up the average number of comments per post on your blog? It’s not too hard. WP Recipes has a little code snippet that does just that.

<?php
$count_posts = wp_count_posts();
$posts = $count_posts->publish;

$count_comments = get_comment_count();
$comments  = $count_comments['approved'];

echo 'Average '.round($comments/$posts).' comments per post.';
?>

Automattic WordPress Post Thumbnails

Jul 27, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 3 Comments

There are plenty of posts floating around the internet about using Custom Fields to assign thumbnail images to individual posts in WordPress. Web Developer Plus has a different idea.

Do you often put images in your posts? You probably upload them through the media manager built right in to the WordPress post editor. Every time you upload an image, it’s associated with the post you first attach it to. And WordPress creates a thumbnail to go along with it, of the size specified in the media settings.

Web Developer Plus has a an article on how to automatically find the thumbnail URL of the first image attached to a post and store it in the variable $img, which you can then echo out into an <img /> tag wherever you want the thumbnail to appear.

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Pods: A Plugin to Turn WordPress Into a Full CMS

Jul 23, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 3 Comments

WordPress is a good, lightweight CMS well-suited for any article-centric website. If you need a blog, a site with mainly static pages, or a combination, there’s no better software to use.

However, WordPress isn’t necessarily the ideal tool for every job. Sometimes you need to define multiple types of content that don’t follow the post/page hierarchy too well. For example: You run a large website that has articles (posts), but it also needs to have a link directory. It would be the most elegant solution to have a category full of empty posts with custom fields to hold the link titles and URLs.

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Getting RSS and Twitter Subscriber Counts in WordPress

Jul 22, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Coding, Featured 16 Comments

Mac AppStorm Subscribe SectionI previously wrote a post about how some blogs are displaying their RSS subscriber and Twitter follower counts. Mac AppStorm is combining their Twitter and RSS counts into one number, and FreelanceSwitch has a section in their footer with separate readouts for RSS, Twitter, and their podcast. Today I’d like to show you how to actually implement such a thing.

We’ll be using PHP and cURL to retrieve the numbers, and then caching them in the database with WordPress’s get_option() and update_option() functions, so we don’t slow things down or use-up your Twitter API limit.

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WordPress Theme of the Month: Doc

Jul 17, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress One Comment

This month’s featured WordPress theme is Doc. [Preview]

Doc Theme

Doc is a minimal one-column theme, about as minimal as you can get. Lots of whitespace, and absolutely no imagery. It’s all typography. The theme is meant to put your content front and center, with as few distractions as possible.

While the concept is a bit unusual, it’s a nice niche theme. It would be well suited for use on a very word-heavy blog, such as a book review site, or an experimental blog-as-a-novel project.

The typeface used is Times New Roman, though it should be easy enough to change it to prefer to something more elegant if you so chose. (I rather like Georgia and Garamond myself, though you can’t necessarily count on everyone having them installed…)

Would You Pay For Support?

Jul 10, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 5 Comments

Suppose a major WordPress plugin, such as WP Super Cache, All in One SEO pack or insert-name-of-your-favorite-plugin, decided to go the paid support route, would you pay? If they offered the plugin for free, but sold an optional package with some extras as well access to one-on-one tech support, would you go for the paid option? How much would you be willing to pay? (Obviously it would depend on the plugin…)

Theme developers have already started to establish businesses doing this, and I don’t think plugin developers are far behind. I’ve been considering this strategy a bit lately, and I know Joost de Valk has been as well. The question is: How profitable would such a move be?

Parse a WordPress Plugin’s README.txt With Regular Expressions

Jul 8, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Featured, WordPress 3 Comments

I’ve been working on a neat enhancement for my Tweetable WordPress plugin. Already I have a handy “Documentation” link on the plugin’s pages in the WordPress admin. When clicked, it opens a ThickBox dialog pointing to the README.txt file.

Not bad, but it had a few rough edges. Raw markdown doesn’t look look stellar, and then there was the problem with the horizontal scrollbars that would appear from loading a plain text file into the ThickBox. So I made a new script that would load-up the README.txt file and use Regular Expressions to parse some of the more basic markdown syntax into good old HTML.

README.txt, parsed into HTML

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Commercial WordPress Theme Directory? What About Plugins?

Jul 6, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 6 Comments

Joost de Valk thinks WordPress.org should have a section for commercial GPL-compliant plugins, like the new one for the themes. I couldn’t agree more.

Of course, we plugin authors get to host our own plugins on wordpress.org, and we can get links back to our site etc. But where’s the page for commercially supported GPL WordPress PLUGINS Matt? Don’t you think it’s time you started treating the plugin authors the same way as the theme authors? Or do we have to start a theme war for that first?

On the GPL, Themes, Plugins & Free [Yoast]

Theme developers seem to get more attention than plugin developers, and have for a long time. It’s sad. There are a lot of amazing plugins out there (including mine, of course…), but their developers are by and large not as well-off financially as the theme developers. You have giants like WooThemes selling $80 themes, that are now GPL compliant, but the plugin developers are pretty much just collecting a few donations here and there.

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