add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'my_get_posts' );

function my_get_posts( $query ) {

	if ( is_home() && false == $query->query_vars['suppress_filters'] )
		$query->set( 'post_type', array( 'post', 'page', 'album', 'movie', 'quote', 'attachment' ) );

	return $query;
}

This code you can put in either your theme’s function.php file or a custom plugin file you created for your site. This code is all good but not many sites will tell you that this might break just any other loop that you might be using on your homepage. For instance if your homepage is showing a custom menu, then they will stop showing. This code infact converted all my custom loop widgets to use this very loop. So practically all widgets started showing the same posts as were shown on the homepage and my custom menu disappeared.

So my suggestion is to not to use this code to show custom post types on your homepage. Infact the code to do is even simpler but you will have to modify your home.php or index.php file whichever one you use for showing your homepage. Find the following line in your home.php/index.php

if (have_posts) :

and just before it add this line

query_posts ( array( 'post_type' => array('post', 'page', 'album', 'movie', 'quote', 'attachment') ) );

This code will modify the loop to show all these post types as well. Well if you don’t want to modify your core theme, you can always create a child theme and copy all the code from your theme’s index.php/home.php and add the above line in it and save in the child theme folder. This will preserve your original theme and your homepage will be over riden with the custom index.php/home.php in your child theme’s folder.

Update: Don’t forget to reset the query by using the below code:

wp_reset_query();

just after endif; in your home.php/index.php or some other query on your homepage might get messed.

Related posts:

1. How to Show Related Posts for Custom Post Types and Taxonomies
2. Difference between home.php and front-page.php
3. Parse Shortcodes in your Custom Fields
4. Add Custom Taxonomy Columns to Edit Posts Page
5. Hide any Category or Asides from Main Content of k2 theme

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Custom Post Types on Homepage – Correct way

I have myself tried numerous ways to tackle it by using captcha (yes I had to use it initally), lots of plugins and even shifted to Disqus for some time. But even now I receive probably 20 spam comments for 1 genuine comment on this blog.

Closing Comments

From what I have observed you need to identify your blog reader and even the content you offer before implementing some anti-spam measures to tackle the spam. For example some blogs have timeless content for which comments should be left open always the topics in those posts are always up for discussions. But for some blogs especially technical blogs, its contents age after a certain time and it would be no harm if the comments on old posts are closed. Keeping this in mind I have closed the comments for all posts older than 90 days. This duration should be set keeping in mind the type of posts you write and how often you write. I am not writing much here so have kept the duration a bit more lest I want my blog’s front page to show posts with closed comments. I will decrease this duration once I start writing more here.

Using Plugins

Most people think that using more than one anti-spam plugins would definitely get rid of the comment spam. Its not about the number of plugins you are using but about the quality of the plugins you are using that will decide how much effective your techniques are. WordPress ships with Akismet plugin by default which is fairly good in fighting comment spam. But for some blogs it has not been that much effective. You can always use plugins on a trial basis and check during the use of which plugins the spam you got was the lowest. Trust me that there is no plugin which can get rid of 100% spam. There are few good plugins which you can try like AntiSpam Bee and Bad Behavior. They both have proven to be good on my blog. As of now I am using only AntiSpam bee plugin. Have disabled Akismet from quiet some time and the results have been good.

Third Party Commenting

Disqus, IntenseDebate, Livefyre and Facebook Comments are your best options if you want to let a 3rd party handle commenting for your blog. Each service has its plus and minus points with some unique features to offer. They allow your readers to comment using their social website credentials and without the need to enter their personal details on your blog. But even they are not free from comment spam. I tried Disqus for some months and still got lots of spam. Spammers are indeed getting clever. Facebook Comments is one service which is differnt from others because its main focus is on making the users their Facebook login and general opinion is that spam reduces once you implement them. But for a tech blog like mine I did not think it would be wise enough to ask people to comment using their social network logins. I have shifted now to WordPress native commenting over which I have full control. Though I think they work better on personal blogs because there you would prefer people to use their social network logins to comment.

Disabling Pingbacks/Trackbacks

At present I see no point in leaving trackbacks/pingbacks open on your posts. Rather than passing genuine links they have become a spam magnet. You should turn them off for all your posts and see the result.

In this post my focus was to discuss the strategies to tackle comment spam and not go into the details of how to do it. To learn how to do it you can always google for plugins and anti-spam techniques. You will find lots of good tutorials on sql commands to close comments/pingbacks, best plugins for tackling spam and .htaccess tricks. And before I end this post, one last tip: Never ever ask your readers to solve captchas/math problems or do anything of this sort to comment. This is a big price you pay as a blog author for a very small convenience in the form of getting rid of comment spammers. Also spammers can bypass these tricks easily so if you think putting captchas is helping you get rid of spam, you are wrong. Instead you are getting rid of readers who wanted to comment but didn’t.

Related posts:

1. Identifying Spam Comments
2. Poison the Spam – Fighting Spammers
3. Akismet Gets a Major Update
4. Defensio is tiring me
5. Threading Comments now easier

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Tackling Comment Spam

When it comes to starting your own first blog, you naturally look for free alternatives. And as of now the Top four free blog hosts are – WordPress.com, Blogger.com, Tumblr and Posterous. They all are free, offer lots of options and you don’t have to worry about hosting or knowing any technical knowhow of uploading/downloading and configuring all that backend stuff. Problem is how to decide which amongst the four would be most suitable for your needs. For that you will have to check what are your basic needs and what all options do these four provide. Each of these four has their own positives and negatives. You will have to select which one would suit you best. Though as always, if you want complete control and total customisation, go for Self Hosted WordPress blog. Nothing can beat that. So let’s take a look at each blogging platform and what can they offer you.

Blogger.com

Blogger is a Google service so you can always expect some tight integration with Google’s own services like Picasa, Adsense, Google+ and Analytics. If you are thinking of monetizing your free blog you should think about going with Blogger.com as your provider. Blogger provides you with basically everything you require in a blog host. And in last 1 year they have really pushed the service with lots of features. To always stay ahead, use Draft Blogger Dashboard. Its a beta dashboard where new features are released first before being released to the public.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com started way back in 2005 has grown into one of the biggest free Blog hosting services today. It has one of the largest collection of the Free and premium Themes available which keeps on growing every month. Their Dashboard is pretty extensive and provides lots of powerful features like a powerful AntiSpam system/Full mobile support/Sharing options and Widgets. But on the other hand it has the maximum limits on features which others provide it for free. For example you need to pay them $12/year to use your own domain. You need to pay them $29.97/year to remove ads whereas other Hosts don’t put any ads whatsoever on your blog. To edit CSS or fonts you need to pay them $30/year whereas others allow you to have full control over the HTML of your blog. If you love WordPress as a platform but not want these limits you always have the option of going with their self hosted version though then you will have to manage everything yourself.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a blog hosting service focussed more on Photo and personal blogs. Though you can use it for any type of blog you want but the unique social features available on it makes it more suited as a social network of sorts to connect with your other friends on Tumblr. You can post photo replies to posts, ask blog authors a question/message them or even submit them posts which makes it the most unique of all the blog hosts. Tumblr is the first service which allowed its users to post text/chat/quote/audio and video posts allowed the themes to style each type of posts differently. Infact the WordPress Post formats feature were intented to mimic this very feature.

Posterous

Posterous’s main focus seems to be towards providing a very minimalist interface to blogging. They provide all the basic features you would need in a host without going overboard or confusing you with hundreds of options. Their dashboard is very simple and does not overwhelm you with options and features. You can upload anything to your blog and it will be formatted nicely. The biggest downer here is the lack of themes. They have very few themes available. Though you can always create your own theme or hire a designer to do it for you but it would have been great if they could focus on providing more and more free and even some premium themes. I hope they do something on that front soon.

Here is a detailed feature comparison between all the services which will help you in deciding on choosing your free blog hosting.

Hopefully now you have got a clearer picture of what each host has to offer and which one will suit your blog. Happy Blogging Everyone.

Tumblr limits: Tumblr does have some limits imposed which are not mentioned clearly on their site. Here are they: 100 Posts per day. 75 Image Files per day. 1 Audio File Each Day (Only Mp3 allowed/max size: 10MB). 5 Minutes of Video upload/day.

The limits are applied each time a new post is published, Queued, Drafted. And, the limits are reset each day at approximately midnight Eastern Standard Time. These limits apply at an account level rather than at a blog level. So, if you have one account with two blogs, you can only create 100 posts per day and can only upload 75 image files per day across both of those blogs combined.

Note: I have tried my level best to check across all the hosts for their features and limitations. If you think I have quoted something wrong, please report in comments.

Related posts:

1. Get your WordPress Blog Installed/configured for Free
2. How to Advertise on John Chow, Shoemoney and John Cow for free
3. Get a Free Job Board for your website
4. How to be World’s laziest blogger – Part 2
5. Convert your WordPress Blog to an Ipad App with PadPressed

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Choosing a Free Blog Host – WordPress/Blogger/Posterous/Tumblr

Related posts:

1. WordPress’s New Default Theme is Out – 2010
2. NSpeaks v5.0 is Live
3. Hide any Category or Asides from Main Content of k2 theme
4. Living a longer life for a change
5. WordPress 3.2 Shipping with TwentyEleven Theme

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Theme Change in Progress

1. Create Separate User Role – First Method Involves creating an additional User role having same powers as Administrator but without the delete_users capability. You can use User Role Editor plugin for this.
2. Use the following code

   add_action( 'delete_user', 'nspeaks_dont_delete_user' );
   function nspeaks_dont_delete_user( $id ) {
   	$dont_delete_ids = array( 1,2,3,4 );
   	if ( in_array( $id, $dont_delete_ids ) )
   		wp_die( 'You cannot delete this user account.' );
   }
   

   in your theme’s function.php or as a separate plugin. Replace 1,2,3,4 with ids of the users you want to protect from deletion. The user will reach to the deletion screen but on final page he will encounter the error message given above.

   Thanks to Justin Tadlock for the code.

Related posts:

1. Optimising Page Title of a Blog
2. Get your WordPress Blog Installed/configured for Free
3. bbPress now as a WordPress plugin
4. Align Images in your Blog posts
5. Convert your WordPress Blog to an Ipad App with PadPressed

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Prevent Others from Deleting your Blog Users in WordPress

Well so I am writing a guide on how to achieve this. This guide will work for any wordpress template and across almost all wordpress versions.

Steps to add search page in your blog:

1. Login to your Adsense account and go to ‘My Ads’ and then click on ‘Search’ and then select ‘Custom Search Engines’.
2. Now click the +New Custom Search button at top. You will see the following screen. (I have expanded all the possible options – click the image to enlarge it) 
3. Now fill in the options. Since you are creating it for your blog/site, select the option ‘Only sites I select’ against ‘What to search’ option. Select other options as suited for your site.
4. Don’t forget to add a custom channel for your search box so that you can track its performance later on.
5. Select proper style for your search box on the page. Also make sure Ad style matches and blends well with your site’s theme because the that style will be used on the ads displayed on the search page.
6. Now under the Search results option select ‘on my website using an iframe’ checkbox where Display results: is shown. This will ensure that results are displayed on your site only and visitors don’t have to leave your site during the search operation.
7. Now create a page on your wordpress blog/site named ‘Search’ with the slug ‘search’ and enter that page’s url in the box where it says ‘URL where search results will be displayed’. It is not compulsory to use the page slug/name as what I am using. You can use it whatever you want.
8. Leave the width of the search results page as 800 as the search results are displayed best in that width. Since my blog’s design didn’t have that much width initially therefore I dropped the sidebar on my search page by using a custom template to display my search page. You can experiment with lower width for the search page and test whether it works for you or not.
9. After filling through all the options, click the final button ‘Save and get code’. Now you will see 2 codes are generated : Search box code and Search results code. Save both of them somewhere in a text file. Now your job at Adsense site is completed.
10. Now go back to the page you created on your site in step number 7 and select HTML tab in write page page (if you had created the site/page in WordPress) and enter the both the codes you got in the above step on this page. Yes we will also display the search box along with the search results. This is because if the user does not get the appropriate results he can use the search box to search again. On my site it also serves another purpose that since I have turned sidebar off on my search results page I need to show the search button again.
11. Now insert the ‘Search box code’ again on the template wherever you want to show the search code or in a Text widget which you can insert into the appropriate place.
12. So that’s it. Your site/blog is running a google search box and will show you results from Google and even show your ads on the results page. If you have any doubts, ask in comments.

Note: This was an old post dated back in 2007 which I have rehashed and updated to work with the latest Adsense Dashboard design and on popular requests. 

Related posts:

1. Increase your Adsense revenue with a simple tip
2. Google Sitelinks for NSpeaks
3. Search Engines Game
4. Google Chrome on Windows 2000/2k? Works with my method
5. Difference between home.php and front-page.php

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Replace wordpress search with Google Adsense for Search

New Media Uploader

WordPress 3.3 has replaced its flash based Media uploader with Plupload (Ticket #18206) which allows you to upload files using HTML5, Flash, Silverlight, Gears, Browserplus or the simple normal upload. This feature has been developed as a GSoC project which is now part of the core. Depending on the technologies, it supports different features on different platforms. If you are using a modern browser, the most significant update with Plupload will be Drag and Drop uploading.

Responsive Admin Section

Admin Panel will now resize itself according to the browser/screen size and will fit itself nicely on different resolutions and different mobile devices like iPhone, iPad or Blackberry. (Ticket #18198)

Feature Pointer

Whenever WordPress releases a new feature, you will be alerted of it via a pop up pointer about it (Ticket #18693). And its completely extensible via filters and actions so plugins can add their own pointers to educate users about new features in their plugins when updated. Here is a screenshot of one of the pointers: You can read more about pointers and how to extend them for your plugins at WPEngineer and Theme.fm.

Improved Admin Bar

Admin bar has got some facelifts to make it blend better with the Site header to save screen space. (Ticket #18197) The screen options and Help dropdowns have been blended with the Admin bar. Below is a screenshot to compare old and new Admin bar:

Language Packs

Uptil now if you want to use a different language version of WordPress, you had to take care of downloading .po and .mo files for core, themes and plugins separately and manage everything manually. With introduction of Language packs (Ticket #18200) you can use a plugin to manage .po and .mo files for your core, plugin and themes. The plugin will access the .po and .mo files by contacting WordPress.org API service and will download them to your blog for translation. This feature has been adopted from a GSoC Project.

New User Experience

WordPress 3.3 plans to improve user experience by guiding new users using a Welcome screen (Ticket #11651) which will tell users about what’s changed since the last version and will show a Getting started sort of guide. Also a Post update screen (Ticket #18742) will be introduced which will show a user friendly changelog and will link to Codex for advanced/dev features. Feature pointer is also a part of User experience improvements which will be introduced in WordPress 3.3. As of now only Feature pointer and first pass regarding Post update has been merged into the core. Welcome screen is yet to be implemented and a blank frame for the time being has been included on the Dashboard where Welcome screen will appear.

Performance Improvements

• Permalink Improvements - Currently using %postname% permalink structure is not recommended as it introduces a big overhead if you have large number of posts as WordPress can’t differentiate whether the url is of a page or a post and it has to generate verbose rewrite rules to solve this problem which overloads the database pretty fast and can even bring down the site in extreme cases. WordPress 3.3 attempts to solve this problem by eliminating verbose rules altogether in favor of queries when using the %postname% permalink structure (Ticket #16687).
• Meta API Improvements - Improvements in the way Meta objects are handled. (Tickets #18195 and 18196)
• Custom Menu Improvements (Ticket #16799)
• Editor API Improvements (Ticket #17144) – These improvements lets plugin and theme authors add both Visual/HTML editors into their projects exactly like they appear in the backend with complete Media upload buttons as well. Read this post by Per Soderlind on how to add Editor on the frontend using the new Editor API improvements.

Minor Improvements

1. Shortcodes work in Text Widgets (Ticket #10457) – Didn’t make it to 3.3.
2. Sort Order by Date in WP Gallery resorts to order by ID (Ticket #17485)
3. Old feed files removed namely – wp-atom.php, wp-commentsrss2.php, wp-feed.php, wp-rdf.php, wp-rss.php, wp-rss2.php (Ticket #18384)
4. Widgets don’t get lost upon Theme changes (Ticket #17979)
5. HTML 5 Doctype in Admin (Ticket #18202)
6. Upgrade Improvements (List of all related Tickets to it)
7. Child Theme Support in Theme Repository and Theme Installer (Ticket #13774) – Didn’t make it to 3.3
8. Javascript Changes and improvements (Complete List of changes)
9. wp_unique_post_slug() Filter to set your own slug. (Ticket #14111)

Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.6 RC1 Released
2. WordPress 3.1 Released
3. What you need to know about WordPress 3.1
4. WordPress 3.1 Roadmap Out
5. What’s New in WordPress 3.2

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | What you need to know about WordPress 3.3

But there is something about Tumblr which I hate totally. Its how they handle user profiles and the follow/follower system and how a user is associated with a blog. Tumblr allows you to host as many number of blogs under a single account but lets you associate your tumblr profile only with the first and primary blog you created. Individual blogs do carry their individual avatars to differentiate for your followers but there is no way other blogs under your account can be associated with an entirely different profile.

So whenever you follow any blog, your primary blog will always be shown as the follower which sucks because if you are expecting a followback from that blog to your other blog, they end up following your primary blog. Now Tumblr allows you to add/remove members and in this way you can transfer your blog to an entirely new owner. But even this doesn’t solve the profile problem because that account must be having a primary blog and the transferred blog will act again as secondary to that account because Tumblr does not allow you to keep a Tumblr account without having any blog attached to it unlike WordPress.com where we can keep a WP.com account without creating any blog.

I want Tumblr to revamp their profiles and let us decide which profile we want to use when we are following a blog and let us keep a totally separate profile with each of our blog. Unless then I would recommend you to not make multiple blogs under a single account and make separate account for each of your Tumblr blogs.

Of there are other things annoying about Tumblr as well but they are more to do with what people do on Tumblr rather than Tumblr itself so won’t mention them here.

No related posts.

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | What I hate about Tumblr

Embedly supports 165 providers and even parses the RSS feed to show the content if the provider is not officially supported. Parrotfish not only supports inline previews but also supports Instapaper so that you can save the link to your Instapaper account from where you can read it later when you find time. Just fill in your account details in the extension’s options and you are good to go. Embedly also checks each url for malware content and warns if it finds anything suspicious. It also supports HTML5 Video and audio tags so all those direct media file links gets converted into respective video/audio players.

Check the screenshots below on how Parrotfish improves the Twitter.com web experience.

Related posts:

1. 100 Followers on Twitter
2. Close your Twitter, Facebook and Orkut Accounts

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Extend Twitter’s Inline Previews with Embedly

Related posts:

1. Easiest Way to Secure your WordPress Admin
2. Get Pownce, 8Apps, Yahoo! Mash and Wallop Invites
3. Get Threaded Comments on your Blog
4. Add Custom Smileys to WordPress without plugin
5. Replace wordpress search with Google Adsense for Search

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Change HTML Editor Font in WordPress 3.2

Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.7 Released
2. WordPress.com Switches to 3.2, dumps IE 6
3. Top 5 Reasons not to use Fantastico for Installing WordPress
4. WordPress 2.7.1 RC1 Out
5. Are you prepared for Blog Tragedy – Backup Now?

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | WordPress 3.2 and BuddyPress 1.2.9 out

Show Template

This plugin will add the name of the theme template file as a comment on the footer of the page. It is very useful when you are working with themes and you need to track which particular theme file was responsible for the page.

WordPress Reset

You can use this plugin to reset WordPress database to default. It will delete all customisations and content. It does not touch the files though. Very useful if you are using a blog for testing and you need to reset and test again from start.

Simply Show Ids

This plugin adds a new column to edit posts, categories, tags, links, users and media pages showing their ids.

Log Deprecated Notices

This plugin logs the usage of deprecated files, functions, and function arguments. It identifies where the deprecated functionality is being used and offers the alternative if available.

Theme Check

The theme check plugin is an easy way to test your theme and make sure it’s up to spec with the latest theme review standards.

Theme Test Drive

Want to test a theme on a live blog directly but don’t want anyone else to see it? Use this plugin. Its purely non destructive and you can come back to the default theme anytime.

WordPress Beta Tester

You want to test something on the latest bleeding edge version but can’t use SVN for some reason or the server you want to test on does not have SVN installed. Just install a normal blog and install this plugin to convert it into a bleeding edge install.

Shortcode Reference

This plugin lists all shortcodes available in your current wordpress installation. Can be useful if you want to track what all shortcodes are available on a blog.

Hope you found them useful. While researching for this post, I also landed up at some handy tips you may find useful as a WordPress developer. Make sure you check them out:

• WordPress Plugin Developer Tips at Mashable
• 5 ways to debug WordPress by Andrew Nacin
• Ten Things Every WordPress Plugin Developer Should Know
• Follow Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers by Jacob at Smashing Magazine

Related posts:

1. Enhance WordPress Gallery feature with Plugins
2. Difference between home.php and front-page.php
3. 10 Unusual WordPress Widget Plugins
4. WordPress 3.0 Released
5. WordPress 3.2 Shipping with TwentyEleven Theme

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Some Useful Plugins for WordPress Developers

• Various Security Hardening measures
• Taxonomy Query Hardening
• Prevent sniffing out user names of non-authors by using canonical redirects.
• Media security fixes
• Improves file upload security on hosts with dangerous security settings.
• Cleans up old WordPress import files if the import does not finish.
• Introduce “clickjacking” protection in modern browsers on admin and login pages.

Either download it and install manually or upgrade to it from your Dashboard.

WordPress 3.2 Beta 2 was also announced yesterday. Here is what you can expect from it:

• Google Chrome Frame is now supported in the admin to support IE 6 users.
• Admin Theme fixes for IE 7.
• Blue Color Theme updated for the new Dashboard Design.
• jQuery updated to 1.6.1. You should test any JS that uses jQuery. Read the post by Andrew Ozz.

For a list of complete changes in upcoming 3.2, you can check my previous post.

Related posts:

1. WordPress 3.1.1 Released
2. WordPress 2.8.4 Released
3. WordPress 3.1 Released
4. WordPress 3.0.4 Released
5. WordPress 2.6 RC1 Released

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | WordPress 3.1.3 and 3.2 beta 2 released

Here are some of the features available:

• Seamless integration with your WordPress site and theme
• Integrated admin interface for forums, topics, and replies
• Split and merge topics within a single forum
• Shortcodes to help you customize where your forums appear
• Currently comes with a child theme of TwentyTen to get you started
• Keep track of changes with topic and reply revisions
• Dashboard widget shows you a shapshot of your forums at a glance
• Automatically creates a new ‘Moderator’ role for your forums
• Mark topics as favorites and view them within your new user profile
• Receive emails when new replies are posted to topics you subscribe to
• Anonymous posting lets you open your community up to the world
• Includes widgets to show latest forum activity
• Comes with an importer to move your existing integrated forums over

There are lots of features available for Developers as well. You can check them out at the release post. If you find any bug, you can report it to the bbPress trac.

Related posts:

1. NSpeaks Forum for Bloggers Launched
2. Add Custom Smileys to WordPress without plugin
3. Tantan WordPress Reports Plugin Fix
4. Akismet WordPress Plugin 2.1.7 version broken
5. Biggest Time wasters on the Net

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | bbPress now as a WordPress plugin

It means the dashboard will not work properly now on IE 6 and users will be prompted with a upgrade message asking them to switch to the latest version or chose an alternative browser via Browse Happy. The reason for dropping IE 6 support is that it requires increasingly complex code hacks to make the WordPress dashboard work in IE 6. And with Microsoft also counting down to IE 6′s end, its time everyone should upgrade.

Apart from this, all the usual upgrades of WordPress 3.2 are now available to WordPress.com users including Distraction Free writing, New Administration theme and a small improvement to Reply comment feature.

No related posts.

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | WordPress.com Switches to 3.2, dumps IE 6

System Requirements

WordPress 3.2 will be supporting PHP 5.2.4+ and MySQL 5.0+. So this is the time you should check with your webhosting and ask them to upgrade their servers if they haven’t done so. WordPress will also stop supporting IE 6 starting with this release and will ask you to upgrade your browsers if it detects you using an outdated browser.

New Default Theme

I have already talked about the new default theme shipping with WordPress 3.2 – Twenty Eleven. It has a magazine style layout and is based on the Duster theme by Auttomattic. This theme comes with its own options panel and comes with Two color schemes – Default white and a dark one. You can also change content layout options and the link color. This theme also ships with rotating headers which have got bigger in size. This theme ships with a special Showcase template. You can see its preview in the screenshot above.

Distraction Free Writing

WordPress 3.2 ships with a brand new Ajax styled Full Screen Writing interface which trims everything to the basic and when you are writing, everything vanishes and you are left only with the text. Even the textboxes become invisible. I simply love this new interface and it makes the writing so much easy and fun without anything to distract you. You can switch to Visual or HTML mode from the full screen only and toolbar shows only the basic buttons.

Showing Minmal Toolbar

Toolbar disappears when you start writing

Administration UI Change

WordPress 3.2 has made some big changes to admin panel’s design and its css. Personally I didn’t quiet like the change because it makes it look like a design from the past. Check Some screenshots of the Admin panel:

All Posts Menu

Check Twenty Eleven Options Page

New Post Page

Faster BackEnd

WordPress 3.2 promises faster performance on the backend as well as the frontend for your blog.

If you want to test WordPress 3.2 out for yourself, go ahead and download the Beta RC1 now. And don’t use it on your live site as of now. Wait for the stable version which is expected to be out by the end of June.

Related posts:

1. WordPress 3.2 Shipping with TwentyEleven Theme
2. My Notes
3. How to Show Related Posts for Custom Post Types and Taxonomies
4. Blogging from Mobile
5. WordPress.com Switches to 3.2, dumps IE 6

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | What’s New in WordPress 3.2

Cleaner Gallery

The native WordPress gallery shortcode generates XHTML Invalid code. This plugin will help you fix that. But this is not the only feature that Cleaner Gallery provides. It allows you to add multiple galleries per post, allows editing the number of pics per gallery, selectively loads JS/CSS for your gallery and supports 18 Lightbox Effect plugins to display your photos.

Paginated Gallery

Default Gallery shortcode shows all photos on a single page. For 10-15 photos, this works fine but not if you have lots of images in a gallery. This plugin breaks the gallery page into multiple pages with a configurable number of images on each page. A must have plugin if you are planning to make a Gallery type site with Native Gallery feature only.

WordPress Flash Uploader

When you have lots of images to share, then uploading them via WordPress Flash Uploader can become cumbersome. To solve that problem, WordPress Flash Uploader was created. You can upload your images via FTP and WFU will sync them to your WordPress’s Media Library. You can insert then those images to your WordPress Gallery. WordPress Flash Uploader can be accessed via its own menu or via the upload tab inside Post Editor.

LightBox Gallery

The name of the plugin suggests that it adds a lightbox type effect to the Gallery images. But it does lots more than that. It displays the associated metadata of the image, adds pagination to the galleries, extends the gallery options and can change the caption view of images to tooltips. If you are adding to spice up your gallery with some effects, this is the plugin you should go in for.

There are other Lightbox plugins as well you can use. Basic functionality is same but they offer various extras. Its upto you which one suits your needs: jQuery Lightbox for Native Galleries, Flexible Lightbox, Lightbox Plus, WP jQuery Lightbox and Simple Lightbox.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. There might be dozens of other plugins apart from which I listed. I just listed those ones which I found useful and easy to implement.

Related posts:

1. Integrating Coppermine Gallery with your WordPress
2. Some Useful Plugins for WordPress Developers
3. Add Custom Smileys to WordPress without plugin
4. 10 Unusual WordPress Widget Plugins
5. WordPress 2.9 – Features, Tips and Screenshots (Updated)

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | Enhance WordPress Gallery feature with Plugins

Now the post’s title is actually a bit surprising because even I am surprised that how almost 4 years have passed since I started writing here. Though I have written some odd 300+ posts only [Can't say accurately because I have deleted lot many posts in recent days] which translates to roughly to 1-2 posts per week. Though I learnt a lot about blogging and gained lots of experience in these years but what I failed to do is the implementation part. Around 2.5 year back I wrote a post about goals for Nspeaks to achieve in 2009. Its 2011 now and if I go through those goals, I have hardly fulfilled a single goal out of them. 2.5 years and simplest goals yet not achieved. Its pathetic.

Why I am writing this post? This post has no such purpose and there are still 2 months left for 4 years to complete. Just wanted to tell that how easy it is to get distracted from your goals and from blogging seriously. And its not the usual distractions which I once talked about. Its when you start taking your blog lightly. Its when you start neglecting your blog. Its when you don’t care about the people who visit your blog.

Going back through all these years, I have made so many mistakes here. To name a few like changing my themes constantly. I have now lost count of how many themes I have kept here. Sorry for that but this time I will make sure I don’t change this theme atleast for the coming year. There were many more mistakes like not replying to commenters on time, changing ad spots locations frequently and making changes/tweaks year around. Sometimes the changes were drastic to put off new visitors. At times, I made changes to the live site which used to break it.

So now what? Well I want to give my full energy once again here. And I have started the process also. I have removed some 30-40 posts in last few days which were totally useless, had broken links or were about services/products that don’t work anymore or in general were low quality posts. This was done to clean out the junk from the blog and also because of the recent Panda update by Google. Theme is a fresh one and is actually Twenty Ten’s Child theme – Magnitude. I will also be showcasing some of my better written posts in sidebar to increase the pageviews and to decrease the bounce rate which is still around 70%. And yes the most important, will be posting new posts regularly here. Hopefully, this time I will achieve those goals which I had set long time back and yet to fulfill.

Related posts:

1. NSpeaks v5.0 is Live
2. NSpeaks Goals For 2009
3. 50+ Things I have learnt from Blogging
4. Blogging Frequency

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | 4 years of Blogging

Related posts:

1. WordPress 2.8.4 Released
2. WordPress 3.0.4 Released
3. WordPress 3.1.3 and 3.2 beta 2 released
4. WordPress 2.7 Released
5. WordPress 2.8.5 Released

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | WordPress 3.1.2 Released

Development over the theme is going on and by the final changes lots of changes can be expected. But as for now, Duster Theme looks a fairly good choice to be selected as next default theme for WordPress. For the first time, WordPress has selected a Magazine style theme. If anyone wants to test this theme on your blog, you can directly download and check Duster Theme. WordPress.com Users can get Duster from WP.com Theme ShowCase.

Note for Theme Developers: If you are creating any theme and want to submit it to WP.org Theme Repository, then you won’t be able to name them as TwentyTwelve and so on. More information on Theme Trac where they rejected another theme named TwentyEleven.

Related posts:

1. K2 – The best theme engine for WordPress
2. WordPress’s New Default Theme is Out – 2010
3. What’s New in WordPress 3.2
4. WordPress Theme Directory Launched
5. Difference between home.php and front-page.php

Hostgator.com 25% Discount code for all plans: nspeaks25off | Dreamhost.com Discount code for whopping $97 off on shared hosting plan: NSPEAKSMAX

© NSpeaks, 2007-2012. | WordPress 3.2 Shipping with TwentyEleven Theme