W3 Total Cache is one of the best plugins I’ve found for wordpress. Yet, at first glance it can seem overwhelming to setup. But, it’s not really all that hard.

Recently I’d moved this site from Drupal to WordPress which went pretty smooth except for a few small issues with the comments which I wrote about in a previous post.

During the process of fixing the out of order wordpress comments I introduced another problem.

While fixing the comments I had disabled W3 Total Cache. The problem cropped up when I went to access the comments after W3 was running once again.

While not paying attention while fixing the comments (nested comments set to 5) I had one comment that would have been nested at #6. Since WordPress was setup to only nest to 5 it simply did not place it where it should have been.

It just placed the post beneath the others and in order, no problem right? Well as I said it turned up only after W3 Total cache was running and you tried to manage the comments.

Most of the time you would just get a blank page and at other times you would get all the way to the edit comments page but there where no comments displayed. Yet, it would show that there where comments and pages.

What ended up happening was that the comment that could not be nested at position #6 ended up having the comment_parent set to the comment_id.

Why it created an issue with W3 Total cache I have no idea maybe someone will stop by and enlighten us. But, by changing the comment_parent back to 0 fixed the issue.

…Moving this site from Drupal back to WordPress which I had alluded to in a previous post. Thankfully there is alot already written about this on the internet.

For some odd reason during the move the threaded comments ended up out of order. Coupled with some but not all of my replies where not attached to me.

After searching through quite a few posts (most just stating the problem, without a solution) I found a few that addressed what I needed to do.

The scary part is that, it does require you to go into the database and correct the issue. This is where you need to have a backup of the database and preferably do this in MAMP or XAMPP.

The first issue that needed to be addressed and was one of the more difficult ones to find was the issue of “Changing the user_id of wordpress comments” back to me.

This was fairly easy to do from phpmyadmin and then it was on to the next issue getting the comments back in order. At first it may seem like a daunting task but as you read all the comments you should see how they fit together.

The issue for the out-of-order wordpress comments was the…

… comment_parent field. The thread comments that where out of order had the comment_parent set to 0 or some other odd number. These could have been change via phpmyadmin but talk about confusing.

With thousands of plugin’s for WordPress a little searching turned up this plugin Edit Parent Comment ID the sad part is that it hasn’t been updated in awhile and compatibility was only up to 2.9.2.

And, I was running WordPress 3.01. Since I was using MAMP and had a complete duplicate of the site it was no problem. I installed the plugin it worked as advertised.

From there it was just a simple matter of figuring out which comment went where. While this would work for a smaller site I know it would not be easy on a much larger site where you may have thousands of comments.

The interesting part is by going through this process I introduced another problem with W3 Total Cache and Comments which I’ll have to write about later.

But, for now if you need to fix you’re out of order wordpress comments this will get you started.

After almost two years of running this site on Drupal 6, I finally came to the realization in late may it was time to move it back to WordPress and Thesis.

What brought me to this decision was more than just the upkeep associated with running a simple blog on Drupal…

It also had to do with the complexity of module interdependence with drupal, which on more than one occasion caused numerous problems.

One of the biggest reasons this site used Drupal in the beginning was the power you had over your content. But, now I feel wordpress has more than caught up.

While I had moved quite a few sites from wordpress to drupal … there’s a module for that. Moving in the other direction seemed like more of a challenge.

Yet, a quick search on the internet turned up this excellent post Convert – Import A Drupal 6 Based Website To WordPress v2.7

Setting up a temporary site via MAMP was the first step, followed by downloading the 2.7 version of WordPress from the release archive.

Following the instructions the data was converted in no time at all. Everything appeared to be there and still intact. The next step was to download and update to the latest version of WordPress 3.01.

Followed by installing the Thesis for WordPress theme, a little fine tuning in under MAMP and then it was time to move it over to the live server.

Creating a new database on the server with phpmyadmin seemed like the easier thing to do. Then using phpmyadmin to backup and download the data from MAMP followed by importing it into the newly created database.

There is one gotcha when moving the database from MAMP to your live server and that is the website url. Fixing this is fairly easy, on the live server enter your database via phpmyadmin and click on your wp_options in the first row of data you’ll see.

Change localhost to your website url.

There is still one other area that has to be changed as well on the second page of the wp_options.

Change it to your website url.

Now that the data was on the server it was fairly easy to move all the files over to the server after deleting the drupal files.

Once you’ve moved all the WordPress files and folders – set the permissions edit your wordpress wp-config.php to point to your new database.

You’ll also need to copy the hidden file .httaccess to your wordpress folder.

Of course you could simply install WordPress…

And then import the database from MAMP.

I did find one odd thing in the move and that was with the comments not being in the correct order. Mainly it seemed tied to replys to comments.

Other than that, the move from Drupal 6 to WordPress was just as smooth as moving from WordPress to Drupal.

On Thanksgiving day, while waiting for the turkey to finish cooking I did some searching on the web. I was looking for a solution to make better use of the the categories in the wordpress Thesis theme.

While most people using Thesis will no doubt simply check the box that to not have the page indexed by the robots it kind of deletes the purpose of having those pages anyway.

During that search I ran across an article written by Rae Hoffman at Sugarrae.com. She has done a fantastic job in explaining what needs to be done in-order to make better use of the category pages.

This is something that I’ve already done in one of my drupal sites and was much easer to do than it was in wordpress.

Ok so what am I talking about here making the categories more robust and giving both the search engines and site visitors just a page with that starts off with:

FROM THE CATEGORY ARCHIVES:

By using hooks we can add relevant text to the top of the archives pages making them both search engine and visitor friendly.

In looking at the code and some of the example sites I did see one thing which I also found as a challenge in Drupal. That challenge is in the pagination of Drupal As well as WordPress.

Here is the code that Rae provided and I’d recommend you read her entire page “Thesis Tutorial – Creating Custom Categories”

In the code there is the statement:

if(is_category('apples')) {

Which does exactly what it is supposed to, but when pagination occurs we end up with the same message at the top of the category page again.

To the search engines it appears as duplicate content and might and I do say might appear to our visitors that they are still on the same page.

What I did was to add just a few items to the code:

if (is_category(‘apples’) && !is_home() && !is_paged()) {

This now gives us the text we want on the main category page and subsequent pages will display 2, 3, 4, etc…

FROM THE CATEGORY ARCHIVES:

Still not perfect but at least it gets us off to a great start. For the technically savvy web surfer it is not a problem, but it is for the majority of web surfers.

If you’re running WordPress for you blog no doubt you’re getting blog comment spam on a daily basis. I never really thought to much about it WordPress ships with Akismet.

While Akismet does a great job in catching most of the comment spam it still requires you to wade through all of the spam, and delete it.

A little more than a month ago, after answering my wife’s questions of is this spam or not on her blog Cloez’s Corner I started looking for a better solution, or a solution that would allow both of us to spend our time being more productive.

After all I’m sure you’d agree that you have better things to do then spend time looking through all the WordPress Comment Spam that comes in each day, right! Most of us, myself included probably really don’t grasp the problem as far as what a time waster it is.

The solution, was to stop using Akismet and use instead Wp_spamfree plugin by Scott Allen the results have been great. While some have mentioned that it is blocking sometimes legitimate comments, I’ve not experienced that.

The Stats on Comment Spam for 30 Days

On my wife’s site in 30 days it was at 701, or an average of 23.36 per day. On my Home Business Site it was only at 177 spam comments 5.9 per day, not too bad! On my Network Marketing Blog it was 370 or 12.33 per day.

When I look at 1,248 WordPress Comment spam caught by Wp_SpamFree that did not make it into the database in that 30 day period it makes me wonder how anyone could do without it, unless you don’t value your time.

If you’re finally tired of fighting it, then this maybe the perfect solution you’ve been looking for. After all it’s better to stop spammers before they get in through the front door.

This past Saturday, I finally decided to get to work with the WordPress Thesis theme. I wanted to create a static front page and also have a blog section. The challenge arose with you guessed it duplicate titles and duplicate description fields.

Although I should be fair I do believe it had more to do with using the All-In-One-SEO wordpress plugin then anything to do with either Thesis or WordPress. It took me almost 6 hours to get it setup, seems like no matter what I tried it just would not work.

Essentially the theme does not really need any SEO plugins to be effective anymore. Yet, I’m kind of hesitant to give up the SEO control to a template. I really did like the All-In-One-SEO plugin, yet all I really used it for was the auto-description function, call most of us lazy!

After hours of research, trying just about everything I finally logged into the database and completely removed Headspace2 and any reference to All-In-One-SEO. After this was done things finally began to progress.

The bad part is I ended up modifying the core Thesis theme header.php file, which also means that I’ll need to keep that in mind should any update come along. The most useful information I found for this process came from Luke Harrison’s page titled “Giving your Static Homepage and Blog page different TITLES in WordPress” this got me going in the right direction.

Yet I did deviate quite a bit from his example, click for a larger view.

Once this was done it was a matter of getting the front page title and the blog title along with the correct description set on the respective pages, as I said I played with this for hours with no progress when the All-In-One-SEO plugin was installed.

In the Thesis forum there was no shortage of advice on how to setup a static front page, with titles and descriptions, which of course did not work. Now this maybe a problem since the version is rc5.

What I finally ended up with that was a working solution is, under Thesis Options >> Document Head >> Title tag everything is unchecked! Under Home Page >> Home Page Meta, there is nothing in the meta description or meta keywords. This is contradictory to everything they said to do.

On the front page using the Thesis SEO Details and Additional Style I entered the meta description here. The title is entered in WordPress >> Settings >> General under Blog Title Home Business Opportunities News & Ideas.

Ok for the blog page, I gave the page a title in WordPress Nav60′s Home Business Blog at this point I now had the title for the front page and blog set along with the description set for the front page.

In order to set the description for the blog page it was back to the WordPress >> Settings >> General under Tagline. Setting this up was a royal pain, as none of it makes any sense. Believe me I tried every possible combination to accomplish this!

My gut feeling is with a clean install of WordPress, then bringing in the Thesis template things are probably different. Yet, how many of us will take an existing site and destroy all of our content?

As I mentioned before one of my concerns was losing the auto-description feature from the All-In-One-SEO Plugin, since I like and use Marsedit to post to multiple blogs both Drupal and WordPress.

Reading through the Thesis forum, there where references that the theme would even take the excerpt field for a post description. So I gave it a try with Marsedit and sure enough it does work!

So now it makes my favorite blog editor that much more enjoyable to use. Of course I’m fully expecting that I may have to do this all over again with the final version of Thesis is released.

Yet if this helps just a few people who are concerned with duplicate titles and descriptions in WordPress then it is worth it. Do let me know if it helps you.

Just A Follow Up… After several months playing with wordpress and thesis I came to the decision that in order to achieve the desired SEO actions I was after to move the site mentioned above to Drupal 6.x.

Eventually I may post about why this move was made and the benefits from it.

This past week I’ve been playing with and setting up the WordPress theme Thesis by Chris Pearson. I had read just about everywhere about the theme and how good it was SEO wise, so I thought I would check it out since I have a few blogs that use WordPress vs Drupal.

Not being able to look under the hood without actually buying the theme made it difficult to see what it was all about. Most of the sites that I had visited, well lets just say there where many mistakes being made that would be so easy to clean up if they only took a little time to do it.

Then again maybe they just don’t know about it. Today there are so many experts out there talking about setting up wordpress, of course will to charge the unsuspecting for it. Many web hosts have it setup to install it fairly quick and easy.

So what did I find different about the Thesis theme? Previously on my wordpress sites I had used the revolution themes, which where pretty easy to customize. If you know a little about php, you can do some pretty neat things.

I ended up installing the 1.5b Thesis theme “note the b it’s a beta version” there is at this time 1.4.2. Just about everywhere I looked everyone had pretty much left the theme almost just like it came. Yet that’s not my style, I like digging under the hood so to speak. One of the things I did not like about Thesis, yet is really is a minor issue if you know how to clean it up is the multiple CSS files.

The Bloat

Some of the sites that I had looked at no less then 15 external Javascript files and 11 external CSS files. I think this is where drupal really shines, it’s the ability to aggregate and compress the CSS files into just one. The Java files are aggregated but not compressed. The lack of aggregation and compression is a WordPress issue, not a Thesis theme issue.

I was very impressed with the support forum at diythemes.com, lots of people in there asking questions to issues they where facing which ranged from CSS issues to more complicated issues. Having a good support forum is essential for any piece of software, often you’ll find a few golden nuggets that lets you take it further then maybe even the designer imagined.

One of the things I’ve always liked is tabbed navigation with drop down menus. With a little CSS styling and a graphic I quickly set it up, now if I only knew how to use my Photoshop CS3 better I could create a decent header graphic for the site. You can see what I did in an afternoon here at Nav60.com with the site and drop down menus.

Thesis Options

This was one area that was a nice addition to any wordpress theme, simply select the options you want or do not want.

Display Options

• Title Tag
• Document Head
• Archives
• Tagging
• Comments
• Sidebars
• Administration

Customize Your Thesis Design

• Custom Stylesheet

Syndication/Feed

Navigation Menu

Multimedia Box

Stats Software and Scripts

Thesis Design Options

Fonts and Font sizes

• Body and Content Area
• Content Area
• Nav Menu
• Header
• Headlines
• Bylines and Post Meta Data
• Code
• Multimedia Box
• Sidebars
• Footer

Layout: Columns and Widths

Home Page Layout and Content

Feature Box

Post Images and Thumbnails

Framework Options

As you can see from the list about, the Thesis theme gives you a lot of options to play around with, allowing you to really customize the theme to you. With just two pages to click on for options it is much simpler then Drupal, yet as far as I can tell at this point is not quite as easy to manipulate as Drupal. If you’re looking for a great theme then you could not go wrong with Thesis for WordPress.

Last night I finally got around to updating my Revolutiontheme template used on one of my wordpress sites to version 4.0. I like to keep things up-to-date. In July of 2008 I wrote about another wordpress theme duplicate content issues with this same template since it pulled in various content from different categories.

This new issues deals with the new features that came out with version 2.7 that has to deal with the comment pagination. The next day I updated one of the static pages on that site and ran the xml sitemap software to update it. Suddenly I had hundreds of new pages all of them with comment-page-1 and /?replytocom=XXX#respond.

While the comment-page-1 link would open into what appears as a new folder /comment-page-1/#comment-XXX while this would not necessarily be bad if it actually opened up a new page with just the comments on it. But since it opens up with the exact same content it does become an issue.

The /?replytocom=XXX#respond does not appear to be quite an issue, yet I still believe the search engines will see this as duplicate content until they adjust their algorithms to accommodate it or until wordpress provides a better solution to address this duplicate content issue.

For now the solution is go into settings – Discussion and find

and then change it to this:

I wish there was a better solution to this issue. I know some will say not to worry about duplicate content issues. The search engines will sort it out and deliver the one it believes to be correct.

While that may seem like a logical solution, I believe we have to think ahead. Duplicate content wastes resouces, with what is possible here you could end up with hundreds upon hundreds of duplicate content. All of which would be indexed whether it is duplicate content or not.

Now for the reason in my opinion why we had better wake up and pay attention to it, if we want to be found on any search engine in the future. The Times Online ran an article environmental impact of google, essentially they are say that doing a google search two searches on google generate the same enviromental impact as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to research.

Now Google did reply to this in a roundabout way via their blog, about the steps they’ve already taken to reduce their carbon footprint. With all the rhetoric about global warming, whether you believe it or not, pressure will be brought against the search engines by environmental groups.

So there is now doubt, that they will begin to seriously take a look at how much of their carbon foot print they can reduce by dropping completely from searches any website that has hundreds, upon hundreds of duplicate pages?

After all if two searches, leaves a carbon foot print equal to boiling a kettle of water, what does crawling hundreds to thousands of duplicate pages on Ten’s of millions of website?

This 4th of July weekend, I spent probably close to 60+ hours trying to figure out an issue with a new wordpress 2.5.1 blog template. I had run into an issue with duplicate content after moving blog from and old style theme. The issue was the new template did not have a next – previous link to step through the blog.

This new wordpress template pulls into various sections, blog posts from various categories, really a sweet looking template. What sent me into a panic was when I looked at the indexing by google and discovered the issue of duplicate content.

What had happened was xxx.xxxx.com/page/2/ was a duplicate of the index page all except for the title which would indicate that you had in fact switched to /page/2/ or 3 or 4 etc… all of them duplicates of the index page.

Spending hours reading through the numerous issues of duplicate content issues within wordpress did not point me towards any fix. In theory the pages are not there but they are!

They will not goto a 404 page because as far as the database is concerned they are there. For example if the site has 100 posts and you have 5 posts per page you will go up to /page/2/ to /page/20/ on /page/21/ you will get the 404 page.

So to fix the problem, I modified the home.php and added a section with the code from the blog which included the previous and next links.

This at least gave me access now to the pages, but really was not what I was after. Finally after all the coding changes, it suddenly dawned on me, since the template does not really have a blog page, and everything is accessed through the various categories etc… Why not just disallow the /page/ via the robots.txt file.

Testing with Google tools verified that it was a good solution as it would block xxx.xxx.com/page/  yet still allow access to xxx.xxx.com/category/page/2/ etc..

Again to point out that this issue only became visible because the /page/2/ had been previously indexed by the search engines. A new site of course did not have this wordpress duplicate content issue, as there was never any links pointing to them.

With so much controversy about duplicate content issues, from it’s a major problem to who cares. I’d prefer to take a more cautious approach.