Category: Plugins

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PadPressed Update

A few months ago, we bought the App Sumo Bundle which included the PadPressed theme. At the time, the plugin/theme combo seemed hard to install and the support channel wasn’t quite there.

We just came back to try it out with a new 1.5.1 release (free for existing customers) and we’re happy to report the documentation has gotten much better and there’s a now a support forum. The developers have put some thought into the features including the ability to pull your site logo as the “home” screen icon when you bookmark the site on an iPad.

The only thing we’re not happy about is that the CoverPad theme doesn’t work well in landscape mode when viewing on the iPad, by that we mean the inner page thumbnails disappear when the iPad is rotated into landscape mode. But otherwise it maybe worth $50 to get your portfolio up quickly on an iPad. Try out our test site on your iPad.

Get it: PadPressed theme

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W3 Total Cache: Tips

We’ve mentioned W3 Total Cache before as one of our favorites WP plugins and no doubt it has a ton of options. One of the most confusing things is the “preview” mode. Once you’ve setup the configuration including enabling and disabling modules, how does one get out of preview mode and “go live?” Not as intuitive as one would think…just click on the “disable” button in the preview module. After going live, make sure to clear all your cache files.

I wish the designers of W3TC did a better job of “going live” with a simple button rather than having to “disable” preview mode.

Also here’s a great in-depth guide to W3TC at Zemalf.com.

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DIY CDN (or load balancing) for WordPress

Here’s sort of a part 2 to our previous “Speed up your WordPress site” post. Admittedly, it’s not quite your own CDN (Content Delivery Network) but the idea is similar: automatically copy data to other virtual server URLs so your page data can load in parallel. How could one do this? There’s a plugin for that – it’s called WP Parallel Loading System. According to the plugin author, your browser will only allow 2 concurrent connections from the same URL on a page. This plugin will off load data to a new URL that you’ve setup and should re-code your pages to automatically pull the content from there.

You’ll need to be versed in your web host company’s control panel (like cPanel or Plesk) to setup virtual sub-domains but other than that it seems pretty straight forward. Theoretically if you have accounts at other web hosting provider, you could have sub-domains setup there too. Anyone tried this and any good (or bad) results?

Get it: WP Parallel Loading System

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Replacement content editor for WP

Have a love/hate relationship with the built-in HTML (rich content) editor for WordPress? Why not give Foliovision’s Foliopress editor a try?

It has a simpler one row toolbar, ability to strip pasted text formatting, and best of all the ability to use simple <br> without them being stripped out like WP’s built-in editor.

It also features a different image upload and library dialog window but we had some problems with adding an image to this post on Firefox for the Mac. It looks promising with larger thumbnails of images in your media library but we couldn’t get it to work at this point. 🙁

Update: if you’re looking for something that will allow code like iframe or embed tags, try the Extend KSES plugin here.

Get it: Foliovision’s Foliopress editor

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Another search plugin for power search: Relevanssi

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.

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Edit your WordPress site from the front end or public view

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

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WP Plugin of the Week: Better Search

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.

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W3 Total Cache debugging

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.

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Quick Tip: Preview a Theme without a Plugin

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.