One of the changes in a recent WP release was a new permalink option.  It used to be that if you wanted the Post Name as the permalink structure you would enter that in the Custom Permalink field as /%postname%/

Now that option is available as a selection just above the custom option field.

I Want to update my Permalink Structure

Four years ago the SEO experts (you know an expert is a has been drip, right) were recommending including keywords for your category names then using a permalink structure of

/%category%/%postname%/

Probably good advise at the time, however, times change and the move toward shorter permalinks happened a couple of years ago.  Therefore, for the past couple of years every new site I setup I use the /%postname%/ structure.

I’ve always wanted to go back and update my older sites to use this simpler structure, but didn’t want to deal with having to create a 301 redirect for all my content and wait for it to be re-indexed with the new structure.

I’ve seen plugins like Redirection which can be fine for one or two redirects, but honestly for one or two I prefer to do it in the .htaccess file and not use a plugin.  And if you don’t use Redirection correctly you can really screw up your site.

Permalinks Moved Permanently

This little plugin is perfect for this situation.  It intercepts a request coming from the search engines to the old permalink and redirects the visitor to the new one while letting the search engines know this is a 301 permanent redirect.

Nothing to do but install the plugin and activate.

Go change your permalink structure and that’s it.  Now just wait for the new permalinks to be indexed.  After a few months you shouldn’t even need the plugin active on your site.

For the Paranoid

I say this as one of the Paranoid.  If you want to verify this, run a site search in Google and page through till you come to a post showing the old permalink.  Click on it.  You should be taken to the post and it should show the new permalink structure in the address bar.

How to do a site search

For anyone new at doing site searches:

Open Google and enter in the search field site:yourdomain.com   The results will show you how many pages/post you have in the google index.

Have you been putting off updating your Permalink Structure?

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Permalinks Moved Permanently

Twenty Ten Author Bio Support

You can see what the TwentyTen and TwentyTen child theme author box looks like in the header above.  It has a link to all the author’s posts at the end of the bio.  You set it up in the User Page.

But what do you do if it isn’t built into your theme.  You get a Plugin, of course.  In this case you get a couple of plugins.

Author Box Plugin

This is a more robust author bio box, but it requires a little bit of work to configure.

First you have to install two plugins for it to work.  And you have to install them in the right order.

WordPress Plugin Framework Reloaded

Add and activate it, then you can go after.  That’s all you do with the first one.  It is, as it says, a framework.

Author Box Reloaded

Install this one and then configure it under Users.  Once you have configured it the way you want it is time to add the author bio and SM links etc.  You do this under the individual User Profiles.

For most themes it will auto display after the post if you check that in the setup.

When it displays it will look like this:

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Author Bio Box

Unfortunately,   It’s not ready for prime time either.   In a few minutes I discovered these limitations and short comings.

[tabgroup]

[tab title="Ctabs"]

Ctabs will now allow:

1. other shortcodes to be inside a tab.
2. This means NO Next Gen Gallery slideshows inside a tab.
3. It also means you can’t put a caption around an image in a tab (Captions are shortcodes)
4. in essence nothing inside [ ] will be displayed

[/tab]

[tab title="Second Tab"]

The second tab could be an image (without caption), a map, a graph, or an explanation of any one of these on the first tab.

[/tab]

[tab title="Third Tab"]

Embed a poll, a video, a questionnaire or even a form of some kind on the third tab.

[/tab]

[/tabgroup]

Once you find a tab plugin that really works (This one is getting closer) it isn’t hard to come up with different ideas on how to use it and keep your content above the fold.

If you want a tab plugin check this one out. But I would recommend you be running WP 3.0 or higher. I tried this on a 2.9.2 version first and it didn’t work at all.

From: Real Estate Blog Lab CTabs Plugin

But if we ever need to edit that page again, and we come to that page from the previous edit being on the visual tab the editor will open the page in the visual mode.   If we save it, it will erase the iframe code.   Not nice.

This little plugin keeps the visual editor from filtering out the iframe code.   Maybe someday this will be built into the WP editor, but for new the easiest way to keep those frames in place is with this little plugin.

Iframes are not SEO friendly

Now I don’t want you to think because I’m reviewing this plugin that it is time to go hog wild with iframes.   I really hate them.   They do nothing for your site from an SEO standpoint.   Once the bots hit the iframe, they can’t see anything going on inside that frame.   (That’s why it is called a frame).

I’ve seen some sites built on Iframes on every page pulling in content from other sites.   And wondering why the site “with all that content” isn’t ranking in the search engines.   Hum.

But sometimes, as mentioned in the case of IDX search pages, the only way to get the content displayed it with an iframe.   If it is part of a page or post and not the entire page or post it can add to the contextual discussion and not hurt your SEO.

To add this plugin go to Add New on on the Plugins tab and search for TSL iframe.   It should pop right up.

From: Real Estate Blog Lab TSL Iframe Unfilter

Keep Your Top Nav Moving

The other day a friend said he wanted to hide some pages from showing up in his top navigation menu.   The theme he is using didn’t expand the top nav and he had too many pages to keep the formatting from throwing up.   There were some pages he didn’t need (or want for that matter) in his top nav.   But many themes use the wp_list_pages function which includes all the published pages.

This little plugin lets you select which pages will appear when wp_list_pages is used to call the published pages.

But what if I want those pages to show up?

Well, there are options.   Depending on how many pages we are talking about and where you want them to appear.

1. Link to them individually in your sidebar.
2. Use a plugin that doesn’t use the wp_list_pages function for pages

Ok not a lot of options but for most of us these will do the trick.

It works on Sub-pages as well.

I had a similar situation this past week.   I have some sub-pages I didn’t want showing up in the Top Navigation.   Using WP Hide Pages I selected those to pages to be hidden and they were removed from the top nav dropdown.   I’ll link to them directly in the sidebar.

WP Hide Pages is a nice little tool that does one thing and it does it simply and well.   If you have a need to hide certain pages from showing up.   Try out WP Hide Pages.

You can find it by going to Plugins “Add New”   Type in WP Hide Pages.   It will show up with some other handy hide things plugins.

From: Real Estate Blog Lab WP Hide Pages

Dynamic Widgets isn’t a Widget

When you activate the plugin you won’t find a dynamics widget to add to your sidebar and tell it where to appear.   But under Appearance you will find a new option called “Dynamic Widgets”   When you get to that screen it will list the active and inactive widgets on your blog; all of them.

Here is the cool part.   Select “Edit” on any of your active widgets and the option to make them Dynamic (You control when and where they show up, you set the rules for them to make an appearance).   It is a tool, to make all your existing “Static” widgets, “Dynamic”.

I haven’t played around with this much yet.   And I can see if you already have a widget from “My Custom Widgets” or “Advanced Text Widget” etc. you won’t want to confuse things by trying to add another layer to those widgets with Dynamic Widgets.   (For example you have a Widget to only display on your home page.   Don’t try and have Dynamic Widgets Display it on a different page or post.)

I like the functionality of this plugin.   It makes customizing the display of content in any widgetized area very easy.

It is becoming very easy to have only certain links and content appear in your sidebar or widget areas.   This targets your links.   It tailors the navigation guiding your visitor to where you want them to go.   It makes any site   flexible.

Take Dynamic Widgets for a spin.   Let me know what you think.   You can find it by going to:

“Plugins – Add New” and searching for “Dynamic Widgets”.

Have I mentioned how much I like being able to install plugins from inside WordPress?

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Dynamic Widgets

Domain Name Changes and Site Migration

You are moving your blog from one domain to another.   Not too hard, right?   You do the backups the re-installs of the files, restore the database, change the domain name in the general settings and up pops the blog.   Cool.   Everything look like it is good and you take down the old site.   Suddenly all the images disappear from your posts.   Why?   Because the image url’s were still pointed to the old domain name.   They worked fine linking back to their original location till you took down the site.   What do you do?

Did you move the image files to the new site?   (Probably, let’s hope so)   You thought they were the ones being pulled into the new location.   But when you open a post in the editor, there is the link back to the old domain wp-content/upload etc.   Now the light comes on.   “Holy Kow, I have to change all the image links in all the posts to point to the new domain.

Senario 2

You built a new site “Off site” for a client.   Once they are happy with the way it looks you move all the files to their hosting, point the blog to their domain name and . . .   Same as above.   All the image links in the post/pages are back to your Development site.   What do you do now?

The answer is the same.   Use the plugin search and replace.   It will go through the database searching for the string to the old domain and replacing it with the new domain.   The plugin has the option to only search and replace in certain areas of the database.   Only need something in a post or page replaced?   check “content”.

For example:   You need to replace www.myolddomain.com   with www.mynewdomain.com.   Go to the search and replace settings page.   Select “Content” then enter www.myolddomain.com in the search field and www.mynewdomain.com in the replace field.   Click “GO” and in about 1/10th of a second it is done.

Note: Make a backup of your database before using search and replace.

Removing Word Inserted Formatting

This past week I had a friend who set up a new site for a client.   The client had been writing all the content for the site in Word.   When the project was ready for content the client did a copy and paste move of all the content to the new pages for the site.

The content was all there, but the site was supposed to be justified so all the margins lined up right and left.   That’s how the Style.css was setup for the site.   The pages however were ragged right.   What happened?   Looking at the HTML editor revealed that every single paragraph for all the pages and post started with <p style text-align=”left”>   That line of html overrode the style.css.   My friend thought it was going to take going through the posts one at a time and removing the formatting code from each paragraph.

Enter search and replace.   Search: <p style text-align=”left”>   Replace: <p> .   Five seconds later the entire site was “justified”   and hours of tedious hand editing was avoided.

Put this Tool Away

Don’t leave this tool laying around.   Meaning, either don’t let anyone using the site know it exists, or better yet, when you are done using it, “DELETE IT” from the site.

Why?   because this can be a very dangerous tool.   If you are not careful you can end up changing text strings that you don’t want changed.

In the example above on domain name change.   If you have a post that references your old domain name and you spell it out www.yourolddomain.com; when the search and replace runs it will replace that string with the new one.   Therefore, you think carefully about the string you want to search and replace. In this example you could go further by searching for www.yourolddomain.com/wp-content/uploads/   and replace it with www.yournewdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/   This would prevent you changing any reference to just the old domain itself.

If someone sees this plugin and decides to use it for a quick way to change references or fix typo’s in a post, they could end up taking down the entire blog.

That is why it is good to only have it available on sites where no one can “stumbleupon” the plugin settings and try and use it.   I treat it like a powertool.   It works great, gets the job done fast, but shouldn’t be left where the “kids” might find it.

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Search and Replace a Time Saver

Easily Navigate Pages on Dashboard is one of these plugins. If you have a lot of pages on your blog, this could be a great help in quickly navigating to your pages.

I don’t tend to have a lot of pages on my sites.   But I’m working with more and more clients that are using their WP blog installs more like a traditional static site with pages instead of posts.   Time adds up finding a post to edit ( if you don’ t have the edit button installed from the front of the pages/posts).   The handy plugin provides a dashboard tree navigation to all your pages and sub-pages.   Find the post on the tree and click to edit.

It is a one trick pony plugin.   Nothing wrong with that, especially if it is a trick you need in your tool box.

If you have a lot of pages on site, try this little plugin with the long descriptive name and easily navigate to your pages on the Dashboard.

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Easily Navigate Pages on Dashboard

Upload on the Road

The WP Easy Uploader is a great tool for your blogging toolbox even if you don’t use it very often.

WP Easy Uploader

This plugin allows you to upload files, any type of files, to any directory on your hosting.   Granted it requires permissions to do so, but on most hosting packages that’s not an issue.

But I FTP into all my sites, why would I need WP Easy Uploader.

I do that too, when I’m home in the office.   But I don’t have FTP access setup on my laptop.   For one thing it is a security issue.   I don’t want FTP login information for all my sites on my laptop.   I don’t think my clients want that either.   But with Easy Uploader installed on all of my blogs I don’t need it.   I don’t even need my laptop.   Any computer that will get me to the admin panel of my blog will let me upload files to the blog from inside the admin panel.

Clients and Friends without FTP access or knowledge

Here is the other time when WP Easy Uploader comes in real handy.   Not everyone I work with or help with their blog even knows how to FTP into their blog.   They have hosting, yes, and they had their host install wordpress for them and email them their login.   That’s as much as they have ever done or known about their blog.

They don’t even know what FTP stands for.   But with WP Easy Uploader all I need is user name and password and I’m in.   They don’t have WP Easy Uploader installed;   easy I install it from “Add New” and then upload whatever files I need for the blog.

Easy access to my blogs while on the road;   easy access to friends and client’s blogs without FTP logins are two great reasons for installing WP Easy Uploader.

I don’t even have to provide you a link.   Simply go to Plugins “Add New” and search for WP Easy Uploader.   You are good to go.

Isn’t this stuff just too cool.

From: Real Estate Blog Lab File Uploads to Your WordPress Blog for the Road Warrior

Tiki Torches have nothing to do with this plugin

I’ve been looking for a plugin to do this for a long time.
Custom Post Limits let you set how many posts are returned in the many ways they can be accessed. Searches, Archive, Category, etc.

The way it is by default in WP is the number of posts you set to be viewed is the number used for everything displaying posts.

If you set 10 posts to display that’s the number everywhere.

I don’t want 10 posts on my homepage.   I want it to load faster and rotate what is on the homepage every 3 posts.   But when I set number of pages to display to 3 then when I do a category display or go to the next page of post only 3 posts display.   That’s a lot of paging when I’m looking for something.

This plugin lets me set the number of posts on a large number of locations.

The simple way I set it up for the Tucson blog was to display 12 post in the read settings page.   Then on the custom post limit settings I set the homepage to display 3 posts.   It works great.   I only had to set up two things.   A dozen posts for all the other displays works for me.   But if I wanted to change that for whatever reason this plugin gives me that ability.

It isn’t the kitchen sink.   It is designed for a specific purpose and it does it well.

The quick way to install this plugin   Plugins/Add New/ Search “custom post limits”

From: Real Estate Blog Lab Custom Post Limits Plugin