Long ago, back when WordPress 2.0 was released, the concept of author/user roles was introduced to the WordPress community.  The problem I’ve always had is that these roles are pre-defined, meaning I can’t let a contributor upload photos, etc.

If you run a multi-author weblog, you may be interested in a WordPress plugin called the Role Manager plugin.  With this plugin, you can control what each role can and cannot do!

Yesterday I got the heads up that I was tagged in a recent post by John Lamansky of The WordPress Expert.  I normally don’t partcipate in these types of “blog games”, but after reading John’s post, I really think it is a great idea and allows us to spotlight a few WordPress plugins that are underrated or somewhat unknown.

John choose to highlight the following 3 underrated plugins in his post (click over for a description):

1. Broken Link Checker
2. WP-Project
3. WP SEO Master

Here are 3 plugins I would like to add to the list that I think are useful, yet underrated:

1. Blog Metrics – This is a wonderful plugin by Joost De Valk that was designed for multi-author blogs like this one.   It tracks all sorts of unusual analytics by individual authors that I find extremely helpful.
2. Digg This – I think this plugin used to be fairly well known, but I don’t see it on many blogs anymore.   This plugin does nothing normally, but when it recognizes that a post has been Dugg, it will create a digg-style button and display it within the post to help encourage people to Digg your post.   They can Digg the post without leaving your website!
3. Math Comment Spam Protection – It adds an extra step for people leaving comment, but it stops spam cold in its tracks.  I use this on many of my blogs and haven’t really had any spam troubles since.

Hopefully some of you will find a use for some of these plugins.

I suppose now I should continue this by tagging three more people.  How about Michael at WPCandy, Leland of ThemeLab, and Jeff of Jeffro2pt0.  If you haven’t been tagged yet, but would like to participate, feel free to do so on your own blogs to help highlight some relatively unknown plugins.

Here are some great WordPress-related posts I’ve enjoyed over the past week:

• Track WordPress 2.6 Progress – Quick Online Tips gives some suggestions on how to keep up with the progress of WordPress 2.6.
• How to Create a Dynamic Sidebar – This is something we’ve covered on a couple different occasions here on this site, but I wanted to point out this post because I think Richard does a great job of explaining how to tell WordPress what to display on each page.
• Project M Finally Announced – Justin Tadlock finally announced the details of his Project M. It appears it is a theme club of sorts, but with a twist. Click over to get the details.
• Do It Yourself WordPress Theme – Hayes Potter has come up with an interesting idea by releasing a WordPress theme. Simply build your stylesheet and you are done.
• WordPress Tricks – Stylized Web offers some useful PHP code snippets for WordPress.
• Making Authors Template Page – Also from Justin Tadlock, this post does a great job detailing how to make a WordPress authors template page.
• Displaying Related Categories and Content in WordPress – Darren Hoyt shares the code he used to make this feature in his popular Mimbo Pro theme.

If you run a multi-author blog and you want to attract additional authors, one thing you can do is improve how you promote your authors on your website. A lot of WordPress blogs choose to do this by creating an author page for each author or providing a link to the author’s website, but now there is now another option for WordPress blogs.

Color Light Studio recently released a new WordPress plugin called Author Exposed, which will allow readers to view the author’s Gravatar and information from a pop-up box using Javascript.

Here is a sample of how it looks:

In order to use this plugin, all you need to do is activate it and place a small code snippet in your loop where you want the author’s information to display:

<?php if (function_exists('author_exposed')){author_exposed();} ?>

Once you’ve placed the code into your theme, you should be all set!
[via WP Themes Plugin]

This guest post was written by John of The WordPress Expert, where he writes about WordPress tips, services, themes, plugins, and more.  If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Say you have an author page on your WordPress blog; but what happens when you find that your author archive URL looks like this?

http://example.com/author/Joe%20Smith/

Of course, you’d probably want to change your name to a more “URL-friendly” format like this:

http://example.com/author/joe-smith/

How do you do it?

Well, WordPress itself doesn’t let you (probably because the URL is intended to be a permalink), but it can still be accomplished through a simple database modification.

Here’s how. This is assuming your hosting account is setup with phpMyAdmin. (If you don’t have database editing experience, you might want to make a database backup just in case.)

1. Go to your hosting account’s cPanel and click on the “phpMyAdmin” icon. If you don’t see it, look for a “MySQL Databases” icon, click it, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and then click the phpMyAdmin link.
2. Select your WordPress database from the menu on the left.
3. Select the wp_users table, and then click the “Browse” tab.
4. Locate the row that has your username in the user_login column. Click the Edit button (the pencil icon) on that row.
5. Enter the desired URL version of your name into the user_nicename field.
6. Click “Go” to save your changes.

And that’s it! Your author archive will now show up at your new URL.