Bloggers Buzz

Lussumo Documation has a guide to integrating WordPress with the Open Soure Vanilla discussion forum available here.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, wordpress,vanilla, forums,

(Found via ProBlogger) Rachel of cre8d design blog has recorded an impressive Wordpress tutorial video covering all the basics of setting your WordPress Site up in the WordPress Quickstart Screencast Tutorial (1)

1. Installing a free FTP program and connecting to your website
2. Creating a database for Wordpress.
3. Installing Wordpress.
4. Configuring Wordpress settings.
5. Setting up permalinks.
6. Writing and editing a post.
7. Uploading images.
8. Creating a blog roll (list of links).
9. Setting up an about page.
10. Installing a plugin.
11. Setting up a contact page with a contact form.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, WordPress,screencasts, tutorials,

Building on from the earlier WordPress as a Content Management System, Bloghelper has started a new series How to Use WordPress for a Portfolio Site. Covered in this part are:

• Thumbnail listing of projects in reverse chronological order, a.k.a. Recent Projects
• Individual project pages with larger picture(s)
• Categorical listing of projects

A demo version is also available to view the portfolio concept first hand.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, WordPress,portfolio,

blogHelper has published their second monthly installment of WordPress plugins released that “provide enough new functionality to be described as worthy additions to our plugin libraries.” Check it out at WordPress Plugins Feature for August

Tags: blogging, blogs, WordPress, plugins,

Bloghelper continues the WordPress-CMS series with Advanced Customization of WordPress Permalink Structure.

Tags: blogging, blogs, WordPress,

More new features from the crew at WordPress.com, My Comments:

One thing that became pretty apparent after we launched the Tag Surfer, people were going to start leaving a lot more comments on blogs they may not visit regularly and it’s a real pain to track followups to comments you’ve left on WordPress.com. (Or even remember what comments you left!)

Well we’ve got a little something new for you today. (Free!) In your Dashboard sub-menu you’ll see a new tab called My Comments.

When you click on this, it’ll show the comments you’ve made across WordPress.com, as well as the comment directly before yours and any replies to the post since yours. Posts with the latest replies are at top. If a comment thread gets really long we trim it and only show the latest stuff.

So check it out, and to celebrate why not find a blog or post with no comments (like on the tag surfer) and share your thoughts? It’ll make someone’s day and now you can easily follow the conversation from the comfort of your dashboard.

Tags: blogging, blogs, , WordPress.com, comments, blog comments,

WordPress.com has added the Related Tag Surfer

Got a ton of good feedback from the related posts test, and thanks to that I’d like to introduce the Tag Surfer. Basically this takes the functionality of the related posts page, but gives you infinitely more control over what types of content you’re getting. The feature has also been renamed to “Tag Surfer” to give you a better idea of what’s going on.

Related posts would look at the tags you use and then grab posts based on that. Depending on your tag usage, it was either great or awful. If you tend to use tags like “music” or “life” that are very high volume and not too specific, your page was probably constantly scrolling with new, semi-random content. (more…)

I recently covered using WordPress to run a magazine or news website and bloghelper has gone a step further with a two part series (so far) on using WordPress as a CMS:

What is “Using WordPress as CMS”?: Generally, it means to use WordPress as a more conventional CMS, for less blog-ish content and presentation style. We’re looking at portfolio sites, news and magazine sites, article libraries, gallery sites, photologs, e-commerce sites, and many more. Thus, it means to push WP beyond what it was originally intended to do - publishing blogs - and into the realm of more robust and perhaps more complex CMSes, like Drupal and XOOPS, or into the realm of CMSes specialised in other fields, like Vivvo (for news and article sites) and WSN Gallery (for media galleries). Read More

How to Put Up a Custom Front Page in WordPress: By default, WordPress’ front page displays a reverse chronological list of your posts - with whatever extras you chose to add, e.g. Recent Comments, Flickr, etc. This is the normal blog index, and is normally the first thing you want to “get rid of” if you want to use WP as a more web site-ish CMS. For example, you might want your front page to display only an introduction and a sitemap, or just a simple Flash movie.

But at the same time, you might still want to have a normal blog index somewhere for the blog aspect of your web site. So, how do you get yourself a custom front page while still having the normal blog index alive and kicking somewhere else on site?. Read More

Tags: blogging, blogs, WordPress, CMS,