Urban Giraffe

CodeSniffer is a PEAR package that checks PHP code for violations of coding standards. According to the developers:

It is an essential development tool that ensures your code remains clean and consistent. It can also help prevent some common semantic errors made by developers.

While it won't make you bug-free, it is another tool to help you produce better quality code, and is very useful when working with a team of developers. CodeSniffer thoughtfully comes with several standards to verify code against the PEAR, Zend, and Squiz coding standards. What follows is a CodeSniffer standard that adheres to the WordPress Coding Standard. Hurray for coding violations!

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I realised that I've added a lot of functionality to HeadSpace without actually making any kind of announcement about it. To make up for this this I decided to produce a comparison chart showing HeadSpace in relation to other popular SEO orientated plugins. This is not a chance to poke competitors in the eye but just an erstwhile attempt for me to show exactly what HeadSpace can do and how it stacks up to other plugins. It's also a good excuse to make sure I can tick as many boxes as possible - HeadSpace is now in its fourth year and although development is still going strong, it is easy to get stuck in your own world and not see what is happening outside.

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HeadSpace has had a meta-robots module for some time. This module allows you to set various options on a page-by-page basis that determine how search engines (and other bots) process the data on that page. This is fine in general, but sometimes it's necessary to have a little more control, and to this end I've created a new module that let's you change the follow/nofollow attribute of certain links.

First it's worth explaining what nofollow does. Nofollow is a tag that was invented by Google to allow website owners to prevent a link from affecting it's target site's search ranking - the link is not followed. In effect this gives you some control over how search engines index your site. The tag itself is very simple:

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It would be easy to assume that everyone on the internet speaks English. The majority of software is produced in English simply for the reason that doing so gives it a larger potential audience (or, maybe more appropriately, gives it access into the American market). However, you shouldn't assume this means everyone reads and writes English at the same level, or that non-native speakers wouldn't want software in their own language. There is a world of speakers outside of English and now is the time to tap into them.

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This guide is another in the Inside WordPress series and attempts to show how to produce a translation for an already-prepared theme, plugin, or WordPress itself. Even if you have little PHP or HTML skills you can still contribute to making WordPress a truly international experience by providing localizations for existing themes and plugins.

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