Recently I had a situation where I had multiple levels of child categories (sub categories), and my permalinks ended up looking like this for a category page:

example.com/parent-category/child-category/sub-child-category/

Because this page would be a destination page that would be shared and even memorized by some, I needed to get the permalink for the Sub Child Category to look like this:

example.com/sub-child-category/

After trolling through lots of close-but-no-cigar code snippets and broken plugins, I finally came across the Custom Permalinks plugin. This plugin lets you set custom permalinks on a per post, per tag, or per category basis.

And in the process, as in my case above, it doesn’t break your bread crumbs either (i.e. my bread crumbs still show the parent category, child category, and sub child category links).

Creating Custom Permalinks

You create your custom permalinks in several places, depending on what  you’re working with (categories, tags, or posts).

For both categories and tags, you can customize the permalink on the edit pages for categories and tags (either when creating or editing on those pages: Posts > Categories and Posts > Tags respectively).

For posts, you can edit the permalink when editing the post.

SEO Benefits

In my case above, I was cleaning up my URLs solely for the benefit of visitors; however, it has been said that shorter, cleaner URLs will also help you with SEO. To what degree that’s true is debatable (as is much in SEO), but it’s clear that Google prefers short, nice-looking URLs. They have even said as much: “A site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. … Whenever possible, shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters.”

So there you are — if you have long, messy URLs, this plugin can help you clean them up.

Photo: www internet web address concept from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

The WordPress Experts – WPMU.org

That’s no good! Attachment Pages Redirect is a new plugin that does one simple thing. It 301 redirects attachment pages to the post parent, if it has one. If not, it redirects using a 302 temporary redirect to the home page. You may have an SEO plugin that already does this, so make sure to check before you install it.

Indexing pages with no content dilutes your site’s power to rank in searches. Attachment Pages Redirect will help you to get all of those dead ends redirected. Download it for free from the WordPress repository.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

The WordPress Experts – WPMU.org

Yep. That’s my column, all self promotion and the like. Paid in chocolate kittens, remember?

Joking aside (right…), I think the WordPress community summit is a great idea. For those of you who find posts on wordpress.org to be scary, here’s the lowdown.

Wait. You find posts on wordpress.org scary? That’s just plain stupid, go read it, battle your phobia, then come back here.

Pretty nice huh? From core developer meetup, to something that sounds like a great opportunity to inject new ideas and point of views into the WordPress project. There is definitely a need for the core developers to be able to sit down and discuss things all by themselves, but just like regular human beings they are not all-knowing, without fault, or well-versed enough in the greatness of single malt whisky.

WordPress have come a long way, really. It is a great platform and I’m personally grateful to everyone who’s helped make it this wonderful over the years. That includes people I’ve had spats with, people who need to work on their manners, and people who are just plain nice. Sometimes I criticize and question these people, Automattic, the WordPress Foundation, and WordCamp Central, but I’m counting on that they all understand that this is just to point out flaws and make sure that I appear in better light.

Someone actually suggested that was the case. Yes, I was taken aback. Seriously? Then again, maybe it is just because these columns are published on WPMU.org, which some people have a hard time with, I don’t know and I don’t particularly care.

Obviously I want WordPress to thrive. Anything negative I say about the platform and/or the people and organization around it is because I want WordPress to thrive even more. To evolve even further. I think we all share that trait, at least I like to think so, although I know it is hardly true. But that’s OK, the open source spirit is optional.

This is why I’m thrilled to read about the WordPress community summit. It is a great opportunity to make sure that even more points of view are discussed with the core team. I’ll be sure to nominate people I think could help. The summit definitely need some Europeans to attend, because things are slightly different here and internationalization is way more important to us than to Americans for example. There should also be representatives from commercial theme and plugin businesses, because that’s a part of the ecosystem that we need to not only come to terms with but actually start think about how to handle.

I could go on but I won’t, because it is, well, the end of the column. Nominate people you think should be at the WordPress summit, do it now.

Did I mention you should nominate?

Nominate.

Nom.

Om nom nom nom?

Photo by woodleywonderworks (CC)

The WordPress Experts – WPMU.org

We see it all the time from big-time media outlets – more than one author getting credit on an article. In WordPress, however, giving credit to more than one author on a post is not possible out of the box.

The Co-Authors Plus plugin solves that problem.

How It Works

This plugin does take a little digging into your theme’s files. You will need to replace the snippet of code your theme uses to call the author in with code provided by the plugin. You can find instructions for this new snippet of code in the “Other Notes” section on the plugin page.

The plugin page gets into some detail about what you might replace your original author code with, but for a generic replacement you would look for a tag similar to “the_author” and replace it with something along the lines of the following:

if(function_exists('coauthors_posts_links'))
    coauthors_posts_links();
else
    the_author_posts_link();

Of course your theme may vary as to the exact tag that it uses to call in the the_author. It may have a customized version, but it will most likely still include the term “author.” Also, remember that you will need to insert the new code wherever you would like it to appear (e.g. single.php, index.php, archive.php, category.php).

The Plugin in Action

Once activated and set up, you will see a new selection below the area where you write your posts. The author who is logged in should already appear in the area. You can then type the name of the other author(s) that you would like to be associated with the post.

And once everything is finished, both authors (or more) will receive credit.

Photo: Endless Writers from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

The WordPress Experts – WPMU.org

With that in mind, I always like it when a plugin simply works. When it meets or even surpasses your expectations in carrying out a singular task effectively.

Super RSS Reader is one such plugin. Check out this video for a quick overview:

As you can see, Super RSS Reader allows you to place one or more RSS feed summaries directly into any widgetized area on your blog. It has a few different options which you can set to determine how the feed is displayed – including description, description length, number of visible items, and so on. And if you are a dab hand with CSS, formatting the widget to your liking is an absolute cinch.

Super RSS Reader is not a game-changer (obviously). But it is a big improvement on the default WordPress RSS widget. So if that is something you already use (or are thinking of using), you should definitely take a look at this first.

Download Super RSS Reader here.

Tom Ewer on Google+

The WordPress Experts – WPMU.org

Any plugin that you favorite will show up on your profile listing at profiles.wordpress.org. This is a great way to keep track of the plugins that you want to remember, use often or want to recommend to others. Check it out at the plugin repository and start adding your favorites.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

The WordPress Experts – WPMU.org

I recently interviewed Lester for ManageWP, and so had the opportunity to take a closer look at all of his plugins. One that caught my attention in particular was WP-ShowHide. It is very simple, but what it does, it does well.

The idea for WP-ShowHide came from the way in which Engadget embeds press releases within posts (here’s an example). And whilst the plugin certainly can be used to present press releases in that manner, it can also be used to embed and show/hide any form of text.

How Does It Work?

Using WP-ShowHide couldn’t be any simpler – just wrap the text you want to embed in [showhide][/showhide] tags, and readers will see the following:

If a visitor clicks on the link, the text appears seamlessly, and the link text changes accordingly:

As you can see, I am using the trusty T’Lipsum Generator for my dummy text (I’ll take any excuse to plug it).

By default, the shortcode assumes that you are embedding a press release. However, you can define a few different variables from within the shortcode to control settings:

• type – if you want to include more than one block of embedded text within a post, you need to name each one using this variable.
• more_text – use this variable to define the text that is displayed when the embedded content is hidden. Include “%s” to display a word count.
• less_text - conversely, use this variable to define the text that is displayed when the embedded content is displayed.
• hidden - define as yes/no to determine whether the embedded content is displayed or hidden (by default, it is hidden).

Here’s an example using all of the above variables:

[showhide type="podcast" more_text="Show Podcast Transcript (%s words)" less_text="Hide Podcast Transcript" hidden="yes"](Podcast Transcript)[/showhide]

And here is the end result:

That’s it! There are multiple potential applications for WP-ShowHide – how will you use it?

Download WP-ShowHide here.

Creative Commons image courtesy of Ernst Vikne

Tom Ewer on Google+

The WordPress Experts – WPMU.org

The site’s creator hopes to make it a more comprehensive and up-to-date reference than the Codex currently offers. The auto-suggest on the search certainly makes it a bit more friendly and convenient for digging through WordPress code. Bookmark QueryPosts.com for the next time you need to do a little bit of research.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

The WordPress Experts – WPMU.org

These are the first 50 results for the search ‘WPMU Penguin’ [*not wpmu.org and not ""] – 98%+ of which are about and reference the article I published last Thursday on how Penguin has affected this site.

However, needless to say, that article is not even listed.

I suppose at least this helps establish, once and for all, that we’ve been actively and massively significantly algorithmically penalized (seeing as there’s been no manual webspam penalty).

Which means that my assumption regarding how to whack one of your competitors, is right on the money.

Meh.

Update: And how, how on earth, has this article just a few minutes later appeared top of the charts? Was the last article penalized for being too popular? Crazy stuff!

Using adwords preview for extra anonymity

James Farmer on Google+

The WordPress Experts – WPMU.org

Sharing media on a network is especially useful if you’re using multisite to manage a number of websites that you personally own and update. Or perhaps you are managing a group of student blogs and want to make a set of allowed images, video, and audio available for use. This plugin is perfect for that. Download Network Shared Media from the WordPress plugin repository.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

The WordPress Experts – WPMU.org