I have a lot of events coming up, so I’ve been trying to coordinate and manage my schedule in a more efficient way. I use Google Calendar, with various calendars that I toggle on or off based on what I want to see. Lately I decided to integrate some of the event information from my Google calendar into my WordPress blog.

I have two new buttons on the top: My Calendar and Presentations. Using the ICS Calendar plugin for WordPress, I integrated the events into my blog by plugging the ICAL feeds for the calendars into the ICS plugin’s settings.

The plugin works pretty well. It automatically pulls the event information from the feed without requiring you to do anything in WordPress. You can specify the format for the event details using the tags in the plugin’s settings page. My custom format looks like this:

<h3>%event-title%</h3>
<div class="icalmeta">%date-time%<br/>
%location%</div>
<p>%description%</p>

It’s a little snazzier than the basic page I had previously used. And I only have to enter event information into one place.

It’s always hard to tell exactly why or how a site gets hacked. One of the WordPress sites I created for a client kept getting hacked. I took more extreme security measures, changing the database table prefix, adding an htaccess file to wp-admin that filtered IP addresses, adding a plugin to encrypt logins, adding a firewall, moving wp-config to another directory, and other measures. I thought the problem was with WordPress.

Then last weekend, I checked the site, and it was totally gone. Completely? Yeah, completely. I logged into cPanel and the entire database had been deleted. Previous hacks had just deleted all posts, pages, and users tables in the database. Now the hacker turned it up a level and deleted the entire database.  Read the rest of this entry »

You can add more than one sidebar section to your WordPress site. For example, with the stc-intermountain.org site, I added a whole bunch of additional sidebar sections in the Appearance > Widgets section. Read the rest of this entry »

When you transfer WordPress from one web host to another, you have to go through quite a few steps, especially if your current web host owns the domain name. Transferring the domain name is the biggest hassle, because it requires a handful of special codes and verifications, but just understanding what’s involved in a site transfer can be somewhat overwhelming. I just helped a person with Yahoo web hosting move to Bluehost, so I’ll briefly outline the steps below in case you’re thinking of moving to a new web host.
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12/9/09 update: I changed it back.

I recently decided to change my blog theme. I know that people are interested in content more than design, but it’s worth a post explaining why I changed this theme.

I recently switched blog themes

I’ve had the Limau Orange theme on my blog for about two years now. I grew tired of looking at it, and the design seemed a little out of date. Woothemes.com was running a Black Friday 50% off deal, and since I’ve always been impressed by their themes, I took the plunge and joined the Developer Club. This gives me access to all their themes with the ability to use them on as many domains as I want. By the way, if you want a theme, let me know and I’ll give it to you for free (yes, I can do that — I checked with them).
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I’m giving a webinar for STC community leaders on January 28 titled “Site Critiques and WordPress Q&A.”

Here’s the description:

Because most communities have far more virtual participants than physical participants, establishing a strong web presence where members can find information, interact with each other, and access resources is critical. In this community webinar, we’ll review a handful of chapter or SIG sites and discuss what’s working well and how they might be improved. If you want to have your site reviewed, send me the URL before the webinar.

We’ll also talk about WordPress — a popular platform many chapters are using for their websites. As a WordPress consultant, I deal with all kinds of WordPress questions, from customizing themes to implementing specific plugins, tweaking the stylesheet, inserting PHP tags, and fixing crashed sites. If you’re currently managing or implementing a WordPress site, bring your questions and I’ll try to answer them. I’ll also go over my top 10 recommended WordPress plugins.

Sign up for the webinar here.

You can install WordPress locally on your computer if you’re traveling or planning to be offline and you still want to work with WordPress.

I also embedded this video in a WordPress wiki that I’m developing.

Installing WordPress locally involves about 6 steps:

1. Download and install Wampserver.
2. Create a database in phpmyadmin.
3. Add a user with privileges to the database.
4. Download WordPress and extract to a folder in the www directory.
5. Customize the wp-config-sample.php file.
6. Run the WordPress install script at wp-admin/install.php.

Section Widget

The winner of the latest WordPress plugin competition is the Section Widget by Godfrey Chan. I was exploring it yesterday, and I’ve got to say, it’s one super cool widget. Look in the lower-right corner of my sidebar to see it in action.

The Section Widget provides a tabbed widget, first of all. On each of the tabs, you can type your own text or code. You can also choose from one of about 20 different styles. And you can apply logic to the widget’s appearance in your blog, so you can set it to display only on certain categories, pages, or sections.

I like the tabbed widget because it allows me to display content in a compressed way — content that would otherwise be buried in my archives. I chose to add two custom bookmark lists and one list of random posts. (I chose the posts in my bookmark lists rather quickly — one tab shows my top 10 or so, another contains posts oriented for students.)

I did have a little trouble getting the Section Widget installed. It seems to take a lot of memory, so you may have to disable your other plugins first (if you run into trouble).

The two runner up plugins are Advanced Export for WP and WPMU, and Live Blogging. The Advanced Export is quite useful as well because although you can export your posts from WordPress using the built-in exporter (Tools > Export), the file is usually larger than 2 MB, which is problematic. When you try importing an XML file larger than 2 MB into another WordPress installation, the PHP rules block it because of a standard 2 MB limit.

To get around the limit, you have to install a php.ini file (which controls how your server’s PHP handles scripts) in your file directory, and then tweak a few limits within that file. In my experience, tweaking the php.ini file is anything but intuitive and sometimes doesn’t work. It’s much easier to just export about 7-8 separate XML files (broken up by date) and then upload them individually.

As for the Live Blogging plugin, I don’t have a use for it, but if you’re attending a live event or updating scores for a football game, it might be useful.

It seems like everyone is moving to WordPress lately. A few months ago, David Farbey moved his blog to WordPress. Scriptorium recently converted their site and blog to WordPress. One die-hard Movable Type interaction designer at my work is moving to WordPress. And now The Content Wrangler has moved to WordPress.

I actually helped Scott transition his site from Expression Engine to WordPress. Converting the site was not necessarily easy, because WordPress doesn’t automatically import Expression Engine databases (like it does with Blogger, Movable Type, and other platforms). You have to run a manual script to convert the entries over.

And while we used a theme from press75.com, we customized it, hiding the featured panels, changing the widths of sidebars, customizing the banner, adding in share-this-post buttons in the post headers, customizing the display of podcasts,  adding a mobile view, integrating an asides column, including author pages, adding the sidebar ads, adding the big subscribe buttons in the upper-right corner, and making other tweaks here and there.

The Content Wrangler on WordPress

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I woke up from my long Sunday nap to see all kinds of commotion about upgrading WordPress to 2.8.4 due to a worm that is currently circulating. The WordPress blog reports:

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

Upgrading to 2.8.4 is pretty easy and won’t take more than 5 minutes. Here’s the process I recommend: Read the rest of this entry »