So I headed over to the official WordPress Plugin repository and searched for a plugin that would allow me to keep/post notes within the WordPress dashboard. Within a few minutes, I found one in the name of the Dashboard Notepad plugin by Stephanie Leary of SillyBean. I installed one similar plugin a long time called Dash-Note but it doesn’t come close to the Dashboard Notepad.

The Dashboard Notepad plugin creates a simple notepad that allows the user to take down notes from right within the WordPress Dashboard. If you have a multi-user blog, you (the administrator) can choose which roles (admin, editor, contributor, etc.) can view/edit the notes. Aside from that, the plugin also allows the user to display the contents of the notepad onto the blog/website via a template tag and/or shortcode. Users can also customize the style of the notepad via their theme’s CSS file.

Screenshots:

Features:

• Dashboard Widgetized
• Control what user-level can edit/view each ‘notepad’.
• Up to 3 different notepads as individual widgets.
• Configuration on each widget directly.
• Disable any WordPress default widgets (globally).
• HTML support for view mode.
• Built in raw CSS customization of each pad.

Installation:

1. Upload the plugin directory to /wp-content/plugins/
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins‘ menu in WordPress
3. Go to your Dashboard and configure the widget by clicking the link in its upper right corner.
4. To display your notes in a theme file, use this template tag: [php]<?php dashboard_notes(); ?>[/php]
5. To display your notes in a post, page, or text widget, use the [dashboard_notes] shortcode. (To use it in a widget, you’ll have to enable shortcode parsing in text widgets, if you haven’t already. Add add_filter(‘widget_text’, ‘do_shortcode’); to your functions.php file.) You can use div#dashboard-notes in your theme’s CSS file to style the notes.

Download the Dashboard Notepad plugin from the official WordPress Plugin repository

Now that I have the Dashboard Notepad plugin, I don’t need to login to Evernote or use the Evernote Web Clipper. Although I still use the Evernote app on my iPhone which is handy for taking down notes when I’m on the road and don’t have my computer with me. If only I could access the Dashboard Notepad widget from the WordPress for iOS app I wouldn’t need the Evernote app. Btw, I use this plugin not only for writing down possible blog topics but also for other important stuff like my To-Do List, schedule, etc.

Hope you liked this review of the Dashboard Notepad plugin. I just wanted to share one of the plugins I use for blogging and hope that some of you would also find it useful for your blogging needs.

Anybody else use the Dashboard Notepad WordPress plugin? What methods or third-party apps/websites do you use as your virtual notepad? Please share your thoughts.

Because of what happened, iThemes via their PluginBuddy website, created and released a free WordPress plugin called ServerBuddy. The ServerBuddy WordPress plugin tests the web server’s configuration to analyze the quality of the hosting provider and its server configuration. The plugin looks for problems with compatibility with different WordPress themes and plugins and provides easy to understand explanations to different server settings. It also generates reports and samples of what to ask hosting providers if a problem is identified in the server configuration that needs fixing.

Screenshot:

Another important ServerBuddy feature is Security Testing. This plugin analyzes file permissions of important WordPress files to check if they are properly configured to make sure that the blog is secure and safe from intrusions. ServerBuddy is a must-have plugin for any WordPress blog and great tool for regular WordPress users, theme & plugin developers and especially hosting administrators.

Kudos to the folks from iThemes and PluginBuddy for releasing the ServerBuddy WordPress plugin to the community for FREE. ServerBuddy is easy to install, just download the file and unzip it. Then upload the folder to the wp-content/plugins/ folder on your web server and then activate it. ServerBuddy will show up on its own section below Tools and Settings.

Download the ServerBuddy WordPress plugin

Anyone here hosted on Network Solutions that got hacked during this incident? What have you done to secure your WordPress blog? Anyone else using the ServerBuddy WordPress plugin to check their hosting provider’s server configuration? Please share your thoughts.

If you’re looking for an easier and quicker way to do this, you’re in luck! There’s now a WordPress plugin called Search Regex that can help you do these tasks quickly and easily.

Here’s a little background info on the Search Regex WordPress plugin:

Search Regex adds a powerful set of search and replace functions to WordPress. These go beyond the standard searching capabilities, and allow you to search and replace almost any data stored on your site. In addition to simple searches you have the full power of PHP’s regular expressions at your disposal.

Features:

• Simple search and replace
• Advanced regular expression search and replaces, back references and capture groups
• Search previews with inline replacing
• Perform searches in post & page content, excerpt, titles, URL, and meta-data, as well as comment content and author data
• Full support for WordPress roles. You can only search and replace in posts you have access to
• Fully localized

Screenshots:
Search Options

Search Results

The plugin author – John Godley, created the Search Regex plugin primarily for helping WordPress users with blog migration and upgrading. This WordPress plugin comes in very handy when you’re changing the image directory for your post images or URL paths to your posts, like if your changing your domain name or moving from a free blogging service like Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress. This plugin can also be used to edit/remove WordPress plugin tags or correct misspelt words. With Search Regex’s search and replace pattern, you can perform these tasks easily and quickly. Saving you lots of time and the hassle of manually editing each post.

For more information regarding the installation, usage, search options and examples regarding the Search Regex plugin, make sure you visit the official Search Regex plugin homepage.

The Search Regex plugin is a very powerful, useful and helpful WordPress plugin. I wish this plugin or something like it was developed earlier. But anyways, I’m just glad that someone came up with the idea of creating a plugin like this so that WordPress users won’t have a hard time and won’t waste too much time editing URL paths or image directory paths. Thanks John and more power to you!

IMPORTANT: To those who plan to use the Search Regex plugin, first thing you should do is create a backup of your WordPress database before making any changes. Also, make sure that you always use the “Search & Replace” preview before saving it to the database.

Check out the Search Regex WordPress plugin.

Some of the most popular posts here on JaypeeOnline are the ones that were part of the Pimp My WP Dashboard series. I’m sure those of you who have been long time readers are familiar with these posts. In that series, I’ve featured and reviewed four different WordPress admin themes – WP Tiger Admin, Spot Milk, Nice Admin and the WordTunes Terminal.

When WordPress 2.5 was released, all these admin themes became obsolete because of the changes done to the WordPress dashboard design and layout. Fortunately for me and those who use admin themes, a new compatible theme was released by Dean J Robinson, called the Fluency Admin. Since then, I’ve been using it as my WP dashboard theme.

I’ve been wanting to do a review of this awesome theme/plugin for a long time now but somehow, I’ve always put it on hold. A few days back, I decided to sit down and start writing the review. Then a couple days later, I found out that Dean released a newer version of the Fluency Admin and that motivated me to finish this review.

Here are the new features found in Fluency Admin 2.1:

• Fluency Admin Options page
• Disable/Enable Fluency style on login page
• Use custom logo on login page
• Classic/Blue color scheme
• Collapsible menu
• Better hover menu

Screenshots:

Standard Menu

Minimized Menu

New Hover Menu (items are now split into 2 columns)

New Classic/Blue color scheme

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• All menus have to be expanded before activating the Fluency Admin theme.
• Does not support Internet Explorer 6
• Color scheme depends on the scheme selected on your user profile

*To change between the grey or blue color scheme, go to Users > Authors & Users. Click Edit on your profile and look for it under Admin Color Scheme options.

The Fluency Admin theme is a neat plugin. It is not something that you really need to have or install on your WordPress blog, but if you like a better looking dashboard and want to have easier and quicker access to sub-menus, then you should give it a try. Fluency Admin is now hosted in the WordPress plugins directory which means that you can use WordPress’ built-in plugin installer and auto-update feature whenever a new version is released.

I’ve been using the grey-based theme for a long time so for a change, I’ve switched to the Classic/Blue scheme. I really like how the new hover menu splits multiple items into 2 columns, which solves the issue when you have lots of items in the Settings page. I had that problem with the previous version where I couldn’t access some items because they were way up too high or too low and become hidden. I also like that Dean included support for minimizing the menu. I’m glad that Dean is continuing support for this plugin and I hope he doesn’t get tired of it. As far as I know, Fluency Admin is the only admin theme that’s compatible to the latest versions of WordPress.

If you want to switch from the standard menu to the minimized menu or vice versa, just click on the “Hide Menu” icon found at the left side, below the other icons. Btw, the Fluency Admin Options page lets you configure whether you want to enable or disable the Fluency style on the login page and whether you want to use a custom logo on the login page.

Check out or Download the latest version of Fluency Admin theme for WordPress.

Anyone currently using or have tried the Fluency Admin theme? What other admin themes have you tried before? Do you know of any admin themes that work with newer versions of WordPress?

I really like the comment info feature of Firestats and find it very useful that I searched for a plugin that specifically did that job. I wasn’t sure if such a WordPress plugin existed but I kept looking and finally found one. The Comment Info Detector plugin is created to help bloggers know where their readers or commentators come from (country of origin based on IP address), what web browser they’re using – Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and what OS (Operating System) they have installed on their computer.

This is a plugin for WordPress 2.6+ that can help you know where your commenters come from, which type of web browser and OS they used when they left a comment on your blog. It provides two functions that take IP and User Agent as parameters and then return HTML string contains country flag, web browser and OS icons. You can put these icons anywhere you like in each comment.

In fact, this plugin is a combination of two plugins: WordPress Browser Detection Plugin and Easy IP2Country that I have intergrated as a built-in plugin for my premium theme before, see this page for example, but now I decide to separate it as a new plugin with some enhancements and share it for everyone.

Screenshot:

Comment Info Detector displays commentator’s country flag, web browser and OS.

Features:

• Detects and shows commenter’s country flag, web browser and operating system
• Supports many web browsers and operating systems: major desktop browsers, antiquated browsers, blogging software (for trackbacks and pingbacks), text based browsers, various PDAs and cell phones.
• Uses a binary file for IP to country resolution and supports database sources from Webhosting.info – Software77.net
• The returned string can be configured as a template to suite your theme

Comment Info Detector isn’t one of those must-have WordPress plugins but very useful if you want to know more about your readers/commentators and can be handy at times. It
can also help you come up with what to blog about especially if your blog is about technology and other tech related stuff. Like for example, if you see that most of your readers/commentators use Firefox as their web browser, you can blog about a new Firefox addon/extension or a list of useful Firefox addons/extensions, get what I mean? I’m sure there are also other ways that the Comment Info Detector plugin can be useful for you and your blog.

It’s not that hard to install, it just requires you to insert a line of code into your theme’s comment.php file. To make sure that you do it right, don’t forget to read the installation and usage instructions found at the plugin homepage.

Anyone heard, tried or are using the Comment Info Detector WordPress plugin? What do you think of this plugin? If you haven’t tried it yet, would you consider using it on your blog? Please share your thoughts.

For more information, installation and usage instructions, visit the official Comment Info Detector WordPress plugin page. You can also download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory.