ThinkPress WordPress Enlightenment

We had a client recently who want to be able to put a link to his rss feed in his sidebar. Visit Studio Light Room to check it out. Oddly enough we didn’t find anything readily available to do that without adding code to his theme files. We decided to create a little widget to handle this functionality. It has the following features and is freely available right here:

• Customizable link text
• Customizable link color
• Selection of Standard Feed Icon in six different sizes
• Enter any feed URL

We also have future plans for this plugin. On our TODO list we have the following:

• Custom icon colors
• List any number of RSS links in the widget

If there’s anything you’d like to see us add to this, please let us know. We’re always open to suggestions. If you have any questions, go ahead and click here. We have a screencast queued up to walk you from download to production.

RSS Feed Icon Widget (57.17 KB)

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Happy Thanksgiving to all the Americans out there from Jeff and I here at ThinkPress. This year, the developer in me knows to give thanks to the best personal and professional publishing system around, WordPress. We’ve been implementing it for our clients for a couple of years now and we couldn’t be happier with how the platform has matured. Thank you WordPress for all the heavy lifting that you do out of the box. Thank you for your pretty urls. Thank you for your extensibility. And most of all, thank you for your belief in the open source movement. We promise to continue giving back to the community. Now go, eat your turkey and tofurkey and be full. Oh, and don’t forget to unplug and enjoy your families too. We wouldn’t be here without them.

Two of the biggest problems you can have with any website is a slow site or a lost site (due to hacking or accidental deleting…). Luckily both of these issues can be solved with one great plug-in. WP-DBManager by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan will both back up your site’s database (and email it to you) and optimize all database tables to ensure fast database performance.  Best of all, you can set up the plug-in so these actions are performed automatically and on a regular basis.

First, download and install WP-DBManager (you can download it here).  Log into your WordPress admin and activate the WP-DBManager plug-in.  Then select “Database” in the main menu.  Next select “DB Options” in the subnav.  Scroll to the bottom of the page to the “Automatic Scheduling” section.

For database back-ups, selection a duration for how often you’d like the database to be backed up.  Then enter an email address for the database back-up file to be sent to.  That’s it!  Now every X number of days/weeks/months (whatever you set up), you will be emailed a back-up file of your database.  (The trick here is just to remember where you put the back-up files!)

For database optimization, all you need to do it select a duration.  A good general rule is to optimize your database every 30 days.  (So if you’ve been running your WordPress site for months or years, you are well overdue.)

Click “Save Changes.”  Now database back-ups and optimizations will done automatically.

It’s now official. Our “Lite” version of the SpamShiv plugin is now hosted by the WordPress plugin directory. If you’re coming here to find out more about the plugin, take a minute to sign up for our mailing list. In exchange for your trust in us, we’ll give you your very own copy of our full featured paid plugin for FREE! Just fill out the form on the top right of this page. Check back with us soon. We have a couple more plugins and widgets currently in development that we think you’re going to love.

For all 5 of you who are both into Geocaching and into WordPress, we’ve built a simple little widget so you can display you Geocache Stat Bar as a widget in your WordPress theme’s sidebar!

So far this is only a 0.9 version release as there are still some features we’d like to add in before we call it final.  But there’s no reason not to use it now.  All you have to do is download the widget, install it in your plug-ins folder, add it to your side bar and edit the preferences.  Enter you username, GUID, select image and enter your message.

To obtain your GUID, log in to you Geocache account, go to “My Account,” then click “View My Stat Bar” (near the bottom on the right side under “Account Options”).  You’ll see some generated code in the text area there that looks something like this

1

<a href="http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?guid=db5629ca-06d2-4f95-8c72-bdb425934722" target="_blank"><img src="http://img.geocaching.com/stats/img.aspx?txt=Let's+go+geocaching&uid=db5629ca-06d2-4f95-8c72-bdb425934722&bg=1" border="0" title="Profile for lordleiter" alt="Profile for lordleiter"></a>

What you want to copy (and paste) is everything after “guid=” and before the last quote in line 1, like so - guid=db5629ca-06d2-4f95-8c72-bdb425934722” We know this is a bit archaic right now and is one of the things we hope to remedy before version 1.

Also, the Geocache Stat Bar comes 200 pixels wide, so be sure you sidebar area is set up to handle the width.

Geocache Stat Bar Widget (1.32 KB)