I have tried for some time to make following: having WordPress installed in a root of host (like example.com) and having content below root (like example.com/page, or example.com/custom-post-type/entry), while having blog posts in special directory (like example.com/blog). This is needed when blog is not main type of content on WordPress powered website, but instead is just one part of a site. Example of usage is having a company website where pages are used for usual static content while there is blog or news section where updates are posted.

At first, this seems easy to achieve. Just change permalink structure on Settings → Permalinks page to something that starts with /blog/ (or whatever subfolder we want to use) as some people (and Codex entry) already suggested.

But there is a problem with this approach: your blog posts will be in your chosen subdirectory but blog’s index and paged pages won’t. This means that you wouldn’t see latest posts by going to blog’s subdirectory (example.com/blog), but instead only by going to front page (example.com).

Solution for this is very easy and I couldn’t believe how I didn’t remember it. I found it on WarriorForum, posted by user Dan Sherman. You simply need to create two empty pages and go to Settings → Reading page and choose those two pages as “Front page” and “Posts page”. Then you go to Settings → Permalinks and choose your new permalink structure.

What is important to remember is to give a name to page that should be chosen for “Posts page” with the same name as you want to name your subdirectory. Also note that for front page you need to either create content as you would for any page, or to use special page template.

Below is a video from WordPress.tv on how to create and setup “Front page” and “Posts page”.

I kind of adopted plugin Cache Images whose original author was infamous Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress. Since I needed this functionality for my own needs, and this (and all similar plugins) was outdated, I rewrote it and send my changes to Matt who in turn gave me rights to update this plugin in wordpress.org SVN repository.

You can now download it from here.

With my new plugin, Gravatar Signup Encouragement, I had a problem with translation of string that is used only on activation.

That string contains default message that is saved in database. No matter what I tried, it would always save original string, not translation.

After asking question on wp-hackers mailing list and exchanging several replies with Otto, I found solution for this. In your function that is used in register_activation_hook, you need to again use function load_plugin_textdomain, even if you loaded it already in init. It should be used before any string.

So if you encounter this problem, you know how to solve it.
Don’t forget to try my plugin mentioned here, Gravatar Signup Encouragement.

Gravatar Signup Encouragement is my first publicly released plugin for WordPress. I got idea to write it after reading comments on post on Weblog Tools Collection titled “Why Is Gravatar Still Not Mainstream”. At that same day I made first version of plugin and posted link to it’s download page as comment on post waiting for responses but comment never appeared.

For last couple of weeks I was doing slow rewriting of plugin while adding new features and finally decided to release it publicly and to add it to WordPress plugin directory. You can now download it from here.