Remkus de Vries

BuddyPress, Your Next Step?

A while back BuddyPress 1.2 was released and with it came a bunch of new features to transform your WordPress installation into a full fledged community. You may be at the point where adding a social layer to your site is the logical next step to build a better blog. BuddyPress allows you to build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress.

BuddyPress.org has evolved into a lively community and ever since BuddyPress can be installed on a regular WordPress site instead of a WordPress MU installation they have really gained momentum. [Read more…] about BuddyPress, Your Next Step?

How To: Create More Flexible Widgets

This is not going to be one of those posts about how to widgetize your sidebar because frankly, if by now you still are not using a theme with widgetized aeras you need start looking for one. This post is about how to use those widget area’s in the smartest way possible.

When I say sidebars, I don’t necessarily mean sidebars. Widget areas are of course not limited to the visual sidebars in a theme. Most themes have one or two sidebars and a matching 1 or two widget areas, but some themes have just two sidebars, but a total of 13 widget area’s.

The problem, even with two sidebars, is that you have very little control over which widget goes on what page or post.. or category or archive even. [Read more…] about How To: Create More Flexible Widgets

In Need for Absolute Privacy for WordPress?

You would think that the owner of every single WordPress site out there would want as many visitors as possible, but you’d be wrong.
There are plenty of reasons why you would want to keep a blog as private as possible. Perhaps you’re using it as an project site in conjunction with the awesome P2 theme and you only want the project members seeing the posts and responding or perhaps you have just set up a site for you newly born and you want to share those early updates with just your family. [Read more…] about In Need for Absolute Privacy for WordPress?

Everything You Need to Know About WordPress Security

Keeping your WordPress installation secure is usually not something a lot of people spend a great deal of time on. However, I believe WordPress security, tightening up the place should be your first priority every single time you install WordPress. No exceptions.

With the recent Pharma hack, more info about it plus a solution on Chris Pearson’s blog, going round I thought it was time to focus on WordPress security today. There are a lot of things you can do build extra layers of security for your WordPress installation.

There are a few different layers involved to secure your WordPress installation. I shall list them grouped together as much as possible. [Read more…] about Everything You Need to Know About WordPress Security

Menu Management for WordPress

The soon to be released WordPress 3.0 comes with a new menu management, but your theme has to have this capability built in. But what if you’d rather not edit your theme files or simply don’t want to wait for WordPress 3.0? Luckily there are a few plugins out there that will enable you to have a very flexible menu – without the fancy interface though. These are plugins I have used extensively on many sites which required a custom menu.

Exclude Pages

Exclude Pages is a plugin that does exactly what the title suggest. It allows you to specify per page whether or not a page needs to be in the menu or not. This plugin adds a checkbox, ‘include this page in menus’ to your page edit screen. All you need to do is uncheck this to exclude pages from the page navigation so that users won’t see on your site. As simple as that. Do keep in mind that pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. [Read more…] about Menu Management for WordPress

What Can You Expect From WordPress 3.0

Those of you who actively look at what kind of news is presented to you in your WordPress dashboard already know WordPresss 3.0 beta 1 is released just before the weekend. Even though the actual release of WordPress 3.0 will be at least a couple of weeks away, it’s good to be prepared to the new stuff which WordPress 3.0 will bring to the table.

You of course already knew WordPress 3.0 will be sporting a brand new default theme, named Twenty Ten, but there are quite a few more new features that can improve your WordPress experience. Instead of listing every single feature, I thought it would be nice to make a list of those who already wrote about WordPress 3.0. [Read more…] about What Can You Expect From WordPress 3.0

Twenty Ten, a New Default Theme for WordPress

WordPress is gearing up to release a new version, WordPress 3.0, which will house a lot of new cool features and the merging of WordPress MU with WordPress stand alone version. Alongside with this release WordPress will also be shipped with a brand new interpretation of what a default theme should be. For years the default theme has been Kubrick, but that’s all going to change.

I’ve never been a fan of either Kubrick’s look or code, but I must say Twenty Ten is genuinely a great base theme to use for all your WordPress projects, especially when working with Child Themes. Sure it’s not as advanced as say Thematic, but it does produce powerful semantic HRML and is in general very well SEO optimized. No surprise there because Ian Stewart, the creator of Thematic, was also the one who inspired Twenty Ten with his theme called Kirby, and recently joined Automattic as a Theme Wrangler. [Read more…] about Twenty Ten, a New Default Theme for WordPress