Post Formats vs. Custom Post Types in WordPress

Will we finally see themes use the power of WordPress when the Post Formats will be introduced in the 3.1? I hope so, and I’d like to see more theme-support for Custom “Post” Types as well.

 

Image by Daniel Bachhuber via Flickr

I’m happy even the WP lead developer Mark Jaquith admits that the Custom Post Types functionality in WordPress was poorly named, I think no one really got those…I mean, it says Posts, but means all but posts Even “Custom Pages” would’ve been better, but Custom Content Type does make a lot more sense does it? I wonder why they don’t just rename it…

To add into confusion, we’ll now have the Post Formats too – If you were/are confused as well, the quotes below are from Mark’s post “Post Formats vs. Custom Post Types”, explaining the difference.

But why theme developers are not using these things in their themes? We haven’t seen much of theme support for custom taxonomies or the custom “post” types, have we? A theme with microformatted support for custom types like ‘product’, ‘review’ or ‘recipe’, anyone?

I’m afraid we won’t be seeing much Post Formats either

Yes, the new Post Formats coming in 3.1 are awesome, but we’ll need themes to put them into use. As the new post formats will help (auto-)formatting special posts, like podcasts, video, images, links, etc. we could have very powerful themes in our hands when 3.1 comes out.

Amplify’d from markjaquith.wordpress.com

Some people are confused about the Post Formats feature that will be made available to themes in WordPress 3.1, especially how it differs from Custom Post Types.

 

Custom Post Types

 

These were poorly named. Think: Custom Content Types. That is, non-post content. Examples: employees, products, attachments, menu items, pages, pets. If you want it to show up in your site’s main RSS feed, then it’s probably not a custom post type.

 

A Post Format is a formatting designation made to a post. For example, a post could be a short “aside,” or a Kottke.org-style link post, or a video post, or a photo gallery post. The data you input might be slightly different — video post should contain a video, an aside should probably not be very long, a link post should have a link. And the way that the post is displayed on the site might be very different — an aside will typically be displayed without a title, a link post may have the title point to the link. A video post may be wider, or have social sharing buttons auto-appended. But they’re all still posts. They still show up in your feed, and you still find them in the Posts section of the WordPress backend. Read more at markjaquith.wordpress.com

 

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Related articles

• WordPress Custom Post Types Guide (gabrielcatalano.com)
• The Easiest Way to Get Custom Post Type Archives for WordPress 3.0 (pressography.com)
• WordPress Custom Post Types Guide – Six Revisions (sixrevisions.com)
• A Guide to WordPress Custom Taxonomy – Six Revisions (sixrevisions.com)

The W3 Total Cache -guide gets a major update

I installed and configured W3 Total Cache to the rest of my blogs today, and used the opportunity to tune my W3 Total Cache -guide up-to-date…

I probably used way too much time on it, and definitely broke my blog only 10 minute a day -rule, but I wanted to do it.

The installation and configuration guide started to attract some attention and traffic, and the plugin had been updated since I wrote the guide in July.

Anyway, it's now out there, all 45+ pages of it, all yours, for free.

Get the free PDF here: W3 Total Cache -guide

30 minutes of goodness about WordPress Security

Watch this video for GREAT info on how to secure WordPress. Brad Williams gave this “Lock it Up” -presentation in WordCamp Boston 2010. I found it via WordCamp.tv

The Video:

Brad Williams: Lock it Up

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Watch the 30-minute video at WordCamp.tv: Brad Williams: Lock it Up

The Presentation Slides:

 

Find the presentation from Brad’s SlideShare account here: WordPress Security: WordCamp Boston 2010

20 Most Useful WordPress Plugins

Instead of spending weeks, months or even years like I have, a beginning WordPress blogger should *NOT* be testing and trying different plugins. Instead of getting the “widget mania”, it will save you tons of time to pick a set of plugins that make things better and focus on stuff that matters, like creating content and writing posts.

In this post, I will give you a complete list of best WordPress plugins you can install to your WordPress blog for free and not worry about what plugins you should use and have.

When Darren Rowse asked What are Your Favourite Free WordPress Plugins?, I left a comment on that post, but wanted to do an extended version of the comment here, since I didn’t want to bloat the comment too much.

So in my comment on the WordPress plugin -post at Problogger, I narrowed it down to 4 from my 8 must-have WordPress plugins, which I would recommend for any, and every, WordPress blog…

• 1. W3 Total Cache – hands down, and without a question, the number one caching plugin for WP, making blog A LOT faster. (WP Super Cache only sees the rear lights of this one). To learn how to install W3 Total Cache, download my free W3 Total Cache guide from my Scribd -page.
• 2. Google XML Sitemaps – the most simple “SEO” one can do in a blog is to create an XML sitemap that will help search engines index the site (and not just Google, despite the name), and this plugin makes it super easy.
• 3. WP-DBManager – automatically optimize and BACKUP the WordPress database, making sure the blog runs smoothly and you won’t lose you precious work in case something bad happens.
• 4. WP Smush.it – automatically optimize images uploaded to the media library, making the images smaller, without affecting the image quality.

The 4 plugins above would help any kind of blog, no matter the purpose. For the typical blog, I would add these 4 to the mix

• 5. Google Analytics for WordPress – tracking traffic is essential, and this plugin is the best there is to setup Google Analytics into a WordPress blog, with the new version adding advanced (yet easy to use) features like tracking clicks with events and tracking traffic per category/author/tag/etc.
• 6. Akismet – If a blog has comments active, like most blogs do, Akismet must be in the blog to avoid most blog comment spam. One might add other plugins on top of it, but Akismet is the foundation.
• 7. All in One SEO Pack – A plugin that takes care of the oh-so-important search engine optimization needs for the blog and individual posts. There are great SEO-plugin alternatives, like HeadSpace2, but I’ve used using the All in One SEO Pack, and haven’t found a reason to switch.
• 8. Redirection – There comes a time when you might move a post, or need to make short and sweet affiliate linking, and redirection helps you to do that. It automatically redirects posts you change, and it can also track 404 (page not found) errors, helping you to spot possible errors on your internal links.

Personally, I add all the 8 plugins to every WordPress blog I create for myself or for my clients. To continue the list, here’s 12 more that make things easier and better for many things, including SEO and other things.

• 9. WordPress Firewall – Security, blocking common “attacks” against the blog
• 10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Automatically add related links and content to all posts
• 11. FeedBurner FeedSmith – Redirect feeds to Feedburner (without editing all the links)
• 12. RSS Footer – Add any stuff, like link back to your blog, at the bottom of each post in the RSS feed. Good for directing readers back to blog, and also get something back from people who rip your feed
• 13. Contact Form 7 – Simple and easy contact form to the blog, with loads of features
• 14. WP-Pagenavi – Adds improved page navigation to the blog
• 15. Yoast Breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs help both people and the search engines to navigate the blog and the posts, and this plugin makes it easy to add’em to the blog
• 16. Sociable – As far as I know the ONLY “social bookmarking plugin” that uses CSS sprites, making it the most effective for page loading and speed
• 17. Robots Meta – Micromanage index/noindex of posts, pages, archives, etc.
• 18. SEO Smart Links – automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Can be used for automating internal linking and also automatic affiliate linking if you’re doing affiliate marketing
• 19. WP Security Scan – helps you check possible security issues on the blog. Acts as a checklist of security tweaks that should be in place in every blog
• 20. Search Regex – If you need to mass edit anything in your blog posts, this plugin will help you search and replace stuff in all posts without manually going through them all. Amazing time saver if you need to update links for example.

The full list of recommended WordPress plugins is part of the resources for bloggers and Internet marketers that I’ve included in my blog at http://zemalf.com/.

Frederick Townes: Working Backwards (via WordPress.tv)

Good stuff from Frederick Townes (of Mashable and W3 Total Cache) about site speed, the importance of performance, and tips on how to speed up WordPress blogs.

Here’s the video:

Frederick Townes: Working Backwards

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And here’s the link to the presentation slides (via SlideShare).

… Frederick Townes: Working Backwards

via WordPress.tv

The Real Truth About WordPress Speed

I’ve been obsessed about WordPress speed and website performance in general for a while now. As a result, my WordPress blog is faster than yours – I don’t say that to brag, but just to show that I know this stuff inside out…

It seems that everyone’s an expert when it comes to site speed

The topic of website performance and site speed has been hot for a while because on April 2010 Google announced that site speed is part of their search engine ranking factors now…

What makes me sad that most of the blog posts and articles I see about speeding up a site are either full of crap or too advanced.

• The first kind are the posts, where the author has no idea how to speed up a site, but just wants to take advantage of the hype about speed…
• The other kind are the posts made by geeks to geeks.

I get the advanced posts, but they are often way too advanced for someone who’s building their first website or blog. And the bigger problem is that many of these posts focus on stuff that takes a lot of time, but only bring tiny results.

They look advanced and geeky and cool, but actually better results could be achieved with less effort.

I’m talking about tweaking the php-code of WordPress themes, optimizing the MySQL, optimizing the PHP, etc. All great things for WordPress optimization, but also something one should do as the last thing after doing the basic optimizations first (which still speed up the site more)

It’s interesting that often these same people often offer help to do such advanced operations – for a cost of course…

I’m not saying they don’t know their stuff, but most of the people making these advanced guides are typical engineers, they refuse to see the simplest and easiest solution, because… well – because it’s easy, and if it’s easy, why would anyone need them, the engineers anymore?

SEOmoz’s post this week is something in between. It does give the good tips, but it also gives some unnecessarily advanced tips while at it. On the other hand, SEOmoz has relatively geeky/advanced readership, so I think it’s OK…

7 Ways to Improve Site Speed (according to SEOmoz)

I made a lengthy comment about speeding up a website (this whole post is an extension of that comment) on SEOmoz’s White Board Friday post: Whiteboard Friday – 7 Ways to Take Advantage of Google’s Site Speed Algorithm (Pop-Up Video Style)

1. Enable Gzip
2. Minify Javascript/CSS
3. Use a CDN (Content Distribution Network)
4. Optimize Images
5. Use External Javascript/CSS
6. Avoid Using Excess Redirects
7. Use Fewer Files

All good tips I think. But using CDN and using external js/CSS are quite advanced techniques, so I wouldn’t worry about those at first. If you just remove crap (using fewer files), enable gzip, optimize images and minify the js- and CSS- files, you’ve done 90% of the speed optimization you need to do.

For most, especially beginners and smaller sites, this is enough. You’ll spend a lot more time getting the right 10% done, but only see minimal gain, compared to the first 90%, which you can do really fast.

My comment and thoughts about speeding up a site

Let me simplify this for you.

Speeding up a site is three step process:

1. loading less stuff,
2. loading smaller stuff, and
3. delivering the stuff in optimal manner

…in that order.

First remove all the crap, then make the stuff that’s left smaller (= e.g. compress/gzip stuff and optimize images), then focus on delivering stuff optimally, beginning with configuring things for browser and proxy caching and caching in case of dynamic content, e.g. on WordPress. After everything else is done, THEN one can start looking into subdomains and Content Delivery Networks.

External js/CSS is quite advanced technique, and you have to mind that the number of domains must be kept under four for things to speed up. CDN is an option which beginners don’t need, and I don’t like it that each and every “speed up your site” guide/tip/blog post suggests that first…

• Why go for paid solution when you can do stuff for free and more easily?
• Why suggest something most users don’t even need?

Focus on stuff that brings maximum impact for minimum effort.

Don’t get stuck on the hard stuff, because you know what…

The truth is… that speeding up WordPress is EASY!

Speeding up WordPress

For people on WordPress, you can take care of 88% all optimization needs by installing the W3 Total Cache -plugin and configuring it the right way. That and 3 other optimization steps is all it takes.

Add little tweaks via .htaccess rules, like gzip (deflate) and cache control for browser/proxy control, use WP Smush.it -plugin to automatically optimize images and you are pretty much set. After that it’s about cleaning up stuff, getting rid of unnecessary scripts and such.

p.s. If you want to know more, I have tons of free information about speeding up WordPress on my blog… start by checking out the WordPress Speed Challenge now.

My WordPress is Faster Than Yours

When I started my self-hosted WordPress blog (not this WordPress.com blog), Zemalf.com, in May 2009, in June 2009 my blog took 12 seconds to load (sometimes 18!!). I was floored.

And pissed. After all, no self-respecting geek would accept to run a site that slow, WordPress or not… Well, at least I couldn’t accept it.

First I thought it was the hosting, but I soon realized it wasn’t. WordPress blog could be made fast on shared hosting, if one only knew how… I started optimizing.

I spent 13 months researching, stuyding and trying out different things in order to find how to make WordPress fast…

There were many tips and “how to speed up WordPress” -lists around, some good, some bad. So I had to put all that together and find the best ways. And make couple of my own, because most of the tips I saw were copied from one another without thinking what was actually the smartest thing to do.

I’ve put these things into blog, as you can see in my blog posts: how to optimize images for web and .htaccess rules for site speed – You can have good results just with those, especially if you haven’t done any optimization yet.

Now my WordPress blog loads under 2 seconds, on shared hosting, no CDN (Content Delivery Network) or anything. Some individual posts load in about 4-6, mostly because I haven’t got around optimizing blog comment section and Disqus yet (which will probably make me get rid of that, but we’ll see).

I have opted for minimal design, with no images but the ones I upload. This and not using too many plugins, external scripts or widgets is the biggest reason for the faster loading times. After all, decreasing load times happen two ways: Loading less stuff and loading the stuff that is left faster.

Anyway, check out this video of mine where I show off the speed of my site versus some of my favorite blogs out there (which also run on WordPress):

Watch the video on YouTube: WordPress Speed Comparison: Zemalf.com vs 8 Awesome Blogs

Pretty cool, eh? I think it is Oh, the video and the test were run with WebPageTest.org visual comparison tool, awesome free system.

Want more WordPress optimization and speed things up a bit? Visit my blog and read the whole story: Speed Up WordPress – Even on a Shared Hosting.

Posted via web to Zem Post(erous): My WordPress is faster than yours.