Meep’s Musings

Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category

Wordpress 2.3.1 came with a few good things but the dashboard is still the same bloated monster with the links to the Developer Blog and other news, which slow down loading considerably. Here are a few tips how on how to streamline it a bit and give you only what you need.

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Just took some long hours and now I have a (hopefully) working new theme on my blog. There might still be some bugs and quirks, so if anything looks strange, please tell me!

I’ve just updated to Wordpress 2.3.1 and still have to tweak plugins and themes, so please bear with me and the ugly default theme!

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What you need for this is first of all the SimpleTags plugin and an icon (quick image search). You will need to edit the file simpletags.php in your ‘wp-content/plugins’ folder.

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Link indication

With the help of this plugin, it is easy to asign a little image to each of your links and style them according to the target of the link. For example, any external link can be indicated by , and there are many more possibilities (e.g. for Wikipedia or IMDb links, etc.).

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This hack lets you set the numbers of posts to show under ‘Manage - Posts’ (tested on Wordpress 2.0+ only). You have to edit the file edit.php in the directory ‘wp-admin’. In this example, I change the number of shown posts from 15 to 30, but of course you can choose any number which suits you. Remember that the larger this lists becomes, the longer it takes to load.

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Spam Karma2

If your blog is hit by comment, ping back and referer spam and you’re tired of deleting everything by hand, Spam Karma 2 comes to the rescue. Through a variety of filters, it calculates each comment’s karma, reliably sorting out all illegitimate feedback (which has bad karma). It works very well and helps you get rid of all unwanted messages pronto. The myriad options are a bit intimidating at first and can be left at their default values, since Spam Karma 2 works its magic either way.

[tags]wordpress, plugins, spam karma2, spam[/tags]

myMooMus

This plugin with a rather cryptic name has finally been released in version 2.0 which means that now you can have your mood displayed as text and image - kinda like the mood themes known from LiveJournal. Of course it’s not only restricted to that but can also show your music, the weather, etc.

It’s easy to set-up (all you need is a mood theme, which shouldn’t be hard to come by ;)) and even easier to use: on your “Write Post” page, a section called “myMooMus” will appear under the text area, in which you can choose your mood and fill out the other fields. Click on “Publish” and voilà, you’re done.

I’ve made the following few adjustments:

• inserted a blank space between mood image and mood text
• added a class called “meta” to my theme style sheet to format the text displayed

Auto-close comments

This plugin shuts off your comments and pingbacks after 21 days - which helps to fight spam efficiently. All you have to do after activating the plugin is edit one random entry, and it kicks in. You can also specify the number of days the plugin should close the comments after posting.

After a while I became unsatisfied with the way Wordpress handles drafts, and especially how they are displayed. Wordpress simply puts title after title, which becomes soon confusing if you have more than one or two drafts. So I came up with this hack (Wordpress 2.0+ only). It arranges your drafts in an unordered list on top of your ‘Write Post’ page. ( Screenshot) You have to replace the following code in the post.php in ‘wp-admin’:

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