Introducing WordPress Jetpack.

What features does it have?

Version 1.1 of Jetpack includes:

• Gravatar Hovercards: Find out who’s commenting on your posts with enhanced information for Gravatars (includes full name, bio, other web profiles).
• WordPress.com Stats: Keep on top of your traffic with powerful and simple to understand statistics for your site.
• Twitter Widget: Keep your readers more up to date by syncing your tweets to your site via a simple widget.
• Shortcodes: Quickly add movies, images, and more to your posts and pages with a single line of code.
• Shortlinks: Automatically creates an easy to copy/paste mini-url for any post on your site.
• : Use the famous markup language to quickly create beautiful mathematical expressions and equations.
• Sharedaddy: Your readers can easily share your posts via email or their favorite social networks.
• After the Deadline: Your writing will improve thanks to this artificial intelligence based spell, style, and grammar checker.

Some of these features use the powerful WordPress.com cloud, others are popular features provided for the convenience of not having to install and manage several separate plugin installations.

It’s easy to see that this one plugin, might just replace quite a few plugins that people use everyday.

Which feature interests you the most?

Highlighted features:

• Internal Linking
• Admin Bar
• Streamlined Writing Interface
• Post Formats
• Network Admin
• List-type Admin Screens
• Exporter/Importer Overhaul
• Custom Content Type Improvements
• Advanced Queries
• Refreshed Blue Admin Color Scheme

New features like the admin bar and internal linking tool will be useful for clients that want to update their own website. WordPress developers and theme creators will find the new Post Formats to be a very welcome addition.

Internal Linking

When you create a link in WordPress you now have the option to choose from existing content on your website. This is a nice feature that speeds up finding internal links within your website when you want to create a link. In the past, you either had to know the URL, or find it on your website and copy and paste it in the old link editing window.



Admin Bar

The admin bar is nothing new to people who use wordpress.com to host their blog, but for a self hosted Word Press website.. this is new. The admin bar appears at the top of your website when you are logged in. It adds tools for you to quickly add and edit posts and pages, and also provides quite a few other tools. The bar is context sensitive, so the tools available to you change depending on what type of content you are looking at.

While the admin bar can be helpful, if you find that you don’t like the new admin bar, you can disable it by going to your personal user settings in your WordPress admin area.

Post Formats

Just like tumblr, the new Post Formats enable theme developers to customize the way different Post Formats appear on the website. Supported Post Formats include: aside, gallery, link, image, quote, status, video, audio, and chat.

tumblr post format

Summary

All in all, the new features in WordPress 3.1 look to improve upon an already great platform. You can download WordPress 3.1 here or update from your WordPress dashboard.

Don’t forget to leave a comment and let us know what you think of the new WordPress.. do you like the changes? or not?

“Wait.. did you say block traffic.. that sounds crazy right?” Not necessarily.

• There is good traffic (potential customers, people who are interested in reading your content..)
• There is bad traffic (comment spammers, image hot linking, spoofed links on other sites linking to yours..)

To block a certain domain or domains from accessing your website, you can edit your .htaccess file with the following:

<Limit GET HEAD POST>
order allow,deny
deny from annoyingdomain1.com
deny from annoyingdomain2.com
allow from all
</LIMIT>

Just change out the domain (or domains) that you want to block, add the code to your .htaccess file and upload to your server. Those domains should now get a 403 (forbidden) error when attempting to access your website

If you use WordPress (you don’t have to be using WordPress for this to work), the WordPress codex contains a very useful article about combating comment spam and blocking access.

They recommend using:

SetEnvIfNoCase Via evil-spam-proxy spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer evil-spam-domain.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer evil-spam-keyword spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Via pinappleproxy spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer doobu.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer poker spammer=yes

Order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from env=spammer

Hope you found this tip useful!

Shopp

The Shopp plugin has been around for a little while and continues to be our plugin of choice when integrating an e-commerce solution for Word Press. They offer extra modules for common gateways and shipping providers, and with the ability to modify the page templates as child templates, you can style it almost any way you want.

Shopp is an e-commerce plugin that adds a feature-rich online store to your WordPress-powered website or blog. Get your store up and running in minutes. Then, take it to the next level with the flexibility of Shopp’s customization tools that allow production studios and power users to tailor every aspect of the shopping experience.

Simply Exclude

There may come a time when you need to exclude categories and pages from your feed or navigation menu. Simply Exclude by Paul Menard, makes this easy.

Provides an interface to selectively exclude/include categories, tags, authors and pages from the 4 actions used by WordPress. is_front – When the user views the Front page. is_archive – When the user views an category or tags Archive. is_search – When the user views a search result page. is_feed – When a Feed is viewed/requested.

Secondary HTML Content

Here is a handy plugin that can help you manage multi-column content. Say you want to add some content to a sidebar, but only have that specific content show up on a certain page.. this plugin makes it easy.

Add up to 5 blocks of HTML content to WordPress pages andposts. A perfect solution for layouts with distinct content “blocks”, such as a sidebar or multi-column view. When editing content, the secondary WYSIWYG content editors will appear beneath the standard content editor.

Syntax Highlighter Evolved

Ever need to post some code for a tutorial? or maybe as an example? The Syntax Highlighter Evolved plugin helps make this process simple while also adding nice formatting, and of course syntax highlighting.

[html]
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<pre><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>PHP Code Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>PHP Code Example</h1>

<p><?php echo ‘Hello World!’; ?></p>

<p>This line is highlighted.</p>

<div>
This is an
example of smart
tabs.
</div>

<p><a href="http://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a></p>
</body>
</html></pre>
[/html]

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved allows you to easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without loosing it’s formatting or making any manual changes.

Headspace2 SEO

Headspace2 SEO is a powerful plugin that helps you manage page titles, descriptions, meta tags, and a whole lot more. This is one plugin you don’t want to miss!

HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site.

So how do you exclude categories from your feed when using FeedBurner?

The solution is easier than you might think…

Exclude Word Press Categories

We stumbled onto this little trick from jaypeeonline.net and decided to share it here.

First determine the post category you want to exclude by going to your admin panel and click on Posts > Categories, and then click the “edit” link. In the edit window, look at the URL in your browser URL bar to see the category ID. It should look something like this:

http://[yourdomain.com]/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&cat_ID=5
The ending number is the post category ID.

Now that you know the post ID, you can modify your feed URL to exclude it.

Original Feed URL:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed/

Edit Feed URL to:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=-5

Adding another category:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=-5&cat=-6
Or try…
http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=-5,-6

Sounds great, but what if we want to include a single category or certain categories in the feed and exclude the rest? Try the solution below.

Include Word Press Categories

Original Feed URL:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed/

Edit Feed URL to:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=5

Adding another category:

http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=5&cat=6
Or try…
http://[yourdomain.com]/feed?cat=5,6

Just remove the “-” and your ready to go!

Features:

• Image Search
• Advanced Image Search
• Drag and Drop images right into your edit window.
• Easy to install and use.

Licensing:

The images provided by this plugin use the Creative Commons License with a few conditions:

• Attribution – Each image has a small watermark and a caption with a link.
• No Derivative Works – You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

From our testing, the plugin appears to work as expected, but does seem to conflict with a few other plugins that enhance the edit window in WordPress.

Give it a try, you just might like it!

• Twitter Tools – This plugin that creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.
• Twitter for WordPress – Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.
• Tweetable – Tweetable is a WordPress Plugin intended to help integrate Twitter into your blog. It can tweet your blog posts as they are published, shortening the URLs with either Tr.im or Is.gd and optionally including Google Analytics campaign tags. You can display your latest tweet(s) in your blog sidebar with a customizable widget, which can even display your follower count.
• Official Twitter Widget – Widgets let you display Twitter updates on your website or social network page.
• Twitpress – Twitpress is a really simple WordPress plugin that does one thing: Every time you publish a post on your blog, it tweets an update to your twitter account.
• Bird Feeder – Bird Feeder is a WordPress plug-in that simply tweets when you publish a post. It doesn’t do anything else, nor will it ever.
• Twitterfeed – Posts your blog updates to your twitter account. Login to twitterfeed using your OpenID, provide the URL for your blog RSS feed, and how often to post to Twitter.

Follow Me Plugin Website

WP FollowMe is a wordpress plugin that allow you to add a twitter “Follow me” badge on your wordpress blog.

With FollowMe you can:

• change the color of the badge
• change the follow me label (Follow me /  Follow us)
• change the position of the badge (left side or right side and the distance from top)

What you need to use this plugin :

• a wordpress powered website (blog)
• a twitter.com account (obviously)

Testing 123 .. cross your fingers.

Here is the link to the plugin : Twit-update

Generally: if you’re upgrading from an older release I recommend to read the HISTORY.txt file to follow-up on all the enhancements and bug fixes, they may require re-configuration of your settings (e.g. date-picker, WP comment form feature etc.)

It is important to note, that WP’s auto update process is far from flawless, ie. it may overwrite any of your custom settings (CSS theme file, background images, font files etc). Please always make backups of files you need to preserve!

With v8.5+ cforms supports a separate custom user folder to store your tailored CSS, font and image files! Simply create the folder:

/plugins/cforms-custom

and move your CSS (including images!), font & background image files (CAPTCHA) to it.