The lack of changelogs in a lot of WordPress plugins is something that’s bothered me for a while, and I wasn’t the only one. I’m very wary of upgrading plugins, and when I see that a plugin needs to be upgraded in my WordPress dashboard, I’d like to know exactly what’s being changed. It might be a major security fix, it might be a minor bug, it might not be a necessary update at all. Changelogs give this information to end users about changes from version to version.

Well, there’s some good news for all of you who like to check out the changelogs before upgrading plugins, but it’ll require some action on behalf of the plugin authors. There is now a standardized way of adding changelog information to the plugin’s readme.txt file. To plugin authors wondering how to do this, read this post on Peter Westwood’s blog. This information will then be displayed on a dedicated “Changelog” tab on the plugin’s page on the WordPress.org plugin repository.

I know themes aren’t usually updated as often as plugins are, but I’m wondering if it would be difficult to implement something similar for WordPress themes hosted in the official theme directory. Anyone have any thoughts about changelogs for themes too?

I recently came across a pretty cool plugin called Theme Tweaker, which basically lets you alter the colors of your theme without touching your CSS code. I thought I would go over this plugin in a review post. In this review, you’ll learn:

• How to install the plugin in WordPress 2.7+
• How to identify and change various colors to your liking
• How to update your stylesheet with changes
• How to generate a custom child theme on the fly

And now, onto the review…

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For the past few days I’ve had some real trouble trying to comment on other blogs. I would make a comment, and it would seem like nothing happened. No “Your comment is awaiting moderation.” message would show up. Same story even with blogs I’ve had previously approved comments on.

I started to suspect that for some reason my comments weren’t getting through because I was being flagged by Akismet’s spam filter. I confirmed this suspicion this morning when I left a comment on a friend’s blog, and they informed me that I was indeed getting flagged by Akismet.

Remember, Akismet is used on thousands upon thousands of blogs to stop comment spam. Every time I would make a comment, it would be relegated “Akismet Spam” page. People don’t check this page as frequently as their non-spam comments. Although some may check it from time to time for the occasional false positive.

No, I didn’t overreact and start drafting some massive “Why you shouldn’t use Akismet” blog post. I simply posted this tweet and just a couple hours later, I received this response from Mark Riley of Automattic. This totally caught me by surprise, as I was definitely not expecting this issue to be resolved by a quick tweet.

So why was I marked as spam in the first place? I have no clue, other than the fact it had something to do with my URL (http://www.themelab.com). I’m just glad it could be resolved so quickly. Thanks Akismet!

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a tutorial here. I thought with Automattic’s acquisition of PollDaddy, this would be a good opportunity to write one about adding polls to your self-hosted WordPress blogs, more specifically - PollDaddy polls. In this tutorial I’ll go over:

• Installing the PollDaddy plugin
• Signing up to PollDaddy (if you don’t already have an account)
• Creating and managing polls from within your WordPress admin panel
• Inserting the polls you create into your WordPress posts and pages

And now onto the tutorial…

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I just came across this excellent WordPress plugin, and thought I would share it with all of you. It’s called the Theme Authenticity Checker, or TAC for short. What this plugin does is scan for encrypted code and other suspicious looking material within a theme. If you have a theme with base64 encoding, for example, it will let you know which file in the theme contains the code. It will also list any external links within a theme and separate them by file.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the plugin, a new page in your Design menu will appear called “TAC.” I tested this plugin on the demo server, and let me tell you - this plugin loads surprisingly fast, even with all of the themes hosted on it. In case you were wondering, all the WordPress themes here got a big green Theme Ok! message.

Let’s face it, not everyone who comments on your Gravatar-enabled blog has a Gravatar.

Instead, commenters lacking their Gravatar are assigned a boring default icon.

What if these commenters could have their own uniquely generated icon, that remained constant as long as their e-mail remained the same?

That’s where these WordPress plugins come into play:

• Wavatars
• WP_MonsterID
• WP_Identicon

Each of these plugins will provide your Gravatarless readers with their own custom made avatar. Read on to learn how to use them…

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There are certain WordPress plugins you hear about all the time. You see them repeated across multiple blogs as the “best” WordPress plugins like a broken record. Who ever looks back and tries to find underrated WordPress plugins though? These are plugins that don’t get much publicity, but are very useful in one way or another.

• Search Regex - I know this plugin has come in handy for me several times. What this plugin will do is search and replace data stored in your site. For example, if you wanted to change the directory path to images (from /wp-content/uploads/ to just /uploads/) throughout all your posts, all you would have to do is type it in once. Be careful with this powerful plugin though. Make sure to back your database before using it.
• WP DB Backup - This brings us to our next underrated plugin - a database backup plugin. This can automate the process of backing up your database by sending you an e-mail attachment at a defined interval. It was briefly gone over in a previous article of mine: The Importance of Backing Up Your WordPress Site.
• No Self Pings - This is more of a personal preference than anything. I personally don’t like how WordPress “self pings” when you link to another page of your blog. If you’re like me, you can install this plugin and not have to worry about moderating your own pingbacks.

And those are my three. Thanks to the WordPress Expert and Kyle of Hack WordPress for this post idea.

It was only a matter of time before a superior WordPress SEO plugin came along to dethrone the extremely popular All In One SEO Pack. After a change of ownership, questions arose as to whether the new owner would keep it up to date with the latest SEO trends. Others would be happy as long as it would remain compatible with future WordPress versions.

A few days ago, a new plugin was released known as Platinum SEO Pack. This appears to be a “fork” of the All In One SEO pack. It claims to do everything All In One SEO does, and more. Here are a few new features in this plugin:

• Ability to add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noodp, noydir meta tags to any post or page
• Automatic 301 redirect if you change your permalink structure
• Choose to block indexing (using noindex tag) on RSS feed pages
• Nofollow external links on front page
• Nofollow links to archive/category/tag pages

Some of this stuff might be considered “SEO overkill” although all of these are options in the backend.

I was using it myself (on another site) earlier today and didn’t find any problems or bugs. You can get the plugin yourself here.

What do you think? Has All In One SEO Pack been trumped in favor of Platinum SEO? Share your thoughts in the comments.

It was recently announced that WordPress.com blogs have XML sitemaps, which are automatically submit to search engines for better search indexing and optimization.

Now, most of you reading this are probably self-hosted WordPress users. How do you get your own sitemaps for your self-hosted blogs? This is where the Google Sitemap Generator plugin comes into play.

Contrary to the name, the plugin will actually automatically generate and submit sitemaps to not just Google - but also Live, Yahoo, and Ask. This will provide a similar automated sitemap solution, similar to the feature WordPress.com recently rolled out. More information on this plugin can be found in this WordPress SEO tutorial, an earlier article featured on Theme Lab.

For those of you who aren’t aware, there was a little scare in the WordPress SEO community when it was discovered that the All In One SEO pack plugin, originally authored by Uberdose, would no longer be supported. I heard over at Hack WordPress that the plugin support and development will now be handled by Semper Fi Web Design.

Semper Fi Web Design is not new to the world of WordPress plugins. They have developed other plugins such as WP Security Scan and SMS Text Message, so it seems like Uberdose found a qualified successor.

All In One SEO Pack was one of the subjects of one of my earlier articles: Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines. It’s a great plugin for taking care of duplicate content issues across archive pages, as well as inserting meta keywords and descriptions on pages.