Sometimes I’m dense. I didn’t notice that Wordpress had stopped incorporating the automatic database backup feature as of the latest couple of versions because I have my backup emails filtered to go into their own folder where they don’t clutter my inbox.
It wasn’t until a site had trouble and the host re-installed a day-old backup [...]

Sometimes I’m dense. I didn’t notice that Wordpress had stopped incorporating the automatic database backup feature as of the latest couple of versions because I have my backup emails filtered to go into their own folder where they don’t clutter my inbox.

It wasn’t until a site had trouble and the host re-installed a day-old backup (losing a number of visitor comments and even one post) that I realized I didn’t have backups coming on that site. Because I’d upgraded to a version that no longer has Backup built in.

Check your WP installs and add the backup plugin if you need it. If your database is huge and you have trouble getting it through email, tell it not to save your spam filter or stats tables from plugins - they tend to store hoardes of data, and that is stuff you can live without in the event of a crash.

On my only multi-author blog, I just have an "Authors" page with a paragraph about everybody. But Developed Traffic has the way to create actual author pages and link to them from the sidebar. Very cool solution.

On my only multi-author blog, I just have an "Authors" page with a paragraph about everybody. But Developed Traffic has the way to create actual author pages and link to them from the sidebar. Very cool solution.

Found another very helpful plugin for Wordpress. It gives you a collapsible category list, so that at first you only see the top categories. Click one of those, and it shows you the subcategories beneath it.
This is ideal for sites with a handful of top categories and lots of subcategories. If you have a lot [...]

Found another very helpful plugin for Wordpress. It gives you a collapsible category list, so that at first you only see the top categories. Click one of those, and it shows you the subcategories beneath it.

This is ideal for sites with a handful of top categories and lots of subcategories. If you have a lot of top categories it won’t make much difference in the appearance of your sidebar.

You can also use this to give the appearance of separate blogs. You could give each writer on a community blog a top category, then they set up their desired subcategories under it.

The same effect can be achieved with CSS, but this plugin is much simpler.

There’s more than one comment out there to let your commenters edit the comments they’ve posted. I originally tried the one by Jalenack that featured an Ajax countdown. It mysteriously stopped working at some point during my upgrade from 1.x to 2.x of WordPress.
Fortunately, Ronald Huereca came up with an Ajax comment editing plugin that [...]

There’s more than one comment out there to let your commenters edit the comments they’ve posted. I originally tried the one by Jalenack that featured an Ajax countdown. It mysteriously stopped working at some point during my upgrade from 1.x to 2.x of WordPress.

Fortunately, Ronald Huereca came up with an Ajax comment editing plugin that is awesome. Every comment has an "Edit" and "Delete" links at the bottom, accessible to the author of the comment  for 90 minutes (you can set the time limit - I don’t want people changing their comments hours after others have replied, so I figure 90 minutes is long enough). The site admin can always see those two links, plus a third that says "Spam". You can set the level of permissions people need to be able to see those links longer than 90 minutes, if you have moderators or a community blog.

Without ever loading another page, you can click on the body of the comment and it forms a window where you can edit. Or you can delete it or label it spam. All fro right there, where you were sitting when you saw the comment gone awry.

3This is a post collecting some plugins and solutions I’ve found for Wordpress. I’ll keep adding links as I find new things. Most of these are from posts in the WordPress261 category, but these are direct links to the hack/plugin itself, not to my posts about them (unless that’s the source of the hack), so [...]

3This is a post collecting some plugins and solutions I’ve found for Wordpress. I’ll keep adding links as I find new things. Most of these are from posts in the WordPress261 category, but these are direct links to the hack/plugin itself, not to my posts about them (unless that’s the source of the hack), so it should be more handy.

Wordpress errors:

1. WordPress 406 errors “Not acceptable…”262
2. WordPress “You don’t have permission to do that” error263

Plugins/Widgets:

For functionality…

1. Add To Any264 - very low clutter plugin/widget for people to bookmark your posts and subscribe to RSS.
2. Another low-clutter widget solution to bookmarks and subscriptions: RSS Subscriber265
3. A dropdown category widget266 that works better than most
4. Preview Theme267 lets you view your new theme without visitors seeing it
5. A plugin that very easily lets you create a horizontal drop down menu in the header of your WordPress template268. Amazing out of the box, also very customizable.

For SEO…

1. Permalink Redirect269 makes it so all your URL’s have a trailing slash, which is good for SEO
2. Rewrite Titles270 - Puts your blog’s name at the end of the article title instead of the other way around.
3. Dagon’s Sitemap plugin271
4. The FeedBurner plugin272 that lets you track all your RSS subscriptions in one place

Solutions:

1. Trim the bloat in your Wordpress theme files with Clutter Free273
2. Developed Traffic’s solution for better archives274. My post275 goes into a bit more detail, especially on using the Custom Query String plugin276
3. Fernando Graphics explains how to make text-resizing available to your visitors using javascript277
4. My Tips to SEO your WordPress blog278
5. WP-Cache279 and Spam Karma 2280 not playing well together? Here’s the fix281
6. A custom WordPress theme282 generator that’s pretty decent from an SEO standpoint
7. Young Go Getter has a great step by step tutorial for using the Preview Theme283 to tweak your theme without your visitors seeing the results until you’re done284
8. The new replacement tag for the Category dropdown function that got deprecated285 a few versions ago
9. How to make Wordpress author pages

If you were using the old category dropdown template tags when Wordpress suddenly deprecated them just to make your life slightly crappier, I have good news and bad news.
The good news is, there’s a new replacement tag.
The bad news is, I can only get the version with a submit button to work. The other one, [...]

If you were using the old category dropdown template tags when Wordpress suddenly deprecated them just to make your life slightly crappier, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is, there’s a new replacement tag.

The bad news is, I can only get the version with a submit button to work. The other one, I select a new category and it just sits there blinking stupidly at me.

Still, the submit button is a nice feature because that way people aren’t locked in to the wait for a pageload if they accidentally select the wrong category.