Three Wise Men

Using menus in WordPress 3.0

Menus are a new big thing in the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0 and most of the theme builders will have to add at least some minor support in their themes for menus to work. Not so long time ago we tested one of the WordPress nightly builds and we had some trouble with our theme. It was about time to address these issues and see how much work will be required to add support for menus to our theme. It turned out that the work was minimal and really simple. We did miss few things that would be nice to have. Read on to see what needs to be done in your theme to support menus.

READ MORE

WordPress 3.0 – What’s new

Image by koka_sexton via Flickr

New major release of WordPress is coming our way. Current release is marked as WordPress 3.0 beta1. We will take a look at what is new and if the new is good or bad. And we will provide screen shots in our quick preview, we promise.

Upgrading WordPress is always something that we don’t take so lightly. A typical website based on WordPress, it could be a blog or not, will have a lot of plugins installed, some widgets and a more or less customized theme, sometimes perhaps even a custom made theme. Upgrading a minor version is a minor pain which means that upgrading a major version will be a major pain. That is why we did this just for you. So that our site will be broken first and you can see where we went wrong. Read on if you want to see how we handled the upgrade.

READ MORE

Optimizing WordPress – Tips for Speed

Image via Wikipedia

WordPress is crap, but it is the best crap we can get. When your website, with WordPress sitting in the back, starts to pick up traffic, it will slow down and become unresponsive. Adding hardware will help, but correctly implemented load balancing and load distribution across more than one computer can be tricky and expensive. Trying to optimize WordPress and the web server itself usually gives better short-term results. In the long run even this won’t help and it will just postpone the inevitable, you will have to cluster in one way or another. I am not going to talk about clustering and load balancing today, I will focus on optimizing your WordPress. Newbie friendly, yet hardcore, meaning that I will provide explanation for all the complicated stuff.
READ MORE

WordPress plugins you need to survive

This is a list of WordPress plugins that we use and more or less can’t live without. In alphabetical order:

• After The Deadline – Spelling, style and grammatic checks. It helps some, after all we’re not the native English speakers.
• Akismet – Spam control, this is the second defense line in case the first one fails.
• All In One SEO Pack – Yes, we are optimizing our pages so that Google and the likes have less trouble finding us.
• Bad Behavior – First defense line for spam. Bad Behavior is here to relieve the stress from Akismet. A clever idea of fighting spam even before you start scanning it for banned words and phrases. It does its job by checking HTTP_AGENT and few other protocol specific things. It will be good until spammers learn how to fake this.
• Google Analyticator – Adding Google code snippets to your theme so that you can use Google Analytics can be a drag. This plugin will do this and more instead of you. The Google Analytics dashboard widget is bloody excellent!
• Google XML Sitemaps – Generates sitemap list for Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and many others. Again one of the SEO things …
• Gurken Subscribe To Comments – For people who wish to track the feedback on their comments. Disabled by default, unlike some other sites.
• Our ToDo List – Which usually contains items named: ‘Review this’.
• Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu – Because it is just pretty! Useful too!
• Sociable – The ability to share. Sociable supports many, many, many different places where people can submit your posts for others to see.
• Visual Code Editor – Free the code, share it! And if you do it then make sure it is properly entered. Visual Code Editor takes care of writing the code in visual WordPress editor.
• WP-Footnotes¹
• WP-Syntax – Remember the part about sharing the code? If you do it also make sure it is properly syntax highlighted. This plugin will do that for you with the help of the Geshi.
• WP Super Cache – Not that we have so many hits, but we like to be ready.
• Zemanta – At last but certainly not least, this little gadget. Zemanta will scan your post and extract relevant links, keywords and find relevant images for you. Then you can add them to your post with few simple clicks. Then you can brag around about semantic web and Web 3.0.

1. Because sometimes you just need them. [↩]

Zemanta features – TWM!

Guys at Zemanta, that did such a great job with WordPress plugin, which makes writing blogs easier than eating pancakes, featured Three Wise Men in their blog!

Thanks for the plugin and keep up the good work! Thanks for the feature too. ;)