A recent addition to WordPress 3 is the “Admin Bar”. It allows you to view your site, and at any time skip to your dashboard, add a new post, and a plethora of other handy “Shortcuts” to places you will likely want to go after viewing your site. Initially, I hated it. I looked for, and found plugins such as “Global Hide Admin Bar” to remove it, so I didn’t have to look at it ever again. Although there are still a few sites I have the admin bar disabled on, it does remain on this site. I guess the reason is that on other sites I am the admin/creator/god, and I have no need for the options it offers, so it’s a pain when I am trying to see if my DIVS are correctly aligned. On this site however, it does come in handy when I look at a post, and realise that I have written gibberish that nobody but me could possibly understand, and I need to go back and edit my posts. Yes, I am admin/creator/god on this site, but I am primarily an editor/user, hence in this capacity the bar is slightly more appealing. My feelings towards the admin bar are definitely on a site by site basis. It depends on if I am the creator, or a user of a site. For the most part, I don’t like it, and I could go on living quiet happily without it, even though it has proved useful at times on some sites.
I have written about some bad WordPress plugins, so I thought it was time I wrote about a good one, and oh boy, is this a good one. This is one of those plugins that is “Bigger than Ben Hur”. If you are building a WordPress site for someone who is a bit of a newb, or in my case an editor of a major print magazine and celebrity national television sports commentator, who has no interest in the back end, and just wants a word processor to update their site, you NEED this plugin.
The point of Adminimize is to minimize the admin, or back end of a WordPress site. This is great for multi user sites. As an admin, you can decide what site users get to see, and more importantly, what they don’t get to see in their dashboard. In my case, my client comes from a purely editorial background. He wants to write his articles, and moderate his readers, and that’s it. So with Adminimize, I have been able to remove all of the other WordPress features such as the Plugins panel, Pages panel, Appearance panel, Tools, Settings, and the menu/settings entries for the twenty something other plugins I have had to install to make the site work to his requirements. He can create new posts, reply to comments, and ad links to his blogroll, because that’s all he wants to do. What I really like about this plugin, is that when you install other plugins, it knows about them upon a refresh, and you can decide how much of their admin capabilities is available to your different user levels as well.
You can remove that pesky admin bar, screen options, or admin colour schemes, and many other of WordPress’s “features” (depending on whether you love them or hate them) not only globally, but on a user level as well. So you can have the admin bar for yourself as an admin, remove it for your editors, and enable it for authors, if that’s what you want to do.
This plugin is one of those ones that I just can’t believe is free. There is a “Donate” option on the settings page, and I believe this one is well worth leaving a few bucks for the authors – It’s a killer plug in! Just one word of warning though, on installation and activation, you will be confronted with literally hundreds of check boxes. Even though it will appear overwhelming, it’s not. Keep in mind there is 5 check boxes, one for each user lever, per option. Just remember the options are down the left hand side in column one, and the rows are for user levels that you want to allow/disallow the privileged. Give it a go, and look at it one option at a time, and before long not only will you understand its simple layout (which appears complicated because there are hundreds of choices), but you will see why I hereby officially give Adminimize “5 Paws Up”!
Adminimize is available for download at the WordPress repository HERE.
All web sites need a good robots.txt in my opinion. For those reading (Ha….what a joke!) who don’t know what that is, a robots.txt file is simply a text file that tells search engines what they are allowed to tell the world about, and what you dont want them to promote. Now, you might be thinking “I want them to index every page on my site”, and that’s a fair call, but what they can also do, is promote the folders and files that exist behind the scenes of your site, that you would prefer to keep private for reasons such as privacy and security.
If you are new to the web/site design, and this is all news to you, and you have realised there are some folders on your server that contain files you don’t want the world to find through a search engine, you can easily generate a robots.txt file using the free robots.txt file generator at McAnerin HERE. Once you have told the generator the directories on your server you want to keep private, copy the code it generates, and then create a new text document on your computer, and paste it in. Call the file “robots.txt” (without the exclamation marks of course) and then upload it into the “public_html” folder of your website.
Now, for those of us who use WordPress, there are quiet a few directories that I think should be blocked. There are also others who have the opinion that your WordPress site ranks higher if you don’t use one. There’s still a lot of unanswered questions about the internet, and this is one of them. Until it is resolved, I personally will continue to use robots.txt.
So for now, below is my robots.txt file I use – If you think I have missed something, or if you think the whole robots.txt idea is junk, please comment! I’d love to hear your thought’s for and against.
Upon building a site for a client who wanted different backgrounds and headers on his site for different occasions, I came across the Chameleon CSS plugin. Put, very simply, it allows you to automatically schedule the use of different CSS Style sheets at different times (Time, Date, Day and Month). Its compatible with WP Super Cache, and is really easy to use.
Check it out now in the Plugin Directory – Chameleon CSS.
This is so disappointing. Dennis Hoppe has written a really really good plugin. Post Page Associator allows you to create a “page” in WordPress, and place content from one, or multiple categories on it, and by modifying the associated CSS file (or creating your own template) you can make it look just the way you want. It truly is a great plug in. There is a paid version, and a free version. The free version is where my issue with this plugin begins. Now, WordPress is created and made available for free, not to be sold. Even though some plugins on third party sites are commercial, plugins that appear in the Official WordPress Plugin Repository are also meant to be free. This plugin appears in the repository HERE. On the authors own site, he bills the program as free from the repository:
So imagine my surprise when I activated the plugin and saw this in my Dashboard:
Not only did it appear in the Admin dashboard, it also appeared under the “Editor” permissions group as well. Thankfully, I don’t have “subscribers” activated on this particular site, as I expect (but can not confirm) it would appear in the subscriber dashboard panel as well. If this isn’t bad enough, should you choose not to donate to the author, and click the button in the bottom right labelled “No thanks, Remove this box now!”, as expected the box goes away……..and so does the plug in! It de-activates itself!
RANSOM and ULTIMATUM! Pay up, don’t use it, or live with a very large obtrusive and ugly nag screen in everybody’s dashboard, that’s your choices.
I believe this is a violation of the spirit and terms of WordPress, and I call this “Dashboard SPAM”. I have no problems with plugin authors including a “Donate” button on their plugins “settings” page, or an advertisement for their plugins paid version, and its benefits over the free version, but I feel what the author has done in this case oversteps the mark. At no point during my selection and installation of this plugin was I asked to accept this term/condition.
I have just been looking to see if the author has made a note anywhere about how to remove the spam part, and I stumbled upon THIS thread. The first thing that caught my attention is that the author does indeed provide a way for you to remove the spam when asked – his answer:
Another suggestion in the thread states that removal of the “donate.php” file is all that is required to make it go away. This may have been true of previous versions, but in the current 1.3.21 version, no such file exists. In the current version, the author has renamed this file to “contribute.php”, and now, simply deleting this file will crash your entire WordPress install. The author has written it in such a way that there is code in this file that code elsewhere in other files looks for, and if it doesn’t find it, it WordPress crashes.
Post Page Associator is not, and will not be used on this site.
I should have known by the “what others are saying” on the WordPress Plugin page for this plug in HERE.
I have been testing a lot of security plugins lately, and even though this one rates poorly, and the comments aren’t flattering, I thought I would take a look anyway and make my own decision. As I installed it on a hosted server, here’s what I got:
Not only did this plugin crash my WordPress site, it got my hosting account suspended! Upon liaising with tech support at the hosting company, it turns out that this plugin created infinite loops which pushed server load beyond acceptable levels, and in a hosted server environment earns you instant suspension in the form of a “terms of service” violation.
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A recent addition to WordPress 3 is the “Admin Bar”. It allows you to view your site, and at any time skip to your dashboard, add a new post, and a plethora of other handy “Shortcuts” to places you will likely want to go after viewing your site. Initially, I hated it. I looked for, and found plugins such as “Global Hide Admin Bar” to remove it, so I didn’t have to look at it ever again. Although there are still a few sites I have the admin bar disabled on, it does remain on this site. I guess the reason is that on other sites I am the admin/creator/god, and I have no need for the options it offers, so it’s a pain when I am trying to see if my DIVS are correctly aligned. On this site however, it does come in handy when I look at a post, and realise that I have written gibberish that nobody but me could possibly understand, and I need to go back and edit my posts. Yes, I am admin/creator/god on this site, but I am primarily an editor/user, hence in this capacity the bar is slightly more appealing. My feelings towards the admin bar are definitely on a site by site basis. It depends on if I am the creator, or a user of a site. For the most part, I don’t like it, and I could go on living quiet happily without it, even though it has proved useful at times on some sites.
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