Yesterday I got the heads up that I was tagged in a recent post by John Lamansky of The WordPress Expert.  I normally don’t partcipate in these types of “blog games”, but after reading John’s post, I really think it is a great idea and allows us to spotlight a few WordPress plugins that are underrated or somewhat unknown.

John choose to highlight the following 3 underrated plugins in his post (click over for a description):

1. Broken Link Checker
2. WP-Project
3. WP SEO Master

Here are 3 plugins I would like to add to the list that I think are useful, yet underrated:

1. Blog Metrics - This is a wonderful plugin by Joost De Valk that was designed for multi-author blogs like this one.   It tracks all sorts of unusual analytics by individual authors that I find extremely helpful.
2. Digg This - I think this plugin used to be fairly well known, but I don’t see it on many blogs anymore.   This plugin does nothing normally, but when it recognizes that a post has been Dugg, it will create a digg-style button and display it within the post to help encourage people to Digg your post.   They can Digg the post without leaving your website!
3. Math Comment Spam Protection - It adds an extra step for people leaving comment, but it stops spam cold in its tracks.  I use this on many of my blogs and haven’t really had any spam troubles since.

Hopefully some of you will find a use for some of these plugins.

I suppose now I should continue this by tagging three more people.  How about Michael at WPCandy, Leland of ThemeLab, and Jeff of Jeffro2pt0.  If you haven’t been tagged yet, but would like to participate, feel free to do so on your own blogs to help highlight some relatively unknown plugins.

Here are some great WordPress-related posts I’ve enjoyed over the past week:

• Track WordPress 2.6 Progress - Quick Online Tips gives some suggestions on how to keep up with the progress of WordPress 2.6.
• How to Create a Dynamic Sidebar - This is something we’ve covered on a couple different occasions here on this site, but I wanted to point out this post because I think Richard does a great job of explaining how to tell WordPress what to display on each page.
• Project M Finally Announced - Justin Tadlock finally announced the details of his Project M. It appears it is a theme club of sorts, but with a twist. Click over to get the details.
• Do It Yourself WordPress Theme - Hayes Potter has come up with an interesting idea by releasing a WordPress theme. Simply build your stylesheet and you are done.
• WordPress Tricks - Stylized Web offers some useful PHP code snippets for WordPress.
• Making Authors Template Page - Also from Justin Tadlock, this post does a great job detailing how to make a WordPress authors template page.
• Displaying Related Categories and Content in WordPress - Darren Hoyt shares the code he used to make this feature in his popular Mimbo Pro theme.

If you run a multi-author blog and you want to attract additional authors, one thing you can do is improve how you promote your authors on your website. A lot of WordPress blogs choose to do this by creating an author page for each author or providing a link to the author’s website, but now there is now another option for WordPress blogs.

Color Light Studio recently released a new WordPress plugin called Author Exposed, which will allow readers to view the author’s Gravatar and information from a pop-up box using Javascript.

Here is a sample of how it looks:

In order to use this plugin, all you need to do is activate it and place a small code snippet in your loop where you want the author’s information to display:

<?php if (function_exists('author_exposed')){author_exposed();} ?>

Once you’ve placed the code into your theme, you should be all set!
[via WP Themes Plugin]

This guest post was written by John of The WordPress Expert, where he writes about WordPress tips, services, themes, plugins, and more.  If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Say you have an author page on your WordPress blog; but what happens when you find that your author archive URL looks like this?

http://example.com/author/Joe%20Smith/

Of course, you’d probably want to change your name to a more “URL-friendly” format like this:

http://example.com/author/joe-smith/

How do you do it?

Well, WordPress itself doesn’t let you (probably because the URL is intended to be a permalink), but it can still be accomplished through a simple database modification.

Here’s how. This is assuming your hosting account is setup with phpMyAdmin. (If you don’t have database editing experience, you might want to make a database backup just in case.)

1. Go to your hosting account’s cPanel and click on the “phpMyAdmin” icon. If you don’t see it, look for a “MySQL Databases” icon, click it, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and then click the phpMyAdmin link.
2. Select your WordPress database from the menu on the left.
3. Select the wp_users table, and then click the “Browse” tab.
4. Locate the row that has your username in the user_login column. Click the Edit button (the pencil icon) on that row.
5. Enter the desired URL version of your name into the user_nicename field.
6. Click “Go” to save your changes.

And that’s it! Your author archive will now show up at your new URL.

In the past we’ve gone over some methods for setting up your theme to separate your author comments in WordPress.   By default, most WordPress themes check the e-mail address to determine who the person is that is leaving the comment.   By adjusting the code to check for the user id instead, you can set up your theme to recognize if you are the author of the post.   This is also beneficial for blogs with multiple authors. 

In addition to separating trackbacks from comments, this is another way you can easily help improve the readers experience when trying to follow a conversation in the comments.    Most people use a different background, but some choose to instead display a logo.   The important thing is that readers can recognize which comments are coming from the author of the post. 

Today I noticed Matt Cutts has written his own tutorial explaining how to highlight author comments in WordPress.   His post also includes the code needed for CSS styling.  If you still haven’t gotten around to doing this on your theme yet, I recommend you check it out!  

Due to the small number of WordPress blogs that have multiple authors, very few WordPress themes seem to come with a custom author page. This means whenever someone goes to the author page, WordPress will by default use your archives.php file, or if that isn’t available, then use your index.php file. This generally doesn’t make for a very nice author page because it just displays that authors posts in the same format as your archives.

In order to create an author page, you will want to make a copy of your archives.php file and name it author.php, then upload it to your site via FTP. Now go into your theme and edit the author.php page you just created. From here, it will vary a little bit depending on your theme, but we basically have to redo the post loop for this page. A typical archive page will call the header, then finish with calling the sidebar and footer. We will be changing the code in between. Here is the code that a standard theme would use between the header and sidebar/footer calls:

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">
<!-- This sets the $curauth variable -->
<?php
if(isset($_GET['author_name'])) :
$curauth = get_userdatabylogin($author_name);
else :
$curauth = get_userdata(intval($author));
endif;
?>
<h3>About: <?php echo $curauth->display_name; ?></h3>
<p><strong>Website:</strong> <a href=”<?php echo $curauth->user_url; ?>”><?php echo $curauth->user_url; ?></a></p>
<p><strong>Profile:</strong> <?php echo $curauth->user_description; ?></p>
<h3>Posts by <?php echo $curauth->display_name; ?>:</h3>
<ul>
<!– The Loop –>
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<li>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>”>
<?php the_title(); ?></a>
</li>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<p><?php _e(’No posts by this author.’); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>
<!– End Loop –>
</ul>
</div>

This will display the author’s nickname, their website, and whatever is in the description field, as well as a bulleted list of all their posts. Once set up, you can control everything from within your Users panel of your WordPress dashboard. To see a list of other arguments you can get, I recommend checking out the official WordPress Author template.

As an added bonus, if you want your authors name link to point towards the authors page, you can do so with the following code:
<?php the_author_posts_link(); ?>