Category: Plugins

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Creating tabbed content

If you need to have a ton of content to be presented on single page it can be challenging so the reader doesn’t become overwhelmed. Dividing your content into a tabbed module is one possible solution It’s especially helpful if one section of content is going to be really long (tall) and the user may want to jump ahead to a different section. One way to do that would be by putting the content into tabs on a single page.

Some possible use cases are for product reviews which could be broken up into: intro, review, and conclusion. Here’s a quick example – click on tabs!

{tab=Intro}
The product was designed by ACME in 2010. Steve Ive and Johnny Jobs collaborated on this brilliant design.
{tab=Review}
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
{tab=Conclusion}
It’s a great product! Buy it today
{/tabs}

So how do you do this with WordPress? We ran across this plugin called “WordPress Tabs Slides” and it works brilliantly. It’s Ajax driven so it’s almost instantaneous and the user doesn’t feel like they’re being taken onto another page. You use very simple shortcode to mark sections in your content within your post or page and you’re done.

Congrats and thanks to Abdul Ibad for coding a great plugin for the WordPress community.

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Replace your login with an Ajax plugin

Once in a while you run into a WordPress plugin that just blows you away. I think Login with Ajax is one of those.

On the surface it works as a widget that shows a user/password login field on your sidebar area. It will also show a user’s gravatar photo if they’re already logged in along with logout button.

The interesting stuff is the extended functionality with membership-like login role redirection rules, in other words depending on the user’s role it can redirect them to specific pages.

login-with-ajax.jpg

The plugin also supports re-writing the standard welcome email that’s sent to newly registered users. The developers, netweblogic, should get some thanks from the WordPress community for this excellent plugin.

Get it: Login with Ajax

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Envato now offering Paid WordPress plugins

We ran across paid WordPress plugins now at Envato’s Code Canyon.

Some of the more interesting ones are an S3 backup tool, Cufon font custom replacement, an Ajax based WP admin login lightbox, an FAQ manager, and an internal page linker (that maybe come useless with WP 3.1 coming soon).

We’ve noticed that a handful of similar plugins can be acquired for free at WordPress.org’s plugin library.

For example, their mobile phone theme switcher ($25!) definitely has a handful of free and solid alternatives at WordPress.org. Update: The theme switcher includes 8 themes. Compare with WordPress Mobile Pack (free) and draw your own conclusions.

An advantage of buying a plugin would be if you needed almost guaranteed developer support and more detailed documentation.

Skimming through the various plugin support messages, it seems like most of the Code Canyon developers are being responsive to their customers. So if you’re on a mission critical project, this maybe a viable alternative, after all, we get what we pay for.

Get it: Envato Code Canyon WordPress plugins

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What’s in my Plugins folder?

A friend of mine asked me about “must-have” WordPress plugins and I thought what a great way to start a post.

For the quick and dirty answer, here’s a screenshot (click it for a full size). It’s quite amazing that these 20 or so plugins work together  without clobbering each other but that’s a testament to the WordPress development  team and product.

I’ll do a write up about each one later but for now enjoy…

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Make your own shortened URLs with le petite url

You’ve been probably seen those shortened URLs (example: http://goo.gl/8hsrE) on Twitter or Facebook. What’s the big deal about them? With the shorter URL, they allow more of the message to fit inside Twitter’s 140 character limit. People use a URL shortener website services like bit.ly or tinyurl or Google’s goo.gl.

But now if you have a relatively short domain name, you can do the same while keeping your URL. Install the le petite url plugin and it will display an admin widget in your posts and pages with an auto generated shortened URL. The plugin is well written has a fair amount of features and seems to be reliable so far.

Real world example: the plugin generated this shortened URL for this page:

http://wpverse.com/bfeyi

verus the full URL:

http://wpverse.com/2011/01/make-your-own-shortened-urls-with-le-petite-url/

If I was really clever, I would register WPver.se (at a Sweden registrar) and use that as for both my domain and shortener. That would reduce the length of my shortened URL by 3 characters by getting rid of the “com.”

Quick Tip: This plugin includes a widget to display the shortened URL on the sidebar so your visitors don’t have to run the page through a 3rd party URL shortener and it will allow you to keep your domain name branding.

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DIY SEO: Scribe Plugin & Service

What’s the best way to get traffic? It’s the old adage, lots of hard work. Simply build the best and most relevant content on your WordPress site. The second best bet is to use a search engine optimization (plugin) for WordPress that will help you fill out the required fields to get a search engine to properly crawl your site.

The third step is to get some advice and research on the best practices and what relevant keywords to use. Usually hiring an “expert” is going to easily cost you hundreds of dollars. So for many of us, we’d resort first to the Do It Yourself model.

So we were excited when we heard the team that brought us StudioPress and the Genesis theme framework recently introduced Scribe, which is a self-service Search Engine Optimization (SEO) web app with a complementary WordPress plugin.

We were also fans of Brain Gardners’ earlier commercial WordPress offerings (the predecessors to StudioPress), so we had high hopes for Scribe. Was this anticipation well deserved?

First the numbers, Scribe starts at $17/month and includes up to 15 evaluations and 35 keyword searches. According to Scribe, it takes about 3-5 evaluations per web page to fully optimize it. Evaluations are every time you scan a web page.

Let’s get started. After signing up with a credit card on ScribeSEO.com, they’ll assign you an API key. The installation process is fairly straight forward, you’ll install their suppplied plugin and paste that API key into a field.

Next you’ll have to have install one of the many WordPress SEO plugins. The one that we like so far is All in One SEO pack. Scribe will detect available SEO plugins and adjust its status indicators for each post depending on which SEO plugin you’re using.

When you open an existing post, you’ll see 3 check box status in the right side widget area: Title Tag Ready, Meta Descriptions, and Content Ready. Think of these as check list to help you figure out where the page stands in terms of search engine readiness.

There’s also a widget called Scribe Link Building which won’t show any data until you scan / analyze the page.

This review will be on going so we can’t really answer whether or not it works but so far we like what we see. The only drawback so far is that there’s really little hand holding once you’re signed up. I hate to say it but you’re kind of your own to figure this out as we didn’t see any “Getting Started” tutorial.

The Welcome email gets you up to installing the API key and a link to the support pages but there definitely needs to be a little bit more TLC for new users.

Stay tuned as we optimize real world sites. One test case will be this site and another will be a biotech services web site. Let’s see if Scribe becomes an indispensable SEO tool or not.

Get it: Scribe

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Plugin of the Week: Business Hours

Last year our friend Wok at Thinkademic wrote the simple but elegant “Sequential Foundation Gallery” plugin. So Wok strikes again by releasing a new plugin at WordPress.org repository to help retail business create a flexible widget on your sidebar that shows if your brick and mortar shop’s open and close hours. It even pulls in your WP server’s language settings so it’ll show the days of the week in your preferred language. If your clients is a coffee shop or restaurant, this is a great plugin to easily publish the operating hours quickly and easily. The only thing we’d like to see is a way to show the visitor if the shop is currently open or closed as long as the web server time setting matches the same time zone as the store but otherwise a great start!

Check it out: Business Hours Plugin

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Plugin of the Week: Google XML Sitemaps

Here’s our Quick Tip of the week and Plugin of the Week rolled into one. If you have not signed up for Google’s webmaster tool, we highly encourage you to do so ASAP. First like most of Google offerings, it’s free. What will it give you? It will give you some insight into the way your web site is seen by search engines, namely Google (of course), in terms of navigable pages, keywords, speed, and overall catch any problems that may prevent your site from being included in search engine results. Of course Google webmaster tools plays nice with Google other webmaster tool, Google Analytics too.

One of the things that you’ll need to take advantage of  are the webmaster tools is to submit a sitemap to help search engines make sure all your content is indexed/crawled. There’s not much rocket science in choosing a WordPress plugin to do that, we like the aptly named Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It can be automated to generate a new site map whenever your site is updated.

Some SEO experts swear generating and submitting a Google XML sitemap is a standard best practice item, we can’t argue against since it takes you only about 10 minutes or so to do this.

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Quick Tip: Tag pages to get better search results page

You know that search field on your WordPress site? Have you ever tried looking for certain keywords or phrases that your readers might try typing in? Chances are that quite a few common keywords aren’t showing the most relevant posts or pages that you want them to do. Sure, you can easily add tags to posts. But how about pages? Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t currently allow tags on pages, but you can use a simple plugin called “Page Tagger” to add tags to important pages. It adds a sidebar widget on the pages editor just like posts.

You can team up Page Tagger plugin with a tool like Relevanssi to fine tune your search results so you give your audience what they’re looking for!

Get it: Page Tagger

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PadPressed update and another iPad theme

A few days ago we covered PadPressed now known as “OnSwipe” raised $1 million. Now they have some competion from WPTouch Pro. We asked them why their theme didn’t work so well in protrait mode. Maybe they’re busy celebrating their round of funding, because we never heard back from them.

Well there’s new competition from WPtouchPro 2.1 by Brave New Code, adds iPad support. We’ll take a look at it in the next few days and do a mini review. Meanwhile you can download the 1.9 version for iPhone/iPod touch for free.