This is very important for administrators who use Amazon Webstores and for anyone that feeds their content off of remote xml data. If the generation of your sites pages can be unlimited based on an external data resource you should examine more indepth ways to restrict access to any bot.

For WordPress users you want to restrict access to files and directories that are not part of your site. You may also want to restrict access to your images and cache files.

A basic WordPress robots.txt file could include the following:

Notice User Agent * is all…. and that disallows are at the top
followed by overrides for Google AdSense.
An included badbot is also banned based on their user agent info found in the webserver logs.

Remember that a robots.txt file is only as good as the bot that reads it.
If someone is using wget to grab your site or a bot designed to harvest emails and links you are better off stopping it with script level denial, .htaccess or firewall commands.

If your site is getting hammered then contact your Service provider for help.

This info is just for reducing unneeded or unnecessary load by having bots run around in circles not finding what they should be looking for.

Most of the products showing this feature include freeware but there are a number of coders that want to make some cash off their hard work and registration or stat gathering is one way they know who where when of sites that use their plugins.

Harvesting of information including the registered email, IP , Site Name and domain along with real time stats for every instance of the plugin being run. Meaning they know where your site is and what your visitor stats are.

Some authors just want their users to register and require your email.

Others are going a little too far it seems.

Site statistics are both private and internal information that no professional website owner wants to give away. These statistics can be used for marketing of advertising and they are never disclosed anonymously.

So, What will happen with this new fad?

Hopefully it will end or be monitored by the core software designers.

More importantly since WordPress has moved to internal automatic updates some of this software could be installed without prior notice.

This would be an atrocious breach of confidence between users and developers and it could mean problems down the road.

So Keep Your Eyes open because someone may be watching your site from the inside.

One of the nice ways we can do this is by giving our visitors the ability to quickly post backlinks and announcements on social and directory networks when they like what they have read. This is where the Sociable Plugin for WordPress really shines.

With about 100 optional sites you can insert links to all of the popular social networks. When a visitor who belongs to one of these sites wants to give your post a bump they click on the icon and are taken to the social network with predefined fields and urls all ready to be submitted.

If you know of a site that isn’t on the list its not that hard to add them. Just find an appropriate ico file for the site and enter all the appropriate information in the plugin code.

The plugin will automatically insert the list you select on the bottom of your posts but you can use php within your post loop to place the button bar where you like it.

Sociable is free to use but considering all of the hours that went into finding and setting up the code (try to add a couple buttons manually and you will see) its cool if you send the author a donation so they can keep updating the code.

In wordpress 2.7 or higher you can install from your plugin settings page or you can visit

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Author: Joost de Valk

http://yoast.com/

Shouldn’t there be an option so the admin for the site can dump these posts?

Well it seems that the core developers believe everyone wants to have 5 backups of every post but with 2.8 about to be released maybe we should send them copies of all our useless revisions by email…. maybe they can find a useful reason to save them.

Does this sound like a little bit of a rant well yea maybe but if a feature could increase your database by 30% its reasonable for core developers to be forthcoming and alert us to the way to turn it off and clean the useless data out before we do an upgrade or install.

Anyway there is a partial cure.

The Revision Control Plugin that was so nicely created by Dion Hulse will allow you to set revisions to a reasonable number or disable them completely. (Which is what I do)

Download it as fast as you can and install it. Then make the appropriate settings in the plugin features page.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/revision-control/

Dion seems to write a lot of code related to every day problems that many WordPress site admins have.  This is a dedicated thing to do and I hope that someone in the core developer team takes note when developers spend hours fixing bugs or adding what could be considered mandatory features that have been left out of major releases.

Visit Dion’s Website http://dd32.id.au/

You are sure to learn a few things about wordpress that you never knew before.

It is also possible to turn off revisions completely by placing this line in your wp-config file but this means you can’t have control of the feature within wordpress.

define ('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);    //  TURN OFF POST REVISIONS.

Yea if you are like me and everyone else trying to deal with inserting images, making selections or even just spell checking got a lot harder after someone cranked up the autosave interval so high that it seems you can’t type more then a paragraph without it fireing off another autosave.

Well there is a way to increase the time between saves.

Open your wp-settings.php file and search for the word “save”

You will find a line of php to edit that looks like this.

/**
* It is possible to define this in wp-config.php
* @since 2.5.0
*/
if ( !defined( ‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’ ) )
define( ‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 60 );

What you need to do is increase the 60 to 600 .

The time is suppose to be in seconds but either there are other events that fire off an autosave or this calculation of seconds must be off.

Anyway if you want autosaves to happen more often you might find a lower number is better for you.

The comment in the wp-settings.php file says it is posible to set this in your config file but I have not had luck doing that although it could have been because I had an active post being edited.

Hey thats not a bad idea ..

Well instead of writing your own php mailer or using someone elses code you can do it through WordPress with wp_mail

The function is pretty straight forward with only a few options that need to be filled in to work.

Parameters

$to
(string) (required) The intended recipient(s) of the message.

Default: None

$subject
(string) (required) The subject of the message.

Default: None

$message
(string) (required) Message content.

Default: None

$headers
(string) (optional) Mail headers to send with the message (advanced)

Default: Empty

Usage

<?php wp_mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers = ); ?>

Remember to use clean vars

The idea of the plugin is to allow you to put a sidebar widget of your Loved and favorited songs that you listen to on Last.fm

To enable the plugin you need an account on Last.fm and you need to set values in your account to populate the widget. For instance if you wanted to show all the songs that you have selected as Loved you need to do that in your last.fm account and then select that option in the plugin options page.

Once you setup what images from songs you listen to you want displayed on your sidebar you can select the widget from your Appearance / Widgets setup and drag it where you want it to be or you can insert the PHP code to call the widget where ever you might want it on your page.

You might want to place it on your home.php front page or in a categories page and you would insert it using the following.

<?php lastfmrecords_display(); ?>

The major drawback we found that can be overcome in a new version or with some heavy editing by the enduser is that you can not display a few of these widgets to have a Loved and Recent  widget displayed.

We also had some problems with our permalinks hooking to Last.fm.

To overcome this you will need to edit the php of the widget and alter all of the references to how the plugin loads the widget and the options page by renaming constants.

It can be done but its not fun.

Other then that it seems to work pretty well and will automatically update your wordpress site when you are adding songs in last.fm

If you need something like this visit

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lastfm-records/

Considering we like most users who might find this something more annoying then useful when most of the updates are simply fixes that are not contributing negatively to the function of our site we tend to put off updates as long as possible.

With the introduction of Auto Updates for plugins… The WordPress Crew was really just getting us ready for 1 click updates to our core files.

This can be a pretty scary premise when you consider the number of files that are necessary for a wordpress install.

As of 2.7 the base install including the sample themes was a total of 603 files distributed within 76 directories. This is a fairly decent sized jump from only about 2 years ago when v2.0 had only about 340 files and half the directories. Sure function has increased but so has the time to manage the distribution.

Test Results
In our test we had 5 sites to update. One of which was running 2.5 just a few weeks ago until we updated all our sites to 2.7.

The first thing we did before upgrading was backing up our databases.

This is a pretty simple process that can be done within cPanel, PhpMyAdmin or since we are on Windows for our desktops we use the MySql Administrator Gui ap.

After your db backups are complete you want to disable your WP-SuperCache and delete all the cached files not just the expired ones. This is just a matter of cleaning that you should do once in a while anyway.

Backing Up Your Files
This really depends on your use of WordPress.

If you are accustom to using the Media Uploader then you should grab all your files by backing up your Uploads directory. You should also make backups of your wp-config.php file wp-settings.php file if you altered it and any other core or config file including your .htaccess file.

Next you should backup your wp-content directory for good measure especially if you are using the default theme and have made any changes to it. We actually forgot to check if AutoUpdate touches this file but while writing this .. if you use the default themes and have made changes to them … back them up.

Now all you need to do is press the button

click …… la de da …..  WHAT HAVE I DONE… NOOOOOO!

no really each of the five live sites that we upgraded did just fine.

But it is a difficult choice to do this on a live site vs migrating files manually from your test server.

After you test your site for function enable your cache and your plugins if needed and retest again by visiting all of your custom category and theme pages.

Remember to check all your plugins, menus and any function that you know you have edited.

Autoupdates are for live sites…. but if you are running a clustered server that gets 1,000 hits a minute you might think twice about it unless you can forward traffic completely away from your server through a dns setting until the process is over.

So, thats all for now… the first round of AutoUpdates have finally been put to the test.

We will probably talk in more detal about the process in other HowTos.

Share your comments about any problems you had we would like to hear them.

Because it is unfair or useless to expect your visitors to read through hundreds of posts to find something you wrote about your pet iguana 3 months ago a category system is provided to let you sort  your posts and generate a menu system for navigation.

You can assign posts to a category and you can also assign posts to Tags. When a visitor clicks on your sidebar posts menu they will be shown posts from that category. The code to display the categories is in your archive.php file. When a visitor reads a specific page on your Iguana you can display related tags at the top or bottom of your page that link to additional posts about your Iguana.

Setting up your WordPress Loop by using query_posts will allow you to modify the list of posts that are returned and either include or exclude posts based on a variety of criteria.

Using query Posts

To setup what data is retrieved in your loop you can place a query_posts before the loop.

General format is like this

<?php
<strong>query_posts('your value here');</strong>
while(have_posts()) { the_post();
<!-- loop -->
}
?>

/1

<hr />

To <strong>retrieve</strong> just a single page <strong>by the ID</strong> of 5
1 <? query_posts('page_id=5'); ?>

To retrieve just a single page by name

 <? query_posts('name=about'); ?>

Include or Exclude Categories

To retrieve posts only from a single category 7

 <?query_posts('cat=7'): ?>

To retrieve posts from a list of categories

 <? query_posts(cat=3,5,8); ?>

To exclude posts from Single category 7

 <? query_posts('cat=-7'); ?>

To exclude a list of Categories

 <?query_posts('cat=-7,-8,-9'); ?>

Order the Posts

To retrieve posts in Ascending Order

 <? query_posts('cat=-7&<strong>order=ASC</strong>'); ?>

To retrieve posts in Descending Order

 <? query_posts('cat=-7&<strong>order=DESC</strong>'); ?>

also use

orderby=author
orderby=date
orderby=category
orderby=title
orderby=modified
orderby=menu_order
orderby=parent
orderby=ID
orderby=rand
orderby=meta_value /This is an optional field set in the post

The Number of posts to get

To set the number of posts to be displayed per page

 <? query_posts('cat=-7&<strong>posts_per_page=6</strong>'); ?>

Use Meta or Custom Fields

Custom fields are inserted by you when you write the post and can be retrieved as Meta Data within the loop or in this case can be used for sorting your posts.

meta_key= The Name of the custom field
meta_value= The Value of the custom field
meta_compare= values of ‘!=’, ‘>’, ‘>=’, ‘<’, or ‘<=’

To retrieve all the posts that have any color set (including all colors)
query_posts(‘meta_key=color’);

To retrieve only the posts that have the color set to blue
query_posts(‘meta_key=color&meta_value=blue’);

To retrieve posts where the custom field price is lower or equal to 100
query_posts(‘meta_key=price&meta_compare=<=&meta_value=100‘);

To retrieve posts based on Tags

To get posts with a single tag
query_posts(‘tag=iguana’);

To get posts from either of these tags
query_posts(‘tag=iguana,chicken’);

To get posts that belong only to ALL tags
query_posts(‘tag=mypets+chicken+iguana’);

Note

There are a number of other ways to use the query post call to your database to setup how your posts.

A great way to use this call is to display your front page as a home page or setup special category theme pages to customize how special categories display for your visitor.

For more information visit the WordPress codex:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts

In addition to the Theme Template files you can also use Conditional Tags to instruct WordPress to do things when people are visiting certain Pages, Posts or when they are reading a post inside a certain Category or if they are viewing the Home Page.

When is this useful?

Well the real uses are limitless but in reality one of the most useful things about conditional tags is formatting your menus and sidebars when your visitors are reading specific content.

For instance if you had a conditional tag set for your Contact Page then you could remove advertising just for that page by loading or unloading sidebars limiting functions.

You can also setup added content that will only be displayed if you are an Administrator.

For example if you wanted something to show on all of your single post pages you could place this in your sidebar.php

if (is_single())
{
     echo 'This is a single post menu';
}

Obviously you would put a whole menu or banner or something useful in your code.

However if you only wanted to change something when a specific post is being shown you might use.

is_single(’35′)

Where 35 is the ID of the post or

is_single(‘Map Post’)
Where the title of the page is Map Post

is_single(‘map-post’)
Where the slug of the page is map-post

or maybe you have a category full of posts with maps.

in_category(’5′)
would work when ever a post is shown and it is in category 5

.

There are a heck of a lot of Conditional variables that you can use to limit or display information. And you should try to be as creative as you can when using conditional tags.

For more information visit the WordPress Codex page.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags

.

Here is a list of Conditions that you can use in your themes to restrict or display content based on if the value is true or not.

comments_open
has_tag
in_category
is_404
is_admin
is_archive
is_attachment
is_author
is_category
is_comments_popup
is_date
is_day
is_feed
is_front_page
is_home
is_month
is_page
is_page_template
is_paged
is_preview
is_search
is_single
is_singular
is_sticky
is_tag
is_time
is_trackback
is_year
pings_open