This post will take you through the four work flow stages.

The Work Flow Tool

The work flow tool is located in the post or page editor usually on the top of the right hand sidebar. This allows you to set a posts status as we move through the work flow system.

Draft

The first status in the work flow system is draft.  When a post or page is marked as draft you are able to work on it, but it does not appear on the front end of your site.

Think on this as a work in progress.  It is also the default state of a new post or page.

Pending Review

The next stage is only applicable to multi author sites.  A contributor role only has permission to write a post and then mark it as pending review (not published).

A post marked as pending review requires an editor level or above to review that post and move it onto the published state.

Pending review allows a work flow where multiple contributors to your site create content and pass it to others as an editorial process.

Published

Click on the publish button and a post is moved to the state of published.  This means that a post is visible on the front end of your site.

This is the final stage of work flow and the content is made available to your end users.

Scheduled

Another work flow status is that of scheduled, if you set the publish date on a post, to a date in the future and click on publish, the post does not appear on the front page, rather it is marked as scheduled and will not appear until the date and time you set.

This is an excellent way to drip feed content to your readers without you being present to publish a post.

Changing State

Once you have moved a post through the work flow system it is not set in stone, you can move posts back to draft status to remove it from the front page, change published dates to the past or future.  The system is very flexible.

Wrap Up

The WordPress work flow system, although simple allows you to control the status of your content with ease.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

The WordPress Work Flow System

Here’s how my story begins

I was deleting a page on my site, with the idea of completely recreating it with new content.

I deleted the page, and began to create a new one only to find the post name was being appended with -2 for example contact-2, I could not for the life of me work out why this was happening, I tried deleting the page again and recreating it, I was banging my head against a brick wall, when I noticed a new link on my edit pages section:

Since When Was There A Trash Can in WordPress?

I am not sure when this trash can was added, I think it was in 2.9.x.  Please leave a comment if I have been dim and trash has been around for an age.

My problem was that a reference to the page I wanted to create was still there, the page had been moved to trash awaiting the final step of me emptying the trash can.  Arrghhh!! nearly one hour chasing my tail.

Recover From Trash

In the same way you can recover deleted files from your mac or PC by recovering items from trash you can now recover deleted post and pages from the trash if you are a bit too click happy with the delete button.

A cool new feature, as long as you know it is there and what repercussions it will create.

The Dizzy Highs and Lows of WordPress Admin

If you are having weird issues with duplicate names when creating pages and posts, have a quick look in trash, this may be the root of your problem.

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Take Out The Trash

Roles

The main technology behind this are WordPress roles.  As you add users to your blog, assign them to roles and this then controls if they can write blog posts and more importantly if they can publish them without your intervention.

Roles are available at users -> authors and users from yoru dashboard.

The Admin – I am the media moghul

This is the main user that is created when you install wordpress. it can do everything, from creating posts , publishing posts to doing technical tasks on the blog, we are note really interested in admins for multi writer purposes.

The Editor – Damn it, just write it up

This is the boss of your blog writers, this role shouts stop the press (or don’t click the publish button) can add content, publish it, delete it and have compelte editorial control of blog posts and pages.  They can delete old posts from anyone.

What the editor cannot do it effect technical aspects of your sitem ad plugins change themes that type of thing.

The Author – I cannot reveal my source

This role could be thought of as a staff writer on a national newspaper.  Your typical hack, cigarette out of the corner of his mouth, ringing his contacts, chasing the story dreaming of the Pulitzer, hang on did I just go off on one there.

This is someone you trust to write on your blog, they have writing and publishing permissions, the editor can cut them off at the knees with one swift unpublish click, but there stuff will go live without editorial intervention.

The Contributor – I write therefore I am

This is your lowest level of writer,  think of them as a freelancer on a newspaper, they write their piece and send it in to the editor for publication.  Contributors can login and write their blog posts and submit them for review, that is it.  they cannot delete their old posts that have been published or publish new posts.

If you have occasional guest posters, this may be the role for them, they add a post, then you review and decide if it is ready for publication.

The Subscriber – it must be true I read it on a blog

For completeness I thought I would add subscriber, this is the end reader with a twist, this is someone who has created an account on your site, think of this as someone who has a magazine regularly delivered, they have a little more access to your site than a casual purchaser of a magazine.  They cannot create posts.

Further reading

Here is a detailed description of the various WordPress roles in WordPress Roles Explained

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Creating A Multi-Writer Blog

Why Close Comments on Just One Post?

You may have written a particular blog posts which has caused controversy and sparked a particularly heated debated and you don’t like the language being used in your comments section.

You may have a troll on one particular post.

You may be getting an awful lot of spam on one particular comment and want to stop this.  This is what happened to me on my post Guest Posting Makes You Attractive To The Opposite Sex Fact, for some unknown reason I was getting a lot of porn spam comments on this one – go figure

How To Close the Comments

It’s pretty simple really, from your edit post screen scroll down to the following section, and click off “allow comments on this post”.  That’s it.

It’s Your Blog

If you don’t like the direction comments are going on a particular posts, it is your prerogative to delete or close down comments.

Remember kids, you are the super user, use your power for good never for evil.

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Selectively Closing Comments On A Post

Why Hide Pages

There is a good chance that you do not want to have every page you have created shown on your sites navigation section.  You may have private pages, that you only want to direct certain people to, or you may have so many pages that your navigation will overwhelm users.

Using the techniques below you can decide which pages your site visitors will see.

Examples of My Hidden Pages

I hide a number of pages on my Nav bar to keep my sites look and feel clean.  I do this because when people are visiting your site for the first time I think it can be overwhelming if there is too much information.  I also want to funnel people onto certain pages of my site so if I can keep their attention away from certain pages unless I want them to go there that is very useful.

I also have a number of hidden pages which run scripts for example I have conversion tracking pages for affiliate and payment processors.  I don’t want these to appear on the navigation bar.  I only want them to be used after a Paypal payment or to record an affiliate visit.

Here is one of my hidden pages

http://wpdude.com/welcome

I use this as my sneeze page from twitter or other social sites.

How To Hide Your Pages

There are two main ways to hide your pages, editing your theme, or using theme functionality or using a plugin.

Theme Specific

If your theme already has functionality to exclude pages just follow your theme instructions (mine does, so does Headway and Thesis) .  But if you are not lucky enough you may need to hack your theme code.

DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any crashed sites because you edited your code incorrectly.  If you don’t have the techie credentials don’t do this or get some WordPress help from  someone who does.  Please progress to the plugin section below if you are not a code monkey – thankyou and have a nice day

Inside of your theme files, most likely the header.php file there will be some code which lists your pages, it will probably look like this:

<ul>
  <?php wp_list_pages(); ?>
</ul>

To exclude a page, you need to add some parameters to the wp_list_pages function, and that is an exclude command with the post ID of the page to hide.  To find a page’s post ID, go to the  page editor and take notice of the URL in your browser bar.  Below is an example of my about page, as you can see my post ID is 2.

http://wpdude.com/wp-admin/page.php?action=edit&post=2

Now add this parametre to your wp_list_pages function as shown below:

  <?php wp_list_pages('exclude=1,2,3'); ?>

Where 1,2,3 are a comma delimited list of all the pages you want to hide.

Bonus Hide

If you take advantage of the parent/child page functionality of WordPress you can set your list page function to only show top level pages by adding the depth parameter.

 <?php wp_list_pages('exclude=1,2,3&depth=1'); ?>

Plugins

If coding your theme is a bit too much, don’t worry there is nearly always a plugin to solve every problem.  My favourite is the Exclude Pages plugin.  This adds a checkbox to the bottom of each page in the editor which allows you (as the name suggests) to exclude that page.  You can download it from the following link:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages/

K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid)

Don’t bombard your blog readers with a huge number of pages that they may never need to see, keep your site design neat and tidy.  Less is always more in my book

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Hiding WordPress Pages

Why Change the Order of Your Pages?

You may want to change the order of your pages to make more important pages stand out, for example on my site, I want hire me to be on the right so it is more prominent or you may want to improve your sites usability by clustering like pages together.

Sometimes you just want to rebel, the OCD of developers may get you down, ordering everything and indexing and categorising can overwhelm the more free spirited.

The Out of the Box Hack

Here is how you can modify the order that your pages are displayed.

From the edit pages section, select one of your pages and you will see the following attribute box on the right of your page copy:

As you can see their is a numeric option for the page order.  By default all pages are set to zero, but if you set a value for each page you can control the order.  e.g. about =1, contact =2, testimonials =3 and this order will be displayed on your page layout.

As it says above, this is a little bit “janky” if you add new pages you will need to  modify the order again.  If you want a simple page order change this hack does exactly what it says on the tin.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall What’s the Best Page Order Process of All

You oh Dude tell everyone the out of the box hack which is fine, but lo what’s this I see, a plugin is more fair than thee.

If you are looking for something a little more polished then why not check out the My Page Order Plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-page-order/

You Are A Free Spirit

Don’t let the “Man” tell you which order your pages should be in.  Go out make a stand and break their structured universe

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

How To Change the Order of Your WordPress Pages

What Do I Mean By Poor WordPress Performance?

I don’t mean that you have no readers or comments or that your content is not very good, that is up to you what I mean is that your pages are rendered very slowly and the usability of your site to open posts or pages, search for content or pull things back from your archives makes your visitors experience very poor and possibly turn them off from yoru site altogether.

There is also a school of thought in SEO circles that slow loading sites are not as well regarded as a fast loading site.  So poor performance could be effecting your search engine ranking.

Before we begin

All of this is information is fairly technical, please backup your site before your begin. I offer a wordpress performance tuning service if you would prefer to hand this over to me. request a quote from my WordPress Technical Support page for details

Here we go, my top 5 tips for improving WordPress performance:

1. Install a Cache Plugin

Cacheing in computer speak is when you take information usually recovered from back end database and hold it in memory or on disk.  When the information is next requested it is served up from the very fast memory/disk store rather than recovering it from the slower backend storage.  The cache is held for a set lifetime and then renewed once the cache has timed out.  This means only one access of the backend is requried for a set period of time.

Think of your blog home page, it is fairly static so loading all of the logo images, blog posts, CSS files etc etc into memory and serving them up can save a lot of time.

The plugin I recommend is wp-super-cache, this can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

UPDATE: I now recommend w3-total-cache it’s mninify and CDN capabilities knock the socks of wp-super-cache http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

A word of warning on using a cache, if you use dynamic content on your pages for example an adrotator where each page load should show a differnt banner ad, using a cache will cause this to fail and only show one banner.  wp-super-cache w3-total-cache has the ability to mark certain scripts or comands as not for cache.

2. Activate the Inbuilt WP Object Cache

WordPress comes with it’s own inbuilt object cache. this allows you to save certain database queries to disk, and recover them much more quickly than accessing the database.

To activate the inbuilt cache you need to edit the file wp-config.php.  This will be held in the root of your blog installation.  To activate the object cache, add the following line ot your wp-config.php file:

define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);

3. Reduce Plugins

Everytime we add a plugin to our blogs, we add an overhead.  Every bell and whistles on your home page needs ot be rendered and displayed.  This will slow down your blog.  My recommendation is to remove all plugins which are not entirely needed on your site.

I wrote an article about performing a plugin audit earlier this year, why not use that as a tool to find out if you need a particular plugin

Database SQL Cache

The query cache holds regularly run queries in memory to speed up the return of database results.  We are getting into real techie land here, and that is to check if your back end MYSQL database has a query cache installed and how big it is.

If you are not happy messing about with your database why not submit a technical support request to your hosting company to do this for you.

To find out you have a query cache installed and it’s status, run the following queries from a MYSQL tool such as PHPMYADMIN

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘have_query_cache’;

This will return a yes or no value, if it is no ask your hosting company to activate a cache.

To show the status of the cache run:

SHOW STATUS LIKE ‘Qcache%’;

This second command will tell you how the cache is being used and if it needs to be tuned.  Here is an excellent resource from the MYSQL site which tell syou much more about query cache settings and configuration.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/query-cache-status-and-maintenance.html

5. Look to Your Hosting

This is my last but least popular recommendation, and that is to look at your hosting provider.  You may be in the enviable position that your blog has grown so popular that you have out grown your hosting account, or you may be  too cheap, I bet that $3 per year hosting account doesn’t look so good now it takes ten minutes to load your blog.

If you are still having performance problems after the first four steps, look to upgrade your hosting to a more powerful setup, this will cost more money, so you will need to weigh this against the value of your blog.

Checking Performance Improvements

You need something to prove that the performance changes you have implemented have provided an increase in speed, you can spend lots of money on traffic analysers to look at the underlying http calls and see response time, me,I go for cheap and cheerful everytime, I use the basic (read free) version of httpwatch a browser plugin which shows your page being rendered and what is taking the time, a very useful tool.  The key point is I can use it to do a before and after comparision of page load time.  It also shows me which components are being cached.

Wrap Up

Performance tuning any computer system is a dark art, where you tune in one place you can introduce new bottlenecks elsewhere.  This list is not exhaustive, there are tweaks to php.ini, your web server config file, or you could be having performance problems due to incompatible plugins or themes making outdated DB calls.

My advice change one thing at a time and roll it back if you see no improvement.

UPDATE: WordPress Users And Roles Training Available

I have recorded a video training session on WordPress performance tuning for my WordPress training and support community the WP Owners Club.

I’ve got a 14 day free trial at the moment, why not take out trial membership and check out the training, here’s what you need to do

1) Sigup for a 14 day free trial account at wpownersclub.com/sign-up

2) Go to http://wpownersclub.com/performance-tuning-workshop and watch your training

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

WordPress Performance Tuning Tips

Why Do I need to Publish Posts Remotely?

You may not be at your computer or only have a mobile device with you, you may be researching a topic away from your Blog dashboard or you may just hate writing from the WordPress editor.  The ability to publish from sources other than your blog has many uses.

Email Your Posts

WordPress has the ability to receive emails as posts to your blog for publication.  In essence you setup a secret email account know only to you and your blog, then any email received by the blog to that account will be accepted as a post.  I am a very lazy man so rather than reinventing the wheel, here is a link to the resource written by the good people at WordPress http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_by_Email

Remote Clients

There are a number of clients out there which allow you to write your posts offline and push them up to your blog at the click of a button.  These tend to be more like client based word processors, and as a result they are more feature rich than the default wordpress editor.

The remote clients all0w you to draft and prepare posts offline.  Perhaps you like to switch off your net connection when you write to minimise distraction, then this is a method for you.

The tool I have tried is Windows Live Writer, it is an excellent gui writing tool which allows you to download your theme to give you an idea of what your posts will look like.  Write your posts, save them offline as drafts, then click on publish when you are ready.

I am a windows boy, are there are mac remote posting clients? Please let me know in comments section.

Browser Plugins

There are quite a few browser plugins available for free download which allow you to post directly from your browser.  I guess the idea is that when you are doing your browsing, the idea for a posts comes to you and the plugin allows you to write the posts during your peak of creative musing.  The two plugins I have used are:

ScribeFire – a firefox plugin which at the press of the f8 button becomes a blog client.  You create an account to your blog and you can write a post directly from firefox.

Press This – a bookmarklet produced by WordPress, from your blog goto Turbo  and drag the Press This link onto your toolbar, when you have the urge click on it and blog from your browser.

As always I am always open to new experiences, let me know if there is a blogging browser extension which rocks your world in the comment section.

Mobile Devices

All the kids with their new fangled what-ji-mi-call-its are blogging from their handsets.  There are a couple of ways this works:

For the uber-trendy there are iPhone applications which act as clients on your Appley doodad.  This was developed by the good people at WordPress, just go to the app store and search for WordPress, it is a free app.  It gives you the ability to write posts, and pages as well as moderate your comments.

The second alternative for smart phones with slower browsers (I am thinking Blackberrys or Windows CE devices) is to adapt your blog to create a reduced interface.  Using the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin you can do this along with creating a mobile device compatible front end.

A Word About XMLRPC & Security

If you allow remote updating, you are opening holes in your blog for potential security attacks.  Think about this before you allow remote publishing.  You may wake up one morning and find your site full of posts linking to viagra companies.

Most of the methods above use something called xmlrpc, which is a standard for remote procedure calls (RPC , did you see what I did there) using XML (stunning RPC + XML = xmlrpc).  In English this means a remote call can be sent to your blog with the data wrapped up as a formatted text file and an update, delete or amend of a blog post can be done.

By default xmlrpc is disabled on a WordPress installation, to enable it goto settings->writing and click on XML-RPC to enable it.

I once used hosting company which disabled XMLRPC at a low level by blocking the WordPress php file xmlrpc.php from running. To get around this I renamed the file xmlrpc-remote.php and it worked fine, something to consider if your hosting company is being overzealous with your security.  Most of the remote tools allow you to setup where the xmlrpc file is located.

Where Am I Writing This Post from ….

.. you guessed it from the dashboard, I have used many of the methods above, but more as a blog post development tools, I throw my ideas together remotely and sit down in front of the dashboard to write up my post.  You may be different and like to write from your iPhone during your commute, give them a go.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

How To Write WordPress Posts Remotely

In the second part of this series I would like to look at how to add video to your blog.

A picture Tells a Thousand Words …

To expand on the cliche;  moving pictures give us a thousand of words a second in infinite detail, video is one of the best forms of communication we have developed, there is no loss of body language (a problem with podcasting) and complex ideas can be communicated fairly easily.

Many bloggers are mixing video and written content, who would have thought, even ten years ago, that you could create your own broadcast easily and fairly cheaply from your own DIY site.

Mixed Media Or Vlog?

A decision you may want to make about your blogging future is if you want to solely produce video content or mix it up with other mediums.

You can scan a written document to extract the bit you want but not a video, but to write an article which shows the emotion of a video is very difficult,   What is the future?

There is no definitive answer to this one, personally I prefer to write, I do not feel at ease in front of the camera and as a result my presentations are pretty clunky, the other end of the spectrum is Gary Vaynerchuk, his blog is a true Vlog with a limited amount of text for links to other site.  He is a self confessed poor writer,  but his presentation skills more than make up for that lack, and as a result he has become an Internet video star.

There is room for both video, images, podcasting and text on one blog, why not mix it up and see what your readers/viewers/listeners respond best to.

Type of Video You Can Add to Your Blog

There are a number video types you can add to your blog, here are four potential formats for the blogger:

Other peoples video – you can add other peoples video to your site.  I did this rather well on a mountain boarding site I used to own, I would take video from YouTube and post it as a feature on the top of my blog.  Check out the big video hosting sites, there is probably some content which matches your niche.

To camera work – this is where you are presenting to a camera, this can be seen as a blog post to camera where you talk about your subject rather than writing your piece.  Give it a go, you may be a natural or you may be (like me) a gibbering idiot in front of camera, a once loquacious person reduced to errms and ahhss and pregnant pauses.

Screencasting – My favourite type of video for technical items is a screencast, using this format you record the screen and play it back with a commentary over the top.  This can be used with great effect for showing technical items or for recording and playing back a presentation.

From Your POV – POV or point of view recording means you are behind the camera recording what you can see, whilst adding a commentary, the uses of this are endless.

I am no video production expert, so if anyone out there knows the proper technical terms for these types of production, please let me know in the comments section.

Video Production

As with the podcasting post I wrote, the subject of producing your media files is too big to go into here on a WordPress blog, but a few words of note, you don’t need a hugely expensive setup to produce content, I use a mid range web cam along with Camtasia to capture screencasts and edit the whole thing together,

How to Add Video to A post

Depending upon your method it is a fairly ease task to add video to a post, the three methods of adding your media file are discussed here.

WordPress Serves Video Out of The Box

Later versions of WordPress allow you to serve video out of the box, click on the icon shown below and upload your video and it will be inserted into your post in the same way images can easily be added to posts.

Embedding a Remote File

Most of the video hosting providers will supply an embedded video code which you can paste into your post from the html section, go to the hosting provider of your choice, and look for embed this video, you should get some code looking like this:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Al74d0x9RKU&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Al74d0x9RKU&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Plugin, Plugin on the Wall, Who’s the fairest One of All?

I’ve tried numerous plugins for video and I have yet to find the one I am 100%  happy with.  Here are the things I want from my video plugin:

• Ability to play from numerous sources i.e. Youtube, self hosted, hosted on other sites
• Counter for the number of plays of a video.
• Re-sizable – I want to pop the video out to full size.
• Re-skinable – I want to be able to change the look’n'feel of the player to match my theme

Here is a link to the WordPress plugin repository which holds hundred of video plugins http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/video

The plugin which matches most of my requirements is Word Tube.  If you use other plugins please let me know in the comments section below.

Most plugins ask you to simply enclose the URL of the video file in a tag, so this can be a locally hosted file you upload from your media section or a remote file on YouTube and Co. Refer to your preferred plugin for full details on how to add a video to a post.

Video Players

There are a number of video engines out there, but he one which seems to be used by the most plugins is from Long Tail Video and is called the JW FLV Video Player.  It is an open source player which can be skinned as you like it,  there is also an ad Solution to self monetise your video.  See below on more ideas to make money from your video content.

Where to Host Your Files

There are two options to hosting your video, you can self host it on your server or use one of the video hosting services, here are the pros and cons.

Self hosting

Pros

You have complete control of your content, you can decide who sees it i.e. you could limit it to approved registered users, or in the case of membership sites, only approved paying customers.

Remember, once you pass your video to companies such as YouTube you loose control of your content, if that is an issues opt for a self hosting.

Cons

Bandwidth hungry video will quickly exceed your limits or impact on the performance of your site.

Third Party Hosted

Pros

There are two  huge benefit of hosting your video with a third party such as Youtube and they are bandwidth protection, Google and Co take the hit to serve up your files, the second huge benefit are the audiences already in place on these services, if you produce something really good, there is more of a chance of (sorry for what I am about to say) “going viral” than this happening from your home site and it’s smaller reader base.

Cons

Loss of control or who views your video or what happens to your video.

Some of the third party hosting solutions I have used are:

• YouTube
• Viddler
• Vimeo

Monetising Your Video

Monetising your video content is still in it’s infancy,  there are various options including:

Pay per click – Viddler runs pay per click ads beneath your videos, and you are paid if someone clicks away from your video to the target site.

Pay Per Impression – You are paid on the number of impressions or views your video gets with some sort of ad banner attached to to it, Vimeo are offering CPM

Sell your own content – setup a members only section of your site and sell you videos yourself.

Good Blog Video Examples

Here are some examples of video used expertly on blogs

Gary Vaynerchuck check out the monetisation

ProBlogger Darren seems at ease before the camera

Yaro Starak to camera & screencast post

Wrap Up

I hope that has given you a taste for video blogging, go on build some content and check out your ability as a presenter, you may be the next news anchor or MTV video jock in waiting.

Of course I couldn’t create a video post without a video post, here is a good video on resetting a lost password, this is shown using wordTube:

[media id=3]

The rest of the posts in this series

How To Add A Podcast to A WordPress Blog

How To Add Video to A WordPress Blog

How to Add Images to a WordPress Blog

UPDATE: WordPress Video Training Available

I’m running a live video training session on using video with WordPress for my WordPress training and support community the WP Owners Club.

I’ve got a 14 day free trial at the moment, why not take out trial membership and check out the training, here’s what you need to do

1) Sigup for a 14 day free trial account at wpownersclub.com/sign-up

2) Sign up for the live event from Go to  http://wpownersclub.com/live-events

I hope to see you on the call.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

How To Add Video to A WordPress Blog

Photo By Tim Morgan

As your  blog begins to gain momentum and you receive more and more comments, you may want to impose some controls over what is written as a footnote to your post.

This how-to post shows the various comment controls available to a blogger using WordPress.  All settings unless stated are under the settings-> discussion section in the dashboard.  It is assumed that your blog is at version 2.7.x

Kill The Conversation

The quickest way to stop any comment control issues you are having is to close comments on your blog, in other words to stop all comments on your posts.  Think long and hard before killing the conversation, feedback to bloggers via comments is incredibly useful to extend the converstation.

To close comments on your blog check the box marked Allow people to post comments on the article.

All Things In Moderation

WordPress comes with comment moderation settings, this means that all comments need to be approved before they are shown on your blog.

They are held in a moderation queue until the blog admin clicks on an approve, reject or spam link.

To enable moderation, click on the check box An administrator must always approve the comment.

Pre-Approved Commentors

You can pre-approve commentors so that anything they subsequently comment upon will automatically be approved and displayed as a valid comment.

This is great if commentors are legitimate, but sometimes comments are raised manually as a precursor to a spam attack.  I personally do not like this setting, prefering manual moderation just in case they are bi-polar in their comments.

To enable comment preapproval click on Comment author must have a previously approved comment

Plugins

There are always a bag load of plugins to help control your comments, the one I rely upon to catch spam comments is Akismet, this excellent plugin analyses your comments against it’s database of offenders and marks anything it catches as spam and holds it for moderation.

There are many other comment plugins including ones which will show a captcha form before submission, ones asking questions to prove you are not a spam bot, others to make the conversation more advanced, please feel free to leave a comment with your favourities.

Here is a link to the comments section of the WordPress plugin directory

Keyword Moderation

You can send a comment directly to moderation if it contains certain keywords.  An example of this could be spammsters leaving comments trying to link to their male enhancement site, if you add viagra or cialis to your list, any comments with these words in will be moderated.

To enable keyword moderation, type the keywords into the blacklist box at the bottom of the discussion screen.

Links Schminks

Most of the trouble you will have in comments will come from people trying to use your blog as a forum for their own products or services.  There is an option to send comments for moderation if more than x links are spotted in a comment.  I have this set to 2.  If someone has a legitimate need for a link in a comment, my thinking is that there will only be one, multiple links spells spam in my book.

To enable link counting,set the number of links in the section entitled. Hold a comment in the queue if it contains

Your Going On The List!

If someone is repeadtely spamming or trolling your comments, you can add them to a blacklist which will automatically send their missive to the spam queue.

You can add someone to your blacklist via their email address, blog URL or the originating IP address

The blacklist is located towards the bottom of the settings-> discussion screen, add one rule per line e.g.

• wpdude,com
• 192.168.101.1
• @wpdude

You can put parts of]j,ge a string for example the above email rule will stop all emails from the wpdude.com domain.

If Your Names Not Down You Can’t Get In

There is a function withing WordPress which forces users to register and login to your blog before they can leave a post.  This is a very powerful control process, but it is also a huge turnoff to commentors, many people will not comment on a blog, that said only people with a real urge to comment will register, click on the email verfiication link, login and then comment (I’m worn out writing it never mind doing it.

Lorelle VanFossen WordPress expert to the stars wrote an excellent piece for the Blog Herald on what changes your mind about leaving comments, you should probably read this before you make your commentors jump through too many hoops to validate your post.

To enable this function click Users must be registered and logged in to comment

Comment Editing

You may have a comment that you want to publish, but some part of the comment is causing you concern, as the blog owner you have the right to edit anything on your blog, feel free to extend this to the comments.

An example of when I have done this was with a recent comment which had a link in it.  Links are like a stamp of authority, and I was not 100% sure of the product in question, so I edited the comment and removed the link, leaving a human readable way to get to the product in question, but removing my sites validation.

A Parting Word

Commenting and the discussion it promotes is one of the best things about blogging.  Try not to make people jump through hoops join the conversation, but be ruthless with Trolls, and low quality comments.

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How To Control You WordPress Comments

It”s a piece of p!ss migrating from blogger to a self hosted WordPress installation.  I have done it for a couple of my own blogs and for clients, so I speak from experience.

Importing the Posts, Comments, Tags & Kung Fu WotNots

If you scroll down the menus in your WordPress dashboard, you will see the tools section, and under there is an import function, and under the import is a huge list of competing blog platforms from which you can import, it should comes as no great mental leap to know that blogger is one of these platforms.

Authorize Authorise

It’s spelled with an S for flip sake.

Once you reach the point of import, the first stage is to authorise your new WordPress blog with the Blogger API.  This means you are giving permission to Blogger to allow access to your posts from a remote server namely your new WordPress host.

Click and Button and There You Go

Once authorised, you simple click on the go button and a progress bar of the import is shown.  Once it is complete, a notification of the number of posts and other data imported is shown.  As long as you have the number you can reconcile the export/import.

Google Juice and Gin

If you have built up some links to your Blogger blog and are getting organic search traffic (AKA Google juice) then you don’t want to loose it.  There are ways to redirect this traffic to your new site.

I use a 301 redirection javascript.  From your Blogger dashboard, add a javascript widget which does a 301 redirect to your new site.  A 301 tells the search engines your data has been moved.

Never one to re-invent the wheel, I found an excellent article on this subject:

http://laffers.net/howtos/howto-redirect-blogger-to-wordpress

The Genius of An Easy Migrate

It is a stroke of absolute genious to make migrating from the competing blog to WordPress as easy as can be.  Remove all obstacles to using your code and people will flock to it.  Make the move to WordPress you know it makes sense.

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Migrating from Blogger to WordPress

Photo by Bexross

One of the functions of WordPress many newbies miss is the post later function.

What is The Post Later Function?

In a nutshell it allows you to write a post, and set a publish date some time in the future or even the past (more on that later).

Why Would You Use That?

Rather than rattling out a large number of posts and publishing them all in one go, you can write a post, set a date in the future to make your article available.

Some people also use this function topublish at an optimum time.  For example if the blogger lives in one time zone and the majority of his or her readers live in another, it makes sense to publish in line with the reader time zone.

How Do I use the Function

Here is a screen dump from a wordpress 2.7 blog (this on in fact).  By default the publish time is set to immediately, but if you click on edit, you can set the date and time of  publication.

Going Back In Time

You can also set posts to be published in the past, I have used this for blogs which are building an archive of how to articles that don’t want to interupt the flow of more topical posts.

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Write Now Post Later

Bugs

Each new release will include a number of bug fixes.  These fixes tend to be rolled out as a 2.7.x update rather than a major staging update.

What do I mean by that, 2.6 was a major staging update, and so is 2.7.  I will be expecting 2.7.1 in the not too distant future when the bugs found by releaseing the code to the general populace come to light.

Security

There are hackers out there constantly probing and testing hte security of WordPress blogs.  Since there are millions of them in existence, it is fairly easy to test the security measures of WP.

Keeping your code base at the latest level ensures that any security breaches found in the code can be patched and the hackers can be kept at bay (at least for a short while until they find the next vulnerability).

New Features

This is for the geeks out there who need the latest and greatest features.  WordPress is not a static platform, it is constantly upgraded and improved.  Upgrade to the latest version and there will be a suite of new toys to play with.

Support

If you keep your code level too far behind you risk putting the level of support available to you down a peg or two.  WordPress is a whole community of people developing plugins and themes, most of this development is done near or close to the latest version.  You may find that your favourite plugin stops working if you do not keep up to date.

Downsides of Keeping up with the Jones

All the latest bells and whistles of an update also come with a cost.  There are two main downsides:

Compatibility issues – your update may cause your plugins or theme to stop working.

Introduction of errors – as you update code, there is an increased chance of corrupting your wordpress install or your backend database.  Always backup before you upgrade.  I will cover this in depth in future posts

Auto Update in 2.7

Just a quick note on the new autoupdate feature of WP 2.7.  We have had the ability to download and automatically update plugins for some time now.  This has been updated to include the code base as well.   I haven’t seen this in action yet, but I look forward to this and blogging about it very soon.

My Thinking on Updates

I don’t take part on beta schemes on my production blogs, they are too “bleeding edge”, but I am considering creating a devblog.wpdude.com to play with new features.  But what I will do is upgrade or patch my wordpress code to the latest version when it is made generally available to the community.

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Should You Update Your Version of WordPress?

Photo by dorothyhess-pictures

One of the new features of WP 2.7 is QuickPress, a small visual editor on the dashboard.

I am using Quickpress to rattle off this post, as you can imagine it does not replace the main user interface to write content, but if you need to write a quick note for your blog, this is probably the place.

Downsides, it does not have a facility to add categories or to use custom fields, something I need to do with the theme I use.

All in all I will probably not use QuickPress to write posts, rather I will use it to quickly capture ideas as a draft post.

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QuickPress and WP 2.7