And I just read a great post on 10 Free WordPress themes.  There’s some really appealing options in that list.  Despite the fact that we’ve been digging into Thesis lately – we’re using it to rebuild this very site and I recently built Ticketfly’s site with Thesis – and we’re liking it, Thesis is a premium theme that will cost you some dollars. Are those dollars worth it?  That depends. 

If there’s one free theme mentioned in that post that I would personally recommend, it would be Thematic.  Especially if you are building a WordPress site that will have a more traditional page and subpage information architecture instead of posts. 

But in a multi author blog, you can’t use the main RSS feed in all of your outposts.  Facebook is a good example.  Holly imports the feed of this blog into Facebook so they are republished as notes in her news feed.  Biggest problem with that is that it brings in posts I write into her news feed.  I don’t terribly mind, but every once and awhile I write a very personalized post.  Like the one I wrote last week on my most significant tweets ever.  Or when my son Jude was born.  So now Holly’s news feed that goes out to all of her Facebook friends has an item in of my most important tweets.  I’m not sure her social graph is terribly interested in that.

But you can easily remedy this by using the feed of the author archives that are built into the WordPress.  To get to an author archive page for a particular user on your blog, type in http://yourblogname.com/author/username.  You can get an RSS feed of all the posts from the author by ammeding that URL with the /feed.  So it would look like http://yourblogname.com/author/username/feed

Take that feed URL and import into your Facebook profile.  Or setup Twitterfeed with it.  Or tumblr or any other outpost you are building. 

As I just read on ReadWriteWeb, Intense Debate has announced a new Plugin API, that will allow third party developers to add additional features to the core commenting system.   They are launching the APIs with plugins for PollDaddy, Seesmic, and YouTube.

Very cool.

First, the influence of Automattic (who bought IntenseDebate last year) is clear. For years, Automattic has been developing the core WordPress platform with a philosophy of focusing on making the core product excel at what it is supposed to do: help people easily publish content on to the web.  Simultaneously, Automattic has nurtured a plug-in community that encourages the development of add-ons to extend WordPress functionality in ways I’m sure Autommatic never imagined possible.  These plug-ins can convert WordPress from a simple blogging system into robust content management systems, even customer relationship managers.

So hopefully history will repeat itself with Intense Debate.  Intense Debate will focus on making the core software excellent.  A community of third-party developers can write software to bolt on functionality for Facebook Connect, Twitter (yes, there’s the obligatory Twitter reference required of every blog post about social media), Yelp, and whatever else can be imagined. 

So what’s it really mean?

Near-term, I still think that systems like JS-Kit offer more immediate functionality.  But with this development, Intense Debate positions itself to grow like a weed.  I also like that you can control which features you want activated within your commenting structures and which ones you don’t.  Not every site using IntenseDebate will want people to submit video comments with Seesmic.

Maybe I did pick the correct blog commenting system.

While that still may be the case long-term, Disqus is stretching its lead in commenting system features.  In December, they integrated Facebook Connect logins.  IntenseDebate has yet to even address that as far as I know.  And most recently, Disqus integrated Friendfeed comments related to a particular blog post. 

It may be time to admit a previous error in judgement and switch to Disqus.

And as a side note, if you are looking to waste some time today, check out the WordPress Download Counter. Number of downloads have increase by 1,000 since I started writing this post. AWESOME!

The video below provides a quick intro to the new dashboard coming in WordPress 2.7.  The changes to the dashboard are dramatic and will require adjustments from even the most experienced WordPress users.  I will say that the automatic upgrade feature in the beta works smoothly.  Keeping WordPress sites up to date should be easier than ever. 

There’s a number of other items coming with version 2.7 as well, including:

Upgrades and installs over secure FTP
Add media without creating post
Quick Edit inline editing
Shortcuts menu
Comment reply from admin
XMLRPC Comments API
Revised Dashboard
Comment threading and paging
API additions
Navigation expand/collapse in two directions
Bulk editing of posts
HTTPOnly Cookies
Automatic upgrade
Screen Options to hide/show modules/columns on screens
Plugin browser/installer
Inline PHPdoc documentation
QuickPress
New design/layout
Drag and drop on dashboard and post screen
Sticky posts

I thought that I would add a blogroll to Red Pill, but I decided to use the blogroll feature of WordPress in a non-traditional way.  Most bloggers use the blogroll to showcase other blogs they read or to give some link love to their blogger friends. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with that, the addition of being able to group links into different blogroll categories give the blogroll feature more potential than it previously had. 

So on Red Pill, I’m going to create 3 link categories (WordPress is actually trying to get away from the term ‘Blogroll’).  A link category for upcoming events we’ll be at.  Another for speaking engagements.  And a third for affiliations and causes we participate in.  The process of adding a link is pretty simple within the dashboard.  See the Codex page and/or this screencast for more info on that.  Once you’ve added some links, you can use the wp_list_bookmarks template tag to generate a list of links in your theme.

<h2>Affiliations and Causes</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_bookmarks(‘title_li=&categorize=0&category=75&show_images=0&show_description=0&orderby=name’); ?>

</ul>

The code above adds some arguments to not display the category title; show only link category 75; not show a description; and order the resulting list by name of the link.

Today, I’m going to adding a list of related posts on the single post page of this WordPress blog.  If this works correctly – and you are looking at the single post version of this page (not the index, archive, or search result pages) you should a list below that shows 3 posts that you might also find of interest.  I’m utilizing the Similar Posts plugin to power this list.  There’s many plugins that will easy give your blog the same functionality, but I like the Similar Posts plugin because you can fine-tune how “post similarity” is defined using post titles, content, and tags.  Many related post plugins simply use tags.

Once you install the plugin, it’s a simple matter of inserting the function into your theme …

<?php //simlilar posts listing
if (function_exists(‘similar_posts’)) { ?>
<div id=”similar-posts”>
<h3>You may also like:</h3>
<?php similar_posts(); ?>
</div>
<?php } ?>

….and then add some styling the list it generates.  You can do both of these tasks directly in the admin panels for the plug-in or in your PHP and CSS files for your theme.  I also like that the configuration options allow you to easily filter out categories and authors.

So in effort, to roll out some new features to Red Pill, as well as get back in the blogging routine, I’m going to add a new site feature to Red Pill every day this week. Each new site feature will be accompanied by a blog post.  And so here we go…

I just added the All-in-One-SEO-Pack plugin for WordPress.  We always install this plugin for our clients, but for whatever reason…we forgot to add it here.  Talk about neglecting your own best practices!

The biggest thing the plugin does for you is format your post titles in the browser title bar so that the post title appears before the Blog title.  The result of which is optimization for your search engine.  There’s a ton of configuration options in this plugin, and I you need a roadmap to figure out how to set everything, I’ll just point you in the direction of the one I used.

This is not a problem unique to WordPress

Some training to help users move along that learning curve must always be provided.  Without training, the solution is incomplete.

It doesn’t matter if you deploying WordPress for your client or you are building an internal only web application or deploying a simple web site for your client.  Some degree of training is always going to be involved so make sure you account for that in project resources, schedules, and costs.  If you think you can get away with building that new site and not doing any training, you’re wrong.  I’ve been building sites of various shapes and sizes for over 10 years and every single one of them involves training at least one person, sometimes hundreds, even thousands.

The clients that I enjoy working with the most are those that are not super tech savvy, but they are interested in using the web as a medium to communicate their message, share their knowledge, or simply tell a story.  To them, the web is a new place they don’t know a ton about, but they are not afraid to learn.  Over the years, I’ve met few people unwilling to figure out how the web works and how they can start using it.  The challenge then becomes, how to people best learn?

Holly and I both have plenty of stories helping folks learn WordPress.  Sometimes it goes well.  Sometimes, not so much.  We’ve used the Codex.  We’ve purchased WordPress for Dummies for our clients.  Those are both excellent resources.  On the web or in print, you would be challenged to find a more comprehensive learning resource regarding WordPress.  But there’s no replacement for actually seeing how things get done, so we thought a set of well organized training screencasts would help address getting our clients moving along that learning curve.  This is why we launched a new site a couple weeks ago – wpscreencasts.com.  As we wrote in our post announcing the site, we did this to assist our efforts in providing training for the clients we deploy WordPress based sites for as well as provide a video resource that complements existing resources like the Codex. 

We may never completely eliminate the calls from our clients asking for simple updates, but we should provide professional solutions.  And a complete professional solution involves training.