Yesterday during the Google Analytics User Conference in San Francisco, attendees got a preview of the new version of Google Analytics. This new, upcoming version – Google Analytics Version 5 is designed to make it easier and faster for users to access the data they want. Many of the improvements done to the new version were a result of user feedback like – users will be able to view multiple advanced segments without having to use “All Visits” and other requested features like multiple dashboards.

New Features for Google Analytics Version 5:

• New Home Section
• New Dashboard
• Widgets
• Updated Custom Reporting Tool
• New Admin Section
• World Cloud Visualization
• Goals as Events

Here’s a video by one of the beta testers who had early access to Google Analytics V5.

For now, only a small group of Analytics users participating in the private testing have access to Google Analytics V5. This new version will eventually be gradually rolled out to everyone in the coming months.

If you want to join the beta testing program, you can visit the beta sign-up page. If you’re already part of the program, you can go to the new version by clicking on the link on your Google Analytics account. Using the new version of Google Analytics won’t affect your website traffic reports and you can use the current version while testing out the new version.

What do you think of the new, upcoming Google Analytics Version 5? Anyone here who’s tried it already? How do you like the new features? Please share your thoughts.

via AJ Batac

From my experience reviewing different WordPress themes, I noticed that one of the main features that a lot of users look for in a theme is being “widget-ready“. This is due to the fact that widgets have become a very popular tool for bloggers especially for WordPress users. Also, a lot of WordPress plugins these days include a widget version of the plugin. Unfortunately, not all theme designers realize the importance and popularity of widgets and create themes that are not widget-ready.

For those of you who use or rely heavily on widgets, finding a beautiful and well designed WordPress theme that’s not widget-ready can be very disappointing, right? You end up looking for another theme thats widget-ready. Wouldn’t it be nice if you can widgetize or make any WordPress theme widget-ready? This short tutorial will show you how to widgetize a WordPress theme.

Before you start, make sure you backup your theme files so that if something goes wrong, you can always revert to the original files.

Now to start. First thing you’ll need is a functions.php file within your theme folder. Most WordPress themes already have it but in case you don’t, all you need to do is create a blank text document using Notepad or any other text editor, save it as functions.php and copy/paste the following code into that blank file.

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebars(3,array(
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '',
'after_title' => '',
));
?>

In the code above, you can edit the following lines: ’before_widget’, ‘after_widget’, ‘before_title’ and ‘after_title’ to fit your preference or theme’s design.

Example, if I want to make the widget to behave like a list, I would edit it like this:

'before_widget' => '<li>',
'after_widget' => '</li>',

Then if I want the widget title to use a specific heading parameter like say <h3>, I do this:

'before_title' => '<h3>',
'after_title' => '</h3>',

If I want to make it italic, I replace <h3></h3> tags with <i></i> tags or if I want it to be bold, I replace it with <strong></strong> tags.

When you’re done with it, save and upload the functions.php file via FTP into your theme’s folder. (e.g. http://domain.com/wp-content/themes/wptheme/)

Now that you’ve created the functions.php file, what you need now is the code that calls or displays the widget. Most users prefer to use widgets on the sidebar but this code can be placed in the bottom bar or footer or anywhere you want to have widgets (depending on the design of the WordPress theme).

Open the sidebar.php file (or any file that holds the area where you want to have widgets) and copy/paste the following code where you want the widget to be displayed.

Widget code

<?php
if (function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : else : ?>

< ?php endif; ?>

What this code basically does is that it checks if your theme supports widgets and looks for the dynamic sidebar function to see if it exists (code that we placed in the functions.php file earlier). When it finds the dynamic sidebar function, it executes everything between the if statement and the <?php endif; ?> statement. It means you can add anything or other stuff that aren’t widgets like an ad banner or script before or after the widget code. You can also add stuff in between the widget code if you want it to display something else in case the function doesn’t exist.

Btw, if you want multiple sections to be widgetized, just copy/paste the widget code and replace (1) with the corresponding number, (2) if its the second or (3) if its the third one.

That’s it. Wasn’t that easy? Now you don’t have to worry about finding a theme that doesn’t have widget support because you can do it yourself and make any WordPress theme widgetized or widget-ready.

Hope you found this simple tutorial helpful and useful. If you liked this post, please don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed or share this post with others using the social bookmarking buttons below. Thanks!

Something interesting caught my attention from the WP Dashboard yesterday, it’s a post from the WordPress blog entitled the Change the Web Challenge.

What is Change the Web Challenge?

Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge is about building innovative tools to help people find and share opportunities to take action on the websites, blogs, and social networks that we all visit everyday.

Change the Web Challenge is basically a contest where individuals and organizations alike are encouraged to create a plugin, widget, mashup, hack or any web application that will help people find and share opportunities to take action. WordPress is taking part in this contest as one of the technology partners and as an incentive for WordPress developers who will be participating and creating a WordPress plugin for this contest, the best WordPress plugin will be featured in the Plugin Directory.

Here are some of the web applications that are already powered by Social Action:

• ‘Related Ways to Take Action’ WordPress Plugin: A plugin you can add to any WordPress.org blog that identifies the keywords of each blog posts and then displays related ways to take action.
• Twitter Action Pack: A directory of 30+ Twitter accounts that automatically post actions on the issues you care about.
• Firefox Ubiquity Command: A Firefox mashup that lets you highlight any phrase as you browse the web and find related ways to take action.

I really like what Social Action is trying to do with the Change the Web Challenge. Not only does it create new applications and technology but it also increases people’s awareness and participation on relevant social issues. Like what Lloyd mentioned in the WordPress blog post, “the real prize is spreading a little more love in the world.” I would love to participate in this contest however, I’m not a programmer or developer so all I can do is blog about it and share it with others.

Deadline for submission of entries is on Fri, April 3, 2009 and winners will be announced on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference. Btw, there will be 10,000+ worth of prizes that will be given away.

To learn more on how Change the Web Challenge works or on how to apply, check out the Change the Web Challenge official page.

Anyone else interested in joining/participating in the Change the Web Challenge? Do you have an idea for a plugin, widget or mashup that will help people find and share actions?

UPDATED: 4/20

A few days ago, I asked this question: Are you Looking Forward to WordPress 2.2? as the release for WordPress 2.2 was scheduled to be on Monday, April 23rd. However, Matt announced yesterday that the release would be delayed for at least a week or two as the guys from the WordPress dev team try to polish things up.

The tagging system which is one of the features that’s supposed to be included in WordPress 2.2, will be included in the next release, version 2.3. But it’s a good thing though coz the dev team is making sure that when the tagging feature is added, it would be totally compatible with the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin making it easy to import your current tags into the new tagging system. This is good news for me and everyone else who’s using UTW.

While the tagging feature has been put off, WordPress on the other hand has included several new features and improvements.

• Improved comment editing
• Multiple format comment feeds, including Atom
• phpmailer integrated for performance and maintainability
• Plugin Sandboxing to Test Drive Plugins
• Default and Classic WordPress Themes widgetized

What I’m looking forward to in this coming release is the Plugin Sandboxing feature. I believe that this would be very useful to a lot of bloggers like me, the type who likes to install and try new plugins. Anyways, all we can do for now is sit back, relax and wait for WordPress 2.2 to be released.

Dougal Campbell on his blog Geek Ramblings, talks about another feature that hopefully will be added in the WordPress 2.2 release, which is the “Deactivate All Plugins” option that can be done with a single click. This is a time saver especially when you want to upgrade your WordPress installation. No more going through the plugins one by one, all you have to do is click on the “Deactivate All Plugins” button. This was one of the things that I hoped WordPress would implement and now it’s gonna be a reality.

Btw, also check out Jhay’s post – WordPress 2.2 Delayed: Removed tagging support.