WordPress 2.6 is live…

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WordPress 2.6 is out, almost one month ahead of its planned release date, named “Tyner” after the jazz pianist McCoy Tyner that makes the new WordPress release a more powerful CMS. Other features have been added including fixing over 194 bugs from pevious version.

Matt has prepared a brief video tour of 2.6, if you have 3 minutes and 29 seconds to spare, it’s worth a watch:

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July 19, 2008 | Filed Under Wordpress | 3 Comments

Homepage Excerpts Wordpress Plugin

David from Dailyblogtips has released a WordPress plugin called Homepage Excerpts, the plugin has two main objectives. The first one is to make blogs that use full posts on the homepage more search engine friendly. The second one is to give flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

Homepage Excerpts for SEO

Most of us are aware that search engines including Google will penalize websites that contain duplicate content. Ideally, therefore, the content of your posts should be displayed fully in one location only, and that is the single post page and no where else.

Where as most of u display full posts on the homepage as well, and the posts remain being displayed in full even when they slip out of the homepage even on others pages.

Davids Homepage Excerpts plugin can be used to reduce this duplicate content while keeping full posts on the homepage. So you can set your homepage to display full posts and then other pages will only display excerpts of the posts. An exmaple is shown below:

As our websites take a week plus to get indexed by search engines it means our only full article will be on the single post page and all othere will be displayed as excerpts and hence remove dupliate content.

Another plus point is it will make the experience of your readers as the contetn is simpiifed on pages 2 onwards and makes it more manageable to read.

Homepage Excerpts for Layout

Here you have the control on how you would like your layout, you may choose to have full homepage using full posts or have the option to have 50% split between full and excerpt posts on you homepage, you have complete control over this.

Notice that you can also select if the plugin should extract the custom excerpt from Wordpress (the one that you insert manually when writing an entry) or if it should automatically grab the first X words of each post, where X is a number that can be specified on the options panel.

Installation

Download and unzip the plugin
Uploade the file homepage-excerpts.php to your plugin directory. (Usually
located in wp-content/plugins/)
Log into the Wordpress control panel, then go into “Plugins” and activate the
plugin
Still inside the Wordpress control panel go into “options” and then “Homepage Excerpts”
Update the plugin options as appropriate

Click here for my other Recommended WordPress Plugins

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