With the release of WordPress 3.3 I was reflecting on how its developers have made my life and the lives of millions of people easier in so many ways, including making money. That same night I was watching an episode of Mythbusters (my kind of reality TV) and they proved that like birds, airplanes can save energy by flying in a “v” formation.

Then the philosophy student in me took over and I began to think about how innovators, large and small, make our lives simpler, richer, and happier. We’re all like the birds who fly in the wakes of others, and those wakes make it easier for us to fly. There’s an old saying that mirrors this idea:  on the shoulders of giants.

Let’s take a moment a think about who’s helping us to fly. But don’t just think about it – thank that person if you can, and then go and tell everyone else how helpful they’ve been to you!

So I’m reading a guest post by Gerald Weber on Vertical Measures from June 2011 about guest blogging and how the author speculates Google might soon crack down on low quality guest blogging:

I’m a professional SEO, link builder and marketer, so I completely understand the need to build links. But I truly believe there are much better ways to build links than throwing together short guest posts that simply litter the blogosphere.

I usually get several low quality guest post requests per week. I reject these requests because it’s obvious they’re nothing more than a link grab. Canned and impersonal guest post requests are becoming just as bad as traditional link exchange spam!

What happened when link exchanges spiraled out of control? Google cracked down on them. The current exploitation of low quality guest posts means it’s only a matter of time until Google takes action once again.

As I’m reading, a tweet goes by referencing this press release: Commercial Loan Firm Wants to Provide Free Content to Competing Firm’s Websites. The wording is, if anything, honest:

The goal of this arrangement would be to further both the authority of their own sites and their competitor’s sites in an effort to make themselves more well known online. The commonly used term for such an action is called “guest blogging” and the search engine benefits are similar to those seen with link trading or virtually any other reciprocal link strategy.

I’m not saying that the offer from this company couldn’t produce quality content and legitimate linking (they do emphasize they want sites within their own industry), but why use so general a tool as a press release? Why isn’t this company finding websites it wants to be associated with and approaching them directly. It all smacks of advertising for links, and if that kind of behaviour grows, I can see Google trying to find a way to stop it.

Some people want to get rid of the tool bar at the top of admin screens in WordPress 3.3.

There is no built-in way to remove the tool bar (you can choose not to display it while viewing the live site), but you can with at least one plugin, and I’m sure more options will emerge over time. This video shows you how.

My preferred plugin for working with Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies in WordPress is Custom Post Types UI from WebDevStudios. If you use it and have upgraded WordPress 3.3, you may notice some odd behaviour on the admin menus.

I’m using version 0.7.1 of Custom Post Types UI and when I’m on any of the plugin’s pages, none of the fly-out WordPress menus work.  The fly-outs work just fine when I’m not in CPT UI.

Someone else has also posted this issue on the WebDevStudios forum, so hopefully it will be fixed shortly. You can see the problem in the video below.

The latest update of WordPress – version 3.3. –  is now out and it mainly features changes to the admin interface. This video gives you a quick tour of those changes.

As always, the question is: change over now or wait?

I always recommend waiting for at least a couple of weeks, in case an unknown issue crops up. WordPress is thoroughly tested, but as with any complex software, there are so many parameters it sometimes takes use by thousands and thousands of people for a bug to show up.

The latest version of WordPress will be released any day now and I wanted to show you what I think are the top five features. WordPress 3.3 is primarily an update of the user interface, so you’re going to notice most of these changes immediately.

Slide-Out Side Menu

Ever since WordPress moved the main menu from the top to the side, users have had to drop down sub-menus. Now, you simply mouse-over a main menu item and the sub-menu items fly-out to the side.

Not only is this more intuitive, it saves both the step of clicking on that main menu item and – for new users – the step of discovering/remembering that’s how the menu works. The only thing I miss is the ability to keep a sub-menu open all the time.

Permanent Fixed Admin Tool Bar

[Correction - this is now referred to as the Tool Bar]

An admin bar that stayed in place at the top of the page while scrolling was a handy feature introduced in WordPress 3.2, but by default it was turned off on admin screens. Now, not only is the admin bar a non-optional part of the admin design, it’s been revamped to look more like the title bar introduced in 2.7 – dark-coloured, with the site title at the top left and user profile at the top right. The bar stays in placed while scrolling and you do have the option to turn it off while viewing the website as an admin. My only disappointment is that the “Search Engines Blocked” warning has not been included.

Simplified Upload/Insert Menu

For a long time the Upload/Insert menu above the Post Editor metabox has consisted of four well-intentioned but often-confusing icons. The idea was that different types of media needed to be uploaded in different ways, but I think for a majority of users it was more complicated than helpful. In WordPress 3.3 there’s only a single Upload/Insert icon serving every type of media.

Drag and Drop Media Uploader

While you can still click a Select button and find the files you want to upload into WordPress, there’s now a very simple to use drag and drop area too. You can still upload multiple files at one time, of course. This replaces the Flash-based uploader, which sometimes suffered from browser compatibility issues. The new system should alleviate those issues because it uses Plupload, an upload handler that defaults to whatever method a browser can handle – HTML5, Silverlight, Gears, Flash, and so on.

Improved Help Menu with New Feature Pointers

The new Help system, which has been kept at the top right beside Screen Options, is more detailed and easier to use. Recent versions of WordPress have added more help information, but the screens were getting hard to read. By using a tabbed menu system, you can get more information that’s easier to find and read.

Plus there are now pointers – little popups – that appear when you mouse-over a new feature. They’re supposed to appear only when you’re upgrading an older version and should only appear the first time you’re using the new feature. All this has changed a lot through the development versions of WordPress 3.3, so how exactly it comes out in the final version, I’m not sure.

More To WordPress 3.3

I’ve only covered the features that will most impact users from the moment they open WordPress 3.3. There are many other useful improvements and additions, including the end to widgets disappearing when you switch themes, and the ability to install child themes through the Install Themes screen.

One handy thing users will notice if they’re on an iPad or other smaller screens – the left side menu automatically collapses now. Apparently more “responsive design” changes are coming for the admin screens, but that’s for 3.4.

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WordPress offers a couple of ways to control the appearance of the Admin Bar at the top of the screen. Here’s a plugin that allows you to control that visibility for all users at once.

Custom Links allows you to place any link on your WordPress menu system – here are a couple of ways you might want to use that feature.

Normally an administrator can add plugins, but if you find that’s been disabled, it’s because you’re administering a site that’s part of a WordPress multisite installation – in other words, there’s more than one site running off a single installation.  In that case, only Network Admins can actually install plugins.

WordPress 3.1 has added a new administration menu option called the Admin Bar. It remains in place at the top of the page as you scroll. Here’s an overview of how it works:

If you’re using the WordPress menu system and you’ve added a page that you don’t want displayed on a menu, here’s what you can do:

The WordPress menu system is not limited to use in theme navigation locations. You can add menus to any widget area as well. Here’s how:

For my birthday this year, my wife Kim had a cake made by our friend Tracy Cook here in Nanaimo. She managed to create my WordPress 24-Hour Trainer book, my 100 Questions to Ask Before Building a Website book, and my MacBook – all in a single cake!

Thanks Tracy, thanks Kim!

This session at WordCamp Victoria 2012 is for people who’ve started using WP and understand the basics, but who don’t yet feel completely comfortable with the platform. It’s about learning to think like WordPress (dynamically) – about themes, content, categorizing, structuring menus, and much more. Not only will it help you embrace WordPress and not feeling stuck when something goes wrong, but you’ll start to see new ways to use it to solve even more of your online needs.

I’ll be using some real world case studies as well as suggestions from the audience to help us get to know WordPress better.

My name is George Plumley, and I build websites in WordPress, help train people to use WordPress, and have written a book for beginners called WordPress 24-Hour Trainer (2nd ed. Wiley, 2011).

I’ve been working on the web since 1993 after doing several degrees in philosophy and working in broadcasting for many years.

I live on Vancouver Island as close to the water as financially possible.

Have you seen this platform?

In a follow-up to his earlier SearchEngineWatch article, Gary-Adam Shannon is claiming again that Google may be penalizing sites for using WordPress:

If you ask me, it makes perfect sense that Google could potentially penalize based on a site footprint.

This time he offers two kinds of evidence for this:

 I’ve talked with a few SEOs who also claim that moving away from WordPress has helped their rankings.

and in what I take to be  indirect evidence:

Did you know Google uses the WordPress generator tag to fingerprint your site? If you run old versions of WordPress, Google Webmaster Tools will actively check your sites and keep you informed, letting you know you’re out of date and need to upgrade WordPress.

Now hold on a minute.

While it’s an intriguing suggestion that some people have had better rankings after switching away from WordPress, there are no numbers or examples given, no context about these switches (what other factors may have contributed, etc.). Plus it doesn’t automatically follow that if this happened it was because Google was penalizing the site for being on WordPress.

The second point hinges on the word “fingerprinting.” The use of this word, rather than “reads” or “records” is a weak attempt at implying there’s a penalty, when in fact all we’re told is that Google Webmaster Tools provides a valuable service by alerting people that their WP installation is out of date.

The big question that Shannon has not addressed in either of his articles is:

Why would Google penalize a site simply because of the platform on which it’s built?

It already penalizes sites for doing/not doing things that can happen on any platform (not having meta descriptions, poor quality titles, no quality content)… what would be the purpose of looking at the platform, unless perhaps one could show that the platform itself is trying to game ranking results, inserting hidden code, etc.

Showing that a platform is doing bad things by default, without users knowledge, or exposing Google for penalizing sites irrationally – these would be useful goals in an article.

To simply say ‘maybe it’s possible that perhaps Google is penalizing WordPress for some possible reason’ is just fear-mongering.

To his credit, Shannon has made some useful points in this second article which actually have to do with possible (though debated) issues of WordPress security, such as hiding the version number or (not debated) protecting administrative folders on the server…  but that’s an article on security, not search engine penalties.

I was talking to a client the other day about free WordPress themes. I said the safest option is to only use the WordPress.org Free Themes Directory. Why is that?

I talked to her about malicious coding, poor quality coding, out of date coding, etc.

And then I found a very well-researched article by Siobhan McKeown that says it all:

Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else

While this isn’t a plugin, the Yahoo Web Player is an easy to use media player you can use with WordPress in place of a plugin. It automatically detects links to media files, such as MP3 or YouTube files, and inserts a play button next to the link and a slide-out player at the bottom of the page. Installation is simple – a line of javascript – and you’ll learn about two ways to do it in WordPress.

Yahoo has had a free media player for quite some time, but back in August of this year they updated it and renamed it Yahoo Web Player – and they’ve made it dead simple to use.

By inserting a single line of javascript into your page, it will detect links to MP3s and videos, then automatically create a play button beside the link and an unobtrusive slide-out player at the bottom left of your screen. That’s all there is to it.

It handles multiple links on the page and gathers them into a playlist (audio or video on a single player).

There are several parameters you can control by a bit of additional coding.

As of the writing of this post the player is still listed as Beta, with the promise of more features to come, but it’s been working just fine in the places I’ve been using it.

Integration with WordPress is very easy – I’ve got a full tutorial on it with a couple of different ways of inserting the Javascript. Members can find this in the Exclusive Content area.

And in case you’re wondering, the auto-embed feature of WordPress still works fine alongside this player. In fact, the Yahoo player is the perfect companion because WordPress auto-embed does not work with links, and this player does. So you could have an auto-embed video display in a post or page, along with some audio and video links that use the Yahoo player.

You can easily add sub-menu items using the WordPress menu system. You just need to make sure your theme supports their display or you won’t see anything.