Chris K Designs

It’s that time of year again, the WordPress Survey is up and waiting for your data. Please go supply some information about how you use WordPress. Before you get all scared about giving them information, here’s a little snippet about what it’s used for:

We hope that your answers can be beneficial to lots of people in the community (including you!). Results will be made available to all survey respondents and may be published at WordPress.org, on the WordPress Developer blog, and presented at WordCamps.

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Head on over today and give some information to help build a stronger product and community for WordPress.

WordPress 2011 Survey

The ‘draft’ status is a feature in WordPress that I use heavily. When I get an idea for a topic, I will typically just write up a title to remind me I have something I want to write about. I went looking for a way to quickly access my drafts and stumbled upon ‘Quick Drafts Access‘.

This plugin adds a menu item under the ‘Pages’ and ‘Posts’ sidebar menu of the WordPress Admin interface, with a count of the number of drafts you currently have. As expected, clicking on this will bring you to your list of drafts. Quick, Simple, and meets my needs. I figured, it could probably help some of yours too.

A few things I think I’d like to see out of this useful plugin would be the ability show this menu to only a specified WordPress role(s), making posts and pages a separate option (would allow the roles option to be more useful), and for WordPress 3.2+ I’d like to see this in the Admin Bar list so I can quickly get to the drafts from anywhere on my site.

I think these three options would make the plugin even more useful to me than it already is. Go install it today if you are having to manage a number of drafts on your WordPress site.

In the age of Professional Blogging, there are many ways to make money with your words. The most common is through advertisements. Some of the easiest way to make money are through targeted ad networks such as Google’s AdSense and Adbrite. You can guess, with the advent of advertising, came WordPress advertising plugins. I’ve got a winning combination of plugins and networks that you can use to help fund your blogging habits.
Continue reading “Pro Blogging Tip: Advertising with WordPress” »

As I have mentioned before, one of my favorite plugins for a WordPress site is W3 Total Cache. This plugin offers you the ability to user a myriad of caching options to best suit your needs. Well with WordPress 3.1, the Admin Bar was introduced where logged in users (administrators) get a gray bar with options to manage commonly used areas of the WP-Admin interface. Well, W3 Total Cache updated to use this menu for clearing your cache at any time.

 

I love this idea and I’m going to explore using this menu as a quick admin bar so I never need to visit the wp-admin dashboard if I so desire. I’m going to write up a ‘hack’ or possibly a quick plugin that will let us use this menu for making our administrative life easier as an admin.

Cheers!

It’s been a while since a post was up here, but I’ll be honest, the month of January was a little bit crazy at my real job so my plugins and WordPress posts took a bit of a back burner to 14 hour days :/. Well, I’m back and I have a few things waiting to come out in updates to a few plugins that I hope to have coded and tested in the next few weeks. For now, a quick tip on XML-RPC.

First off, what is it?

XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism. “XML-RPC” also refers generically to the use of XML for remote procedure call, independently of the specific protocol.

In short, it allows you to remotely manage the content of a website from outside of the websites framework. If you’ve ever been in the Settings menu and clicked on ‘Writing’ you might notice an option of “XML-RPC” option that allows for XML-RPC Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.

So what does that all mean? Well, for you WordPress users with fancy smartphones or blog management software, that means you can use applications to publish to your site. This includes the WordPress mobile apps for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. This will let you manage, create, and approve posts, pages, and comments while you are not at your computer. I use it for my comments. I hate getting emails about comments as it causes inbox clutter, instead I just let my phone check every 30 minutes or 1 hour for new comments. It also allows me to manage posts from other authors on one of my blogs. If you find a misspelling while on the go, no sweat, edit a post and save it to make that change live.

Yep, that’s right, you can now venture in to the scary world of ‘outside’ and still be able to manage your WordPress site. No what are you waiting for!? Go get some fresh air!