Visual WordPress Sitemap theme

Slickmapper sitemap pages wordpress themeIf you’re building a WordPress site with over 20 pages, in addition to the “bulk post creator” plugin we mentioned a few days ago, you might want to try out the Slick Mapper WordPress theme by Luke McDonald. This will allow you to get the landscape overview of how pages fit within the site and help you map out navigation bar issues more effectively. This is known as part of the information architecture portion of User Experience (UX) jargon these days.

Once it’s activated, Luke’s sitemap theme will generate a visual site map that you can see at the web site URL just like your home page. Site maps are normally often seen in Visio or other drawing program. The beauty of this theme is that the theme generates a site map using the pages saved into WordPress. The theme will structure the pages into parent and child hierarchy. Just make sure your pages are published – not saved in draft mode.

There are quite a few options available to customize such as the box background and border colors and logo upload.

If you want to keep your current theme running, simply use the old theme preview trick by adding this line of text to the end of your base URL like this:

?preview=1&template=thelukemcdonald-slickmapper-bb1ebf4&stylesheet=thelukemcdonald-slickmapper-bb1ebf4

So if your site is was domain.com, then it would look like this:

http://domain.com/?preview=1&template=thelukemcdonald-slickmapper-bb1ebf4&stylesheet=thelukemcdonald-slickmapper-bb1ebf4

The current info page for SlickMapper at ThemeGarden is down so check out the GitHub page for the download: SlickMapper

Comprehensive set of free CMS plugins

WNET a PBS station in New York uses WordPress to power their website. Now in conjunction with their developers, Tierra Innovation, they’re giving back to the WordPress community a set of unique WordPress plugins that extend its CMS functionality. Here’s a quick summary of the available plugins:

Ajax Report Comments allows users to report inappropriate comments to the administrators.

Audio Playlist manager extends the MP3 play capability of the built-in media gallery.

Billboard Manager is a JQuery-like slider or gallery. You can give it images or videos to cycle through along with unique hyperlinks for each one.

Extend KSES allows your WordPress editor to accept currently disallowed HTML tags like embed or iframe.

Facebook iLike allows your users to like your pages within your WordPress site along with customization options.

Smart Category Ordering allows you to resort your categories at both the parent and children level. This is useful if your theme automatically shows themes on a sub-navigation bar.

WPDB Profiling lets you profile your SQL database. It’s useful to track down errant plugins that might be slowing down your website.

Get it all: Tierra Innovation