BuddyPress reached version 1.0 last year but it was friendly only with the multi-use version of WordPress – WordPress MU. Those with single installations of WordPress, like myself, were unable to use BuddyPress with the same ease as WPMU users.

With the release of BuddyPress 1.2, single installations of WordPress can also use BuddyPress now for their forum needs.

We can install BuddyPress as just a plugin from within the WordPress installation. BuddyPress makes it very easy to integrate a forum in an existing WordPress blog.

And you can share your existing WordPress blog user base across your forum too, just like that. If you had tried to integrate user login with forum software like PHPbb or the like you might already know how painful that is.

BuddyPress makes that a breeze. But, there was one catch. BuddyPress comes with it’s own default theme and most WordPress single installation blogs already have their own themes.

The good news is that, Andy Peatling, founder and lead developer of BuddyPress has created a WordPress plugin – BuddyPress Template Pack.

The Template Pack walks you through the theme additions step by step that adds the necessary configuration to your existing WordPress theme in a non-destructive way so you can back out if you don’t like it.

I can’t wait to try out BuddyPress integration shortly in some of our sites. How about you?

Try BuddyPress

BuddyPress Get WordPress Single Install Friendly - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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You can blog on the go with WordPress app for Android.

WordPress has released version 1.0 of the WordPress app for Android. I am huge fan of the WordPress app for iPhone and the Android app looks very close to it.

WordPress for Android Features

• Configure and manage multiple blogs
• Comment moderation including the ability to reply to comments
• Create and edit posts including categories, tags and photos
• Create and Edit pages
• Get notified of new comments in the Android notification bar

Here is a video of the app in action.

If you have been using the wpToGo app, it will be discontinued and WordPress for Android will be the app to have.

Go ahead and give it a spin!

Download WordPress for Android

[via WordPress for Android blog]

Write Posts On the Go With WordPress for Android - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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BackPress is a PHP library of core functionality for web applications that grew out of the WordPress project.

BackPress includes a variety of foundations needed to build a robust, scalable web application as a core library package that anyone can use.

BackPress Features

• Logging
• User Roles and Capabilities (Permission systems)
• Database connections (across multiple servers and multiple datacenters)
• HTTP Transactions
• XML-RPC Server and Client
• Object caching
• Formatting
• XSS and SQL injection protection, including a variety of powerful escaping functions
• Taxonomies
• Options management

Look here to get a full list of BackPress features.

PHP world offers a lot of open source libraries that you can leverage to build your web application. But, if you have used WordPress or BuddyPress, you will feel right at home implementing some of the features you have grown to like in WordPress into your own next kickass web application.

Download BackPress

Power your PHP Web Application with BackPress - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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You can read about WordPress 2.9 new features here.

Some of the cool new features I am excited about are

• Global undo/trash feature – no more accidental deleting of post, comments, etc.
• Built-in image editor – this is huge for me as I love to add images to every post I add
• Batch plugin update and compatibility checking
• Easier video embedding
• Automatic database optimization support
• Custom post types
• Create custom galleries

Download WordPress 2.9

You can also watch a brief overview of new WordPress 2.9 features here.

Enjoy WordPress 2.9!

WordPress 2.9 Is Available for Download - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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In the last 4 years, this is the first time WordPress has won this award. Plus, it was named first runner-up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category inching ahead of Joomla. And Drupal outranked it only by a small margin.

For those unaware, WordPress is an open source blogging platform that powers hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of websites including this one.

To even those who are familiar with WordPress, it is commonly known as a blogging platform. But, a little known fact is that WordPress can also be an excellent Content Management System.

WordPress has already gained a lot of momentum and exposure over the last few years and this award is going to give it a further push into being recognized as a CMS platform as well.

My wife recently launched her WordPress based web development business – KarShan Media (shameless plug) and she has been building websites with WordPress as a CMS for a long time. This award is going to make her life a tad bit easier convincing interested individuals that WordPress CAN power their website.

You can check out all the PacktPub awards for 2009 here.

Congratulations WordPress!

[via WordPress blog]

WordPress Wins Best Overall Open Source CMS Award - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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Most recently, Twitter added goetagging to the tweets so you can look up tweets by location.

Now, my favorite open source blogging platform WordPress has enabled geolocation for bloggers hosting their blogs at WordPress.com. With this feature you can get answers to questions like

• Where was this post written?
• Where is the commenter located?
• Are there other WordPress.com bloggers near you?

How Do I Add GeoLocation?

If you have a blog at WordPress.com, you can start attaching location to individual blog posts. This will let your readers search posts from specific places.

Before you go whoa! why on earth would I want to do that, this is totally optional. If you don’t want to disclose locations, you don’t have to.

Let’s say you want to use this feature you can start using it in one of 2 ways. If you have a Geolocation aware browser, then all you have to do is confirm the location it detects or you can override that to enter it manually.

To start using geotagging, you have to go to Users -> Your Profile and enable it.

Right now, this geo tagging is limited only to blog posts and profiles on WordPress.com. But, support for commenter location, poll votes location, a live map view of blog updates, an annual report showing where your posts were written and where your comments came from are on the anvil.

Can I add GeoLocation to a hosted WordPress blog?

Hosted WordPress has not gotten this as a native feature and I haven’t seen this listed in WordPress 2.9 new features. May be I missed it.

But, you can get some of the geolocation features with a couple of plugins depending on the feature you are looking for.

• WP-Brighkite – You can locate authors using Brightkite
• Visitor Maps and Who’s Online
• GeoHTML.com GeoMarketing

If you are interested, I have put all my favorite WordPress plugins in nice categories in a page – Top WordPress Plugins.

If you are excited about geotagging, how do you see yourself using it in your WordPress blog?

[via Mashable]

WordPress.com Adds GeoLocation Feature - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms and is available in a hosted version at WordPress.com and as a free self-hosting version at WordPress.org.

WordPress 2.9 is the next version in the recent updates and I am pretty excited for a few of the features in the release. But, it is not as exciting as the huge changes in WordPress 2.7 but again that’s why it is a release update and not a version upgrade to 3 yet.

But there is still a slew of new features in this release and let’s take a look at some of them.

WordPress 2.9 New Features

• Post Thumbnails – With a simple filter in the template file you can add a post thumbnail from an image in many views such as index, archives, etc easily
• Image Editing – You can do basic image editing like rotate, crop, flip, etc right from your WordPress admin = faster blogging experience
• Media embeds – Easily embed videos from YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion or any service that uses oEmbed standard in your posts. (Think Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin)
• Trash Status – Deleted posts, pages, comments are moved to a trash for you to recover quickly if you accidentally delete them
• Comment metadata – This basically means you (or a plugin) can do cool things with your comments data such as displaying popular comments, etc.
• User Registration via XMLRPC – You can now enable user registration through a XMLRPC client
• Gallery Shortcode – You can easily add a gallery attached to a post with a shortcode such as [ gallery ] It’s not new – Thanks Travis & Andrea
• Better Feedback – Better feedback on publishing of future posts and pages
• Plugin/Theme Editor Enhancement – Your scroll position is saved in plugin and theme editor which means no more trying to find the line you just edited!
• Auto Repair Tables – Added means of automatically repairing tables
• Canonical – Support for rel=Canonical for singular pages (Canonical?)

As you can see, as usual this WordPress update has a nice set of new features. I know some of us love frequent updates and new features and some of us hate it as it means frequent website updates.

Automatic upgrade introduced lately has been a great help for many (as long as you make a database and file system backup beforehand) and I have hardly seen any upgrade failure in the many WordPress upgrades my wife has been doing for her clients.

Although it needs my attention now with many new plugins I use, Top WordPress Plugins has been the most popular article in ShanKrila and I hope you will enjoy it too.

[via Dougal Campbell]

Top 10 WordPress 2.9 Features You Should Know - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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And WordPress 2.8 beta 1 has been released! So, I grabbed a copy of it and installed it to take a look at what’s in store for us.

WordPress 2.8 New Features

WordPress lovers, we have a ton of new features/improvements although a lot of them subtle. I’ll try to highlight a few that I loved to see.  You can read the complete list at the WordPress blog linked at the bottom.

User Features

• Improved Admin icons
• Search/Install new Plugins/Themes from Admin
• Theme editor gets syntax highlighting
• Upto four columns for Dashboard widgets
• Post via e-mail – just set up an email account with POP3 access and go!
• Auto-save post/page with Ctrl+S
• Description field for tags
• Setting timezone made easy – choose a city in your timezone

Developer/Tech Features

• Improved database performance
• Using SimplePie for widget and dashboard feeds
• Using TinyMCE 3.2.3
• Better script loading performance
• Enhanced support for custom taxonomies
• Proxy support via wp-config.php – great for Intranet WordPress installs to get updates to plugins, themes, etc
• jQuery 1.3.2 with minify support
• New Widgets API
• Menu reordering via Plugin

WordPress is looking better than ever with 2.8! It’s great to see the community involvement and the fast release cycle. With the easy auto-update feature in WordPress 2.7+, I like the fast development cycle better than ever.

WordPress 2.8 beta 1 Features – full list

Download WordPress 2.8 beta 1

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@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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Their website is running on WordPress and here’s how we added Google Maps to their website.  Just note that these instructions are for self-hosted WordPress blogs only.

1. Get a Google Maps API Key from here. It’s as easy as logging in with your Google account.
2. Install Inline Google Maps WordPress plugin
3. Go to Plugin configuration page and enter the Google Maps API Key from step 1 and save it.

   

4. You can adjust your Maps dimensions for your site here:  it defaults to 500px by 300px.
5. Go to Google Maps, find the place you want in the map, adjust the zoom and double click on the place you want to be in the center of the map. (or right click on the pin and choose to center map here)
6. On the top-right corner, find the ‘Link’ button and copy the link there. You may have to play with this a little bit to get it right. Try generating links at various zoom level and check how it shows up in your website.

   

7. Now go to the page you want to insert the Google Maps
8. Type in a text you want to appear in the marker in the map like ‘Discover Smiles’ and add the link you copied in step 6

   

9. Make sure you give the link a title of ‘googlemap’ (you can enter a title of ‘googlemap;nocontrol’ if you don’t want an interactive map)
10. Publish your page and you are done!

Hope the above steps weren”t too hard to follow. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

You can also add various options to the map via plugin parameters. Also check out Avi’s post linked at the bottom if you are looking to add more bubbles, features to the map.

[via Avi Alkalay

How to Add Google Maps in a WordPress Site? - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

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@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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Recently I stumbled across the DrupalCon DC Website. It is the official website for the Drupal Conference held in Washington DC in March.

Now that the conference is over, the website has now been transformed into a goldmine of Drupal information.

Videos of more than 100 presentations are now freely available in this website. The sessions were given by Drupal experts on various aspects of Drupal in the conference.

Even though I have been using this site for weeks, my aha moment to post about it here came when I saw a mention of it in the official Drupal blog this morning.

Drupal Videos

Here are some of the sessions I enjoyed so far:

• Drupal Module Development Kickstart
• Totally Rocking your Development Environment
• Protect your site from hackers: Introduction to Security
• Backend Drupal Performance Optimization and Tuning: a guide for everyone
• SEO & Drupal: Search Engine Optimization Tips, Tricks and Best Practices
• Drush – command line Drupal productivity
• Optimizing your LAMP stack for Drupal
• Learning jQuery UI

A lot of these videos gave me really good insights into parts of the Drupal that would have taken me weeks to gather from reading the manuals. Plus, I learn the best by examples so sessions like these and pieces of code from blog tutorials are what I like the best.

Plus, imagine having access to every session from this popular conference that you can now view from the comfort of your desk!

If you are just starting to work with Drupal, give yourself some time to learn the ropes. It opens up a lot of possibilities with Drupal.

Go to DrupalCon DC Website

Giveaway: Enter to win a Comodo AntiVirus & Firewall Pro License ($39.99 value)

Goldmine of Drupal Videos – DrupalCon DC Website - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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I use Twitter

• to network with fellow bloggers
• find up-to-date information on breaking news
• to follow interesting personalities & draw inspiration/motivation from them (like my buddy @MattJabs)
• share the tons of interesting links I come across that will take too much time to blog about
• keep myself up to date with certain interests without flooding my feed reader
• and sometimes just to have fun

With the recent blog re-design, I also wanted to find my readers on Twitter. Some of you I follow and converse on Twitter might have found me though this blog. But, I am sure there are still a lot of you I probably don’t know or interact on Twitter.

That’s why I fell in love with this WordPress plugin – WP-Twitip-ID that let me integrate Twitter into the Comments section.

When you leave a comment here, you can also enter your Twitter ID and it will show up like this. I am going to be able to see that and follow you. So can the other readers.

Let’s see how to do this quickly.

Integrate Twitter ID into WordPress Comments

• Grab and install the WP-Twitip-ID WordPress Plugin
• Activate the WP-Twitip-ID plugin
• Go to the plugin Settings page
• Set where you want the Twitter ID field to appear. It defaults to after the url field and it is usually fine.
• Now edit your comments.php file to add the code where you want the Twitter ID to appear in the comments.

WP-Twitip-ID can automatically insert the Twitter field in the comment form for you through Javascript. But, it didn’t work too well for me so I just added the field manually to the comment form in comments.php.

How I did it?

I opened up my comments.php and to add the Twitter ID field in the comment form, I added a line similar to the url field with the appropriate values after the line which displays the url field in the comment form.

Next, I found out where the date is displayed in the comment loop and added a line next to it to display the Twitter id.

If the styles don’t appear right, just make sure you are using the same class as your other input fields.

This is just a quick overview. You can get the various options, variables & juicy details here at the WP-Twitip-ID plugin page.

Download WP-Twitip-ID

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KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
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What’s new in WordPress 2.7

• Ten New Features in WordPress 2.7
  Demetris of op111.net has posted on 10 new features in WordPress 2.7. He talks about Mass Edit posts/pages, paging in comments, Inline quick edit, etc
• WordPress 2.7 Comment Enhancements
  Otto dissects the new comment functionality in WordPress 2.7. He shows you how to create a WordPress 2.7 compatible coments.php.
• WordPress 2.7 Keyboard Shortcuts
  WordPress 2.7 comes with keyboard shortcuts to the admin interface to make browse and moderating easier. Kyle of WP Hacks also has an useful post that goes into WordPress 2.7 keyboard shortcuts.
• WordPress 2.7 Publish Module
  Mark Jacquith explains in this cool video, what’s new in the Publish module. Slightly older but still relevant if you want to know what’s new in 2.7.
• An In-Depth Look at 2.7 Updates
  Theme Forest blog looks at the new updates in WordPress 2.7 with plenty of screenshots. If you are looking to get a quick overview of new things in WordPress 2.7, this is the post to read.
• Is Core Update Feature Compatible with my WebHost?
  WordPress 2.7 introduces core update feature that makes upgrading WordPress manually obsolete in the future. WP Hacks shows you how to find out if you web host is compatible for this core update feature in 2.7.
• 5 Amazing New Features in WordPress 2.7
  Nettus lists 5 cool features in WordPress 2.7 with a lot of eye candy. Have at it.
• WordPress 2.7 – Initital Impressions
  Stylized Web has posted their initial impressions on WordPress 2.7.
• WordPress 2.7 – 20 Must See Features
  A Mashable.com list of 20 must see features in 2.7

Upgrading to WordPress 2.7

Before you upgrade to WordPress 2.7, here are a few things to check:

• Official Upgrade Instructions
  Also check the extended upgrade instructions.
  
• Is my theme WordPress 2.7 compatible?
  Nathan Rice answers this probably most asked question when it comes to upgrading WordPress eloquently. Short verdict. Yes, it is compatible. Read the post for full details as to why.
• Check for Plugin Compatibility
  WordPress Codex has a list of plugins that are compatible with 2.7 and those that are known to have issues with 2.7. Check this list before you upgrade.
• WordPress 2.7 Theme Compatibility
  WordPress Codex also sports a list of themes that are compatible with WordPress 2.7. Find out if yours is listed. if not, follow Nathan’s advice.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin by Keith
  You can still use WPAU to easily upgrade to WP 2.7. I confirmed this personally with Keith via IM. It’s a bit sad that WPAU will be no more after 2.7 as WordPress gets this feature built in. Thanks for this
  contribution buddy!
• Plugin Compatibility Notes
  This WordPress plugins lets you know of potential plugins compatibility issues by adding the WordPress versions your current installed plugins are compatible with. So, instead of upgrading and trying to find out which ones are broke, you can see ahead which ones could give you
  problems.
• How To Upgrade Automatically The Last Time To WordPress 2.7 In 5 Minutes!
  Great tutorial showing you how to upgrade easily to the current release.
• WordPress 2.7 Upgrade Tips
  Lorelle has posted an insane amount of tips tricks and gotchas when it comes to upgrading to WordPress 2.7. Check it out before you touch yours.
• 2.7 Upgrade in One Line
  For those who love the command line, Hack a day has a one-line command for upgrading WordPress to 2.7.

Advanced WordPress 2.7 Resources

If you are a WordPress theme or plugin developer, a few of these articles could come in handy to make your theme or plugin compatible with WordPress 2.7 if you haven’t already done so.

• Making Your Theme Comments Compatble with 2.7 & Earlier Versions
  Justin Tadlock delves into this nice topic and shows you how you can make your theme compatible with WordPress 2.7 as well as make it backwards compatibe with earlier versions. Aimed at theme developers.
• New Page Menu in WordPress 2.7
  Another ustin Tadlock article shows you how the new function wp_page_menu() removes a lot of the work you may do with using wp_list_pages() function.
• Definitive Sticky Posts Guide
  Sticky posts is a new feature in 2.7. Nathan Rice has an excellent guide on how to use, create and style sticky posts!
• Getting Your Plugins & Themes Ready for WordPress 2.7
  Again WordPress Codex is the best place for any info related to WordPress. This post shows you how to migrate your plugins and themes so it’s compatible with WordPress 2.7.
• Top Level Menu in WordPress 2.7
  WP Engineer shows us how to add icons to menus in the top level in the admin interface.
• How to Improve WordPress Plugins
  Again, WP Engineer shows plugin authors how they can take advantage of the new 2.7 vertical menu and add icons to their plugin menu.
• 2.7 Comment Classes
  Fun with WordPress blog explains how the new WordPress 2.7 Comment Classes look when you view it visually. This would help anyone tweaking the comments.php file for styling.
• Blogging Tips Themes Enhancements – I
  Shows you how to enhance your theme for WP 2.7.
• Blogging Tips Themes Enhancements – II
  Sarah shows you how to make use of the new comment options.
• Blogging Tips Themes Enhancements – III
  Sarah shows you how to make use of the new comment features.

Plugins for WordPress 2.7

• Compatibility Notes
  Compatibility Notes is a simple WordPress plugin that will attach a list of supported WordPress versions to every plugin’s description on the “Plugins” page.
• Post Notes
  On its own, this plugin adds a text area on the sidebar of the add and edit post pages so that users can add notes for themselves or others.
• 20+ WordPress 2.7 Compatible plugins
  Mashable has put together a great list of plugins your shiny new 2.7 install can handle.
• Make Simple Tags Plugin Work
  Ask VG has this hack to make Simple Tags plugin work in WordPress 2.7
• Top WordPress Plugins
  A continously updated list of WordPress plugins by yours truly. Bookmark this to find new WP 2.7 compatible plugins.
• 2.7 Plugin Compatibility List
  WordPress
  Codex has a list of plugins that are compatible with 2.7 and those that
  are known to have issues with 2.7. Check this list before you upgrade.

And, if you are wondering with so many significant changes in 2.7, why wasn’t it named as 3.0, this post Why 2.7 is not 3.0 will clear that up for you.

Also, Six Apart, the company behind the rival blog platform Movable Type has come out with WordPress 2.7 Upgrade Guide again!

If you enjoyed this list, please take a moment to Stumble, Digg, Tweet or share it with your fellow WordPress bloggers through your favorite social meda tools.

Top WordPress 2.7 Tips, Hacks, Plugins & Resources - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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There are a ton of new features available in WordPress 2.7. That means some of us geeks are going to jump up and down with excitement to be a part of this great Open Source community that isn’t afraid to push the envelope to get us the features we want (and some we don’t want) faster than ever.

This also means some of us are going to cringe at the thought of upgrading to the new version and the possibility of breaking your perfectly working site.

But, unlike previous WordPress releases, WordPress 2.7 offers some serious advantages to upgrade. Here are a few new features in WordPress 2.7:

• Brand new Admin Interface to manage your WordPress easily – get tasks done in fewer clicks
• Customization options to make the admin screen look like you want
• QuickPress – for those quick posts you want to publish
• Comment threading – a much awaited feature supported natively
• Reply to Comments from Dashboard
• Install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click
• Sticky Posts
• Ability to customize Write page to have stuff that matters to you
• Auto-upgrade for future WordPress releases.

That’s right, of all the features one reason that could sway you to upgrade to WordPress 2.7 might be that this will be the last time ever you manually upgrade WordPress!

Here is a visual demonstration of what WordPress 2.7 looks like:

As excited as I am about the new release, I will also be careful with the upgrade checking Plugin Compatibility, my theme compatibility, etc.

WordPress 2.7 Gotchas

I have been collecting resources for WordPress 2.7 and putting together a massive list of useful WordPress 2.7 links, articles. tips, theme development tutorials, theme compatibitlity articles, etc. {update – just published!}

If you are wondering about the WordPress 2.7 release name – Coltrane, WordPress has a tradition of naming it’s released after famous Jazz musicians and this release is for John Coltrane.

Download WordPress 2.7

Stay tuned.

Let’s Welcome WordPress 2.7 Coltrane - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

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What do you win?

You could win one of the 11 premium themes listed below

• Arthemia Premium Theme from Colorlabsproject.com – $70
• Chimera Premium Theme from Themespinner.com – $59
• WPRemix 2 from Wpremix.com – $75
• Thesis Premium Theme from Diythemes.com – $87
• Revolution – Real Estate from Revolutiontheme.com - $59.95
• Fresh Folio from Woothemes.com – $70
• On Demand Premium Theme from Press75.com – $75
• Braincast Premium Theme from Storelicious.com – $79.90
• Jobpress Premium Theme from Dailywp.com – $59
• Fresh News Premium Theme from Woothemes.com – $70
• WpShowcase from Gabfire.com – $59

How to enter?

Entering the contest is simple.

1. Subscribe to Blog oh Blog’s RSS Feed
2. Write an entry in your blog about the contest

That’s it.

Contest Deadline

Contest ends on Nov 27th & the winners will be announced on Nov 28th.

I would love to win any of these but I have my eyes on Thesis, Arthemia & Fresh News themes. Any of these would suit Shankri-la! Which one would you like to win?

Win a Premium WordPress Theme at Blog oh Blog - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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I get behind on moderating comments sometimes because I have to get into the WordPress Dashboard to do it. WordPress 2.7 is supposed to have some commenting API’s that could make this the thing of the past.

But, until then Daniel Dura comes to our rescue with the Moderator Adobe AIR app + WordPress plugin combo.

Moderator lets you

• View comments in moderation queue
• Dock and system trat notifications of number of comments waiting
• Minimize the adobe AIR app to system tray
• Approve, delete or mark comment as spam within the AIR app
• Even shows Gravatar icon for the commentator (optional – turn this off if you have a huge moderation queue)
• Option to set checking interval

How to install Moderator?

Installation is very easy with Moderator. Just note that Moderator requires WordPress 2.6+ to work.

• Just install the WordPress plugin and activate it
• Go to settings page to download & install Moderator Adobe AIR app

Now, just fire up your Moderator Adobe AIR app to login and start moderating comments. Don’t you dig the clever logo?

Moderator is still in it’s early version and is a little bare bones at the moment in terms of features. But, with WordPress 2.7’s impending release this month Daniel promises support for WordPress 2.7 that might make the requirement of the WordPress plugin moot.

But, I like the roadmap for this project that promises features like

• Viewing unmoderated comments from multiple blogs
• Popup notification of incoming comments
• Support for WordPress 2.7’s comment moderation menthods

One suggestion I have is adding the title of the post the comment is for. Right now, I have to guess which post the commentator is talking about but atleast I can mark the spam ones easily but sometimes the comments are borderline spam without looking at the context.

I will be keeping an eye on this application as this seems to be one of a kind for WordPress. If you know of any other app that does this, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Moderate WordPress Comments from your Desktop - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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Hack WordPress has just turned 1 and the 2000+ RSS subscribers is just a hint at what it has acheived as a milestone in it’s infancy. If you do anything with WordPress, HWP is a site to bookmark.

In celebration of HWP’s 1st birthday, Kyle has unveiled a redesign and I just love the new look. Plus, he has a huge Premium themes giveaway. Here is a list of premium themes you could win:

• 6 Month Developer Subscription – The winner of this prize will receive a 6 month developer subscription to Woo Themes (Courtesy of the Adii and the Woo Themes team)
• 2008 Theme Club Subscription – The winner of this
  prize will receive a copy of all themes released by iThemes in 2008,
  valued at over $1400.00  (Courtesy of Cory Miller of iThemes)
• 3 Revolution Single-Use Licenses – All 3 winners will get their choice of which Revolution theme they want their license to be for.  (Courtesy of Brian Gardner of Revolution Themes)
• 5 One Theme Single-Use Licenses – All 5 winners
  will receive a webmaster (single-use) license of the extremely popular
  One Theme (Courtesy of Lee Cooper and Karl Forshaw of One Theme).
• 2 Gabfire Single-Use Licenses, 2 Multiple-Use Licenses, and 2 Developer’s Licenses – Winners will have a choice of which of Mehmet’s 3 different themes you would like your license to be for.  (Courtesy of Mehmet of Gabfire Themes)
• 2 TV Elements Single-Use Licenses – Winners will get a single-use copy of the extremely popular TV Elements video theme.  (Courtesy of Jason of Press 75)

How to Enter?

It’s very simple to enter.

• Blog about this contest – 3 Entries
• Leave a Comment – 1 Entry

As you can see, there are a great many prizes to win in this giveaway and it’s very simple to enter! Contest ends on Oct 9 and the winners will be announced Oct 10th.

Giveaway aside, I wish Kyle & Hack WordPress good luck as HWP has become a cornerstone in the WordPress community. I secretly wish to write as a guest author in HWP sometime but haven’t been able to due to time constraints.

Congratulations, Kyle!

HackWordPress.com Turns 1 and Has a Huge Giveaway - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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DoFollow

For those unaware, WordPress makes comments a ‘nofollow’ link to make it unattractive to spammers. But, there has been a movement to reward commentators with a linkback by removing the nofollow from comments. The DoFollow WordPress plugin makes this really easy to acheive.

So, anyone leaving a comment here will get a PR5 link back to their website helping them a little in their search engine ranking. Yes, ShanKri-la just went from PR4 to PR5 with the latest pagerank update!

CommentLuv

CommentLuv is another awesome plugin in use in ShanKri-la. This is purely to highlight the commentator’s latest post automatically by parsing their blog’s feed. So, with every comment you leave, your latest post is automatically showcased in your comment giving you some exposure with my other readers.

KeywordLuv

Even though you get these benefits, the links to your site doesn’t carry much weight like a link with a targeted keyword as anchor text. That’s why we see comments with names like ‘Free iPod nano’, ‘Detroit Real Estate’. Although it looks spammy, some of these folks are well meaning and leave comments that contribute to their discussion. I can tell a spam comment most of the time and I delete them without hesitation. I do allow comments with keywords but I still don’t get to know the name of the person leaving the comment.

My friend Stephen Cronin has solved this problem with his new plugin, KeyWordLuv. Here is an excerpt:

KeywordLuv helps you reward your commentators by separating their name from their keywords in the link to their site. This gives them improved anchor text, which can help their site rank higher in the search engine results.

You can now leave a comment with your name as well as a keyword of your choice here and get a PR5 link back to your site! How cool is that? People pay big bucks for that and all you have to do is comment here.

Here is how you do it:

Leave a comment with the name field like this : (spaces are fine)

K-IntheHouse@Top Firefox Extensions

The name link in the comment will appear as:

K-IntheHouse from Top Firefox Extensions

If you are a registered user, make sure you logout to see this. Check out Stephen’s other useful WordPress plugins as well.

Words of Love

I have taken the time to make this blog friendly as well as rewarding to you should you participate in any discussion here. And I highly encourage you to do so as a blog’s real value most times lies in the discussions & comments.

But, please don’t abuse it by leaving meaningless comments like ‘Nice post’ just to get some keyword love. It doesn’t help anyone and I will delete it even though I appreciate the encouragement.

Are you ready for some loving?

Get CommentLuv And KeywordLuv For Your Comments - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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I was pleasantly surprised to see that the upgrades went so smooth. All my plugins (30+) worked great after the upgrade except one which I’ll address at the end of the post.

Here are some of the new features/changes I came across in no particular order:

• A brand new Admin layout
• Admin profile color options
• Media Library – shows type of file, date imported and the post it appears in and a Permalink to use it elsewhere
• Supports multi-file upload
• A Manage – Link category option
• View Links (renamed Blogroll) by category and you can order it name or sort it by popularity, address or id
• Manage Posts shows tags, number of comments and status. Also sports a drop-down to view by month
• Search posts & pages (earlier no pages)
• Write screen is cleaner and sports a Toggle full screen option – very useful in my opinion
• Better support for adding different media types in the Write screen
• Excellent built-in Tag management
• Collapsible areas show tags, categories, etc under the post write screen
• The side area has been cleaned up to show just publishing options and some related links
• Related options area gives you quick links to manage all posts, comments, tags or categories
• Write link screen has an advanced option to add an image, rss feed, notes and a rating
• The Widgets page has been redesigned as well with the available, used, unused widgets filter laid out vertically instead of at the bottom of the page.
• Comment area has seen a big revamp as well.. looks and acts more like the Better Comments Manager plugin interface
• List View & Detail View
• Click on the heading to edit a comment – has a nice area to format your comment
• Settings, plugins and users management links separated out to the side
• Automatic plugin upgrade
• One buton deactivates all your plugins
• You can now set a maximum size for images in a post (Settings->Writing screen)
• Gravatar support to toggle display avatars and their rating (Settings-> Reading screen)

Here are some screenshots:

One of the best improvements for me has to be automatic plugin upgrade! This feature just rocks when you have numerous plugins like me and it pretty much becomes a hassle to keep them updated every week. Now, it frees up my time to actually write some content here.

Popularity Contest Plugin Issue

The one plugin that I had a problem updating automatically was ‘Popularity Contest’. But, WordPress Codex’s Plugin compatibility list for WordPress 2.5 already had a note linked to this plugin. Following the note, made the Popularity Contest plugin work just fine.

WordPress 2.5 Image Upload Issue

Also, when I tried to upload the images for this post I got an error with the image upload. Then, I found this useful post from Josh Highland on how to resolve it.

All I had to do was edit the .htaccess file in my server and add the following:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

Overall, I am very pleased with the WordPress 2.5 upgrade and gave me a chance to get rid of some of the plugins I don’t need anymore, making way for new ones I want to try.

If you are on the wall about upgrading your blog to 2.5, hope this would give you a little push towards that. This really has to be the smoothest upgrade I have ever done!

Of course, I took the plunge after making sure I had a good backup of my blog and knowing the backing from the incredible community of helpful folks surrounding WordPress. Have you?

Download WordPress 2.5

Spanking New WordPress 2.5 – First Impressions - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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Why modify instead of a new theme?

You might be thinking why I took the trouble of clobbering an excellent theme. I will have to take you back to the reason I started blogging in the first place. It was my interest in learning web development and I did not imagine I would try to make money off of it when I registered ShanKri-la (Sep 20, 2006). What better way than to get your own domain name and run a live website? After a few months of fiddling with cPanel & learning HTML & CSS, finally installed WordPress and started blogging towards the end of Feb 2007.

I am still learning various aspects of web development and have become quite adept at helping others with their WordPress theme customization. I loved the current theme I was using but wanted ShanKri-la to have it’s unique look. So, here we go with my custom modification of the Saur theme.

I have to mention a very helpful WordPress plugin that let me work on this new design while you were still looking at the old one.

Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin lets you chose a theme – in my case I made a copy of current theme to a new folder – and after activating the new theme in the plugin menu, you will see the new theme while you are logged in as Admin. Everyone else will continue to see the old theme.

Direct Advertising in ShanKri-la

I have finally opened up direct advertising in ShanKri-la. This was another reason for making the theme mod so I can implement the ad scheme the way I wanted to. A lot of themes seem to put more focus in that than usability and I wanted to strike a good balance for my readers. I would love to hear what you think about it.

Also, you won’t see Google Adsense ads anymore if you are a regular reader here or if you come directly from someone else’s site. I have made it so the ads are visible only to the search engine visitors as they are more likely to click on ads anyways and it would make it pleasant reading for my readers.

For those interested in advertising in ShanKri-la, you can get details of various advertising options from the ‘Adevrtise’ page.

Areas of Improvement

If you have a keen eye, you would probably notice all the changes but I am going to list them here quickly if anyone is interested in things of that sort.

Header area

Just some minor tweaks with the search bar gone from here to make way for a premium 468×60 ad space.

Content & Comment Area

Not any major change except the Adsense ads won’t appear for my regular readers (tell me if you miss it ) plus I have removed other ad programs that weren’t performing well.

Sidebar

This is where the big changes are done. I am a strong believer in using tags and tag clouds for easy navigation. Hence the prominent area for the tag cloud. I think the dark colored block stands out highlingting the tags, subscription options & the search field.

Also, added the 125×125 ad area for direct advertisements here.

Footer

Footer is another area I have modified a lot by moving some of the clutter from the sidebar to the footer so I can free up the sidebar space for more relevant things. Plus, the slow loading widgets such as MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, etc won’t be a concern anymore as they will be loading after everything else in the page loads up. One major advantage to this is that the sidebar now can show more and longer comments hopefully helping everyone to see the conversation going here.

I am going to concentrate next on improving the load time of the blog as well. I would love to hear any suggestions or your experience in tackling the load time problems.

After all, I have done all this to in an effort to make ShanKri-la a better reading experience for you and would love to hear how you perceive this change.

ShanKri-la Gets a Makeover - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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But, a few weeks back I came across an interesting post at SlickMania about another site named MySpacePrivateProfile.com. As the name implies, all you need to do is paste the friend id from a MySpace profile and it lets you view private pictures from anyone! Says a lot about MySpace security, huh? The sad part is, you don’t even need a MySpace account or be logged in to view someone else’s private pictures!

I didn’t want to link to a site that couldn’t have been designed with good intentions and give them some link juice! It already has a Google PR 2 & Alexa ranking in the 120,000s. It is indicative of the traffic this site is attracting.

I did want to make sure my readers were aware of this security hole and the false sense of security the ‘private’ feature in MySpace might give you.  If you have a MySpace account and have pictures that you think are private, think again.

A good rule of thumb would be to just not to trust any site with pictures or videos that you wouldn’t want someone else to see, however private that website proclaims those to be.

With a lot of people coming here to find out how to unblock a blocked website and searching for information on myspace, bebo, etc., I figured it might be worthwhile to share this information here.

Even if you don’t use this, spread the word to anyone you know who uses MySpace.

Now, don’t forget that MySpace has launched new MySpace Private Profiles 2.0.
Read on to see how they have addressed this issue and the new features offered.

MySpace Private Profiles Aren’t That Private - Published at ShanKrila.com (RSS)

KarShan Media blogs: ShanKrila - Top iPhone Resource - Spicy Tasty
@KIntheHouse - @TopiPhone

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