1. Missing hooks

It annoys the *peep* out of me when I find out that my plugin is in fact working fine, but the *peep* theme author didn't think it necessary to add a wp_head or wp_footer call. This happens more than you'd think, but in most cases you can't really blame the user in question, the theme author is just a moron. For your reference: the wp_head() call needs to exist right before the closing </head> call, and the wp_footer() call should be right before the closing </body> tag.

I used to check for this in my plugin, but the code doing the check caused even more problems, so if you have a good solution for this, that'd be appreciated. I personally think WordPress shouldn't even activate themes without these two hooks.

2. A caching plugin

If you're looking at a cached version of a page, and you've just installed or reconfigured the plugin, chances are the changes aren't reflected in the output yet. In my Google Analytics plugin, I've actually added cache clearing code for W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache, if you're a plugin author you might find it useful:

<?php
if ( function_exists('w3tc_pgcache_flush') ) {
  w3tc_pgcache_flush();
} else if ( function_exists('wp_cache_clear_cache') ) {
  wp_cache_clear_cache();
}
?>

This is only necessary to do after you've saved settings that would change the output of your plugin of course.

3. You're not supposed to see anything

My Google Analytics plugin has the option to hide the tracking code for certain user levels. Turns out that, when you enable this feature, you're actually not seeing anything at all in the code. That's a good thing, right? Wrong. It meant dozens of emails coming to me in the course of like 6 months, until I was smart enough to add the following message to the output of my plugin for those users:

echo "<!-- Google Analytics tracking code not 
  shown because users over level ".$options["ignore_userlevel"]." 
  are ignored -->n";

Remember that when people use W3 Total Cache's minification feature, they won't even see this. The solution is to wrap it in CDATA tags.

4. You have to actually enable the plugin!

Seems obvious right? Well it doesn't always seem to be. I get this email about once every 2 months "your plugin doesn't work, it's shit. Help me fix it" (sometimes they're nicer, oftentimes they're worse :) ). The best part is when it's followed, like 5 hours later, by "ehm I actually forgot to activate your plugin". Happens to all of us, you know.

5. You haven't configured the plugin yet

There's a reason my plugins now scream at you to configure them as soon as they're activated: I got emails saying it didn't work, when the person emailing simply hadn't even configured the plugin yet. Yeah I know, my plugin should be able to just guess what your analytics account is, I'd love to be able to, but alas... So, especially for those people who think I have magic skills, there's now a warning in the admin:

And a notice in the source output:

echo "<!-- Google Analytics tracking code not shown because
  you haven't configured the plugin yet. -->";

6. You can't change the settings

Either you're blind or another plugin is malfunctioning, but you can't find the settings page for the plugin you want to configure. Luckily, WordPress has you covered (and yes, some people think that emailing the plugin author is the solution for that). Go to the plugins page, and click on the Settings link for the plugin:

That is of course, if the particular plugin actually was kind enough to include that link... For some reason, some plugin authors seem to think these standards don't have to be adhered to. They deserve to get more email.

7. The plugin is incomplete

When you uploaded the plugin, you might have missed a file, or two. Or the upload went bust. Or the auto install went bust. It happens. I haven't had to build in a check for this yet, since my plugins aren't that big usually, but I noticed this in W3 Total Cache most recent changelog:

Added an additional notification to help users identify
  incomplete installations upon activation.

That shows you two things: A, Frederick knows what he's doing and prevents people from emailing him over issues like that, B, it happens more often than you'd guess.

Your experiences

All the code examples above have been added to my plugin after several support requests for that particular issue. They might save you a fair bit of time if you've just started developing plugins, so feel free to use them. I know a fairly large portion of my readers dabbles with this stuff themselves, I'd love for you to share your experiences in the comments!

7 reasons for malfunctioning plugins (and their fixes) is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Since the debug script uses the console to display its information, I also added the option to immediately load Firebug lite. See how it works in the following screencast (ow and enjoy my new screencast intro, I'll be doing loads more screencast in the coming months):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google Analytics for WordPress gets a debug mode is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Wrong. Why that's wrong? Let's say that, a year from now, you're tired of this theme and want something else. It happens to all of us. So, you're switching themes. Have you guessed the problem yet? Because that theme you started using the titles and descriptions of uses it's own methods and locations for storing those titles and descriptions, when you switch to another theme, it won't recognize the old stuff.

If you're smart, you'll notice. If you're not, you'll be in even deeper trouble, as someone I did a site review for recently found out. She'd written superb SEO titles and meta's for her last 50 odd posts, and the hundreds of posts before that didn't have them. Took us a while to figure out she'd switched themes...

If you're a developer, changing a couple of post meta fields in the database might be reasonably easy, but for most people, it's not. That's why your theme should only contain functionality that alters the looks and the code of your site, not the content.

So there are no "SEO friendly themes"?

Does this mean a theme couldn't be SEO friendly? No it doesn't. A theme still determines a large part of what your heading structure looks like, whether it shows your content first and then your navigation or the other way around, whether your code is clean and tight or all messy etc. etc. etc. These are all very important aspects of on-page SEO, and I applaud every theme developer thinking about this and trying to learn about it.

Conclusion

There's a reason why we've got plugins and themes. We want to separate content from design. If something has to deal with your content, stuff you'd want to be the same regardless of which theme you're using, it has to be a plugin.

Update: Nathan has released his SEO Data Transporter plugin, which allows you to "transport" your data from one plugin to another, or from a theme to a plugin etc. This makes the technical fix easier, but still doesn't take care of the fact that people switch themes and simply forget about things like these. So my stance remains that it is a bad idea to have this functionality in your theme.

Why functionality in themes is not always good. is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Google Analytics has gotten so many new features in the last year, that the only way I could incorporate those into my Google Analytics plugin, which has been downloaded 1,192,566 times, was by doing an almost complete rewrite. That’s why today, I’m proud to announce version 4.0 of this plugin.

What’s new with this Google Analytics plugin?

Asynchronous tracking

First of all, this new version 4.0 switches to the new asynchronous tracking method. This new tracking was also the reason it took a while to get this version out the door: there were quite a few bugs to work out; tracking by the beta was not reliable for a while.

What’s the advantage of the new tracking you ask? Why bother switching? Well, there are three reasons, as listed by the Google Analytics blog:

• Faster load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution of the tracking code.
• Enhanced data collection & accuracy.
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn't fully loaded.

If you want to know more about asynchronous scripts, check out this blog post by Steve Souders, in which he explains the concept and what it means for page load times. The short version: a normal script blocks other objects on your page, like images, from being loaded until it has been fully loaded. An asynchronous script allows for those other objects to be downloaded at the same time.

Custom Variables

Google launched the custom variable support in October 2009, and I’ve been playing with ways to use these in tracking ever since. Custom variables are a way to add data about the current page, the current session or the current user in your tracking, which you can use for some very cool things.

I've been thinking and working with guys like my buddies Frederick Townes and Justin Cutroni about what you should and could be tracking. It wasn't easy, which is why I’m very proud to show you this settings panel:

Google Analytics Custom Variables

As you can see in the screenshot, you can segment by:

• Logged in users: speaks for itself, very useful on BuddyPress sites etc: where do people that are logged in go, where do others go. It stores the users primary user level in the variable, so you can even segment for just "subscribers". (There's an advanced option to ignore users of certain levels should you want to btw)
• Author name: track page views per author.
• Single category: if your posts are in only one category each, this allows you to track views per category.
• All categories: track multiple categories per post, a bit harder to view in Analytics, but could still be useful.
• Tags: track all tags for each post, has its limits but might be useful.
• Publication year: see what’s doing good and bad, more specifically whether your old posts are still getting traffic.
• Post type: especially with the new custom post type features in WordPress 3.0 this is very useful: if you’ve got movies, actors etc. set up as custom post types, this allows you to track how many page views each post type got.

So you could run reports showing which authors do better, which categories and / or post types get more pageviews and so on. This will provide you with the kind of analysis you need to improve your blog. I hope you’re starting to get why I’m so excited about this release. But wait, there’s more.

Google Analytics API integration

Where in the past I'd ask you to enter your "UA ID" from the backend, you can now simply click a button, authenticate with Google Analytics, select the right account and then the right profile and start tracking! Check out how easy that is:

Google Analytics Configuration

Of course you can still enter the UA ID by hand if you want to, just check the box in the lower left of the screenshot and you'll get an input box to enter the UA ID.

E-Commerce integration

This plugin now fully integrates with both WP E-Commerce and Shopp: for both of these plugins it tracks sales using e-commerce tracking, allowing you to track where people that bought something came from, how they went about your site and which pages triggered them to buy.

All you have to do is install the plugin, and it'll automatically detect whether you're running one of these two plugins. You'll then get a box like this:

WP e-commerce analytics integration

Event tracking

In the past this plugin used page views to track downloads and outbound clicks, thereby inflating page views. I started doing this before event tracking even existed, but of course this needed to be changed. The plugin now uses event tracking for this by default, but, if you want to, you can just check a box and it’ll switch to using page views again. You can also switch to page views just for downloads, to keep your goals working the same way.

An API for this plugin

This plugin adds a couple of filters so you can add your own tracking from your own plugins without having to hassle with the rest of the tracking. The 3 filters are:

$push = apply_filters('yoast-ga-custom-vars',$push, $customvarslot);
$push = apply_filters('yoast-ga-push-before-pageview',$push);
$push = apply_filters('yoast-ga-push-after-pageview',$push);

Custom variables are hard to deal with, as they need to be in the same "slot" all the time, that's why the $customvarslot is passed along.

Go get the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin

I have to believe that I've convinced you by now, so please go get the plugin. Please do let me know in the comments when you've upgraded, and what you think I should be adding!

Google Analytics for WordPress reaches version 4 is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Quite a while back I'd written a plugin for exactly that purpose, called email commenters. It had some small issues though, and I hadn't updated it for quite a while, but thought tonight was a good time to do just that. So I updated it, and it now gives you a link in the top right of the post to email all users:

An easy way to let people know that you've updated a post. Search for "email commenters" in your backend, install the plugin and activate: no need to do more. Let me know what you think in the comments, should I add something?

Emailing your commenters is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope you enjoy it and make sure to install W3 Total Cache on your site or blog!

W3 Total Cache and why you should be using it is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• The Salesforce plugin we released last week, WordPress to Lead, got so much attention that my head is still buzzing... It got featured on Mashable, TechCrunch and loads and loads more blogs and news sites. Very very cool to see such a reply to one of my products. We've got loads more ideas for v2, but we'd still love your feedback, preferably on the original post.

  Some of the ideas we've already received? Make it work as an addon for Gravity Forms, allow for multiple forms, allow to set the lead source through a shortcode, and many more.

• VPS.net will now help you migrate your site from any other hoster, even if you buy only 1 or 2 nodes. I've been wanting them to do this for a while since migration can be hard, and now they do. If you've considered migrating, it just got a bit easier. Ow and btw, if you send them a postcard, you get a $10 discount and have a chance to win an iPad!

• This tuesday on the WordPress Podcast, we'll have John Mueller, aka JohnMu as a guest. We'll be talking about Google Webmaster Tools and other things Google provides bloggers with to improve their blogging. We're really looking forward to it, and would love for you to be there live. Make sure to listen live and chat, we broadcast at 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern and 10 PM GMT.

  Also, I think our last episode with Chris Pirillo about creating communities was quite good, you can go listen to that on WMR.fm.

• Brian Clark (of Copyblogger fame and a buddy from SEOktoberfest) emailed me yesterday that he wrote a 24 page report on SEO copywriting that pretty much covers all the basics. I've read through it and it's very, very solid stuff, so I suggest you click here to grab your free SEO copywriting report.

  If you read through to the end there's some stuff about Scribe too. Scribe is an SEO plugin Brian co-created that actually is very cool, I'll have to find the time to do a proper introduction of it to you, but starting with this report by Brian is probably a very good idea, even if you don't want to use Scribe, the content is solid, and free.

• WordPress 3.0 beta 2 has been released. Yoast.com is running it and it seems quite stable. WordPress 3.0 is the first release to merge WordPress and WordPress MU. I haven't had a chance to upgrade a big MU site to this version yet, once I, or one of my colleagues, do, we'll let you know, but I'd love to hear your experiences.
• Last, but not least, for the geeks among you, there's three pretty cool tutorials I'd love to share, first of all, Ozh wrote a post about oEmbed and embedding tweets that I really enjoyed. BinaryMoon had a very cool post on embedding Twitter's new @anywhere service into the WordPress comments, and Leland had a good post on styling WP-PageNavi, which is what I use for my pagenumbers here on Yoast.

Small updates from me & my friends is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Today I want to introduce you to another cool new plugin I came across: Online Backup for WordPress. There's quite a few plugins out there doing backups already, WP-DBManager by Lester Chan, for instance, but there's a lot more. But... They all backup to your own server or to email. What you really want is safe and secure off-site backups. Automatically.

This plugin solves that, and, even better, it does so for free. Backup Technology built this because they had to scratch their own itch: Patrick Altoft and his team at Branded3 built their new site, they wanted it to automatically back up, and a plugin idea was born. Once they'd built it, they decided it would be pretty easy for them to offer this to other WordPress users, for free. You get 50 MB of data, which is about 10 backups of my blog, and those backups rotate around.

So what does it do? Well it backs up your blogs database, zips it if your server allows for that, and sends that backup to the Backup Technology server. You'll need to create an account there, so that, in the unfortunate event that you loose your data, you can log in and retrieve your backup. It has a pretty nice backend showing you how many backups you've got:

Click to view a larger version

Of course it allows you to schedule those backups, and it allows for encryption too if your server supports it. So is it cool? Yes it is! There is another plugin out there like it, but this one comes with more free data storage, a better backend and more scheduling options.

So I love the idea, but it lacks one thing that would probably be to expensive to do for free: it doesn't back up any files. I'd very much be willing to pay for a service that does that: my theme, my uploads, and possibly even my plugins.

But still: you should go try it, especially if you're not backing up your blog already!

Backing up your WordPress blog with ease is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

If not, it'll throw an ugly warning on each and every page until you fix it:

The code for it is easy, and as I'd like other plugins to start using it as well, let me give it to you here:

function blog_public_warning() {
  if ( '0' == get_option('blog_public') ) {
    echo "<div id='message' class='error'><p>";
    echo "<strong>Robots Meta Issue: You're blocking access to robots.</strong>";
    echo " You must <a href='options-privacy.php'>go to your Privacy settings</a>";
    echo " and set your blog visible to everyone.";
    echo "</p></div>";
  }
}
add_action('admin_footer', 'blog_public_warning');

That's easy enough, I think each and every WordPress plugin to do with SEO should do this check, to be honest.

Checking Blog Privacy Settings is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope you enjoy it!

WordCamp NL Presentation is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There's two reasons for the updates: the first is security, there is an XSS hole (mentioned here) in the latest version of my plugin, which is fixed by this newest update, so please, do update.

The second reason is a lot more fun: I'm going to be adding support for the new asynchronous tracking. It's going to be optional, of course, which makes it a bit of work to implement, so please give me some time. You can expect an update in about a week for version 1, but as this is a new form of tracking, I can't guarantee the new form will be entirely working, there might be bugs in there, etc.

So, thanks for using my Google Analytics plugin, and please share all your thoughts about it in the comments!

Google Analytics plugin updates is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There's a small issue though: it lacks a bit of functionality that people who were used to my WordPress contact form were really used too, and sometimes even relying on. My plugin added referrer data and the search keyword(s) used to the notification emails. To solve this issue I've written a small "add-on" plugin that adds just that data to notification emails. You can download it here.

There's another tiny thing that people needed: a widget that allows you to easily embed the forms in your sidebar(s). I made another add-on plugin that adds just that.

It should be noted that this widget currently does not add any scripts or style tags, so should your form depend on those, it won't work at the moment unless you load those scripts into your theme manually. Other than that, it works fine!

You can download the Gravity Forms widget plugin here, just upload, activate and use the widget. Grab the updated Gravity Forms widget here.

I've given the code for both these add-ons to the Gravity Forms guys, so they might end up adding these features to upcoming releases. If you've got anything else you want from Gravity Forms, I'd love to hear it in the comments!

Gravity Forms Widget + Extra’s is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Let me start by showing you the "end result", first what a "visit" containing a comment looks like, second what data is stored for each visitor (the new feature adds both the name and the email address):

This is done by some pretty cool combination of the WordPress API and the Clicky API, and it also allows you to add comments as a goal in your Clicky:

Pretty neat huh?

Comment Tracking in Clicky is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Update: the plugin is now out of beta and on wordpress.org, search for Clicky in your backend and install it, or download it from the Clicky plugin page on WordPress.org!

For a 1.0, this plugin has a pretty decent feature set:

• Automatically adding your Clicky tracking code everywhere:
  • Option to ignore admins
  • Option to store names of commenters
  • Option to track posts & pages as goals and assign a revenue to that page or post
• An overview of your site's statistics on your dashboard
• Integration with the Clicky.me Short URL service:
  • Automatically create a short link for each now post and page
  • Option to automatically tweet posts and pages on publish

It's using my backend class for it's admin UI, so it looks nice and clean (click for larger version):

And it adds a box to your edit post / edit page screen in which you can decide to Tweet the post or not if you've got those settings enabled and define the goal tracking variables:

Clicky Tracking for WordPress is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

This seems to have gone in beta now on wordpress.org, where you'll see a block like you see on the right appear next to plugins. I think this is an awesome addition, as it makes the compatibility data a lot more reliable.

Plugin Compatibility data now crowdsourced is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The first thing it does, on the homepage of the blog you've activated it on, is show the most important constants for that blog (see this screenshot). It shows you the important URL's, editor and memory settings etc.

On subpages it will show you something else: the page type, all the query vars that are set and the SQL query for that page. I've found that just doing a print_r or var_dump of $wp_query is hard to read, this theme tries to be a bit smarter about that, see these examples.

This theme also works in the preview, so that might be enough in a lot of cases. It also works great together with Donncha's Theme Tester, as Alex Leonard mentioned in the comments. Be warned that you might want to remove this theme from live sites though!

So all you have to do to use this is download it, upload it to your server and activate it.

If you're a developer this theme might come in handy sometimes, I'd love to know if you use it and what you'd add, maybe we can turn this into something super useful together.

WordPress Debug Theme is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

We talked about which area's of WordPress are under utilized according to Aaron, and he mentioned an area that is dear to my heart as well: the widget functionality that was introduced in 2.8. WP Engineer has a great post on how to build widgets 2.8 style, but if you're a TextMate user, like both Aaron and myself, you should really check out both my TextMate bundle for WordPress and Mark Jaquith's TextMate WordPress widget snippet.

Then we talked briefly about BackPress, which is the attempt to normalise all the code that is shared between BBPress and WordPress into one library of functions and classes that can be used separately as well. Aaron mentioned using it for some non WordPress projects and I've done the same.

We also ranted together on WordPress security, mainly because Aaron did a post on Technosailor with the title WordPress Security and How I’m Going to Take All Your Money. He explained his point: the people who know how to fix this stuff have jobs, they usually make their living building WordPress sites, we don't have the time to fix your blog, so please please upgrade, and if you do get hacked, and it's your dumb fault, we will charge you a lot of money for it.

When asked about his book signing tour it turns out that WordPress authors don't get flown around the world yet to promote their books, which probably has something to do with the WordCamp's being quite local and cheap to go to. I did mention that Aaron should actually be at WordCampNL, where I'll be speaking too October 31st, and he seemed eager to come but probably not this year...

There was a lot more that I'm not going to type out, you'll just have to listen to the show!

Make sure to subscribe to Press This by using the appropriate subscribe button on the Press This page, or tune in live on webmasterradio.fm each tuesday at 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern, 10 PM GMT, so you can join in the chat! Next week I'll be talking to my buddy Todd Garland of BuySellAds about how to monetize your blog!

Press This with Aaron Brazell is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So when the guys from startups.com approached me about whether they could take over maintenance on Sociable, I happily said yes. They have plenty of experience and some very good ideas for the plugin, so I'm confident they'll do a good job.

Before any of you ask: yes, some money was involved in this transaction, but I can tell you that if I had to buy everyone who reads this a beer I'd still be bankrupt. I'll still be involved in the development for a while, but they'll be responsible for keeping the plugin up to date from now on. The new home for Sociable is called blogplay.com, and all that is left for me is to wish them all the best with maintaining Sociable!

Sociable gets a new home is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

In the show with John Godley we discussed WordPress Plugins and plugin development, and how the "world" works for WordPress plugin developers.

Last night I had my buddy Frederick Townes on the show, Frederick is the CTO of Mashable, the founder of w3-edge and w3-markup, and the designer of a lot of great looking blogs, amongst which this one. Last nights show was an awesome experience, Frederick talks easily and has a wealth of knowledge about WordPress, and the chat room came up with a lot of cool questions.

I've put up a page here on yoast.com about Press This, which also featuresa the agenda of upcoming shows. If you have any suggestions for cool guests, or would like to be a guest yourself, let me know!

Press This: John Godley and Frederick Townes is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Today, I've fixed that. I've just submitted version 3.4 to wordpress.org, this version makes it possible to add sites to Sociable from either a plugin or from your theme.

You'd simply have to do the following:

function sociable_add_sites( $known_sites ) {
  $known_sites['Joost'] = array(
    'favicon' => 'http://netdna.yoast.com/images/joost.jpg',
    'url' => 'http://yoast.com/submit-to-yoast',
    'description' => 'What else would you do?'
  );
  return $known_sites;
}
add_filter('sociable_known_sites','sociable_add_sites',10,1);

As you can see you can easily add your own sites now. The favicon URL can be both an absolute URL to the file, or just a filename. If it's just a filename Sociable will look for it in the image directory you've defined in the backend.

You could also use this functionality to change the icon for a certain site, just add the following to the code above (before the return statement):

$known_sites['del.icio.us']['favicon'] = 'http://netdna.yoast.com/images/joost.jpg';

As said, you can either add this code into a plugin, or put it into your themes functions.php file. After doing that, the site will become available for you to pick in the Sociable admin panel.

Update: version 3.4.1 also fixes the Sphinn submit button, to work with the new version of Sphinn.

Adding Sites to Sociable is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!