From the guys who brought you the well known and popular ThemeForest is a new social code snippet system called Snipplr and it’s filled with quite a few WordPress code snippets.
Free WordPress Help
Speaking of needing help with WordPress, do you need help customizing a theme, speeding up your site, or finding a good plugin? Ask me for free by clicking on the vertical red “Live Help” button on the left side. If I am online and available, I’ll try to answer your WordPress related question.
WordPress plugin of the week – Sociable
Update: I don’t recommend this plugin anymore due to the poor customer service outlined here.
Here are three alternatives for your WordPress social sharing plugin needs that are free and work well.
Original article follows:
This week’s WP Plugin spotlight belongs to Sociable. It’s an amazing way to allow your visitors to publicize or bookmark page(s) on your site using Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, etc. The installation is no brainer from the WP self hosted admin panel, just go to Plugins and Search for “Sociable” and select the “Sociable for WP 3.0”. Note there are several choices, but this is the one that works best for me.
Once it’s activated, all your pages and posts will have a bunch of little social network app icons at the bottom (like this post) where visitors can recommend or bookmark your pages easily. Sociable is another “must have” WordPress plugin in my book.
WordPress consulting is red hot
You know being a WordPress designer or consultant is red hot when you run across a page like this at WPHelpCenter.com. Wow, $100 bucks an hour sound good? Yikes, the starter package called “Silver” is $550/month for 4 hours of support (2 incidents x 2 hours each). Yes, that includes backups of your themes, plugins, and database but that’s still pricey in my humble opinion. If you really need help quickly, jump up to the “Gold” plan for $1,050/month and you can get a response from them in 9 hours (!). I am curious to see what the market thinks!
Yet another way to quickly post content with new Tumblr-like feature
I’d like to think of myself as fairly web savy. But today I learned something new – a web app called Tumblr. Yes, it’s yet another social media platform to allow you to post updates and more about your life. For whatever reason it’s gotten a popular following and yes their website looks web 2ish. What’s the WordPress tie-in? Woothemes and Konobi studios are now offering WordPress users a way to update their WP site using a system similar to Tumblr.
Easy ways to update your WordPress site
Sometimes I don’t feel like updating my blog (like this site) with new content because I have to login to my WordPress dashboard and click a bunch of stuff. There are a bunch of ways to avoid having to do that including WordPress’ new iPad app, 3rd party services like Posterous, or a web browser plugin.
One of my favorite ways to do that is using a web browser plugin called “ScribeFire.” It’s a plugin for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari that adds a button the bottom of your browser. Simply click on it to bring up the writing screen, start typing, and click on “Publish”. Of course you’ll have to first set it up by entering your WordPress URL and credentials before hand. But once that’s done, you’ll have almost instant access to adding content to your WordPress blog when you see an interesting article on the web! There’s a full formatting tool bar with bold, italics, and inserting links. It even has a draft save mode so you can come back later and finish off that long post you’ve been putting off!
Get it: ScribeFire
Theme of the Week: Meta- Morphosis
This week’s WordPress theme is Meta-Morphosis by WooThemes . It’s a great theme for building a content rich blog or magazine. It’s a 2 column design with a customizable footer widget area. I love the home page which shows on the left column, a main feature content area with other highlights below it and on the right column are blog/news posts. When you drill down to post or page, the main content area appears on the left and comments area is on the right column. I am using Metamorphis for my client: FitnessByMaggie.com
It has WooThemes’ very easy to use and customizable admin control panel. I would rate customization ease-of-use for this theme as fairly straightforward either through the WooTheme control panel or editing the style sheet. Best of all this theme is free!.
Why I adore WordPress
With tons of Content Management Systems (CMS) and blogging platforms, you’d be hard pressed to get a better deal or bang for the buck than using WordPress. I heart WordPress because…
1.) WP is free! The only catch is that if you want to host your own custom domain, you’d have to pay for web hosting. WordPress is open source, so you can install it many times over. But if you want to just use it for your own blog, grab a free WordPress site to try out at WordPress.com!
2.) WP is extensible! While WordPress has grown into a mature product it still lacks some basic functionality. Luckily the developers thought of this and added a flexible plugin system to do almost anything you can imagine! You can even get plugins for Firefox to allow copy/paste while you’re browsing other webites and post them into your WP site almost auto-magically.
3.) WP is easy to use! I’ve built over a dozen WordPress sites for clients and most of them are blown away when they see how easy it is to add or edit content. The fact that the presentation (theme/look & feel) are separate from the content makes a world of difference for my clients who want to edit their own site and not accidentally damage anything in the process.
WordPress is not a 100% perfect product but it’s getting there every major release!
Web Hosting Options for WordPress
People often ask me, “where should I host my WordPress site?” Well, two web hosting providers that I use everyday for myself and my clients are DreamHost and Media Temple. DreamHost is the cheaper of the two – starting at $10/month. It’s great if you have small to medium websites to host and I really like their easy to use one click WordPress installer.
MediaTemple’s grid service is a bit more high end and double the cost at $20/month but if you’re planning on growing your site to have a decent amount of traffic or have a small to medium business website, I’d suggest MediaTemple (or affectionately known as MT)’s Grid Service. Their one click WP installer is a little quirky that you have to delete the “html” folder via FTP first before you can install WP.
On a personal note, I’ve been able to setup a brand new registered domain with WordPress running in less than one hour, using GoDaddy for domain registration and either DH or MT for hosting!
Some people have asked me about HostGator and after using them for several projects I am not a big fan of the way they organize the sub-domains or sub-accounts. It makes installation and previewing WordPress sites into a pain in the butt task.
Top 3 WordPress plugins
So, where do I start in my new WPVerse site? How about professing my deep admiration for the WordPress platform and it’s developers? Ok, now that’s done, how about a list of my top 3 plugins for WordPress? These are absolute must haves if you’re serious about working with WordPress as either a blog or content management system
Enable Media Replace
This one is a no-brainer to install. Ever want to overwrite an image in the Media Library? Believe it or not, the standard WordPress installation won’t let you do that easily. You have to delete the image and re-upload the image! The Enable Media Replace plugin gives you a simple text link to overwrite the existing file in the Edit view.
Google Analyticator
How would I know if anyone is actually visiting my site? Well thanks to Google’s free Analytics web application I can tell exactly how many visitors I have and where they are coming from. Simply signup for Google Analytics account, then grab the assigned ID code, and paste it into the Google Analyticator plugin. You’ll also get a WP admin dashboard widget to get a quick overview of traffic coming to your site!
Contact Form 7
The difference a “pro” webmaster and….ehrem amateur, is if you publish your email address for the contact page on your WordPress site. Don’t do it! You’ll soon get added to a spam list. Instead use Contact Form 7 plugin to create a quick and easy to use Contact Form to your WP site. You can customize the fields, direct it to email address(es), and even add a file attachment upload form! Cool huh?
Note that many of these plugins are donation-ware, so please donate if you use it! Even a few $ goes a long way!
Get it: Enable Media Replace plugin | Google Analyticator plugin | Contact Form 7 plugin