Sticky Posts

Ever had times when you needed to ensure that an announcement or post was read by all your readers? In the past, you could either use a plug-in to make a post “sticky” or do what I did — put the announcement up as a page then made sure that I directed readers there as often as possible in every post.

Well, now there’s no need to go to such great lengths to make a post “sticky”. The feature is included in the core program!  To make a post sticky, simply check the box “Stick this post to the front page” under the “Publish” menu.

Comment Threading

This is probably the most anticipated feature in WordPress 2.7. As with sticky posts, the feature was also previously available through the use of a plug-in, but is now built into the core program. I didn’t really like the plug-in, so I resorted to other methods to help myself and readers realize who is responding to which comment. Not a big deal, perhaps, but I’m not too fond of utilizing that many plug-ins.

Comment threading wasn’t turned on by default in my installation of WordPress 2.7 RC1 so if you are wondering where the feature is, you’ll need to go to Settings > Discussion > Other comment settings to enable it.

Automatically Close Comments on Old Posts

Spammers love to target old posts on blogs, and it’s been a chore to always have to monitor your posts and close the comments when they are of a certain age. WordPress 2.7 offers you an effective way to automatically disable comments on old posts of a specified age.

To enable this feature and set the “expiry” date, go to Settings > Discussion > Other comment settings (the option is just above the one to enable comment threading).

One-Click Plug-in Management

The Plug-in Browser/Installer is a very welcome addition to the core program in WordPress 2.7 — you can now easily browse for and install plug-ins from within the Dashboard, instead of having to first browse for one at WordPress.org, then download, unpack, upload and activate it!

Yes, I know there was a good plug-in for doing the same previously, but (again) I’m not a big fan of using too many plug-ins.

Batch Edit Posts/Pages

What happens when you decide that you need to add a new tag to a number of posts, or assign a new category to them? In the past, you would have to manually edit each affected post or page — time-consuming when you run a blog that has a good many years of archives!

With WordPress 2.7, you can now perform a batch update/edit:

1. Click Posts › Edit, or Pages › Edit.
2. Check the boxes of the posts/pages you want to edit.
3. Select “Edit” from Actions, then click “Apply”.
4. Add/edit/remove a tag, category or perform whatever edits you need to.
5. Click “Save”, and you’re done!

Quick Edit from the Posts Dashboard

I simply love the convenience and ease that comes with this enhancement. This is so much easier than having to navigate to each individual post in order to edit it!

Quick Reply to Comments

Again, another welcome added convenience! In fact, you can even do the same from the Dashboard, but that display gives you a truncated view of the comment — still alright for short comments, actually.

There are quite a number of enhancements that are also worth mentioning, like paginated comments, the ability to rearrange elements on the Dashboard, etc., but if I had to choose just seven, the above-mentioned will be my list.

What are yours?

While the first option is definitely the easiest route, using a commercial theme does not automatically mean that your blog will truly stand out in terms of design — others can buy and deploy the same theme. Moreover, sometimes you might find that you would be violating the terms of the license agreement should you wish to tailor the theme to your liking. You might have to pay for a “developer’s license” if you wish to do that.

Professional designers can definitely give you a unique theme, but that usually involves paying a good amount of money so unless you have cash to burn it’s not really an option for many.

So, we come to the option of creating your own. It sounds like fun and even easy, perhaps, but building one from scratch might prove daunting to many although there are great tutorials out there that give a step-by-step how-to (one of my favorites is the one written by SmallPotato a good while ago).

It’s a good thing that there are now a number of frameworks, or base themes, available on which anyone can utilize to build their own themes using the concept of “child themes”, i.e. by simply modifying or adding Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) components, one can easily build a new theme without having to tinker with PHP code.

For now, I’ll just leave off elaborating on the usefulness of child themes and CSS and just introduce the more popular frameworks that I personally have come across and had spent some time tinkering with.

Sandbox

Perhaps the first theme to be offered as a framework, Sandbox is beautiful code-wise and is a joy to work with. There are already numerous beautiful blogs built on the Sandbox framework, so it’ll be easy to find and see what others have done with it. To help you, Lorelle has a great list of all the available styles in the Sandbox theme.

Demo | Support

Thematic

Thematic by Ian Stewart is such a great framework that one can even use the theme as-is without customization — it looks good enough on its own. If you like, you can choose to purchase either one of two commercial child themes (Travailler and Acamas), or grab one of many free child themes now currently available.

Oh, wait! My bad. I forgot we are talking about creating your own WordPress theme here so forget I mentioned those.

Demo | Support

Theme Hybrid

I’m going to be biased here — Theme Hybrid by Justin Tadlock is now my favorite framework, and I am actually working on a child theme for my main blog based on Hybrid. Like Thematic, the theme is good enough to use as-is without customization if you like.

Demo

Carrington Blog

Carrington Blog by Crowd Favorite (Alex King) is excellent on its own and I’ve used it once on my main blog as-is. However, it’s proven a little daunting for a novice like me to customize and it’s no wonder — it’s been released as a framework more for the technically-inclined versus those who are more inclined to fiddling around with just the CSS.

Demo | Documentation

Now that you’re all fired up about creating your own WordPress theme, do look out for the next installment to the series where I’ll showcase some great sites and blogs where you can find inspiration.

Screenshot of CSS mark-up taken from Plaintxt.org.

If you’re looking to improve your blog’s page rank, Google has posted a compact guide Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide that will guide you on adopting some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike utilize to improve their sites’ crawl-ability and indexing.

The guide covers around a dozen areas that you can consider improving, e.g. title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, etc., and includes many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help explain the topics. It’s also easy enough for anyone, even those new to the concept of SEO, to follow.

Why improve my site’s SEO, you ask?

While it’s true for many Christian bloggers that putting their thoughts down on a blog is just one way to archive their thoughts and lessons learned, most times those posts do serve as encouragement and edification for others too. Moreover, if you’re trying to warn others in the church of false teachings and teachers, you’d want to get the message out to as many as possible. Adopting good SEO practices helps increase the visibility of your content on search results — most people will likely click on the first few results returned than navigating to others further down or on subsequent pages.

If you’ve not already done so, consider subscribing to updates on Google’s blog via RSS — Google will update the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

You can download the guide here (PDF).

Such online storage services are great if you work on documents and files on a number of computers in different locations. Personally, I like to sometimes bring work home so I can concentrate on completing the task in the dead of the night when there are few distractions. Sure, you can always email the file(s) to yourself or FTP it to a server, but why bother when you can just use a service like Dropbox?

What makes Dropbox different?

For starters, instead of having to log on to the service site, you download a client onto your computer (available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux) which then assigns a folder on your computer where you can easily add/delete/edit your files and they’ll be immediately synched. Create or delete a new folder in the assigned folder and it’ll be created/deleted on your Dropbox account too. The same goes for files.

To access the files on another terminal where you can’t install the client, you can access the web interface (shown below) to do the same.

Here comes the next great part about Dropbox: if you make changes to any file either from the web interface or from the specified folder on your computer, a notification will pop up to tell you just that on any computer where you have the client installed! This feature is great if you plan on using Dropbox to collaborate on documents with co-workers.

There are other great ways to use Dropbox that I’ll briefly detail below:

File Sharing
What good is an online storage service when you cannot share files with others? Dropbox lets you share files either via a link or by specifying a specific folder as Shared. Personally, it’s a simple and great way for me to share sermon mp3s and transcripts with friends without having to worry about mail attachment thresholds.

It’s also great for those who would like to add an audio clip on their blog but are unable to do so because of restrictions on the plug-ins that they can use, e.g. blogs on WordPress.com.

Basic SVN
Developers will know what a SVN is and appreciate its usefulness. For non-technical folks it just means that you can see changes made to a document and even roll-back or revert to an earlier version of the document, without having to rename each iteration.

Traditionally, if you have a document saved as DocumentOne, you might want to save a modified version of the document as DocumentOne-date. With Dropbox, you don’t need to worry about renaming your document — the SVN features in the service lets you see what changes have been made to the document, and you can even revert to any iteration (shown below). To take advantage of this feature, you’ll need to access your account via the web interface.

Best of all, you can also recover files that you accidentally delete too!

Photo Gallery
Dropbox offers a special folder as a photo gallery. As with services like Flickr, pictures dropped into this folder have thumbnails automatically generated (shown below). When you click a thumbnail to view the larger-size picture, you can navigate to other photos in the folder as a slide show.

The folder is private by default, but you can easily share it or any sub-folder within with friends and family using the public URL.

OK, I want Dropbox; how do I get an account?
Dropbox is still in beta, but those who already have an account, like me, can invite up to 10 people as users. The service is currently free, and all beta users receive 2 gigabytes of storage space. If you are keen on using Dropbox, just leave a comment and I’ll send you an invite via email.

Here are some of the add-ons and themes that I like and cannot do without:

GreaseMonkey
Essentially, GreaseMonkey allows you to customize the way web pages look and function. Once installed, you can easily add a plethora of free scripts to enhance your web surfing experience. For example, I use the Better YouTube, Better GMail 2, Better GReader, WordPress Comment Ninja (which is great for managing comments on your WordPress blogs) and Blog Comment Autofill scripts.

Download | Search for, and download GreaseMonkey scripts

TwitterFox
I love using Twitter and this add-on helps me keep track of tweets from friends and allows me to respond to private or replies immediately within the add-on itself. While there are good Twitter applications out there like TweetDeck and Twhirl, most of them are stand-alone which means I have to switch windows. With Twitterfox I can stay on any page I’m on and still get updates. Best of all, the add-on is unobstrusive, popping up only when you click on its icon in the browser’s status bar.

Download

AdBlock Plus
Ever been really annoyed at web sites that take forever to load because they are clogged with more advertisements than content? With AdBlock Plus, you can say goodbye to those frustrating minutes spent waiting — the add-on automatically blocks out advertisements on web sites! Even if it somehow misses out on a banner, you can right-click on the banner and “banish” it forever, i.e. that ad spot will not load the next time you visit the site.

I’d think it’ll be especially helpful for those on slow connections or volume-based access plans.

Download

URL Fixer
This is a great add-on to have if you have fat fingers like me — you know, like when you type “domain.con” instead of “domain.com” in the address bar and immediately get an error page. URL Fixer automatically corrects the typos you make when typing in addresses.

Download

Del.Icio.Us Bookmarks
Since I use Del.Icio.Us to store my bookmarks, this add-on helps integrate my bookmarks and tags with Firefox and keeps them in sync for easy, convenient access. There are quite a few add-ons for Firefox that do the same with your Del.Icio.Us bookmarks, but I chose to install this as it is the official add-on from Del.Icio.Us for Firefox.

Download

DownThemAll!
If you, like me, download quite a few files daily, this download manager/accelerator is the add-on you must have. DownThemAll! features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400% and allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time. Best of all, it lets you download all the links or images contained in a web page and you can even refine your downloads by specifying criteria to get only what you really want.

Download

FireFTP
Turn your Firefox into a FTP client with this free, secure add-on that provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. Along with transferring your files quickly and efficiently, FireFTP also includes more advanced features such as: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SFTP, SSL encryption, search/filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag-and-drop, file hashing, and much more. Why pay for stand-alone FTP clients when you can use FireFTP?

Download

FireShot
This add-on doesn’t shoot fire arrows, but lets you easily create screenshots of web pages like the ones I featured in my list of top 10 best-designed Christian blogs. Furthermore, FireShot* provides a set of editing and annotation tools which let you quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations — features especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers. You can also choose whether you want to capture an entire web page or just the visible part of the page. Captures can then be uploaded to free public screenshot hosting, saved to disk (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP), printed, copied to clipboard, emailed, or sent to a configurable external editor for further processing.

* Unfortunately, this add-on only works on Windows.

Download

WebMail Notifier
An unobstrusive add-on that sits in the browser’s status bar and notifies you if you have new mails on GMail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc.

Download

WiseStamp
I use GMail for both personal and the odd professional email correspondence. However, it is bothersome not having a signature manager under GMail, i.e. I often find myself having to add/edit my signature manually. WiseStamp allows me to specify two signatures — one personal and one business — that I can easily switch between.

Download

Foxkeh theme
If you like bright and cheery themes, then you’ll like Foxkeh! Based on the mascot at Mozilla Japan, it’s been a huge hit with many Firefox users. The mascot — Foxkeh — even runs while a page is loading! Who cares if some say it’s a little kiddie and girly? I like it! The preview showcases a Japanese interface, but you’ll be downloading the English version of the theme.

Preview | Download

Chromifox 2
If slick, clean themes are your thing instead, check out Chromifox 2 which draws its inspiration from Google Chrome. This theme is still listed as experimental though, so if you are not too adventurous, you can choose to download the current stable version of Chromifox instead.

Download Chromifox | Download Chromifox 2

I hope you’ve found a new add-on or theme that might be useful. What are your favorite Firefox add-ons and themes?