The DropCap plugin comes from an observation by David Ogilvy - a highly respected direct response marketer. He observed that he got a 13% increase in people reading his sales copy if the first letter in the first paragraph was a large drop capital.

This plugin makes implementing that literally two mouse clicks. You double-click the first word to highlight it, and then you click on the DropCap button on the toolbar. The plugin’s code selects out the first letter of the hightlighted word, and applies the DropCap CSS to provide the effect you see at the start of this post.

So how is this affected by the upgrade to WP 2.5?

Well - you need a toolbar  button to click on for the dropcap functionality to work.

The problem with the this upgrade is that the tinyMCE visual editor was upgraded. Well - it’s not really a problem - in that this new version of the visual editor is much better than the previous editor. However, the manner in which you add custom toolbar buttons has changed.

Up till WP 2.5, I had been using a modified version of the Buttonsnap class that had originally been developed by Owen Winkler. When Owen decided to no longer support the class (I think it was with the upgrade to WP2.1), I fixed the class, and this fix worked up till the introduction of WordPress 2.5.

What I had to do to overcome this was to learn how to write a tinyMCE Vsn 3 plugin.

Fortunately there are a couple of examples in the documenation - so getting the DropCap button to appear and work was not too difficult a mission to accomplish. So once again, we have the simple process of adding a dropcap in both the Visual, as well as the HTML editors :

WordPress is an extremely powerful application, but it was developed to deliver blog capabilities, not Search Engine Optimized (SEO) web pages.

This plugin addresses WordPress’s SEO shortcoming. It interacts with the templates provided with the RNW System, and delivers conditional SEO behaviour based on values you define on the SEO Options page, and in SEO custom field on individual pages and posts.

This plugin addresses WordPress’s SEO shortcoming in the following ways:

• It allows you to use SEO tags to insert or modify ? on a per-post or per-page basis:

• The page Title
• A Description metatag
• A Keywords metatag
• A tagline in the Footer.

• The plugin also allows you to set site-wide SEO tags which will be used if you do not set SEO tags for specific pages.
• It also allows you to insert additional Meta tags - either on a site-wide, or per-post/page basis.
• Finally, while not SEO related, it allows you to redefine the page CSS - probably just used to redefine the header image - so you can have custom-looking Post, Page and Category pages.

This template interacts with the RNW-WordPress templates in the following way:

• If there are SEO tags set for a specific page/post, these are used in preference to the site SEO tags.
• However, if there is no page-specific SEO tag defined, the values defined on the Site Settings will be used:
• Title tags defined on the options page are inserted in front of the default post or page title.
• A footer tagline is created from the footer ‘pre-text’ plus site keyword. This tagline is hyperlinked with the site URL, which means all site pages provide a link back to the main page.

For WordPress 2.5, an enhanced version of the plugin has been created. One particular feature will help with entering SEO fields:

To overcome the clumsiness of adding individual Custom Fields, the Quick SEO Tags section has been added to this plugin to help make adding multiple SEO tags to each page/post a quicker and relatively painless process:

If you don’t like this Quick SEO section, then simply check off the checkbox on the Options page.

A quick check of the meta tags confirms that the this is working as required.

This plugin allows you to order:

• Pages,
• Categories, and
• Posts

using a simple drag and drop interface:

The good news is that the latest version of WordPress now provides a term-order field in the term relationships table - and so it is no longer necessary to upload a tweaked taxonomy.php file - as we had had to in the previous verison. While this was done automatically by RapidFormatter, it’s always best if you don’t have to start modifying some of the base WordPress files.

So the end result is a custom-ordered Categories listing, instead of the default alphabetic listing :

A quick test of the Manage Page Order also resulted in a re-ordered listing of pages (much easier using drag and drop than messing around with setting values in the page order field).

So - it appears that this RNW plugin can be used as is with WordPress 2.5, and with the bonus that it’s no longer necessary to tweak the taxonomy.php file.

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I didn’t expect the RNW Breadcrumbs (Version 1.0) plugin to give any trouble - and I was right.

The plugin activated OK, and the breadcrumbs were displayed as expected - on all page types.

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I downloaded the latest versions of Post-Plugin Library ( Version 2.5b22 ), and Similar Posts ( Versioni 2.5b22 ).

Both activated without problems. I set a couple of options on the setup’s Options page, and then added the following PHP code to an Affililate Ad widget :

<?php if (function_exists(’similar_posts’)) { similar_posts();} ?>

The widget immediate started displaying related posts for whatever post was being displayed.

Seems fine with WordPress 2.5

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The Paged Navigation 1.0 plugin is the third plugin by Andy Staines that I like to include on my sites. It provide good-looking page navigation on both the category as well as individual post pages.

This plugin has no options page. It activated without any problems, and the theme pages immediately began displaying the enhanced page navigation.

Looks to be fine with WordPress 2.5.

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I have been using Organizer - a very useful plugin to help upload and organise files on your server.
If uploaded Organizer - Version 1.2.1 to my test blog.

When I activated the plugin - no errors were generated. However, when I tried to update options - I wanted to add SWF as an allowed file type, the update failed (twice)..

I then tried browsing for existing files in the Uploads folder. This function worked - as did a file upload, and a file resize.

So - it seems that apart from being unable to change the list of allowable file types, the plugin can be used on WordPress 2.5.

I will take a look at this minor problem over the next few days and see if I can quickly fix this inability to change file types.

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I don’t often use this plugin - Kimili Flash Embed - Version 1.4.2 - but needed it for this site, and also for my customer support site.

If seems to work as expected - by using a simple tag, you get a flash image or movie displayed …

[ kml_flashembed movie="http://jeff-w.com/wp25/wp-content/uploads/flash/UpgradeFlash.swf" height="225" width="275" /]

gives you:

---

One problem with the conversion that I noted is that the tinyMCE plugin for versions prior to WordPress created the following code to centre a div tag wrapped around an image :

The issue is that in Version 2.5, the attribute ‘align’ is not allowed. What you need to do is change to using the CSS equivalent :

<div style=”text-align: center”>

This could cause a problem if there are a large number of centered images in a site that is being upgraded - as your images will lose their alignment as soon as you open the the post while in Visual mode.

I tried using the Add Video media button - as an alternative to using this plugin. This doesn’t appear to be an equivalent to the Kimili plugin, as it uploaded the flash file, and inserted a link in the post content. Clicking on the link did result in the flash being displayed - but not as an embedded flash object inside the post. Something to investigate further once the upgrade has been completed and issued.

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Next was Google XML Sitemaps - Version 3.0.3.1.

Once again, there didn’t appear to be any issues with this plugin and WordPress 2.5.

One problem I did experience with this version of the plugin was getting the plugin to write the sitemap.xml file. I uploaded an empty sitemap.xml file, and tried setting the permssions with FileZilla. I tried setting them to 666 (the usual value I use with no problem). No dice. Tried 755, and 777 - and still the plugin couldn’t write the sitemap file.

I checked the comments on the plugin’s site + did a Google search - and sure enough - there were others that had had a similar problem. What you need to do is do a manual update - by clicking on the link to rebuild the sitemap manually - found on the options page.

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I uploaded the latest version of Global Translator - Version 0.8.

From what I can see, there are no issues with running this plugin on WordPress 2.5.

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