Wordpress Master » Wordpress Software

Thesis v1.7 is out! – New Features Inside!

Ed Gately — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 04:22:40 +0000

I decided to be adventurous tonight and be one of the first folks to install the v1.7 release of Thesis by DIYthemes. I’ve always been impressed by the code the team at DIY produce. This new version will not disappoint. Granularity of control seems to be the name of the game with this new release.

SEO goes to lightspeed

SEO for WordPress is going to be turned on its ear. You now have the option to apply custom and javascript settings for every post and page…. yes EVERY one. On top of that, you can also control ROBOT tages (noindex, nofolow, noarchive) for every post and page too! All of these options are no grouped on a new Thesis menu option titled PAGE OPTIONS.

Menu Layout Changes

I did have a moment of panic when I was looking to tweak the configuration of my Home Page meta only to find it missing from where I expected it. Version 1.7 of Thesis has had a reboot of the organization its menu. Items seem to be more logically associated.

There are 5 main pages now:

Site Options – organized for most of your top level configuration items

Design Options – organized to hold all items css type items

Page Options – new item holding page, post, category , robots and javascript customizations

Custom File Editor – virtually unchanged

Options Manager – AMAZING addition to save your config (Backup, Upload, Restore) crazy good for theme developers

Java Support

Poking around I noticed several check boxes for jQuery, jQueryUI, Prototype, MooTools, and others. This will be killer for removing the need for JS library folders. I can’t wait to get to playing with these.

Other feature ups

Easy 301 redirects for your affiliate links
New headline filter for creating diverse posts styles (think of “asides”)
Beefed-up Internationalization – better translation support
Improved core element defaults
Flexible new comment system – drag and drop display order of comments, trackbacks and comment form.

Installation was pretty painless. I would like to mention there is a slight difference between the Video Upgrade Tutorial vs the Written Upgrade Tutorial. I wound up making a small mistake following the written upgrade tutorial. (I will be posting an update on my little adventure with this later) Follow the Video Upgrade Tutorial and you will be golden.

Accessing WordPress functions from external PHP pages

Ed Gately — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:53:50 +0000

So a friend of mine shoots me an email today. She had a front end website, just set of basic pages built with PHP and one of the links on the navigation was a WordPress blog installed on the same hosting. She wanted to display an RSS feed in the sidebar of the front end website by using a nifty little script called Simple Pie.

Looking over the script, I found it to be a handy little script. It pulls an RSS feed and parses it easily for you and then you can output the parts you want with links to the full article. The only problem I found with what she was trying to do, she just wanted to parse the RSS feed of the WordPress blog on the same site and display the last 5 articles on the home page of the primary site.

This is easily done with about 8 lines of code. You can get full access to everything WordPress has to offer from external PHP pages on the same site.

The first thing you need to do is include a WordPress file in order to load the functions you’ll need access too:

require_once('./blog/wp-blog-header.php'); ?>

The above code is assuming that your installation is in the “blog” directory, naturally change it to reflect your installation. Once this is included in your script you can access all the WordPress functions. Now if we expand on that code as follows:

require_once('./blog/wp-blog-header.php'); query_posts('showposts=5'); ?>

Now if you plug through the code you’ll see that we are pulling the last 5 posts (showposts=5) and then we are looping through that information and writing it in HTML. Surround each title with an H2, or your own choice, and create a link with the appropriate WordPress permalink.

So instead of messing with an entire separate class or script we’ve included the WordPress functions, then just used the functions to display the information we already wanted. Keep it simple. Use the tools you already have available to you.

The main lesson I find with this example is that there is always 101 ways to skin a cat. The idea is to make sure you are using the tools already available to you, and implementing the solution that keeps it simple. Don’t get focused in on a solution and waste a lot of time, and never hesitate to ask for help.

Free Backlinks Using Social Bookmarking

Ed Gately — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:15:22 +0000

If you’ve studied SEO techniques at all you already know how important it is to have backlinks to your site. Doesn’t really even matter what kind of site you have, links from other sites to your site is how the search engines find you. In addition once you are found the search engines use these links as kind of a “voting” system to determine the value of your site.

The more backlinks to your site the better, but the quality of the links you are getting is also very important. So don’t just immediately think that getting 1,000′s of links will do anything for you if they are just from random no name sites.

Another reason to go after high quality backlinks is the larger benefit than just SEO purposes. I was talking with the owner of a large blog once and he brought something to light that I never realized before. He said that his number one source of traffic was Google. He received probably 30-40% of his traffic from searches on Google. But if you looked at the rest of the traffic as a whole, he was receiving 60% of his traffic all from other sites that were linking to him. While he’d never wish loosing Google’s traffic, the rest of his traffic all came from backlinks, and it was even more valuable from him on it’s own.

So let’s talk more on getting a backlink booster shot

The hottest topics these days are social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, social everything. While many of these areas offer opportunities lets just focus on the social bookmarking in this article.

There are literally hundred’s of websites dedicated to bookmarking sites online that might have valuable information and sharing those bookmarks with others. These networks are like large databases of links.

Lately, I’ve been investigating how to properly add links to my own sites into these social bookmarking sites. Not only could this mean lots of backlinks if done properly but with attractive listings you could open your site up to these networks of people looking for quality information.

There is an easy backlink builder for you to utilize

Creating and managing 100′s of bookmarking sites will be difficult, but it will also be well worth it. If you’d like to learn more about exactly how to create bookmarks and why there is a correct way and a wrong way, then you must read this quality PDF on generating free backlinks.

While I would highly recommend reading the PDF first because it is important to understand how to do it on your own, if you’d like to also learn an automated method of generating these backlinks, learn how to Drive Hordes Of Targeted Traffic In Minutes!