Some of the best customizations to a site are built through thinking about the users of a particular site. When users log into BuddyPress they are automatically redirected to the homepage and are often left with a “what now” feeling.

Users love to be able to customize their profile and blog easily, so it only makes sense to add easy to use navigation menus to logged in users landing pages. I created the following code to make it semi-easy to add a edit profile menu.

The menu has been tested with BP 1.0.1 and WPMU 2.7.1

We’ll look at each link individually first

Here is the full code in a unordered list that is only displayed to logged in users.

Now you can wrap it in a div and style to your liking. If you would like to use it as a widget I recommend downloading the Samsarin PHP Widget, which allows you to add PHP to certain widgets.

One last css design hint, the default BuddyPress widget title is styled as class=”widgettitle”

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Adding code to your WordPress post can be easy and pain free… or it can be a huge hassle! I originally thought it would be easy enough to just add a new plugin that will allow code to be wrapped in a tag, which will output the exact text that was entered.

I unfortunately found out that many of the plugins available for this need, don’t always seem to work correctly.

If you’re going to be constantly displaying code in almost every post, you may want to try out the plugins that are available. However, if you are just going to be displaying code every once in a while, I highly recommend you use the simple text converter HTMLizer by www.onlinetools.org.

Display Code, The Easy Way

HTMLizer is a simple form that converts all of the special characters in your code into HTML standard code. Its as simple as copy, paste, cut, and then paste. Now that is much easier then spending 30 minutes trying to get a plugin to behave.

Try out HTMLizer and let me know how it works for you. HTMLizer no longer exist, but here is a site that also has an html encoder.

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BuddyPress is a new program that is in dire need of some SEO optimization. Luckily there is a new plugin that is going to take a lot of the duplicate content and title tag issues out of the picture for us BuddyPress site developers.

Seo for BuddyPress: a great plugin

The new plugin is called Seo for BuddyPress and was created by Sven Lehnert. With Seo for BuddyPress you can enter

• Titles
• Descriptions
• And Keywords

for the following pages:

• Profile Pages -profile, activity, blogs, friends, groups, wire
• Groups Pages – groups home, groups wire, groups forum, groups members
• Events Pages from the bp-events plugin
• Bb-dev Youtube & Flickr pages
• Your own buddypress pages, such as your profile

Also the plugin comes with these great special tags to automaticly insert the user name, group name, or event name.

• %username%
• %groupname%
• %eventname%

I highly recommend you install Seo for Buddypress on your BuddyPress site. It has worked flawlessly for me and appears to be headed in the right direction for future updates.

The big G will love you for it.

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The State of Affairs is officially 1 year old this month and I was thinking of ways that we could celebrate all of the work, time, and commitment we have put into growing this site. At first I couldn’t think of anything symbolic enough worth noting, but after a while I was able to come up with this list of things you can do to celebrate your blogs first birthday!

1. Donate to all of the plugin developers that have written the plugins you use on your blog.
2. Take a week off from blogging. Celebrate with a break from the usual.
3. Buy each writer a cup of coffee. If you’re the only writer buy your self one and a croissant to go with it!
4. Go for a hike. If you don’t want to take a whole week off from blogging, at lease take one day off and go enjoy some sun.
5. Redesign your site or just do some rearranging. Nothing like a nice spring cleaning for a blog.
6. Congratulate yourself on “sticking-with-it” for the past year. Honestly, most blogs don’t make it a year and the fact that yours did signifies your commitment and determination.

Once you are done celebrating, your next focus should be on where you want your blog to go over the next year. There is nothing wrong with planning ahead and getting a early start right?

Technorati Tags: blogging, celebrate, donate, coffee, blogging tips, tips on blogging

Coming up with ideas and topics for new articles can sometimes be very easy, while at other times can be quite demanding. I find the best way to brainstorm for topics is by simply browsing the web for articles that haven’t been covered yet.

The problem with this approach is that it’s not very goal-driven. I am simply looking for a topic, not looking to write on one yet. This leads to many ideas popping up then simply fading away as I start twittering, checking email, and viewing stats or whatever else distracts my attention.

This is why I suggest every blogger starts keeping notes to help grow their blog and bring focus to writing content. Even if you only note down 4 or 5 words a day, such as “comparison of muscle memory techniques”, you will still be putting time into creating content.

Recommended Note Taking Software

There are two programs that are free and readily available I recommend for note taking. One is a self contained program called KeepNote and the other is a Firefox browser addon called ScribeFire.

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Recently I have been thinking of ways to add greater usability to my BuddyPress project ebodia.com. One thing I noticed is that when new users sign up, they are redirected to the homepage.

I felt this left new users with a “What now?” feeling, so I thought it would be a good idea to add a second navigation bar with some helpful links to the buddypress home theme. The Main roadblock I found was how to create custom links for users that were logged in. I did some digging and was able to find a snippet of code that will automatically parse the correct user id into the link.

How is this useful?

A few of the direct links I added for recently logged in users was -

• A link to their Profile
• A link to their list of blogs
• A link to their BuddyPress account settings

I felt this would be useful for new users that weren’t sure where to start.

Code for Custom Links in BuddyPress

This code will work for most custom links you will need, but not all of them. For example, I was not able to create a link to a users blog directly, so instead I created a link to their list of blogs.

Here is the Old example code to add a link to the logged in users friend activity. The new version is after this one.

<a href="<?php global $bp; echo bp_core_get_userurl($bp->loggedin_user->id); ?>activity/my-friends">Your Friends Activity</a>

Update: Andy P. suggested a alternative to the code above. Instead of declaring the bp global variable and requesting the logged in user id, why not just use a handy template tag? This code will output the same thing as the code above, but uses a very useful BuddyPress template tag.

The above code will output this link

http://yousite.com/members/logged-in-user-id/activity/my-friends

If you take a look at the links in your own profile you should be able to see the small bit of code you will need to customize the links. Activity/myfriends can be replaced in the original code by profile/public to create a link to the logged in users profile, for example.

I want to thank Burtadsit for providing the original code used in the above example and Andy P. for providing the template tag AND BuddyPress.

Technorati Tags: buddypress examples, buddypress, buddypress code, custom links, links buddypress, buddypress profile, using buddypress, Building Link, construct this URL, variable user name, username, buddypress themes

The most popular way to add an online store to your WordPress blog is to use the WP E-Commerce plugin. However, recently (Nov 08′) Roya Khosravi has released a new plugin called WP-osCommerce (WP.osC) that should be replacing the old standard very soon.

So what is the difference between these two plugins? Quite a bit actually. These two plugins have very little to do with each other except they both allow you to easily add a store to your WordPress blog.

WP E-Commerce plugin VS. WP-osCommerce (WP.osC)

WP E-Commerce plugin is a proprietary software that was built with a goal of getting the user to upgrade the plugin for a fee, while the WP-osCommerce (WP.osC) plugin was built using a completely free and open-source software called OS-Commerce.

WP E-Commerce is buggy and has no community support behind it. If something doesn’t work right with your site, where do you go for help? I feel the lack of support and buggy nature of WP E-Commerce rules it out as a reliable means to create an online store.

Stay Open Source!

OS-Commerce is a highly popular and free software to create an online store. The WP-osCommerce (WP.osC) plugin allows you to integrate OS-Commerce directly into your blog and keep the WordPress theme system. The online community support is huge for OS-Commerce and even WP.osC has started a new and growing community for support.

Where do I get WP-osCommerce (WP.osC)

You can download WP.osC from http://wposc.com/. There are many helpful tutorials on how to set up WP.osC as well as a community forum to help you get started there.

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If you are looking to or have already started a new blog and are struggling to find a niche topic to stick to, then this list might spark some ideas for you to ponder. Topics are in no particular order.

What ideas do you have for your new blog?

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Roya Khosravi has just released a great, new plugin for WordPress that makes creating and distributing your blogs custom Google Gadget incredibly simple. WP-iGoogle creates a dynamic Google Gadget that displays your latest post by date with your Gravatar image.

You can try The State of Affairs Gadget right now to see how it looks on your iGoogle page. Pretty slick huh? You can also add your custom Gadget to your webpage or offer the option for your readers to add it to their webpage.

Roya even made it easy to submit your custom Google Gadget to the Google Gadget Directory by automatically generating the link for you on the plugins settings page.

So far I give this plugin 5 stars and have found it incredibly easy to use. Drop me a comment below or send me a email if your interested in knowing how to edit the plugin so you can submit a screenshot of your Gadget to the Google Directory.

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State of Affairs is now 9 months old and I can say it has been quite a journey. This is Rachel’s and mine first blog and we have learned quite a bit about the blogoshpere and the search community. Most bloggers base their success on the number of visitors they receive to their site, but this can be a misleading statistic on the value of your blog to your readers. That is why I recommend growing a blog with persistence rather than growing it with visitors.

Setting the roots

When your blog is just a wee little site, it is important to set the roots for your blog early. This can be done by branding your site and picking your niche early. Consistency can be a great way to show that you are dedicated to your blog and are happy with its growth.

Pruning the leafs

While you continue to grow your blog, adding fresh content helps to keep your blog healthy looking for search engines. Another thing that I like to do from time to time is to prune older post by adding unique css styling, changing the layout, and updating the material with relevant comments. That way when your post hits Google and the other search engines, it will look it’s best and still be relevant.

Persistence, persistence, and persistence

You definitely don’t want to give up on your blog, even if your number of visitors should fall. Here is a look at the stats for The State of Affairs over the last 6 months;

• July 2008

  - 285 Unique visits
  - 500 Page-views

  * 12.73%
  Direct Traffic

  * 86.14%
  Referring Sites

  * 1.12%
  Search Engines

• August 2008

  - 1,140 Unique visits
  - 2,058 page-views

  * 9.12%
  Direct Traffic

  * 86.23%
  Referring Sites

  * 4.65%
  Search Engines

• September 2008

  - 893 Unique visits
  - 1,613 Page-views

  * 9.18%
  Direct Traffic

  * 63.27%
  Referring Sites

  * 27.55%
  Search Engines

• October 2008

  - 2,404 Unique visits
  - 3,719 Page-views

  * 5.45%
  Direct Traffic

  * 36.77%
  Referring Sites

  * 57.78%
  Search Engines

• November 2008

  - 5,018 Unique visits
  - 7,961 Page-views

  * 7.09%
  Direct Traffic

  * 34.85%
  Referring Sites

  * 58.05%
  Search Engines

• December 2008

  - 7,190 Unique visits
  - 9,770 Page-views

  * 5.38%
  Direct Traffic

  * 13.31%
  Referring Sites

  * 81.31%
  Search Engines

Notice that in August, we had 1,140 visitors and in September, we had 893 visitors. If we had accepted this as a indication of failure, we would have never made it to 10,000 page views by the end of the year.

Also another thing to note is, the percentage of visitors from search engines going from virtually nothing in July, to a reasonable 27% in September. It takes anywhere from 3-6 months to start getting organic search engine visitors, so don’t be discouraged early on by the small gains.

Watch it grow

Remember, there is no miracle grow for your blog. Just pain old content to feed it. This is something I think all successful bloggers have come to terms with in regards to visitors. In a way you have to step back from your blog and let it be a blog; let yourself be a writer and just watch it grow.

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