WordPress Plugin to Remove ‘Category Base’

Setting up correctly the permalinks in WordPress is one of the things that contribute to your blog’s better search engine optimization (SEO). Using relevant slugs for categories, pages and posts will help improve your general ranking. Those looking to get the most out of these permalinks will want to remove the ‘category base’.

There are about a dozen tutorials out there, telling you how to handle this job on your own, editing PHP files, the .htaccess file and adjusting WordPress settings, but what you actually need is one small and efficient plugin that does it all for your, with no extra effort, other than the download and installation process.

WP No Category Base

The WP No Category Base plugin will remove the category base from all your linkd in a SEO friendly way, using 301 redirects for all your old permalinks to the new ones. Also, it is compatible with other Sitemap plugins and works with multi-level categories.
Click here to read the full blog post!

My Take on the WordPress Themes & the GPL License

There’s a huge hype these days around WordPress and the (infamous?) GPL license. Out of the “big guys”, first Brian Gardner of StudioPress (ex-Revolution) decided to distribute his themes as GPL. Later, iThemes followed, and now it’s time for WooThemes to adopt the license.

The discussion around this always seems to evolve into “open source” versus “author protection”. As Alex King pointed out in one of his posts, theme authors should be aware of what the GPL license exposes them too, while it provides freedom for basically everyone else.

I’m not by any means against freedom and open source. I’ve been preaching about the power of WordPress and the wonder that it is, but what I love more is to see a protection system for those authors that make a living out of releasing quality themes and plugins for WordPress. Somewhere along the way, in our quest for “freedom” we forgot how hard it is to earn our living, how hard it is to learn the things we now use to feed our families.

With all the respect I have for Brian, Adii and Alex who have been more than an inspiration for so many people and their contributions to the world of WordPress changed our lives, I fail to see how this sudden change of heart (or maybe “dictated” by Matt Mullenweg’s recent reactions) will help other developers.

The problem does not reside in the GPL license, but rather in the fact that by using WordPress you have to also release your “products” under this license. In theory the GPL license is an amazing thing that allows people to improve and build upon other people’s work, and thus contributing to the development of a bigger, better product, free or paid.
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WP Plugin: Query Posts WordPress Widget

Justin Tadlock has recently released on cool little WordPress plugin that works miracles for those with little PHP knowledge. As the name says, the plugin is a visual reconstruction of the query_posts WordPress template tag.

So, what does the plugin do? It basically allows you to setup an infinite number of widgets in you widget-ready theme, widgets that will display posts from your blog, defined in the widget option area. You can display posts with a certain tag, posts from a certain category or published in a chosen month. You can display them in full, excerpt or under the form of a list, and many other really cool options.

Adam Warner has also released a video overview of this nifty plugin that you can view here or on WordPress.tv.

More info on this plugin you can find on Justin’s blog.

And you can download the plugin from WordPress.org.

Note: While PHP knowledge is not required in order to manipulate this plugin, a basic understanding of how the query_posts template tag works would turn out to help.

WP Plugin: Latest Posts by Category Archive

After posting the Latest Posts by Category Archive tutorial, I’ve received requests to transform the code into a WordPress plugin.

Update: Version 1.2 has been released. Read about the changes below, in the “Version History” section.

The Features of ‘Latest Posts by Category Archive’ WP Plugin

Here’s the list of features currently available:

• Can be used via hard-coding inside page templates;
• Can be used as a widget in your widget-ready areas;
• Can be used via shortcodes inside pages’ or posts’ content;
• Can be used either inside or outside the loop;
• Can limit the archive to certain categories, or exclude certain categories;
• Can display or hide post dates;
• Can display or hide post excerpts and adjust their length in words;
• Can set the number of listed post from 1 to ‘all’.

Version history

Version 1.2

• The plugin is now available as a widget for your blog’s widget ready areas;
• The widget’s output can be easily customized using a few newly added CSS classes. Information about the widget is available in the plugin documentation, which is also included in the download package;
• Fixed the dashboard area that notifies WP 2.7+ users on the latest plugin version available.

Version 1.1

• Added option to display post dates;
• Added dashboard widget for plugin version tracking (Only available for WP 2.7+ users).

Documentation

The plugin documentation is available for download in PDF format: LPBC Documentation (2289)

For further information and plugin updates, please refer to this page, as it will be edited with further improvements.
Click here to read the full blog post!

Keep your blog ordered with WordPress Plugins

Even with the latest WordPress release – 2.5 – we still need to make use of plugins to order our pages, categories and links, without having to go through each one and set an order number manually. If we still have to do this, let’s do it right.

Geeky Weekly is the blog of a 23 year old self-proclaimed geek, with a BS in Computer Science and extensive expertise in computer technologies and databases. For a while now he has been working on 3 WordPress plugins that he kept constantly updated, with every new release of the blogging platform. The latest versions of his plugins are fully compatible – claims their author – with the 2.5 release and are now listed and hosted in the “Plugins” section of Wordpress.org.

So, for your ordering needs, Blogsessive recommends:

• My Link Order
• My Page Order
• My Category Order

Also, for more information and update history, visit the dedicated sections on the author’s blog: My Link Order, My Page Order and My Category Order.

From now on, enjoy your blogging. Everything is “in order”.