Whether you use WordPress as a weblog tool to publish articles in reverse chronology or as a more traditional CMS to publish pages arranged in a hierarchy, your webpages probably have a page navigation menu somewhere near the top. Sooner or later there comes a time when you need a way to manage this menu better. In fact, if your content is hierarchically arranged pages, this time comes right at the beginning.

There are several good plugins that help you improve your page menu. op111.net has published quick howtos on two: Page Links To and Page Menu Editor. A few months ago I started using another page-menu plugin, which finally replaced for me both Page Links To and Page Menu Editor, as well as Exclude Pages. It is called Page Lists Plus and this is a small review of it.

Page Lists Plus

Homepage: technokinetics.com/plugins/page-lists-plus
WP.org homepage: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-lists-plus
Author homepage: technokinetics.com
Version reviewed: Page Lists Plus v1.1.5
Compatibility: Tested and works fine with WordPress v2.8, v2.9 and v3.0-dev.

Page Lists Plus is a plugin that offers options to customize the output of wp_list_pages() — this probably sounded like Greek to you, but I’m starting with it for a reason: wp_list_pages() is the main WordPress function for generating a list of all pages (as opposed to posts) in a site, and it is what WordPress themes use to create page navigation menus. What that means in practical terms is that Page Lists Plus and its array of useful options will work with essentially any WordPress theme that has a page menu.

What are these customization options then?

Page Lists Plus global options

Page Lists Plus has about twenty options. They are all presented on one screen, separated in two groups. The first group is the global options, which you set once and forget about:

Add “Home” link at the start of Page lists is the first option and it must be among the most useful to users of the plugin: If your theme does not display a Home link on the page menu, or does not offer an option to add one, all it takes to add it with PLP is one click.

Add class="first_item" to first list item and the four options after it make it easy to change the appearance of the page menu via CSS.

The last global option, Remove title attributes from anchors, is what intrigued me most the first time I tried PLP, as it indicated a concern for an area which has sometimes been singled out as the weak point of WordPress (and in which WordPress has made significant progress in the last few versions) — accessibility.

As Tim Holt, the author of Page Lists Plus, explains in his site, what WordPress does with title attributes is wrong and, unless you are manually adding meaningful and informative title attributes to your links, the best thing to do is remove the attributes completely. Selecting Remove title attributes from anchors will do exactly that.

(Even leaving accessibility aside, a title attribute identical to the anchor text is pointless and can also be annoying.)

Page Lists Plus per-page options

Next is the group of page-specific options. They are eight in total and, since not all will be of interest to everyone, the plugin lets you select the ones you want to use:

The options you select will then appear grouped in a box on the Edit screen of your Pages:

As of version 1.1.5, the page-specific options of PLP are eight — one that I dislike, one that I’m indifferent to, and six I like and use:

Add Custom Classes to Individual List Items

Adding custom CSS classes to specific items makes it easy to style them individually via CSS.

Alternative Link Text

To specify, for example, a short link text for a page that has a long title. If I had a page with the title, say, Greek Cuisine Recipes by Demetris, I could use just Greek Recipes for the page menu.

Alternative Title Attribute

To supply supplementary information that appears when a link is hovered over. (See screenshot example below.)

Include

To specify whether a page appears on page lists and page menus. This option is selected by default for new pages. (In the Global options you can also specify whether children of excluded pages are excluded too.)

Link

To unlink a page. Useful, for example, for empty pages that serve as parents to other pages.

Redirect To

To make a page that appears on page menus and redirects transparently to a specified URL. For example, you can make a page that redirects to a category archive, by specifying the URL of the category archive.

In this example from op111.net the link for the Archives page has a TITLE attribute that provides some supplementary information on the target. Graphical browsers commonly display the TITLE attribute when the link is hovered over.

Suggestions & Feature requests

All in all, I’m happy with Page Lists Plus. It’s been a three-in-one plugin for me, and it has been working flawlessly.

The following are just a few small points that I think would help make it even better, at least for what I need:

• An additional Save button near the top of the Options screen.
• An option to use page Excerpts as title attributes of links.
• An option to use custom anchor text for the Home link.

Questions & Answers

These are a few questions I had when I started using Page Lists Plus, along with the answers I can offer now:

Is PLP a replacement for Page Links To?

Page Links To is a specialized plugin that does redirections of all kinds, but if you only need to add links to your page menu, Page Lists Plus will do that for you just fine.

Is PLP a replacement for Page Menu Editor?

For me it has been a complete replacement, as it does everything Page Menu Editor does, and more. Also, PLP is more economical in database queries: While Page Menu Editor makes one query for every page that exists in a site, Page Lists Plus only makes one query per active option that needs information from the database. (Some of its options, like the addition of various CSS classes, do not need database information at all.)

Does PLP work with wp_page_menu?

It should in theory, as wp_page_menu is simply a wrapper for wp_list_pages, and it seems to work in practice too. (At this writing, the page menu of op111.net is constructed with wp_page_menu, and Page Lists Plus seems to work fine with it.)

Behind Page Lists Plus: Tim Holt

Page Lists Plus is made by Tim Holt, a web developer in England. Tim Holt specializes in WordPress customization, and, as his homepage and Page Lists Plus show, has also a special interest in web accessibility.

Tim replied prompty and informatively to two questions I sent his way before I started writing this review. I want to thank him for his kindness from here too.

Links

All Page Lists Plus links a second time, for your convenience.

Remember that you can install the plugin directly from your WordPress dashboard too: Go to Plugins › Add New, search for Page Lists Plus and click Install on the first result.

• Page Lists Plus, homepage
• Page Lists Plus, WP.org homepage
• Page Lists Plus, author homepage

Thank you for reading! I wish you a happy 2010!

/δκ

CHANGES

• 2010-01-02. Added Questions & Answers part.

Related

• Add meaningful tooltips to your WordPress menu links with Page Menu Editor
• Add any link to your WordPress navigation menu with Page Links To
• Plugins used
• Tangofy: Better icons for WordPress 2.7 and 2.8

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© 2009 op111.net | Permalink

After six months in preparation, the first beta version of WordPress 2.8 was released on 16 May 2009. Following WordPress 2.7, which focused mainly on the UI, WordPress 2.8 brings changes that are more evenly distributed across all areas. There are big improvements in the user interface, but there is a much larger amount of not immediately obvious improvements in two main areas:

• Extensibility
• Optimization/Performance

Also, many bug fixes and enhancements, big and small: This version saw more tickets opened and, most importantly, closed than any other version of WordPress before. The closed tickets are almost 800 at this moment. — All in all, WordPress 2.8 is a better tool than WordPress 2.7.

A NOTE ON COMPATIBILITY

In general, backward compatibility seems good. With two exceptions (one theme that broke itself and another that broke WordPress) all themes I’ve tried work well. Same with plugins: A few have problems but most work well. If it is any indication, of the plugins used in op111.net only one explicitly supports WP 2.8 at this moment; yet, all work without problems. (op111.net has been running on development snapshots of v. 2.8 since March.)

On to what’s new, in alphabetical order…

Accessibility improvements

WordPress 2.8 brings several improvements, big and small, to accessibility. A lot of work went into two areas in particular:

1. Adding labels and alternative text to input elements that did not have them.
2. Making the functionality of the new Widgets UI (more on that later) fully available without JavaScript.

Authentication: more pluggable

The authentication mechanism is now improved, so that authentication methods like OpenID and authorization methods like OAuth can cooperate easier with it (without replacing it and then having to deal with other issues). Read more:

• Authentication in WordPress 2.8 — Will Norris
• #8938 (Use new filter for extending WordPress authentication) – WordPress Trac

Improvements in this area also pave the way for OAuth support in the core (which will probably come in ver. 2.9).

Columnification and pagination in Screen Options

Screen Options has two new options, depending on the type of screen:

1. Number of columns
2. Number of items per page

Items per page is the one I’ve found more useful, but I can imagine columnification would be very useful too in some situations, e.g. on a netbook with an 800×480 display.

CSS: new dynamic classes with body_class()

Dynamic CSS classes were first brought to WordPress by the innovative Sandbox of Scott Wallick and Andy Skelton, offering a simple way to modify to any extend the appearance of a WordPress site by CSS alone. They offer possibilities that would otherwise require JavaScript or PHP.

WordPress 2.7 added dynamic CSS classes for the post div(ision). Version 2.8 adds dynamic classes for the body element too. Both implementations were based on Sandbox.

For theme authors. To add this to a theme, simply open the body element like so:

<body <?php if (function_exists('body_class')) { body_class(); } ?>>

More on the body_class() function:

• WordPress 2.8 and the body_class() function — Nathan Rice

Feed links for everything

WordPress 2.8 automatically adds feed links specific to the page viewed. For example, when you view the archive of the category Cooking, it adds a feed link for that category. When you view the archive for author Cyrus, it adds a feed link for that author, etc.:

For theme authors. The two main feed links—all posts and all comments—are not added automatically. To let WP add them too, put the automatic_feed_links() function (defined in general-template.php) in your functions.php.

Note. Extra Feed Links, a plugin by scribu, adds the same functionality to earlier WP versions.

JavaScript at the bottom

JavaScript files properly registered via the appropriate script API can now be placed at the bottom of the page. In most cases this is preferable, because JavaScript blocks parallel downloads (browsers need to evaluate it before proceeding) and can delay the time by which a page is usable and also the time by which the rendering is complete. So, unless a JavaScript file needs to be at the top, it can be moved to the bottom for better performance.

For plugin/theme authors. This is done with a new optional argument in the wp_enqueue_script() function. The argument defaults to “false” (not in the footer). To put a script in the footer, set it to “true”. E.g.:

wp_enqueue_script('script_handle', 'script/url/file.js', '', '', true);

More:

• Script loader updates « WordPress Development Updates
• Loading JavaScript In Footer In WordPress 2.8 « Lester Chan’s WordPress Plugins

LiveJournal Importer: Redone and improved

Importing a LiveJournal blog into a WordPress 2.8 blog is easier and more complete thanks to the rewritten LiveJournal Importer, which uses the LiveJournal API. Read more:

• The All-New LiveJournal Importer for WordPress « Dented Reality

Minification and concatenation of CSS and JS…

… or, faster admin pages.

Most CSS and JavaScript files in the administration area are now concatenated (chained together into one file) and, depending on the server setup, compressed too. Javascript files are also minified. Using minification, concatenation and compression improves performance in two ways:

1. The total size of files to get is reduced.
2. The browser requests fewer files from the server.

This kind of optimization could prove even more beneficial to the frontend (the public part of a website). Of course, things can become more complex there, but the current impementation could serve as a testing ground for applying something similar to the frontend at a later time.

What is minification? Minification is the practice of removing from a file bits useful to humans but unneeded for machine execution, like comments, spaces, line breaks and indentation. On the web it is used mainly for CSS and JS files, to reduce the amount of bytes sent from the server to the browser.

Plugin Installer

The plugin browser/installer was first introduced in the previous version, six months ago. I’m including it here for two reasons:

1. It seems it’s not very well known yet…
2. It’s been improved in v. 2.8. In the meantime, the search mechanism of wordpress.org was improved too, and now the whole system works much better.

Here is how to install a plugin in the new way:

Plugins management

The plugins manager was retouched, and is still being worked on at this writing. It now offers views/filters by plugin state, which I’ve found to be very convenient:

Pretty permalinks for IIS 7

IIS 7, the current version of the Microsoft web server, recently got an official rewrite module and can now do URL rewriting like Apache does. WordPress 2.8 detects if the server is IIS 7 with the rewrite module and offers the option to use fully pretty permalinks with IIS 7 too — not just the semi-pretty ones with index.php in the middle. Read more:

• IIS 7 URL Rewrite Module support in WordPress 2.8 : Ruslan’s Blog : The Official Microsoft IIS Site

Proxy support

Easy proxy support (without editing core files) had been missing from WordPress and was a frequent request. Now it is part of the WordPress HTTP API. You enable it by defining a few constants in wp-config.php.

The documentation for this, along with an example, can for now be found in the file wp-includes/http.php (look for the WP_HTTP_Proxy class).

Quotation marks locale-aware

WordPress has a smart typography filter that, among other things, replaces ASCII quotes—"like these"—with proper quotation marks “like these”. Before v. 2.8 this filter only knew about quotation marks as used in American English.

Now translators can specify the appropriate quotation marks for a language, and, if you use a localized version, they will be used instead. For example, «αβγδ» for Greek, „abcd“ for German, and so on and so forth.

Relational navigation links

A relational link in an HTML document points to another document and states its relation with the current document. Examples of such links that are used for navigation are “prev” (previous in a series) and “index” (index for current). Browsers can use them to offer an interface for navigation, much like they do when they show an icon/menu in the URL address bar for the feed links in a document.

WordPress 2.8 generates four types of relational navigation links: home, index, prev, next. If your browser supports such links (not many do, at least natively), you’ll be seeing them more often as WordPress sites upgrade to v. 2.8:

An interesting possibility of relational links is that browsers can also use them as hints to prefetch (predownload) a page, cache it, and then serve it from the cache, for better speed. Firefox—the only browser that does link prefetching currently—does this with relational links of the type next. (I have not been able to verify if it works in WordPress sites.)

Smilies: Now faster!

Version 2.8 cuts in half the time needed to convert text smilies to image smilies! :-o The faster code is also availabe as a plugin for WordPress 2.7: Faster Smilies

(Of course, you can always turn graphical smilies off in Settings › Writing › Formatting, and WordPress will be even faster!)

Theme Installer

Installing themes in v. 2.8 is as quick and easy as installing plugins is in v. 2.7:

Theme/Plugin Editor with highlighting and lookup

I was never fond of this feature of WP: I don’t see any need for it and I also think that it encourages bad habits. But others like it. They’ll be happy to know that the theme/plugin editor is now improved, with syntax highlighting and function lookup:

Note. In Chrome and Safari you’ll see the plain old text area without fancy colours. These two browsers (that share the same rendering engine) are not supported at the moment.

Timezone selection and DST

Settings › General had been displaying for a long time this apologetic message:

Unfortunately, you have to manually update this for Daylight Savings Time. Lame, we know, but will be fixed in the future.

Well, the future is here! :-D Now you only need to enter your location:

Note. Automatic DST adjustment uses functions that were introduced in version 5.1.0 of PHP. So, you won’t see it if your server has an older version. (The minimum requirement to use WordPress remains PHP 4.3.)

• Automatic Timezone is the plugin on which this enchancement was based. It adds the same functionality to WordPress 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7.

Widgets API: new and multiple-instance

Another part rewritten in v. 2.8 is the Widgets API. Writing widgets is now simpler and, importantly, widgets based on the new API are multiple-instance by default, like the Text/HTML widget in previous versions. (Writing multiple-instance widgets was already possible but convoluted.) Read more in this announcement by Ryan Boren:

• New Widgets API - wp-hackers | Google Groups

As a bonus, the new function the_widget() lets you display the output of a widget anywhere in a template.

Widgets management UI: Redone, much improved

This took a lot of work and is, in my estimation, the most important improvement in the user interface of WordPress 2.8.

The new Widgets manager:

1. Does everything by simple drag ’n’ drop (and is fully functional without JavaScript too).
2. Has better memory/storage: You can deactivate a widget without losing its configuration, and widgets that are deactivated automatically retain their configurations too.

Also, thanks to the new Widgets API, widgets can now have multiple instances. You can add a widget as many times as you wish.

See the screenshots:

That was it!

If you think I left out some important feature, please leave a comment to say so. If you want to try test versions of WordPress 2.8 as they come out, watch the official blog: wordpress.org/development — Usual warnings apply, of course: This is not a final product! Do not install on a live website unless you are prepared to spend time investigating and reporting bugs!

Note. The menu icons on the screenshots are not the default ones. If you like them, you can have them too!

Thanks for reading!

/δκ

Changes

• 2009-06-18. Added function_exists condition to body_class example.
• 2009-06-11. Locale-aware quotation marks by wptexturize.
• 2009-06-02. Link to X. Borderie on 10.000 tickets and 2.8 dev stats. Link to Automatic Timezone.
• 2009-06-01. Link to N. Rice on the body_class() function.

Related

• WordPress 2.7: Ten useful new features
• Progressive enhancement of drop-down menus with the :not CSS selector
• Five good WordPress plugins you may not know about
• Page Lists Plus: Comprehensive control of your WordPress page menu

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© 2009 op111.net | Permalink

UPDATED 2009-06-17

WordPress plugins are like Firefox extensions: there are thousands—literally!—and there is one for everything. If you can think of a way to modify or extend Firefox or WordPress, most likely someone else has already thought about it and made it into an extension or a plugin.

This is great, but it can also be confusing, especially when you start: “I found 5 plugins for this or that. Good! Which one to use now?” Or: “What plugins to install to make my site better for me and my visitors?” This list of plugins is meant to answer questions like these, questions that beginners in WordPress usually have.

I put together a selection of plugins that improve and extend WordPress in basic ways and that I think every WordPress user should know about. That is, not “the best plugins” (although all are among the best) or “must-have plugins” (no plugin is a “must-have” in general), but plugins I consider just that: Basic!

Since a selection like this is bound to be subjective to a point, I also included the ratings from WordPress.org for a quick objectivity check.

Enjoy, and ask away if you have questions!

GENERAL NOTES

• All plugins are plug-and-play; no editing of templates needed
• All are free to use and licenced under the GNU GPL
• All are installed with a few clicks via the WordPress Dashboard (Plugins › Add new › Search for the plugin name and click Install)
• All work well with WordPress 2.7 and 2.8.
• Ratings from WordPress.org are as of 7 April 2009

QUICK LINKS to the homepages of all plugins:

• Bad Behavior
• HeadSpace2
• Search Everything
• Shutter Reloaded (or WP-Slimbox2 or Lightbox 2)
• Similar Posts (or YARPP)
• Subscribe to Comments
• WordPress Database Backup
• XML Sitemap Generator
• Contact Form (Easy Contact or Contact Form 7)
• Mobile WordPress (MobilePress or WordPress Mobile Edition or Wordpress PDA & iPhone or WPtouch)

Bad Behavior

Home: Bad Behavior
What: Blocks automated spam
By: Michael Hampton
Version: 2.0.26
Rating at WP.org: 75/100 by 47 people

Bad Behavior is an antispam solution that takes a different approach. Instead of looking at the message, it examines the messenger and the delivery method: If they are not legitimate, they are simply blocked, before they even get to submit a message. Since most—almost all—comment spam is delivered by automated bots, this is a clever approach, and it seems to be effective too. Bad Behavior virtually eliminates comment spam. Optionally, it can also consult the blacklists of harversters and comment spammers maintained by the Project Honey Pot, and with this option it is even more effective.

One type of spam that Bad Behavior is not designed to catch is manual spam: spam messages submitted by hand by humans. For this reason, it is often used as a first line of defense in front of a plugin like Akismet. But if you don’t receive a lot of manual spam, you may be fine with Bad Behavior alone.

LEARN MORE

• Spam Prevention Strategy. The developer of Bad Behavior explains how to use the plugin as a part of an antispam strategy.
• Project Honey Pot. To activate the http Black List in Bad Behavior, you need to register to Project Honey Pot (it’s free) and get an http:BL Access Key (it’s free).

HeadSpace2

Home: HeadSpace2
What: Search-engine optimization and more
By: John Godley
Version: 3.6.19
Rating at WP.org: 75/100 by 65 people

All in all, WordPress is well optimized for search engines. It does not need fixing and there are only a few things you can do here and here, like generating meta descriptions from post and page excerpts, or adding noindex tags to Archives, Categories etc.

HeadSpace2 is perfect for this: By default it does nothing, while, at the same time, it is powerful and versatile, more than any other plugin for WordPress SEO. So, you can use it to apply as few or as many optimizations as you want.

It also offers an array of extra features not directly related to SEO but handy nevertheless, like an option to activate themes or plugins per page, or an option to display a different number of articles on the home page and on archive pages.

Search Everything

Home: Search Everything
What: Extends the WordPress search
By: Dan Cameron and many contributors
Version: 5
Rating at WP.org: 78/100 by 93 people

The built-in search mechanism of WordPress is limited: it only looks in the content of posts. Search Everything extends the WordPress search to pages, comments, excerpts, tags and more, and it’s very easy to configure. To use it in its default configuration, you just activate it. You can modify its default settings by ticking or unticking a few check boxes.

Shutter Reloaded

Home: Shutter Reloaded
What: Lightbox effect for images and galleries of pictures
By: Andrew Ozz
Version: 2.2
Rating at WP.org: 73/100 by 49 people

The Lightbox effect is one of the best things JavaScript has brought to the web: a pleasant, unobtrusive way of going from thumbnail to full-size image and of viewing slideshows.

Since the original Lightbox appeared in 2005, many alternative implementations have been developed and there are several plugins that adapt Lightbox implementations to WordPress. Shutter Reloaded is different that most in that it does not require a JavaScript framework like jQuery or MooTools, and so it is very light. Like the two alternatives below, it is also easy to setup, has many features, it is applied automatically to images (you don’t need to change anything in your posts) and it can also group images into sets.

ALTERNATIVES

• WP-Slimbox2 by Greg Yingling, rated 89/100 by 9 people, brings Slimbox2 to WordPress and uses the jQuery framework. It is a relatively new plugin at this writing (April 2009) and it seems to work very well. (It is the one currently used in op111.net.)
• Lightbox 2 by Rupert Morris, rated 79/100 by 93 people, has a feature that I miss in both Shutter Reloaded and WP-Slimbox2: It takes the image titles and uses them as captions on the images. On the downside, it requires the sizeable Prototype framework.

Similar Posts

Home: Similar Posts
What: Diplays a list of similar posts/pages
By: Rob Marsh, SJ
Version: 2.6.2
Rating at WP.org: 83/100 by 24 people

This may be overstretching the concept of “basic plugins”, but it is a navigational aid I enjoy in websites, and I know other people do too: A list of pages similar or related to the page I am at.

Similar Posts calculates similarity on the basis of title, content and tags, and it can display a list of similar posts/pages under the content, on the sidebar, and in RSS feeds. Also, as can be seen on the two screenshots above, it is very customizable.

NOTE. Similar Posts has not been updated yet for WordPress 2.7 and 2.8, but it works well with both.

ALTERNATIVE

• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin by mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine), rated 77/100 by 60 people, is very much like Similar Posts in functionality and options. Also, its current version (v2) requires more resources than Similar Options. The coming version 3 (currently in beta) is a major rewrite that adds a caching system to deal with this and improve performance.

Subscribe to Comments

Home: Subscribe to Comments
What: Option for commenters to be notified of new comments
By: Scriptygoddess (originally), Mark Jaquith (now)
Version: 2.1.2
Rating at WP.org: 73/100 by 172 people

If you accept comments in your WordPress site, you must install Subcribe to Comments, at least as a courtesy to your commenters. It adds a check box that commenters can tick to get e-mail notifications of new comments.

The same can also be achieved by subscribing to the post feed. However:

1. Not everyone uses feeds; and
2. The convenience of Subscribe to Comments is appreciated even by those who do

If you allow comments in your site, install Subscribe to Comments!

WordPress Database Backup

Home: WordPress Database Backup
What: Automated and on-demand database backups
By: Scott Merrill (originally), Austin Matzko (now)
Version: 2.2.2
Rating at WP.org: 81/100 by 102 people

Good webhosts backup automatically the sites they host. Even so, having copies of your database sent to your inbox at regular intervals is an extra layer of protection and a nice convenience. WP DB Backup does this without hassle. You set it and then forget about it.

NOTE. WP DB Backup only makes copies of the database: posts, pages, comments, metadata and also settings of themes, plugins and of WordPress itself. It does not back up the files (pictures, videos etc.) that you upload to your posts (and which are located in wp-content/uploads).

XML Sitemap Generator

Home: XML Sitemap Generator
What: Generates and maintains an XML sitemap
By: Arne Brachhold
Version: 3.1.2
Rating at WP.org: 85/100 by 430 people

An XML sitemap is a file in the home directory of a website, e.g.: http://example.com/sitemap.xml, that tells search engines where to find the pages that are available to crawl. It is an important part of any modern website that wants to be visible by search engines, but making and maintaining one is not simple. XML Sitemap Generator does this automatically. It makes an XML sitemap, it updates it every time a new post or page is added and it also notifies a few major search engines about the change.

NOTE. XML sitemaps and sitemap pages, like this, are different things. The former are unstyled XML documents meant for machines. The latter provide an index, an overview of the site’s content, for human visitors.

Contact Form

WordPress sites have comments, but often people need to contact you in private, by e-mail. The most convenient means you can offer for this is a contact form. There are many good contact forms for WordPress, but none I’m perfectly happy with. Here are the two I like most:

• Easy Contact by Scott Wallick, rated 98/100 by 18 people, is near perfect: It’s easy to set up and has all the basics plus two optional features that I consider essential in a contact form: a quiz (for antispam protection) and a check box that senders can tick to receive a carbon copy of their messages. — It also does something bad: By design, upon deactivation it deletes automatically all its settings from the database.
• Contact Form 7 by Takayuki Miyoshi, rated 82/100 by 199 people, is more advanced, supports more fields and also multiple instances, but it does not offer a CC option.

op111.net uses Easy Contact: op111.net/contact — You are welcome to try it if you want; just remember to put [TEST] somewhere in the subject.

Mobile WordPress

As more and more people browse the web through mobile devices, it is becoming essential for websites to look good in mobile browsers. One way to do this in WordPress is a plugin that, when it detects a mobile browser, activates a theme tailored for mobile devices. Here are four that I’m looking at:

• MobilePress by Younique (rated 79/100 by 41 people).
• WordPress Mobile Edition by Crowd Favorite (rated 66/100 by 22 people).
• Wordpress PDA & iPhone by Imthiaz Rafiq (rated 75/100 by 34 people).
• WPtouch by BraveNewCode (rated 80/100 by 39 people).

Related

• Plugins used
• Five good WordPress plugins you may not know about
• WordPress: 20 answers
• The manual Excerpt in WordPress: What, why, how, tips and plugins

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© 2009 op111.net | Permalink

Το WordPress 2.8 προβλέπεται να κυκλοφορήσει κατά τα τέλη Απριλίου. (2009-06-14: Η έκδ. 2.8 κυκλοφόρησε επίσημα στις 10 Ιουνίου 2009.) Έρχεται με βελτιώσεις στα εξωτερικά χαρακτηριστικά και, ακόμα περισσότερο, στην εσωτερική λειτουργία, την ταχύτητα και την ευελιξία. Αυτά θα τα δούμε στην ώρα τους. Στο μεταξύ, ο εξελληνισμός της έκδοσης 2.8 είναι σχεδόν έτοιμος. Αν χρησιμοποιείτε ήδη WP 2.8 σε προέκδοση και θέλετε να βοηθήσετε, είστε καλοδεχούμενοι!

Εκτός από την απόδοση των νέων αλφαριθμητικών (όρων και φράσεων), η μετάφραση του WordPress 2.8 βελτιώνει σε πολλά σημεία ό,τι υπήρχε ήδη. Η πληρότητα έχει υπερβεί το 99,5%.

Στόχος, όπως πάντα, είναι να αποδοθεί το περιβάλλον του WordPress σε απλά, στρωτά ελληνικά. Σχόλια, προτάσεις, διορθώσεις, ενστάσεις και αντιρρήσεις είναι όλα ευπρόσδεκτα. Αφήστε ένα σχόλιο από κάτω ή στείλτε μήνυμα από την σελίδα επικοινωνίας.

WordPress 2.8 στα ελληνικά

Αρχεία

WORDPRESS 2.8 ΣΤΑ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ

Η μετάφραση του WP 2.8 βρίσκεται προς το παρόν στον κορμό (trunk) του αποθετηρίου: Η μετάφραση βρίσκεται πλέον στον κλάδο 2.8 του αποθετηρίου:

• http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/el/branches/2.8/messages/el.mo
• http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/el/branches/2.8/messages/el.po

Γενικές σημειώσεις για τη μετάφραση

• άγω. Για τους στιγμιαίους χρόνους των συνθέτων του άγω χρησιμοποιώ «άγω»· όχι «αγάγω» ή «άξω». Με άλλα λόγια, δεν γίνεται διάκριση μεταξύ στιγμιαίας και εξακολουθητικής ενέργειας του ρήματος. (Γιατί; Διότι οι τύποι «αγάγω» και «άξω» μου ακούγονται αφύσικοι και εξεζητημένοι μέσα στα σημερινά ελληνικά.)
• Ημερομηνίες. Για τη σύντομη μορφή χρησιμοποιείται ο τύπος j/m/Y, H:i, που δίνει, π.χ.: 31/12/1999, 23:59.
• Πολυμεσική ορολογία. Κάποιοι όροι, ειδικά για Flash, δεν ξέρω αν πρέπει να εξελληνιστούν. Δεν έχω ιδέα κιόλας πώς ή αν μεταφράζονται:
  • Buffer
  • Current marker
  • Flashvars
  • Kiosk mode
  • Loop
  • SAlign
  • Script callbacks
  • SWLiveConnect
  • Target cache
  • WMode

Ορολογία

Μερικοί δύσκολοι όροι ή όροι με αμφιλεγόμενη ή ασυνήθιστη απόδοση:

• dashboard. «πίνακας ελέγχου»
• draft. «προσχέδιο»
• featured. «επιλεγμένα». Ευχαριστώ τον Φίλιππο για την ιδέα.
• inline. «επιτόπιος» (για επεξεργασία)
• media. «πολυμέσα» ή «αρχεία πολυμέσων»
• password. «συνθηματικό»
• pingback. «πίνγκμπακ» ή «παράθεση» — βλ. και «trackback» παρακάτω
• sidebar. «πλευρικό πάνελ»
• slug. Αμετάφραστο επί του παρόντος...
• spam. «ανεπιθύμητη αλληλογραφία» ή, συχνότερα, «ανεπιθύμητα» σκέτο (πληθ. ουδ.). Ευχαριστώ τον Σίμο για την προτροπή.
• trackback. «τράκμπακ» ή «παράθεση»
• user. «μέλος» συνήθως — αποφεύγονται και τα προβλήματα γένους.
• visual (editor). «κειμενογράφος» — (Το «WYSIWYG» (What You See Is What You Get) είναι ακριβές αλλά όχι κατανοητό σε όλους.)
• widget. «μονάδα»

Αυτά!...

Ευχαριστώ για τον χρόνο σας!

δκ

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© 2009 op111.net | Permalink

UPDATED 2009-10-05

WordPress excerpts, which are not excerpts in the common sense of the word, make a WordPress site easier to browse and its content easier to discover. When also used as META descriptions, good excerpts bring more and better traffic from search engines.

This article looks into the WordPress Excerpt and explains how to use it.

CONTENTS

1. What is the WordPress excerpt
2. Why write excerpts in WordPress
3. How to write excerpts
4. WordPress Excerpt Editor
5. Excerpts as META descriptions
6. Notes, Miscellaneous
7. Links

1. What is the WordPress excerpt

The excerpt in WordPress is a short summary of a post. It is written by hand and it can replace the full post in places where a summary is preferable.

Or, as the Excerpt box in WordPress 2.7 2.8 says:

Excerpts are optional hand-crafted summaries of your content. Learn more about manual excerpts.

In other words, the WordPress excerpt is not an excerpt in the common sense of the word; it is not a part taken from a post but an extra piece of information added to a post, in the same way that tags are added. And, like tags, it is optional. To add an excerpt, you simply write one in the Excerpt box, right under the post editor:

But why bother with writing excerpts?

2. Why write excerpts in WordPress

Because of what happens if you don’t!

The following assumes a WordPress theme that displays excerpts in search results and in author/category/date/tag archives. Not all themes do. For a solution, see WordPress Excerpt Editor, on which more in a while.

2.1. Archive pages and search results

Let’s start with an example:

Say that you search for minimalist+wordpress in this site, op111.net. Among other results you’ll get “Five clean, minimalist themes for WordPress”, along with a brief description:

Five good WordPress themes examined and compared: Basic2Col, Moo Point, Sandbox, Simplish, and Thematic.

Which is the excerpt I wrote. If I hadn’t written one, the first 55 words of the review (that is, the automatic excerpt) would be displayed instead:

UPDATED 2009-02-13. I recently decided to look for a good minimalist theme for op111.net. I did not expect it would be an easy search, and, in a sense, it wasn’t. (Partly because WordPress had been going for some time without a central repository of themes. Now there is one, but it is still young.) [...]

Which one is better for a list of search results? I agree!

The drawbacks of the automatic excerpt are obvious, but let me enumerate them for the sake of argument:

1. The beginning of a piece is usually an introduction, not a summary.
2. Even if it is a summary, 55 words are too many for a list of search results.

On the other hand, by writing a manual excerpt I was able to add a few extra pieces of information to the information provided by the title, and say all I wanted to say, in 13 words and 105 characters.

Even if I the excerpt I wrote is not the best, it can be scanned instantly by the eye. Not only that: Since the other results have excerpts too, the results page is now more appealing and useful as a whole. And the same goes for archive pages—archives by date, category, tag, or author—since excerpts can be used there too. See, for example, Category “English” in op111.net

So, in a sense, hand-written excerpts are good navigational devices: They help visitors find easier what they look for. Or, if that does not exist, they let visitors know, so that they don’t click back and forth in vain and get frustrated in the end.

2.2. Result pages in search engines

Most interestingly, this navigational device can be used off-site too!

Let’s see an example again: Try this search on Google, Live Search, or Yahoo!. You’ll get something like:

It’s a typical SERP item: A title, a URL address and, right in the middle, a short description, which is exactly the excerpt I wrote!

How did Live Search know about that? This text does not appear anywhere in the indexed page. Did Microsoft guess it in some way? No! The answer is simple:

In op111.net excerpts double up as meta descriptions.

Regularly, search engines compile the description of a result by putting together bits from the page. But if the page has a META description, and if they think it is a good description and relevant to the search query, they display that instead.

This means that, to a certain degree, META descriptions let you control how your content is described by search engines. And if a description is good, people are more likely to click on the link.

More on WordPress excerpts as META descriptions in Part 5.

2.3. Summing up the Whys

1. Manual excerpts help visitors navigate a site easier and find good results.
2. Manual excerpts can double as META descriptions, which are frequently used by search engines to describe search results. In this way, good excerpts increase and improve traffic from search engines.
3. Therefore, you should write excerpts by hand!

3. How to write excerpts

You should be convinced by now: You’ll never hit Publish again without writing an excerpt first! But how to write one?

Writing good excerpts/summaries is not simple—it’s something of an art. Writing a decent excerpt, however, only takes common sense: What is the excerpt for? What is its purpose? Answering this question will show us what the excerpt must be like.

PURPOSE OF THE WORDPRESS EXCERPT

To help readers tell at a glance if a page is what they look for.

So, to do that, the excerpt must be:

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EXCERPT

1. Brief
2. Informative

3.1. How brief

As brief as possible! My rule is to write no more than 160 characters, partly because I use excerpts as meta descriptions too (see Part 5 for that). For English, 160 characters is 25 to 30 words. It may seem little but it’s not, for two reasons:

First, the excerpt is always displayed along with the title. So, for the purpose of offering a summary description these two are a set: title + excerpt. Assuming that a title should be no longer than 70 characters and that the average word length is 5 letters, we have:

( 70 + 160 ) ÷ ( 5 + 1 ) ≈ 38

That’s thirty-eight words in sum! You can almost write a short story in 38 words! :-)

Second, you can say lots of things in 160 characters if you follow good practice. Not only that, but your excerpts will be better as a result:

TIPS FOR CONCISE EXCERPTS/SUMMARIES

• Prefer short words. E.g., write “use”, not “utilize” (unless you mean “utilize”).
• Prefer simple constructs. E.g., say “because”, “since”, or “as”, not “due to the fact that”.
• Prefer verbs to abstract nouns. Abstract nouns are longer and less lively (and also lead to lengthier and clumsier constructions).
• Use adjectives and adverbs sparingly. Does that adjective really need an adverb to qualify it?
• Read over to remove needless words.
• Read over again.

3.2. How informative

As much as possible! The rules I try to follow are two:

First, be honest. Try to summarize the content accurately and objectively and do not write aggresively promotional copy. Imagine a friend asked you about the page. How would you describe it to them? Use the same description as your excerpt.

Second, complement the title. Since the excerpt is always displayed along with the title, there is no reason to repeat what the title says. Of course, some repetition is unavoidable and may also be useful, e.g. for emphasis, but, other than that, try to complement the title and to add to it.

TIPS FOR INFORMATIVE EXCERPTS/SUMMARIES

• Describe honestly and accurately. As if you were describing to a friend.
• Complement the title in any relevant aspect; things like:
  • Amount. Simply add more information.
  • Scope. E.g., give the general context for a specific title.
  • Tone. E.g., write a serious excerpt to balance a playful title.
  • Variety. E.g., if a title word has a common variation, use that variation in the excerpt. (To facilitate humans, not to trick machines!)
• Write excerpts last. Then you have a better overview.
• Revisit you excerpts. Even if you got everything perfect the first time, other things may have changed.

To recap, when writing WordPress Excerpts try to be, as much as possible:

1. Brief
2. Informative

Let’s see some tools now.

4. WordPress Excerpt Editor

A default WordPress setup offers one tool to manage excerpts: the Excerpt box. If you are serious about excerpts, you need more. Fortunately, even though the WordPress Excerpt is underappreciated, there are quite a few good plugins for managing excerpts. Part 5 suggests a couple that generate META descriptions from excerpts, while the Links at the end include a couple more.

This part looks at one plugin for excerpts that, in my estimation, offers the most general usefulness:

WordPress Excerpt Editor

WordPress Excerpt Editor does what its names implies and much more. It is essentially an excerpt manager. Among other things, it lets you:

• Add and edit excerpts quickly
• Add excerpts to pages
• Control the appearance of excerpts
• Display excerpts instead of full content on index pages (search results, tag archives etc.)
• Display excerpts instead of full content on the homepage

If you need to add excerpts retrospectively to a large number of posts, or simply edit a large number of excerpts, Excerpt Editor brings all excerpts, empty and filled-in, together in one place, so that you can edit or add excerpts one after the other. For posts with no excerpt, it shows the first 70 words, to help you start. Once you are finished with an excerpt, you click Save and it goes to the next:

It also lets you add excerpts to WordPress pages, which is not possible without a plugin.

If you only need Excerpt Editor for these two features—adding/editing post excerpts and adding/editing excerpts to Pages—, you can deactivate it when you finish and reactivate it the next time you want to add or edit a large number of excerpts. (This is how I use it at present.)

The extended functionality of Excerpt Editor, beyond adding and editing excerpts, is too wide to go over here. There is one feature, however, that can be essential for what we discuss. This is “Replace Posts”:

If your theme does not support excerpts, or supports excerpts poorly, “Replace Posts” lets you define where to show excerpts instead of full content. You can even have the homepage display excerpts but show the latest post in full.

5. Excerpts as META descriptions

5.1. What is a META description

The language in which most webpages are written is HTML or its cousin XHTML. A META description is an optional set of data in the head of an (X)HTML document that describes the content of the document. “META” means that this set of data is metadata or meta-information; that is, data about data, or information about information: about the information in the document itself.

A basic XHTML document with a META description looks like this:

Click to see how this document appears in a web browser.

Unlike the title of a page and the text in the body, the META description is not displayed by web browsers. Browsers understand it, however, as do web crawlers, the programs search engines use to browse the web automatically and index web pages.

When search engines were still young, in the early days of the commercial Web, they used to rely on this description, as well as on the “keywords” meta element, to understand what a page is about and how relevant it is to a query. As a consequence, description and keywords were abused to senselessness by webmasters. Search engines, at least the ones that matter, don’t do that any more. They do not use description and keywords for indexing and ranking. However, they still use description, very frequently, for what its original purpose was: Description!

The reason why search engines are interested in the meta description is the same reason why web authors should use it. The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog explains:

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL. [...]

We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don’t achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it’s worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t affect your ranking within search results.

SOURCE: Raj Krishnan, Google Snippets Team, in Improve snippets with a meta description makeover, 27 September 2007.

Considering the source of the quotation, I don’t think I need to add anything. — I’ll just cite one more example of search results:

Searching for “clean minimalist themes” in Google returned, among other results, two op111.net pages. Both have meta descriptions. Google seems to think that the descriptions are descriptive enough and relevant enough to the search query, so it uses them. If these pages did not have meta descriptions, Google would make descriptions by extracting relevant bits from the content and putting them together.

5.2. Using WordPress excerpts as META descriptions

You can write meta descriptions in WordPress by using a plugin. But if your posts already have excerpts, there is no reason to do that. Since the WordPress excerpt and the HTML meta description are about the same in purpose, you can use your excerpts as meta descriptions!

In the WordPress logic, this is simple. In the same way that, for example, we instruct tell WordPress to get the post_title of a post from the database and use it as a title for that post, we can tell WordPress to get post_excerpt and use it as a meta description (in addition to using it as an excerpt). Only we can’t do that in a default setup. We need a plugin. Here are two for you:

Platinum SEO

Platinum SEO Pack does this automatically. Once you install it, all posts with excerpts will also have meta descriptions. You don’t need to do anything else. (The same is true for All in One SEO Pack, on which Platinum SEO is based.)

If a post has no excerpt, Platinum SEO will use its first 160 characters as a meta description. This is the option “Autogenerate Descriptions”, which is enabled by default:

My advice is to disable “Autogenerate Descriptions”. If you have posts without excerpts, let the search engines piece together descriptions for them. They do a better job.

If you want to use a meta description different from the excerpt for a particular post, go to the post editor and write one in the SEO Platinum Pack box, in the Description field.

Headspace2

HeadSpace2 allows much finer control of the head of (X)HMTL pages and can do that and much more, but does nothing by default. (That’s one reason why it is among my favourite WordPress plugins.) Setting it to generate meta descriptions from excerpts is easy:

1. Go to HeadSpace Settings › Page Settings
2. Click to edit the Posts & Pages section
3. Type %%excerpt_only%% in the Description box
4. Save your changes

This tells HeadSpace2 to generate meta descriptions for posts and pages that have excerpts.

To use a meta description different from the excerpt for a particular post or page, simply go to the page/post editor and write a meta description for that page or post:

Last, HeadSpace trims meta descriptions to 150 characters. You can change this value in HeadSpace Settings › Page Modules › Page Description. (I use 168.)

Themes that generate META descriptions from excerpts

If WordPress plugins can take an excerpt and use it as a meta description, so can WordPress themes. One theme that does this is Hybrid:

Another is Thematic. Thematic does this by default and, since version 0.9, does it the smart way too: It makes meta descriptions only for posts that have a manual excerpt.

5.3. Length of META descriptions

Since META descriptions are written for search engines, what matters here is what search engines do. At this writing (February 2009), Google seems to use up to 160 characters to describe search results, Yahoo! up to 170, and Live Search up to 180:

LENGTH OF DESCRIPTIONS (SNIPPETS/ABSTRACTS) IN SEARCH ENGINES IN FEB 2009

• ≤ 160 characters in Google
• ≤ 170 characters in Yahoo!
• ≤ 180 characters in Live Search

So, if you want your descriptions to be displayed in whole when picked up by search engines, do not exceed 160 characters. For English, that’s about 25–28 words.

For a quick check-up of your meta descriptions, you can use the Diagnostics tool in Google Webmaster Tools. It will tell you whether you have too long, too short, or duplicate descriptions, how many of each, and it will point you to the pages that need attention:

6. Notes, Miscellaneous

6.1. Excerpts for Pages

WordPress supports Page excerpts internally (the database field is the same as for posts: post_excerpt) but offers no means to add excerpts to Pages from the administation panel. WordPress Excerpt Editor makes no such distinction and lets you add excerpts to both posts and pages. If you create pages often, another plugin you may find useful is PJW Page Excerpt: It adds an Excerpt box to the page editor, same as the Excerpt box of the post editor.

6.2. Teasers

The “teaser” is another useful device of WordPress, which is often confused with the Excerpt. You make a teaser by inserting the more tag in a post. (The More button is to the left of the spellchecker.) Then, the part above the more tag becomes a “teaser” and is displayed by default on the front page in lieu of the full content, along with a Read More link.

The relation between the Teaser and the two Excerpts, manual and automatic, is this: When a post has no manual excerpt, WordPress looks for a teaser and uses that instead. If the post has no teaser either, WordPress uses the first 55 words as an excerpt.

6.3. That’s it!

The WordPress Excerpt is a narrow subject but rather confusing for it scope. I tried to make some sense of it by focusing on what seemed essential to me and without going into too much detail. If you think there is still too much detail, or not enough detail, leave a comment to say so. If you are still perplexed about the excerpt that’s not an excerpt, please ask. In any case, feel free to say what you think. Your contribution is appreciated.

Thanks for reading!

δκ

7. Links

7.1. General

Template Tags/the excerpt

Documentation for the function the_excerpt() in the WordPress wiki.

Wanted: Excerpt Exacter

“I need a WordPress plugin that won’t let me publish a post until I’ve filled in the excerpt field. Anyone got one?” By Eric Meyer. — 2009-10-05: See Autofields below.

WordPress Now Available (v0.70)

Release notes for the first public release of WordPress, v0.70, in May 2003. The Excerpt is among the highlighted features: “Manual Excerpts — This allows you to handcraft summaries of your posts to appear in your RSS feed and other places.”

7.2. WordPress plugins for excerpts

All plugins below can be installed from the WordPress Dashboard: Go to Plugins › Add New, look up the plugin name, and click Install.

Advanced Excerpt

Tweaks the excerpts that WordPress generates automatically when the Excerpt field is empty.

Autofields

Autofills the Excerpt field (optionally) and also warns about missing excerpt (optionally).

HeadSpace2

Powerful metadata manager for WordPress. Can be used for SEO and for much more!

Platinum SEO Pack

A WordPress plugin for easy search-engine optimization. (Based on All in One SEO Pack.)

PJW Page Excerpt

Adds an Excerpt box to the page editor, same as the one in the post editor, to add excerpts to pages.

WordPress Excerpt Editor

An excerpt editor, formatter, and manager for WordPress.

7.3. “description” META element

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Good concise (22 pages) SEO guide in PDF format, by Google. It has a section on the “description” element.

Google Webmaster Tools

A set of useful tools by Google. Among other things, they analyze your META descriptions and tell you if there is anything wrong with them.

Making the Most of Meta Description Tags

How to write good meta descriptions, by Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz.

Video: anatomy of a search snippet

Matt Cutts of Google explains on video how descriptions are generated in Google results. (English and Korean captions available.)

Changes

2009-10-05

Added Autofields to list of plugins for excerpts.

2009-06-14

Corrected: Platinum SEO and All in One SEO cut meta descriptions at 160 characters, not 150.

Several other edits.

2009-03-03

Added Thematic to themes that generate meta descriptions.

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© 2009 op111.net | Permalink