1. Redirection

   Redirection is an easy way to create 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors, it makes it extremely easy to create 301 redirections to posts/pages and outside links, it will automatically add a redirection to a post/page when it's permalink changes, so that you do not loose visitors to a 404 error page. Keeping track of all of the 404 errors your blog spits out is also extremely useful, because it means you can fix broken links and stop visitors from landing on the wrong page.

2. Exec-PHP

   This plugin allows execution of PHP code in your posts, pages and text widgets. It executes PHP code in the excerpt and the content portion of your posts and pages and restricts execution of PHP code in posts and pages to certain users by using roles and capabilities.

3. Contact Form 7

   Contact Form 7 is a simple, lightweight and flexible contact form. It allows you to create a large amount of contact forms and easily embed them into any post/page. It is very easy to configure and does not have an options page stuffed full with Ajax. I chose this plugin in place of cforms II because it is lightweight. The cforms II plugin has too much junk, for such a small thing. If cforms II wasn't so slow, it would surely take this plugins place.

4. WP-DB-Backup

   WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database. You can schedule it to backup your database hourly, twice daily, once daily or weekly. I have it scheduled once daily so that if anything goes kaput I don't have to start from square one. However, it does lack some useful features such as download links, listing, restore, deleting and specific schedule time). I have updated it myself to include some of these features and may release it later on.

5. Subscribe To Comments

   Subscribe to Comments allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.

6. Lifestream

   Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites. It is a good way to let your readers know what and where you are on the web. It can be setup for an unlimited number of feeds, and stores the entire feed history. Best of all it's efficient; it's built on scalable database structures so it won't bog down your website.

7. Ajax Edit Comments

   Ajax Edit Comments allows users and admins to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments on the fly. It attaches a few links to the bottom of comments to allow admins to edit, de-link, delete and mark as spam without ever having to access the WordPress dashboard.

8. Twitter Tools

   For all you Twitter freaks out there! Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It enables you to archive your tweets, tweet from your WordPress dashboard, create digest blog posts from your tweets and tweet about recent posts automatically.

9. ©Feed

   This plugin extends your default feed and allows you to add information such as copyright, a digital fingerprint and the IP of the feed reader to eliminate content theft. The feed can be also be supplemented with comments and topic-relevant contributions.

10. WP-PostViews

    WP-PostViews counts the number of hits each post receives and allows you to display the most popular posts. This plugin is veru helpful for gathering valuable statistics for certain types of posts, so that you know what to write more or less of in the future.

This plugin puts the auto save function to good use. The auto save interval can be customized from the options page and you can also manually save the post through Ajax with the press of a button. This button is added next to the default "Save and Continue Editing" one, on the post/page administration pages. The original WordPress auto save function has been edited to accommodate extra features; this function used to only be able to save the posts content and title but it can now save categories, passwords, slugs, statuses and so on. The only settings that are not saved through Ajax is the page template, the post timestamp and tags, these three require a page refresh anyway.

You have the option to remove the "Save and Continue Editing" button that is currently used and replace it with a "Save Through Ajax" button or have both of them. The plugin also enables you to change the interval time between each post/page auto save. The name of the new button can also be modified from the options page, which makes it a brilliantly versatile plugin.

Anyway, you can read more about it and download it from the Ajax Post Save page.

Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Compilation failed: nothing to repeat at offset 1 in /htdocs/wp-includes/classes.php on line 95

Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Compilation failed: nothing to repeat at offset 1 in /htdocs/wp-includes/classes.php on line 96

It didn't only show one though, it showed up to 15 of them and appeared randomly one time while I was editing some of my installed WordPress plugins. I submitted a support ticket to my host asking them whether they had made any changes to my server recently and their senior engineers took the trouble and effort to try and sort out something that was not even caused by them, which was very helpful. I do not think they were familiar enough with WordPress to be able to tell me that it was something to do with permalinks though.

I knew that I was registered to the WP-Testers mailing list so decided to put it to good use and ask whether anyone had any information about this error message. Within about 10 minutes I got a reply from someone named DD32 who had very kindly read my message and written this reply:

Thats something to do with the Pretty Permalinks, (URL Rewriting).
Purely a suggestion would be to either disable permalinks, and then re-enable them, or to change the permalink structure to something else, and then back again, Just to flush the rules and get it to re-generate the rules.

Also, any plugins you have recently installed might be causing an issue, the general stuff.

This fixed the problem, yet I am still not sure why it occurred in the first place because I was not making any adjustments to my permalinks.

Anyway, you may or may not have noticed that my blog has been constantly changing over the past month, this is because I am in the process of testing plugins that I can install. The error messages that were shown to me for no apparent reason (see above) were the final straw though, and I have now taken the trouble to transfer all of my K2 modifications from version 0.9.5 to 0.9.6 and I have also created myself a separate WordPress installation to test improvements on. At the moment, this blog powered by 52 plugins and counting. For instance, I have recently installed and customised these plugins:

• Dashboard Editor: Enabling me to remove the unwanted crap (such as Developer News) from my WordPress dashboard and add anything I wish.
• Dean's Code Highlighter: Highlights code that I post on my blog – this has been hugely edited to suit my needs, it now accomodates a plain text link feature (for ease of copying) and a nicer styling.
• Enforce www. Preference: To remove the www. prefix from my blog's URL when a visitor navigates to my blog.
• WP-Untexturize: Runs through all of my posts and pages, removing the 'curly-quotes' and other pointless text modifiers that don't seem to display properly anyway.
• WP-Cache: This is used so that my blog loads faster by way of reading cached files so that it does not have to parse all of the PHP code everytime a visitor browses my blog.
• Firestats: An amazing statistics plugin, showing visitor detail including country, web browser and operating system – very helpful for web developers who like to see their website statistics.

I will be installing more at a later date, but I think that 52 is a good number, maybe that explains why my blog is responding so slowly.

I have just started up a new project, called K2 Explained; K2 Explained is hopefully going to become a source for documentation of How To's for the currently, extremely popular WordPress theme, K2. In itself, K2 Explained will aim to rewrite some of the "How2K2" articles by Cary Holt (seeing as they are no where to be seen) and add many more of it's own.

According to the K2 Wiki, the following articles were created well over a year ago now by Cary Holt:

• An Indepth Look At Alerts – This should explain the built-in K2 alerts that are available and also show you how to add your own alert system.
• Customizing Your Header – An in-depth explanation of how to customise your K2 header.
• Sidebar Customization – How to customise your K2 sidebar and have more than one in your installation.
• Categories – A little help for those of you who are in need of a category and category use explanation.
• Modifying Comments – This will show you how to modify the comment lists that are shown underneath every post.
• Becoming Search Friendly – Explanation on how to make your blog as search engine friendly and optimised as it can.
• Showing Off Your Stats – How to show your readers what your blog consists of.
• Text Linking To Your Feed – In-depth talk about feeds and feed advertisement.

Around about 2 months ago the blog which hosted them became unavailable and has not yet been put back up. Which means that hardly anyone can find the articles that were once there, or atleast they are just rare to come across. This is why I plan to rewrite some of them. The problem being, I do not have the original copies, which means that they will be different and my not be rewrites at all as I only have the titles to go by (which I will more than likely decide to change to avoid confusion).

Some of the tutorials/explainations will only work with the K2 theme and it's variants, whereas others will surely work with both K2 and the default WordPress themes, including many of those custom-made themes that do not make large-scale modifications.

• AntiLeech
• Angsuman's Referrer Bouncer
• Bad Behavior
• Diagnosis
• Dofollow
• Google (XML) Sitemaps
• http:BL WordPress Plugin
• Ultimate Google Analytics
• WordPress.com Stats

Angsuman's Referrer Bouncer, Bad Behavior and http:BL WordPress Plugin are anti-comment spam tools. Angsuman's Referrer Bouncer automatically bounces referer spammers back to their own sites. Bad Behavior is a PHP-based solution for blocking link spam and the robots which deliver it. The http:BL WordPress Plugin checks IP addresses of clients connecting to your blog against the Project Honey Pot database. All 3 of these plugins prevent any potentially harmful clients from accessing your blog. Since installing these plugins I have had no spam comments at all.

AntiLeech is used to help prevent content theft by Sploggers. It prevents errant parties from stealing your content and bandwidth by producing a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you've turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.

Diagnosis adds a debugging page to your WordPress Dashboard so that you can easily debug problems in your WordPress installation or plugins. It also tells you information about your server, MySQL database and PHP settings.

Dofollow is used for the "U Comment, I Follow Movement". The plugin removes the "dead end" piece of code inserted wherever there is a link in a comment, so that search engines will now follow the links as they are crawling the internet. The name was given to this movement by Randa Clay Design and people are now starting to add logos/images to there website stating that they are part of the movement. I joined in and created my own button-image on my blog's footer, to remove the "nofollow" code on comments I had to install this plugin.

Google (XML) Sitemaps automatically creates a sitemap for your blog that search engines can use to quickly, simply and easily index pages from your website. Ultimate Google Analytics automatically installs the Google Analytics code so that you do not need to do it manually. WordPress.com Stats allows you to track your blogs statistics as if your blog was created at WordPress.com.

I would advise that you download and install these plugins to your own WordPress-powered blog as they are extremely helpful. Also, take a look at this blogs complete list of used plugins.

Some of these edits only change parts of the coding to make it quicker to load, thus making it less time-consuming for you, as a reader, to browse through my blog. Others are simply to change the output such as cases, to add punctuation and so on, basically anything that I think should be there that isn't. I have made a few edits to theloop.php file within the K2 theme directory so that I can add the post ratings, views and some other small features.

Currently the biggest tweak I have had to make would be to add those little icons you can see on the right hand side of the sidebar headers (at the time of posting), I added this feature today. To do this I had to edit 2 files in my K2 theme directory, the first was the k2/app/display/sbm-ajax/edit-module-form.php file, this is what shows the sidebar modules' options on the administration panel of the K2 Sidebar. In here I had to add the following:

<p>
<label for="output-prefix-image"><?php _e('Prefix Image', 'k2_domain'); ?>:</label><br />
<input id="output-prefix-image" name="output[prefix_image]" type="text" value="<?php echo($module->output['prefix_image']); ?>" />
</p>
After this, on line 25:

<p>
<label for="output-css-file"><?php _e('Related CSS file', 'k2_domain'); ?>:</label><br />
<input id="output-css-file" name="output[css_file]" type="text" value="<?php echo($module->output['css_file']); ?>" />
</p>

Producing what you can see on the right. After I had added that and managed to get it to work I then had to open k2/app/classes/sbm.php which is what is used to draw the sidebar when the page loads for the user. In this file I had to change:

$params[0]['after_title'] = $sidebar->after_title;
On line 766, to this:
if($this->output['prefix_image']) {
$params[0]['after_title'] = "<span class='metalink'><img class='feedlink' src='" . $this->output['prefix_image'] . "' /></span>" . $sidebar->after_title;
} else {
$params[0]['after_title'] = $sidebar->after_title;
}

Which I admit, proved a little difficult to get working at first, trial and error works just fine though. Basically, what that last bit does is add an image which is aligned to the right on the same line as the title of the sidebar module currently being processed. When I say processed, I mean when WordPress goes through every module that you have added to the "Sidebar 1" list in the K2 Sidebar Modules admin page, adding them to the current page's sidebar, one after the other. It reads the image location from the textbox, highlighted in the screenshot above, with this line of code: $this->output['prefix_image'] which reads whatever was last saved to the database under the module's ($this) settings.

If you are still unsure of what I am talking about then don't worry, all that you really need to know is that it wasn't easy to do originally and took me a good few hours. All you need to do is follow the steps to do it for your own K2 blog. This may also work with the Unwakeable theme by Tyler Longren.