WordPress site owners have an option under Settings > Privacy to keep their site open to visitors, but block search engines. Very handy when developing a site, or managing a private site that you don’t want the world to see, but you don’t want to have to deal with logins either.

We often use that setting on sites under development…and more than once forgot to open the site to search engines once the site was launched. Ouch.

Around WordPress 3.1, a handy feature was added where a line of text was added in the admin next to the name of the site saying “Search Engines Blocked” when search engines were, you guessed it, blocked. Like this:

For some reason, in WordPress 3.2 that notification line has disappeared. Here’s that same site, search engines still blocked, but upgraded to 3.2:

That notification was a life saver. Does anyone know where it went? And why it was taken away? I miss it and want it back. Sniff.

This post was originally published at What happened to the “search engines blocked” notification in WordPress 3.2? on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

I know that child themes and frameworks are all the rage. Especially since the release of TwentyTen. It’s hard to find even one negative post about child themes on the web. I do understand that there are advantages to working with child themes, and they are very tempting. But. Not tempting enough. I purchased the Genesis framework from StudioPress a while ago but when it came to adding simple functionality, I felt like I had to go through a whole maze of hooks and filters. And that’s just for Genesis! What if I decide to switch to Thesis, Headway, or one of the other frameworks. And as for TwentyTen, what if I want to change around the whole layout? Is it still worth it to use a child theme? I can see the benefit of using child themes or frameworks for minor style and color changes. Am I still saving time? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of child themes or frameworks as I see them.

Advantages (let’s start with the good news)

• Stays up to date to get new WordPress functionality. You just have to make sure it doesn’t break any of the functionality you have in place.
• Options Panels. Maybe (notice how this also appears in the disadvantages) Options Panels are great for people who don’t want to get their hands messy with code.
• Saves time on development. Maybe. Depends what you’re trying to do, but if you end up creating tons of custom files for your child theme, or spend time trying to learn all the ins and outs of the framework, or have to fix things that broke with the new version of WordPress, the time saved could come to a big zero.

Not very convincing advantages, are they?

Disadvantages

• Learning Curve / Development time. How do I add another widget or a query_post()? Good luck trying to figure out whether it’s in the child theme or the parent theme. Learning a new child/parent theme or framework can be a total time suck. Have I mentioned that already?
• Lots of unnecessary stuff and options panel. I miss the days when a theme was just a theme. It helped you out with the styling but left you in control of functionality. Can we go back to basic?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go figure out how to remove all the features that the client didn’t order. Sigh.

What do you think?

Am I alone in these feelings? What have your experiences been with child themes and frameworks? What was the good and bad? Which ones have you worked with? Maybe you’ll convince me to give it another try.

This post was originally published at Why I don’t like WordPress child themes and frameworks. Don’t be angry. on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

I am totally in love with the Screen Options pull down tab in WordPress. I know it’s been there for a few versions, but I never fully appreciated it until I started using the Show on Screen feature that lets you fill in how many pages you want to show in your list of Pages. Some of our clients sites have hundreds of pages and posts, and this gives them the option to see all their posts or pages at once and not have to click next next next.

To use it, go into the Pages or the Posts Tab in your Dashboard, click on Screen Options in the top right corner of the screen, and set the number in Show on Screen to something high, like 200. This functionality really adds to the elegance and amazing usability of WordPress.

Depending on which plugins you have installed, you’ll have different options in your Screen Options Panel. For example, we have Yoast’s SEO Plugin installed, so we can check or uncheck the checkboxes to show the plugin-related options in our Post/Page editing areas.

Here is a screenshot of how the Screen Options panel looks in WordPress.

This post was originally published at QuickTip: Show More Pages in your WordPress Dashboard on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Generally, the only thing a new Gregorian year (there are other calendars out there too, you know) means to me is that I must remember to write 2010 on checks. But since I’ve been reading so many New Year’s posts on other blogs, it got me thinking about what I have to say as we welcome writing 2010 on checks. And here it is:

Thank you Automattic and the WordPress community.

While eating breakfast this morning, I started thinking about how much of our business’ activities revolve around WordPress – developing sites and blogs on WordPress, hosting WordPress sites, providing WordPress support and consultation, and more. And then I started thinking about how many people there are out there who also make a living from WordPress services. There must be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of WordPress service providers around the world.

In addition, there are thousands of others who, thanks to the relative simplicity of WordPress and the freemium hosted service at WordPress.com, have managed to set up their own dynamic web presence to help them grow their businesses or organizations.

In Judaism, our tradition teaches us that the most ideal way of giving charity is to give someone else the ability to generate their own income (similar to the saying about teaching a man to fish rather than giving him fish). Automattic has not only created their own business, but has helped others create their own streams of income. I think this is particularly significant for those in the developing world: with WordPress they can provide their services to clients all over the world, without the need for expensive software and supplies, thus increasing their ability to generate income for themselves and their families.

Automattic obviously plays a big role in the success of WordPress, but without the community I don’t think WordPress would be where it is today. Automattic’s approach to the community is of course what made it so robust, thanks to the fact that the software is Open Source, and thanks to the implementation of an API system that allows others to add on features through the development of plugins. It’s also due to the environment that Automattic created, whereby the community is encouraged to support and be active in the development of WordPress.

The WordPress community certainly took up the torch, and has helped WordPress spread like wildfire. Three years ago, when I was researching the available Open Source platforms for creating dynamic websites, one of the reasons I settled on WP was because of the amazingly useful community generated information I found. And that’s why I started this very blog: to give back to the community in my own small way.

So thank you WordPress community.

Thank you Automattic.

Thank you for WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, WordCamp, the Codex, and BuddyPress.

Thank you for creating such an awesome piece of software, and for continuing to innovate and listen to the community.

Happy New Year!

This post was originally published at My 2010 New Year resolution: to say thank you to WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Fancy words aside, a canonical URL is Google’s way of identifying a “preferred” URL for your posts to avoid duplicate content. Duplicate content is generally defined as “separate web pages with substantially the same content, which may attract a penalty from search engines.”

WordPress is often criticized for having duplicate content since new posts appear on many pages including category pages, archive pages, feeds, and trackbacks.  While this helps visitors find the content they are looking for, it confuses search engines, forcing them to “choose” which URL to serve in search results.

And so… Google (Yahoo and Microsoft too)  recently came out with a new link tag to help with the duplicate content issue which can be added to the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

But honestly, who can be bothered to go into the <head> for every post. Luckily, there are 2 WordPress plugins that are here to help:

Yoast adds rel=”canonical” links to your blogs <head> section

SEO No duplicate – This simple plugin helps you easily tell the search engine bots the preferred version of a page by specifying the canonical properly within your head tag.

For more information, read the official announcement from Google.

This post was originally published at Canonical URLs to help WordPress duplicate content issue on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

I just received an email from Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, letting me know that the “Plugin search no longer sucks”.  I was so excited that I didn’t even notice the typo he later reported on Twitter.

According to the official WordPress site, WordPress Plugins directory search is no longer a big mess, and can actually help you find the plugin you’re looking for. Last week I think I did a search for “video” and got results like contact form, social bookmarking, etc. and had to resort to a Google search. But now the search brings up much better results and is a great resource.

WordPress improved the search using Sphinx (a “free open-source SQL full-text search engine”) to power the search from the plugins directory and from your blog’s admin area (Plugins>add new)

All I can say, is, give it another chance and you may just find a great plugin from the 4,245 available.

This post was originally published at WordPress Plugins Directory Search no longer “sucks” on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

As you may have seen, Rebecca already wrote up a great review of Sunday’s 2nd WordCamp Israel event. I was privileged to present two short presentations at the event, which I have finally uploaded for all to see. Note that the images and titles of plugins or sites are all links, and you can click on them to get to the actual sites in question.

Setting up a blog with good foundations for the future on WordPress.com or Blogli

Many people prefer to start their blogging career on free sites like WordPress.com, or the Israeli version called Blogli. These sites take away the headache involved in installing the software and managing technical issues. They also allow for a soft start with little financial investment.

However, if you are serious about blogging, then you will want to see your blog grow. As it grows, you may find that it outgrows the limitations of WordPress.com, where you can’t upload plugins or completely customize the appearance of your blog. So while using WordPress.com for your blog is a great choice, you should make sure to implement a few things to ensure that if you do decide to move to a self-hosted blog in the future, it’s not too painful. The most important thing, in my opinion, is to use your own domain name from the start on WordPress.com by upgrading your account. It costs about $10 a month, and is worth it.

Automating your blogging and social media activity

A site or blog is no longer enough if you want to create a web presence that really works for you. It is important to integrate social media into your online strategy so that people can find you off your site as well. But we all know that managing a blog takes tons of time; how in the world do we find time to also manage social media profiles?

This presentation shows you plugins and online apps that will help you automate many of your social media/blogging activities to save you time, and make sure you can still have a bit of life offline too.

And finally, here are links to some other people who wrote about WordCamp Israel 2008 both before and after the event:

WordCamp Israel Has 560 Registrants

Photos and Links from Wordcamp Israel 2008

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WordCamp – Raanan Bar-Cohen – Tips for “virtual” company

WordCamp Israel

This post was originally published at WordCamp Israel 2008 part 2: my presentations on WordPress.com and Social Media on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Being that Wordcamp Israel was a bloggers conference in Tel Aviv, I’m sure there will be tons of people writing up their reviews in Hebrew. But maybe not quite as many in English, so here goes. This year’s Wordcamp was in the ZOA house in the middle of Tel Aviv, a schlep for Jerusalemites, but a great location for everybody else.

The Shmoozing

And they’re off, let the shmoozing begin. Instead of sitting in a corner, hoping someone would come talk to me, I started standing and sitting strategically next to people who looked friendly. The first guy I met was Eyal Sela, who plans to write about productivity on his brand new WordPress blog, still in its Kubrick diapers. Throughout the rest of the day, I met Itzik Edri of Wikimedia(trying to get more people to use Wikipedia), Eyal Gura, CEO of PicApp (a legal image solution for bloggers), Eyal Beit-On, of Suntrader (online marketing consultant), and Amir Uval(new Hebrew blogger at Geek in the Kitchen). Are you keeping track? So far, that’s 3 Eyals. I also got to hang out with the founders of Nuconomy, Eran Kampf and Yossi Taguri. Toward the end, I sat with Ezra Butler, (of Twitter fame), Charlie Kalech,  Debby Benstein, Eyal Gonen, Idan Gazit(new Twitter friend), and Ido Shacham. If you’re counting, out of 13 people that I met, 4 happened to be named Eyal.

The Organizers

The conference officially started with co-organizers Tal Galili (who cut his hair) and Noa Danzig(who may or may not have cut her hair) welcoming everyone and telling us that they planned the conference in less than 2 months, and worked extra hard to include non-profits by creating an additional track of sessions.

The Sessions

I didn’t get a chance to go to every session, so I would love if people added their comments about the sessions they went to. You can see the full schedule here.

Session: Blogs built on WordPress.com / Miriam Schwab

From what I heard, Miriam gave a great presentation on the features and limitations of WordPress.com, and its viability only in the short term. Presentation slides will be posted here shortly.

Session: 70 unusual uses for WordPress / Sarit Amar and Tomer Lichtish

While it was hard to decide which sessions to go to, I ventured for the “70 unusual uses for WordPress”. But, according to my desktop scientific calculator, only 4 were mentioned:

1. Contact Manager – Using a special template, you can enter each name as the link the a post which contains someone’s contact details.  You can also find people through the tag cloud.
2. e-Commerce/store
3. Portfolio – using thumbnails as links to each piece in the portfolio.
4. Lifestreaming – updates from Twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, etc. to represent your “online” life. A way to bring the focus back to the blog.

This session was a little basic for me and could have used specific links to themes and plugins that help you create these special WordPress sites. I’m hoping there’s a link online to the other 66 interesting uses.

Session: Blogging with Video / Ron Yekuteal, Kaltura

Kaltura is the first open source video platform, and they have a plugin for WordPress. Ron said that Kaltura is free, flexible, and most importantly, open source. This plugin supposedly offers a lot of functionality and I’m looking forward to trying it out.

Session: Social Media Marketing / Miriam Schwab

Since I couldn’t clone myself and be at Miriam’s talk, even though I wanted to, I listened to other people’s reviews. People said Miriam encouraged quality content on your blog, your home base, and to be a part of the conversation on social media sites by contributing and helping others, since that’s where your audience is. She also listed WordPress plugins that can boost your ‘social proof’ on your website by displaying your activity around the web. Presentation slides will be posted here shortly.

Session: Statistics / Zvika Jervy of Statistics Web Control and Yosi Taguri of Nuconomy.

Zvika spoke about the basics of Google Analytics to check number of visitors, referrers, time spent on the site, and top content, Technorati to check incoming links/authority, and Feedburner to check feed count.

Yosi spoke about Nuconomy’s plugin for WordPress which offers statistics beyond pages, such as clicks on video and Ajax. It also lets you see stats on commenters and compare lots of different data sets for a bigger picture of stats and user interaction with your site.

Session: Virtual Collaboration, Raanan Bar-Cohen, Automattic

Originally from Israel, Raanan now lives in California working for Automattic (the company who created WordPress), and playing Adam Sandler roles on the side (Miriam pointed this out, and I have to say, I agree, they do have a striking similarity). And, to my delight, Raanan delivered his presentation in English, a welcome treat for my Hebrew overloaded brain.  Raanan was a really great speaker and offered some tips on running a virtual company, since Automattic has 30 employees scattered around the globe in every possible time zone.

1. Empower your team – everyone should have ownerships of their projects, and set their own hours.
2. Go real time – yay for searchable, storable group chats and boo to email
3. Go semi real time – use internal blogs and  Prologue (group twitter)
4. Get together – coordinate conferences and meetups for real, in-person get togethers
5. Open Source – more opportunities to get help and gain insights from others
6. Metrics -  compare many different tracking services and data points
7. Go bite size – ticket tracking, break down a project into small pieces

He also gave a sneak peek into Prologue Groups, WordPress’s project tracker, plus Twitter-like chat, which launchesin 2 weeks at Wordcamp Australia. And finally, he gave a heads up that BuddyPress, WordPress’s Social Networking Platform will be available in December.

Session: Panel with Knesset Member Miki Eitan with host Jonathon Klinger

Set up like a late night talk show, Jonathon Klinger played host to Likud MK Miki Eitan and 3 other guys. I apologize, but I didn’t see their names in the program or online. Please feel free to comment with their names and organizations. [Update: Other panelists were Yoav Lerman from a blog about the renewal of Tel Aviv, Zvika Bashur from CityDov blog, and Yochai Ilam from Black Labor blog.]

MK Eitan was invited to be on the panel because he started a blog built on WordPress. When asked why he chose WordPress, he said, “it was the  cheapest option”. Other memorable quotes (probably not exact) included “You don’t need to be a Likudnik to believe in Miki Eitan”, a subtle plug, and “As you can see by my ability to choose a low-cost solution for my blogging, I also know how to create a balanced budget for the country”. As the wise Miriam pointed out, Miki is trying to take Obama’s strategy by creating a trendy site and a new slogan that translates roughly to: “To prove that things can be different”. What Mr. Eitan didn’t cover exactly was what those changes would be and how he would implement them. Sheesh, people, who can be bothered with details?!

When asked if Mr. Eitan writes his own posts, he said yes! Can you believe it?! Haha, Just kidding. He’s a politician who doesn’t see the ROI in blogging himself and therefore asked his assistant, hiding in the corner, how much time he invests in the blog. The assistant responded by saying 1 hour a day.

I’m sorry, but a Likud MK showing up at a bloggers convention reminds me of a similar situation (((Twilight Zone music here))) when Bibi Netanyahu showed up at the JBloggers Convention.  Why does every blogger convention end with a  rally for Likud? Am I missing something here? Have we finally caught on to their sly little plan?

Session: Introduction to WordPress Plugins / Ziv Perry

This session was very high level, and I think should have been publicized as such. Ziv showed how to create a basic WordPress plugin, but If you don’t already have a solid grasp of PHP or the guts of WordPress, then this session was probably way over your head.

Session: Home, sweet Jerusalem

Sorry to say, I didn’t make it to the very last sessions, but Kol Hakavod to the organizers, and to meeting and seeing lots of fellow WordPress junkies, er.. people. My recommendation for next year’s Wordcamp would be to have 2 tracks, one for beginners and one for advanced WordPress users.

And last, but not least, I got a hilarious sticker that says “Lo Nachon” (Not true), and the purpose being that if you ever see a bumper sticker you disagree with, you can discredit it by placing your “not true” sticker next to it. Oh, people, you are so witty, how did you know that is exactly my type of humor?!

This post was originally published at Review of Wordcamp Israel 2008 on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

We all use Feedburner to track our RSS subscribers. It’s not just to feed that egotistical need to know how many people are hanging onto our every word, but the number of RSS feed subscribers you have is an important metric for indicating the success (or failure) of your blog. It seems that the number of subscribers has a connection with the number of visitors to a site since I’ve found that the number of people visiting a site seems to rise in relation to the number of feed subscribers, but this metric also indicates the stickiness of your content.

But recently Feedburner has not been behaving. We have one client whose feed consistently showed a page that said something like “Kraaak bork, your Feedburner feed is not working,” a stressful site to say the least for a guy who wants to make sure his feed subscribers are getting his content. Many people have been complaining about problems with Feedburner in the last while: ReadWriteWeb reported that Feedburner was slow on pinging feeds, and over here at WordPress Garage I had the pleasure of watching our readers plunge from 1030 to 380. The next day the number went back up, and I can’t imagine it’s because 700 of you unsubscribed and then regretted your decision and resubscribed.

(And may I just take this opportunity to thank all our subscribers for sticking with us. We love you. You rock.)

Anyways, this situation is yet another example of the scariness of a) The Google monopoly (Google bought Feedburner) and b) The problem with allowing services to “own” your content. This is similar to the problem with hosting your blog on WordPress.com, which I’ve discussed here in the past. In the case of Feedburner, your are at their mercy if they have trouble with the service, or if for some reason they decide to cancel your account, in which case  you lose all your preciously collected subscribers.

So…the question is: is there an alternative to Feedburner? After doing a bit of searching, I found the following alternative ways for measuring feed subscribers:

1. Check how many people are subscribed to your blog on feed reader services that offer these types of stats, like Bloglines and Google Reader. See this post for instructions on how to see the number of subscribers on each service. This solutions would allow you to see general trends, like if the number of subscribers is going up or down, and you could even calculate percentage growth or decline. However, you would not get a good indication of the total number of subscribers on all feed readers.
2. (The following methods were all described on this post on the Free Marketing Zone.) Access logs: Use server logs to track how many times your feed page was accessed. This apparently does not give accurate results.
3. Images: Put a 1px by 1px image in your feed, which will be accessed every time your feed is opened in a reader. However, this only tells you how many people are reading your RSS, not how many are subscribed.
4. RSS Buttons: track the number of clicks of your image button that leads to an RSS feed. This is also not accurate since some people may just click and then not subscribe, and many people subscribe to an RSS feed without clicking on a button on your site; they use the RSS access in their browsers address bar, or simply enter your site’s URL in their feed reader, and the reader detects the URL automatically.
5. Tracking URL: Create a unique URL for every click to access the feed, so that whenever a person clicks the button, a unique URL is assigned, like the following: http://domain.com/feed.xml?uniqueurl_countvisitors. But I don’t know about that option – it sounds a bit much to create so many new URLs for a site.

As you can see, these options are ok, but not great. So if anyone knows of another service that provides feed subscription stat services, please let us know. And if there isn’t another option, please can someone create one? It would do all of us a great service.

This post was originally published at Is there an alternative to Feedburner? on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

ThemeForest is a brand new online marketplace where you can buy and sell WordPress, CSS, Joomla, Drupal and many other types of templates. I’m aware that I get overly excited about new theme/template sites, so I’ll try to tone down my excitement by putting my impressions into list format. Here are some reasons why you should check out ThemeForest.

1. The site stays true to the forest motif with a very nice color scheme, but thankfully a bear-free environment.
2. As I poked around, I found the navigation of the site brilliant – I love the tree chart that breaks down the site by template type (Joomla, WordPress, CSS, etc.) and category. The breadcrumbs were also a nice touch and made it easy to find my way around.
   
3. I enjoyed the pretty thumbnails next to each template and had to hold back from opening up each template to take a closer look. I know how arduous the process is of making screenshots and then cropping it, resizing it, etc. so you can tell they’re putting a lot of work and detail into the site.
4. All templates start at $10 and most templates I liked were between $10-40, an amazing deal for unique and creative templates that I’ve never seen before.
   
5. Referral Program – If you refer a new person to ThemeForest and they buy a template, you get 50% of their purchase. Nice! Here’s an example of a badge you can put on your site
   
6. WPCandy’s Sweet Contest – WPCandy is giving away 5 sets of $25 to spend at ThemeForest. Check out WPCandy’s post here
7. To beef up their stock, ThemeForest is hosting a contest with prizes of $600 to template authors who submit the most templates by the end of September.

This post was originally published at 7 Reasons to Check out ThemeForest on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.