Your guide to the WordPress universe
Speaking of killer deals, check out Mojo Themes’ Cyber Bundle with six good looking WordPress themes plus one event management plugin for just $30. There’s also a Magento and Tumblr themes thrown in for good measure! The offer expires on December 9th.
Get it: Mojo Themes’ Cyber Bundle
WooThemes makes some of our favorite WordPress themes (Meta-morphosis) and today they have a doozy! Get 5 themes for the price of 1 theme at just $56 – until the end of today! Get it: Not So Black Friday Special
If you need something a lot more powerful than Better Search, check out Relevanssi (Finish for Relevance). It installs just like any other WP plugin but when you take a look at the control panel, it is truly mind boggling. 
It even has a Google style “do you mean” search suggestion as well as Fuzzy matching so it helps users find results better. Like Better Search you can log your visitors’ searches. You can also exclude certain words from being included.
I have decided to give it a whirl here on this site versus Better Search. Let’s see how it does.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could edit your WordPress site as you browsed the site like a regular visitor? Of course you’ve probably noticed that when you’re logged in as an editor or an admin, you’ll see an “edit” button in the meta information area of your site for posts and pages. The down side to that is that clicking on that link takes you into the WP admin post or page editor.
The next step to being able to access admin features while viewing your published site is by installing admin bar. This gives you access to much of WP’s admin functions with a menu bar at top of the site similar to WordPress.com.
What if you wanted something even more direct that allowed you to much more quickly edit your WP site? This is where Front End Editor comes into play. After installing the plugin, login to your WP admin, and then start browsing the site. Want to change the title of your headline? Simple, just double click on it. Or do you want to edit the entire post? Again, just double click on it. In the place of the static text, it’ll bring up the rich text editor with most of the same functionality you get in WP admin.
It’s super powerful and easy. So far it seems to work in conjunction with Admin Bar, so far so good! Watch a quick screencast of this FrontEnd Editor plugin in action.
Update: I’ve noticed that at least with the “Sight” theme mentioned above, Front End Editor causes some problems with the site logo hyperlink and built in social network features.
Get it: Front End Editor
Have you ever had a visitor to your WP site complain, they couldn’t find what they wanted? Especially when they typed in a keyword into your search field and the search results were not what they were looking for? I’ve actually been looking for a plugin like this, called “Better Search“. It will give you search statistics and a heat map of search terms. Using these stats, you can fine tune your categories and tags to help the search engine do a better job of returning results.
Another choice is using the Google powered WP site search plugin. We’ll take a closer look at that in the future.
While most of us love using WordPress as general purpose content management tool or blog, others have adapted for internal communication or as a knowledge base. Let’s take a quick look at three free WP themes that transform it into something a little different.
P2 – “Twitter-lite”
Want something like a private Twitter system for your company or group without the rest of the world seeing your messages? Check out P2, made by the WordPress peeps (Automattic) themselves. You can use this theme to quickly communicate with people on your team about your status or ask questions.
Quality Control – Case Management
The QC theme turns your WP install into a simple ticketing system to create tickets, assign status, and milestones. Use categories and tags to filter tickets. You can use this as a customer facing system for customer service or an internal bug tracking system. The theme seems to be well supported and maintained.
WikiWP
How about a WordPress theme that lets you create a Wikipedia-like encyclopedia? WikiWP has a very similar look to a real Wiki application with a left thin navigation column and main content area. And yes, there’s a commercial WP theme called WordPressWiki, but why not give WikiWP a try first?
Here’s a simple but clean looking and best of all, free, WP Theme called deStyle. It’s a 2 column design with a main body and right hand side column for widgets. I think it would be perfect for a simple blog and should be easily customizable. It also has an easy to change navigation bar background color switcher. It’s from a new WordPress theme company called ThemeShift.
Get it: deStyle
I’ve been going crazy installing the W3 Total Cache plugin on all my WordPress sites up until a few minutes ago without a hitch. On my 4th site, it returned 3 permission errors which were quickly solved by applying the magical 777 permissions to the folders. The fourth error message that stumped me was “advanced-cache.php is not installed.”
This one is pretty easy to fix. First, download a copy of the W3TC plugin onto your computer. Extract the files to a folder, then upload the file inside the zip file called “advanced-cache.php” to the root of your “wp-content” folder of your site using FTP.
Thanks to A. Fatih Syuhud for the fix.
Did you know that you can preview an installed WP theme without having to install a new plugin?
This would be useful if you’re switching over a WP site to a theme that’s a work in progress but didn’t want public visitors to see it yet.
Simple add this to the end of your published site’s URL:
?preview=1&template=twentyten&stylesheet=twentyten
For example, this site with the Twenty Ten theme would be:
http://wpverse.com/?preview=1&template=twentyten&stylesheet=twentyten
Simply replace the name of your theme in the example after both template and stylesheet equal (=) signs. What if you’re not sure what the exact theme name is – for example if the theme name has spaces in it? To find out, go to the “Manage Themes” page, then hover your mouse over the “Activate” button of the theme you want to try out. In the bottom status bar of your browser, you’ll see the theme name that you’ll want to use.
This maybe the longest plugin name I’ve seen in a while. It’s called “Related Ways to Take Action” (RWTA). This will interest you if your site is about social and philanthropic issues. It’s a plugin that adds relevant links to non-profit organizations based on your content to the bottom of your post or page.
According to the developer’s info page, the plugin will show relevant content from “Change.org, GlobalGiving.com, Idealist.org, DonorsChoose.org, Kiva, Care2 and over twenty other social change websites.”
For example, if you’re talking about about “micro finance” on your blog post, then this plugin, RWTA, will add links from Kiva.org. The only thing I’ve noticed is that it takes 1 or 2 refreshes of a page for the plugin to find truly relevant content.
Get it: Related Ways to Take Action