Logically, our clients want the Hebrew website to have a Hebrew Dashboard. However, out of the box, WordPress Multisite defaults to English, and needs a bit of tweaking to localize the Dashboard into the language of your choice.

(Friendly warning: if you don’t change the Hebrew Dashboard into Hebrew, the post/page Editor is really problematic and usually messes up alignment and styling on the site.)

So here’s how to localize a site within WordPress Multisite into Hebrew, but you can apply the same general rules for any language.

1.

Download Hebrew WordPress from the Hebrew WordPress website and copy the language folder or use this zip file of the language folder (from WordPress version 3.2.1).  Upload the language folder into you’re site’s wp-content folder. 

2. Add the following to wp-config.php: define (‘WPLANG’, ‘he_IL’);

3. Go into your Network Admin Area by clicking in the top right corner on Howdy, YourName and click on Network Admin

4. In the left Navigation menu, click on Sites > All Sites

5. On the Hebrew site, click Edit

6. Once you’re in the Edit Site area, click on Settings

7. Once you’re in the Settings tab, search for the line “WPLANG” and fill in the language reference code such as he_IL.

Or, as Andrea pointed out, you can go into the Hebrew site’s General Settings and switch the language from there.

That’s it!

This post was originally published at How to localize a Hebrew website’s Dashboard with WordPress Multisite on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

1. Use the built-in WordPress Bulk Edit feature.

This feature was introduced back in version 2.7 but only now did I fall in love with it!  It allows you to batch edit lots of information for multiple posts at one time: change categories, modify the author, change the post status, and most importantly (for me, right now), open or close comments.

To use it, go to:

• Posts > All Posts
• Select the posts you want to edit by checking off the checkboxes next to the post title.
• Click on the Bulk Actions dropdown menu. 
• Select Edit and click Apply. It’s a bit scary to have to click on Apply before you’ve made changes but once you build up the courage, it’s worth it! No changes will happen yet.
• In the Comments dropdown, select Allow.
• If you want to edit more than the default 20 posts per page in the admin screen, you can go to Screen Options in the top right corner and change the number of Posts Displayed per page.
• Done! However, I had to check a few posts to make sure that it actually worked. I think that there is something buggy in the feature because it only worked some of the time. Maybe there is a max of how many posts can be bulk edited at once.

This method is good if you don’t want to get into the database. My only complaint is that it’s a bit time consuming and there’s no way of seeing a list of all the posts that have comments open or closed.

2. Do some SQL work in the Database

The other option for allowing comments globally in WordPress is to get into the PHPMyAdmin (ugh) and run a script to open all comments.  Although it can be scary to get into the database and run SQL queries, it is the most accurate way of making sure the comments are open on all your posts.

Here’s the SQL query to run to open all comments:

UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = 'open';

As you can see, each method has its pros and cons. Making this change within the dashboard is not as daunting but you don’t feel like you have as much control over the process. Also, it seems not to work 100% of the time, for some reason. And going into the database is, well, daunting. But otherwise, at least you know that it does what it’s supposed to do. It’s very possible that the dashboard direction is one we’d explain to a client but that if this is something we’re working on, we’ll prefer to go the database route.

This post was originally published at How to Re-enable and Allow Comments in Older Posts in WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

1. Install, activate and configure the TinyMCE Advanced plugin. This plugin allows you to add useful buttons to the WYSIWYG through a drag and drop settings page.

2. In the settings (Settings >TinyMCE Advanced), drag the “Insert Movie” button into the WYSIWYG:

3. Save changes.

4. Upload the video file of your choice to your WordPress site through Media > Add New.

5. Copy the URL of that video:

6. Open up the editor of the post/page where you’d like to embed the video (if you aren’t there already).

7. Click on the button which says “Insert/edit embedded media” when you hover over it:

5. Under “Type,” choose “Windows Media.”

6. Paste the URL in File/URL field.

7. Click “Insert.”

8. Save Draft or Publish.

9. Verify that it worked in the front end.

Note that the user’s browser has to have the Windows Media Player plug-in, and it needs to run to play the video in a player.

This post was originally published at How to embed a .wmv file in WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

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.

Here’s what I did:

1. First, I set up the author image using the Author Image plugin to give our client an easy way to manage thumbnails of each author from the user’s profile settings.
2. Then I started looking for a way to link the author’s image to their archive. When I couldn’t find an easy answer in the WordPress template tags, I remembered that WPGarage has that feature in the footer area of each post! So I checked out the code of WPGlide theme (the theme we use on this site by Solostream), found the code I needed and modified it.Here’s the code I used:

<a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>/author/<?php the_author_meta(‘user_login’); ?>/”> <?php the_author_image(); ?> </a>

This post was originally published at How to link author image to their previous posts in WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

I’ve always wanted to share drafts of posts with people before I publish them but didn’t want to bother them with “can you log in, look at the post and let me know if there are any changes.” Now I just send a private URL and they can look over the draft without logging in! You can also set the expiration date of the draft URL so you have control over how long the link is available for.

There is one annoying thing about this plugin though: if you are logged in, then the draft is blank and you can’t read it.

I totally think the sharing drafts via URL functionality should be integrated into the next version of WordPress.

Here’s the plugin I used, aptly called… Share a Draft.

This post was originally published at How to share a draft with a private URL in WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Here’s what I did:

1. Install and activate the Members Plugin
2. Go to Settings > Members Components and activate the Edit Roles component
   
3. Go to Users > Roles. Click on Editor. In the options panel, check off create_users, edit_users, and delete_users.
   
4. Add this code into your funcitons.php file.
5. Test it out.
6. That’s it.

This post was originally published at Allow Editor access level to add users in WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

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.

Here’s what we worked on: A custom menu with unique icons for Twitter, YouTube and Facebook:

After searching the web for how to add images to the WordPress custom menu, we tried the Custom Menu Images plugin with no success. We even tried some crazy workarounds like trying to put the image path inside the navigation label! WTW?! Crazy, but true. And it didn’t even work in the end. It printed out the character tag &lt; reading the HTML instead of rendering it.

And then, we saw the light! In the form of the Screen Options pull down tab right there in the Custom Menu screen in front of our faces! Well, actually the light came from this post that told us where to look. How did we ever miss it? It was so obvious! Once you know where to look, that is. So here’s what to do:

1. Go into your Custom Menu (functionality added in WordPress 3.0) under Appearance > Menus
2. Click on Screen Options in the top right corner of your screen
3. Check the checkbox next to CSS Styles in the Show Advanced Menu Properties
4. Create your menu
5. In your menu item, in the CSS Classes field, enter the name of the CSS style you want to associate with that menu item. Just the name of the class without the period. Ex. “twitterstyle”
6. Go into your CSS file and add the style and add images and/or styles as you see fit.

That’s it. More coolness that Screen Options can do, Show more pages in your WordPress Dashboard.

This post was originally published at How to add images and styles to the WordPress custom menu on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

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.