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Site Review: Digging Into WordPress

Digging Into WordPress (DigWP.com) is a great site and resource for WordPress powerusers, theme developers, and plugin developers. This is a blog by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr that focuses on the finer points of fine tuning your use of WordPress with excellent (and well documented) tips and code snippets.

Both Chris and Jeff are WordPress veterans with several sites under their direct tutelage. They both have been involved with WordPress as long as I have, taking us all the way back to 2005 (which seems like a long time ago).

Digging Into WordPress is set up to be full of useful information about tuning your WordPress site – code snippets, how-tos, widgets, design, and more. It also serves to promote their book Digging Into WordPress.

I personally own a copy of the book and I heartily recommend it for your library. You can get a print version (currently sold out) or a PDF version. The print version includes a copy of the PDF version, and both versions include lifetime updates – very nice plus. You also get access to a few other extras including some exclusive themes.

The site is loaded with how-tos and code snippets, and both Chris and Jeff operate under a similar school of thought as I do, which includes the following:

Less is more
Do it the right way
Don’t do it with a bulky plugin when roll-your-own will be a better fit

A favorite post of mine is their tutorial on how to make WP’s Visual Editor actually WYSIWYG. If you freelance and you do this for a client site, I guarantee they will be amazed! Especially if they are already using WordPress.

If you want a good overview of their best articles, take a look at their Best of DigWP.com. This has a list of their top posts for the last few years and should give you a good idea of what you can find on DigWP.com.

Whether you are looking to improve your self hosted WordPress site or you are a WordPress developer, there is going to be some good material for you on DigWP.com. Check them out.

5 Reasons to Use Guest Bloggers

By Jake Magleby Leave a Comment

Running your own blog can be an exhausting business. You have to make sure it’s well designed, has enough readers, and that your posts are frequent and well written. It becomes hard to have time to do anything else since this can take up more time than a full time job. Accepting guest posts is a perfectly logical measure to take to give yourself a little more relief. These five reasons are all valid and may lead to lower stress in your life.

1. Blogger to Blogger Relationships

Building relationships with other bloggers can make your job even easier. When you have reliable bloggers post on your site, you can invite them to do additional posts when you need the content. It can also give you an opportunity to write a guest post for their blogs as well. No matter what business you are in, having strong relationships always makes the work a little easier – and a little more fun.

2. Extra Credibility

Having guest bloggers post on your site can make it a more credible blog. It shows that your blog has a high enough authority for others to want to be a part of it. A lot of blogs produce extra revenue by charging anywhere from $5 to $50 to publish a guest post for someone. This isn’t required though. You’ll be likely to get more guest post offers if you post them for free.

3. Unique Content

As a blogger, you can sometimes find yourself coming up with more bad ideas than good. It’s difficult to consistently come up with topics to entertain your readers. Guest bloggers can offer a fresh look on topics within your blog’s niche. Take advantage of their creativity and allow them to share their ideas with your readers as well. You find yourself learning something new, and your readers will be pleased with the new take on old ideas.

4. Quality Content

A lot of guest bloggers pitch ideas because they want to get their name known. Therefore, they won’t waste their time and yours by writing poor content. The best guest bloggers will write highquality content that will benefit both your blog and their own writing on other sites. There are some fantastic writers out there just waiting for the chance to be published.

5. Constant Content

If you have a lot of loyal readers, it can be difficult to supply enough content to keep them all satisfied. This is especially true if you are running your entire blog on your own. As previously mentioned, you can run out of your own ideas pretty quickly. This makes it very hard to roll out blog posts on a consistent basis. But with well-written guest posts, you can take comfort in the knowledge that your readers will be entertained with new content.

Accepting guest posts on your blog can definitely be to your benefit. However, it is okay for you to be selective about the posts that you accept. If you feel like a post doesn’t fit into your niche, is poorly written, or is too spammy, it’s okay to reject it. This is your blog, you can set the boundaries for your guest posts. If you publish the best content possible, you are sure to find more success in your blogging.

Plugin Review: User Switching

By Chad Butler Leave a Comment

If you are a WordPress developer of either themes or plugins, or you are running/building a membership site with something like WP-Members, then you may find yourself logging in and out of your test site a lot. In building WP-Members, I find myself doing this constantly to test the plugin with different user accounts.

The User Switching plugin has made my life easier in this area, and if you are a developer, I think you’ll find it incredibly useful as well. It is also handy for site admins that might be testing features of their site and might need to be logging in and out of various test accounts.

About The Plugin

As I mentioned, the plugin allows you to switch user accounts, and you can do this all from the WP Users screen. The plugin was developed and is maintained by John Blackbourn, WordPress specialist at Code For The People.

This is a free plugin maintained in the wordpress.org repository.

Analysis

The first concern with any plugin that deals with user accounts is of course going to be security. I was impressed with John’s attention to detail in this area, including use of WP nonces. This is from the plugin description:

Only users with the ability to edit other users can switch user accounts (by default this is only Administrators on single site installs, and Super Admins on Multisite installs). Lower level users cannot switch accounts.
User switching is protected with WordPress’ nonce security system, meaning only those who intend to switch users can switch.
Full support for administration over SSL (if applicable).
Passwords are not (and cialis online cannot be) revealed

The plugin is essentially one single file. There is not a lot to it in terms of code. This does have the downside of needing to load with all WordPress plugins. Personally, I would like to see a two file system, the first testing to see if the user has user editing capability (required for the plugin’s security) and if so, go ahead and load the class file for user switching.

Even without that, it is a very lightweight plugin and uses proper security controls, so it could be used on a production site, but I would recommend limiting its use to staging sites and if used on a production site, definitely limit its use to only active when needed.

The plugin supports WP standard installs, but also Multisite and BuddyPress (and WP-Members!).

Critical when considering a plugin is support. John is active on the wordpress.org forum, so support issues are addressed in a timely manner. This also tells you that the plugin is continuing to be maintained. The plugin’s most recent update just last month and it has ongoing downloads, 81,397 as I write this. The ratings are impressively high with 79 5 star ratings and only 1 each 4 and 3 star. The non-5 star ratings were before the new wordpress.org review system, so we don’t know the reason for that, but clearly those individuals were out of touch. This is a 5 star plugin.

Status

Definitely Recommended!

Where To Find It

Get it in the WordPress Plugin Respository:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/user-switching/