Insert Related Posts from WordPress Plugin for Windows Live Writer

Related Posts for WordPress is a Live Writer plugin that I wrote to allow me to have control over inserting related posts from my WordPress blog directly from within Windows Live Writer.

Although there are plugins available directly for WordPress that allows for this to happen within the WordPress Dashboard, I hate the online editor and use Windows Live Writer exclusively. As such, I wanted to created Related Posts links within the posts without having to apply lots of intelligence around tags, categories etc.

It is quite easy to use and will add directly into the post wherever the cursor is.

Once configured, it can retrieve all the posts from your hosted WordPress blog and allow you to select one or more posts and inserts into the post.

It has the following features:

• Ability to store your blog details and settings
• Encloses the related links in DIV—>UL—>LI html links
• Allows for CSS class labeling of the DIV, UL and LI Links, so that you can control the look and feel of the links
• Gives an un-styled preview of the links to show you at a glance which links have been chosen and will be inserted into the post.
• Allows to insertion of “target=_blank” in the a links to allow the links to be opened in a new window if required.

To see installation and usage details, see below

Read more

How to Make Your WordPress Site Private

For users who like to have a private (or restricted) WordPress site, there are several plugins that can restrict access to only registered users. However, I’ve had to search extensively for a solution that worked well with the current version of WordPress (v2.9.2).

In the end, after doing all the searching and finding information all over the place, the closest i got was to take an existing plugin that used to work with earlier versions and change a couple of things in it.

Because I did not wish to step on anyone’s toes, I’ve detailed two ways of achieving this:

1. By taking the original plugin and making changes to it via the WordPress Dashboard
2. By downloading a modified version of the original plugin and following the original authors instructions using this new script instead of his original one.

Both methods are detailed below.

Read more