If you’ve changed the default WordPress admin user name from ‘admin’ to something else, great. However, if you write a post as the admin, your new admin username will be displayed on your blog. Not good.

In order to help you keep your admin username a secret from would-be hackers, I’m releasing a new WordPress security plugin: Admin Post Reminder.

How Does It Help?

The Admin Post Reminder plugin is useful if you’ve got a separate editor account just for posting.

Sometimes you’ll still need to log into WordPress as an admin to change settings, use certain plugins, etc. It can be easy to forget that you’re still logged in as an admin when you go to write a post.

What Does It Do?

What Admin Post Reminder does is simple–it checks to see if the user that’s logged in is an admin. If they are, an alert is displayed at the top of the page, reminding the user not to publish any posts while logged into this account.

Regular logged in users won’t see the message.

Download the Plugin

You can view the plugin page for more details or

Download Admin Post Reminder at the WordPress Plugin Repository

Buy Me a Coffee

If you enjoy this plugin, consider making a small donation–any amount is appreciated. Thanks!

Updated: 12/04/2009–Note: This information applies also to pages as well as posts.

Anytime you see suggestions for making your WordPress install more secure, you’re gonna see the regular suspects:

• Change your database table prefixes
• Update WordPress and WordPress plugins regularly
• Change the default WordPress admin username

These are all good suggestions that you should certainly be doing to make your WordPress install more secure.

But I want to address the last one–changing the default WordPress admin account–and a practice that will render this pointless.

The following may be common sense, but the reason I’m gonna mention it is that I have never seen this cautioned on any other WordPress security tips post.

Why Change Your Admin UserName In the First Place?

WordPress automatically generates an account named admin when you first install.

This means every single WordPress install on the planet has an account named admin. If you don’t change it, any would-be hacker/cracker only has to figure out your password–making it much easier to get into your site and muck about.

Don’t Use Your Admin Account to Post

Is there a flaw in your WordPress security?

So you’ve changed your default admin username to something totally unguessable. Then you write a post and publish it from your renamed admin account.

Oops!

The whole point in renaming your account is so pranksters have no idea what username you’re using for your admin account.

True, you can change the display name for your account so it doesn’t show your actual admin username on your site.

However, if your theme displays the post author’s name and a link to sort by author or author feed.

The actual username will be right there in the link address (usually something like: ‘http://blog.com/author/admin-username‘). Oops!

Posting from your admin account completely negates the whole point of changing your admin username in the first place.

Don’t Publish Pages From Your Admin Account Either (Updated 12/04/2009)

Beyond the author link in posts, there are other places the author’s username can show up.

Body Classes on Post and Pages

Even if you remove the link to the post author from showing in your theme, the username of the author also can be seen in classes on the body tag when you view source.

WordPress by default inserts various classes to the body tag. This is so you can target pages and posts via CSS.

One of the classes WordPress creates and inserts into the body tag is the author’s username (not the nickname).

Most of the time it will look like this: author-yourusername (for posts) or page-author-yourusername (for pages)

Most (all?) current WordPress themes do not remove the author class. This means, on both posts AND pages, the author’s username can be easily discovered by simply viewing the source code.

Depending on your theme, a class containing the author’s username may be displayed in other places as well.

Fix It Now

If you’ve changed your admin username and yet have been publishing posts (or creating pages – updated 12/04/2009) using that same account, fix it now.

Don’t worry, it’s easy enough.

Here’s the quickest way:

1. Add a new user who has an Editor or Contributor role
2. Add another user with Admin privileges
3. Log out and back into WordPress as the new Admin
4. Delete the old Admin user (the one you used to publish posts from)
5. WordPress 2.8+ will ask what to do with the posts you previously wrote…
6. Assign the posts to your newly created Editor/Contributor account
7. Only use that Editor account to write posts from now on

That’s it. It only should take 2-5 minutes, and your WordPress install will be more resistant to hacks and general tom-foolery.

More WordPress Security Tips

Here are some other WordPress security tips:

• How To Keep WordPress Secure (WordPress Blog)
• Hardening WordPress (WordPress Codex)
• WordPress Security Tips and Hacks (Noupe – Beware step #9 though)
• 12 Essential Security Tips and Hacks (Six Revisions)
• 11 Best Ways to Improve WordPress Security (Pro Blog Design)
• 20+ Powerful WordPress Security Plugins and Some Tips and Tricks

WP Plugin

(Updated: 10/19/2009) Based in part on the response to this article, I’ve created a new WordPress plugin called Admin Post Reminder.

Updates

(Updated 12/04/2009) Pages and posts also contain classes in the body tag that disclose the author’s real username.

Lately, I’ve been using Thematic–a framework for building WordPress themes faster.

Thematic gives you a solid, bare-bones theme with reset CSS styles, a very basic layout, no color and limited typography. A clean slate.

Don’t Touch That Theme!

To create your theme, you don’t actually edit any of Thematic’s theme files. Instead, you make changes using a separate child theme.

It’s really powerful since you’re not actually touching any part of Thematic. You just get a nice starting place, without worries about future Thematic updates overwriting your code edits.

You don’t have to rewrite a bunch of code all over again–you’re just adding the bits that you want to be different. This works very much like the custom styles on WordPress.com hosted blogs.

I’ve collected together 40+ Thematic resources, tutorials and links to help you get up and running faster.

Thematic and WordPress Child Theme Basics

• Official Thematic Website
• WordPress Child Theme Basics
• Modular CSS
• Theme Template Directory Structure

Theme Hooks

• Thematic 0.9.6.1 Is Live (Updated 2/10/2010)
  Details about newest version. Contains new hooks and filters for even more control.
• Using Action Hooks in WordPress Child Themes
• Theme Hooks
• Adding Custom WordPress Hooks
• Using Filter Hooks in WordPress Child Themes
• Theme Filters
• Frameworks, Child Themes, Filters and Hooks?
• Overriding Parent Theme Functions in Child Themes

Thematic Tutorials

• 10 Design Tips For Your Custom WordPress Theme Built With Thematic
• Edit Your Theme With Functions.php
  Tons of fun by adding functions to edit your theme.
• How I Used a Custom Page Template to Redesign My Blog the Smart Way
  Step-by-step creating a new child theme.
• Replacing WordPress Content With an Excerpt in a Thematic Child Theme
  How to replace the_content() with the_excerpt()–without touching your theme files.
• Add “Featured Posts” to Your Thematic Child Theme
• Use WordPress as a CMS With Thematic: Part 1
• Add a Header Image to Thematic the Easy Way
• Add a Search Box to the Thematic Menu
• Adding Theme Options to WordPress Themes
  Creating theme option pages to your WordPress theme.
• ThemeShaper Forums
  If you get stuck, the Thematic Forums is the place to go for help.

Editing Parts of Your Theme With Thematic

There is a whole series of tutorials on the Thematic website for edit particular parts of your WordPress theme:

• Thematic 0.9.6.1 Is Live (Updated 2/10/2010)
  Details about newest Thematic version. Contains new hooks and filters for even more control.
• WordPress Themes Template Tutorial Series
• Working With the Index Template
• Editing Your Thematic CSS
• Editing the Header Template
• Editing the Sidebar Template
• Editing the Single Post, Post Attachment and 404 Templates

Thematic Cheat Sheets

• Thematic Structure Cheat Sheet
  A visual look at all of Thematic’s main elements–div’s, theme actions, hooks and widget areas. Very, very useful.
• Widget-Ready Areas
  Images of widget-ready areas for each major template and section of Thematic.

Thematic Child Themes

There are already some nicely-designed Thematic child themes.

Acamas

SimpleCart (js) – E-commerce theme

Audry

Gallery

Aether

Sugar Cane

Update: 3HoursTheme (by Matteo Stagi. Also includes tutorials to help you to use the theme)

Cosmos Labs

I can’t include Thematic themes without mentioning Cosmos Labs. They have released several nice child themes. Here are a few.

Byty

Street

Early Morning

Commune

Crystalline

Element Templates

These are not full child themes, but themes for specific parts of a WordPress site that can be used along with another child theme.

• Login and User Registration Page Templates For Thematic
• Replacing the Thematic Menu With a DropDown List of Categories

Hopefully these links will give you a good place to start using Thematic.

What Do You Use?

Do you use Thematic? Do you use some other WordPress framework? Tell us in the comments.

The only problem I have is that it’s only viewable to registered WordPress users with an admin role. Editors, Authors and Contributors can access the WordPress backend, but can’t view the stats.

You could always install a bloated role manager plugin just so you can allow others to view CyStats. But this is overkill unless you need to adjust roles for some other reason.

Here’s a quick way to allow non-admin users to view your CyStats stats:

1. In WordPress, go to Plugins > Editor
2. Select CyStats from the upper right dropdown list
3. Choose cystats/includes/admin.php from the list of plugin files on the right.
   Alternatively, FTP to the wp-content/plugins/cystats/includes/ dir and edit the admin.php file.
4. Notice there are several ‘8’s (or possibly ‘9’s or ‘10’s). These are the numbers for the WordPress user levels/roles. 8-10 are admins, 7-5 are editors, etc.:

   /**
    * Builds admin panem menu for Plugin
    */
   if(!function_exists('cystats_create_admin_menu')){
   	function cystats_create_admin_menu() {
   		if (function_exists('add_options_page')) {
   			add_options_page('CyStats Options Page', 'CyStats ', 8, 'cystats-options', 'cystats_admin_options');
   		}
   		if (function_exists('add_menu_page')) {
   			add_menu_page('CyStats Statistics Plugin', 'CyStats', 8, __FILE__, 'cystats_admin_index');
   		}
   		if (function_exists('add_submenu_page')) {
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Index','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Index','cystats')), 8, __FILE__, 'cystats_admin_index');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Blog','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Blog','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-blog', 'cystats_admin_blog');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Clients','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Clients','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-clients', 'cystats_admin_clients');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Referer','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Referer','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-referer', 'cystats_admin_referer');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Robots & Tools','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Robots/Tools','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-robots', 'cystats_admin_robots');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Pages','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Pages','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-pages', 'cystats_admin_pages');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Time','cystats')), htmlspecialchars(__('Time','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-time', 'cystats_admin_time');
   			add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Options','cystats')),htmlspecialchars(__('Options','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-options', 'cystats_admin_options');
   		}
   	}
   }

5. If you want editors (as well as admins) to be able to view the stats, change the 8, 9 or 10 throughout the includes/admin.php file to the number of the user level your want (ie 7, 6 or 5 for editors).
6. If you only want the admin to be able to edit the CyStats options/settings (recommended), don’t change the final 8 (or 9 or 10). It looks like this:

   add_submenu_page(__FILE__, htmlspecialchars(__('CyStats: Options','cystats')),htmlspecialchars(__('Options','cystats')), 8, 'cystats-options', 'cystats_admin_options');

That’s it! No editing the database.

Note: You’ll probably need to make these changes again when you update the CyStats plugin, so this isn’t a perfect solution, but the CyStats plugin isn’t updated too often.

Enjoy.

When you’re building a website in WordPress and using it as a CMS, you’re going to have pages that you don’t want showing in your main site navigation/menu.

How do you keep those pages from showing up in your navigation?

Include and Exclude Specific Pages

There are several methods, but most of them require hard coding the menu to either exclude specific pages from the navigation…

Or including only certain pages like so:

<?php wp_list_pages('include=1,2,3,6,19' ); ?>

These methods work, but are impractical (at least for client work) because they’re not flexible enough.

What happens when you add more pages to the site, or want to add/remove pages in the nav?

Also, could you explain how to make the needed code edits to your clients? I don’t think so.

Use a Plugin

The fastest, most flexible and easiest to use method is to just use a plugin.

My choice is the Exclude Pages plugin from Simon Wheatley.

After you activate it, Exclude Pages gives you a new option on the write panel for each page—’Include this page in user menus‘.

The option is checked by default on all the new pages you create, so if you don’t want the page to show up in the navigation, simply uncheck the box before publishing, and it never shows.

It also removes pages that have already been published.

The Exclude Pages plugin is great because clients (and you) can easily choose which pages to include in the site’s navigation. Unticking a box is a whole lot easier to explain than editing code.

Use Bookmarks For Your Navigation

Another option is to use WordPress’ built-in links to create site navigation.

Justin Tadlock offers an interesting take on using links (blogroll/bookmarks) to create navigation.

This is a pretty creative approach, and it makes logical use of your blogroll.

The only downside I see is that, you’ll have to rework your theme to incorporation this technique—it’s not a quick, drop-in solution.

Do you have any other suggestions for removing pages from your WordPress navigation? Share with us in the comments.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2355395 bytes) in /public_html/wp-includes/http.php on line xxx

If you look at the file mentioned in the error message, you won’t find anything worthy of changing. I believe the line number mentioned is simply the line where WordPress ran out of memory.

Fortunately, I found the answer in a thread on the WordPress Forums (which should be one of the 1st places you go when looking for WP-related answers).

The error is memory related, so increase your available memory (after backing your site up, of course). Edit your wp-config.php file and add the following line right after the opening php statement:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

Save the file and try the upgrade again. Unless you have something else wrong with your site/WP setup, the upgrade should now work perfectly.

Now WordPress has announced the ability to post to your WordPress.com blog easily through email–either from your desktop, webmail or your mobile/cell phone.

This is a huge improvement on the very limited WordPress ‘Post via email’ option previously available.

Now you can add images, video and MP3 audio to your email and have it added to your post.

Introducing Post by Email for WordPress.com

This doesn’t replace all the functionality of Posterous, but if you only need to update your WordPress.com blog, this is a nice option.

I’m sure more than a few people are chomping at the bit for this to be included in the self-hosted version of WordPress.

Has anyone tested this out yet? What are your thoughts?

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page

Now this was a puzzle. The kind of puzzle you don’t enjoy getting when you know everything should be working fine.

The following is my unfortunate tale and, while the 1st part may not specifically apply to the above error, it has a bearing on the solution, so bear with me.

The Setup

Here are the steps I took up to the point of getting this error:

1. Using the tutorials found here and here, I exported my local MySQL database, created a new database on the server (using Plesk)
2. Replaced all mentions of localhost in my exported SQL file with the actual address of the live site
3. Imported the local database into the newly created one
4. Made some adjustments to the wp_options table and others to make sure the URLs and paths were correct
5. Then I uploaded my WordPress files and edited my wp-config.php file and added the correct database info

At that point, it should’ve worked. But it didn’t. I couldn’t even get a single page to load.

Case Matters (Apparently)

When setting up WordPress on my local install via XAMPPlite, I used wp311guP_ (obviously not exactly what I had, for obvious reasons) as the table prefix for WordPress instead of the standard prefix, for security reasons.

Come to find out, the table prefix had gotten changed ever so slightly when the database was created and setup with WordPress.

Example (again, not the actual values I used, obviously ;) ):

The original table prefix I had set: wp311guP_

Table prefix as it was recorded by MySQL: wp311gup_

Notice: For some reason the last letter was changed from a capital P to a lowercase p. I haven’t been able to find any WordPress or MySQL documentation that mentions this, though I haven’t searched too deeply.

Tables? We Don’t Need No Stinking Tables

WordPress couldn’t get connected correctly to the database because it was looking for tables with a prefix that didn’t exist. I changed the table prefix to the lowercase version in wp-config.php because this was easier and faster that going through and replacing all the capital letters in my WordPress database.

Once I made my changes I could view the front page. Huzzah!

But sadly when I entered my login info, I got:

“You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page”

A Solution

After searching on Google for an answer, I found a post on beconfused.com.

The jist of the post is that he ran into similar problems. His problems were a result of manually changing the table prefix for security reasons. To fix things, he had to go into his database and change some of the values to fix the permissions error he was getting when logging in.

This wasn’t exactly what had happened to me, and yet it was the same basic issue.

Looking through his post though, I checked my own database for:

• wp_user_level
• wp_capabilities

I noticed that even though everywhere else the table prefix had been changed to wp311gup_ (lowercase p), in those sections it was still my original wp311guP_ (uppercase P).

Anyhow, I searched and changed all the  uppercase versions of the table prefix to the lowercase version and it fixed my WordPress login permissions error.

other Possibilities

My above issue might not be why you’re getting the WordPress permissions error. If you’re getting that error, here are some other possibilities.

No .htaccess File?

If you’re receiving an permissions error, you may also want to check that you have .htaccess in your main WordPress directory. This can also sometimes cause you problems.

Upgrading Problems?

If you’re upgrading from a previous version of WordPress and you get the permissions error, you might look at this solution.

The Conclusion

If you’re going to use a different table prefix than the default (which you should for security reasons), you might want to steer clear of using capital letters in it. They may well be converted to lowercase in the majority of MySQL tables, yet the login tables may leave the capital letter(s) in tact and cause you grief.

Also, the lowercase/uppercase issue may only rear its ugly head once you go to put the site live—I never had a noticeable problem when testing using XAMPPlite.

I’m curious: Has anyone else run into this issue with table prefix characters changing?

Anyone else use uppercase characters in their WordPress tables?

Has anyone found mention of issues with uppercase characters in MySQL table prefixes?

The solution I (finally) found involves sorting the posts in the Events category based on the value of a certain custom field.

Before finding the solution though, I tried several different ways to get events to show up, ordered from newest to oldest., but nothing I came across worked completely.

Skip ahead to the solution…

What Didn’t Work

In order to save some people who are looking into doing something similar, I’ll tell you what didn’t work for me. Some of the things mentioned here might work for your project, but it didn’t work for me.

WordPress Plugins

I started out trying not to reinvent the wheel and just go with a WordPress plugin. However, I couldn’t find anything that fully met my needs.

Calendar Plugins

I tried using several calendar and event plugins to get the job done. These might work for you, but I needed to have each event have its own post page. This was because each event had a registration form for the individual events.

Most of the WordPress plugins I found, either didn’t allow linking to actual posts—they only showed a summary. Many of them used a non-WordPress system to store the details about the event. Some just didn’t work at all and gave errors.

Event Plugins

I had similar issues with WordPress event plugins as I did with the calendar plugins. They had their own system of storing events (not as posts) and many of them where too rigid as far as options.

Future Post Plugins

I also tried using a future post plugin to make it appear that posts that were scheduled for a future date (say the date of the event) were actually published.

All the plugins I found apply this to all posts in all categories with no way to control it. So if you ever scheduled any post in any category to publish later, it would be published immediately—not just your future events.

Other WordPress code

In the meantime, I tried different code offered on sites to help with this and some would work partially, while others would not.

One “solution” was to schedule the post to be published on the date of the event and then use some PHP/WordPress code to show all the posts tagged as future posts in a certain category.

I was excited about this and it looked like it was exactly what I wanted.

The flaw with this plan is that while it will show the future scheduled posts and they will be all in the correct chronological order on a page pulling in posts, you can’t actually view individual post unless you’re logged in as administrator. People not logged in will get a 404 File Not Found message when trying to view the full post. This is just the way WordPress is designed and I couldn’t find any workaround for this.

The Solution, Already

I know, a lot of build up for the solution. Well, here it is.

Part 1: Flutter Plugin and Custom Fields

I was already using a great plugin called Flutter, which lets you create custom write panels and work with custom fields and all in a much more user-friendly way.

I created an Events write panel in Flutter and made an event_date custom field. I used this to display the date of each event instead of the published date of the post on my main Events page.

Flutter’s documentation is pretty sparse, and I could not get the sort by custom field to work using the code examples on their site, so…

Part 2: Order Using a Custom Function

Since the custom fields made by Flutter are just regular WordPress custom fields, we don’t have to use Flutter’s code to order them.

I found a great post and bit of code on Think Press‘ site:

Order Posts by Custom Key Revisited

Take a look at the above bit of PHP code and make these adjustments:

1. Wrap the code provided in PHP tags (see comments if you’re unsure how to do this)
2. Copy and paste that code into your functions.php file in your WordPress theme.
3. Adjust the if statement to match your page or category to your needs
4. Change to the custom field you want  to sort by on this line (change ‘Price’ to your custom field):

   $where.= "AND $wpdb->postmeta.meta_key = 'Price' ";

This worked like a charm. All the events are ordered from newest to oldest—based on the event date, not the publish date. This also works on any custom field; not just those used in Flutter.

Recap

Here’s a recap of my basic process:

• Created an Events category in WordPress
• Used Flutter to set up custom fields for the event date, time, etc
• Set a custom single post template for posts in the Events category (to show event registration code)
• Set up my Events page to pull in those posts
• Added the code found at Think Press‘ site to my theme’s functions.php file
• Replaced the post publish date with the custom field for the event’s date in my templates

Some of the above steps may not apply to your project, but hopefully this will save you some time when needing to sort by custom field in WordPress and when working with creating events.

A month or so ago, I stumbled across a post that led me to Posterous—a free online service that lets you post to your blogs and other sites by email.

Posterous also lets you autopost—posting to multiple sites/blogs with a single email.

Last month, I wrote a step-by-step tutorial about using Posterous and its autopost feature to post to WordPress (hosted and self-hosted), Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, etc, etc.

This is extremely useful because WordPress’ built-in email posting system is very limited. Posterous makes it easy for people with a web-enabled cellphone or BlackBerry to post on the go. The autopost is great for anyone who wants to make posting the same information/photos to several sites a 1 step process.

More Tutorials and Features

Posterous also has a few more features and capabilities that’s been released since I wrote my original tutorial in January. These features make it even easier to control which sites you autopost to and control the information you can post to your blogs.

Official Posterous Tutorials and Features

The Official Posterous blog shows a simple way to select which blogs and sites to autopost to on the fly using the #url@posterous.com syntax.

It also explains how to assign WordPress categories to your posts with Posterous. For example, add your categories to the end of your Subject like so: ((tag: apple, gadgets))

Thanks to Posterous

I want to thank Posterous for making it simple for non-technical people and those with mobile devices to still post to their sites with as little effort as possible.

I also want to thank the guys at Posterous for linking to my earlier tutorial on their blog and newletters.

I look forward to seeing where Posterous will go in the near future. They seem to be adding new features about every other day lately:

• New Posterous Bookmarklet
• Password Protect Your Posterous Site
• Official Posterous Blog

It’s recommended that you save your work (if you’re in the middle of writing a post/page) a couple hours ahead of the scheduled maintenance time.

I recommend that you save everything you are working on at least two hours before the maintenance down time begins. If you “need” to blog something, write it up in a text editor or (at the very worst) a word processor and save it there until you can copy and paste or paste using the Word quicktag button in the Visual Text Editor.

Source:http://lorelle.wordpress.com

This will not affect self-hosted blogs—only blogs hosted on WordPress.com.

There is no downtime associated with the maintenance. It just involves some work that affects WordPress.com cookies. If you are logged into WordPress.com at the time, it will probably just log you out and you’ll have to log back in again.

According to the WordPress blog, you don’t have to backup your blog. Just make sure if you’re working on a post, back it up because you might get logged out before it can be auto-saved.

Official WordPress Blog Post

Previously, I shared some of the graphics and web design-related websites that I’m subscribed to. I think it’s interesting knowing what sites other designers go to for news, resources, tutorials, inspiration and the like.

Continuing this theme, today I’m finishing the list of web design-related sites with 14 17 more great sites.

Web Design and CSS Inspiration

• FullSingle
  A CSS website gallery dedicated to sites that are only 1 page.

Web Design Articles, Tutorials and Code

• CSS Zone
  Articles, tutorials, code techniques. Focuses on the fairly technical side of web development.
• jQuery For Designers
  Great jQuery code snippets, tutorials, plugins and articles. Focused on helping designers learn useful techniques for extending their sites with jQuery.
• Vignet Inspire: Web Design Blog
  Nice articles and tutorials for web designers and developers, with a splash or graphic design thrown in.
• WebAppers
  Daily-updated links to top-quality web design-related posts, tutorials, code, plugins and other open-source web resources.
• Min Tran’s Weblog
  XHTML and CSS tutorials and not to mention some great icon sets for web designers.
• Woork
  The consistently great blog of Antonio Lupetti. Features a HUGE collection tutorials on AJAX (Prototype, MooTools, Scriptaculous), PHP and database design, as well as XHTML and CSS.
• Smashing Magazine
  Showcases inspiration, tutorials, icons, fonts, themes, online tools, graphics and web design resources. Articles on just about everything a web or graphic designer would be interested in.

WordPress

• WordPress Publisher Blog
  The official WordPress blog. WordPress news, tools, themes, resources and plugins.
• WPCandy – The Best of WordPress
  Links to WordPress-related articles, tutorials, themes and other resources.
• WPelements
  WordPress themes, tutorials and plugins.
• WPMU Tutorials
  WordPress MU (Multi-User) tutorials, plugins, themes and news.
• Blog Perfume
  WordPress themes, tutorials, plugins, icons and other WP-ish news.

ExpressionEngine

• EE Blog (Official ExpressionEngine Blog)
  The official EE blog with EE news and articles about the inner workings of ExpressionEngine. Great for keeping up with new versions.
• EE Design
  Hasn’t been updated in a while, but contains ExpressionEngine themes, templates and tutorials.
• EE HowTo
  Nice, bite-sized how-to tips, tricks and tutorials for using and building EE sites.
• Train-ee
  The best ExpressionEngine tutorial site out there. Period. This is where I learned how to build my 1st EE site. A must read for anyone wanting to use the EE CMS.

What’s in Your Feed?

What web design-related sites do you visit or subscribe to regularly? Share them with us in the comments.

Jeff Chandler wrote a post on Web Blog Tools Collection yesterday called Do You Post By Email? In the post, he asked if anyone was actually using the post by email ability that WordPress has had since at least version 1.5.

From the comments on Jeff’s article, most people have not used it because it’s incredibly limited in what can be posted—no images, HTML, video or formatting. So basically, you can only post text.

Also, it’s of limited use since most people who have access to email also have access to a regular computer. Since the blog posts that can posted by email are only text, typing on your cellphone’s keyboard takes forever.

Post by Email With Posterous

However, a free online service called Posterous was also mentioned. This lets you post not only text, but also images, videos, etc by email.

Posterous also allows you to link to your Flickr account, WordPress blogs, Blogger, Movable Type, Typepad, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and more. This means not only can you post via email to those sites, you can post via email to ALL those sites simultaneously. No more making individual posts one by one to every site you have.

Benefits are pretty obvious for those with camera phones and a connection to the internet. Imagine being able to post directly from your phone or BlackBerry.

Posterous also gives you 1GB of space and a free blog on their site.

Posterous Tutorials

I couldn’t find any tutorials for Posterous, so let’s walk through:

• Posting via email with Posterous
• signing up for a Posterous account (optional)
• Linking your Flickr, WordPress, Facebook, etc accounts
• Posting to all account at once

Posting Via Email

This is seriously easy. It could not be simpler. Really.

1. Go to www.posterous.com
2. You don’t have to sign up for an account at this point, so click on Step 2: Email anything to post@posterous.com
   
   
   
3. Your email client will open with post@posterous.com as the recipient. If you use Gmail, Hotmail, etc, just log into your webmail account and create a new email addressed simply to post@posterous.com
   
4. Type your post as you want it. You can use HTML formatting in your posts and drag and drop photos, files or videos into your email. If you add more than 1 image, Posterous will create a simple gallery for you.

2 things to note at this point:

1. If the email address you are sending from attaches a signature, you will want to highlight and remove it or this will be included in your posts.
   
   Edit: If you don’t want to remove your signature by hand each time or are posting from an online service that adds a signature/ad at the end of your emails, type #end where you want your post to end and Posterous will ignore the rest. (Thanks, Alan)
2. Posterous will use the first name in your email address as your name on their site. Make sure the email address you’re sending from contains your name. If you sign up for an account with Posterous, you can change your profile later though, so it’s not really a big deal

After you’ve written your post and attached/added your files, send your email and you’re done!

Editing and Removing Posts

After you send in your post, Posterous will send you a link to your new blog on Posterous.

You also have the option to edit your post or delete it altogether.

You can set a password for your blog as well. This requires signing up for an account though, but it’s free. This also lets you to choose your own username and address for your Posterous account and allows you to link to your blog(s), Flickr, Facebook, etc.

While you don’t have to create a Posterous account to post by email to your Posterous blog, if you want to follow the rest of the tutorial, you will need to sign up for an account.

Signing Up For a Posterous Account

Now, let’s password-protect your new blog and sign up for a Posterous account.

1. In the email that Posterous sent you after your first post, click the link Click here to set a password for this site. This takes you to the Set a Password page.
   
2. Choose a name for your site (ex: yourblog.posterous.com) and a password and click Sign Up
   
3. You’re now at the Manage page where you can change your profile, set up more email addresses or mobile phones to post from, and set up your Autopost accounts.
   

Posting to Other Sites and Blogs With Autopost

Now, we can link other sites to your Posterous account and when you post to Posterous, all those other sites and services will be posted to as well.

Linking WordPress to Posterous

Let’s begin by linking our WordPress blog to Posterous

1. Choose Autopost to Everywhere in the sidebar on the right
   
2. You can now add an account to your Posterous account and link it
3. On the Autopost to Everywhere page, click Add a service
   
4. Let’s choose WordPress by clicking the More Blogs link
   
5. Go to your WordPress blog and make sure XML-RPC is enabled in your WordPress settings
6. Back in Posterous, type in your blog’s address and username/password
   
7. Click the Advanced options link. By default, Posterous adds in a blurb at the bottom of every post. If you want to remove it, just highlight and delete.
   
8. Click Save to complete

You will now see your WordPress blog listed in your linked services.

Link to Your Flickr Account

Now, let’s link a Flickr account to Posterous.

1. Click Add a service and choose Flickr from the next screen
2. Click Click here to authorize Posterous to access your Flickr account
   
3. This takes you to Flickr’s site to sign in and confirm giving access to Posterous
   
4. Click OK, I’ll Allow It and you’ll be returned to Posterous where you’ll see that it’s added to the Autopost to Everywhere page
   

Now you can follow the same basic steps to add more services and sites to Posterous if you want. All the sites that are linked to Posterous will be updated when you post to Posterous.

The neat thing is that when you write a post and send it to Posterous, the complete contents of your post get posted to WordPress, but only the photos will be added to your Flickr account. Neat, huh?

Our post is published to both Flickr and our WordPress site with a single email

WordPress note: The thumbnails and galleries Posterous generates are 500 pixels wide, so make sure that your theme has at least 500px in width in the post area. Otherwise, it may throw off your layout.

Hopefully WordPress will improve their posting by email system soon. It would be nice if something like this was included right in WordPress. I guess we’ll just have to wait. Until then, Posterous seems like a great solution for posting by email.

When you’re building a new WordPress site or reworking a previous design, there are bound to be problems or issues that need solving. Some require rolling up your sleeves and coding your way to a solution. But sometimes plugins can do the job much easier and come in quite handy.

Here are just 5 of the problems I came across on some of the blogs I’ve designed and the WordPress plugins I used to solve them:

1. Easily Add CSS Styles From Your Stylesheet to Posts
2. Automatically Shorten Long URLs in Comments
3. Making Regular, Automatic Backups of Your WordPress Install and Database
4. Don’t Ping Yourself When Linking to Your Own Posts
5. Provide a Version of Your Site For Mobile Users

Note: Unless otherwise stated, all the following plugins work with WordPress 2.6 and 2.7+

Easily Add CSS Styles From Your Stylesheet to Posts

Problem: The Styles dropdown list in WordPress only contains WordPress-specific classes. I needed the ability to select styles from my existing CSS stylesheet when writing posts or pages. For example, I have a class for my captions.

Solution: TinyMCE Advanced

After a little searching, I came across TinyMCE Advanced—a set of plugins that covers quite a few things when it comes to editing and formating your posts.

Among other things, with TinyMCE Advanced you can rearrange your buttons and automatically import styles from your stylesheets. Now, when I use the Styles dropdown, I get a list of all my classes—not just WordPress-specific ones.

Automatically Shorten Long URLs in Comments

Problem: Someone leaves a comment on your blog that contains a URL that’s too long. This can cause serious issues, such as overflowing text and dropped floats, not to mention it just looks ugly.

Solution: WP Chunk

WP Chunk shortens long URLs in comments into short, manageable ones, thus saving your visitors from having to deal with the heartbreak of nasty, long URLs.

Making Regular Backups of Your WordPress Install

Problem: I’m lazy…when it comes to backups. I think this is a fairly common problem. You want to make automatic backups of your database and WordPress files.

Solution: WP-DBManager

With WP-DBManager, you can schedule automatic backups and they will be saved to a directory on your server as well as gzipped and emailed to an email address of your choosing.

I have mine set to go to my Gmail account which I check via Thunderbird. This way I have a copy on my server, a copy on my computer from my Gmail account and 1 more copy saved in my Gmail account online.

WP-DBManager also allows you to set a certain number of backups to be kept on the server. After the number is reached, it will delete the oldest backup.

In addition to scheduled backups, you can also do one-off backups when the need arises.

Don’t Ping Yourself

Problem: In order to keep a well-connected blog, I often link to posts that I’ve already published. Unfortunately, by default, WordPress adds a trackback on the original article. This is redundant and uglies-up your comments area.

Solution: Use No Self Ping to stop unnecessary trackbacks.

Provide a Version of Your Site For Mobile Users

Problem: You want readers that are using mobile devices and cellphones (iPhone, etc) to be able to view your content. How do you do this without creating another version of your blog yourself?

Solution: Use Mobilize by Mippin

Mobilize by Mippin is actually a plugin that works with a free online service called Mippin.

On Mippin’s site, you enter your site’s address and customize the look. Mippin will generate a mobile version and only serve it up to those coming to your site on mobile devices. Very handy.

The Mobilize plugin also works with Mippin to get content from your RSS feed and display it nicely, no matter what device you’re using. There’s no configuration needed for the plugin either—just activate and enjoy.

What Worked For You?

WordPress has tons of great and useful plugins available and I’ve been able to use them to solve most any problem I’ve come across.

What problems have you come across and what WordPress plugins have you used to solve them?

Even though this blog is relatively new, there have been many great web and graphic design-related posts in the last few months of 2008. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and look at just a few (21, actually) of the topics we’ve covered.

Tutorials

• DIY Online Incremental Backups
• BlogDesk Part 1: Publishing Posts to WordPress
• BlogDesk Part 2: Posting to ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine

I’ve written several posts about ExpressionEngine. Here are a few of the most popular.

• Javascript Templates in EE: Speeding Up Page Loads
• Easier Editing in ExpressionEngine and WordPress
• Learn ExpressionEngine in 2 Days

WordPress

Within minutes of WordPress 2.7 being released on WordPress.org, there was the WordPress 2.7 Upgrade Checklist. This contains tips on upgrading your site, including making sure your plugins and themes are compatible with the newest version of WordPress.

Online Tools and Services

We’ve reviewed and highlighted several online services and websites that make your job as a web or graphic designer much easier.

• Automatic, Painless Backups With Mozy
• Free Icon Search Tools
• 4 Royalty-Free Photo Search Engines
• 5 Free Online Photoshop Alternatives
• Free Online Billing and Invoicing—Curdbee
• Manage Multiple Email Accounts With Zenbe

Web Design Code

• Don’t Remove Visual Cues For Links
• Quick and Dirty: CSS Shorthand Tips
• Quick and Dirty: Lightning Fast Page Setup
• Quick and Dirty: Optimizing PHP (For Fun and Profit)

Graphic-Related Posts

• 12 + Mega Icon Sets For Designers
• OpenX Admin Icon Set
• 10 More Free Icon Sets
• Inspiration: Retro Clothing Labels

More to Come in 2009

These are just a few of the great posts that have been featured here on the blog and there’s more to come in 2009.

This blog is updated 2 times a week—on Mondays and Fridays/Saturdays. The Monday posts deal with web design-related topics and things of interest to web designers. The posts at the end of the week usually deal with graphic design topics.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to the RSS feed so you won’t miss a single post.

That’s right. The much anticipated update to WordPress-WordPress 2.7 (final release) is making its debut on WordPress.org after months of development, testing and anticipation! Hurray!

Before you go and upgrade, check your themes and plugins to make sure they’re ready for the newest version of WordPress first.

The dust is still settling on the WordPress website (I haven’t heard an official announcement from WP yet), and some links are still pointing to the 2.6 docs, so I thought I’d post the correct links to the 2.7 docs and guides.

Download WordPress 2.7

Is Your Theme Compatible?

There have been some changes to themes for WordPress 2.7-primarily in the code for comments. Do yourself a favor and check out the Migrating Plugins and Themes to 2.7 section if you’ve made your own theme or are heavily customizing an existing theme.

Also, check WP’s list of 2.7-compatible themes.

Are Your Plugins Compatible With WordPress 2.7?

It’s vital before making the jump to 2.7 that you make sure any plugins that you rely on have been updated and work bug-free on WordPress 2.7.

Check WP’s list of plugins that work with WordPress 2.7

Ready To Upgrade To 2.7?

If your theme and plugins all check out and you’re ready to upgrade to 2.7, take a look at WordPress’ Extended Upgrade Instructions.

I’m not making the leap myself for a couple week probably. There are still some plugins that I’m going to wait on be updated before I take on the upgrade.

What are your upgrade experiences? Let us know in the comments.

Previously, I wrote a brief post about BlogDesk, a Windows desktop app that lets you publish to your site without setting foot inside your blog/CMS’s admin section. BlogDesk works for WordPress, ExpressionEngine, Drupal, Movable Type and Serendipity.

Over the next 2 weeks, I’ll be showing you how to use BlogDesk to publish to WordPress and ExpressionEngine.

This week, in part 1, we’re going to look at setting up BlogDesk and publishing a post to WordPress 2.7 (beta 3).

BlogDesk Installation & WordPress Blog

1. First, make sure you have a WordPress blog set up and configured. Even though this tutorial uses WordPress 2.7, any version of WordPress 2.3 and up will work the same way.
2. Although not required, it would be good to set up some categories on your blog if you haven’t already
3. Next, download BlogDesk and install it on your computer (Windows 98, NT, 2000, ME, XP, Vista)

Set Up a Connection to Your Blog

1. Run BlogDesk and you will see the main application screen—this is where you will write, save and publish your posts. First, though, we have to set up the connection to your WordPress site.
   
2. Go to File>Manage Blogs
   
3. Click New to start the Blog Wizard. The Wizard will guide you through setting up the connection between BlogDesk and WordPress.
4. Enter the name of your blog on the next screen. Any name will do—it’s just to help you identify your site within BlogDesk.
   
5. On the next screen, you will enter the address of your blog. You don’t have to put http:// or a trailing /—BlogDesk will add them when you click Next if you leave them out.
   
6. Next, choose your blogging platform. In our case, we will choose the 1st WordPress option since the version is above 2.2.
   
7. BlogDesk will try to guess the location of your xmlrpc.php file. The default should be fine unless you’ve specifically changed your WordPress settings.
   
8. WordPress (2.6 and up) does not enable XML-RPC by default, so now is a good time to enable it if you have not already. You will need to log into your WordPress control panel and go to Settings>Writing. Under Remote Publishing, check the box next to Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols and save the settings.
   
9. Back in BlogDesk, click the Next button and enter your WordPress login information
   
10. The next screen is for your Blog-ID. This establishes a connection to your blog. If you’ve enabled XML-RPC in WordPress, click Get Blog-ID. You should get a success message. Click OK and go to the next screen.
    
11. If you have categories set up in WordPress already, the Get Categories button will import the list into BlogDesk. If you have not created any categories yet, you can always import your categories later.
    
12. The next screen tests to make sure you can upload images through WordPress (as opposed to using FTP). Test Upload will upload a small badge image. If this doesn’t work, you may have to set up an FTP connection instead later.
    
13. Click Next and then Finish to finish and exit the wizard.
    

Now BlogDesk is mostly set up. There are a few more things, however, we can check before we write our first post.

Check Blog Properties

1. In the Manage Blogs window, you will see your newly added blog. With the blog selected, click Properties.
2. The Blog tab lets you see your blog’s details. Make sure your Encoding matches what’s used on your site. For us, we’re going to keep it at UTF-8.
3. If you could not upload files directly (step 12 above), the FTP & Upload tab lets you add an FTP account. If you had no issues uploading the test image, don’t worry about this.
4. In the Categories tab, Get Categories From the Server will update the list of categories if you’ve added or deleted any categories in WordPress. If you want new posts to belong to one or more categories by default, tick the appropriate boxes.
5. In the Publish tab, tick the boxes next to the fields that you want to check for content when publishing posts (think required fields in forms)
   
6. If you selected UTF-8 encoding, make sure Encode Special Characters in HTML is unchecked
7. Click OK to save your settings and exit the Properties window
8. Click Close to close the Manage Blogs window

Now you should see your blog’s name and a list of categories in the upper right panel on the main program screen. Now let’s write a post for our blog.

Write a Post

The rest is pretty self-explanatory, but here are some quick tips:

• Use the main window to write your post
  
• To switch to HTML code editing, go to View>Source
• The Extras menu lets you add/edit tags and custom fields, password posts and edit program settings
• The Save button saves a draft of your post to your harddrive for later editing
  
• By default, the Publish button will publish your post automatically. If you want to just upload the post as a draft to WordPress, untick the checkbox next to Publish after Upload, in the right sidebar.
  
• You can see your brand new post if you log into WordPress. You can edit the post from the WordPress control panel after you publish it, just like any other post.
  

Editing WordPress Posts in BlogDesk

In BlogDesk, you can also edit posts that have already been published, whether or not they were written originally in BlogDesk.

1. In BlogDesk, go to File>Edit Posts Already Published (logical enough)
2. In the Edit Posts window, select the blog you want to edit from the drop-down menu at the top
3. Choose how many posts you want displayed, then click Show
4. Select the post you want to edit and click Edit
5. Once you have made your changes, clicking the Publish button will save the edited post back onto your site

Useful Tool

BlogDesk looks like a solid program for Windows users or for those who have clients that use Windows. With BlogDesk, you don’t have to give your clients access to WordPress or any other blog/CMS’s control panel.

This could be great for times when you need to write a post, but don’t have access to an internet connection. It can also be used to keep local backup copies of your posts.

More BlogDesk Tutorials

Read Part 2—BlogDesk: Publishing to ExpressionEngine.

If you’ve enjoyed this post or any other post on this site, stay up-to-date by subscribing to our feed.

EEHowTo posted about Using BlogDesk With ExpressionEngine to add entries and edit existing entries without having to be logged into the control panel.

BlogDesk is a free, desktop app for Windows (sorry everyone else… if I get it working in Linux, I’ll post about it).

This would be great for clients who don’t want to log into the control panel (or for those clients YOU don’t want logging into the control panel).

Another benefit is that you can work on your posts offline if, say, you’re somewhere that doesn’t have an internet connection. Then you can upload the posts when you’re ready.

I plan to test it with WordPress and ExpressionEngine and see how it works. Look for a post soon about BlogDesk. Check out the BlogDesk tutorial series:

• BlogDesk Part 1: Publishing Posts to WordPress
• BlogDesk Part 2: Posting to ExpressionEngine

Using It’s All Text in Firefox 3 on Ubuntu

How do you keep your code properly indented when you’re coding in a textarea?

Spaces are no good, Tab just jumps you out of the textarea. Even good old copy and paste doesn’t work—even from Notepad without having to copy and paste the entire textarea back and forth.

When writing posts in WordPress, you’re not really dealing with a ton of actual raw code that needs formatting. But what about when using the theme editor or editing code in ExpressionEngine?

How can you keep your code from being all jumbled and akimbo when editing in a textarea?

Plugins To the Rescue!

2 browser plugins—Saft for Mac/Safari users and It’s All Text for Windows and Linux Firefox users.

Both plugins do the same thing: Edit the text in any textarea in an external editor of your choice and then save the text back to the textarea.

It even gives you a nice AJAX-like update glow in your textarea to let you know it made the update.

Macs

Saft is a useful developer plugin for Safari. One of its many features is that it can link your textareas to an external editor like TextMate or Coda.

Windows and Linux

For Windows and Linux, there’s It’s All Text, a plugin/add-on for Firefox, which does the same thing. You get to pick virtually any program as the external editor. In Windows, I have mine set to use Notepad++, and in Linux (Ubuntu), gEdit.

To edit the contents of a textarea, just hover your mouse over the textarea and a small purple button will appear. Click it and it launches your external editor with the content from your textarea loaded.

The only slight weirdness with setting up the plugin is that after installing the add-on the first time and restarting Firefox, you will need to choose which editor you want to use. Then, you must restart Firefox again before it will save your changes. Once that’s sorted, it works just fine.

If you’re a Mac user who doesn’t want to shell out for Saft, you should be able to use It’s All Text with Firefox on Mac, but it takes a little extra work to get it set up.

The great thing about these plugins is that they work with just about any regular textarea on a page, so you can use them in ExpressionEngine, WordPress or any other CMS or website that allows editing or posting via textareas.

They’re also useful when posting long-winded comments on blogs or forums.

Other Useful Plugins?

Are there other browser plugins that you use when developing in ExpressionEngine or WordPress? Leave a comment and tells us about it.