February 15, 2010
WordPress 2.9.2 has just been released. This closes a hole where logged-in users can see trashed posts belonging to other users. If you have a multi-author blog where some bloggers may leave sensitive posts in the trash, you'll want to upgrade asap. (And yes, it's probably a fairly uncommon scenario, but upgrade anyway - it's a good habit to be in.) If you don't see the upgrade link on your... Read more
February 14, 2010
Everyone seems to have asked this one this week, so here goes 
The short answer is no, Twitter Tools will only send the automatic notifications of a new blog post to ONE Twitter account. And that's one Twitter account per WordPress install, not one Twitter account per blogger. The easy way around that is to use Twitter Tools to automatically publish to one Twitter account, and something... Read more
January 19, 2010
It's the 19th January: did you update the copyright line on your blog yet? Or are you still saying copyright 2009? Or worse still, 2008, 2007 or 1999? I like to edit my WordPress theme's footer so that it automatically updates with the new year. Here's the code if you want to do the same: © <?php bloginfo('name'); ?> 2008 - <?php echo date("Y"); ?> Obviously you'll... Read more
December 19, 2009
If you've ever seen a number higher than 1 in the Orange Dot of Doom by your plugins, you're going to love this one. WordPress 2.9 now has an "upgrade all plugins with an available upgrade" feature, so you can upgrade everything in one click, rather than having to do them all... one... by... one... Bizarrely, the feature has been hidden in Tools > Upgrade rather than put on the plugins page,... Read more
November 27, 2009
If your blog isn't quite ready to face the world, what do you do? You might be working on content, you might be reworking your theme, but the fact is that for most of us, WordPress is an online application, and visible to other eyes, even when we're not ready for them to look. Here's a simple way to make sure that you're the only one who can see your blog until you're ready to share it with the... Read more
September 17, 2009
Akismet is one of the plugins that comes bundled with self-hosted WordPress blogs. It's designed to stop spam comments from showing up on your blog, and though it won't be enough on its own once your blog gets properly indexed, for new bloggers it should do the trick. In order for Akismet to work properly, you'll need to grab an API key from WordPress.com. That's right, from WordPress dot... Read more
September 13, 2009
A friend called me yesterday* about a list of pages he was trying to set up. He needed pages with children indicated by a ">" after the link. "You'd think there'd be some kind of setting in wp_list_pages", he said, "but if there is, I can't see it." The function we want is get_pages(), which passes the list of pages as an array to PHP to process. You can then test for the existence of... Read more
September 8, 2009
There are lots of reasons why people don't keep WordPress up to date. Most excuses revolve around time and busy-ness and forgetting: a few bloggers have the more legitimate cause that they know crucial plugins will break with newer versions than what they're using. And one dear chum gave as her reason for still being on 2.7 the other day, "well, Sue, we're not all as obsessed by our blogs as you... Read more
September 8, 2009
There have (unsurprisingly) been a lot of blog posts written in the last few days about WordPress security and what you can do to keep your blog safe from hackers. I'll be chucking my own twopennorth in shortly, but for now, I want to look at one of the recommendations in more detail: "get rid of the user called 'admin'". This is a pretty sensible piece of advice. On most WP installs, "admin"... Read more
September 7, 2009
One feature WordPress lacks is the facility to edit multiple posts at once. If you've changed your URL, for example, you'll be faced with editing dozens or even hundreds of hard-coded image tags in your posts. Moving domains from one host to another often causes WP to render single quotes as “ or â€~, and British pound signs as Á£ - editing all those by hand isn't a task I'd relish... Read more