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A “lifestream” site up and running in 30 mins

A Lifestream is a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life. In the era of the social networking this could mean more simply an aggregation of all the traces you leave around the web by using the varied heap of social networks out there.

So, do you want your own Lifestream, somewhat similar to mine? Good. Assuming you are a web developer (or anyone else that can do the following without further explanations):

• Download WordPress, then install it;
• Download Lifestream WordPress plugin and install it;
• Pick up a WordPress theme you like and that is easy to customise;
• Edit your theme to remove the bit that display the posts and add as many sidebars as you need;
• Play with the Lifestream plugin and its widget.

That’s it. Enjoy.

PS: I know, I know. I just don’t feel like writing a long post. It’d take more than what it took to me to set up my Lifestream about 30 mins ago…

WP-DownloadManager 1.31 and WPMU

The latest version of the WP-DownloadManager WordPress plugin (1.31 to the time I am writing) is not able to work with WordPress Mu blogs, because it does not create an upload directory for each blog.

My patched version solve this problem. I already contacted Lester Chan (the author) and he said that my patch will be included in the next official release of WP-DownloadManager.

Meanwhile, here you can download the patch or the ZIP archive with the patched plugin.

Download and Install the patched plugin

Download the archive, and follow the installation instructions for the regular 1.31 version of the WP-DownloadManager.

  WP-DownloadManager (Mu Edition) (73.4 KiB, 289 hits)

Download and install the patch

  WP-DownloadManager (Mu Edition) - Patch (4.1 KiB, 265 hits)

$ cp wp-downloadmanager.diff /path/to/wp-downloadmanager/
$ cd /path/to/wp-downloadmanager/
$ patch -p1 -i < wp-downloadmanager.diff
$ rm wp-downloadmanager.diff


Gengo 2.5.3 and Category Feed Links

The latest version of the Gengo WordPress plugin (2.5.3 to the time I am writing) produces a problem with the category feed links, i.e. with the links to the per-category feeds provided by WordPress.

With a vanilla WordPress instalation, such links are usually of the form

http://your.web.site/category/[category-name]/feed/

If you install Gengo 2.5.3 you got something like this (which does not yield a feed)

http://your.web.site/category/[category-name]/[language-code]/feed/

whereas the correct form would be

http://your.web.site/category/[category-name]/feed/[language-code]/

That is, the language code is supposed to be at the end of the URL. Always.

I corrected this issue and made a patch. I am also going to notify the issue (and the patch too) to the authors/mantainers of the Gengo plugin. I trust that it will be included soon in the Gengo mainstream.

Meanwhile, here you can download the patch or the patched gengo.php file.

Download and Install the patched file

Download the archive, uncompress it, and replace the original gengo.php file of your installation.

  Gengo 2.5.3 - gengo.php patched (25.3 KiB, 316 hits)

Download and install the patch

  Gengo 2.5.3 Patch (1.5 KiB, 314 hits)

$ cp gengo-2.5.3.php.patch /path/to/gengo/
$ cd /path/to/gengo/
$ patch -p0 < gengo-2.5.3.php.patch
$ rm gengo-2.5.3.php.patch


Introducing Mu-ABS

Mu-ABS is a plugin for WordPress Mu which eases the authentication of users in a blog network.
Read more about WordPress Mu Automatic Blog Subscription.

WordPress for Newspapers/Magazines: Premium themes

The demand of Newspaper and Magazine themes for WordPress is growing day after day. In this first part I want to make a selection of WordPress premium themes for building Newspapers and Magazines. A post about free themes will come after this.

Premium Themes are available under commercial licenses. There are usually two kinds of licenses to buy a premium theme: the personal license and the developer license. The former allows the buyer to use the theme for his own purpose; the latter is for developers that want to reuse and modify the theme they have bought. Sometimes we can find a third type of license: the multi-use license, that allows multiple uses of the same theme, but deny any modification.

WooThemes

WooThemes provides us with a number of well designed, fresh, attractive WordPress themes. They have ten themes in their portfolio so far, and most of them are intended for using WordPress as newspaper platform.

For the different licenses and prices, look at their WooThemes Club page.

Revolution

Revolution work is focused on newspaper and magazine themes. Themes are very accurate in details and functionalities, and there is perhaps a theme for each kind of magazine: sports, musics, newspaper, media, business, etc.

Their prices are quite similar to the ones of WooThemes. Additionally, they currently have a special offer: a developer package which includes all the ten themes in the portfolio, only for 399$.

Proximity by Nathan Rice

Nathan Rice has released three newspaper themes so far: iNews, Proximity, and Proximity Classic Dark. The Proximity News Theme is the warhorse of Nathan so far, because it includes a powerful back-end which allows everyone to easily manage the newspaper stuff (homepage, ads, featured videos, etc.). Take a look to prices too.

Gabfire

Gabfire released both premium and free WordPress magazine/newspaper themes. Premium themes include a Newspaper theme and a Magazine theme.

Graph Paper Press

Graph Paper Press released two grid-based themes WordPress that are suitable for Newspaper/Magazine websites: Gridline News and Gridline Magazine.

Design Adptations

Design Adpatations has three themes in the portfolio. As now, only the Cornerstone theme is directly available, whereas the other two are coming soon.

Zidalgo

Zidalgo has released two well designed newspaper/magazine themes so far. You can see a demo of Magazine News Theme here and News Plus One here.

Quommunication

Quommunication released a clean and simple newspaper theme called (guess what?) News. It is available under three licenses: personal, five-sites, developer.

Pro Theme Design

Pro Theme Design has released Mimbo Pro only. You can see a demo here, and get all the details here.

Indomagz

And here it is, the last (but not the least) premium theme of this selection. Indomagz is a very simple news theme. You can see a demo here and commercial details here.

WordPress Theme – Keepitsimple (Updated)

I personally added the support for localization to the Keepitsimple theme. So far, the theme has the main vocabulary in English and a first localization: Italian (of course).

One more thing: I am hosting a demo here.

WordPress Theme – Keepitsimple

I wish to notify you all about a brand new WordPress theme, which looks fresh, simple, clean, and modern. Plus, it supports a lot of features. The author is not me, but a net-friend called Claudio.

WordPress Theme Name: Keepitsimple
Author URI: Claudio Semeraro
Version: 1.0
W3C status: XTHML 1.0 Strict, CSS2
Browser: The theme looks the same loaded in any of the modern web browsers
Widget Ready: Yes
Smart comments: Yes, the comments from the post’s author are automatically recognized and emphasized. Moreover, trackbacks are separated from comments and displayed differently
Gravatar support: Yes
FeedBurner counter: If you write you feedburned address in the sidebar.php file, the number of subscribers will be automatically displayed close to the feed subscription link.
Download: Keepitsimple from Claudio’s Blog.

WordPress Plugin: WP-UnitPNGfix /2

This is for notifying a little but important update to the WP-UnitPNGFix plugin. The version 0.2 has been released: it fixes the path to the ‘clear.gif’ image in the ‘unitpngfix.js’ file. Please update.

For details, downloads, comments, and pingback, please refer to the official page.

WordPress Plugin: WP-UnitPNGfix

My first (official) plugin for WordPress has been released. The plugin works on img html tags and background attributes to fix the wrong behavior of IE6 (and previous versions) w.r.t. trasparent PNGs. It relies on the Unit PNG fix solution. I wish to thank Claudio for letting me know about it.

For details, downloads, comments, and pingback, please refer to the official page.

On the usability of Wordpress Admin – Episode 1

With its new version 2.5, Wordpress introduced a renewed admin interface, with a completely new style sheet, new menu organization, new placement of form fields, new sidebar widget management, and so forth.
They state an improved usability of the administration interface. It’s not really true.
Let me focus on the new widget management and on the particular task of moving a widget from one sidebar to another. I compare the old way and the new way side by side.

Old way: simply drag and drop the widget from one sidebar to the other one, then save new settings.
New way:

• select the sidebar you want to remove the widget
• wait for the page refresh
• remove the widget
• save the settings
• wait for the page refresh
• select the sidebar you want to add the widget removed from the other sidebar
• wait for the page refresh
• add the widget
• reconfigure the widget as in the sidebar you removed it
• save the settings

Well, I do not have to add more words. This is far to be a usability improvement, isn’t it?
See you on the next episode of the “On the usability of Wordpress Admin”.