Option 1: Remove it Using CSS

Method one is perhaps the simplest way. Go to your dashboard and find Appearance >> Editor and then select your style.css file. Paste this in there and you’re good to go:

#site-generator {
    display: none;
}

Option 2: Remove it from footer.php

In your WordPress dashboard go to Appearance >> Editor and remove the section that looks like this:

<div id="site-generator">
				<?php do_action( 'twentyten_credits' ); ?>
				<a href="<?php echo esc_url( __('http://wordpress.org/', 'twentyten') ); ?>"
						title="<?php esc_attr_e('Semantic Personal Publishing Platform', 'twentyten'); ?>" rel="generator">
					<?php printf( __('Proudly powered by %s.', 'twentyten'), 'WordPress' ); ?>
				</a>
			</div><!-- #site-generator -->

Tweet This Post

Joel Spolsky outlines why the Stack Exchange may be more helpful to you than existing forums at WordPress.org:

• WordPress.org’s forums don’t have voting, so you have to read through every answer and decide for yourself which one might solve your problem.
• WordPress.org users don’t have reputation, so there’s no way to see whether you’re getting an answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about.
• The WordPress.org forums don’t have wiki-style editing, so collaboration is impossible.
• A WordPress user has to log on to answer a question, so the burden of participation is higher.

The WordPress Stack Exchange offers multiple sorting options.

Right away you will notice how many more options there are for sorting questions: newest, featured, hot, votes, active, unanswered, as well as sort by tags or users. When you’re having trouble articulating your problem but want to see if it’s already been answered, you can select the sorting option that makes the most sense to you.

Badges help to motivate user participation.

As you use WordPress Stack Exchange to ask and answer questions, you can earn badges, which will appear on your user page and in your user card. This helps you to be able to gauge the value of another user’s advice, especially if you are selecting from multiple answers for your problem. It taps into the basic human drive for achievement and is more motivating than you might imagine.

While reviewing the site I found it remarkably easy to surf around to various topics, without feeling like I was digging through pages and pages of text. Features I enjoyed most:

• Live previews of your response to questions as you type
• Clean, attractive and cheerful UI makes it feel more like fun than troubleshooting
• Activity timelines and reputation graphs
• Usage stats displayed, including the percentage of answered questions
• Individual user RSS for questions, answers, and comments

This is certainly not a replacement for the WordPress.org forums, nor is it to say that the WordPress.org forums are not helpful. Rather, it’s a comparison to the forums that you already know and many of you have been using for years. If you want to try a new way to find answers to your WordPress problems, head over to the WordPress Stack Exchange and give it a spin. Feel free to leave your thoughts and a personal review here in the comments.

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

Why do I need an XML Sitemap?

This is one of the basics of SEO. A sitemap helps search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. Search engines are better able to crawl through your site with a structured sitemap of where your content leads. This plugin supports all kinds of WordPress-generated pages as well as custom URLs. Whenever you create a new post, it will notify major search engines to come crawl your new content.

Here’s what Google has to say about the importance of having an XML Sitemap:

Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.

Why Sitemaps are Critical for WordPress Sites

Due to the ease of creating and updating content on a WordPress site, you will have regular changes that may not be indexed without a well-structured sitemap.

Google makes it clear what kind of sites will benefit from including an XML sitemap:

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

This is one free SEO tool that you cannot do without. There’s no excuse now that you can install one single plugin to create sitemaps for your entire network of WordPress sites.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one Sitemaps and complete SEO package for WordPress Multisite, then check out our Sitemaps and SEO – WordPress Multisite Style. Not only does it create sitemaps for all of your sites, but it also adds dynamic keyword and description tags based on post or page content to every post and page on every site. If you’re serious about Multisite SEO, then you don’t want to pass up this all-inclusive tool. It’s specially tailored to put Multisite networks on the grid with Google.

Tweet This Post

Brajesh Singh created a BuddyPress Sitewide Activity Widget for this purpose and has recently updated it to include many new features that BuddyPress enthusiasts are sure to appreciate:

• Posting from widget
• Activity list can be restricted to logged in users activity when a user is logged in
• Blog admins can use the widget on their blog and It will show blog admins activity only.
• Show/hide avatar
• Show/hide feed link
• Show/hide the activity filters tab(the links that appear at the top and allows to filter the activity).
• Include only specific components activity in the sitewide activity widget(e.g include only profile/blog activities).
• Exclude only specific components activity from the sitewide activity widget(e.g exclude group activities from the activity list).
• Localization support

The plugin is in the WordPress repository but hasn’t been updated there yet. The best place to get it is on Brajesh’s site: BuddyDev.com

Tweet This Post

WordPress PayPal Donation Plugin

This plugin enables you to recieve donations in multiple currencies in one click. It can be used in the sidebar, posts and pages. WordPress PayPal Donations Plugin uses IPN to ensure the values are correct. You can also elect to display your total donations to date.

Download Plugin

Easyfileshop

Easyfileshop enables you to sell files as downloads. It creates a fully customizable PayPal checkout button for you. The files are stored inside a secure access protected folder on your server. After the payment is verified the buyer receives a customizable email with a personal download link.

Download Plugin

Senzoo Donation Widget

The Senzoo widget makes it simple to add a donation form with growl-type notification that includes PayPal, Amazon FPS and Google Checkout on your WordPress site. Visit senzoo.net for a quick demonstration.

Download Plugin

Multi Currency PayPal Donations

This plugin allows you to route different currencies to specific paypal accounts, in order to avoid high fees for cross border transactions. Even if you don’t have multiple paypal accounts this is still a great plugin for accepting donations.

Download Plugin

PayPal Booking Framework

This plugin, while still in Beta, is one to check out if you’re looking for event registration. It has been built to support courses and classes bookings. Payments are done via PayPal IPN. It sends the registrant to your PayPal payment page for online collection of event fees. Events are sorted by date and a short code is provided to display a single event on a page.

Download Plugin

Enhanced PayPal Shortcodes

This plugin allows you to easily embed a fully functional PayPal buy now, subscribe or hosted button using shortcodes. It supports Wishlist Member and provides integration with iDev Affiliate and JRox JAM.

Download Plugin

Are PayPal

This plugin is used to monetize WordPress blog content with PayPal. It is designed to sell your knowledge by restricting content to be shown only to users who have payed to view your blog. Googlebots will still be able to index your content so that searchers will find your site, but they won’t be able to see unless they’ve paid.

Download Plugin

WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart

If you need a simple shopping cart with PayPal for taking payments, then this may be the plugin for you. It places an ‘Add to Cart’ button on any posts or pages. It also allows you to add and display the shopping cart on any post or page or sidebar. You can also integrate it with NextGen gallery images to make your products more compelling.

Download Plugin

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

Here’s how you can customize your WordPress login with your own logo in under a minute. Simply add this to your theme’s functions.php file:

function my_custom_login_logo() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
h1 a { background-image:url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/logo.png) !important; }
</style>';
}
add_action('login_head', 'my_custom_login_logo');

Replace the logo.png with your filename and make sure to drop the file in your theme’s images directory.

Tweet This Post

Please tell us a little bit about My Chatbox and what inspired you to create your own micro-blogging service.

After launching a couple of other BuddyPress social networks, I realised that it is such a big framework with so many options on the front end that members sometimes gets overwhelmed with all the features that the framework offers.

I already had the idea of creating a scaled down micro blogging network and was looking at other options until I read a blog post on WPMU.org on How to build a Mini Twitter Site with BuddyPress and decided to give BuddyPress another go – and it works. Thanks Sarah!

What kind of user is attracted to an independent micro-blogging service?

The whole idea of My Chatbox is quite simple – anyone can create their own Chatbox (micro blog) for themselves or for their business regarding any topic or niche. Using the flexibility of BuddyPress, Chatboxes (micro blogs) can have multiple administrators and moderators to control the top level content on the micro blogs so you can have multiple micro blog contributors. Have a look at this Chatbox for an example – http://mychatbox.me/chatboxes/tech-ed-africa-2010-durban/

No one except for the admins and moderators can post top level content on the Chatbox, but it all depends on how the Chatbox was setup (public or private) and then members can reply to content on the Chatbox and become “members” of the micro blog.

Why did you select 200 characters for the limit on user posts and how were you able to implement that?

I decided to use 180 characters, but later increased it to 200 characters to give more room to express oneself and maybe include a YouTube video or a Flickr image on your update.
Any micro blog posting, status update or activity reply on My Chatbox, is limited to 200 characters to keep the modern rule of micro blogging – “keep it short and sweet”. The remaining characters are displayed on the text area where members add content. Micro blog descriptions are also limited to 200 characters.

How does My Chatbox handle the geo-location for user updates?

If a member registers the normal way without using Facebook or Twitter, they have to complete a couple of profile fields. These includes an “About me” field together with a location field “City, Country” that is used to pin point their location on a Google map displayed on their profiles. Similar to BuddyPress.org without Gpress.

Members can also edit their profile to include other social media channels they belong to and this is then displayed with icons on their member header with links to those channels.

Please explain the idea of creating your own niche “Chatboxes” focused on topics for more in-depth micro-blogging conversations.

Same Idea as above where you can have multiple contributors to a Chatbox . To give you an example – If you own a record store, you can create your Chatbox (XYZ Records) and let all your employees contribute to the Chatbox focused on your products or services. Other members can reply, but only you and your employees can add top level content to the Chatbox.

What plugins are necessary for powering your MyChatbox.me and did you have to create any custom functionality not currently available?

The site uses a couple of popular BuddyPress plugins including the BuddyPress Oembed plugin so that members can share content from other popular social networks such as videos and images.
Other plugins included is a modified activity stream hashtags plugin as well as a modified Group tags plugin that is used for tagging the micro blogs – still needs a little bit of work. The micro blog tags are also limited to 55 characters.

I am also using the BuddyPress followers plugin and disabled friend connections so that you can only follow members.

What functionality do you plan to add to MyChatbox in the future?

Lots of custom modifications have been done to the theme and custom plugins were developed for all the functionality.

There is quite a couple of future plans for My Chatbox and one is to create a mobile compatible theme as everything is steering towards mobile.

My Chatbox is far from 100% complete (will it ever be the way technology is growing?) so if anyone wants to help contribute to My Chatbox, contact me or register on My Chatbox and create your own Micro Blog.

Thanks to all the BuddyPress plugin contributors.

Contact Anton Koekemoer on Twitter @antonrsa or at http://www.antonkoekemoer.com.

Tweet This Post

]]> http://wpmu.org/my-chatbox-a-new-micro-blogging-service-built-on-buddypress/feed/ 5 http://wpmu.org/my-chatbox-a-new-micro-blogging-service-built-on-buddypress/