When using WordPress there are to 2 ways to add content to your WordPress CMS, WP Posts and WP Pages. I commonly receive the following questions regarding WP Pages vs WP Posts:

• What’s the difference between WP Pages and WP Post?
• What is better from a search engine marketing point of view, WP Pages or WP Post?

For the first part of this 2 post series we’ll cover the first question; What’s the difference between WP Pages and WP Post?

The Difference Between WP Pages and WP Posts

The main difference is pages are static and posts are dynamic. Another to way I like to say this is pages are stationary and posts have legs. What this all means is that pages are meant for long term content that should be regularly accessible. For example, an About section on a website is a great use of WP Pages. Why? Because it doesn’t need legs to proliferate out into the internet to be commented on or interacted with.

WordPress posts which have legs are able to have their content pushed around the internet so people can consume it via Ping O Matic, RSS Feeds, Facebook Profiles or Pages, Twitter, Stumble Upon… and the list goes on. This content gets consumed, interacted with and hopefully shared with others.

Another way to look at WP Pages Vs WP Posts is to regard pages as making up the nuts and bolts of your website, your homepage, your about page, contact page, products or services pages. Then use posts as your PA system to send updates, important dates, articles, product releases, business news, etc. These posts will go out and begin filtering into and through the social media spheres.

Have more questions about working with WordPress? Check out some of our tutorials hosted at CMS with WordPress or contact us today for a consultation on how Search Friendly Web Design can help.

Comic credit goes to Blaugh.com

I was working with Cart66 today for the first time. Cart66 is the next generation of PHPurchase Shopping cart plugin for WordPress.

After installing and setting up a few products I attempted to test the cart and received the following fatal error:

Fatal error: Cart66::initCart() [cart66.initcart]: The script tried to execute a method or access a property of an incomplete object. Please ensure that the class definition “Cart66Cart” of the object you are trying to operate on was loaded _before_ unserialize() gets called or provide a __autoload() function to load the class definition in /home/xxxxx/public_html/xxxxx/wp-content/plugins/cart66/models/Cart66.php on line 360

I was advised by Cart66 support to look for a conflicting plugin. The site I was working with is small and only had 5 plugins activated, one of which was WordPress Maintenance Mode. Considering I only use that plugin periodically I deactivated it and that fixed my problem.

How To Find A Conflicting Plugin

I got lucky in this case with Cart66. Typically WordPress sites can have 15 or more plugins running. In this scenario the way to find the conflicting plugin is to deactivate all your plugins. Once deactivated, reactivate 1 plugin at time, testing the site every round until the conflict happens again.

Good luck and happy blogging!

I’ve been upgrading WordPress installations for clients this weekend. Ever since the WordPress update process was included in the dashboard I’ve never seen it work successfully. Being this is a brand new next generation version of WordPress (3.0), I decided to try the update option and once again it failed me.

This time I came up on a problem… not only did the update fail, but now the site was stuck in maintenance mode. This was a first, but fortunately I found a quick fix. Here is what you do in the event your wordpress site get’s stuck in maintenance mode.

1. Login to your Root folder (usually the same folder as your wp-config.php file) via your FTP client

2 Find a file named .maintenance and delete it.

That’s how you fix your WordPress site when it get’s stuck in maintenance mode.

My friend, Internet Strategist @GrowMap, emailed me about how all her CommentLuv links were pointing to a feedburner redirect link. She wanted to know if I could tell her why the links were pointing to a Google redirect URL.  I initially thought it had something to do with the CommentLuv plugin but I dug in a little to find her an answer and it actually turns out it has nothing to do with the CommentLu, but everything to do with a setting in Feedburner.

Not having used CommentLuv, I installed the plugin here on Search Friendly Web Design and on another blog. Turns out that the links get hijacked by Google if you have a certain setting enabled in your Feedburner account . To fix it you have to turn off the Feedburner Redirect link  by unchecking the ‘Item Link Clicks’ setting of the Feedburner Stats menu. You can find this under the analyze tab.

With the release of WordPress 2.6 a new feature was added that tracks and retains all previous versions or revisons to WordPress Posts and Pages.  Many think this is a great feature and can be very useful. In the building of California Whitewater I used the revision feature several times to roll back to a previous version.

A Valid Problem With Post Revisions

If you sift through the WordPress Support Forum you will find many WordPress users griping about the revison feature because it tracks all revisions. If you have a 100 posts and you edit each post 2 or 3 times you will get an additional 200 – 300 records in your MySQL database. For bigger sites or blogs do the math. This makes for an unruly database size.

Being that California Whitewater took us several months to build and with 4 people making content edits over the course of 4 months we had an extra 2600 records of revisons in the database. We build the site in a development space and when it was time to move the site to the live server I couldn’t move the database in one shot… I had to split it into 4 parts, do a find and replace on each part to update the URL and image paths and then move the DB.

Before moving I did look through the forums for help on how to clean up the database but I wasn’t comfortable with doing a global delete of all revisions in the MySQL database to reduce the size of the DB.

Deleting Your Post Revisions

Database Cleanup

Now that site is live and all is good, I went back to the development space for California Whitewater and ran this MySQL command to clear out all the revisions. I did it on the dev site to test the process and ensure I wouldn’t break anything on the live site if something were to go very wrong.

Step 1. Back Up Your Database.

• You can follow the steps outlined here in Simple Maintenance to run a backup.
• You can also install a WP-Plugin like  WP-DB-Backup or try anyone of the Backup Tools.

Step 2.  Run a delete command in PHP My Admin

• Open PHP My Admin
• Select the database you wish to clean up
• Click the SQL Tab in the top horizontal navigation
• Copy and Paste this Command:  DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

Step 3.  Test Your Site to make sure nothing broke in the process

Use a Post Revision Plugin

There a several Post Revision Plugins in the WordPress Extend section. The one I downloaded “Revision Control” is  great and has become part of my personal collection of plugins I use on all sites.

What I like about Revision Control is that you can enable or disable revisions on global bases as well as set the number of revisions to keep. I set Revision Control to retain the last 5 versions of both pages and posts. You can also control the revision process on a page-by-page or post-by-post basis.

There you have it.. an easy way to delete post revisions from the database as well as a great plugin to control revisions.

]]> http://searchfriendlywebdesign.com/managing-post-and-page-revisions-in-wordpress/feed/ 0 http://searchfriendlywebdesign.com/changing-the-color-of-your-visited-links/ http://searchfriendlywebdesign.com/changing-the-color-of-your-visited-links/#comments Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:59:24 +0000 Sammy Russo http://searchfriendlywebdesign.com/?p=109

A client recently asked me…

I notice that on our website the colors change from blue to purple after clicked on. My question is When some one enters the site are all the category’s purple and then when clicked on they turn blue. However when some else enters the site are all the colors purple or are some blue some purple? 

I started to answer his question then thought it best to go beyond answering it and to also explain why.

Here is my response to the question…
When a user visits your site (industrypacking.com) the links are programmed to be blue. Once a user clicks to a page… all the links to that page will turn purple. The change in color signifies that the page has been visited and helps the user better navigate the website…

• By helping them get back to a page that has the information they found useful
• By helping them from visiting the same page twice if they’re still searching
• By helping them know which pages or content they have not viewed yet

Jacob Nielson Says…
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040503.html

People get lost and move in circles when websites use the same link color for visited and new destinations. To reduce navigational confusion, select different colors for the two types of links. 

So Why These Colors
Blue and purple for links and visited links are the default internet colors for starters. Since the dawn of the WWW links have always been blue and purple making it the most prime website usability function.

According to another Nielson article (Guidelines for Visualizing Links)…

• The color for unvisited links should be more vivid, bright, and saturated than the color for visited links.
• The two colors should be variants or shades of the same color, so that they’re clearly related.
• Shades of blue provide the strongest signal for links, but other colors work also.
• When using color to signal information, you should provide redundant cues for color-blind users.
• Never show text in your chosen link colors unless it’s a link.

I logged into my dashboard and saw a post in the WP feed about what to do if your blog goes down upon deactivating a plugin. I’ve had this happen to me a couple of times. The plugins I usually have this issue with are..

• Related Posts
• Breadcrumb Navigation
• Recent Posts
• My Category Order

When a plugin breaks my site.. if I know for certain I’m going to be reactivating the plugin anytime soon I go ahead and delete the PHP call for the plugin. If I think I’m going be using the plugin in question again I comment it out instead.

How to ID the Plugin Causing the Problem?

If you’re new to WordPress and PHP, one thing the original article left out was how to ID the Faulty Plugin. The error message usually tells you. Lets say you deactivated al plugins and now your front page has this message..

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_breadcrumb() in /home/hostname/public_html/websitename/wp-content/themes/genesis-10/header.php on line 48

I have all the info I need to quickly find the bad code and either comment it out or delete it. I know that on line 48 in the header file of the Genesis theme i need to find the code get_breadcrumb(). Make sure to include the open and close php brackets that enclose the call.

Here area a few tips and tricks to keeping your WordPress blog or WordPress CMS safe and secure. There are plenty of other tactics out there to take for increased security but these will get you started and should be considered best practice.

The Blank Index.html File
Most web hosting servers do not block site visitors from being able to view the root of any folder. To keep anyone from figuring out what is running your site you should put a blank index.html file inside your wp-content folder as well as inside uploads, themes and most importantly plugins.

The blank index.html file keeps anyone who might be snooping around where they don’t belong from finding out what theme you are using or the plugins that being used to run your site. The more a hacker knows about your site the more places he/she can look for vulnerabilities. So stop them ahead of time by placing a blank index.html file in the root of all folders within the wp-content directory.

Don’t Wait for Fantastico!
When security is at risk.. manually upgrade your WordPress Installation… its not as difficult as one might think.. just be sure you back up everything before you upgrade. Auto-installers are great to get you started but in all honesty they more of hindrance. Everyone puts so much stock into Fantastico but its a hassle because it always takes so long to for them to get current. So while you’re waiting for Fantastico you’re getting owned by some hacker who is injecting bogus links into your posts. Forget about.. get a copy of filezilla and manually upgrade your site as soon as a security update is released.

Usernames and Passwords
I’ve got a few tips regarding your WordPress username and passwords.

• Don’t ever let your browser save your username and passwords. This information is saved in a cookie which can get hijacked by a hacker.
• Always change your admin passwords everytime you upgrade your installation.
• Don’t use admin as your main administrator username.. that only leaves half of the problem to solve for a hacker trying to access your website.
• Make your passwords difficult, use both upper and lower case letters, use symbols such as ! $ & # @ and use numbers.

There is a great plugin out called WP Security Scan that offers several security tools like password strength and DB Prefix Updater.. to name a few. Aside from what I have detailed above you should check out the plugin and make your WordPress installation bombproof.

If you have other security tips and tricks for websites, WordPress Blog or CMS Installations please post your comments below.

So I was half way done building out a WordPress CMS website in which I was using div class tags and inline styles inside the editor. What I soon realized is that WordPress was removing all of code and breaking my pages. So I searched the WordPress forums and sure enough I wasn’t alone.

Several other WordPress users were experiencing the same thing many griping about how dare WP change my code.. and why isn’t this fixed yet. The questions were answered like this from a WordPress moderator…

WordPress is designed as push button publishing for the non technical / non coding person. For this reason certain code or tags are not allowed to protect these users. If you want to have your code then turn off the visual editor.

This answer is helpful but it disn’t solve my situation. I have not problem with using only the code editor.. but that doesn’t work for the team of editors I work with… they don’t know code. So I needed to somehow fix the problem. This Thread I found in the WP Forum was helpful in fixing my issue… the downside is you have to hack core code.

The Fix is outlined below so people don’t have to sift through the tread to figure things out.

*** CAUTION: THE FOLLOWING REQUIRES CHANGING CORE FILES. PLEASE BACKUP EVERYTHING! ***

In file wp-incluede/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php about 24th line, find:

$valid_elements = ‘p/-div[*],-strong/-b[*],-em/-i[*],-font[*],-ul[*],-ol[*],-li[*],*[*]’;

replace with:

$valid_elements = ‘-strong/-b[*],-em/-i[*],-font[*],-ul[*],-ol[*],-li[*],*[*]’;

Another issue is the “Post Formatting” issue, wordpress will add

tag inside the tag

when you brows the post,
so you have to hacking the file: wp-includes/formatting.php
about 66th line find:

$pee = preg_replace( ‘|
(
]*>\s*)|’, “$1
”, $pee );

and comment it out.

After you apply both of these hacks you may find that your wp editor goes away… both visual & code view buttons.. all you are left with is a text box that will except code.

Install the following plugin for an alternate wysiwyg editor
Dean’s FCK Editor

That’s It! Remember.. If you apply this hack.. you have to apply it every time you upgrade your installation of WordPress.

A client emailed me the other day and asked.. “how do a schedule posts to publish in the future”? Hm, I thought… this is new.. never been asked this question before. So I went looking.. I knew WordPress could do it.. I just never had a need for it so I was unaware.

The answer is simple. On the post page, adjust the time stamp into the future and click publish. WordPress by default will mark this post Unpublished until that date / time comes up. At that time your post will go live.

That’s it. Enjoy.