1. An account with x.co (which is the same as a GoDaddy.com account)
2. Install Twitter Tools for WordPress
3. Download this .zip file and extract it into wp-content/plugins/
4. Activate the Twitter Tools – x.co URLs plugin from your plugins list
5. Login to your x.co account and click on the ‘Settings’ tab, copy down your API Key.
6. From the ‘Settings’ menu select ‘Twitter Tools’ and you will need to enter your X.co API Key.
7. That’s it, you are ready to tweet your posts with x.co shortened URLs!

If you have any feedback let me know and I’d be glad to see what I can do to help you out. I will try and get this up on WordPress.org within the next day or two for installation directly in your WordPress admin area.

Check it out at the Better AdSense Targeting page. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Actions vs. Filters

There are two types of Hooks used in WordPress, Actions and Filters.
Actions are the hooks that the WordPress core launches at specific points during execution, or when specific events occur. Your plugin can specify that one or more of its PHP functions are executed at these points, using the Action API. These are most commonly used for the bulk of your plugin development.

Filters are the hooks that WordPress launches to modify text of various types before adding it to the database or sending it to the browser screen. Your plugin can specify that one or more of its PHP functions is executed to modify specific types of text at these times, using the Filter API.

An Example

Let’s take an example from my Updated Today Plugin. We’ll focus on the settings I have included for “Insert Into:”. The options are Header or Footer. What these reference is the functions wp_header() and wp_footer. Both are functions that exist in the index.php of your theme (or should exist). When a user selects the option of Footer as recommended, that tells the plugin to execute when wp_footer is run. How does it know when this is run? A Hook is how we know when it’s run. In the initial setup of the plugin, I tell the function ‘ck_wp_footer’ to run when the hook (in this case the footer) ‘wp_footer’ is executed.

[php]add_action(‘wp_footer’, ‘ck_wp_footer’);[/php]

It’s as easy as that. Want your code to execute when the header is run?

[php]add_action(‘wp_header’, ‘your_function_name’);[/php]

Keep in mind that some theme developers are now also building or creating their own hooks, so you can further customize your plugin/site to the max. If this isn’t quite making sense let’s have some real world experience. Below is a sample plugin for you to copy and paste into a new document named my-first-plugin.php.

[php]
/*
Plugin Name: My First Plugin
Plugin URI: http://www.chriskdesigns.com
Description: A template for your first plugin
Version: 0.1
Author: Chris Klosowski
Author URI: http://www.chriskdesigns.com
Copyright: 2010, Chris Klosowski
*/

add_action('wp_head','my_first_plugin_header');

function my_first_plugin_header()
{
?> }
?>
[/php]

Save it, and upload it into your wp-content/plugins/ folder of your WordPress site (use a development version if you don’t want this to impact your users). Activate the plugin and then visit your website. When WordPress starts to load the header, it executes the JavaScript alert we made and will wait to proceed until this alert is cleared. In this case it halts the loading of the site on purpose. I wanted you to see where the code executes, which we can identify as nothing on the page has loaded yet. If we were to change this to load in the footer, the entire page would load until the footer, then alert, and finish once you have clicked ‘OK’.

For a complete list of WordPress Hooks you can check out AdamBrown.info who keeps a complete list of Hooks for quite a few versions of WordPress.

Note: you need to have access to a Linux command prompt and the MySQL database via command line in order to perform this by my steps

Export…

First, we need to make an export of your current database, we’ll do this with mysqldump:
[text light=true]$ mysqldump -h yourhostnamehere -u YourUserName -pYourPasswordHere YourDatabaseName > dumpfile.sql[/text]
No, I didn’t forget a space after the -p flag. There is no space between the password flag, and the password itself.

Search and Replace

After that completes you should have a file named dumpfile.sql that contains your current database. Now it’s time to search and replace all references to the previous domain (we’ll call it domain-one.com) with our new domain (domain-two.com).
[text light=true]$ sed -i ‘s/domain-one.com/domain-two.com/g’ dumpfile.sql[/text]
The ‘-i’ flag is for inline. I simply replaces domain-one.com with domain-two.com where the command finds it. This means, any database settings or posts referencing the domain itself, will be altered, and therefore work when imported….so on to importing.

Importing the newly modified .sql backup

[text light=true]$ mysql -h yourhostnamehere -u YourUserName -pYourPasswordHere YourDatabaseName < dumpfile.sql[/text]
This command with the < or less than sign, pushes dumpfile.sql up to the database mentioned.

And there you have it, you just exported, modified, and imported an entire WordPress site including all categories, posts, users, etc…into a new database for use on a different site. Not so bad was it?

For more information on the sed command you can head over to brunolinux.com for a pretty decent sed tutorial and more options.

If you view the source code of your site after you’ve loaded it up in your favorite browser you’ll see a line like so:

[html][/html]

[php]function i_want_no_generators()
{
return ”;
}
add_filter(‘the_generator’,'i_want_no_generators’);
[/php]

Apply those changes, and save the file and you no longer have a version number reporting. Have no fear, the version will still report inside of the admin backend.

Alternatively, if you feel you need more security and don’t want to start messing with the WordPress core than this there is a great plug-in called Secure WordPress. This plug-in offers a wide array of security enhancements that include:

• Removing error-information on login-page
• Adds index.php plugin-directory (virtual)
• Removing the wp-version, except in admin-area
• Removing Really Simple Discovery
• Removing Windows Live Writer
• Removing core update information for non-admins
• Removing plugin-update information for non-admins
• Removing theme-update information for non-admins (only WP 2.8 and higher)
• Hids wp-version in backend-dashboard for non-admins
• Adds string for use WP Scanner
• Blocks bad queries
• Validates your site with a free malware and vulnerabilities scan with SiteSecurityMonitor.com