Posts Tagged wordpress
After having to fix a bug in the Wordpress Subdomains plugin so that All in One SEO would work, I decided it would be a good time to install it on my live site and see if there are any other issues I could see. So far it’s been pretty good, but it did raise some further questions about how SEO compatible the plugin is. This is where I need input from other people because I’m no expert on this.
First up is a feature I added last release (0.6.0). It basically kept links to normal Wordpress Pages on the Category or Author Subdomain being browsed. I did this mainly so that the person viewing one of your subdomains doesn’t get thrown back to the main site when they choose one of these pages. I did wonder if this would be seen as duplicate content by search engines and therefore be bad for SEO. Adam Dempsey felt the same, so I posted details of how to turn it off. I’ve made it optional in the next version (0.6.1 – in testing now) where it’s default state is off.
Maybe one solution to this would be to have these pages be set to ‘noindex’ when viewed on a subdomain so that search engines leave them be. I’ve not had a chance to look into how I’d do this yet.
Next up is how to deal with the root page of Category Subdomains. One of the options of the All in One SEO plugin is to set noindex on Categories Archives. This is to combat the problem of duplicate content, however when you turn this on it means that the root page of a Category Subdomain will be marked noindex and wont appear on search engine searches. This should not affect your content as it should all be linked from your main site which will still be indexed. That is except for Pages that you have tied to specific categories.
For this reason the next version will include a new custom field for pages that will have links for them appearing in page lists (widgets, etc) on your main site. I’ve done this with my Projects page which is tied to the Web Development subdomain, but I wanted it to be linked from main page as the Web Development subdomain main page is not indexed.
The question is, is this the best way to do this from an SEO point of view and what if you want your subdomain root pages to appear on the search engine?
I’d also be interested to know people opinions on the how the plugin handles SEO in other ways. What does it do wrong? What could be improved?
I look forward to hearing from you.
WP Subdomains 0.6.1 is in testing on this site and will be released soon.
I fixed the page parent bug easily and put the fix on the last post. I was going to just do a new release yesterday, so those not brave enough to fix the bug themselves could just download a new version. However I got a little carried away with cleaning up crappy code, adding some comments and fixing a few other issues that I’m now having to test it fully again.
I’ve deicided to release this as a very quick 0.5.2 in the next few days. If you need the page parent bug fixed before that and don’t want to change the PHP yourself then send me a message and I’ll send you a replacement php file.
After too long a wait I’m finally releasing WP Subdomains 0.5.1.
New Features:
- Better configuration, still more improvements to come
- Redirect old URLs to new subdomains
- Ability for a page to override a category’s page filter (where it only shows pages tied to it)
Bug Fixes:
- Theme picker works in wordpress 2.7
- Sub pages now follow the options set on their parents (subdomain or category tie)
- Page subdomains work with short permalinks
You can download the archive here.
Please let me know if you spot any problems. Either post a comment, use the contact form, or add it as a bug on launchpad.
Future Plans:
- Author subdomains. e.g. http://alex.mydomain.com/ would list all posts by author ‘alex’
- Category base removal on subdomains. e.g. http://travel.mydomain.com/category/china would become http://travel.mydomain.com/china
- Check compatibility with SEO All In One plugin
- Create filter for google sitemaps that only gives google an XML file for the subdomain it’s querying
All other suggestions are warmly welcomed. Two of the above on my todo list came from users.
Hopefully with the New Year Holiday coming up I should be able to get another release out in the next week or so. I want to get the Google Sitemaps and Author subdomains in for sure.
Related Pages:
UPDATE: typically enough, within moments of release I found a bug. You can’t seem to pick a page that is configured as a subdomain or tied to a category to be a parent to another page. You can get around it, just unconfigure it, add it as the parent and then reconfigure it and all works well. It just wont show in the drop down box when picking a parent. Needless to say this will be the first thing I’ll be fixing.
FIX: Ok, found a fix already. Too late to do another release tonight so will do it tomorrow. However, it’s very easy should you wish to do it yourself. Find the function “csd_filter_pages” in the filters.php file. At the top of the function add the line “if (!is_admin()) {” then at the bottom just above “return $pages;” add the line “}”. Done all should work properly.
Just upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.7 after checking WP Subdomains worked ok in 2.6.x. So far everything seems to be ok which makes a release of 0.5.1 tomorrow look good.
I like what they’ve done with the Admin area in 2.7. It seems a lot cleaner and more professional. Also it’s nice having the admin links down the left hand side rather than running across the page. Before it could get quite cramped when you had a lot of plugins installed.
I’ve not forgotten it, just been pretty busy with work the last few weeks. Was going to spend the weekend on it but a couple of drinks with some collegues in Beijing on Friday turned into an all nighter and Saturday was a total write off. I got some done today but my brain is still not quite up to speed so it was slow going.
Seems I’m not as young as I thought I was 
Will be back on it full speed this week and should have a new release by the weekend if not earlier. Wont be too many new features mostly a bunch of bug fixes and improved configuration pages.
There has been a delay to the latest release as this last week was a lot busier than I expected. Now it’s over and all exams are marked hopefully next week will be less hectic and I’ll get a chance to finish off the changes I’m working on and release the first version of the Category Subdomains plugin under the new name WP Subdomains. It will be released as version 0.5.1.
Current changes are:
- clean up to settings pages.
- redirecting old urls to subdomains
- bug fixes
- working on being able to remove “category” from category urls
- few other bits
Will post here as soon as it’s released.
Category Subdomains is a Wordpress plugin that lets you setup subdomains on your site that point to Categories or Pages on your wordpress install. This site is using the plugin. The main page shows all posts, however my travel subdomain shows only the posts in my Travel category and it’s children.
This plugin was first written as Subster Rejunevation by Dax Herrera. It was subsequently updated to work with more recent versions or wordpress by Adam Dempsey and Gilad Gafni. I have continued the version numbering on from where the last developer left off.
I originally just wanted to add a few features that I wanted for my site. However it turned out that to do what I wanted it would be easier to pretty much rewrite most of the plugin. I added some classes that store a lot of information about the categories and pages which are to be subdomains. This means a lot of repetitive code code be removed from the main plugin. This has made the code base much easier to look at and navigate.
Now most people wont care about that and just want to know what’s changed:
1. Added category option to show only pages tied to the category
2. If not in a subdomain only non-tied pages are shown
3. Site widget, sidebar widget which lists the category subdomains, good for navigation
4. Categories widget, sidebar widget with a list of categories in the current subdomain. If not in a subdomain will show like normal categories widget.
Also a few bug fixes where links were pointing to the wrong subdomains.
The plugin still automatically turns your categories into subdomains. Next thing I’ll change is to remove that so that you configure each one you want to be a subdomain. I’ve also got some other ideas i want to work through and get things like Calendar and Recent Posts only showing the relevant posts when you’re in a subdomain.
Plugin is available here: Category Subdomains 0.4.5
If you’ve used a past version of this plugin and try this one to find things don’t work quite as you expected then please let me know. Also if you’re new to this plugin and need help or want to report a bug then also just let me know.
Well if anyone is actually reading this site yet they might notice that it breaks occasionally.
I’ve never been entirely happy with the way wordpress worked until I discovered a plugin called Subster, this lets you configure a wordpress category as a subdomain. Not only that but you can then specify a different theme for that subdomain. For instance I have a lot of travel posts that I wanted to appear on travel.casualgenius.com using this plugin I can.
However there were a few problems, the different theme part didn’t really work, and some things I wanted that it didn’t provide. So I’m setting about writing the plugin to do what I want. This includes filtering page lists and providing extra widgets.
It’s still work in progress, hence the site going a bit funny sometimes, but once it’s done I’ll post the latest version here. I’ll also try and track down the latest author, it seems the plugin is like an unwanted child and has been through about 4 authors so far, and see if he’s still developing it or not.
If anyone spots this and is interested in the plugin feel free to quiz me about it.
