Some themes do not include an ‘edit post’ or ‘edit page’ link!

It’s hard to believe that such a simple addition can be forgotten and it’s so useful!

A small snippet of code rectifies the problem easily. Here’s how you do it …

• Login and go to Admin>presentation>theme editor
• Open file ‘Single.php’ Single post file in the list
• You can enter the edit link wherever you think best
• example; find the line

<?php the_content('<p>Read the rest of this entry »</p>'); ?>

and add beneath it

<?php edit_post_link('(Edit Post)', '', ''); ?>

• Save the page and refresh a full blog post page to see your edit link under the post
• Repeat the same process for a page by editing the ‘Page template’ file in the same way

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TreeMagic Cypress is a new lightweight browser plugin for WordPress. Install, configure, then double click any word, or select a group of words on the page. On mouse-up a small popup appears adjacent to the selected text that gives you instant access to define, expand and explore related resources. It does not replace or interfere with existing hyperlinks, but adds an instant and powerful reference compliment to all your texts, regardless of formatting and styles.
The plugin can be configured to any external Internet website, as well as connecting to your own data, or network. TreeMagic Cypress is available as a free download from the downloads section of this site

The popup has a list of links that is configurable from the plugin administration section. The idea is that when you double click or select a group of words on a page, the popup is invoked adjacent to the word(s) allowing you to rapidly select a web site from the list. Typical examples of this are search engines, Wikipedia, Refdesk and similar knowledge-base sites. After selecting a site, the word(s) you have selected become part of a search string that returns results in a smaller separate popup window. You can of course keep your query results ‘on site’ such as searching your own content, help files or related resources. Because the query URLs are completely configurable in administration, you have total control over the searches, including opening the results page in a resized new window or using the existing target.

TreeMagic Cypress is not new technology and utilizes a small javascript and css to provide the fastest possible way to show extended meaning, content and relationship for text on a page. Once installed every text word on your site, that is not a hyperlink is potentially active. It does not interfere with any other mouse click functions and is totally unintrusive in use. Installation is simple, via a standard WordPress plugin. There are no database changes and the plugin adds negligible overhead to your HTML.

The broad concept is to provide the visitor greater freedom to take diversions from interesting cues in the text, but not taking them from your site in the process. Too many turns in the road and too many temptations to explore, can take your focus away from the content on a page. Most of us have come to realize that it is all too easy to be a ‘browser butterfly’ taking detours from hyperlinks and searches that often leave you marooned and lost in hyperspace. TreeMagic Cypress addresses the need to explore and supplement page content from other resources, but keeps your visitors safely focused on your website.

Searches can be configured for anything from a dictionary definition, translations, image searches to a full blown encyclopedia expositions. Following further links within the results ‘new window’ allows readers to explore in a separate browser page, while keeping your website in view when they want to return. Because we use a new window to display content, all your usual browser tools are available such as page saves and bookmarking your excursions for future returns.

As a web master, you have a simple administration interface that gives options for adding and deleting your website search strings, also the results window target and size. We have included a few samples to get you started, but the choice is up to you to provide the most suitable supplementary content for your website. There are numerous types of applications available for this tool and because you can manage your own reference links, you can offer a variety of offsite or internal content. All you need to do is track down your reference site and discover the correct query string.

Some typical examples of sites are as follows:

Google search
–Images
–News
–Maps
Wikipedia search
Currency converter
whois /IP lookup
answers.com
dictionary.com
Clusty.com
Translation
–en-fr
–en-ge
–en-it
Currency conversions
–£-$
–$-£
Navigation
–Home
–Contact us
–Help!
–Site map
–Site search

Do you need TreeMagic Cypress?

One of the main considerations with WordPress is choosing carefully which plugins to use. Too many and your website can suffer with decreased performance. Because of the tiny script footprint, this plugin will not add any significant processing burden to the database or page loads. It’s simple to use and will add some great features to your web page texts with the minimum of setup. The features and benefits are only limited by your imagination.

Download here …

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Licence.

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WordPressHelp offers several handy features to authors and readers. We have selected a few plugins that help to create increased readability and connectivity within the post contents. Here is a brief summary of plugins used, what they do and how to use them

1- aLinks. This plugin automatically links keywords both systematically and automatically. It’s a complex plugin that uses algorithms to search and match kewords you input to relevancy on the page. Thats the automatic part, once you enter a keyword in the admin section of the plugin. This ‘search and match’ is based on a scoring method and the top match is used in the link. This match changes, as posts get added, because it’s a dynamic action that gets passed to the database as the page is being rendered. The actual links, don’t exist, until the page is displayed. Additionally, the ‘search and match’ is restricted to a maximum of 30 days previous posts, to make the process as fast as possible in the database scans.

The other option of this plugin is to create a keyword with a specific URL for it to go to if the keyword is found in any post. This is more deterministic and the link to that URL remains indefinitly. My guess is there is less processing involved and no DB scans are involved.

Alinks also has an Amazon associate section, that searches amazon items according to keywords. We don’t use this function in our context.

If we DON’T like the automatic linking, via scoring of posts content, but prefer to hard link a post to a specific keyword, we should consider a simpler (with less overheads) plugin called SH-Autolink. (this is already installed) This plugin has no scoring system, but only offers a ‘keyword to specific URL option’. The only downside is that it matches EVERY occurance of a word in all posts, where as aLinks only matches the first occurrance of a keyword per post, to avoid link saturation.

Do we have a preference as to which method we prefer?

The other WPH author features are more straight forward and easy.

1- Footnotes. This is a neat plugin that lets authors add footnotes really easily to their posts. The footnote is linked (anchored) from a numbered superscript character to the actual footnote on the page. The footnotes have a ‘return’ link that takes you back. Here’s how you use it. Any text, link or content that you want to be a footnote is created inline with your page text as follows. ((This is my footnote)) yep, 2 curly braces round your content makes a numbered footnote. Make sure you leave a space between the start and end braces!

2- Snippet Highlight. Great plugin that renders code in well formatted lined snippets for easy reading and copying. Simply enclose any code snippet with <pre> </pre> to render full html, php, etc unparsed on the page.

3- Image Caption Easy. Transforms the alt text of an image into a caption which can be controlled through css. When you insert an image into a post you can make a caption and a nice genle border round the image. To make a caption, the ALT tag must be entered and this becomes the text in the caption. No ALT tag and no caption is created. I’ve asked the developer to add an option of allowing an ALT tag, but not transforming this to a caption to make images xhtml compliant. He’s agreed. This plugin allows nice captioning for diagrams, charts, images etc.

WPH also has some other connectivity features that work in the background. These are designed to create a ‘thick website’ of interlinks and related content. These are listed as follows:

1- Simple Tags. Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3. Auto-completion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags. One of the best available tagging system for 2.3 after UTW. This tagging plugin produces rich cross referencing and auto -suggests tags in posts creation.

2- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches, limited by a certain relatedness threshold. The list is conveniently situated below the full post. It can be configured for matching thresholds.

3- TreeMagic-Cypress. Provides instant queries against any word or phrase on the page. Query resources are configurable and provide highly focused, non-intrusive supplementary information for the user.

WPH posts management features.
1- Audit Trail. Keep a log of exactly what is happening behind the scenes of your WordPress blog. This needs to be accessed in the website admin section. Although it does not allow for conventional ‘rollback’ to a version previously, versions can be viewed and re-saved, or data salvaged.

2-WP Admin Bar Reloaded. Adds a small admin bar to the top of every page. Simple and fast access to admin sections through this discreet addition to the header of every page. Seen by logged in users only and permission based for the available links.

3- WP-DownloadManager. Adds a simple download manager to your WordPress blog.

4- User Permissions. Provides user read/ write permissions on a per post basis. Easily set from a block in the editor write page. If we trust this … it’s useful for internal posts not for public consumption

5- Subscribe to Comments. Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

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I discovered this by accident and it worked! I had a blank white page on my local WP test site after installing a plugin or maybe another problem, who knows? I could not even login, as the admin pages were just stuck loading.

Any way if you append your base URL with this “wp-admin/plugins.php?deactivate-all=true” it allows you to deactivate all plugins from the outside of admin. I did this and now my site is functional again. Of course you get the login screen first, to authenticate the call

Prior to this, I could not get past the login screen even to disable stuff in admin in the usual way.

The full url call looks like this on my machine. http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/plugins.php?deactivate-all=true

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Writing and manging content in Worpress using Mimbo theme

- Required: WordPress 2.3 – Mimbo theme installed, active and configured. – Image manager plugin installed and configured. – Basic image resizer software such as PhotoFiltre

The Mimbo theme makes extensive use of front page images. It does this by utilizing the powerful wordpress ‘custom fields’ feature to add exclusive images to excepts displayed in the front page of the site. There is no auto-resize feature in this process and in order for the page to look presentable, these images need to be correctly prepared and optimized to load quickly and fit into the layout dimensions of the template. Image preparation can be done locally using an ordinary and free image/photo manipulation software such as the gimp or http://photofiltre.free.fr/ In addition, WordPress has an excellent browser based image manager http://www.soderlind.no/archives/2006/01/03/imagemanager-20/ that provides all the cropping, resizing, compression and formatting required. We will make extensive use of this tool, as it simplifies the whole process.

NOTE If you are going to use pictures generated from original high quality digital photos or artwork, you do need to add an extra step in the process. High quality images usually provide excellent resolution and dimensions. This is essential for print and artwork display, but is quite unsuitable for website use. A web page has to display images by transferring digital information to your browser. Put simply, the more digital information the image has, the longer it will take to render that image in the browser. Original digital images are often many megabytes in size, which is way too big and would take several seconds to load on a page. Likewise their dimensions are often far to large for the web page template. Many people make the mistake of resizing their images into a smaller dimension, without optimizing the digital data. This means, the images are still too large and render slowly on the page.

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This applies to moving the site within your own webspace, or if you want to move it to another host server. I have read a few versions of how to this and many details have been missed that are important.

Notes

1. When moving a site you have to consider if you have ever modified (hacked) any core files in wordpress

2. If you have and you want to maintain the functionality you must copy these over to the new installation

3. WordPress stores all user data in the wp-content folder and sub-directories and its database. This means all plugins, themes, images and other added fies will be in wp-content folder. NOTE. Some plugins DO put files elsewhere. Be aware!

4. If your file mods/ hacks are in the wp-content folder then carry on as below.

5. If you have hacked/modified files anywhere else, these must be copied over separately.

6. If you have no special mods/hacks, simple ignore the above.

Preparation on the old site

1. log into the original site as admin

2. Deactivate all cache settings and cache plugins. Make sure all cache files are cleared/ deleted.

3. If you have Askimet installed make sure you delete any spam comments in the moderation queue.

4. Log in to the FTP account and copy the wp-content folder and config.php to your desktop.

5. Copy any other files from other locations if they have been modified! (see notes above)

6. Some plugins are poor at removing their database tables and configs from the database. Login to phpMyadmin and delete any tables that are no longer being used by your existing activated plugins.

7. Now optimize your database using the cpanel or other utility

8. Make a database backup, using cpanel, phpmyadmin, db backup, or some other utility.

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WordPress for Wiki prototype

According to Wikipedia:

A wiki is software that allows users to create, edit, and link web pages easily. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. These wiki websites are often also referred to as wikis; for example, Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis.^[1] Wikis are being installed by businesses to provide affordable and effective Intranets and for Knowledge Management. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.^[2]

Why wordpress as a wiki?
Put simply, WordPress is probably the finest Internet publication system available. It efficiently broadcasts posts to search engines and social networking services and provides excellent visibility, both in design, code structure and connectivity. To combine these well established features and the collaboration qualities of a wiki like setup produces a good combination of high visibility and group authoring requirements.

The following plugins have been chosen to emulate a wiki-like feature set. Most wiki features have been accomplished with these carefully selected plugins. We will evaluate this setup and refine/adjust as required. Most of these plugins have been selected to provide ‘connectivity’ between subjects, topics, keywords and meta information.

0. Awsom News Announcement: Allows you to post news announcements in the area above your posts on the index page (or anywhere else you want). By Harknell.
1. Audit Trail: Keep a log of exactly what is happening behind the scenes of your WordPress blog. By John Godley
2. Autolink tags for content: This plugin automatically checks out your posts to add tag links for the tag text in the posts. By Kelvin Xu.
3. Image Caption Easy: Transforms the alt text of an image into a caption which can be controlled through css. By Mark W. B. Ashcroft
4. SH-Autolink: In posts and comments, it transforms predefined words automatically into hyperlinks. By Stevie.
5. Snippet Highlight: embedd code between <pre> </pre> tags. apply code language as css class: php, css, js etc. By Roland Rust.
6. Subscribe2: Notifies an email list when new entries are posted. By Matthew Robinson.
7. TreeMagic-Cypress: Way of making Internet and Intranet information easily accessible. By Ambient Webs LLC
8. Upload+: Secure, cleaner and customized file names for uploaded files. By Pixline
9. User Permissions: Per-post user permissions By John Godley.
10 WP-DownloadManager: Adds a simple download manager to your WordPress blog. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
11 WP-Footnotes: Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post. By Simon Elvery.
12 WYSI-WordPress: This plugin adds a more advanced WYSIWYG editor to the WordPress post editing screen. It includes advanced image handling, including on-the-fly thumbnail resizing and compression. It also includes Martin Chlupác’s excellent Iimage Manager v 1.4.1. By MudBomb.com.
13 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: Returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches, limited by a certain relatedness threshold. Like the tried and true Related Posts plugins—just better! By mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine).

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