The Quickest Way to Create Custom WordPress Queries

by Sarah Gooding May 25^th, 2013 Leave a comment

When working with WordPress templates for posts and pages, WP_Query allows you to customize and order the information you want to display. The WordPress Query Generator is a new web application, created by the folks at Spruce Interactive. It’s a very useful tool for quickly spitting out customized queries to use in your templates.

The generator lets you easily select post status, type, order, etc via a dropdown menu. You can also type in your own categories and tags.

Here’s a sample query generated:

WordPress News

Google Penguin 2.0: Are You Nervously Watching Your Traffic Stats?

by Raelene Wilson May 24^th, 2013 5 Responses

If you don’t compulsively hit refresh on your site’s traffic stats, you might want to go and take a look.

Google has released the latest – and highly anticipated – update to its anti-spam algorithm, Penguin 2.0.

WordPress users could be forgiven for welcoming the news with trepidation. After the last major update a year ago many sites took a massive hit in traffic… including WPMU.org

This time, the roll-out hasn’t come as a surprise. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, announced on his personal blog on May 22 the roll out of the next generation of the algorithm was complete.

Opinion, WordPress News

What To Expect In WordPress 4.0

by Raelene Wilson May 24^th, 2013 19 Responses

Here at WPMU.org we are waiting in excited anticipation for the release of WordPress 4.0. It doesn’t matter that 3.6 is just around the corner – 4.0 just can’t come soon enough!

So to help calm our nerves we’ve been speculating about what it will include and what we hope to see in this future version of WordPress.

Some of our predictions might seem a bit more, erm, unlikely than others, but hey, we’re allowed to have some fun and dream a little huh :)

Let us know your thoughts, and what you’s like to see in WordPress 4.0 in the comments…

Posting From Google Glass

WordPress News

Google Wants Your WordPress Site

by Raelene Wilson May 23^rd, 2013 4 Responses

The biggest web company in the world has finally announced its support for the most widely used programming language.

At its I/O developer event last week, Google announced PHP is now supported in its platform-as-a-service offering, Google App Engine.

It’s fantastic news for WordPress users – it means Google can now host WordPress sites in its cloud and developers can take advantage of App Engine’s auto-scaling, reliability and security.

Plugins

Is Your WordPress 404 Page Killing Traffic & Drinking Your SEO Juice?

by Joe Foley May 23^rd, 2013 Leave a comment

A 404 page is the error page that users see when the page they’re looking for is not at the URL they’ve landed on. Some 404 pages are creative, some are useless, and some don’t even exist at all.

Users might land on a 404 page for various reasons – the page has been moved or deleted, they’ve followed a badly constructed link, or they may have typed in the wrong URL.

“Not Found” pages are more than just a nuisance, however, they may be losing you both visitors and SEO juice as well.

Is Your 404 Page Hurting You?

Community, News

The WordPress Planet Has Been Replaced

by Sarah Gooding May 22^nd, 2013 4 Responses

The WordPress Planet news feed is in some serious need of revamping. In our recent post “The WordPress Planet is Pants – and here’s how to improve it”, James pointed out what everyone was already thinking.

The WordPress Planet has been cluttered with irrelevant content for a long time. As no initiatives to improve it have been made known, the folks at WPLift has taken it upon themselves to create “A Better Planet,” a feed that includes WordPress news sources based on merit and relevance.

Introducing: A Better Planet

Miscellaneous, Tutorials

Getting help: Useful For Users or Waste of Space?

by Raelene Wilson May 22^nd, 2013 2 Responses

Let’s say you’ve just installed WordPress for the first time and you’re a bit confused about the admin area. What are posts as opposed to pages? Is the tools section the same as the settings section?

It’s easy for newbies to feel just a little bit overwhelmed. So what do you do? You click on the help drop down menu, of course. You know the one, it’s in the top right hand corner? You click it and it drops down and there’s text and stuff…? Yeah, I haven’t used it either.

Tutorials, WordPress News

The All New Post Formats in WordPress 3.6

by Raelene Wilson May 21^st, 2013 14 Responses

Post formats are set to get a major shake up in version 3.6 of WordPress.

And it will be hard to miss them – post formats will be smack bang above the editor, all in a neat row of large icons.

Community, Miscellaneous

Something is Rotten in the State of WordPress

by James Farmer May 21^st, 2013 15 Responses

To the vast majority, WordPress is the poster-child of the open source world.

With over 65 million sites worldwide, 52% of the top 100 blogs on the web and ~17% of the top million websites out there, it’s the ultimate tale of how a community driven project with a open source free-for-all GPL2 license can beat the big boys and take over the web.

It’s full of derring-do, us vs. them, the open internet versus the proprietary, and personal ownership vs. third party dependence – it’s a lesson in what happens if you ‘do the right thing’.

Mullenweg looking in no way at all like big brother...

Tutorials

Protecting WordPress from Dangerous Clients

by Sarah Gooding May 20^th, 2013 2 Responses

One of the scariest things a developer can hear from a new client is the infamous claim: “I know just enough to be dangerous.” Translation: I don’t really know much but I sure love to tinker with things! This always puts up a little red flag in my mind. However, a seemingly harmless bit of tinkering can have disastrous consequences on a live website.