With the release of WordPress v 2.3, there were some structural changes to post categories that broke functionality of version 1.01 of the Ryboe Tag Cloud. I have finally had a chance to sit down and make the couple of quick changes necessary to restore functionality. In this newest version of the Ryboe Tag Cloud, I have also built in backwards compatibility– so if you have not yet upgraded your WordPress install to 2.3, you should still experience a flawless experience.

Without further ado, here is the new plugin.

Download Ryboe Tag Cloud WordPress Plugin

Past Releases:
Release 1.01
Original Release

Caching is a very important skill for you to obtain when building websites that may receive a lot of traffic at any given time. When using WordPress, you have a very good opportunity to get into some heavy duty caching action so that you can save your server a little bit of work.

The Why.
Just a low level explanation of exactly what happens when your web server displays a page to a visitor. When the visitor comes to your site and page is requested, the WordPress application requests, from your database system, the information that relates to the corresponding post(s). The issue therein lies that normally, every single visitor to your site requires your server to query the database and grab the text to display. As you can imagine, this can quickly get very expensive as far as your server's resources are concerned. This is why caching can really save you. Through caching, your site content will be stored in a "flat file" on your server. This will eliminate the need for your database server to be queried with every single page view.

The How.
To get started, goto your WordPress files and /wp-config.php in your favorite text editor. In this file, you'll see all of the current configuration settings for your database connection.

Add the following line to the end of all that (it really doesn't matter where this code is, as long as it lives in the wp-config.php file):

define('ENABLE_CACHE', true); // cache setting, true means on

Once you've saved that file, go ahead and upload to your server, overwriting the previous file.

Now you have turned on caching! But before you get blogging again, there's one more thing to do.

What we need to do next is create a place for these cached "flat files" to live on your server.

The default location for your cached files is in the directory on your server /wp-content/cache. If that folder is not there, then create it and name it appropriately. Also, you need to double check that the server has permission to write to this directory. In order to do so, you will need to CHMOD the folder to a setting of '777'.

And there you have it! That's how simple it is to use the caching functionality of WordPress.

If you're more technically advanced and would like to learn more about what you can do to your server to speed up your blog, check out this excellent article entitled 4+1 Ways To Speed Up WordPress With Caching

The crew over at WordPress has announced the release of version 2.2.  This has been a widely anticipated release, as it is the first to include the ever popular WordPress Widgets pluging built right into the release.  This means no more customizing your themes to allow for the plugin!

Also included in the release is full on support for Atom feeds and some core speed optimizations.

I went ahead and got the install fired up on my local dev site and it works like a charm!  Compliant with both PHP 4.3 and PHP 5.2.  As always, the upgrade is a breeze.  Most of all, don't forget to get the Ryboe Tag Cloud Plugin added into your install! (just toss it in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory)

To read more about the release, head over to the official WordPress Development Blog entry

You can download WordPress 2.2 here

We received such a positive reaction after the release of the Ryboe Tag Cloud for WordPress Plugin. It seems that there are many people out there with WordPress blogs who are looking for a simple and elegant tag cloud to show off their category tags. Well, we are pleased to announce that we have added a nice little enhancement to the plugin in the form of an update — version 1.01.

We received a few emails from individuals who wished to use the tag cloud on their blog, however they were not using the default WordPress structure for category links. The original version of the plugin relied on the fact that the user was able to link to their categories in the following format:

<a href="/category/php">PHP</a>

However, it became apparent that many users could not use these nice "slug" links due to limitations of their web server (mod_rewrite issues, etc) or general favor in defining the links using the category ID in the following format:

<a href="/?cat=1">PHP</a>

We have included an option in the Ryboe Tag Cloud widget so that you may choose to "Use Nice Category Links". This option is a simple checkbox that you can select to use the SEO-favored slug method. If you leave the box unchecked, it will simply link using the category ID.

Download the newest version of the Ryboe Tag Cloud Plugin for WordPress

Enjoy!

Familiar with seeing tag clouds around the net?  Would you like to display the content on your WordPress blog as tags and tag clouds respectively.  Then look no further.  We have released the first version of the Ryboe Tag Cloud Plugin for WordPress. This plugin uses the WordPress widget system to place a tag cloud in your sidebar.  With a fast and easy install, you can quickly convert your categories to "tags" and have a tag cloud in your sidebar in no time!

Download the Ryboe Tag Cloud Plugin

Here's how to install it:

1. Make sure you have WordPress Widgets installed on your .blog. If you don't, go ahead and head here for official instructions on how to install WordPress widgets. Note** The download link is on the left side of that page.
2. After verifiying that you have WordPress Widgets installed, download the Ryboe Tag Cloud Plugin for WordPress.
3. Unzip the file and copy it to your /wp-content/plugins/widgets directory with all of your other widgets.
4. Log into your WordPress Dashboard and head to the "Plugins" menu. Find the plug-in entitled "Ryboe Tag Cloud" and select "activate"
5. Navigate to Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets and drag the "Ryboe Tag Cloud" onto your sidebar layout. (Be sure to change your title here if you wish to have one).
6. Visit your blog to see your new tag cloud!

It's that quick and easy.  Now you have a slick little tag cloud of all your post categories on your sidebar!

As I am working on the site here, I have noticed a behavior of WordPress that is indeed annoying. By default, WordPress renders quotes as the fancy style of quotes. Usually this would not be an issue as they are awfully pretty quotation marks, curving according to their placement on the string. However, when using code examples, this is not a desirable effect as it will keep users from being able to copy & paste code examples for their own use.

The Problem. How do I remove fancy quotes from my posts in WordPress?

The Fix. In an effort to fix this problem I came across an easy fix. The folks over at semiologic.com have put together an easy to install plugin for WordPress enttitled "Unfancy Quote Plugin". The plugin is a single PHP file that you need to upload to your /content/plugins directory in your WordPress install. Once you have it uploaded just head over to the admin panel and activate the plugin! Presto!

Unfancy Quote Plugin for WordPress

How does it work? Well it's actually quite simple. The plugin utilizes the PHP str_replace() function to seek out instances of the fancy quotes in strings and replaces them with standard quotes. This is possible by using the HTML entities codes for the corresponding quotation marks.

As I was getting my template refined for the implementation of this site, I came across an interesting little code snippet.

What was I trying to do? I was working on adding what WordPress calls "Pages" to my site to use as static content for my project examples. Once I had added my pages, I needed to display these pages on my header.php. In order to do so, WordPress provides a function. Here's what the code looks like:

<?php wp_list_pages(); ?>

The issue with this function is it provides an entire list of links to each of your pages that you have added to WordPress. In my case, I had set up a number of Pages to be children [pages linked off] of the "Project Examples" page. It turns out that you can provide to the wp_list_pages() function an argument defining the depth of pages shown. If you wanted to only show one level of pages, you would use the value '1'.

I was able to choose the levels deep I wished to display pages from the parents. In doing this, the function would no longer display all my pages but rather just the top level. It's now up to me to manually link to the other existing pages in my content management system.

The final code:

<?php wp_list_pages('depth=1'); ?>

Note, you can also exclude individual pages from being displayed using this function. In order to do so, provide the id's of each page you would like to hide and format as such:

<?php wp_list_pages('exclude=12,43'); ?>

It turns out there is quite a bit you can do with this functions. Check out the official WordPress docs for more