Today we’re covering the Configure SMTP WordPress Plugin. This simple plugin allows you to customize the server your blog sends email for notifications, comments, etc… It is very useful if your emails from your blog are getting blocked because of the smtp server they are relayed through is black listed.

Features Include:

• SMTP host and port options
• SMTP authentication user name and password
• SMTP over secure SSL option
• Sender “From:” name and email
• Configure for Gmail option
• Test configuration

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about the Configure SMTP WordPress Plugin, please visit the WordPress plugins page, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/configure-smtp/. To see more projects developed by Scott Reilly, please go to www.coffee2code.com.

In this episode, Angelo goes into detail of the WordPress coverage at this year’s PodCamp Pittsburgh.

Quick Announcement: I will be speaking on Friday, October 16th at the 2009 Blog World and New Media Expo within the WordCamp Las Vegas sessions track. I’ll be speaking on how to setup WordPress for Podcasting at 12:45pm. Friday and Saturday I will be present at the Blubrry/RawVoice booth, so if you’re at Blog World, please stop by and say hello!

PodCamp Pittsburgh 2009

The first session I attended was WordPress Knowledge Exchange hosted by Mike Woycheck (Woy) & John Carman. The session covered an array of recommended plugins and had a lot of insight on WordPress. Here are links to John’s and Woy’s recommended WordPress plugins. Plugins that stood out to me were Bookmarkify, Useful 404s, Time Zone, and Maintenance Mode.

The second session I attended was SEO Plug-ins for Your WordPress Website: Using SEO Tools for your WordPress Website hosted by Jami Broom of Clicks to My Site. Her session slides are available as a downloadable PDF. Jami covered a number of resources for SEO including Google’s Starter Guide, SEOBook.com and SEOMoz.com. Plugins that stood out during this session were Google Analyticator, Robots Meta, Redirection, SEO Friendly Images, Nofollow Case by Case, Platinum SEO Pack, and SEO Smart Links.

PodCamp Pittsburgh was a great unconference! The organizers and volunteers did a great job with the event. I can’t wait for next year!

Next episode I’ll be speaking with Max Sweet (TimeStampStudios.com), a WordPress plugin developer and web designer for WebmasterRadio.FM. Max discusses why his employer moved to WordPress and how the custom plugins he’s developed meet specific needs for the online radio station. We also discuss WordPress MU.

Today we’re covering  TweetMeme Button WordPress plugin.

The TweetMeme Button WordPress plugin adds a Tweet me icon to your blog posts and pages. The plugin displays the number of re-tweets referencing your blog post. It is useful both to encourage readers to re-tweet your blog post as well as display how popular the post they are reading is on twitter. You can configure the plugin to remove the tweet me button from both static pages and from your home page. You can also customize the position and location of the button in your blog posts and pages.

The TweetMeme plugin is easy to configure and setup. One small note, some users may experience issues with the button itself depending on how well the theme is designed.

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about the TweetMeme Button plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetmeme/as well as the TweetMeme service at tweetmeme.com.

Announcements

PodCamp Pittsburgh 4: I will be speaking at PodCamp Pittsburgh this Saturday, October 10th on Plugins for WordPress to assist with Blogging and Podcasting. If you live in the area, please try to make it out, PodCamp Pittsburgh is a free event and covers not only podcasting, but social media, blogging and social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Blog World and New Media Expo 2009: I will be speaking on Friday, October 16th at Blog World within the WordCamp Las Vegas sessions track. I’ll be covering how to setup WordPress for Podcasting at 12:45pm. Friday and Saturday I will be present at the Blubrry/RawVoice booth, so if you’re at BlogWorld, please stop by and say hello!

If you’ve recently upgraded to WordPress 2.8 and you’ve noticed that your friendly post editor (WYSIWYG by TinyMCE) no longer appears, you must likely have Google Gears enabled for your site. The Javascript error console includes a line number error and when viewing the script source, unreadable binary characters are present.

To fix, remove your site from the list of sites Google Gears is enabled. To do this from Firefox, click the “Tools” pull down menu and select “Gears Settings”. Click ‘remove’ for the sites listed that are having the problem.

From my research, I’ve discovered that Google Gears Caches files locally without regard to javascript errors, cleared browser cache or taking into account the query strings in the URLs.  It may be too complicated for Google Gears to detect javascript errors, but it should detect when the cache has been cleared in a browser in my opinion. More importantly, when the URL changes, e.g. from /wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.php?c=0&ver=3241-1141 to /wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.php?c=0&ver=3241-1141&change=1), Google Gears should treat this new URL link differently, as the query string may tell the server to send back a completely different code.Google Gears Developers: Please treat the URL including the query string as separate files to be cached in Google Gears.

The only way I could see WordPress developers from preventing this from happening in the future is to rename the wp-tinymce.php file for every release. There may be some documentation for Google Gears as well to tell it to upgrade all of the locally cached files.

This episode we continue our interview with Paul Kehrer. Paul has written 4 plugins, 2 of which are publicly available called CDN Tools and Fidgetr plugins, both available at wordpress.org.

Please click for part 1 of this 2 part interview.

In part 2 of this 2 part interview we continue talking about tips for WordPress developers. Paul recommends WordPress plugin developers check out Adam Brown‘s web site for his extensive documentation of the actions and hooks  (Adam Brown’s wp_hooks) in WordPress. We go on to discuss the subversion repository provided by WordPress.org. We reflect on the old and new WordPress plugin search web site as well as discuss the problem when plugins haven’t been updated for the latest builds of WordPress.

To learn more about Paul Kehrer and his plugins, please visit swearingscience.com.

This episode we interview Paul Kehrer, a WordPress user and plugin developer. Paul has written 4 plugins, 2 of which are publicly available called CDN Tools and Fidgetr plugins, both available at wordpress.org.

In part 1 of this 2 part interview we talk about developing plugins, web development, HTML5, as well as discussing open source software. Paul is an open source veteran and co-developed the popular MySQLTuner application written in Perl.

We discuss other plugins such as WP Super Cache, WP-Syntax,

Near the end of part 1, Paul discusses tips for other WordPress plugin developers.

Part two will be available next week, stay tuned

Today we’re covering the  NextGEN Gallery WordPress plugin.

The NextGEN Gallery plugin adds image gallery functionality to your WordPress blog. Click here for a demonstration.

Features include:

• Flash Slideshow
• Flash Viewer (as an additional addon)
• Templates
• CSS styling
• Watermarks
• JavaScript Effect (Web 2.0 feel)
• Custom Media Gallery RSS feed
• Sidebar Widget
• Tag images
• Detailed descriptions
• Multi-language support
• Administration
  • Copy/Move images
  • Upload zip file of multiple pictures
  • Integrates to Post/Page editor (TinyMCE)

The NextGEN Gallery plugin makes it easy to add a modern gallery to your blog. Users knowledgeable in CSS and HTML can take further advantage of this plugin, though knowledge of CSS and HTML is not necessary to use this plugin.

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about the NextGEN Gallery plugin, please go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/.

Today we’re covering the MailPress plugin to quickly add a newsletter mailing list to your blog.

Features include:

• Newsletters for (users can subscribe to)
  • Each post
  • Daily (digest of posts each day)
  • Weekly digest
  • Monthly digest
  • Comments
• Manually send newsletters
• Detailed logging of sent messages
• Themes for Email newsletters
• Add-ons (Sort of like plugins for this plugin)
  • Bulk import tool (comma separated list of addresses)
  • Import data (csv, XML sample, other WordPress plugins from database)
  • Mailing lists manager
  • Newsletter categories
  • Synchronize WordPress accounts with MailPress Users
  • Add roles and capabilities (Special User Roles to apply to WordPress accounts)
  • Custom Fields

The plugin is very powerful which makes it very complicated to setup and configure. It definitely helps to read all of the documentation and have previous knowledge of how to edit source code before attempting to use this plugin.

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Advanced

To learn more about MailPress, please go to www.mailpress.org.

Today we’re covering the Search and Replace plugin to find and replace text in your blog.

The plugin allows you to find and replace text found in many of the database fields including:

• Content Body
• Titles
• Excerpts
• Meta Data
• Comments
• Tags
• Categories
• Category Descriptions

The plugin permanently changes text in the database. It is highly recommended that you first backup your database using the WP DB Backup plugin before proceeding with this plugin.

Show Feedback

Gene inquired about using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin (covered in episode 5) for multiple WordPress blogs located in sub folders on one web site domain. By default the Google XML Sitemaps plugin will create the sitemap within the root folder of the WordPress installation. Since Web Crawlers look for the sitemap.xml in the root folder of your web site, Gene was wondering if the plugin was intelligent enough to merge each blog’s sitemap into one in the root folder.

Unfortuantely, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin isn’t designed for managing multipe blog installations. Luckily, there is another solution to this problem. Setup a sitemap index as your root sitemap.xml file that links to other sitemaps on your web server. Here is an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/blog1/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2008-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/blog2/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2009-01-01</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

More details on sitemaps is available at www.sitemaps.org.

Today we’re covering the WP-DB-Backup plugin and touching on a few other backup tips. With just a few simple steps, you can keep backups of your blog so you can feel confident you’ll never loose data.

Key features in the WP-DB-Backup Pack include:

• Complete database backups
• Exclude post revisions
• Exclude comment spam
• Backup to folder on server (not recommended)
• Email backup as attachment
• Save backup on your computer
• Schedule backups

To learn more about the WP-DB-Backup plugin, please visit the WordPress plugins WP-DB-Backup page, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/.

Some other backup tips include:

• Keep a backup copy of your wp-config.php and .htaccess file on your local computer
• Occasionally backup the entire wp-content/uploads folder and all of its contents
• Keep a list of your important plugins handy in case you need to re-install them
• If you modified your theme, backup the entire theme folder and its contents, typically found in the wp-content/themes/your_theme/

PodCamp Toronto This Weekend

I will be attending PodCamp Toronto this weekend. On Saturday between 2-2:30pm I will be speaking in room 357 on “Setting up WordPress for Podcasting”. If you can make it out to PodCamp Toronto, please feel free to say hello.

The Plugins Podcast is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the new Classic Image Button WordPress plugin.

The Classic Image Button plugin adds the classic image button option to the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress. The plugin adds the image button to the top row of the text formatting options. The plugin can work in tandem with the built-in WordPress image functions. This plugin also includes an option to disable inline styles in case you want your image styling to be compatible with the widest range of feed readers.

Disabling inline styles reverts the image properties vspace, hspace, border and align as image attributes instead of inline styling (e.g. border=”2″ instead of style=”border: 2px;”).

The Classic Image Button is added to both the main post and page visual editors as well as the smaller Press This editor.

The plugin may be downloaded from the WordPress Plugins Directory or by the following link: Download version 1.0.

Today I gave a friend my list of web logs I like to ping. If you’re not familiar with pinging as far as blogging is concerned, it is a method for your blog to let other web blog directories know that you’ve published a new post. If you don’t ping sites to let them know you have new content, then your post will not get picked up until a web crawling app crawls your site. I personally like things to be instant, which is why I love weblog pings.

In WordPress, these ping sites are saved in a field titled Updating Services. Each Service (or weblog, as I like to call it) URL is entered on a new line. Here’s my list of weblogs I currently ping when I publish a new post.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rssrpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://odeo.com/api/xmlrpc/1.0/ping

Pingomatic.com one is the default value. Technorati.com, weblogs.com and blogsearch.google.com I believe are the most important sites to ping. I still include some others as you see above to get the most bang for my ping.

You can learn more about this topic on the Update Services page on wordpress.org.

What sites do you ping and why?