Browsing the blog archives for March, 2010.

Daily Tip: How to Use Fuzzy Dates For WordPress Posts

Internet Marketing

Many social networking sites display dates and times as relative to the current day- ie. ‘Today’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘2 Days Ago’, ‘2 Weeks Ago’, ‘2 ‘Seconds Ago’, ‘2 Minutes Ago’, ‘2 Hours Ago’.

You can do this too with your WordPress updates. Grab the WP-Relative Date plugin and install it. Then, open your index.php, single.php, page.php or any other file using the_date and edit as follows:

Replace this:

<?php the_date(); ?>

With this:

<?php relative_post_the_date(); ?>

Now you should have “fuzzy” dates for your updates. :)

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

No Comments

9 Fresh and Original BuddyPress Sites For Inspiration

Internet Marketing

Wondering what people are doing with BuddyPress lately? It’s time for another round of BuddyPress design inspiration. I’ve collected some great new examples to inspire you for your own projects. We have several in this round from non-English speaking countries where BuddyPress is becoming more popular, as it is rapidly being translated for more languages. Enjoy, comment, and explore BuddyPress beyond the default theme.

Amplify

Amplify is a platform for engaging in conversations online with people who you’re already connected to on other networks. “In between tweeting & blogging, there’s a world to talk about.”

Virgin Media Pioneers

Virgin Media Pioneers Online is all about helping young entrepreneurs ‘make their ideas happen’. It’s an online space where you can get help to develop your idea, pick up new skills and create your own network.

Caryl

Caryl is a ommunity website intended for expatriates in Morocco to be able to share their experiences.

Régions Démocrates

Régions Démocrates is the campaign site of the National French Democratic Movement for the regional election of March 2010.

Gm3r

Gm3r is a community site for gamers to interact, discuss news, and review games.

Travel Junkie

Travel-Junkie caters to the low-budget, long-term and off-the-beaten-track traveller and aims to be a valuable resource for all things backpacking.

Salomon Trail Running

Salomon Trail Running is a Polish community where members can share records, galleries, and tips on trail running.

Share My Playlists

ShareMyPlaylists.com is a resource for Spotify users to share and explore Spotify Playlists.

Young People

Young People is a web portal for youth workers where they can share resources, media tips, and information.

Want to check out some other posts highlighting beautiful BuddyPress sites? You might also enjoy:

10 of the Latest and Greatest Inspirational BuddyPress Sites
BuddyPress Eye Candy – 17 of the Best and Beautiful

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

No Comments

Daily Tip: Want to Run BuddyPress on Multiple Blogs in Your WPMU Install? Here’s how…

Internet Marketing

Configuring WPMU to run BuddyPress on multiple blogs is easier than you might think. This is a tip directly from the BuddyPress guide to changing internal configuration settings:

Allow BuddyPress to function on multiple blogs of a WPMU installation, not just on one root blog:

define ( 'BP_ENABLE_MULTIBLOG', true );

Add that bit to your wp-config.php file and you’re good to go!

Want to Submit a Daily Tip to WPMU.org?

If you’ve got a great tip for WordPress, WPMU, or BuddyPress users, send it our way on Twitter: @wpmuorg and we’ll happily credit you. Create a tweetable title and let us know if you have a more info or an article you’d like to link it to.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

No Comments

Autoblog With WordPress MU – The Fastest Way to Turn Your Site Into a Mega Media Aggregator

Internet Marketing

How is it possible to have fresh content publishing from many different sources to your various WPMU blogs? Autoblog is currently the best WPMU plugin available for creating a robust network of syndicated content across multiple blogs. This plugin allows you to set up your own syndication hub without having to mess with cron jobs or PHP code. It is similar to what you’d expect with FeedWordPress and WP-o-Matic, except that it is professionally supported, includes tons of custom options, and is much more easily configured so that you can be publishing greater volumes of content in just a few minutes.

Benefits of Using the Autoblog Plugin:

  • Easily syndicate content across platforms
  • Create a searchable archive of content focused on one topic
  • Boost SEO with more inbound and outbound links to your fresh content
  • Vastly expand your site’s relevance and authority by adding content in just a few clicks

This is the easiest way to propagate your content or others’ across multiple platforms. Let’s say you have a corporate blog you want to post to your WPMU site under a subdirectory of /work. This plugin makes it easy for you to do that , even if the blog you’re pulling from isn’t using WordPress. Or perhaps you’re running a network of WPMU sites as a news media aggregator and you want to pull in the latest local crime stories to a /crime subdirectory and the latest financial news to /finance. You’ll have no problem with Autoblog. You can add as many feeds as you want. Other examples might include creating a searchable archive of all of your tweets on Twitter. That way you never lose that information and you can hunt through it using the WordPress search functionality. You’re able to import tags from other feeds and even assign categories to each of the incoming posts.

Effortless Blogging With Autoblog

Autoblog grabs the RSS feeds and uses WordPress to post items from the feeds as posts in your blogs. Simply add a new feed and assign it to one of your existing WPMU blogs.


From there you will have a host of other handy options that you can configure to customize the presentation of your feeds:

Features and Options for Autoblog:

  • Choose if you want new posts to be published straight away, pending review or as drafts
  • Select any author from your WPMU install
  • Assign posts to categories and / or apply tags to them and / or import post tags with the post
  • Filter posts that are included or excluded based on keywords or phrases
  • Use excerpts (number of words configurable) or whole posts and choose what link (if any) you want to give to the original source
  • Select how often you want Autoblog to check for posts

In short, this plugin (plus our blog and user creation plugins) essentially allows you to create a WordPress MU site with thousands of blogs that are automatically published to by RSS feeds, within just a few hours….with no code knowledge required! Save time and start pulling in relevant content on a daily basis with Autoblog. Set it up on your WPMU site and you’ve got a well-oiled machine to crank out new updates from your blogs on a daily basis with no effort.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

No Comments

Daily Tip: Create a Robots.txt File to Avoid Duplicate Content and Boost WordPress SEO

Internet Marketing

Robots.txt is a simple text file that you upload to your server root. It contains instructions for search engines indexing your site, ie. follow that link, don’t index this directory, etc. You can get help creating a WordPress-specific robots.txt file at Ask Apache: Robots.txt For WordPress. Discussion is open below in the comments if you want to add to this tip.

Want to Submit a Daily Tip to WPMU.org?

If you’ve got a great tip for WordPress, WPMU, or BuddyPress users, send it our way on Twitter: @wpmuorg and we’ll happily credit you. Create a tweetable title and let us know if you have a more info or an article you’d like to link it to.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

No Comments

Stay Sharp With the New WPMU.org ‘Tip of the Day’

Internet Marketing

In addition to keeping you updated on all the latest news for WordPress, WPMU, and BuddyPress at our blog, we’re starting a WPMU.org Daily Tip via Twitter. We are very much enjoying keeping up with all of our subscribers on Twitter and even helping with a bit of troubleshooting when we can since we’re completely immersed in WordPress every day.

Our readers are some of the most innovative and skilled users in the WordPress community, so we’d love it if you’d like to contribute to sharing the knowledge with other users. Feel free to jump in and participate with us! We’re looking for any sort of quick WordPress, WPMU or BuddyPress related tips for site security, SEO, performance, theming, hooks, plugins, tweaks – you name it.

How to Participate:

Subscribe to our Twitter updates: @wpmuorg

@reply us or DM us with your favorite tip and we’ll mention you in the tweet.

And for tweet’s sake, make it short so people can retweet it. ;) Let us know in the comments what topics are of the most interest to you. We hope you’ll learn some new tricks, expand your WordPress knowledge, and be reminded of best practices. Feedback is always welcome. Get subscribed on Twitter today and keep your WordPress skills fresh!

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

No Comments

Introducing BuddyPress Daily our latest theme

Internet Marketing

BuddyPress Daily is a highly flexible theme based around a news layout.

It’s all about giving you options with offering 8 distinctive designs alongside our usual home page layouts and content options.

Alongside that, it’s our first theme that naturally supports front page video posts (see below).

And of course it works perfectly for BuddyPress, WPMU and regular WordPress too.

With BuddyPress Daily your site will always make the headlines!

BuddyPress Daily

You can customize the look and feel with ease:

  • Various featured content layouts – video, content tabs and slideshow
  • Various home page content layouts – columns, the wall (a fantastic new way of displaying your images) and rows

And there are great automatic image and advertisement placement options too, you can:

  • Show images from your posts without using custom fields – it just works by pulling your first image through
  • Spotlight category on your home page
  • Advert placement: header, side wide block, skyscrapers: Simply add your advert code and it picks it up or add a link to an image from your media library
  • Set a square logo, logo or site title for your image

Alongside that of course you can upload custom headers and allow multiple widget areas.

But we didn’t stop there, packing this theme with an amazing number of other features:

  • Blog / news template, full width template and default 2 column template
  • Site message displayed at the top of your site
  • Automatic bread crumbs for BuddyPress and if you just use it without BuddyPress it reverts to WordPress bread crumbs
  • Shows your server time and date on your site automatically
  • Support for multiple languages (default mo and po files and rtl.css)
  • 8 distinctive designs that go beyond simple colour changes
  • Create your own design using the simple colour picking theme options that require no code being touched to change colours and fonts
  • Parent and child theme structure

As with all our themes this comes with a complete PDF manual as well as instructional videos… backed up by live support and the best BuddyPress / WPMU / WordPress forums on the web.

And our upgrade and support guarantee!

Here are some screen shots to whet your appetite…

This is what posts look like as you can see there are a lot of styling options so you can make your content stand out:

Here is the activity stream:

You want more… sure thing, here’s a preview video:

And here it is in action on our demo site.

Find our more and Download BuddyPress Daily here.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

No Comments

Internationalize Your Blog in Minutes With Global Translator for WordPress and BuddyPress

Internet Marketing

Global Translator automatically translates your blog into 48 different languages and is one of the fastest ways to start engaging thousands of new visitors. This plugin can help increase global awareness of your WordPress blog or BuddyPress social network, as well as allow non-English speakers to understand your content, leave comments, and interact.

Instead of building a mirror site for other languages, this plugin lets you tap into readily available free translation services on the fly with a powerful built-in caching system to reduce the number of requests your site is making to the translation engine. Global Translator makes it possible to get multilingual capabilities for your blog within just a few minutes. Not only does it translate your content but also all of the text-based UI elements on your page. You can choose from Google Translation Services, Promt Online Translator, Altavista Babel Fish, and FreeTranslator.

Features of Global Translator:

  • Four different translation engines: Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt, FreeTranslations
  • Search Engine Optimized: it uses the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your URI. For example the english version on http://www.domain.com/mycategory/mypost will be automatically transformed in http://www.domain.com/en/mycategory/mypost
  • Fast Caching System: new fast, smart, optimized, self-cleaning and built-in caching system. Drastically reduction of the risk of temporarily ban from translation engines.
  • Fully configurable layout: you can easily customize the appearance of the translation bar by choosing between a TABLE or DIV layout for the flags bar and by selecting the number of translations to make available to your visitors
  • No database modifications: Global Translator is not intrusive. It doesn’t create or alter any table on your database: this feature permits to obtain better performances.

Simple Installation

  1. Upload the folder “global-translator” to the “wp-content/plugins” directory.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
  3. From the main menu choose “Options->Global Translator” and select your blog language and your preferred configuration options then select “Update Options”.

Translation with free services is not necessarily perfect, but it’s adequate for quick browsing and getting around. If your content is of interest to your international visitors, you’ll be able to add to your subscribers, since they will have the confidence of being able to read your blog in their own language. Whether you need just one additional language or want to offer all 48 included, this plugin makes your site instantly more accessible to thousands of visitors.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

No Comments

6 BuddyPress Power Hacks You Don’t Want to Miss

Internet Marketing

On a recent trip to the BuddyPress forums, I found a few useful hacks that may in fact be options that you’ve been wishing for. Every BuddyPress site has unique needs and the default setup may not be suitable for your community’s interaction. No need to wait until someone makes a plugin for you – just drop a little hack in and get it done yourself. I’ve tested all of these hacks with WP 2.9.2 and BP 1.2.2.1. The ones I’ve selected are those that I think will be the most useful to the greatest number of people. Happy Hacking!

1. Display Username in Member Directory Instead of Default Member Name

Add this to your theme’s functions.php:

/* Display Username in Directory */
function my_member_username() {
	global $members_template;
	return $members_template->member->user_login;
}
add_filter('bp_member_name','my_member_username');

Source: r-a-y at BuddyPress.org Forums

2. Disable Required User Activation

This may be a built-in option to enable or disable the required activation for user accounts in future releases of BuddyPress. For now, just add this quick hack as a plugin or in your theme’s functions.php file:

function disable_validation( $user_id ) {
  global $wpdb;
  $wpdb->query( $wpdb->prepare( "UPDATE $wpdb->users SET user_status = 0 WHERE ID = %d", $user_id ) );
}
add_action( 'bp_core_signup_user', 'disable_validation' );
function fix_signup_form_validation_text() {
  return >false;
}
add_filter( 'bp_registration_needs_activation', 'fix_signup_form_validation_text' );

Source: Andy Peatling at BuddyPress.org Forums

3. Put BuddyPress Profiles in the Root – ie. http://example.org/username/

Add this line to your wp-config.php file:

define ( 'BP_ENABLE_ROOT_PROFILES', true );

Source: BuddyPress.org: Changing Internal Configuration Settings

4. Change the default tab opened when looking at a user’s profile (default is activity):

Add this line to your wp-config.php file:

define( 'BP_DEFAULT_COMPONENT', 'profile' );

Source: BuddyPress.org: Changing Internal Configuration Settings

5. Disable the BuddyPress Admin Bar at the top of every screen

Add this line to your wp-config.php file:

define ( 'BP_DISABLE_ADMIN_BAR', true );

Source: BuddyPress.org: Changing Internal Configuration Settings

6. Add a View BuddyPress profile link in Dashboard >> Users

Add this to your theme’s functions.php file:

function user_row_actions_bp_view($actions, $user_object) {

global $bp;
$actions['view'] = '<a href="' . bp_core_get_user_domain($user_object->ID) . '">' . __('View BP') . '</a>';

return $actions;
}
add_filter('user_row_actions', 'user_row_actions_bp_view', 10, 2);

Source: Rich Fuller – Tutorial

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

No Comments

6 BuddyPress Power Hacks You Don’t Want to Miss

Internet Marketing

On a recent trip to the BuddyPress forums, I found a few useful hacks that may in fact be options that you’ve been wishing for. Every BuddyPress site has unique needs and the default setup may not be suitable for your community’s interaction. No need to wait until someone makes a plugin for you – just drop a little hack in and get it done yourself. I’ve tested all of these hacks with WP 2.9.2 and BP 1.2.2.1. The ones I’ve selected are those that I think will be the most useful to the greatest number of people. Happy Hacking!

1. Display Username in Member Directory Instead of Default Member Name

Add this to your theme’s functions.php:

/* Display Username in Directory */
function my_member_username() {
	global $members_template;
	return $members_template->member->user_login;
}
add_filter('bp_member_name','my_member_username');

Source: r-a-y at BuddyPress.org Forums

2. Disable Required User Activation

This may be a built-in option to enable or disable the required activation for user accounts in future releases of BuddyPress. For now, just add this quick hack as a plugin or in your theme’s functions.php file:

function disable_validation( $user_id ) {
  global $wpdb;
  $wpdb->query( $wpdb->prepare( "UPDATE $wpdb->users SET user_status = 0 WHERE ID = %d", $user_id ) );
}
add_action( 'bp_core_signup_user', 'disable_validation' );
function fix_signup_form_validation_text() {
  return >false;
}
add_filter( 'bp_registration_needs_activation', 'fix_signup_form_validation_text' );

Source: Andy Peatling at BuddyPress.org Forums

3. Put BuddyPress Profiles in the Root – ie. http://example.org/username/

Add this line to your wp-config.php file:

define ( 'BP_ENABLE_ROOT_PROFILES', true );

Source: BuddyPress.org: Changing Internal Configuration Settings

4. Change the default tab opened when looking at a user’s profile (default is activity):

Add this line to your wp-config.php file:

define( 'BP_DEFAULT_COMPONENT', 'profile' );

Source: BuddyPress.org: Changing Internal Configuration Settings

5. Disable the BuddyPress Admin Bar at the top of every screen

Add this line to your wp-config.php file:

define ( 'BP_DISABLE_ADMIN_BAR', true );

Source: BuddyPress.org: Changing Internal Configuration Settings

6. Add a View BuddyPress profile link in Dashboard >> Users

Add this to your theme’s functions.php file:

function user_row_actions_bp_view($actions, $user_object) {

global $bp;
$actions['view'] = '<a href="' . bp_core_get_user_domain($user_object->ID) . '">' . __('View BP') . '</a>';

return $actions;
}
add_filter('user_row_actions', 'user_row_actions_bp_view', 10, 2);

Source: Rich Fuller – Tutorial

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

No Comments
« Older Posts