Plugins – Page 3

April 13, 2011June 2, 2011

Plugin of the Week: Sharedaddy plugin

A few weeks ago we looked at Automattic’s Jetpack plugin which adds a plethora of new features for WordPress. One of the more useful plugins incliuded in this swiss army knife of plugins is the Sharedaddy plugin which adds “share” buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and others onto your WordPress site. Did you know you can get Shareaddy as a standalone plugin too?

Once you install the Sharedaddy plugin (alone or as part of Jetpack), you’ll need to configure which types of sharing you’ll want to show on your WordPress site. You have your choice of Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter, Email, Digg, Reddit, and Print services.

Here’s where our (two) tips/tricks comes in:
You’ll notice two areas below where you can drag the type of sharing services you want to enable. If you drag the sharing service icons to the left, they’ll be shown in order exactly as you see on the screen. If you drag the icons over to the right, the services will be hidden under a main “Share+” button.

This part might be confusing for users so here’s a quick diagram. You can see the results of this on the bottom of this actual post.

If you’re an advanced user looking to customize the plugin, we converted Sharedaddy into a shortcode plugin for use in one of our client’s custom themes and it has worked well so far. We were able to use CSS to add a colored background and make alignment modifications without much problems.

We were previously fans of the Sociable plugin but with the total lack of paid support provided by WPMU (Inscub) and the developer, we have moved on to Sharedaddy. It is probably the best out of the box solution out there for easy content sharing on your WordPress site.

Update plus 2nd tip: The biggest issue we ran into is that once the plugin is installed and activated, it doesn’t automatically turn on a set of default sharing buttons. So if you just activate it, you still need to define the social networks you want to show up.

We can see a situation where a user may just activate the plugin and forget to actually add popular networks like Facebook and Twitter. So our second tip, is that if you’re moving your site to another server, don’t forget to check and add the services manually otherwise you won’t notice they’re not there until you’re reading your published pages. Yes, we learned this the hardway! Also this would most likely apply to the version of Sharedaddy bundled with Jetpack.

Get it: Sharedaddy plugin

March 25, 2011June 1, 2011

Review: OnSwipe plugin/theme for iPad

A few days ago we mentioned that OnSwipe released their plugin/theme combo to easily make an iPad friendly version of your WordPress site. We took a look at it today and we’ll fill in some of the blanks that aren’t obvious until you actually try it and look around the UI. Basically this plugin will almost “auto-magically” convert your existing WordPress site into an iPad friendly site.

Still confused to what this will do for you? If you’re using a modern WordPress theme, this plugin will automatically “convert” your WP site into something that looks like it’s custom-made for the iPad. People visiting your website on a regular desktop/laptop browser will continue to see the regular WordPress theme and people on an iPad (it doesn’t work on iPhone yet) should see a special version of the site.

Let’s walk through a typical installation. For this example, we’ll use a test site for one of my clients, “Beautiful Day Photography.” I am currently converting her site from Flash to WordPress (yay!). On this project for now I am currently using the Graphpaper Press theme Modularity.

So once you’ve downloaded, installed, and activated the OnSwipe plugin, you’ll go to Appearance and select the OnSwipe options. You’ll see a control panel like this:

We tried to upload a transparent PNG logo but it didn’t like it until resized it exactly to 200×200. You can choose which image to display on the home (“launch”) page. You can also select from a set of non-standard web headline fonts and a skin background color. There are no other options on the backend other than this panel. One thing we noticed is that there isn’t a way to specify an iOS home page bookmark/launch icon in this interface.

So what will your visitors see? Your custom logo will appear on the splash page of the site when a visitor goes to the site on an iPad. The user will have to swipe their finger right to left to “open” the page.

Next they’ll see a page like this:

As you can see this plugin was able to take the home page content using the Graph Paper Press theme and reformat it automatically for the iPad’s screen size. It even displayed the NextGen photo gallery on inner pages as well. Unfortunately there’s no swiping support built into NextGen gallery plugin yet so the experience isn’t seamless as it could be.

One of the things we noticed is that for now OnSwipe plugin isn’t going to do anything for iPhone 4 Safari or Android web browsers yet. We’re surprised that this plugin doesn’t support iPhone Safari since it’s essentially the same thing as an iPad.

If you’re looking to set up a quick and easy iPad experience for your WordPress site, you can’t beat OnSwipe and best of all it’s now free. If you’re site happens to be on WordPress.com, you’ll notice that Automattic has already added this plugin for you.

Get it: OnSwipe theme/plugin

Update: Here’s a quick preview plus video of the newest version of OnSwipe coming in late June!

March 15, 2011

Quick Tip: changing old permalinks to new format while keeping the old URLs working

Let’s look at two plugins to help when your WordPress site URLs “go bad.”

One of the things that people sometimes forget or neglect to change in a new WordPress settings is the permalink settings. Using the permalinks settings you can generate search engine friendly URLs. The default WordPress setting is a little obscure with post and page ID tag numbers. Despite what the name says, permalinks aren’t so permanent if you decide to switch URL settings, you’ll get in trouble with missing page errors.

So if you’ve already published a lot of posts with the default settings, and have decided to switch to a more search engine friendly format, check out Dean’s Permalink Migration plugin to help the old URLs keep working while using a more SEO friendly URL structure.

Here’s also another plugin called Redirection that will “manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have.” Sounds good right? Well on one of our WordPress sites, it caused the home page to be “permanently” mapped to a page called “home” page even after we turned it off in Settings -> Reading. The solution? Either de-activate the plugin or read this workaround at WP Optimization so you can keep plugin active for other things.

Bonus: A way to avoid having broken links during any future permalink change is to install something like le petite URL, and always publish links using that plugin’s abbreviated (shortened) links, that way you links should work regardless of permalink settings.

March 12, 2011

Taxonomy Drill-Down plugin – Plugin of the Week

Here’s an excellent WordPress plugin for sites that have a lot of categories and tags for posts. You can use Taxonomy Drill-Down to either a widget on the sidebar which displays a faceted search box. The widget shows plus and minus signs for categories/tags, allow your visitor to drill down to a filtered set of posts matching their criteria.

It even supports the Simple Taxonomies plugin (similar to post types) so you can do even more fancy things.

You can even use the plugin to insert code snippet directly into your theme template to show it anywhere on your WordPress site.

Based on our experiences, here are some tips: before you install this into a live WordPress site, install this into a test WP site where you have a recent copy of your content imported. Once you actually test out this plugin yourself, it will expose any deficiencies in the way you’ve set up categories and tags. In our case it showed we went a little overboard setting up categories on some of our sites. The plugin also automatically loads new matching posts on the fly so there’s a quick transition that jumps the user to a new page so the widget disappears below the fold making it somewhat jolting, so you may want to have this widget near the top of the page so the user doesn’t wonder what just happened when they use it.

You can use this Taxonomy Drill Down plugin in combination with an improved search plugin like Relevanssi to help your visitors find the content they’re looking for. After all, if you have a ton of useful content you should make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for.

Get it: Taxonomy Drill-Down plugin

March 10, 2011June 3, 2011

New WordPress All-in-One Plugin JetPack: Our Review

Well, it’s only been about 8 hours since Automattic released an arsenal of all-in-one WordPress plugins called Jetpack. After trying them out for the past few hours, we’ve arrived at this conclusion: If you add these to existing live sites, you may run into some compatibility issues with existing plugins.

Example #1: On one of our sites running Platform Pro theme, the sidebar disappeared entirely. We had to delete the cache in WP Super Cache to get the sidebar back.

Example #2: We also had one site running the popular Sociable for WP 3.0 plugin, which seemed to cause problems with the ShareDaddy module (for obvious reasons) with the end result of missing icons. In the end, we turned off Jetpack on all our sites until we know things are ironed out.

Our Conclusion
It’s interesting that Matt & company have chosen to go the “shotgun” approach route to extending WordPress’ functionality right after the 3.1 release. Some of the plugins aren’t new to the community – for example “After the Deadline” has been around in stand-alone form for a while. We’re not surprised that when someone “mixes” (installs) a lot of new functionality into an existing WordPress installation, there are some hiccups, especially if you have other plugins running. I am sure the WordPress crew tested it as much as possible, but there’s nothing like code in the “wild,” as they say.

Update: If you’re using the Sharedaddy module either alone or with Jetpack, be sure to check our tips and tricks for it here…

Update 2: If you’re having problems activating Jetpack – getting an error message connecting with WordPress.com, check out a great debugging thread at WP.org which includes many fixes and workarounds.

March 6, 2011

Quick Tip: How to replace full posts with excerpts on home page

If you have seen a WordPress theme that you’d like to use but don’t like that it shows a full post and want to show only an excerpt? Don’t fret, as modifying the theme to show only excerpts is pretty easy to do.

This assumes that you’ve edited WordPress theme files before and I recommend you have a back up of your theme files that you can easily upload to fix any potential problems but other than that it’s straight forward.

In WordPress admin, open Appearance -> Editor -> and select Main Index (“index.php”).

Then find the code:

php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>

and replace it with:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

Note this code maybe not always be in the index.php file, it may been in a theme specific loop file. If you’re an advanced user, your best bet maybe is to add this to the bottom of your functions.php page via the instructions at WP Recipes.

Bonus – WordPress post excerpt resources:
The second thing you’ll want to do is to install the Better Excerpt plugin that will let you customize the length of your excerpt and replace the […] with your own text plus a hyperlink to the full post.

If you need more information on posts/excerpts, here’s a great post at Rarst.net.

Update: if you want the quick and easy way, check out the Evermore plugin mini review…

March 5, 2011

Site of the Week: WPsnipp.com

If you’re an intermediate WP user, WPsnipp.com by Kevin Chard provides useful WordPress code snippets and shortcodes almost everyday of the week!

Here are some of our favorite ones: Redirect a home page to a random post, show taxonomies as a list on a post or page, and disabling widgets on certain pages!