This week, I was planning to continue with my WordPress plugin development for a GEDCOM viewer, after making myself busy with OS upgrading and testing, as well as niche blog building since last year.

Alas, when I checked the WP.org Extend directory to request a repository for my GEDCOM project, I’ve found that a GEDCOM viewer plugin has already been developed. So I thought that since mine is still a beta, I might as well not reinvent the wheel and let someone else do the hard work (and believe me, there’s a lot of hard work and reading going on with my GEDCOM plugin development).

l’ve decided to stop development of my GEDCOM plugin, and instead recommend you to check out WP Family Tree. There is also one simple but pretty-looking GEDCOM viewer called Family Tree PHP, which you can install if your web hosting provider supports PHP and MySQL. Last but not least, PhpGedView is one other option if you’re interested in a more extensive genealogy application on the Web, and was the basis of my WordPress plugin.

I only recently found the need to use sticky posts in a couple of my WordPress niche blogs. Sticky posts are basically blog posts that remain prominently displayed in the main page of your site, and won’t get bumped even as you post up new articles or posts into your blog.

Although this is a permanent feature made available in WordPress 2.7 and later, you also have to realize that you need a sticky-friendly theme to go with it in order to make them work. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? Many of the popular WordPress themes out there aren’t, in fact, sticky-friendly. Such is the nature of one of my favourite WordPress AdSense templates called ProSense, a design made famous by Dosh Dosh.

But fret not. It’s actually quite simple to modify your choice WordPress theme to make stickies work, as long as you’re comfortable doing a little bit of HTML/CSS editing or are familiar with the Theme Editor section of your WordPress blog dashboard. Quick Online Tips has a short and sweet step-by-step on how you can DIY, while Nathan Rice delved deeper into the innards of sticky posts, if you’re into those sort of thing.

Are you using ProSense, and would like to get the sticky-friendly version of it? Yeah, I have it. Just click any of the following links to download it: ProSense (original brown color), Prosense Blue, ProSense Grey.

My penchant for using long titles in my blog posts, and my now active involvement in all things Facebook and Twitter, drove me to install this nifty but challenging plugin called YOURLS. I took for granted that this was going to be one of those normal WordPress plugins you get to install through the dashboard.

But it’s not.

My number 1 mistake was thinking that all I had to do was install the WordPress plugin version of it and it will run immediately. Nope, it doesn’t work that way. You actually have to download the package and FTP everything into your web folders. Next, you need to do some manual configuration for both the database and config file, then run it the first time via the admin panel, and ONLY THEN should you install and set up its complemental WordPress plugin within your WordPress dashboard. And I’m explaining these in way too simplistic terms.

My number 2 mistake was to not understand enough the statement in the FAQ that says “You cannot install YOURLS and, say, WordPress, in the same directory” because YOURLS needs its own .htaccess file.  I ignored that and tried anyway. Didn’t work, of course.

I tried to rectify it by reinstalling everything into its own subdirectory (e.g. http://webgrrrl.net/z/), as advised in the FAQ.

Guess what? IT DIDN’T WORK, EITHER!

But then, I had a light-bulb moment — why not set YOURLS up under a subdomain instead?! And that, ladies and gentlemen, did the trick. I hazard a guess that since my WordPress was installed in my root folder, my blog’s mod_rewrite settings were waging war against YOURLS’s, which in turn causes the shortened URL not to work. In any case, I’m fully satisfied with using the domain z.webgrrrl.net for my personal URL shortening service.

I’m currently using YOURLS / z.webgrrrl.net for this blog as well as Blogging Fu. My favourite option in YOURLS is its bookmarklet ability. Whenever I’m on a web page that I want to tweet and get its URL shortened, I just click the bookmarklet on my browser, and it will automatically bring me to z.webgrrrl’s console for me to generate the short URL. Nice.

Hey, by the way, did you get it? z.webgrrrl? As in Ze WebGrrrl? Hahah, hahahah!

Another TCW update has been posted in WordPress.org’s Plugins Repository to include two new additions based on user requests.

Show top commentators between certain dates: This option was requested by James Pearse of Avon School District, MA. In his e-mail, he included a link to his school’s blog, demonstrating the idea that having your name displayed in the site and getting listed in the top commentators’ list not only can be used to increase traffic to your blog, but more so to help generate interest and participation on the posts among your site visitors. What a delight it is to see how something as small as TCW can contribute so much to learning and education. It makes developing WordPress plugins that more worthwhile for me.

Open links in a new window: I received a surprising number of requests lately, both through the WP.org Support forum and e-mails, asking me to include this option in the widget, so there you go – pretty straight forward at that.

As always, feedback and bug reports are appreciated. Do so in the WP.org’s Support Forum (preferably) and remember to tag your post with the words top-commentators-widget, or drop me a line via my Contact Form.

Since my last post concerning WordPress as a content management system (CMS), I’ve seen a few more sites that showcases this type of setup. Even WordPress.org has jumped on the bandwagon by highlighting sites that are deemed to be well-designed CMSes, and if any WordPress-powered site should aspire to look like a CMS, this is the place to go for inspiration.

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One site in the list is definitely noteworthy, like the New School University Student Senate web site. Golf Royalty is another nifty site and should have been ranked up there in the top 10, not those vote-rigged sites you see right now. Need more inspiration? Here are 10 more fantastic-looking WordPress CMS that Adrian from Rubiqube recommends.

A few tips to make your WordPress site less blog-like and more CMS-like: don’t go for the boring ol’ header-topnav-post-post-post-sidebar-footer layout. Get user interactivity into it (polls and such). Highlight important content and group them well (highlights, news, announcement). Snazzy graphics are welcomed, but not required. There are so many themes and plugins out there that can help your WordPress site stand out and not look like a blog.

If you’re still at a loss, you can always hire me