I really have enjoyed using FeedForAll as a nice, customizable way to insert ANY RSS feed into a web page. I use it with some of my wordpress sites to get relevant news (relevant to the page in question) published without the toil of multiple daily updates. It’s a nice “set it and forget it” style tool.

Recently though I wanted to make some tweaks to the layout of some of my feeds:

I was VERY glad to find the documentation here showing me what to add to my rss feed template file to sort the entries by date (newest first) and to change the default 5 feed items caught up to what I was looking for (10 items).

I really appreciate this free tool and ESPECIALLY thanks for the great documentation!

I’ve just updated my Wordpress install on 2 sites up to the new release version 2.7 which is now two days old or so. I quickly took a look at the sites and saw that the global translator plugin wasn’t working. (It was giving 404 errors, or…. “nothing found for es” for example.) After a quick look at the FAQ, I just navigated to the settings page for the plugin and scrolled to update options (without really making any other changes) and all is back to normal.

I expect to ripple the new version of wordpress around to my other sites over the next week or two. Right now there is not a pressing need to upgrade (2.7 is a new feature release, not necessarily security update.)

I spent the better part of a Friday night sorting this out. I had just launched 4 new wordpress blogs that were secondary installs on each server. (I use a VPS and /home/domain/www/ was the primary wordpress install – the secondary installs existed at /home/domain/www/secondsite ) . The problem was that I switched on the fancy permalinks in the control panel of wordpress and after that nothing worked but the main page. Setting things back to the default I could see posts, but not the feed or anything else that relied on mod_rewrite.

Everything else gave the server generated 404 error page. I started by comparing .htaccess files they seemed fine. Then I disabled all the plugins and switched back to the default theme. That didn’t solve things. I disabled and re-enabled the pretty permalinks THAT didn’t work. I started nosing around the VPS’s /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file and made sure mod_rewrite was there (of course it was because the pretty permalinks work on the /home/domain/www install of wordpress…)

So, the fix is to have a directory entry for that folder with AllowOverride ALL to allow the .htaccess to override the default settings. (Or change the default folder settings for apache to allow overrides.) It has to be done in .htaccess

An example of setting the default to allow overrides (allow .htaccess “stuff”) is….

<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

You can use that template to specifically allow that for your chosen directory and hopefully not have the hair pulling evening that I did.

I’ve started using a “universal translator” plugin for wordpress across most of my sites lately. In the past I’ve seen many people using google or bablefish translation to view pages (according to the logs.) I thought it would be a great convenience and perhaps open up my posts to be searched by viewers who read other languages. I’ve studied Spanish for quite some time and previously have studied German and French. Since, the universal translator plugin is based on google’s translation engine I know it’s not going to be perfect. But, I did a bit of proofreading in the languages I could and from what I could see it was more or less intelligible (obviously there were some problems, but I’ve seen (MUCH) worse translations of Japanese news-stories to English..)

Anyway, the nature of the plugin is that it’s not possible to manage the translations (they’re dynamically pulled from your pick of several translation services.) I have had relatively NASTY feedback from one reader that the Danish version of the page was jibberish (gibberish?) and there should be a link to the original as it MIGHT make sense. Well, for those that are interested there are links on each page to the original as well as the various translations. Just look for the various flags in the sidebar. (I know a flag does not equal a language, but that is the way a good many sites do it and it makes sense to most everyone.) This, and my other sites are originally written in English. I would love to manually translate everything into other languages, but at present the time/expense of that is prohibitive so for the present time, machine translation is the only way we’ll have multi-language content here.

(The Spanish language translation alone could take me several years to complete the way my current schedule is….)

I hope viewers will appreciate at least the attempt to make this site more accessible.

I vaguely remember hearing about Google Gears when it was announced and it wasn’t the kind of thing that grabbed a lot of peoples imagination or a lot of attention. Here’s the description from the Google Gears site (gears.google.com..

Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:
Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance

But… the next version of Wordpress (2.6) is supposed to support Google Gears and here’s what exciting things this can mean…

First up, I think of all those times that I’ve been hard at work on my wordpress based sites when… the internet connection goes out for an unknown stretch. From time to time we have had cable internet outages that have had me pulling hair out because up until the outage I was making quick and significant progress on my site(s). With Google gears that MAY not be a problem from what I’ve seen talked about it may be possible to make OFFLINE changes and then the next time the internet connection is available those changes can be synchronized. How cool is that!

Here’s the next big item. Speed. Sometimes doing lot’s of changes in a wordpress site is the kind of thing that’s frustrating because it seems like the changes are quick, but waiting for the page refresh… isn’t. Given the nature of Google Gears IF you enable google gears with your wordpress site it should behave more like a local application.

All in all, THIS is the feature in 2.6 that I’m eager to see in action. Wordpress 2.6 is due out in August.

As you know I’ve used wordpress as a platform for many of my sites. It makes updating and adding information so quick and easy (as well as great extensions available for it and good theme possibilities.) Anyway, I’ve wanted forum functionality on a few sites as well and so I installed bbpress v. 0.8 some time back. I was able to integrate the installs with their respective Wordpress installs and share users. At one point though,l I upgraded Wordpress to 2.5.1 and a few weeks later when I tried to log into the forum…. my password was rejected. At first, I suspected a security breach, but tested the login with wordpress… it worked there, but not bbpress….

So, I looked at the bbpress site and found that the 0.9 series had been released of bbpress. The good thing is that it fixed integration with wordpress. The config file for the older version was simply config.php, now it’s bb-config.php Among the things I really like is that more is configurable through the web interface. Akismet has been moved to a plugin, the key is configured in the web gui now. (You have to remove your old style config file and start fresh.) The new version looks head and shoulders higher than the last.

And yes, after the upgrade I was able to use my login again.

I’ve started adding the Share This plugin to several of my sites and was frustrated on one site to see on the front page “SHARETHIS.addEntry(” and a lot more ugly text. Upon investigation the < script tag enclosing the SHARETHIS javascript. So, I went on an investigation. I looked in the share this forums and found some people reporting the same problem with no real solutions.

I tested putting the javascript in the header manually. That didn’t solve it. I tried disabling other plugins and that didn’t work.

Finally, I compared the source of the working page and the non working page and that’s when I saw that the enclosing script tags were missing. So, I started looking at the template tag right before the sharethis plug. I noticed that the working site had <?php the_content(‘Read the rest of this entry »’); ?> the one that wasn’t working was using the rss head of the article to get the summary text on the front page. <?php the_content_rss(‘…. so I replaced that bit and the sharethis plugin started working on the front page.

I like this because it also solved the problem I had with the popularity contest plugin not working.

There are a lot of good things to like about the newer versions of wordpress. It seems to keep getting better. One of the really cool plugins is the Wordpress.com stats plugin. This lets you have a nice simple stats interface accessible from your Dashboard on your wordpress blog. (It uses wordpress.com to track stats, so you’ll need a wordpress.com account to be able to use it. I set up a wordpress.com account some time back to be able to use the akismet plugin and the same key that you have for akismet can be used for the stats plugin.) You essentially upload the stats.php file into your wp-content/plugins folder, enable it in the plugins list, then enter your API key in the configuration page for stats. That’s all that should be to it, but I’ve noticed sometimes that’s not all it takes to get things going.

One recent site upgrade I added the stats plugin to and waited, visited with a browser I wasn’t logged in on (as long as your logged into your account you’ll not add up your stats numbers.) Nothing. Other stat trackers I had showed that there had been traffic so I started investigating.

It turns out that your theme needs to have <?php wp_footer(); ?> at the very end of the footer before the </body> tag.

That was enough to make things start working again. (Actually, I had to flush out the cached pages held by wp-super-cache first.)

Among the things I like about the wordpress stats plugin is that there’s a dropdown list of ALL the sites with wordpress stats installed so I can quickly compare stats across all sites. It doesn’t offer the kind of detail that google analytics does, but it does a good job of showing the basic trend over time, and let’s face it if I checked google analytics enough to read all of it’s information I would not have any time to actually DO anything else.

By the way, the stats plugin like this get’s along just fine with cache plugins because the stats are called from a javascript code at the bottom of the page (which is cached just the same as the other content on the page.)

I’ve started the process of upgrading several websites to the newest release of Wordpress and one of the things that became possible was installing bbpress. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, wordpress is the “blogging” software that I use for this and several other sites. It makes adding content to a website very easy and has a great ability to be extended with plugins. bbpress is forum software by the makers of wordpress and with a similar look and feel. It also has the capability to share the user list with wordpress.

First off, you need to download both wordpress and bbpress from www.wordpress.org and www.bbpress.org respectively. Next you will need to download two plugins. One for wordpress, one for bbpress to allow the integration. Install wordpress, then make sure to follow carefully the bbpress install instructions at this page. Pay particular attention to the wordpress table prefix setting so that bbpress knows what table to access.

I’ve managed to get a basic integration (users that register at the forum can login to the blog, users that register for the blog can use the forum.) It’s possible to get fancier…. integratepress shows some other ideas. (Theme integration for instance – there are also ways that blog posts can be used as new forum topics.)

It’s good to see bbpress coming along to such a usable state, I’m looking forward to it’s further development and hopefully even easier integration in the future.

There are a couple new software packages in wordpress’ family: MuPress which is a multiuser (and multi-site) wordpress archicture… is available. IF that had been available a year ago, I might have based my sites on it, because it sounds as though you could have one backend for several sites. I may yet play around with it, but…. let’s see.. the other entry is bbpress which is a bulletin board backend that integrates with the wordpress user management system (shared user name/passwords/single login kind of stuff..) Good to see these releases and continuing development.