CleverWP.com -> WordPress Customization, WordPress Development and WordPress SEO

WordPress Content Deployment with RAMP

Lars Koudal — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 06:09:06 +0000

RAMP is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily deploy changes you create on staging or development servers directly to the production server WITHOUT the hassle of either replicating all steps manually, exporting and importing or even the more hardcore way of dumping and importing the database.

Not only can you work on your local server and deploy changes directly with one click, you can also utilize the preflight checklist to make sure the changes you are deploying are not in conflict with the development server.

So, if you have created a new post and during that creation also created a category and/or a few tags, RAMP will automatically create these categories and tags as well.

RAMP also checks if there has been any more recent changes on the production server, saving you the emberassment of overwriting newer changes with older ones.

This WordPress plugin looks quite amazing, and I have not even played with it yet. I would love to play around with it for an upcoming future project!

Now, the most important thing is the Rollback feature. Or it will be for me at least.

If you do any mistakes you can easily roll back to an earlier version, letting you sleep well at night.

The tone and dash of humour on the site is a big plus in my book as well

Go take a look, and let me know in the comments what you think of it

The company behind is Crowd Favorite.

CrunchBase Information

Crowd Favorite

Information provided by CrunchBase

WordPress Functions.php Code Collection on Stackexchange

Lars Koudal — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:33:57 +0000

WordPress functions.php

The functions.php file in your WordPress theme is an underutilized resource for many WordPress powered sites.

Relying on WordPress plugins only to customize your site can result in an overabundance of WordPress plugins which slows down your site.

Whenever possible I add pieces of code to the active WordPress theme’s functions.php file instead, and a great resource for useful snippets of code that works in functions.php is on the continously updated “Best Collection of Code for your functions.php file“.

Best functions.php Code Collection

The WordPress Answers site hosted on Stackexchange is a brilliant resource to interact with other WordPress developers and exchange knowledge.

Here are just a few of the code snippets you can find there:

Remove Update Notification for all users except ADMIN User
Modify the Login Logo & Image URL Link
Loading jQuery from the Google CDN
Remove the WordPress Version Info for Security
Add Spam & Delete Links to Comments on Front End
Remove Default WordPress Meta Boxes
Set a maximum number of post revisions to avoid DB bloat
Function to change the length of Excerpt
Customize the Dashboard
…

The list goes on…

Direct link: Best Collection of Code for your functions.php file

My WordPress Answers Profile page.

Portable Development with “Instant WordPress”

Lars Koudal — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:32:37 +0000

Instant WordPress is a standalone development environment, specifically designed for WordPress.

The developer, Seamus Brady, used to work as a contract IT Trainer and he needed a way to quickly set up test environments.

The best thing is that it works from a USB drive, and is completely self contained. A great idea for setting up test environments in seconds.

Direct link: Instant WordPress (Windows only)

Source: wpmu.org

WordPress header.php Optimization Tips

Lars Koudal — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:20:51 +0000

WordPress is very fast when you first install it, but there are many things you can do to optimize your WordPress site for more speed.

In this article I will outline a few tips you can do use improve your header.php file.

Beware of Theme Updates

If you implement some or all of these suggestions, you will loose them if you do an automated theme upgrade in the future.

WordPress header.php file

The header.php in your WordPress theme gets called every time a page loads on your website. Any optimization that can be made here will affect all pageloads on your site.

WordPress theme developers have to develop the theme to be used on a wide range of WordPress websites, but once installed and configured, you can make some changes to the header.php file to make your site run a lot faster!

1. Hardcode HTML constants

Here is how the top of my header.php file looked. I’m sure yours will look somewhat similar.

Notice the 3 pieces of PHP code? These pieces of information is collected via WordPress PHP functions that in return uses internal function and database calls.

Does that description sound slow? It’s not that bad, but in terms of optimization, every millisecond gained matters.

The fix is simple.

Load your website in your browser. Find and copy-paste the corresponding code in the source code.

This is the correct HTML code which you can simply copy-paste and overwrite the corresponding area in your header.php

Here is mine after copy pasting:

2. Hardcoded Feed Urls

Unless you intend to change your url feed at some point in the future, you could also save some speed on hardcoding your feed urls.

That is 4 unnecessary pieces of PHP.

Here is what mine would be once optimized using the same procedure of visiting the website and copy-pasting the processed HTML code.

3. EXTRA RSS tip – Feedburner

I take RSS optimization one step further by using Feedburner.

I recommend using Feedburner or similar service to speed up your website even more.

I have recommended using Feedburner in the past, so I will be brief.

Less pageloads on your site.
Your feed is constantly updated by Google
Google visits your site more often
Increasing your feed subscriber count can affect your authority and hence rankings
Works in all formats
Feed reader statistics

Here is what the code is reduced to, and there is no PHP code.

Read more on the Feedburner service page. Best of all? It’s free!

4. Multiple calls to bloginfo()

Throughout your header.php file you will see several calls to bloginfo() and some parameter. The function returns important information about your WordPress site, such as name and url location of your theme.

The WordPress function, bloginfo(), fetches and returns the data from the database.

If your theme depends on the exact same call more than once, you can improve the speed.

You will most likely find this piece of PHP code called several times throughout your header.php file.

We can save processing time by storing the value in a PHP variable, and then simply output that variable instead where needed.

Somewhere before the first time the call is made, insert the following PHP code:

The get_bloginfo() is very similar, except than instead of simply outputting the value, it returns it to the variable instead.

From now on we can simply replace each occurrence of

with

Repeat the process with any more calls you find repeated several times, each time saving a bit of time.

There are many more things to do when optimizing header.php, and with these steps you are well on the way to a faster and smoother running WordPress site.

Want more tricks?

I promise I do not spam or share your e-mail with anyone else.

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WordPress Project – Securitydecisions.org

Lars Koudal — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:02:52 +0000

I am happy to announce a new WordPress customization project that has been launched recently.

Securitydecisions.org is the new homepage for DESSI, which is a collaboration of a group of international partners.

The homepage acts as a central hub for the ongoing DESSI project, and contains the latest news and publications.
The homepage is also integrated with both Facebook and Twitter to communicate with interested people, as well as collecting newsletter subscribers to send out news and launch information.

What is DESSI?

DESSI is a decision support system for decision makers and end users of security investments.

DESSI will be useful for public authorities, developers of security solutions, commercial enterprises and for social organizations.

Watch the process!

I recorded part of the process of customizing the homepage, by taking a screenshot of my screen every 3 seconds while working.

The tools I used

I use the FireFox browser along with the excellent extensions, Firebug and Web Developer to pinpoint and test out styling issues. I could NOT work without these tools. I often check my progress in various browsers, but FireFox is my main development browser at the moment.

If I do not work on a server (sometimes I work on my local machine while developing using MAMP PRO) I use Transmit (FTP program) and Coda (Code editor) to edit the PHP and HTML/CSS code.

All graphic design and changes is done in Adobe Photoshop, there simply is no alternative!

I use Google to look up information and reference code often, but I also use my repository of code snippets that I have collected in Evernote. This is also the tool I use to keep all notes and details for each project I work on. Evernote automatically synchronizes all notes not only to “the cloud” but also to all my machines.

The partners of the DESSI project

The Danish Board of Technology, Oesterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Peace Research Institute Oslo, The Norwegian Board of Technology as well as the Verein für sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung und Beratung e.V..

WP E-Commerce Tip: Download Purchases

Lars Koudal — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 09:34:44 +0000

What is “WP E-Commerce”?

WP E-Commerce is a well known WordPress web shop plugin, and is used by millions.

Although stable and very flexible, WP E-Commerce can be hard to tweak, and there is currently no method for allowing returning customers to re-download their purchases from a page on your site.

I will show you how to do this in this blogpost.

I have been working the last few days on moving from an old shop plugin to the well known WP E-Commerce WordPress plugin to handle my store on CleverPlugins.com

I have worked a bit with WP E-Commerce before and it has been used in many of my latest customer projects as well.

For my customers (on CleverPlugins.com) I wanted to make a way for them to log in and download their purchases again and/or any updates should they occur.

I do this via a custom page template which I have then customized a bit.

The following piece of code checks if the visitor is logged in. If so a check is made if any purchases have been made and the code then lists the WP E-Commerce download link for each purchase.

By using WP E-Commerce’s internal download system, you automatically use any limitations on downloads if you use that feature.

get_results('SELECT `id` , `sessionid` FROM `'.$wpdb->prefix."wpsc_purchase_logs"
.'` WHERE `user_ID` = '.$current_user->ID.' LIMIT 100');

    if(count($downloadables) > 0) { //we've found previous purchases!!
         foreach ($downloadables as $downloadable){ //get data for each download and process...
              $filedata = $wpdb->get_results('SELECT `id` , `product_id` , `uniqueid` , `downloads` , `ip_number` FROM `'.$wpdb->prefix."wpsc_download_status"
.'` WHERE `purchid` = "'.$downloadable->id.'"');

              $downloadurl=get_bloginfo('wpurl')."http://cleverplugins.com/?downloadid=".$filedata[0]->uniqueid; //Generate the unique download link.
               $prodtitle = $wpdb->get_var('SELECT `post_title` FROM `cpwp_posts` WHERE `ID` = '.$filedata[0]->product_id); // Look up the title of the product

               echo "$prodtitle
Click here to download";
         }
     }
}

else {
	// visitor is not logged in. Here you can show a notice.
}
?>

Enjoy.

Venus O’Hara v. 3 – Redhead WordPress Goddess

Lars Koudal — Mon, 02 May 2011 04:00:01 +0000

I have been involved in quite a few WordPress projects recently, the first I blogged about was the new WordPress Multi site installation I helped develop for Ramboll.

Another project I am quite pleased about is the new website for Venus O’Hara, http://venusohara.org/

VenusOhara.org version 3

I have worked with Venus before on her website, in fact I also helped build version 2 a while ago.

Here is the visual progress of her website with all 3 designs side by side:

3 versions of VenusOhara.org

Appearances is not everything

The changes have not only been visual, there is a lot of new things under the hood:

New host! Venus had outgrown her previous webhost a long time ago, and a move was in order. venusohara.org is now hosted with WestHost.

New WordPress Theme! Version 1 and 2 of her website was based on the same theme, but with a lot of visual tweaks obviously. Venus had also outgrown this theme, and we found an ElegantThemes theme that was very close to Venus’s vision of her new website.

The WordPress themes from ElegantThemes are very flexible and easy to customize and optimize in my experience. I use ET themes quite a lot as base designs and then tweak and adapt to the individual clients needs.

Multilingual! Venus is fluent in English, Spanish, Catalan as well as French, but so far only English and Spanish are featured on the site. This is powered by the unique and extremely powerful WordPress Multilingual Plugin (http://wpml.org/)

Strong administration tools. Powered by the amazing GD Press Tools PRO 4 WordPress Plugin by Milan Petrovic. Here is a review I did when he released the plugin: http://cleversem.com/WordPress/review-gd-press-tools-4-0-pro.html

With this plugin we are able to increase security, tweak a wealth of settings and tweaks, timed sitemap generation, automated backup, etc. etc.

Now with caching! We experienced a lot of trouble trying to get a proper caching module installed on the previous webhost. On WestHost it is a breeze and is now powered by the amazing W3 Total Cache.

Fetish Glossary! A major new feature on the new website is the Fetish Glossary. With over 50 different fetishes (and growing) Venus is building an online fetish glossary using herself in series of photos for each.

These are just the highlights. A few more cool things are being worked on behind the scenes, so keep an eye out for Venus O’Hara!

Ramboll blogs with WordPress

Lars Koudal — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:53:17 +0000

I am happy to announce I have recently helped giving birth to a heavily customized WordPress installation for Ramboll.

The blog runs on the latest WordPress with multisite configured. All subblogs are running the same theme specifically designed for Ramboll. (Not by me).

Ramboll?

Ramboll was founded in Denmark in 1945 and the multinational engineering consulting company has since then grown to employing about 9.000 people around the world.

At present there is only three sub-blogs live, with more coming up. In no particular order:

Urban Energy Solutions. This blog is maintained by Anders Dyrelund, and he writes about the ideas and challenges regarding new energy strategies.

The second blog is written by Graeme Smith, and he blogs about the Tallinn Town Hall Project in Estonia.

The third blog is written by Susanne Kalmar Pedersen and she blogs about the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel.

But why WordPress?

I asked one of the key people in this project from Ramboll to write a few words about the project and why they chose WordPress.

After having researched different options for creating internal as well as external corporate blogs for a while, Ramboll decided to launch a WordPress based blog in 2008. This was used by our CEO during a major integration process – Ramboll had just bought a UK-based company, and we needed to communicate directly with these new colleagues, as well as existing Ramboll employees.

While this blog had minor skinning changes, to make it easily recognisable as a Ramboll site, we had no internal resources for making major changes, or even creating a real Ramboll theme. This proved problematic when we wanted to use the blog for more general purposes, and started integrating different plug-ins.

During autumn 2010 we wanted to re-launch our blogging efforts, and a pilot project was initiated, where bloggers from different parts of the organisation posted about the theme “Urbanization”. This was in relation to a conference held at our Head Office in Copenhagen.

Lars Koudal, of CleverPlugins.com and CleverWP.com fame, helped us with the development, integrating plug-ins, and created a specific Ramboll theme.

He later customised this theme for use on the portal site http://blog.ramboll.com, and a subsequent internal blog portal.

Our bloggers now have all the benefits from WordPress’ easy-to-use back-end, and a refined front-end.

Espen Nikolaisen (Group Webmaster), Ramboll

A few nifty things

Several special things were custom-coded for this particular WordPress installation. Although some of the features could have been implemented using 3rd party plugins, it was important to have as few dependencies as possible.

In some cases where it did not make sense to code a particular function, research was done to find the most efficient solution using WordPress plugins.

Follow, Like and Email

Three particular functions were added to the custom theme, custom e-mail sending of blog posts and then two new features:

The follow button is only available to registered users, and when any author is “followed”, the user will get an e-mail every time a new post is published by this author. Un-following equally easy.

The “like” functionality is also only available to registered users and is used to track the more popular posts across the network of blogs.

Setting Featured Image via code

Lars Koudal — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 01:26:28 +0000

I have been gradually updating a WordPress blog over the past few weeks, and one of the new features requested was adding more imagery to the site.

The previous layout was plain and boring and adding photos to the blogposts was a quick way to update the style.

A slight problem, however. The WordPress installation have thousands of blogposts and setting a featured image for each of them would have taken days, perhaps even weeks!

I was lucky that the site was very niche specific and a lot of general imagery could be found that could be used throughout the site, and I will now share with you an easy way to assign featured images to every single post…

The problem

WordPress have had the Featured Image feature built in for a while, but there is no code-function (that I could find) that I could use to ASSIGN a specific image(URL) to a blogpost.

After digging through WordPress’s code, searching high and low on Google, I realized I would have to make my own solution to fix this.

While searching through the code I saw that the way the Featured Image information is stored is to via a custom field with the name ‘_thumbnail_id’ and then the value of the attachment id of the picture. The referring meta value is then linked to another meta key with serialized data which is generated while uploading the image and then… You get the picture.

Now, the optimal coding solution would be to create a script that would automatically upload an image using WordPress’s built-in functions and have the image processed, grab the attachment ID, and then add that to the blogpost.

That would be a lot of coding, for a once-off project. Way too complicated. I chose the semi-automated way.

The semi-lazy solution

I picked 30-40 random blogposts and went to edit them each.

For each post I chose a picture from the stock library and attached it as a featured image.

Now, that sorted out those blogposts, but what about the rest? Here’s how I added a random featured image to the other thousands of blogposts.

I added the following code to my functions.php

function SetRandomFeaturedImage($content) {
	global $post;
	if (is_single()) {
		$meta=get_post_meta($post->ID,'_thumbnail_id',true);
		if (!$meta) {
			global $wpdb;
			$val = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT distinct `meta_value` FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE `meta_key` LIKE '_thumbnail_id' order by rand() limit 1;");
			update_post_meta($post->ID,'_thumbnail_id',$val);
			unset($wpdb);
			}
        }
    unset($post);
    return $content;
}

add_filter( 'the_content', 'SetRandomFeaturedImage' );

This solution is not for everyone and if you do not know what you’re doing, do not try this code. There is no undo!

Now, the code in itself is quite simple. I add a filter to ‘the_content’, which means the code will run every time a post is visited.

I added an if (is_single()) to detect if it is a single blogpost or not. (I’m not interested in triggering this code on pages, tags and category page views…)

The code then checks if there already is a featured image added to the post. If there isn’t I make a MySQL query from the postmeta table to find a RANDOM featured image, and grab the meta_value of that. Once that is grabbed, I attach it as a meta value to the current post, and voila… The post now has a featured image, which is then used in the theme throughout the site.

In a week or so, I will revisit the site and remove the code. The site is well visited, so all posts will have an image attached by then, and I will no longer need the code.

Before and after

The pictures before and after show the much improved first impression with nice imagery.

But, why not…?

I could have chosen to create a MySQL query, but I am no database master and I was afraid of ruining something on an otherwise stable site.

I could have used a more general piece of code that just took a random image and displayed it as a featured image, but that would mean random images for each visit and an ever-changing html source code.

Using this method will also ensure that each blogpost will have a featured image attached to it, and by using WordPress built-in Featured Image functionality I know that if I ever need to change the theme, the imagery for each blog post will not change.

(Most premium WordPress themes support the built-in functionality).

I also chose this method to add the imagery since I like the idea of the visitors (and search engine crawlers) doing my work

Do you have a better method, or are you a MySQL master that can create a query to do all this with a single piece of code? Don’t be shy, leave a note and tell me!

Find Available Domains In Any Niche With FREE Tools!

Lars Koudal — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 01:21:26 +0000

Find available domains in ANY niche!

Having a keyword-specific domain name for a target niche can have a huge impact for your SEO – Search Engine Optimization.

I am going to share a method for finding high traffic keyword niche specific domains, using only FREE online tools!

The tools we are going to use:

Google External Keyword Tool
GoDaddy Bulk Domain Checker
A spreadsheet application. (Excel, Open Office, or even a Google Docs account)

1. Find keywords

First of all we will need to find a niche, and in this example I will use “acne“.

Go to the Google External Keyword Tool, and set up your search.

Click the "Advanced options" to tweak your search

You can choose any region and language you want, in this example I choose English and all countries, but this process can be used for any language supported by Google Keyword Tool, and for all domain endings (.com, .info, .net, .dk, etc) supported by the GoDaddy Bulk Domain searcher.

Click the “Ideas containing my search terms” option to limit your search, otherwise the keyword tool will return related keywords also.

I limited the search to only return keywords containing my search (“acne”) to make sure the keywords are targeted to the “acne” niche.

After you have searched you will be presented with a list of 100 keywords. You can have more results if you log in via your Google account.

You can choose to just download the entire list, I choose in this example to load the top 30 performing keywords (number of global monthly searches).

Download selected keywords

2. Prepare a list to check

Choose to download the list as CSV for Excel and save it to your machine.

Unzip the file and open the .csv file in your spreadsheet application.

Open the .csv file

When you import the file remember to check the settings are set to separate by “Tabs”!

Verify import settings

Before you check the available domains, you need to take a copy of the list, open it in a text editor and do a search-replace of ” ” (spaces) with “-” (hyphens).

Find and Replace

This way you can check all the keywords for both with and without a hyphen. GoDaddy’s bulk checker automatically removes any spaces before it searches.

Here are the two combined lists, giving us a total of 60 domain names to check. GoDaddy currently supports up to 500 domains at a time.

acne
acne treatment
acne treatments
treatment of acne
treatment for acne
acne scarring
acne scars
getting rid of acne
get rid of acne
skin acne
acne laser
best acne
back acne
how to get rid of acne
treatments for acne
acne remedies
rid of acne scars
free acne
get rid of acne spots
get rid of acne scars
laser acne therapy
acne on back
acne products
acne cream
laser acne treatment
acne laser treatment
acne removal
home remedies for acne
acne home remedies
clear acne
acne
acne-treatment
acne-treatments
treatment-of-acne
treatment-for-acne
acne-scarring
acne-scars
getting-rid-of-acne
get-rid-of-acne
skin-acne
acne-laser
best-acne
back-acne
how-to-get-rid-of-acne
treatments-for-acne
acne-remedies
rid-of-acne-scars
free-acne
get-rid-of-acne-spots
get-rid-of-acne-scars
laser-acne-therapy
acne-on-back
acne-products
acne-cream
laser-acne-treatment
acne-laser-treatment
acne-removal
home-remedies-for-acne
acne-home-remedies
clear-acne

3. Find available domains

You now take the entire list and copy paste it into the GoDaddy bulk domain checker.

You can choose whichever domain TLD’s (.com, .info, .net, etc…) you wish, in this example I have searched only .com and .info

Ready to search for domains

After clicking Search you will see a list of error notifications each one indicating that a domain is not available. If you scroll down in the end of this list you will find a list of the domains currently available for registration.

4. Find the best domains!

The list of domains can then be cross-referenced with the spreadsheet we got from Google with the traffic information.

Here is the list with monthly searches:

Domain	Keyword	Monthly Searches
RIDOFACNESCARS.INFO	“rid of acne scars”	90.500
GETRIDOFACNESPOTS.INFO	“get rid of acne spots”	74.000
LASERACNETHERAPY.INFO	“laser acne therapy”	74.000
ACNEONBACK.INFO	“acne on back”	74.000
ACNE-SCARRING.INFO	“acne scarring”	550.000
BEST-ACNE.INFO	“best acne”	165.000
RID-OF-ACNE-SCARS.INFO	“rid of acne scars”	90.500
FREE-ACNE.INFO	“free acne”	90.500
GET-RID-OF-ACNE-SPOTS.COM	“get rid of acne spots”	74.000
GET-RID-OF-ACNE-SPOTS.INFO	“get rid of acne spots”	74.000
LASER-ACNE-THERAPY.COM	“laser acne therapy”	74.000
LASER-ACNE-THERAPY.INFO	“laser acne therapy”	74.000
ACNE-ON-BACK.COM	“acne on back”	74.000
ACNE-ON-BACK.INFO	“acne on back”	74.000
ACNE-CREAM.INFO	“acne cream”	74.000
HOME-REMEDIES-FOR-ACNE.COM	“home remedies for acne”	60.500
HOME-REMEDIES-FOR-ACNE.INFO	“home remedies for acne”	60.500

The two most interesting are acne-scarring.info and best-acne.info. acne-scarring.info is a targeted domain name for a keyword that gets more than half a million searches. Per month.

Now, just because the domain is available, doesn’t mean it is going to be easy to rank in the top #3 on Google for “acne scarring”. There are several other factors, especially the competing websites for that keyword.

That being said, it is a really good start for SEO.

It is interesting to note that acne-scarring.com is currently only a parked domain, so the domain with the best SEO-impact is not utilized, meaning the .info should be able to catch up fairly well.

You can also go with a domination-strategy, where you buy both the .com and .info domains for “get rid of acne spots” and set up both domains separately.

This way it is possible for you to own more spots in the top 10 for that keyword search.