Just Search Labs Just Search Research and Development

Not only do I personally run a few blogs, but I also contribute to and maintain the Just Search blogs.  So when a new version of Wordpress comes out I have to organise updating between 10 and 15 blogs.  What normally happens when a new version is released is that I read the release notes to see if there are any security issues that have been fixed.  If there is then I always update as soon as I can, otherwise I will usually leave it for a week and watch the blogosphere for any news of problems.

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Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development

Here at JustSearch we love Wordpress. As a cms solution it works almost for every case and saves times, which means cheaper development. It took me a few days to fully grasp all the possibilities of Wordpress and I learn everyday new ways to do things.

This is all great but sometimes you need stuff you can’t do with the out-of-the-box install. That’s where plugins come handy. You can find all sorts of plugins and you can imagine all the plugins that don’t exist already.

How many blogs are running on wordpress nowadays? Hundreds of thousands. The plugin market is huge. And the community is very active, always looking for new fancy functionalities for their blog. You have to option when you start getting into plugin development:

• Complex plugin targeting a special part of the market. If you’ve planned the development correctly and build a plugin that will get a big demand you could sell it.
• Simple pulgins for a wide audience. If it didn’t take you to long to write it consider releasing it for free from the wordpress.org website.

Free work might sound bad to you but it doesn’t means you wont get anything in return. Start by setting up a page on your site or blog to talk about the plugin and to allow its users to comment or ask for help. Then upload it on the Wordpress plugin repository. Loads of people are checking the Wordpress site and you will certainly get decent traffic from here.

You will see in a later post that it’s easy to get started with development. We released a simple plugin called Competition Manager early this year and got good response from users. People comment on problems they have or just to say thanks which is content for the site.

The down turn is that you have to think about support. Things might go wrong at some point, you need to keep checking your plugins with new releases of Wordpress. You can’t just leave it because you might get some bad reviews.

Releasing free stuff is something you should think as a long term investment. Getting people to know the company through freebies is only the beginning of selling them your products and ultimately goes towards your online reputation.

Benoit Gilloz
Programmer, Research and Development

Developing a new theme is exciting. And exciting is good because it keeps your brain in the zone. But sometimes excitement means also rush, and rush leads to mistakes.

So when you’ve finished you theme, check those points to see if you haven’t forgotten anything:

Files

• 404.php for custom 404 page template
• single.php for single post template
• page.php for default page template
• archives.php for archives display (optional). If not present the index template will be used
• search.php for search results display (optional). If not present the index template will be used

If you’ve started from the default template you should have all those file already created.

Navigation

• Next and previous post links styled up and pointing to the right page
• Menu links showing all the pages, in the right order
• Menu links pointing to the right pages.
• Link in the header linking to the home page

Content

• titles line-height is enough to read ok when more than one line
• unordered list display bullet points
• ordered list display numbers
• nested list correctly indented
• blockquotes
• Image alignment left, right and center
• text alignment left, right and center
• code snippet
• Test long and short content
• special markup like <sup> and <sub> displayed correctly

Meta informations

• Correct date format
• Author correctly displayed
• Number of comments counter
• Tags

Comment

• Comment form is correct and display correctly
• Show ‘No comments’ when there is not comment to display
• Comments are styled up correctly including avatar, author name, link to author website, date
• blockquotes are displayed correctly in comment list
• Follow or nofollow link rules

Sidebar

• Widgets are displayed correctly
• Nested list of categories or pages are indented correctly
• Widgets don’t overlap each other
• Test ordering the widgets differently, the layout shouldn’t break

This is of course a non exhaustive list and I might add a few elements in the future.

Benoit Gilloz
Programmer, Research and Development

I notice that there seems to be an increasing the amount of comment spam appearing in my WordPress blogs. While comment spam is always annoying, the new type of spam differs because It takes the form of a string of 16-random characters and nothing else. They seem to be coming from the range of IP addresses 94.102.60.150-153 which I checked point to servers in Amsterdam. For example:

Examples of comment spam

Normally comment spam is designed to place a link to a web site to increase the number of links pointing to it and hence the increase its traffic and also possible ranking in search engines other than Google which do not count these links if they are designated no-followed.

However these comments do not contain links.They seem to be  a form of a hash. It seems that others are having the same problem and there is a discussion open in the WordPress forums. The consensus of opinion is that this is a robot that is adding the links and checking later to see if the links will remain in order to build a list of blogs that will accept future comment spam.

If you are getting a lot of this type of spam, from these IP address, you can block the servers from your .htaccess file using

order deny,allow
deny from 94.102.60.150
deny from 94.102.60.151
deny from 94.102.60.152
deny from 94.102.60.153
allow from all

Alternatively, if you don’t want to dig into .htaccess you can use WordPress comment blacklist. (Found in settings-> options-> discussion. Add ip address to the text area comment blacklist)

Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development