wordpress

DashBoard Editor: Changing your Dashboard in Wordpress

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Sometimes as a blogger, I get tired of the traditional feel and look of the Administration Panel, and the slow loading of the Wordpress feeds drives me nuts. I’ve already tinkered with the Administration page before on more than one occasion, but recently, I’ve been trying two plugins that are pretty neat: DashBoard Editor (this post) and MyDashBoard (Thursday).

DashBoard Editor
The first is Dashboard Editor, which is a simple panel that adds a dashboard configuration switch under the Dashboard editor. Currently, I can’t get the website to load but you can try again later.

dashboard-clean

It’s very simple to operate. And, most importantly, it works in a non-destructive way, so you can simply disable the plugin, and everything’s back to normal.

At the top you will see a text area that you can type in. This text will appear in the dashboard. Formatting is very similar to the bb-code style of posts and pages. If you used to blog in WP1.0+, you will already be familiar with the switches.

Below that area are a number of check boxes, all of which are self explanatory. They will allow you to remove the feeds, incoming links, news and so on. Of course, you can simply clean everything and start from nothing. One of the neatest features is that you can use Plugins, too. If you look at the last switch entitled “Use Sidebar Widgets”, this will create a separate column under your Presentation >>> Widgets menu. Simply create, add or move any widgets you want to show up on the Admin panel.

There are some limitations that you may wish to consider:
1. There’s no obvious way to have a widget in two places, though, ie. in your Admin Sidebar as well as the general sidebar(s). Also, the Admin sidebar is only available to those who login.

2. If your blog has many users who can register and login, you may wish to think carefully about the information you enter. For example, putting passwords for your email account in there may not be the wisest thing to do! Currently, there is no way to change the Admin area for different levels of users.

Overall, it’s easy to implement, easy to use, and easy to remove. We are looking forward to the developer adding features in the future!

New Themes: Revolution and the Morning After

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The choice of a theme for a website using WordPress used to be: blog style theme or pay a lot of money to have your website designed professionally. But now, there is a lot of interest from publishers to use WordPress as the website, so it’s getting easier to find themes that can fit that need.

news revolution

Revolution Themes by Brian Gardner is one such set of themes which allow WordPress to appear as a magazine almost. The theme makes good use of a number of factors important to magazine sites including:

  1. front page space allowing main features to be shown,
  2. lots of links to recent articles,
  3. videos and large graphics
  4. mailing list box,
  5. 486×60 box for graphic,
  6. archives,
  7. Section Pages

There is also space for a lot of other things, too, at the bottom and in the middle. Since the quality of the design is excellent, and it would likely appeal to those creating a magazine style website, it’s not free, but at $99 for a single install, it could be a good deal! His other notable themes include the Blue Zinfandel series.

While for those on a budget, there are a couple of ‘free’ themes that work along the same line of thinking, of which the best seemed to be ‘The Morning After’ from Arun Kale.

home preview tma

To get the posts working, you’d need to create two additional categories for the blog. But it looks good and might be a good way to test out a magazine format. Other features include:

  1. A three-column home page
  2. “Featured” post highlighting
  3. Associating images/thumbnails with recent posts
  4. Customisable logo/header image
  5. Easy CSS classes for adding captions and wrapping text around images in posts
  6. Asides

Whether or not your blog is becoming a magazine, the number of links on the front page to your archives in either of these formats would be a good way to drive traffic to your older posts. You could tweak the formats even more to add extra stories, this would help your older stories be found more easily, especially if you have so much of the content that is hidden away (on my primary blog, there are now nearly 800 individual posts!).

Techniques: 5 ways to speed up Wordpress

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The last few weeks haven’t been the happiest time for my blog because of hosting issues, network problems, and server problems. But with them out of the way, I came across an interesting article on Lorelle on speeding up your WP installation. So I’m putting this in my ‘Sunday Projects’ category:

The 3 Easiest Ways to Speed Up WordPress
So, in the past 2 weeks I’ve had 3 articles hit the front page of Digg. Let me just tell you, the onslaught of traffic can bring a server to it’s knees. Over the last many months I’ve learned a thing or two about tweaking WordPress, and while this is not meant to be an exhaustive tutorial on how to survive a Digg, it will give you some tips that can definitely improve your blog’s performance for all of your visitors.

OK, what have I done? Let’s see, I’ve done five things to speed things along.

1. Unused Plugins: Or what do you do when you have more than 30 plugins?

On Lorelle’s advice, I moved ALL my unused plugins to a separate folder in my root folder, out of the way of the Wordpress Software. If I need them, I can move them back. If not, why are they are there? She noted that they will slow down a WP installation.

2. Unused Themes: 49ers?

I also moved my 49 unused themes (some of them quite hideous) to the same location. I don’t know if it made any difference or not, but finding the theme should be much quicker when there is one in the theme presentation folder!

3. My Sidebar

I cut down, removed, and converted elements in my sidebar. I cut down on useless stuff such as Javascripts to online services (I only kept Payperpost, Google Adsense and Analytics, and Alexa). I trimmed my comments and recent posts to only five items each to see how that would fare. Also, I decided only to have twelve categories after all. I simply copied the text from the front page, pasted it into a new post, switched to code view, retrieved that new HTML code, and pasted it into an already used widget. You can’t tell, can you? I also did the same thing to the blogroll. Still can’t tell, can you?

4. Maximum number of posts per page

I trimmed the number of posts on each page to three. Most people have five or even ten, but I can’t at the moment. It slows the server down too much. So I opted for three. It’s not ideal, but…

5. Standard PHP Code

I am slowly thinking of following another of her suggestions: switching ‘static’ php code to its html equivalent to speed up things. For example, in this theme, a PHP call for the blog URL and title and so on would require three separate routines for the same information (ie. the same everytime it’s called). I’ve kind of already done it with the sidebar itself. I’m thinking of switching to HTML from PHP for some of the plugins that I use or use to have: such as using a real robots.txt file instead of a plugin, re-adding my signature as HTML with local hosted images, and so on. I already removed the footer PHP for that reason and the Archives page has become static HTML, too.

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, I’d like to thank Jorge at Investing Adventures dot com for keeping an eye on things and giving me feedback when my blog is slow. It was taking 20 seconds or more for a page to load, right now as I type this pages are loading in under 10 seconds. But I’ll keep an eye on the load, speed and traffic over the next few days to make sure things are ‘normal’.