Daily Tip: How to Force WordPress to Empty the Trash

When working with WordPress there may be times when you want to force it to empty the trash. This is handy if you’ve deleted a post or page in the past but want to use the same slug for a new version of that page. That slug won’t become available until you empty the trash. Previously we posted a tutorial about how to set your site to automatically empty the trash every few days. If you want to force it to empty immediately, go to: Dashboard >> Posts and you’ll see “Trash” at the top:

Then, select everything in the trash and click delete permanently.

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WordPress Theme Releases and Updates: December 2010

W3c6

Atmosphere 2010

Fudo

Red Christmas

Shaan

Tweaker 2

Simply Works Core

Valentine

FreeDream2010

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Weekly WordPress Plugin Directory Releases and Updates 01/06/2011

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Featured WordPress Plugin: CustomPress

This year saw a plethora of CMS plugins leaping onto the scene, plugins that take advantage of WordPress 3.0’s great features. My favorite of these has got to be our own WPMU DEV’s CustomPress which was released late this year. CustomPress really is the best plugin to transform your WordPress website into a fully fledged CMS. It uses WordPress’ custom post types and taxonomies and gives you all of the flexibility that you’d expect from a WordPress Premium Plugin.

Features

• Easily Create Custom Post Types
• Choose which features are supported by each of your Custom Post Types
• Create and assign custom taxonomies
• Customize all of your labels
• Use custom menu icons
• Use text boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, multi-line text boxes, dropdown boxes, or multiselection boxes for your custom post types
• Use the auto generated taxonomy and custom field embed code to place it inside your WordPress loop to display them within your theme
• Easily create a theme file for your custom post types

Our Mini Review

If you’re looking for a truly useful CMS plugin for WordPress then you can do no better than CustomPress. There are quite a few plugins out there that let you create custom post types but none offer the additional flexibility of CustomPress. These features are essential if you’re a business using WordPress as a CMS to its full potential.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

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WordPress Showcase: 20 High Profile Sites Running on WordPress

Lately a lot of high profile names have been building their sites with WordPress. No wonder, with the flexibility and popularity of this wonderful platform. Truly, this is a community on rise, and the list that follows comprises only a few big fish that have found that WordPress works. For anyone who has a WordPress site or wonders if you should have one, we hope these samples inspire.

Martha Stewart

Margaret Cho

The Lance Armstrong Foundation

Giada De Laurentiis

Kobe Bryant

New York Times Blogs

Sigur Ros

Jay-Z

Harvard Gazette

Pepsi Refresh Project

TechCrunch

Miley Cyrus

Mashable

Russel Brand

Terrell Owens

John Grisham

Sylvester Stallone

Ryan Seacrest

CNN Politics

The Mozilla Blog

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Daily Tip: Enable AJAX Search For WordPress

Here’s a little thing that you can do to make the default WordPress search functionality a bit more smooth and enjoyable to use. Add the ThreeWP Ajax Search plugin.

It should work automatically with the Twentyten theme and its derivatives. It can also be tweaked for your theme and customized using the built-in options, CSS and jQuery. The options page has a wide array of display settings that can be changed through the dashboard, such as cursor navigation, CSS Selectors, Search Box Display, header and footer text, JavaScript callbacks, and many more.

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Featured WordPress Plugin: WordPress SEO by Yoast

2010 saw a fantastic addition to the word of WordPress SEO. Joost de Valk – i.e. Yoast – launched his WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin into the world. When I started using WordPress one of the first walkthroughs that I came across was Yoast’s SEO walkthrough and it became a touchstone for any WordPress installation. Now you can find pretty much all of the SEO basics that you need using this plugin.

Features

• Change post title and meta description meta box on a per post basis.
• Support for taxonomy (tag, category & custom taxonomy) title and meta description
• Google search result snippet previews
• Focus keyword testing
• Meta Robots configuration
• Improved canonical support
• Configure RSS footer / header
• Permalink clean ups, while still allowing for things like Google Custom Search.
• Breadcrumbs support, with configurable titles.
• XML Sitemaps
• XML News Sitemaps.
• .htaccess and robots.txt editor.
• Basic import functionality for HeadSpace2 and All in One SEO.

Our Mini Review

For a long time WordPress SEO involved installing one plugin and configuring it, then installing another and configuring it, then another one, and another one. It was a pretty long and boring process. WordPress SEO by Yoast lets you install one plugin, configure and off you go. It’s incredibly useful and it was brilliant to see it launched late in 2010. I can see it become the top SEO Plugin of 2011.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

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Send WordPress Posts and Pages to Your Amazon Kindle for Free

Want to make your WordPress site content available to users who are reading from a Kindle or other mobile devices running a Kindle app?

The new Kindle This Widget is a sidebar widget that displays a button for sending a blog page to a user’s Kindle using the free.kindle.com automatic conversion. There are a number of widgets that allow you to display what you’re reading with Kindle, but this one actually allows you to send content in the other direction.

The widget uses only the free.kindle.com service so the document will appear on the Kindle device as soon as the user makes a wifi connection. The conversion results will be a Kindle document so please note that links, images, embeds, javascript, etc may not appear.

Send your blog to new places…

The Kindle Wireless Reading Device is Amazon’s #1 bestselling item for two years running. It is the most-wished-for, most-gifted, and has the most 5-star reviews of any product on Amazon. The Kindle can often go to places where users may not bring their laptops. This plugin facilitates a “read later” strategy for sending longer articles to devices for reading at a more convenient time.

If you want to test the Kindle This Widget, make sure that you’ve edited your Kindle approved e-mail list. Your Kindle (or mobile device) can only receive e-mailed attachments from e-mail addresses authorized on the “Manage Your Kindle” page within your account.

This widget may not be beneficial for every kind of blog. It is probably the most relevant if you post content that is fairly lengthy, such as a novel in progress, tutorials, a collection of recipes, an academic archive, etc. If your pages or posts tend to be in this category, then the Kindle This Widget will add another way for users to explore your content.

Coming soon for the Kindle This Widget…

Keith Graham, the developer of the plugin, is currently working on a version that will allow users to customize the posts and add headers and footers to the extract that is sent to the Kindle. He also plans to add a shortcode so users can do just one page as needed. Get in touch with Keith on his site if you want to send feedback or feature requests. We look forward to see how this plugin evolves to serve Kindle users within the WordPress community.

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Featured WordPress Theme: Quality Control

This week I’m going to feature my favorite Plugins and Themes of 2010. It’s been an exciting year for WordPress, with WordPress 3.0 being unleashed into the very excited WordPress community. There have been all sorts of Plugins and Themes that have flexed WordPress 3.0’s formidable muscles. Let’s start with my absolute favorite favorite favorite theme of this year: Quality Control.

Okay, so I’ve talked about Quality Control already, a few times….. but any list of articles about my favorite plugins and themes of the year has just got to include it. Quality Controls transforms your WordPress website into a ticketing system. Users can create tickets, assign statuses, milestones categories and tags. It’s a great application of WordPress 3.0’s powerful features.

Features

• Core functionality needed to set up a ticketing system
• Set statuses, tags and milestones
• Use as a framework to develop your own system

Our Mini Review

I told you a few months ago that I love this theme – and I still do! It stands at the start of some seriously exciting times for WordPress users, showing off WordPress 3.0 functionality to its full extent. And since its release there are still few themes that quite reach the standard of this one. The thing that makes it so good is that the developer had a problem and used WordPress to solve it both simply and elegantly. Best of all, he released it to the world. Thank you!

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

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Teaching WordPress the Absolute Beginners Pt 2: The Content

Once you’ve got your students all excited about WordPress, the next step is to talk to them about how to write great web content. This won’t be the easiest thing to do because once someone has started to grasp WordPress all they want to do is to try out different themes and plugins. It’s your job to get their head back into learnings.

Writing for the web is entirely different to writing for print. A study has demonstrated that when people read for on the web they will normally skim. We pick out keywords, jump on headings and tend to ignore much of the wordage on a web page.

This means that you need to stop writing in the way that you would for printed media. Believe me, this is particularly difficult when you’re teaching people who are writers, academics or who do anything wordy. Why, they want to know, can’t they use their perfectly crafted prose for the internet?

Answer: Because people won’t read it.

Actually, that’s a little hyperbolic – there are blogs and web pages that are erudite and verbose and that can get away with it. But they tend to have an established reputation and people will take the time to sit and read them. If you’re just starting out it’s a good idea to make it as easy as possible for people to read.

Tip: I do not mean that you should make your text patronizing. Anything but! But there are techniques that you can use to make your text more readable and to help you get your point across.

1.    Writing Content

Be Conversational

Writing for the web is much more informal than writing for traditional forms of media. If you’re writing a blog and want to keep it up for a sustained period of time it’s very hard to maintain a formal tone. People expect blogs to give their readers a sense of the writer’s personality. This is quite different to a newspaper, for example, where (outside of editorials) the tone is expected to be quite neutral.

Be yourself!

Keep it Simple

I love reading beautiful prose, and for me the most beautiful prose is always the most simple. This is great for writing for the web. Web content needs to be simple to enable people to follow along with it. Your web visitors will read your content fast and they won’t want to stumble over unnecessary adjectives and adverbs.

People don’t often like to be told to get rid of their adjectives but it will improve their web content (and their writing generally. Adjectives = BAD! Grrrrr).

Scrutinize your punctuation

There’s nothing that will make you look more unprofessional than incorrect punctuation. You should scrutinize every comma, dash, semi-colon, colon or any other punctuation that you are overly fond of.

Punctuation sets the rhythm of a piece of writing. As I already said, people read web content much faster than they do traditional print content. You want to help this rhythm by cutting down on unnecessary punctuation. The great thing about this is that when you do use a dash, semi-colon or colon, you can use it properly – for effect.

Be direct

It’s important that your writing is direct and to the point. You website visitors are not going to want to stick around trying to figure out what you mean. You may think that you sound really intelligent by being abstract or by writing things that you think sound clever, but you’re more likely to come off pretentious. This is particularly important for headings. As we’ll see below, headings are important for giving the reader an indication of what comes next. So say what you mean!

Tip: Another reason for getting to the point is for Search Engine Optimization. Headings that contain relevant keywords will be great for your SEO. Similes, metaphors, puns, or anything else intended to make you seem smart or funny will do nothing for optimizing your content.

2.    Formatting Content

Formatting can transform your web content. It’s remarkably easy and effective.

Imagine you are sat down at a screen and you have masses of text with nothing in it that stands out. All of the text is exactly the same throughout – nothing stands out. It’s difficult to extract what the writer thinks is important. What the reader will extract during their initial skim might have nothing to do with the main thrust of the argument.

As a writer of web content, you should direct the reader. You can do this incredibly simply by varying up your formatting. Do this effectively and your reader will get all of the important points on their first skim. If they like what they see they’ll go back and read the article more carefully.

Headings

Discrete sections of a web article should have headings. You can see that I’ve been using them throughout this article. This lets your reader know what’s happening in each section so they can decide if they want to read it.

Bold

Picking out key phrases in bold makes them stand out. A person skimming a piece of content will instantly pick out anything that you have in bold. This will tell them what the important points in the article are. It prevents them from creating the overall picture themselves and lets you keep control of it.

Block Quotes

Tip: Use Block quotes. They will help something that is particularly important stand out. I like to use block quotes for tips as it distinguishes them from the rest of the text.

See what I did there?

Shorter Paragraphs

Again, to aid the speed at which people read you should keep your paragraphs short. Short sentences are also good :). You should keep to one point per paragraph and get to that point pretty quickly. Don’t make your readers wade through loads of superfluous text before they get to the main point.

Link

Linking is an important part of writing for the internet. By linking to other articles and web pages you’re sending your reader on to read more about things that they’re interested in or to learn more about an issue. It will also enable them to look at your sources. The internet is all about surfing – don’t be the end point!  Send your visitors on somewhere else.

Break it up

A good way to help out your readers is to break up your text and images and videos. Using these different types of media helps with skimming the text. An image can tell you a lot about what is going on within the content. Also, people like to engage with ideas in different ways – adding images and video can help to engage readers who don’t want to read lots of text.

Are there any plugins to help out?

If you are worried about getting your content just right you could try out a plugin like Wordy for WordPress. Wordy.com provides online copy editing at a fee. It’s pretty handy as you can type your post in WordPress and have it sent straight to Word.com for copy editing. If you are looking for some copy editing assistance then it might be a good solution. Here’s a video on how it works:

3.    Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When I’m teaching a class about WordPress I don’t tend to go in to SEO. SEO can be pretty complex and if you’ve just got a group of people to upload their first image onto the web you will be met with quizzical expressions. It would be easy to spend a whole day looking just at SEO.

However, in case someone does ask about SEO, it’s always good to have a few points up your sleeve.

1. Decide whether you actually need to worry about SEO. If you are writing a personal blog or something that will be circulated easily within a specific niche, do you need to bother with it? Good SEO takes quite a bit of work and since WordPress takes care of a lot for you, unless you feel that it’s really important that you rank highly you might be better off forgetting about it.
2. Try some good walkthroughs. You can take a look through one that I wrote a few months ago or try out Yoast’s excellent SEO for WordPress.

Unless you are teaching a class on SEO I would avoid talking about it too much. Most people really won’t care, not at these early stages.  And it’s not fair to bore everyone else with SEO when only one person is interested.

To finish, here are my top five writing ticks that I hate and that you should avoid:

1. Cliches – if I read in one more place that “content is king” I’ll poke myself in the eye.
2. Paragraphs that are just one long sentence – unnecessary on the web and in print.
3. Hesitant writing – sticking “seems,” “seemingly,” “perhaps,” “maybe,” or any versions of those words, in front of lots of key phrases. My husband does this a lot! He gets poked with a stick when he does it.
4. Improper use of apostrophes – check the very important Apostrophe Protection Society for correct apostrophe use.
5. Overuse of adjectives – it’s not necessary to say “the striking, fluffy cat sat regally on the crooked, dirty mat.” The cat sat on the mat, period.

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