Gravity Forms + Custom Post Type addon

By default, Gravity Forms allows you to create posts through a form. It doesn't have support for custom post types at the moment though, in part because a wonderful plugin was already created that allows for this. This plugin, aptly named Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types can be downloaded from WordPress.org.

Once you have both Gravity Forms and this plugin activated, you can start creating a form. The first step is to make the form fill our custom post type. We start with creating a form and dragging in a title field:

The title field can be found in the posts field section of Gravity Forms field, below the advanced fields:

Once you've added this input field and given it a name, go to the advanced section of its edit block, you'll see an option to save as post type, this has been added by the afore mentioned plugin:

You check the box and select the custom post type you want to use, in my case, WPSEO Themes. Now we start adding the form. We need a couple of different types of values:

• The title: done.
• The "description", which will just be the body text, so you can easily drag in the Body input field.
• An image, which should be saved as the featured image too, more on that below.
• Several custom fields, more below too.

Adding a featured image trough the form

This is actually pretty easy: drag in an image field and click edit, you'll see something like the screen below:

As you can see, setting the image as featured image is as easy as ticking the box. It's wise to also ask for a description if you don't know what's going to be on the image. In my case, it's a screenshot of the theme, so I won't bother and just set the alt tag automatically.

Adding custom fields through Gravity Forms

The next step is to add the several custom fields we need. In my case I had 5, but you can have as much as you want. You start by dragging a Custom Field input into your form. Once you have that, you click edit and you select the appropriate custom field type:

In this case, I'm asking for the theme URL, so I select website, but there are all sorts of options you can choose from, as you can see. Now here comes the tricky part, you need to set the name of your custom field. You should go into your Types -> Custom Fields page and check the second value below the custom field title:

That's the name of your custom field, but you should prefix it with "wpcf-", because that's the Types plugin naming convention, which prevents its custom fields from clashing with other ones.

Of course, if you created a custom field group from already existing custom fields you don't need to prefix the custom field name.

True / false or "boolean" input fields

Some of your custom values might be checkboxes, they're either on or off, true or false. That's called a boolean value in math / developers language, but for you, it's really simple. Just create a custom field type "checkboxes", and go into it's settings:

Be sure to check the "enable values" box and set the value to just "1". That way, if checked, Gravity Forms will save it as value "1" and the Types plugin will "get it".

Deciding on workflow

Now, once you've used the above info to finish your form, you need to decide on a workflow. On the post title field, the one whose advanced settings we used to save this input as a custom post type, we now go to the "normal" properties:

As you can see, you can set a default post author and a post status. Now in my case the author will be me in most cases, as nobody will be logged in. However, if you have enabled registration on your site, you can force people to be logged in before even being able to use this form, by going into your forms advanced settings and checking the "require user to be logged in" checkbox:

This allows for all sorts of workflows, find one that suits your site!

Conclusion

We still haven't written a single line of code, yet we've already created a custom post type and created a form that allows people to submit custom post types to us.

So, one more thing to check of off the to-do list:

1. Creating a custom post type + custom fields.
2. Creating a form through which people can submit themes that fills this post type.
3. Creating a browsable interface for this post type.

In my next post, I'll explain how to use the Views plugin to create "views" for this post type and unveil the finished product!

Use Gravity Forms to submit custom post types is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

Database of Themes that support my WordPress SEO plugin

I've also got a project I'll use this for: I want a database of themes that support my WordPress SEO plugin, with some specific settings info, a screenshot, etc. I want to store these as a custom post type. So the first step is to determine which info I would need to store:

• Basic stuff:
  • Title of the theme
  • Short description
  • Screenshot
  • URL
  • Is this a paid theme or not?
  • Price (if applicable)
• And some more advanced stuff:
  • Does this theme have its own SEO options that "yield" to WordPress SEO?
  • Does this theme support breadcrumbs?
  • Does this theme require force rewrite titles to be on or not?

Creating a Custom Post Type

Having determined what I wanted to store, the next step was to create a Custom Post Type. That's as easy as using this interface:

I could add Taxonomies to it as well, but I'll leave that for now, although creating a taxonomy is just as easy through the Types interface. I end up with my WordPress SEO theme CPT:

Adding Custom Fields

You'll think "huh, that hasn't got any of the specific data yet": that's right. It doesn't. That's where the true power of Types comes in, you can create "Custom Field Groups" and add these to post types. So I did:

As you can see you can choose from a lot of different types of fields, and all these types have their own content checks. For instance for a URL, it'll allow you to "force" a correct URL. I've added the custom field group to my WPSEO Themes post type, and now, when I go into edit or create a new WPSEO Theme "post", I get this interface below the title and content area:

So far, no coding was required, thanks to the wonderful Types plugin! You can get that, for free, on wp-types.com or on WordPress.org.

So, what we needed to do:

1. Creating a custom post type + custom fields.
2. Creating a form through which people can submit themes that fills this post type.
3. Creating a browsable interface for this post type.

Subscribe below to make sure you won't miss the next two steps!

Types WordPress plugin – Easy Custom Post Types is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

When I added mine, in the beginning, it drove lots and lots of traffic. People weren't used to it yet and thought I had somehow "found my way into core". Recently, I've added more elaborate tracking to my WordPress SEO plugin links. Allowing me to see how much traffic the individual sections of my plugin were sending back to my site. Let me share that with you now (click for a larger version):

Traffic and conversion statistics for plugin links for the last 28 days

As you can see, the widget sends a bit of traffic (1800 visitors in total) but only drove 3 conversions... Conversions on my site are click outs on affiliate programs and, more importantly, sales for my website review service. Turns out, people clicking on from the plugin interface or the plugin link are far more valuable visitors than people clicking on the dashboard widget.

So, in an effort to annoy less people and focus on the traffic that matters, I've just pushed out version 1.1.5 of my WordPress SEO plugin, without the dashboard widget. I will shortly remove it from my Google Analytics plugin too. Of course other developers should do their own analysis if they want to, but for me it's clear that the widget doesn't help enough to be interesting.

If you used the dashboard widget regularly to find new posts on my site, please consider subscribing to my newsletter using the form below!

On WordPress Dashboard Widgets is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

For those who do decide to yield and for those who do not integrate SEO functionality into their theme, this is the guide to follow on how to make sure your theme works with all the major SEO plugins and more in particular, my WordPress SEO plugin.

1. Basics
2. Head elements
   1. Titles
   2. Meta's
   3. Link items
3. Body elements
   1. Breadcrumbs
   2. Other body elements
4. Is your WordPress SEO plugin active?

Basics

Whether or not your theme is in the WordPress.org repository, you should strive to meet their Theme Review guidelines. With the theme check plugin you can simply check whether that's the case for most of the technical aspects. This makes sure you have all the necessary hooks for plugins to do their work. If any of those fail, fix them before even looking at the stuff below.

Head elements

Titles

The most common issue with SEO plugins and WordPress themes is with titles: theme authors have a tendency to hardcode (sections of) titles into their themes, which results in hard to fix behavior, which I recently discussed here and hasn't been fixed in WordPress core yet. In short, your title should be not even a tiny bit longer than this:

<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>

If you decide to embed SEO functionality in your theme, you should then put a filter function on to that wp_title functionality just like a plugin would. This allows you to "unhook" that filter when an SEO plugin is active.

Meta's

Meta tags come in a vast amount of shapes and sizes, but there are only a few that "matter". There are the meta description, the meta keywords (on which I have a strong opinion too) and the meta robots tag. In my opinion, your theme should never embed any of these meta tags, but, if you decide to embed SEO functionality into your theme, write functions for these things and hook them on to the wp_head action.

Be very, very sure to allow for site owners to fully disable any meta functionality you write. I regularly, read: daily, advise people to change themes when their theme has a lot of SEO stuff embedded that is just plain wrong or collides with other plugins. Make no mistake: a portion of your users, probably a large portion of your users, cares about their SEO. Getting it wrong is worse then not doing anything, so if I were a theme author I'd most definitely opt for the latter.

Link items

There are a lot of <link> items that matter for SEO these days. There are rel=canonical, rel=next and rel=prev and a few more. WordPress does rel=canonical on single posts and pages but nowhere else yet, though a patch for core is ready to make WordPress add rel=canonical in more cases, but your theme should not do any of these. You're, to be honest, bound to get them wrong.

If you do decide to add them, do it in the same fashion as meta elements: hook them on to wp_head and make sure site owners can disable the functionality.

Body elements

Breadcrumbs

While the above points make integration for any SEO plugin easier, this point is more specific for my own WordPress SEO plugin. Integration of my breadcrumbs is quite easy, use something like the following code:

if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
   yoast_breadcrumb('<div id="breadcrumbs">','</div>');
}

This code will not display anything unless the breadcrumbs feature of my SEO plugin is enabled.

Breadcrumbs Variables

This breadcrumb path takes the following 3 variables:

$prefix
The code that your breadcrumb should be prefixed with. Default to an empty string.

$suffix
The code that should be added on the back of your breadcrumb. Default to an empty string.

$display
If set to false, will return the breadcrumb path instead of echo-ing it. Defaults to true.

Other body elements

You should take note of my guides on HTML heading structure and HTML Sitemaps. While my SEO plugin doesn't "interfere" with those, it's good practice to make them optimal. You should also read my WordPress SEO Theme Guidelines to make sure you're doing all the other necessary things.

Is your WordPress SEO plugin active?

You should check whether a constant named WPSEO_VERSION is defined, preferably like this:

if ( defined('WPSEO_VERSION') ) {
// Disable your SEO stuff
}

WordPress SEO Plugin Theme Integration Guide is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

After a couple of years of struggling with email I have finally found the solution to make sure each of my emails reaches the inbox of its recipient and I'm about to share it with you.

Note: this is not a paid review. In fact, since Postmark doesn't have an affiliate program, it's not even a post with some affiliate links. It's just me solving a problem for myself that I hope you will now be able to solve too.

The problem: email not reaching its recipient

I wrote about email reliability before, but let's be honest: getting all the web servers we use for sites to send email reliably is a pain. You need to setup SPF records, preferably set up DKIM too and make sure that your web servers do not get blacklisted. One of my servers, for which I had set up SPF, for some stupid reason got blacklisted a couple of weeks ago, resulting in a couple of website review emails not reaching my customers. I hated that so much that I started looking for another solution.

On this site, I had switched from Gravity Forms to Wufoo a while back. Wufoo is another awesome web forms service, with the at that time "added value" that Wufoo would take care of the email sending for me. My main gripe with using Wufoo was that I really wanted my forms and the entries of my forms in my site's install, not somewhere else. On top of that, Gravity Forms gives me a bit more programming flexibility, so I wanted it back. So, I had two email problems and started to look for a solution to both at the same time.

Postmark: reliable email

I found that solution in Postmark, which handles transactional email through a set of reasonably simple but reliable API's. Using this pre-built library, I was able to replace the email sending in my website review application for Postmark within about 10 minutes.

Yes, Postmark costs a bit of money, but if you consider that at $1,50 per thousand emails, you run a lot smaller chance of losing customers over email not reaching its destination, it seems to me that that's money well-spent.

It took me a bit longer to code a WordPress plugin that I liked for Postmark. There are a couple of WordPress plugins listed on the Postmark site, but all of them relied on CURL, which I don't have on every server I run WordPress on, and they all ignored some of the headers that plugins like Gravity Forms passed along. So I used the same pre-built library, but adapted it this time to use the WordPress HTTP libraries and added a wrapper to more reliably pick up all the headers that might get added by plugins.

The result is a plugin that is pretty easy to use, my own Postmark Email for WordPress Plugin.

WordPress email sending tips

By default, WordPress sends email from wordpress@example.com, where example.com is your domain. In 99% of cases this is a non-existing email address. More and more people, including Postmark, are saying that using a non-existent email to send your email from is not a good idea. I agree. So I created wordpress@yoast.com, which gets filtered into a tag in my email.

The great thing about actually creating that email address is that you can also assign a gravatar to it. This means that when people use email clients like Sparrow, or other email clients that support Gravatar, they'll see a nice avatar image for your email too. In my case, I made sure that image was the Yoast logo.

Go forth and email!

And please do let me know your comments about both Postmark, the plugin and your tips for reliable email in the comments!

Sending Reliable Email with Postmark is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

• Do you think the increased number of metatags released by Google are good for webmasters and the web, or just making things more complicated for the amateur so only those that can afford SEO consultancy will benefit?

  I think Google is making it harder in some ways, but they're also allowing us to help solve problems we couldn't solve before. Things like rel=canonical, rich snippets, rel=author and rel=next & rel=previous might make the "average" user think that more and more needs to be done. Some of them help us solve problems that we couldn't solve before, others allow for new options that just weren't there before. So yes, it's becoming a bit more technical, no I don't really think that's a bad thing. Does it mean more websites need an SEO? I don't think so, most of that stuff is covered by plugin authors like myself. My WordPress SEO plugin for instance already does 2 out of 4 of the above.

• According to you, what is the optimal way to use pagination in web shop pages (categories, filters) to prevent duplicate content issues and crawling issues?

  This is one of the hardest bits of e-Commerce SEO, mostly because it differs for each website. We encounter this regularly when we do website reviewsfor e-commerce sites: 9 out of 10 sites have bad categorization. I don't mind whether you use tags or categories or something else; I do mind if whatever you use isn't logical and doesn't allow me to easily find all the products you offer.

  Faceted search results are by far the most user-friendly in my opinion, but come with a set of SEO issues of their own: do you want all facets indexed? Usually the answer is no. Do you then want to keep them all out of the index? No. I want to hand pick which ones are indexed, yes, that's hard if not impossible in most systems. So you can understand that this is the sort of thing I can't answer in a couple of paragraphs, or even in a longer article. It requires a per site analysis and testing.

• How do you think G+ will help SEO for your website?

  It's already helping. Author highlighting through rel=author in combination with Google+ is proving to be a tremendous improver of click through rates from the search results. What would you click on? If you saw 5 results and one of them had an author picture next to it and stated the author was in 10,000+ circles? Right. Awesomeness.

  For the "average blogger" though, who's not getting highlighted in the search results yet and doesn't have a big following on Google+, it might seem less obvious. But trust me: you want to invest the time in it.

• Any WordPress Plugin you recommend to manage Schema microformats?

  None really. I think most of that belongs in your theme. The couple of plugins I've seen out there that say they do stuff with microformats do it through filthy hacks, or by hiding data. I would really suggest reading my articles on rich snippets and implementing it in your theme.

• Why does adding more content doesn't automatically lead to more visitors anymore? Do you really need links to every post to get the traffic?

  Yes you need links. Loads of unlinked pages within your site will usually not help you an awful lot anymore, even though it might have in the past. It depends a bit on your domain authority though, any post on this site will rank, regardless of whether that individual post has a lot of links to it or not. What does help is that I have a relatively "ok" internal link distribution and I tend to interlink my posts a lot.

• If you were to write the 10 commandments of WordPress & SEO, what would they be?

  Well, let's see, commandment #1: install & configure my WordPress SEO plugin. #2 through to #8: write great content. Commandment #9: properly tag / categorize that content. Commandment #10: talk to your prospective audience about what you've written on every platform that audience uses and engage with them. Bonus commandment #11: forget all other technical tricks.

• What is the best html5 resource you recommend (book or site) so I can point some of our programmers in that direction?

  Buy them this small book from Jeremy Keith & the great guys at A Book Apart, then send them to Dive Into HTML5.

• Best one for last: From your view, how to Recover from a Google Panda Penalty?

  The sites I've seen that really got hit don't really stand a chance of coming back, and usually rightfully so. The quick & dirty guide though is: get rid of all your low quality pages and make sure you offer a fantastic user experience and loads of added value. By then you won't need the Google traffic anymore of course, but that's usually the point when you'll get it in droves.

Questions and Answers – Google+ edition is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

Last friday I was telling my buddy Remkus de Vries, known as @DeFries on Twitter, that I was almost done with the internationalization support for my WordPress SEO plugin. He told me that I should be using GlotPress, which is a collaborative, web-based software translation tool maintained by some of the people behind WordPress. I concurred and asked him to set it up for me.

He did and he wrote a post about it: How to use GlotPress for your translations. After a bit of work on my side on getting a registration form going, I tweeted about my GlotPress being there on translate.yoast.com. Within 20 minutes about 10 people had registered and started translating. I was very excited about that and decided to look into it a bit better by the following morning, when 14 people in total had signed up already.

Because I could see this becoming unmanageable quite soon, I decided to create a mailing list for the contributors. As you'll see when you've read Remkus' post I listed above, we use a WordPress install on /register/ to manager the users. This allows me to use Gravity Forms, along with its User Registration add-on, to allow people to register. Because I built it that way, it was a piece of cake to add the Mailchimp add-on and make sure all new translator were connected to the mailing list as well.

Be sure that when you set it up like this too, you make the language people want to translate into a variable in MailChimp too, so later on you can easily segment on that, by emailing just the people who are translating your plugin(s) into Polish, for instance.

The amount of people working on this has surprised me. I've tweeted about it twice and so far, 31 people have signed up and are actively translating into 12 different languages, so far translating 2568 sentences!

Your turn?

Are you using WordPress in your native language? Would you want to contribute some of your time to help translate my plugins into your native language? Then register here, you'll receive instructions from there. If your language isn't listed yet, please allow me some time to enable that language and from then on your good to go, looking forward to seeing my plugins run in more languages then were speaking on the tower of Babel!

(Collaboratively) Translating Yoast Plugins is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

Mashable has been running WordPress SEO for quite a while now and so have my friends over at The Next Web. Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, one of the founders and owners of The Next Web, recently said the following about my plugin:

“The SEO plugin by Yoast helps all our editors add SEO juice to their post fast & easy. Editors should focus on writing content, not gaming results. But they are the ones most suitable to write descriptions and titles for their own stories. The plug-in allows them to do just that without needing an SEO expert to walk them through the process. An invaluable tool for any professional blog."

I think Boris got exactly what my aim is with this plugin. I don't want to bore you with all the details, I want you to write better content and aid you with that. The help from Linkdex and the Page Analysis functionality we created in that has been invaluable. That said, I'm not there yet. The plugin still has a gazillion settings that you need to find your way through and I'm not happy with that. Functionality to fix that will be coming soon.

Another big big thanks is due for the guys at Level Level who designed the logo for this plugin as you see above, in the same style as the logo for my Google Analytics plugin. Guys: you rock!

Google News Module

Today I also finished the work on the Google News SEO Module, the first official module for my WP SEO plugin. It's free, if you're in Google News you should really start using it right now!

Update & Donate

So, it's there. If you were already running the plugin, update to 1.0, if not, install it now, have fun and tell me in the comments both why you use the plugin and what you'd like to see next! If you want to thank me, a donation is sincerely appreciated. All of the money that comes in in donations is spent on hiring the best WordPress developers for hire to help me improve on this plugin even quicker.

A good example of that is that I hired Jon Cave, a WP Core Contributor, to build the XML Sitemaps API that allows this plugin to easily create XML sitemaps for the very large blogs it's used on.

WordPress SEO by Yoast, version 1.0 is a post by Joost de Valk on 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 full "shape" my social buttons look like this:

There are several plugins that do social buttons in WordPress. As a lot of you may know, I used to maintain a plugin called Sociable back in the day when social buttons where all still 16x16, simple, buttons. At some point, I think it was Digg that introduced the script based social button with a counter in it, which was later on adopted by several social sites. To date, there are many many social bookmarking sites that have widgets like these. Not every site needs all of these social buttons. I picked the 5 that work for me, your mileage may vary.

How did you implement these social buttons in WordPress?

I hear you thinking "get on with it already". Ok ok ok. Here we go. It's not a plugin. It's in my theme. Which doesn't mean it couldn't be a plugin, it's just that it'd be pretty hard to embed them in my site as sweet as these social buttons are embedded right now, using a plugin.

So they're in my theme. As you can guess, the buttons themselves are a template part. This template part is actually rather small and simple, it looks like this (line breaks added for readability):

<ul class="social buttons">
  <li>
    <fb:like href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" send="true"
      showfaces="false" width="120" layout="button_count"
      action="like"/>
  </fb:like></li>
  <li>
    <a href="http://twitter.com/share" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"
      data-text="< ?php the_title(); ?>" data-via="yoast"
      class="twitter-share-button">Tweet</a>
  </li>
  <li>
    <g:plusone size="medium" callback="plusone_vote"></g:plusone>
  </li>
  <li>
    <script type="in/share" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"
      data-counter="right"></script>
  </li>
  <li>
    <div id="stumbleupon-button"></div>
  </li>
</ul>

As you can see, these are the "regular" buttons for most of these services, with that exception that all of them are lacking the script tag. Back in february, Frederick did an awesome post on his blog about optimizing the performance of widgets & buttons. I used the knowledge in this post, but took it a few steps further.

Loading these Social Buttons script files

Let's start with Facebook. Their asynchronous code works quite well. First, make sure you have a fb-root div:

<div id="fb-root"></div>

Then load the JavaScript, (all of the code samples below should be within <script> tags):

window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
  FB.init({appId: '<APPID>', status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true});
};
(function() {
  var e = document.createElement('script');
  e.type = 'text/javascript';
  e.src = document.location.protocol +
     '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js';;
  e.async = true;
  document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e);
}());

This loads the Facebook JS once the page load is done, which works quite nice and then loads the app. Later on we'll be adding code to track all the interaction with the Facebook buttons, but let's load some other social buttons first.

The other scripts I'm going to load using jQuery. Not only do I load them asynchronously, I only start loading them when the page has actually already completed rendering. The code to do that for the Twitter share button looks like this:

jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
  // Load Tweet Button Script
  var e = document.createElement('script');
  e.type="text/javascript"; e.async = true;
  e.src = 'http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
}

And LinkedIn, Google's +1 and StumbleUpon's buttons work in the same way:

jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
  // Load LinkedIn button
  var e = document.createElement('script');
  e.type="text/javascript"; e.async = true;
  e.src = 'http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
  // Load Plus One Button
  var e = document.createElement('script');
  e.type="text/javascript"; e.async = true;
  e.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
  // Load StumbleUpon button
  var e = document.createElement('script');
  e.type="text/javascript"; e.async = true;
  e.src =
  'http://www.stumbleupon.com/hostedbadge.php?s=1&a=1&d=stumbleupon-button';
  document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
}

You could even simplify this further by just making it an array and looping through it, but for readability's sake I didn't do that.

Tracking Interaction with Social Buttons

When Google released +1, I quickly identified how to track interaction with that button. The obvious "follow up" was questions from people on how to track interaction with other buttons. Not for each of these social buttons tracking of interaction is actually possible. It depends on how the button was designed whether this will work or not. I got it working for Twitter and Facebook, so I'll share the code for tracking interaction with their respective social buttons below.

For Facebook, it's pretty well documented around the web how you can track the interaction with their buttons. I played around a bit and came up with the following implementation, which tracks the interaction with my like & send buttons and with the big like box on the right. It tracks the interaction in both Google Analytics and getClicky.

Instead of just the above FB.init line, we'll do the following:

window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
  FB.init({appId: '<APPID>', status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true});
  FB.Event.subscribe("edge.create",function(response) {
    if (response.indexOf("facebook.com") > 0) {
      // if the returned link contains 'facebook,com'. It is a 'Like'
      // for your Facebook page
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','Facebook','Like',response]);
      clicky.log(response,'Facebook Like Facebook Page');
    } else {
      // else, somebody is sharing the current page on their wall
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','Facebook','Share',response]);
      clicky.log(response,'Facebook Like / Share Post');
    }
  });
  FB.Event.subscribe("message.send",function(response){
    _gaq.push(['_trackEvent','Facebook','Send',response]);
    clicky.log(response,'Facebook Send Post');
  });
};

As you can see, if you can read a bit of code, this will create different events for each of the different optional actions. Now, let's do the same for the Tweet button (using examples based on their docs, but switched to async):

// Load Tweet Button Script & Associate Google Analytics Tracking
var e = document.createElement('script');
e.type="text/javascript"; e.async = true;
e.src = 'http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(e);
$(e).load(function() {
  function tweetIntentToAnalytics(intent_event) {
    if (intent_event) {
      var label = intent_event.data.tweet_id;
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'twitter_web_intents',
	    intent_event.type, label]);
      clicky.log(document.location.href,'Twitter '+label);
    }
  }
  function followIntentToAnalytics(intent_event) {
    if (intent_event) {
      var label = intent_event.data.user_id + " (" +
	   intent_event.data.screen_name + ")";
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'twitter_web_intents',
	   intent_event.type, label]);
      clicky.log(document.location.href,'Twitter '+label);
    }
  }
  twttr.events.bind('tweet',    tweetIntentToAnalytics);
  twttr.events.bind('follow',   followIntentToAnalytics);
});

LinkedIn has an API for these things, at least, it has documentation for it, but it doesn't work in my testing and quite a few people are complaining on LinkedIn's developer forums as well. For StumbleUpon there's no documentation to be found and it doesn't seem to be possible at this time to track interaction with their social button.

All of this is pretty geeky, I know, but there's a lot of value in both implementing these social buttons in a good and fast way and measuring all these interactions. Seeing which sort of social buttons work for which types of traffic can really help you find what you should be optimizing how.

Social Buttons: Adding them to your site & Tracking them is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

All In One SEO Pack Import

The steps are simple:

1. Install WordPress SEO (search for "WordPress SEO" in your backend and you should see it).
2. Activate WordPress SEO.
3. Disable All In One SEO pack.
4. Go to SEO -> Import, you'll see this:
   
5. Select the appropriate checkbox, probably "Import from All-in-One SEO" and click "Import".
6. You're done (with the automated part).

This imports all the meta descriptions, meta keywords and titles that you entered into All In One SEO Pack. Should this, for any reason what so ever, not work, then you can use the brilliant SEO Data Transporter plugin. This plugin allows you to move SEO data back and forth between several theme platforms and plugins, so it would also allow you to migrate to WordPress SEO from other plugins like Ultimate SEO.

All In One SEO Pack's data is in, now what?

So after you've done this, you might want to setup title template, under SEO -> Titles and enable the XML sitemaps, under SEO -> XML Sitemaps. You could also go through all the other options, which I know the plugin has a lot (too much) of. In the future my plugin will have a setup assistant, asking you questions about your site and basing SEO decisions of that, I'm currently developing the logic for that.

Why WordPress SEO beats All In One SEO Pack

Do I really need to tell you that? Features like the snippet preview, page analysis functionality and included XML sitemaps functionality make my plugin a true all in one SEO solution. Most importantly, my plugin helps you do better SEO. Good SEO means, in most cases, good content writing. My plugin aims at supporting you with that as best as possible.

Are you using Google XML Sitemaps?

If you're using Google XML sitemaps or another XML sitemaps plugin, you can just disable that and enable the XML sitemaps feature in WordPress SEO. The location changes with that, Google XML Sitemaps uses example.com/sitemap.xml, which is a static file, you can safely remove that. The new XML sitemap will be at example.com/sitemap_index.xml.

Successfully migrated? Let me know!

I'd like to hear in the comments from people who have switched over from All In One SEO Pack to WordPress SEO as to what worked for them, what I could improve in the import process and what issues you might have had. If you have any tips for the process, please share them so everyone can benefit!

All In One SEO Pack to WordPress SEO Migration is a post by Joost de Valk on 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 for large version

Add columns to the overview page for a Custom Post Type

So you'll want to add some columns to your post type's overview page, or remove some. Don't forget to replace <CPT> with your own custom post type in all these examples:

// Change the columns for the edit CPT screen
function change_columns( $cols ) {
  $cols = array(
    'cb'       => '<input type="checkbox" />',
    'url'      => __( 'URL',      'trans' ),
    'referrer' => __( 'Referrer', 'trans' ),
    'host'     => __( 'Host', 'trans' ),
  );
  return $cols;
}
add_filter( "manage_<CPT>_posts_columns", "change_columns" );

Be sure to always leave the cb column in there or your mass edit / delete functionality will not work.

Give these new columns some content

Now let's fill these new columns with some content from the custom post type:

function custom_columns( $column, $post_id ) {
  switch ( $column ) {
    case "url":
      $url = get_post_meta( $post_id, 'url', true);
      echo '<a href="' . $url . '">' . $url. '</a>';
      break;
    case "referrer":
      $refer = get_post_meta( $post_id, 'referrer', true);
      echo '<a href="' . $refer . '">' . $refer. '</a>';
      break;
    case "host":
      echo get_post_meta( $post_id, 'host', true);
      break;
  }
}

add_action( "manage_posts_custom_column", "custom_columns", 10, 2 );

Make these new columns sortable

Now this extra info is cool, I bet you want to sort by it, that's as simple as this:

// Make these columns sortable
function sortable_columns() {
  return array(
    'url'      => 'url',
    'referrer' => 'referrer',
    'host'     => 'host'
  );
}

add_filter( "manage_edit-<CPT>_sortable_columns", "sortable_columns" );

Filter Custom Posts by Custom Taxonomy

Ok so far this is all fairly simple. Now let's go a bit more advanced. Let's say you have a custom taxonomy attached to that custom post type and you want to show a filter for that custom taxonomy on the custom post types overview page, just like you have a categories drop down on the posts overview page. This code was taken (though slightly modified) from this thread.

Let's first add that dropdown / select box to the interface:

// Filter the request to just give posts for the given taxonomy, if applicable.
function taxonomy_filter_restrict_manage_posts() {
    global $typenow;

    // If you only want this to work for your specific post type,
    // check for that $type here and then return.
    // This function, if unmodified, will add the dropdown for each
    // post type / taxonomy combination.

    $post_types = get_post_types( array( '_builtin' => false ) );

    if ( in_array( $typenow, $post_types ) ) {
    	$filters = get_object_taxonomies( $typenow );

        foreach ( $filters as $tax_slug ) {
            $tax_obj = get_taxonomy( $tax_slug );
            wp_dropdown_categories( array(
                'show_option_all' => __('Show All '.$tax_obj->label ),
                'taxonomy' 	  => $tax_slug,
                'name' 		  => $tax_obj->name,
                'orderby' 	  => 'name',
                'selected' 	  => $_GET[$tax_slug],
                'hierarchical' 	  => $tax_obj->hierarchical,
                'show_count' 	  => false,
                'hide_empty' 	  => true
            ) );
        }
    }
}

add_action( 'restrict_manage_posts', 'taxonomy_filter_restrict_manage_posts' );

And then, we add a filter to the query so the dropdown will actually work:

function taxonomy_filter_post_type_request( $query ) {
  global $pagenow, $typenow;

  if ( 'edit.php' == $pagenow ) {
    $filters = get_object_taxonomies( $typenow );
    foreach ( $filters as $tax_slug ) {
      $var = &$query->query_vars[$tax_slug];
      if ( isset( $var ) ) {
        $term = get_term_by( 'id', $var, $tax_slug );
        $var = $term->slug;
      }
    }
  }
}

add_filter( 'parse_query', 'taxonomy_filter_post_type_request' );

Note that for these last two snippets to work, query_var must have been set to true when registering the custom taxonomy, otherwise this'll never work.

Bonus: Add Custom Post Type to feed

This one came courtesy of Remkus de Vries a while back and was helpful today, adding a custom post type to your site's main feed, don't forget to replace <CPT> with your own custom post type:

// Add a Custom Post Type to a feed
function add_cpt_to_feed( $qv ) {
  if ( isset($qv['feed']) && !isset($qv['post_type']) )
    $qv['post_type'] = array('post', '<CPT>');
  return $qv;
}

add_filter( 'request', 'add_cpt_to_feed' );

Custom Post Type Snippets to make you smile is a post by Joost de Valk on 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 funny thing is that their oEmbed API still returns the old code, and that's there's no good way to tell up front which width you want for the presentation to be embedded. So I had to hack around a bit, but it works now: the plugin now uses oEmbed to retrieve the correct ID for the presentation and then transforms it into a player of the new style, with the width your theme supports. This means that all you have to do now is enable the URL and enter a SlideShare URL on a line of it's own and it'll be embedded.

To be honest though, I've found that this is a bit slowish and using the WordPress.com embed code (available under embed -> customize) is still a more reliable and faster embed method. If you use the plugin, be sure to grab the updated SlideShare plugin, now at version 1.8.

SlideShare plugin, now with oEmbed is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

Feeds & Microformats

This panel, together with Richard Baxter of SEOgadget and James Lowery of Latitude, contained some great discussion on how to use microformats for rich snippets in the Google SERPs. I mostly discussed hReview & hReviewAggregate:

Tools, tools & tools

Next was a session with my buddy Dixon Jones from Receptional and Majestic SEO (who by the way just launched the Majestic Million) and Ross from Ad Insight, a pretty cool call tracking platform. I discussed 22 free tools that I use regularly:

WordPress SEO

The last session of the last day (yeah that's a painful spot) but still a decent turn out of people listening to me and how I think they should optimize their site's structure using categories, tags and custom taxonomies more, and some other geeky stuff:

Presentations from SAScon is a post by Joost de Valk on 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 what is it: full content SEO analysis functionality. The WordPress SEO box, with the snippet preview you've come to know, has a new tab, titled Page Analysis. This tab features a report of the content for the current post, check what it looks like (click for larger versions):

Page Analysis Tab that helps you with Content SEO

And one that's a bit more positive:

Page Analysis - Content SEO well done!

What's in that page analysis tab that helps me with Content SEO?

As you can see, there are three different types of messages: warnings, notices and messages. The messages are in the bottom, as they tell you stuff you probably don't have to do anything about. The notices are above them, they can range from saying "No images appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate" or, if you do have images but didn't use your focus keyword in the alt tag it'll say: "The images on this page do not have alt tags containing your keyword / phrase".

Warnings are messages like "The keyword / phrase does not appear in the page title." Another useful message: "You're linking to another page with the keyword you want this page to rank for, consider changing that if you truly want this page to rank."

Other messages can concern the meta description, the page title, your use of headings, the number of links, the length of your post or page's copy, the keyword density and the Flesch Reading Ease score for the page. The latter score determines whether your page is easy to read, by checking for long sentences and words with a lot of syllables. This feature currently only works properly for the English language.

You'll probably understand why I think that such feedback will help you write better (optimized) content and thus makes content SEO easier.

This seems to good to be true, what's the catch?

Let me be clear, even though this is a collaboration between Linkdex and myself, the new content SEO functionality featured in the plugin is 100% free and will remain free and open source. There is no catch. As said, this feature is free for all users of the WordPress SEO plugin, doesn't require registration or anything else and doesn't send your data to other servers. All the analysis is done right there within your blog. As you can see in the screenshot above there's some minor promo for Linkdex underneath the box, which is an awesome service, and if you sign up for Linkdex using one of those links, or the ones in this post for that matter, I get a little bit of money.

This release also features a set of updates to the General tab of the WordPress SEO box. The snippet preview has some enhancements, mostly relating to properly using ellipsis when the content is too long, as well as several JavaScript improvements. The focus keyword box, moved up in the previous release because it is so important for all these content SEO analyses, has gotten a new Google Suggest implementation using jQuery and jQuery UI that is far more robust than the previous one. Check it out:

Snippet Preview with updated Focus Keyword Suggest

Lastly, there are some new features in the indexing area, for instance allowing you to noindex, follow all paginated pages in taxonomies, so you can have /cat/seo/ indexed, but /cat/seo/page/2/ noindex, followed. In all, I think this is a killer update. There's one thing left to tackle, the way XML sitemaps are built. It works but I'm not happy with it, once I've finished that the plugin will come out of beta. For now, enjoy version 0.3, and let me know in the comments what you think! Bonus points for the person who guesses the focus keyword of this article :)

So, go grab the plugin!

Content SEO made easier by WordPress, Yoast and Linkdex is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

As you can see from the announcement post, this new feature helps you determine questions like:

• Which landing pages are slowest?
• How does page load time vary across geographies?
• Does your site load faster or slower for different browsers?

You'll be able to find the results from this tracking under Content → Site Speed in Google Analytics. This release also fixes the slight error with the custom code option, that's now properly stripped from slashes.

Site Speed tracking in Google Analytics is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

You see, the plugin is in beta. WordPress is not. Why, please do tell me, would you not upgrade WordPress first but instead upgrade the plugin and then decide not to upgrade WordPress? I've had 10+ threads on the WP forums about this same topic now (which actually is another issue in itself, people don't search and I can't close threads).

Common reasons not to upgrade WordPress

Let me list some standard reasons for not upgrading and my response:

• "I'll loose my customizations" - I'm sorry to say that you've done it wrong and should've built a plugin, which is your fault, not mine. At some point I will drop support for 3.0, so you really should go and fix it.
• "My theme doesn't work with 3.1" - for starters, I don't believe it. WordPress 3.1 hardly broke anything that was built using normal WP standards. If it's really true, you've got a crappy theme and you should either fix it or change themes.
• "I can't tell you why but it's not an option to upgrade WordPress" - if you can't tell me, I can't help you, but the above reasons probably apply.
• "My developer says it's not safe to upgrade" - fire him and get another developer. If he / she thought it was safe to use beta software (my plugin) but doesn't think it's safe to upgrade WordPress, he has too high an opinion of my coding and too low an opinion of the WordPress development team. You're in luck though, apparently there are 20,000+ of them.
• "Other plugin X-Y-Z breaks when I upgrade." So, instead of complaining to the developer that doesn't update his plugin to work with the latest version of WordPress, you decided to complain to the developer who did do that, in fact updated his plugin to let you benefit of all the new functionality? Wrong way round.
• "This plugin I paid for breaks when I upgrade". This is he worst of all. Read the line above and then add to that in your head that my plugin is free.

Now, I'll point everyone here who has one of these issues. If you feel I'm too harsh: I'm sorry. That won't change my opinion though. If you really need my plugin and are at a loss at what to do, you can always, you know, hire me.

Upgrade WordPress, then upgrade plugins! is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

What I did find though, is that there are lots of developers out there who don't know how to use all the powerful API's that WordPress provides them with to develop plugins. This is why I also immediately started a WordPress development best practices section in which I'll highlight the most important things. The issue is that there are quite a few development best practices that you should know about if you're intending to be a real good plugin developer.

Professional WordPress Plugin Development: the book!

This is where a new book, by Ozh Richard, Justin Tadlock and Brad Williams comes in, it's aptly titled Professional WordPress Plugin Development (aff link). It's a big fat book that covers each and every bit you need to know to become a super developer of WordPress plugins. All you need after that is creativity and good ideas.

I have to admit, I am a bit biased, as I wrote the foreword for the book, but I'll also admit to having been incredibly honored when these guys asked me to write that. You see, these guys have been my source for interesting articles about WordPress for years and they were the perfect team to write this book. Having now gone through it completely, I'm 100% sure: if you're interested in WordPress plugin development, whether or not you want to do it professionally, you should buy and read this book.

So what are you waiting for? Go order that book!

Professional WordPress Plugin Development is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

http://yoast.com/wp-plugin-review/feed/

That feed is actually a valid "sitemap" for Google Webmaster Tools as well, so you can just submit it there, as you can see here:

Custom Post Type feeds in Google Webmaster Tools

If you submit them there, Google will regularly poll them which will make it easier for you to get your custom post types indexed!

If you want to add your custom post type feed to the head section of your page, use the following code, of course adapting it for your own post type:

function yst_add_feed() {
	if ( is_post_type_archive( array('plugin_review') )
		|| is_singular( 'plugin_review' ) )
	{
		$feed = get_post_type_archive_feed_link( 'plugin_review' );
		echo '<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
			title="Plugin Reviews by Yoast RSS Feed"
			href="'.$feed.'" />';
	}
}
add_action( 'wp_head', 'yst_add_feed' );

Power User Tip: Custom Post Type Feeds & Google is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

It's not that my plugin requires it per se right now to do what it does, although, knowing that for instance json_encode is always there is a great improvement. It's really the fact that it saves me testing time on older systems. As of the last release, because of that, my WordPress SEO plugin will automatically disable itself when it detects that you're running a PHP version lower than 5.2, linking to this post.

Let me say this: if you're hosting with a hosting company, and they still offer you PHP4 as a default, they're daft and I wouldn't trust them. I've written extensively about what I think about WordPress Hosting, it might be a good idea for you to review that and switch hosting to WestHost or VPS.net now if you encounter that issue.

Why WordPress and some of my plugins require PHP 5.2 is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!

WordPress Plugin Review is a post by Joost de Valk on 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!