Widgets were a HUGE deal when WordPress added them in as a feature, before adding them in to the core system widgets functionality was added through a plugin.  This was clumsy but it worked well at the time.

Since being added to WordPress core widgets have allowed site owners to manage their sidebar functionality (or other areas of their sites) by dragging, dropping and configuring widgets through the Appearance admin page.

We have put together a bunch of articles to explain how widgets work and what each of the default widgets in the WordPress core do.

Widget Actions:

• Adding a Widget
• Editing a Widget
• Removing a Widget

Specific Widgets:

• Archives Widget
• Calendar Widget
• Categories Widget
• Links Widget
• Meta Widget
• Pages Widget
• Recent Comments
• Recent Posts
• RSS Widget
• Search Widget
• Tag Cloud Widget
• Text Widget

Since our post on your about us page, we have had some questions about how to submit your site to aboutus.org.

First, go to http://aboutus.org and put your website’s URL (your domain name) into the search field.

Once your site is entered, you will be taken to your site’s page. The URL should look something like this:

In order to edit the page you are shown about your site, you will need to register for access to aboutus.org.

Once your page is set up, it will look similar to the following image:

Your AboutUs.org page can be very useful for people to find your website and learn more about what it is that you do.

Plugin Home Page: http://mattwalters.net/projects/WordPress-file-monitor/

WordPress Plugin Page: http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/WordPress-file-monitor/

What is it?

This plugin allows you to monitor the changes made to scripts on your site, which can help you identify potentially hacked files on your site. It will send you an email if there are any changes that you should know about.

Caveat:

I have seen this slow sites down quite a bit. My hope is that they will solve this problem in future builds.

I have heard this complaint form a couple different people where all of a sudden their visual editor is gone and they only have the plain-text (HTML) version of editor.  It seems like this mostly happens after an upgrade, but in older versions of WordPress it seemed to happen almost randomly. Either way, if you are used to the visual editor, having it disappear can be quite a jarring experience.

The solution is usually pretty easy. Just click your username in the top right corner of your WordPress administration screen.  This will take you to your profile page.

The very first option on this page is a checkbox, which if checked will keep the visual editor from showing. Make sure this box is unchecked and then click the “Update Profile” button at the bottom of the page.

Now, go back to your “Add new” post page and you should see your editor. It will look similar to this:

Recently a long time friend contacted me because he saw a new user on his site that he did not set up.

The user’s first name looked like the below two screenshots:

Upon viewing the page source, I saw that WordPress has a safety measure in place to html escape all this content, so it does not actually effect the usability of the website and there was not a massive security breach.

Sphere: Related Content

]]> http://wp-relief.com/2010/07/12/weird-data-in-the-first-name-field-of-a-user/feed/ 0 http://wp-relief.com/2010/07/12/suggest-plugin-file-gallery-plugin/ http://wp-relief.com/2010/07/12/suggest-plugin-file-gallery-plugin/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:00:18 +0000 Matt http://wp-relief.com/?p=593

Plugin Homepage: http://skyphe.org/code/wordpress/file-gallery/

WordPress Plugin Page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/file-gallery/

What is it?

This plugin will completely change how you handle file uploads to your WordPress posts, especially if you prefer to show images individually in your posts.  Before File Gallery, the process for uploading multiple images and showing them in your posts individually was:

1. Click the upload button
2. Select the files you want to have in your post
3. Watch them upload
4. Click the “Show” link for one of the images
5. Click “Insert into Post”
6. Lather rinse repeat all but steps 2/3 for each other image you want in your post

With the File Gallery plugin, your steps are:

1. Click the upload button
2. Select the files you want to have in your post
3. Watch them upload
4. Close the uploader window
5. See the images in your File Gallery box
6. Check the checkboxes for the images you want in your post
7. Click the “single files” button and all your images are in your post

This literally saves hundreds of steps very easily if you want to post tons of images

How to Install

You can install this plugin in the normal way for plugins. Once you have it installed, we found it useful to move the File Gallery box to be just under the main editing window in the following manner:

Plugin Home Page: http://tadhg.com/wp/wordpress-plugins/related-posts-by-tag-widget/

WordPress Plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/related-post-by-tag/

What Is it?

The Related posts by tags widget will add a short list of articles that share tags with the article currently being read. This allows your visitors to click through another page on your blog and spend more time with your website. Also, users will be able to find other articles you have written that are on or near the same subject of the article they are reading. This gives your visitors a much better experience with your website.

Setup Instructions

You can install this with the normal plugin installation routine. Then just view a single post (click the title from your homepage) and scroll to the bottom to see the list of related posts.

You will have to make sure your posts have tags of course, otherwise nothing will be listed! When you have related articles, it will look similar to this:

Tags can be a very useful tool for allowing people and search engines one more way to find your blog articles. There are built in pages in WordPress for displaying related articles by tag, and you can even get a related posts by tag plugin to add links to related articles at the end of your post pages.

To add tags to your posts, look in the right sidebar of your post-editing page for the “Post Tags” box:

From this form field, you can enter the tags you want to use in a comma separated manner (as seen above).  If you then click the “Add” button, the tags will be created in your database and added to this post. This is displayed in the following manner:

You can also “Choose from the most used tags”, by clicking the link in the bottom of the “Post Tags” box. This will display a tag-cloud of post tags.  Click a post tag to associate it to your post

As you can see above, we clicked the “Posting” tag, and it was added to the list above.

If you go ahead and save your post, the tags are associated to your post. Visitors and search engines can now use the tags to find articles they are looking for!

Over at Journey To a Better Man, we use the Swift theme.  So far we have absolutely loved it because it provides some great functionality that helped us to get a clean theme out of the box that has some great and easy customization tools.

Everything was going great, until the theme was updgraded.  All of a sudden everything broke.  I mean, really broke.

The style sheets were completely broken, the sidebar widgets broke, js files were missing. It was awful.

I have tried to reproduce the issues for screenshots, but now that I have fixed everything once I cannot reproduce the issues I was seeing previously.

Style Sheet issue

This issue was caused by something breaking with the header navigation.  The way I fixed this was to go to the Header section of the Swift Administration panel, add my comments back in and re-save the settings. This set the options up correctly and allowed the site to show the theme again.

Broken Sidebar issues

With the broken sidebar I was seeing that the custom sidebar tabs widget was completely broken (see screenshot above).  Since I knew this was JavaScript that created the tabs, I opened up firebug and noticed that there were missing JavaScript files.  Specifically, the files I was missing were from a plugin called WDP Ajax Comments, which for some reason is included directly in with the theme instead of in the plugins directory.  So, I grabbed the files from the WordPress plugins site and then FTPs them to the swift theme directory.  I had to change the folder name from wdp-ajax-comments to wdp-ajaxed-comments.

The other issue I noticed was that I was missing the uploads/swift_custom/swift-js-functions.js file.  So, as a shot in the dark, I grabbed the js-functions.js file from the wp-content/themes/swift/js directory, renamed it and put it into the uploads/swift_custom/ directory.  When I refreshed the page everything was back to normal.

Conclusion

For some reason the upgrade for our site completely failed. I could not find ANYTHING on the Swift support forums that spoke to upgrade issues and I could find no reason why the missing files were deleted.  The only thing I could point to is the upgrade script from WordPress is deleting everything from the directory before upgrading instead of replacing the files individually. This is not ideal, as people make custom changes all the time.

If you have any problems that you would like someone to look at, please feel free to contact us through the comments below or through our contact form.

Plugin Home Page: http://www.incerteza.org/blog/projetos/shockingly-big-ie6-warning/

WordPress Plugin Page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shockingly-big-ie6-warning/

What is it?

If you ever have to work with HTML and CSS you immediately realize (or you learn quickly) that IE6 is the blackhole of all internet browsers. It will literally suck the life out of you and then spit out HTML in such awful and horrible ways that you will literally quit. I have been there, it is a terrible experience.

Many top websites are either blocking people from using IE6 on their sites, or they are making stern suggestions that people should get a more modern browser.

The Shockingly Big IE6 Warning plugin helps you to show people using IE6 that it is time to upgrade their browser.

Setup Instructions

Normal plugin installation.

The only note we will add is that you should proof-read the original plugin author’s warning text to make sure all the words are spelled correctly.  We found “acess” instead of “access” in our download.

This is what the warning will look like to your IE6 visitors: