The official Changlog for version 1.1 includes:

• Removed PHP Short tags
• Changed from print() to echo
• Fixed invalid use of _e function
• Generally cleaned up code

The plugin can be downloaded from the wordpress plugin repository at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/comment-link-manager/ 
More information about the plugin can be found on the Comment Link Manager page of our site.  

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Comment Link Manager Version 1.1 Update" rel="external" target="_blank">Comment Link Manager Version 1.1 Update

The CLM plugin does exactly that. It can also remove the nofollow tag from both author comment links and links left in the body of a comment as well as open those links in a new window. Here is the full list of features available in the system:

• Enables admins to remove nofollow attribute from comment author links
• Allows for optional removal of nofollow attribute from links left in the body of comments
• Provides admins with the ability to open comment author and body links in a new browser window.
• Provides ability for admins to require a specified number of comments before enabling comment author links
• Has built in whitelist and blacklist functions to override general setting of required number of comments

To download a copy of the comment link manager plugin, please visit the comment link manager page on wordpress.org.

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Comment Link Manager 1.0 WP Plugin Released" rel="external" target="_blank">Comment Link Manager 1.0 WP Plugin Released

Some of these new features include:

• Theme Installation & Upgrades – Due to the popularity of the main system and plugin upgrade systems inside the admin panel of WordPress, they decided to add a similar feature for themes.
• Improved Widget Administration Interface – The WP dev team went back and completely redesigned the widget administration interfaces to allow WP users to edit widgets on the fly using drag and drop interfaces that they are used to.
• Cleaner & More Robust Widget API – Provides a better API for WordPress Widget Developers. With any kind of luck at all we should see more people developing widgets for WP like we do plugins.
• New Screen Options – The dev’s have added screen options to more administration pages allowing users to customize thier admin interfaces more to their liking.
• And Much More! (There’s always a “and much more”.. isn’t there?)

At the bottom of the annoucement Matt also touches on some of the future changes for WordPress, just not in great detail. Everyone should download a copy of WordPress 2.8 and check out the new features! As of the time of this posting, the upgrade option was not yet available in our wordpress administration panel.

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Newly Released WordPress 2.8 Promises to be Faster" rel="external" target="_blank">Newly Released WordPress 2.8 Promises to be Faster

Let us start by giving a nice big thanks to experts in the SEO community. It’s likely because of them that there are literally thousands, possibly millions, of WordPress installations that setup with less than optimal settings. Many unsuspecting and uneducated users look to this group of experts for ideas and techniques to improve their search engine rankings and to gather more website traffic. Little do these users know that even some of the most popular people in this group of experts are handing out bad advice regarding how to setup WordPress systems.

Bad WordPress Permalinks Advice
Most of the SEO experts on the net recommend that users setup their WordPress permalinks in a very specific way. Every article on the net I have seen written by an SEO expert regarding WordPress permalinks suggests that users either use “/%postname%” or “/%category%/%postname%” for their permalink structure. This is a bad idea for many reasons, which I will cover below, yet the SEO experts continue to promote it.

In fact I was at SearchFest, a Portland SEO & search marketing conference, in March and I watched an SEO expert use this as his suggested permalinks structure to an entire room of people during a WordPress SEO session. Now I just feel bad for anyone who actually wrote down or took that advice. There are much better ways of setting up your permalink structures.

Why Are Those Permalinks Structures Bad?
Well to sum it up very simply it comes down to two things. Speed and Reliability. Thinking from the blog readers points of view these have to be the two of the three most important items that your blog can give them. The third of course being content, but that’s not what we are here to talk about today.

Let’s start off with reliability and how these permalink structures affect that. Both of these permalink structures have the first variable in the structure as a text based keyword. The variables I am talking about of course are %category% and %postname%. Unfortunately by using a text based variable you can cause WordPress to get confused when the system goes to process the request from your users. The reason for this is that there are just too many possible items it can match.

When we look at a example URL of “/blah-blah-blah/”, WordPress can run into problems when trying to match items to the request. Does it match a category, a page name or a post name? All of these text based variables use the same pattern matching so the system would have to run multiple database queries to figure out what the user is looking for. That’s not to mention the fact that the system also has to parse that request for attachments, tags, author pages and feeds which all use text based keywords as well.

Even then the system could get confused if you have a page/sub page combination that matches the slug of a category/post combination. Which one should the system load? These combinations of random keywords could easily cause WordPress to load the wrong page or post for a user which in turn makes your site less reliable in the user’s eyes.

So now compound all of the above with the speed issues. The most obvious of speed issues is that WordPress has to run all of those database queries that I mentioned above.Those are not lightweight and fast queries. They take time and delay the loading of the page that the user is requesting. How many times have you left a site because it loaded too slowly?

Another speed issue is for the WordPress author themselves. When using a permalinks structure with a text keyword as the first variable you end up causing WordPress to generate internal redirects to try and fix the issues mentioned above. These redirects are stored in the wp_options table in the database and are generated when authors add and edit posts or pages in the system.

The system is semi smart and generates internal redirects for all the pages that are loaded into the system. A simple page with a couple of attachments, whether they are displayed or not, can easily generate 11 internal redirects in the database. This is because the system needs the redirects for the page, it’s attachments, the trackback URLs and feeds that go with it. To make matters worse the system has to have a line for the redirect as it would show up in the request, the permalink for the item, and a line for how WordPress is to understand that request. So now we can double the number of lines in the database for that one post to 22 lines.

So by using the permalinks structure with the first variable being a text based keyword the system now generates these redirects upon saving a post/page and causes delays for the author. In fact there have been reports where users with 200 or so pages, with random attachments, in their WordPress installations actually causing server time outs during the generation of these redirects. This causes them not to be able to post to their WordPress installations at all.

Continuing with the speed problems, lets not give up on those internal redirects. Those internal redirects also affect the users of the website and their page loading speeds. With every page request the system has to load all of those extra redirects and process them. That’s 22 extra lines of code per request that has to be processed before the page will load for the end user. Imagine if you had a simple site with 10 pages, that’s an extra 220 lines of code. That is of course is on top of the other 125 lines of code for internal redirects that WordPress needs by default with no pages.

I took a look at one of my customers blogs who has 24 pages and compared that to his internal redirect list. His redirect list had a total of 773 lines of code that needed to be processed for every request to his blog. As you can see that 22 lines of code is a lower end figure when compared to his total number of pages. On our blog we have 22 pages and do not use one of the permalink structures above. Our blog only has 140 lines of redirect code that has to be loaded and none of those reference any of our pages individually like our customer’s redirects did.

Be advised that none of this touches on what kind of damage your doing to your server. Since WordPress is written in PHP and MySQL, all of the requests and code are processed on the server side rather then the user’s end of the connection. By adding excess lines of code for redirects and increasing your number of database queries, you are also increasing the amount of work your web hosting server is having to do. That also isn’t a good thing.

So What is the Solution?
The solution is to use a permalink structure that does not start with a text based variable. By doing this you will drastically reduce your risk of the problems listed above. Here is a list of variables you can use that are not text based:

• %year% – The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
• %monthnum% – Month of the year, for example 05
• %day% – Day of the month, for example 28
• %hour% – Hour of the day, for example 15
• %minute% – Minute of the hour, for example 43
• %second% – Second of the minute, for example 33
• %post_id% – The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

Now that doesn’t mean you can’t have text based variables in your permalink structures, you just need to make sure the first variable is not text based. On Weberz we use “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%” as our permalink structure.

Why Would The SEO Experts Recommend The Wrong Structure?
The reason SEO experts recommend the “/%postname%” or “/%category%/%postname%” structure is simple. It makes the URLs easy to remember and it introduces keywords into the URL string that should match the content of your post. Typically in SEO the shorter the URL the better as its easier for the users to remember. The reason some SEOs recommend adding %category% to it is because categories normally include common keywords in the name that match the contents of the posts in that category. Are these extra 2-3 keywords from %category% worth it? Not in my opinion.

A better question would be why aren’t SEO experts recommending the permalink structure of “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%”? A simple answer to that one would be because they think the URL might be too long or they are unaware of the issues I am writing about today. After all some of these problems were not introduced until WordPress 2.7 was released. Hopefully some of the SEO experts will read this article and change their recommendations to their customers.

Why Blame the SEO Experts For This?
SEO experts are the ones who always are trying to optimize their pages to get the best search rankings possible. They are likely the reason that these options even exist for the permalink structures. Always wanting to get a extra 2-3 keywords in the URL out of the %category% tag or wanting to shorten the URL to just “/%postname%”. It’s just insanity.

Of course there is always the fact that they are the only ones I see recommending this to people because of the optimization boost that it can give you. If it wasn’t for SEO, there would be no reason to use one of those permalink structures except to make things look pretty.

How Do I Know This is Real and Not Just Your Crazy Opinion?
That is a very good question. Unlike the SEO experts opinions, I happen to have the official WordPress documentation on my side. The WordPress Codex page for Permalinks specifically states the following:

“For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.”

Really who is going to argue with the official documentation? Just in case you still think I might be making it up, here is a link to a discussion on the WordPress Testers mailing list thread that discusses these very issues.

Now as of the time of this writing there is a patch for part of the problem listed above. A user has provided the WordPress developers a patch via the WordPress Trac site to make the generation of internal redirects faster when authors save a post or a page. While I believe this is great, it still doesn’t solve the issue of those redirects needing to be there in the first place. Even if you generate the redirects faster, you still have the problem of having to process them with every request from a user. Seems like a band aid over a much bigger problem.

So Who Are These SEO Experts Giving The Bad Advice?
Honestly the list is too long to name everyone. There are a few key people in the community that I am going to point out anyway. Now don’t get me wrong, all of these people are extremely good at what they do and I have a huge amount of respect for them. It’s just on this particular issue, they got it wrong at some point in the past.

• Scott Hendison – Scott runs a internet marketing company called Search Commander and was the one who introduced me to WordPress. Scott also has a WordPress plugin called WordPress Core Tweaks that automatically cleans up your WordPress installation for you. Unfortunately Scott’s plugin sets your permalinks to “/%category%/%postname%” which we now know is less then optimal.
• Aaron Wall – Aaron is the founder of SEO Book – SEO Training Made Easy. SEO Book provides a number of good articles to readers about search engines and the SEO community as well as sells an ebook written by Aaron. Aaron mentioned in this comment under a blog Q&A session that he likes permalinks that are “/name-of-post” or “/2007/09/name-of-post”. At least one of them was a good format right?
• Joost de Valk – Joost runs Yoast.com a website dedicated to tweaking websites for better SEO. Joost is particularly popular among the SEO community for having great WordPress SEO advice and some of the best WordPress plugins available. In Joost’s WordPress SEO article under section 1.1 titled “Permalinks” he specifically states “I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/“.
• Michael Gray – Michael runs Graywolf’s SEO Blog a widely popular blog covering search engine optimization and search marketing news. In this thread Michael not only shares with users that he uses “/%category%/%postname%/” for a permalink structure, but also helps users solve some related permalink problems in the comments.
• Matt Cutts – Matt is head of the Google web spam team and runs a personal blog on mattcutts.com. Matt is not an SEO but he is a major figure in the SEO community. Matt recently posted the slideshow that he used at WorldCamp 2009 when discussing blogging and WordPress among other things. There was no video posted but on slide 25 Matt was obviously talking about URL structures and permalinks. Unfortunately the slide also shows users should use a permalink structure of “/%postname%/”.
• Jordan Kasteler – Jordan runs Search & Social and also has a Utah SEO Blog setup where he posts copies of his conference presentations. Jordan was the presenter at SearchFest 2009 that informed an entire room of users on how to setup their WordPress installations incorrectly. Here is a copy of his slides.. Slide 10 is obviously my favorite!

To add to the list above of people who handed out the wrong advice to users, below is a list of SEO experts that are using the wrong permalink structure on their own blogs. Since I couldn’t find anywhere that the people below had handed out advice on what to use, I didn’t want to mix them with the wrong doers above.

• Vanessa Fox – Vanessa runs Nine By Blue and previously worked for Google where she built Webmaster Tools. Unfortunately Vanessa setup a blog on Nine By Blue where she uses /%postname%/ as her permalinks structure. She even talks about changing the structure in this post.
• Adam Audette – Adam runs Audette Media a strategic internet marketing firm. Audette Media was kind enough to put up a blog where the primary poster is Adam himself, unfortunately they used /%postname% as well.
• Stephan Spencer – Stephan runs Net Concepts an SEO marketing and consulting firm. While I could find many places, including a WorldCamp 2009 presentation, where Stephan recommends users shorten their URL and create custom post slugs, I couldn’t find anywhere he actually recommended a permalink structure. With that in mind, the Net Concepts blog also seems to use /%postname% or a custom post slug for each entry which is also a text based variable.
• Danny Sullivan – Danny is the founder of Search Engine Land which is one of the largest sites on the internet for covering search engine and search marketing news. Danny’s personal blog located at daggle.com is also a WordPress blog. Unfortunately Danny setup his permalinks structure to be /%postname%-%postid% which is also not a good way of doing things.

By now you are probably asking if anyone did get this correct, the answer is Yes! I was able to find two SEO experts that actually have their blogs setup correctly and didn’t appear to give advice to anyone on how to setup their permalinks. These two great individuals are:

• Jeremy Schoemaker – Jeremy runs Shoemoney.com where he shares his experiences in online marketing. Jeremy uses a permalink structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%.
• Neil Patel – Neil runs QuickSprout where he explains and discusses ideas and techniques for online marketing and social media. Neil is also using the permalink structure of /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%. As a side note, Niel also provided the best SEO presentation I have ever seen at SearchFest 2009… If only there was a video of it.

Hopefully this article will enlighten WordPress users and the SEO community to find a new permalink structure to use and promote. While it’s certainly obvious from the points above that there are better permalink structures available, I have no doubt that some users will continue to use bad ones. From your point of view, is using one of these bad permalink structures worth it? Is the extra processing and potential load time issues worth getting a extra few keywords into the URL? Share your comments below and let us know!

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Many SEO Experts Give Wrong Advice Regarding WordPress Permalinks" rel="external" target="_blank">Many SEO Experts Give Wrong Advice Regarding WordPress Permalinks

The reason behind making such as change was simple. WordPress has such as huge following that the internet community at large has created plugins and themes for the system for almost every possible need. This is great as it allows us to use those plugins rather then having to code custom pages in PHP on our old website to get similar features.

During my journey I found out that using WordPress as a CMS was not a difficult task. I made plenty of mistakes along the way and it was a little bit of a bumpy road, this was mainly due to the lack of information regarding the problems I was having on the internet. I will cover all these problems below and hopefully they will ease the pain for others in search of answers.

Here is what I wanted out of the system.

1. WordPress is made up of posts and pages. Posts are normally displayed in chronological order and thus work extremely well for the blog entries. Pages carry more of a static content look and feel, leaving them as the optimal choice for the “website” outside of the blog.
2. WordPress should be installed in the root of our domain “/” and the same installation should work for “/blog” where our blog will be located.
3. The entire setup, site and blog, should use the same plugins and themes so we get the same look and feel throughout the user experience.
4. The front page, or main domain page, should look different from the other sub pages on our site. Example: http://www.weberz.com looks different from http://www.weberz.com/network
5. All of the blog posts and information should be located under the posts page, or home page in WordPress code speak. This is so the users and search engines can easily tell our blog area’s from the main website.

Now the above may seem like a lot, but its really not that bad. That is of course once I figured out how everything goes together and works. With that in mind… Here’s how it all works.

The CMS & Blog Setup
I installed WordPress into the root domain folder just as I specified above. I setup the configuration file and did a little trimming of the default entries in the database. These included changing the admin password, removing the links, removing the about page and removing the hello world post. Once all that was done I simply created two new pages in WordPress. One I named “main page” and the other I named “blog”. For both of the pages I left the content blank and simply typed in the title for the page.

Once I had the two pages setup I was able to go to the Settings -> Reading page and found the option labeled “Front Page displays“. I changed this to the “A Static Page” option. Once I had those set there were two drop down boxes that could be used to select which page was the front page and which was the posts, or blog, page. I selected the proper pages and saved the options at the bottom.

That was all there is too it. At this point the page I named “main page” is now the main website home page and the page I named blog is now where my blog posts will display. They result into the following URLs:

Main Page: http://www.domain.com
Posts Page: http://www.domain.com/blog

This was perfect! I thought it could not get any simpler then this.. I was right.

Changing the Main Page’s Design
This one was a little more difficult. According to the codex document for WordPress Pages, I am able to specify a different template/page layout for a page. So what I did was make the default layout for pages be what I wanted all the sites sub pages to look like. I did this by editing the template files and CSS design. The end result turned out to look like our network page.

The main page however I wanted to be different. So I designed a new layout in a template file and placed the following at the top of the PHP file:

/*
Template Name: Index Page
*/

This designated the template file as a special page template called “Index Page”. Once the design for this template file was done, I was able to go back into the WordPress administration and edit the page I previously created called “main page”. On the right of the page editing screen there was an option for “Page Template”. In the drop down there was a template called “Index Page” which changed the design of only this page to the new layout I had created.

Between those two items we pretty much covered most of the requirements above. The last one was the largest pain and caused me the most headache. That was the requirement of wanting all of the blog information to stay under the blog directory. What I mean by this is that I wanted all the URL’s for tags, posts and categories to be located under “/blog/” where the posts page, or home page, was specified to be.

Tag and Category Base’s

These were actually easy to set and get correct. By default WordPress set the tag and category base urls to be as follows:

Tag Base: http://www.domain.com/tag/
Category Base: http://www.domain.com/category/

Well as I mentioned before this wasn’t going to work for me. Not because it didn’t actually work but more due to my OCD for wanting to get things correct, at least correct in my mind. So in the administration panel under Settings -> Permalinks there are two input boxes to specify the URL structure to use for the tag and category base’s. I set my tag base to be “/blog/tag” and my category base to be “/blog/category”. This left me with the following URLs when saved:

Tag Base: http://www.domain.com/blog/tag/
Category Base: http://www.domain.com/blog/category/

This was perfect and working out well. The only thing left to do was get the permalink structure setup correctly so my blog posts also showed up under “/blog/”. Little did I know that this was going to be a 4 day process of trial and error while doing a lot of searching on Google for answers.

Permalinks
WordPress Permalinks, my new arch nemesis! Permalinks is the name for the concept of giving a blog post a pretty URL to use rather then a ugly one. Here is an example:

Pretty: http://www.domain.com/general/my-general-post-about-wordpress
Ugly: http://www.domain.com/index.php?id=346

The general idea is that your going to give your blog posts not only a nice looking url that’s easier to remember but also that your getting a little search engine optimization in there by having the title of the post be in the url, hopefully with some keywords. In general the most commonly used permalink structure for WordPress is “/%category%/%postname%/” which ends up looking exactly like the “Pretty” example I gave above. With that in mind we know that this wont work for me because I wanted everything to be located under “/blog/” that was part of the blog. By now you have the same idea I had.. so lets go through it.

Permalinks are setup on the Settings -> Permalinks page by choosing the “Custom Structure” option and typing in a Permalink structure that fits your needs. So like you guessed, I put in “/blog/%category%/%postname%”. After all I will get extra bonus keywords in my URL’s if the category names also include keywords. This would have made the blog posts links look like this:

Post URL: http://www.domain.com/blog/general/general-post-about-wordpress

This is perfect! Unfortunately it broke my WordPress. Upon doing this and testing I found that all the post links were working properly however the pagination, page navigation, on the post page, home page, didn’t work. In fact the pagination resulted in a 404 error on some pages and it redirected using a 302 redirect to posts on other pages. Lets sidebar to pagination real quick!

Pagination is the idea of having multiple pages to display the lists of the blog posts. This is simply done by specifying a number of posts per page on the Settings -> Reading administration page. Once you specify a number of posts per page, WordPress will automatically break up your main posts page, or home page, into multiple pages displaying X number of posts. X of course being what you specified in the option. Pagination URL’s typically look like this:

http://www.domain.com/blog/page/2 or

http://www.domain.com/blog/page/3

So back to permalinks! Once I used the permalink structure mentioned above the pagination on the blog quit working. In fact one page, /blog/page/2, ended up redirecting to a post from last year and /blog/page/3 resulted in a 404 page not found being displayed. Why you ask? All because of those damn permalinks!

After many days of trying to figure out what was causing the issue I ended up changing the permalink structure to see if it was the problem and sure enough it was. So I did many hours of searching for every combination of keywords I could think of to try and solve the issue. I had no luck at all. Turns out the answer was in the codex documentation page for permalinks the whole time.

Upon reading the page VERY carefully many times I can across a paragraph that mentions another issue with permalinks. As it turns out the WordPress developers suggest that your permalinks structure start with a field that contains a number rather then one that contains text. On the codex page there was a link that goes to a WordPress testers discussion that explains why.

Basically what it comes down to is that WordPress has to parse the request for a page against a number of variables. In the testers discussion it mentions that for this reason you should use a number field rather then a text field to start your permalinks structure. This is because all pages always start with a text field and by using a number field you are telling WordPress that this is indeed a post rather then a page. This helps cut down on processing time to figure out what the user is trying to load and also reduces the number of internal rewrites that WordPress has to maintain due to the %category% being the first variable of the permalink structure.

This make sense because the same thing did not happen with the tag base or category base. This is because the keywords “tag” and “category” were hard coded into the base’s (in the options by specified above) and therefore WordPress did not have to guess what the users of those requests were looking for.

Once I changed the permalinks structure to one that has a number for the first field rather then text, the pagination no longer resulted in a 404 and the mysterious redirects were gone. The structure I used was “/blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%” so my URLs were still under “/blog” and they also fell in line with the WordPress calendar function which year, month and day in it’s url structure.

In the end the options I mentioned above ended up giving me the URL’s of:

Static FrontPage: http://www.weberz.com
Blog Home Page: http://www.weberz.com/blog
Blog Category Page: http://www.weberz.com/blog/category/general
Blog Tags Page: http://www.weberz.com/blog/tag/wordpress
Post Page: http://www.weberz.com/blog/2009/06/wordpress-cms-blog

Now I have a fully working WordPress CMS system with a blog in a single installation. All of the pages use the same set of template files and plugins for easy administration and everything is working fairly smooth. With any kind of luck at all.. This article helped you setup your WordPress installation as a CMS and hopefully it didn’t take you 4 days to find it!

This article was originally posted by Weberz Hosting at: Using WordPress as a CMS and a Blog" rel="external" target="_blank">Using WordPress as a CMS and a Blog