Redirection is a plugin to manage 301 redirections on your WordPress blog, and has just been updated to version 2.1.27. As well as 301 redirection, this plugin keeps track of all your 404 errors and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is also useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Some of the new features include;

• 404 error monitoring – capturing a log of 404 errors
• Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don’t exist
• Redirection methods – redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrer!

Existing features of the Redirection plugin include:

• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
• Manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file
• Full regular expression support
• Apache .htaccess is not required – works entirely inside WordPress
• Strip or add www to all your WordPress pages
• Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
• Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL
• Fully localized

To download the Redirection plugin you can visit the wordress plugin page. For more information about this plugin and the extentive options available you visit the authors Redirection Plugin page.

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The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin is a great addition to your blog. It generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With this sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Also, it automatically notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post on your blog. More information about what XML-Sitemaps are and how they can help you to get indexed by the major search engines can be found at Sitemaps.org and the searchenginewatch blog.

To download you can visit the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin WordPress page or visit the authors website here.

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Having trouble figuring out how to edit comments in the latest WordPress versions? This is problem that I recently came across in the newer 2.5/2.6 versions of WordPress. Basically, it’s not immediately obvious where you have to click in the Admin Panel/Comments section to actually edit a particular comment.

The trick is to click on the Name
of the commenter. That’s it!

It’s easy once you know how, lol. It will be easy to find because if you hold your mouse over the name of the commenter, a label will show ‘ Edit Comment’. BTW, it is also possible to click on the avatar image as well to edit the comment.

It’s probably not very intuitive of WordPress to do it this way and I believe the next major versions will revert back to a more straight-forward method of editing comments.

I hope so, anyway.

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Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

FLV Embed is a super WordPress plugin made to simplify the process of adding Flash videos (FLV’s) into your blog by using Jeroen’s FLV Player. For information about encoding videos into FLV and why you should use FLV, Jeroen has written an excellent article which you can find on his website.

The FLV Embed’s main features are its ease of installation and a no bells and whistles approach to getting this plugin to display FLV files instantly on your blog!

Plugin Features

• uses simple, intuitive tags to generate Flash video (FLV) movies for your posts
• supports video sitemap generation
• standards compliant: valid XHTML
• many options are configurable, such as autostart, show/hide control bar, player colour, poster image, full screen button etc.
• highly interactive admin option panel for player configuration
• supports text only output for RSS that prompt readers to visit the original post for Flash content
• supports outputting poster image for RSS if desired
• accessibility: requires Javascript to display FLV player, but will prompt user to enable Javascript when disabled
• accessibility: prompt user to download latest Flash player if it is not installed or too old
• accessibility: no annoying “click to activate” for IE users

Installation

1. Download the plugin from FLV Embed
2. Extract to the “flv-embed” folder
3. Upload the “flv-embed” folder to your WordPress plugin directory, usually “wp-content/plugins”
4. Activate the plugin in your WordPress admin panel

Usage

The great thing about this plugin is it uses one universal, standard tag style, which is;

[ flv:url width height] (remove space before flv when using it yourself!)

• url – the URL of the FLV file you want to embed, the path can either be site relative or absolute
• width – width of the FLV movie
• height – height of the FLV movie

Jeroen’s FLV Player also supports the use of poster frames or clip preview frames so that you can use a single still image from anywhere in the FLV video and have it display automatically once the flash player is loaded. (For an example of this see the video at the start of this post.)

A great time-saver when using this plugin is that if you upload an FLV and JPG image and they both have the same name, e.g. demo.flv and demo.jpg, it means you can still use the short bit of code above and it will automatically display the JPG as the preview picture for the video clip. Very Nice!

Download

You can download the FLV Embed plugin 1.0 for WordPress and try it out for yourself here.

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The latest version of WordPress Version 2.3.3 has now been released and it is billed as an urgent security release. It seems a flaw has been discovered in the XML-RPC implementation if you have user registration enabled on your blog. The flaw basically allows a registered user to employ a specially crafted request in order to allow them to edit posts on your blog.

Also, this new Version 2.3.3 release fixes a few minor bugs. There are a couple of options if you want to avoid this latest security threat to your blog. Firstly, if you are only interested only in the security fix you can download the fixed version of xmlrpc.php and copy it over your existing xmlrpc.php, or secondly, you can get the new WordPress 2.3.3 version here and overwrite your existing installation files directly.

So, this could be a good time to update your own WordPress installation!

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Caroline Middlebrook has just released a free ebook on how you can develop money-making niche sites with WordPress. The ebook is completely free and is available for instant download on Caroline’s WordPress Niche Sites webpage.

The ebook is very well put together and all 41 pages are jammed with useful information regarding configuration, setting up new WordPress blogs, monetizing your blog and lots more.

So if you’re ever wondering about generating income from your blog or niche site, it is definitely a book thats worth taking a look at.

You can download your free WordPress ebook here;

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/niche-sites-wp/

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Chromatic Sites have just announced a brand new WordPress Themes community website which features only professionally made WordPress themes. You can browse over a small collection of these professional themes right now at their Professional WordPress Themes website. Remember these are still free, high-quality WordPress Themes! Well worth a look.

It is worth mentioning that only themes that satisfy strict criteria will appear on this website. All of the WordPress themes published there will be inspected for;

• W3C validation,
• quality of design,
• bugs,
• profanity

If a theme passes all 4 requirements then it will be published on the Professional WordPress Themes website. This will ensure WordPress theme lovers will get high-quality, bug-free, standards compliant WordPress themes made available to them. The site is deliberately meant to look like the original themes.wordpress.net website but to have a similar website dedicated to quality WordPress Themes is a terrific idea.

Remember, this site is brand new and so are starting from scratch. There are just a few themes uploaded at the moment. So if you are a theme maker, please do upload to this new site.

You can check them out now by visiting the Professional WordPress Themes website.

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The new WordPress 2.3 will be released in a few short days and it will have loads of new features that will surely make you want to upgrade right away. Some of the new features will include automatic plugin updates as well as the long awaited built-in support for Tags.

Matt, over at the WordPress Development Blog, has just released some ideas that will help you prepare for this major new release of WordPress 2.3. The following is a small list of some of the things you can do to help prepare for the big upgrade on Monday;

• Back up your blog. Check out the Codex page with a few different methods.
• Check for the latest versions of your plugins. Here’s a list of known compatible and incompatible plugins with 2.3, Google Sitemaps seems to be one causing a lot of issues. (Forum thread)
• Enjoy the last time you have to check for plugin updates manually as WordPress 2.3 will do it automagically behind the scenes.
• Read up on how to modify your theme to add tag support.
• Consider switching your install to use Subversion to make updating ultra-easy.
• Make a list of your friends who are less computer literate so you can help them upgrade. Maybe throw an upgrade party?

Have Fun!

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I just came across a very useful post on the weblog tools collection blog about using Keyboard Shortcuts in WordPress. Using the basic keyboard shortcuts in WordPress have been a great timesaver for me, but I had no idea that there were as many shortcuts as there actually are.

The following list features probably the most used and useful Keyboard Shortcuts you are likely to need for your WordPress blog.

• Bold: ALT+SHIFT+b
• Undo: ALT+SHIFT+u
• Redo: ALT+SHIFT+y
• Link: ALT+SHIFT+a
• Italics: ALT+SHIFT+i
• Align Center: ALT+SHIFT+c
• Align Right: ALT+SHIFT+r
• Align Left: ALT+SHIFT+f
• Insert: ALT+SHIFT+s
• Delete: ALT+SHIFT+d
• Code: ALT+SHIFT+c
• Read More: ALT+SHIFT+t
• List Item (li): ALT+SHIFT+l
• Ordered List (ol): ALT+SHIFT+o
• Unordered List (ul): ALT+SHIFT+u
• BlockQuote: ALT+SHIFT+q
• Unquote/Outdent: ALT+SHIFT+w
• Advanced Editor: ALT+SHIFT+v
• Publish Post: ALT+SHIFT+p
• Edit HTML: ALT+SHIFT+e

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A new version of the WordPress Database Backup Plugin has been released. This V2 Version works great in conjuction with the latest WordPress 2.1 version and gives you the ability to schedule automatic backups of your WordPress database either hourly, daily, or weekly and also with the ability to have the DB backup file emailed to an email address of your choice, automatically!

Once installed there are several new options under the Manage/Backup menu in your WordPress admin panel. The top section of the Backup screen is for doing immediate backups while the bottom section is for scheduling automatic backups. The created backup will be in the form of a SQL script file that contains all the data of your blog as well as the proper commands to restore it. To restore the data you will need to execute the SQL on your MySQL database, using PHPMyAdmin, which will recreate the tables and repopulate the data into the proper fields.

The new automatic backup feature makes this a must-have plugin to have on your blog. Check it out.

Download: WordPress Database Backup Plugin

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