Ken Villines 1.0 ‘s website has two great plugins, Draft Control and Post Control, for the management of multiple posts either in draft form or already published. These plugins were favorites of mine simply because they make mass editing much more convenient. I used to use Draft Control version 0.96 but found that it was incompatible with later versions of WP 2.0.x. I thought the author hadn’t updated the plugin, but then recently found that he had updated and added Post Control, too. So two great plugins!

The functionality is added in the Manage button. Once there, you will see the features added in the bar. Also, functionality is similar between the plugins. You can mass-edit a group of posts, publish/unpublish, categorize or delete at will.

There is a useful toggle feature for all posts that can be found at the bottom of each page, allowing you to mass-edit every post on the page. Nice!

The only aspect that puzzled me, and perhaps that is a limitation of the system, is that posts can only be assigned or reassigned to ONE category at a time. So, if you regular post across categories, you may find that the tools screw up your categories by forcing you to choose one category only. This may or may not be a concern for you. I suspect that the limitation may be due to design.

Otherwise I’d reckon this to be an extremely useful tool for those with larger blogs looking for a way to mass edit posts. Or for bloggers who create a mass of drafts as the muse strikes.

Bla.st Blog recently raised the use of domain names: Which is better, using mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com?

I agree with their analysis of the problem: having two slightly different URLs under Google could in fact lead to dilution of your PR Rank. In fact, until recently IB here had this problem. Recently, my webhost attempted to solve this issue by giving its customers the choice as follows:

I have been suggesting my customers to choose one, usually the one with the higher PR rank as the default. Why argue with a good thing?

You can check your page rank for your blog name and see what happens when you enter your domain name +/- www. I don’t think it matters that much which one you decide on, but in my explorations I did notice that some versions of SMF did NOT like having two addresses. In fact when members visited SMF via the wrong URL, it produced an error. I followed my host’s advice and the problem went away, when I set it to the same as the address in the SMF configuration file.

If you get a chance, do a survey on Google Search and with your readers/customers/members to find out which is more popular or more preferred. But once you change, don’t flip back again. It could backfire!