Restrict Usernames

The first step you can take to stop this type of thing is to download and activate a plugin called Restrict Usernames.

This plugin will allow you to restrict certain names from being registered (such as “admin”) or even names that contain a restricted username (such as “joeadmin” or “Head Admin” etc.). Of course you can also prohibit obscene words. (I’d give you some examples of those too, but I’m afraid I don’t know any.)

Here’s an example. I restricted the username “admin” so that it couldn’t be used as even part of username. And this is what someone trying to register a name with “admin” in it sees.

Here’s a list of some ideas from the plugin’s author for what you might want to prevent or require in a username:

• Prevent usernames that contain foul, offensive, or otherwise undesired words
• Prevent squatting on usernames that you may want to use in the future (but don’t want to actually create the account for just yet) (essentially placing a hold on the username)
• Prevent official-sounding usernames from being used (i.e. help, support, pr, info, sales)
• Prevent official username syntax from being used (i.e. if all of your administrators use a prefix to identify themselves, you don’t want a visitor to use that prefix)
• Prevent spaces from being used in a username (which WordPress allows by default)
• Require that a username begin, end, or contain one of a set of substrings (i.e. “support_”, “admin_”)

Disable Nicknames

The Restrict Usernames plugin above does its job, but there’s still one problem. Users can register with an innocuous username, and then they can change their nickname to anything they like on their profile page. It’s their nickname that’s seen on the public front end of the site, so in a way, that’s even more important than the username.

I couldn’t find a plugin to take care of this problem, but I did finally find a snippet of code you can put into your functions file. (Note: this snippet is adjusted slightly from the original source. Thanks to WPMU DEV developer Ve Bailovity.)

Place the following code in your function.php file. (Appearance > Editor > Theme Functions – functions.php)

// remove nickname
function prefix_hide_personal_options() {
        if (current_user_can('manage_options')) return false;
?>
<script type="text/javascript">
  jQuery(document).ready(function( $ ){
    $("#nickname,#display_name").parent().parent().remove();
  });
</script>
<?php
}
if (is_admin()) add_action('personal_options', 'prefix_hide_personal_options');

Once you do this, you’ll notice the nickname section disappears from the Profile page. The Administrator will still be able to see and edit nicknames, however.

(Note: If you’d like to turn this bit of code into your own personal plugin, you can learn how to do that here.)

Protect the Integrity of Your Site

Taking these two steps above (installing the plugin and including the code snippet) can help protect your site’s integrity. Bots are trouble enough, but a human troublemaker can be creative and hard to stop.

Photo: Business Concepts: Hello, My Name Is from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

Here are the most important updates you should know about:

New Support Tab

Forum threads about a plugin are now pulled into a new “support” tab on the plugin’s listing page. This is a huge UI improvement that closely ties support in with its corresponding plugin and makes it more of a focal point. Housing support forums under the plugin page is a much tighter integration and more convenient for anyone browsing.

Plugin Author Display

Plugin authors are now more prominently displayed with bigger gravatars, the number of plugins they’ve created and better placement on the page. This is one of my favorite updates, as it gives developers a little more credit for the plugins they offer for free to the community and gives the donation link more prominence.

Support Activity Summary

Now you can see how active and well-supported a plugin is by glancing at how many threads have been marked as resolved in the last two weeks.

New Favorites Feature

You can now mark plugins as favorites. Your favorites will show up on your WordPress profile page so that you can find them quickly.

Forum Stickies

Forum developers now have the ability to set stickies on the plugin forums. These can be used to showcase FAQs or to provide extra information on troubleshooting. Any user you add as a committer on the plugin will have moderation access to the forum.

Head on over to the plugin repository to check out all the changes. What plugins are you adding as your favorites?

Sarah Gooding on Google+

So if I spot something that can make the task of designing themes a little easier with no downside, I’ll happily take the opportunity to plug it. Monster Widget is one such something.

There is nothing complicated about Monster Widget’s functionality – all it does is consolidate all 13 core widgets into one single widget. So if you want to check the appearance of all core widgets in your theme design, you drag and drop just one widget, rather than 13.

Simple!

That’s it! It’s just a simple little timesaver which you can add to your standard WordPress development installation.

Download Monster Widget here.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of anieto2k

Tom Ewer on Google+

example.com/parent-category/child-category/sub-child-category/

Because this page would be a destination page that would be shared and even memorized by some, I needed to get the permalink for the Sub Child Category to look like this:

example.com/sub-child-category/

After trolling through lots of close-but-no-cigar code snippets and broken plugins, I finally came across the Custom Permalinks plugin. This plugin lets you set custom permalinks on a per post, per tag, or per category basis.

And in the process, as in my case above, it doesn’t break your bread crumbs either (i.e. my bread crumbs still show the parent category, child category, and sub child category links).

Creating Custom Permalinks

You create your custom permalinks in several places, depending on what  you’re working with (categories, tags, or posts).

For both categories and tags, you can customize the permalink on the edit pages for categories and tags (either when creating or editing on those pages: Posts > Categories and Posts > Tags respectively).

For posts, you can edit the permalink when editing the post.

SEO Benefits

In my case above, I was cleaning up my URLs solely for the benefit of visitors; however, it has been said that shorter, cleaner URLs will also help you with SEO. To what degree that’s true is debatable (as is much in SEO), but it’s clear that Google prefers short, nice-looking URLs. They have even said as much: “A site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. … Whenever possible, shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters.”

So there you are — if you have long, messy URLs, this plugin can help you clean them up.

Photo: www internet web address concept from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

That’s no good! Attachment Pages Redirect is a new plugin that does one simple thing. It 301 redirects attachment pages to the post parent, if it has one. If not, it redirects using a 302 temporary redirect to the home page. You may have an SEO plugin that already does this, so make sure to check before you install it.

Indexing pages with no content dilutes your site’s power to rank in searches. Attachment Pages Redirect will help you to get all of those dead ends redirected. Download it for free from the WordPress repository.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

With the WP Juicebox plugin you can easily create a gallery via the WordPress Media Library or from Flickr. Galleries can be inserted into content using a shortcode. The shortcode is generated when you click on the ‘Add Juicebox Gallery’ or the Juicebox icon button and enter your desired options for the gallery. When you create a gallery using Flickr images, your published gallery post in WordPress will be automatically updated when you add or remove image within Flickr.

Juicebox is packed full of features:

• Universal Playback – displays on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android
• Intuitive Navigation – intuitive image navigation via mouse, touch and keyboard
• Light and Fast – lightweight and fast to load, giving your users a great viewing experience. Smart image pre-loading means images display faster
• Responsive Layout – resizable interface, which adapts to the browser size. Gallery UI adapts to fit any size screen.
• Auto Generated Thumbnails – no need to create thumbnails for your image galleries. Juicebox handles this for you.

If you want even more features, there’s a pro version available that supports 70+ advanced customization options, no branding, unlimited images, audio, watermarks and more.

WP Juicebox is not a plugin that you’ll find in the WordPress repository. It’s available for free from the team at Juicebox. If you’re looking for an easy-to-use responsive gallery that looks great out of the box, this may be just the ticket for you. Give it a play and let us know what you think.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Here’s a quick overview of what’s new in the latest release:

• Basic statistics added
• Possibility to have a custom css file outside the plugin directory added
• Support for unlimited protected content on a single page
• wpmudev_wpal function to be used for custom post type templates added
• Deprecated message for PHP5.3 fixed
• Embedded scripts are moved to the footer for W3C and better performance and problems with some themes
• Improvement of UI in post editor and settings page
• Fixed setcookie issue when zero or empty value is entered

Basic Statistics

You will now find a Basic Statistics section near the bottom of your settings page for the plugin. This section will tell  you …

• How many total “likes” you have (this includes Facebook Likes, Google Plus Ones, Linkedin “Ins,” and Tweets)
• The number of “likes” from the four different services (Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Twitter)
• The top “most liked” posts

And here’s what it looks like:

Add a CSS File Outside the Plugin Directory

Another important feature in this release is the ability to add a custom CSS file outside of the plugin’s directory. This allows you to add styles that won’t be overwritten when the plugin is updated.

(Note: If you’re a WPMU DEV member, then you know that many plugins see constant updates and new features. Therefore, if you would like to add your own styles to this plugin, make sure you take advantage of this option.)

There are instructions for what you need to do in order to add your own custom stylesheet at the very bottom of the plugin’s setting page.

You can check out more about the Pay with a Like plugin and download it on its homepage.

Photo: Hand Cursor – Thumb Up from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

But here’s the thing – I am a bit of a usability freak. I first read Designing Web Usability ten years ago (I was a very cool 16 year old). I like to make stuff that is easy to use, and I like to use stuff that is easy to use.

Which makes it all the more frustrating to me that in certain ways, WordPress has a long way to go in terms of usability.

Plugins

Ultimately, as a WordPress user, you will spend the majority of your “fiddling” (i.e. non-writing) time with plugins. Once you’re finished with your design you’re not likely to go back to your theme files and settings much, but you’ll regularly find new and interesting plugins that can make your site even more awesome.

The problem is that such plugins are often unintuitive and difficult to use. Let me give you an idea of what I mean. The following are screenshots of where you can find plugin settings on the backend of my own blog:

Yikes.

Does the following process feel familiar to you?

1. Install plugin.
2. Check plugins page – settings screen not linked to. Hm.
3. Check sidebar – plugin isn’t listed.
4. Go to Settings menu bar – no settings screen (or perhaps it is there, but named in such a way to almost seem deliberately misleading).
5. Go to Tools menu bar – nothing there either.
6. Consult documentation, which may or may not hold the answer.
7. Cue head scratching and frustration.

Every single new plugin installation is a variation on this theme. Occasionally you’ll find what you need immediately, but sometimes you’ll go some of or all the way along the above process with no joy.

The Problem

Initially I figured that there must be some plugin UI best practices listed – that it was simply the open source curse that some plugin developers don’t follow “the rules”. Rules as to when a plugin should get its own spot in the sidebar, when its settings screen should be placed in the Settings menu, what makes a plugin a “Tool”, and so on.

So I turned to my trusty friend Google. Here are a selection of articles I found, from respected WordPress-related blogs:

• Best practices for WordPress coding (Cats Who Code)
• 7 Simple Rules: WordPress Plugin Development Best Practices (WP Tuts+)
• WordPress Development Best Practices (Yoast)

These articles cover common themes, such as coding standards, internationalization, and so on…but nothing at all about UI best practice.

After some further digging, I finally found WPCandy’s Completely Unofficial Guide to Plugin UI. A noble effort, certainly, but the key is in the words completely unofficial. How many plugin developers are likely to stumble upon this. And whilst the advice therein seems sensible, is it truly complete and correct?

The Solution

The WordPress development team are currently busy beavering away on improved custom headers, improvements in internationalization and localization, HTML in image captions (finally!), improved help tabs, and so on.

I would argue that providing an official guide to plugin UI best practice would be more beneficial in the long run than the sum of all the improvements that they are currently working on. Everyone uses plugins, and I believe that everyone has experienced frustration as a result of poor plugin UI usability.

Plugins are of course here to stay. They are an enormous part of the reason as to why WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. The problem I have discussed today is not going to go away of its own accord.

If WordPress wants to be truly awesome, it needs to be so as a complete package – plugins and all. Seeing the usability wheels fall off after the installation of a few plugins is simply not good enough.

Creative Commons image courtesy of nerdegutt

Tom Ewer on Google+

Sharpen Resized Images has no settings – just install and activate. Please note that it will not affect images that have already been uploaded. It will only affect new uploads after you’ve enabled it. Download Sharpen Resized Images for free from the WordPress plugin repository.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

We see it all the time from big-time media outlets – more than one author getting credit on an article. In WordPress, however, giving credit to more than one author on a post is not possible out of the box.

The Co-Authors Plus plugin solves that problem.

How It Works

This plugin does take a little digging into your theme’s files. You will need to replace the snippet of code your theme uses to call the author in with code provided by the plugin. You can find instructions for this new snippet of code in the “Other Notes” section on the plugin page.

The plugin page gets into some detail about what you might replace your original author code with, but for a generic replacement you would look for a tag similar to “the_author” and replace it with something along the lines of the following:

if(function_exists('coauthors_posts_links'))
    coauthors_posts_links();
else
    the_author_posts_link();

Of course your theme may vary as to the exact tag that it uses to call in the the_author. It may have a customized version, but it will most likely still include the term “author.” Also, remember that you will need to insert the new code wherever you would like it to appear (e.g. single.php, index.php, archive.php, category.php).

The Plugin in Action

Once activated and set up, you will see a new selection below the area where you write your posts. The author who is logged in should already appear in the area. You can then type the name of the other author(s) that you would like to be associated with the post.

And once everything is finished, both authors (or more) will receive credit.

Photo: Endless Writers from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+