On Wednesday I merged both my Tech blog and AIS blog on this domain into one. Mainly because the AIS one just wasn't getting many updates to it and I chat about web development and business topics on my Tech blog anyway which are probably of interest to both blogs anyhow.

The merge itself wasn't too hard however to ensure everything was done correctly and that I didn't affect the live site too much, I did the merge offline on my own computer instead of on the live server. I could have installed WordPress in a directory and done the same so if you do every need to try this out and don't want to install a web server then you can do that too.

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I've been improving my old Custom Page Title Attributes plugin, and have effectively added to the flexibility this can give by adding an additional text field to allow you to easily change the anchor text (menu label) of the page in the wp_list_pages() output. Okay, that sounded quite technical…!

Basically (I say that word far too much!), by default WordPress offers you two text fields for a static Page (note the capital P for a WordPress Page) – Title and Post. Ignore Post, we know what that does. The Title field supplies content for the page title (wp_title()), page header (the_title()), the anchor text in the menu (menu label) and the title attribute of the page link in the menu (these last two are generated by wp_list_pages()). That's the same content 4 times, and not always appropriate!

Let's look at WordPress for a CMS point of view. We have the front page. We want a nice long 75 character page title to help with our SEO. We've got the All in One SEO pack or the SEO Title tag plugins for that job – great! Okay, we want a slightly shorter but just as meaty header. However we only have about 100 pixels for the menu label and let's face it 'Home' is usually the best choice. However, we don't want 'Home' as the header. So up until now, to combat this, I've removed the_title() from theme files and used the title field for the menu label and hardcoded the title into the content area (ie. put the title into a h2 within the content field).

That's fine for me, and anyone who knows what a h2 is, but let's face it, most clients don't and it's really not a good idea to try and explain them! So to get around this I figured that I could just use the same idea for replacing the anchor text as I already had for the title attribute, a couple of hours (and fun and games with pattern matching) later, I managed to get the new plugin working.

So, without further ado or rambling from me, feel free to go grab my latest plugin – Page Menu Editor and let me know what you think

Yep, still busy here, but getting through it all slowly. In the mean time any WordPress users out there may be interested in my latest posts for BloggingTips.com. I decided that I wanted to see how the new Gallery feature worked in WordPress, along with displaying the EXIF data of the photo(s) uploaded, in part because it's useful to know, and also because I'm setting up my own gallery of favourite shots with a bit more info on each. A bit of a photoblog but not just the typical 1 photo a day, more a selection of galleries and posts mainly on photography and various events with good photo opportunities.

Anyway, since version WordPress 2.5 was released, a gallery feature has been available, but the WordPress Codex doesn't really go into detail about how to use it, so after a fair bit of research and playing, I've created my own how to posts on using it. I hope it's perhaps of use or interest to others too.

• WordPress Gallery and EXIF
• Theming Your WordPress Gallery
• Mixing Gallery and Blog Posts

Just a quick post to let you know that I've upgraded both of my WordPress Plugins today to make them fit in with the new look of the WordPress 2.5 admin panel.

What Others Are Saying has had the admin page redone, whilst the Page Link Title Attributes plugin has been altered to fit in with the collapsing options in the Add/Edit Page page and also it only appears for Pages and not Posts.

There's no security updates, just the way they look have been altered.

I've just noticed a further flaw in the Show Top Commentators Plugin (original by Nate Sanden) where despite forming the list by author email instead of name, the URL was still being retrieved using the author name. I've now fixed this as well and have uploaded the new version of the plugin. Anyone using this is recommended to upgrade to the latest version. Sorry I didn't spot this sooner!

Download the upgraded Top Commentators plugin.