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5 New WordPress Plugins I Am Finding Helpful & You Might Too!

Chase — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 07:56:33 +0000

I’m always looking for new WordPress plug-ins to help improve the functionality and design of my blogs. Call me nerdy, but one of my favorite things to do is search through the endless WordPress Extend repository and look for and test new WordPress plug-ins. After doing this recently I wanted to bring to your attention 5 new plug-ins that I am testing and using. All 5 of these WordPress plug-ins look very promising and I think you will find that at least 1 of these will be very useful to you.

1. Omniture – Site Catalyst WordPress Plugin

The company I work for uses Omniture for all of it’s web analytics so you can see why something like this could be helpful to me. This plugin ties into your Omniture account to help you track certain Blog type data such as page views, comments etc. As this plugin grows and evolves it will eventually help you turn your enterprise blog into more of a ROI machine as you will be better able to track certain metrics through Omniture.

2. Sketch Bookmarks

One of my favorite blogs is SiteSketch101.com. The webmaster for SiteSketch101.com created this plugin where he uses his designed social bookmarks and created a plugin out of them. You are probably already familiar with the Sociable plugin or Share This plugin. This just gives you a more unique style with your bookmark icons to make your blog look a little sharper.

3. Fixed Social Buttons

This plugin for WordPress places social media icons in a fixed position in the top right hand corner of your blog. I’ve actually thought about doing this before but just didn’t want to put together the CSS to make it happen. Guess I’m lazy. But this plugin will do it automatically. What are the benefits of this? If you want your readers to connect with you on other social media outlets such as Facebook or Twitter, this can be a good stylish way of getting their attention and getting them to click on one of your profiles.

4. WP Footer Ad

Many high revenue blogs such as JohnChow.com use fixed ads at the footer of their blog in order to drive attention to the ads and get more purchases/clicks. This plugin helps you easily add a fixed horizontal banner ad at the bottom footer of your blog. This tactic works for some blogs and doesn’t work for others. Depending on your revenue goals with your blog, this could be one tactic worth testing to see what the results are.

5. WP Careers

Ever thought of turning WordPress into a job board of some kind? The developer of the WP Careers plugin has developed it in such a way that you can turn a WordPress install into a full on Job Board System. Applicants can post resumes and search job opportunities while employers can post career positions and search through applicants.

I hope you find these new WordPress Plugins helpful. All of these are pretty new to the WordPress repository as of me writing this blog post.

The Best & Easiest Way For You To Contribute To WordPress

Chase — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:00:56 +0000

As you are well aware, WordPress is an open source content management system. And it has been the most influential of it’s kind. It is where it is because of the hard work and dedication of thousands across the world. Because of the contributions that have been made from developers, designers, and end users, WordPress has become by far the most powerful blog cms in history.

But there is still work to be done. And you don’t have to be a developer or a designer to contribute. If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can contribute to the WordPress community in a powerful way. Here’s how.

If you have visited the WordPress Plugins directory recently, you would have noticed a new box on the right hand side of every plugin page that looks like this:

This new tool allows you to provide two types of feedback on the plugin for the community. These are:

1. A 1-5 Star Rating on how good you think the plugin is. How easy was it to configure? Did it work well? Was there anything about the plugin you liked? Anything that bothered you? These questions can all go into your rating process to help future downloaders see how good the plugin is before they download it.

2. The new Compability tool. This one is crucial. Previously, WordPress would leave it up to the developer of the plugin to inform us whether or not the plugin worked with the newest version of WordPress. Now we don’t have to take the developers word for it. We can now share with the community whether or not the plugin has worked for us and for what version of WordPress it is compabible with.

The WordPress Community Needs Your Help

I have been contributing feedback in these two areas on every plugin that I am currently using on my WordPress blogs. I am noticing that most of the plugins don’t have any feedback. It appears that the top 5% or so of the most popular plugins have feedback, while the rest don’t.

Setup your free user account at WordPress.org and whenever you go to update a plugin or download a new one, take just a second and provide some feedback to the community. You will help thousands of bloggers, and the good open source deed will find it’s way back to you someday!

The Week in Review Ã¢â‚¬â€œ 10/25/09

Chase — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:41:45 +0000

In the past week I have covered everything from new WordPress plugins to help you with your blog, to a new CRM theme for WordPress that I designed that you can download and start using. In case you missed any of these articles from the past week I have listed them here. I would also like some feedback from you guys on what your needs are so I can tailor my posts this week a little more towards helping you guys. Here is the content from the past week:

12 WordPress Plugins To Help Your Readers Find Your Best Content

Chase — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:52:30 +0000

The great bloggers have the ability to direct you to their best written stuff, no matter what blog post you happen to be reading at the time. This is one of the big keys to their success. You want to be able to inform your new readers of the great content you wrote 6 months ago, or even 3 months ago. There are some handy plugins that can help you with this. Here are 13 that will help your readers find your best content.

1. WP-PageNavi

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/
Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog. This is called ‘pagination’ in the development world. The navigation will direct your readers to older posts. The navigation looks very similar to that of Google’s.

2. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. An example of this is what you see below the bottom of this article.

3. Popularity Contest

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/popularity-contest/
Which of your posts/pages are most popular? Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. You can then use the sidebar widget that comes with this plugin in your sidebar, to show off a certain amount of your most popular blog posts. See my sidebar to the right for an example of this.

4. Multi-level Navigation Plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/multi-level-navigation-plugin/
Adds an SEO friendly, accessible dropdown/flyout/slider menu to your WordPress blog. The plugin produces W3C valid XHTML and CSS. When you have a blog that has lots of pages, this can be super helpful. The drop down nav simply gives you more room to list pages.

5. Redirection

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. You never know how many 404 error pages you have out there. Might as well direct that traffic to some of your good content.

6. Yoast Breadcrumbs

http://yoast.com/wordpress/breadcrumbs/
This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme. Not only does this provide SEO benefits, it is also helpful for readers to find their way to parent pages and categories that list more of what they are reading.

7. Search Everything

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-everything/
Search Everything increases the ability of the default WordPress Search. The plugin will search every tag, category, title, and comment to help your readers find what they are looking for.

8. WP-Sticky

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-sticky/
Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog. What this means is that you can keep a blog post at the top of your ‘loop’ for an exteneded period of time, even above other articles that you write after.

9. Featured Page Widget

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/featured-page-widget/
Allows you to feature pages on your sidebar using an excerpt of the page and a text or image link to the page. You may want to feature a specific page of content that you wrote recently because it carries a certain amount of significance.

10. Category Posts Widget

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/category-posts/
Category Posts Widget is a light widget designed to do one thing and do it well: display the most recent posts from a certain category. For example, you could highlight a specific category every week or so in your sidebar. And with this widget you could display the most recent 3 or so posts from that featured category. Very helpful.

11. Instant Weekly Roundup

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/instant-weekly-roundup/
Instant Weekly Roundup is a free WordPress Plugin which will help you create the weekly or monthly or any span roundups of your blog posts in a few mouse clicks. It will help you to write, order, design and post a roundup post in no time.

12. SEO Smart Links

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/
SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. This will help you link to other articles within your posts on a mass scale.

13 WordPress Plugins To Help You Get More Comments

Chase — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:18:24 +0000

Creating more conversations through blog posts is the holy grail of blogging. Bloggers are constantly trying to find more ways to get their readers to interact with them. And while much of this depends on the quality of your writing, there are some technical things that you can do with WordPress to help you along the way. Here are 13 plugins for WordPress to help you get more comments.

1. Twitter Avatar

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-avatar/
Allows a User to enter their Twitter username when posting a comment on your blog and a link to their Twitter page will appear next to their comment. This plugin will also replace the avatar on the comment with their picture on Twitter, both on the front-end and the Admin of the Blog.

2. Twitoaster Ã¢â‚¬â€œ Twitter Conversations

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitoaster/
Automatically retrieve Twitter Replies to your Blog’s Posts. These Twitter Replies are handled like Posts Comments, using WP built-in comment system. This way you can leverage the conversations on Twitter on your blog.

3. Facebook CommentsTNG

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-commentstng/
Facebook CommentsTNG will pull your comments from imported Facebook Notes back into your blog. Additional features include: Pulling accurate comment time from original Facebook comment, Being able to pull comments from Facebook’s under different languages. Setup your blog’s rss feed to be imported as notes in your Facebook account. Then whenever your friends comment on one of your articles within Facebook those comments will also appear on your blog.

4. Thank Me Later

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/thank-me-later/
Thank Me Later (TML) will automatically send an e-mail to those who leave a comment at your blog. Use this plugin to say ‘Thanks’ to your visitors, and prompt them to further engage with your blog. This will keep your best commentators coming back.

5. Ozh’ Absolute Comments

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ozh-absolute-comments/
A comment manager plugin that lets you instantly reply to comments, either from the original Manage Comments administration page, or from the email notification, without the hassle of visiting the post first. Replying to comments within your blog is critical to keeping the conversation going. This plugin will help you do that faster.

6. WP oySidewiki

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-oysidewiki/
Automatically get all Google Sidewiki comments for each post or page URL and display them as regular comments for your post. As Google Sidewiki gets bigger, this will become an even more important plugin.

7. 140follow

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/140follow/
140follow removes NOFOLLOW from author link if the comment has more than XXX characters. The character count can be adjusted at the admin pannel. So basically, if someone leaves a comment at your desired length, the NOFOLLOW attribute will be added to their link. An incentive for people to leave longer, more insightful comments.

8. CommentTwitter

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/commentwitter/
Commentwitter is a WordPress plugin that gives commenters the option of Tweeting their comment with a link to your post. This is nice for those big Twitter users who like to post on Twitter often. They can kill two birds with one stone when you have this plugin activated.

9. CommentLuv

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/commentluv/
This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit. Show your commentators some love!

10. Comment Notifier

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/comment-notifier/
Comment Notifier lets a blog reader subscribe to comments of a specific post when he or she leaves their own comment. This is critical for keeping the conversation going. Giving people the chance to respond to comments made in reply to their own.

11. wp-AuthorComment

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-authorcomment/
From the authors of wp-Typography comes wp-AuthorComment, allowing you to uniquely style post author’s comments. This way you as the author have your comments stand out, visually displaying your presence in the conversation.

12. BackType Connect

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backtype-connect/
The BackType Connect WordPress plugin finds conversations related to your content and allows you to display the associated comments inline with your own. Existing conversations about your content taking place across the web can now be displayed right on your blog for your visitors to read and respond to. It works on top of your existing WordPress comments, both threaded and non-threaded.

13. Top Commentators Widget

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/top-commentators-widget/
The Top Commentators Widget is a sidebar widget that shows the top commentators in your WP site. This gives your readers a certain feeling of ownership within your blog. They feel that they are being recognized for their large contributions to the site. Very important!

My New Free Ebook: WordPress Insider Tricks

Chase — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:40:42 +0000

After some blood sweat and tears I have finally released my first free ebook. It’s titled WordPress Insider Tricks – Specific Steps For Making Your WordPress Blog Better. It’s completely free to download. More details here. After developing over 300 blogs during the past couple of years, I have decided to share everything I know on the technical side of working with WordPress.

Check it out and give some feedback. If you don’t mind sharing with your friends on Facebook, Twitter etc. that would be great as well. The idea behind the Ebook was to list step by step instructions (37 in total) for making wordpress perform better in the following categories:

SEO
Reader Participation
Social Media Buzz
RSS Improvement
Admin Interface
Analytics
MySQL Performance

Who Is This Ebook For?

Anyone who runs a blog using the open source WordPress content management system and is looking for ways to increase traffic and readership to that blog. This Ebook is not for bloggers who use a different blogging platform other than WordPress. ItÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s also not for bloggers who blog Ã¢â‚¬Å“just for funÃ¢â‚¬Â. These tips are only helpful to the serious blogger. More information on the this free ebook here.

5 Best Choices for WordPress Forum Plugins

Chase — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:29:33 +0000

What if you want a forum on your blog? Well there are plenty of open source forum systems available. But what about integrating your blog cms with your new forum? There are some effective WordPress plugins to help you accomplish this. But choosing the right one is critical. There are many plugins to help you accomplish this, but I found 5 that actually do what they say they do!

1. bbPress – Far & Away The BEST Option

http://bbpress.org/
Pound for pound bbPress is your best option for integrating a full fledged forum into your blog. bbPress has a very simple interface which makes it very popular amongst it’s users. The templates are easy to customize. In fact they are just as easy to customize as WordPress templates. And the plugin actually integrates the forum database with your WordPress database, that way the integration is seamless.

2. Forum Server

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/forum-server/
Forum Server is a plugin for WordPress that is a more advanced and up-to-date plugin of the original WP-Forum plugin. It will integrate with your WordPress Users database table so that users who are registered with your blog will also be registered with the forum. The plugin is a little bit more complex to use than bbPress, but you will find a few different characteristics of this forum that you might like and choose over bbPress.

3. Simple: Press Forum

http://simplepressforum.com/
If you like lots of icons in your forums than you will enjoy this plugin. Again this one is not as easy to use as bbPress. But for those who are accustomed to more traditional looking and functioning forums than this will be a great choice for you. This plugin can too integrate with WordPress user registrations and logins. This forum appears to have the most overall features than any of the other WordPress forum plugins. If it is a more advanced forum you are after, then go with Press Forum.

4. phpBB Recent Topics

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/phpbb-recent-topics/
There may be a situation where it’s best to install your forum with an open source application, separate from the blog entirely. phpBB is by far the most popular and notable of the open source forum apps. This plugin for WordPress called phpBB Recent Topics will allow you to include in your blog (anywhere of your choice) a list of the most recent threads or topics from your phpBB forum! This is the quickest and least painful way of integrating a forum with your blog.

5. Wp2BB

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp2bb/
Wp2BB provides another way for you to integrate your phpBB forum with your WordPress blog. What this plugin does is that it automatically creates new topics in your phpBB forum for every new post that you write in your WordPress blog. It can also coexist with the WordPress comments system or replace it completely. In a nutshell this plugin would increase the conversation in your forum rather than where normally takes place in your blog posts comment threads.

Tip: Use BBPress and the Coda Theme

BBpress has the ability to integrate well with any WordPress theme both pre-built and custom. One theme that BBpress integrates really well with is the Coda theme from WooThemes. This is a premium theme that costs about $70. After you download and install you are literally looking sharp in seconds. Here is a screenshot of what the theme looks like…

The Coda theme contains a wide (960px) width that allows the perfect amount of space for having a BBpress forum. This theme comes with 10 different styles to help you quickly customize the look and feel/color scheme to match your needs. You can click here for more details on this theme.

9 of the Best WordPress Video Plugins

Chase — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:09:20 +0000

When it comes to WordPress plugins the most important thing is that they are updated to work with the most recent version of WordPress. Otherwise you’re stuck depending on a plugin that is not advancing with WordPress. There are tons of video plugins for WordPress that give WordPress all sorts of video type functionality, but finding those that actually worked was a chore! I’ve listed 9 of what I feel are the best video plugins for WordPress right now. Not only do these plugins have awesome features, they also work!

1. Smart YouTube

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-youtube/
A plugin from Vladimir Prelovac that allows you to easily insert YouTube videos and playlists into your blog posts, comments, and RSS feeds.The problem with some of the other WordPress plugins that accomplish this such as the Video Quicktags plugin, is that they don’t embed the video properly which would make it so the video wouldn’t show up on the RSS feed. This plugin takes care of all that for you.

2. Lightview Plus

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightview-plus/
A wordpress plugin which implements lightview of Nick Stakenburg. Lightview does the same as lightbox only with this plugin you can do it with Video from YouTube and Vimeo. Creates that nice hover over the page effect with a video. Look very sharp!

3. Simple Flash Video

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-flash-video/
Has the same Lightbox effect with your video like the Lightview plus, only this time it’s using the popular JW FLV player. This comes in perfect when you are wanting to host your own videos. This plugin ads a very slick look to your blog.

4. Hulu Embed

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hulu-embed/
This plugin makes it extremely easy to add video from Hulu to your WordPress blog All you do is put [hulu:http://www.hulu.com/embed/HoHzWbOm9DB0lMa8oT_AYg] of course putting in the specific url for your video.

5. Daiko’s YouTube Widget

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/daikos-youtube-widget/
I actually find this plugin to be quite useful. It displays a random YouTube video from your selection of videos. You can find so many uses for this. Create a list of 10 or 15 of your favorite videos and they can randomly display in your sidebar. Good stuff!

6. YouTube With Style

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/youtube-with-style/
This is perhaps the plugin that I am most excited about. When you embed youtube videos on your site, instead of using the same old YouTube player skin you have a custom skin that you can brand yourself. The player is very slick and you can place your own logo to show on the top left hand corner.

7. Vodpod Video Gallery

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vodpod-video-gallery/
This plugin is the perfect plugin for creating any kind of Video Gallery where you are wanting to display more than 1 video on a page. Because it uses VodPod services with your free account with them, you can collect multiple videos from multiple locations such as YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion etc. into one gallery displayed in your page/post. Very useful plugin here!

8. DOP Player

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dop-player/
The DOP Player is a very easy to use plugin for WordPress that gives you your own customizable video player for playing all sorts of video types. You can easily through the settings in the admin panel change the colors of the player to fit your blog.

9. ProPlayer

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/proplayer/
Pound for pound probably the best video plugin for WordPress. Just like the YouTube with Style plugin you can have a more custom video look to your videos, even though you are using YouTube embed. You can also use Vimeo, DailyMotion, Google video and many more with this plugin. A must have! This plugin requires Curl. You can read the installation instructions for more detail. I was able to get this plugin working just fine by just installing it on my Dreamhost server.

Is Too Many Plugins A Bad Thing For Your WordPress Blog?

Chase — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:59:37 +0000

One of the many unique advantages that WordPress has over other content management systems is the vast pluign community it has. It continues to grow nearly every single year and it has gotten to the point where there seems to be a plugin for just about everything you can imagine! Plugins are such an advatage obviously because you can add so many various types of functionality to your blog/site with relative ease. But should we depend on 3rd party plugins as much as some of us do? And also, can too many plugins on one WordPress blog be a bad thing?

Should We Depend on 3rd Party Plugins As Much As We Do?

The answer is of course no. A classic example of why is when a plugin comes out, and then stops being supported by it’s original developer for some reason. The right Open Source thing to do would be to pick it back up yourself and “re-support” it and contribute code wherever you can. But this doesn’t always happen! And if you are a end-user, not a programmer, you could end up finding yourself in a tough situation because your plugin no longer works with the most current version of WordPress. There are many plugins that you will feel that you just need, but have some moderation on the plugins that you depend on so that if a plugin goes “unsupported” you won’t be left in a bind.

Can Too Many Plugins On One WordPress Blog Be A Bad Thing?

Yes. Consider the answer to the previous question as one of the reasons why. And the other reason being the number of MySQL queries that are required the more and more you add new plugins. I have worked with many peoples WordPress blogs that are just way too “heavy” and slow to load because of poor plugin management. Deactivate and get rid of the plugins you are not uisng or are going to use! Clean up your WordPress CMS of any wasteful and uneeded materials. That goes for your code as well!

Use Code Over Plugins Whenever Possible!

Obviously if you are a PHP guru you are going to have no problem writing all your own code inside your theme. But many of you are savvy enough to find code hacks or snippets that can get the job done without using a plugin. Let me give you an example. Instead of installing a Link Directory plugin of some kind, learn how to use the wp_blogroll functions with PHP in your theme to build your own Link Directory using WordPress code itself. Many times theres no need to depend on a 3rd Party Plugin for something the WordPress Code can cover on it’s own. Make sense?

A perfect site for beginners is a blog called WPHacks.com which daily displays code on achieving certain functionality through code rather than through plugins. And once you are a little more familiar with WordPress, get yourself introuced to the WordPress Codex. There’s almost nothing you can’t do with all the code documented there.

Login Redirect WordPress Plugin

Chase — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:30:11 +0000

Peter’s WordPress Login Redirect Plugin is a great plugin for redirecting your users once they login to a specific destination of your choice! By default, when a registered subscriber to your blog logins in to his/her account they are automtically taken to their wordpress admin dashboard. What I am finding is that many of my clients do not want this, as they want the logged in user to be redirected to the homepage or a specific welcome page of some sort.

That’s where this plugin comes into play. Download it, place it in your plugins directory, active it from the plugins menu in your admin backend for WordPress then customize your settings for the plugin. You can setup different redirects for specific users and specific role.

The screenshot above shows you what the opions/settings page looks like from the backend of wordpress.Ã‚Â You can see your options. In this case I set it up so that all users with the “Subscriber” role were automatically redirected to the /index.php or front page of my blog upon login!