Category: Plugins

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WordPress Plugin of the Week: Related Ways to Take Action

Related Ways to Take Action pluginThis 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

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Speeding up your WordPress site – Part 1

In the next few days, we’ll look at some WordPress plugins that will help speed up your site.

Why speed up your site? If you have a WP site with more than 50 visitors a day and have 100 or more pages, you need to keep your site running fast as possible so people don’t leave your site when it takes more than 4-5 seconds to load a page. Also search engines will be more likely to give you higher rankings if your site loads faster than your competitors.

To speed up your front end pages such as home page, a cache system will store a copy of that page as static HTML which will load much faster in your visitor’s browser than WordPress having to dynamically generate a page on the fly. Here are three page caching plugins:

WP Cache is one of the original plugins if you are running older versions of WordPress. The last time it was updated was in 2007, so use with caution.

Here’s another plugin based on WP Cache, it’s called WP Super Cache. The last revision was in September 2010, so it’s well supported. I tried this plugin in a few weeks ago and had some error messages pop up that I couldn’t debug at the time so I disabled it. You may have better luck if you have the attention and time to spend on it.

W3 Total Cache screenshotAnd we’ll save the best for last: W3 Total Cache. Like the previous plugim, the last update was in September 2010, so it’s pretty recent by most standards. They claim up to a 10x improvement when the plugin is completely setup.

After taking a quick look at it, W3 Total Cache (W3TC) seems pretty damn comprehensive including a “preview” mode. You can actually preview your site without enabling the cache for all visitors. Cool, huh? They even support propagating your content on a Content Delivery Network.

My choice? Right now I am running W3TC to give it a whirl.

If you’re interested in seeing why your site may seem slow, give Firebug and Y! Slow plugins a try. Once installed in Firefox, enable the “Net” dashboard at the bottom to see which items on your page are taking their sweet time to load.

If you want someone to do the hard work for you, give my friends at LightSpeedNow a ring. They have a free site analysis tool like Firebug but you won’t have to install anything, just paste in your URL and go.

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Plugin of the Week: Exclude Pages

One of my favorite things about WordPress 3 is the new navigation bar menu system. In the pre version 3 days, creating a navigation bar was kind of a pain in the butt. Now with WP 3’s menu system you can easily build a navigation in compatible themes.

But what if you’re using a theme that’s not WP menu friendly and you want to hide or remove certain pages from appearing on the navigation bar? That’s where “Exclude Pages” comes into play. It’s a really easy to use WordPress plugin, that puts a module called “Exclude Pages” right in your page admin below the page ordering where you can specify if that page should not appear on the list of pages. It’s a quick and painless way to hide pages from appearing on the navigation bar. Get it: “Exclude Pages“

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PadPressed: Tough to use – so far

Remember the AppSumo bundle from a few days ago? I finally got around to installing the PadPressed plugin which is more of a “kit”. It includes a plugin and built-in themes. My first mistake was to install the contents of the ZIP file via FTP into the plugins folder. For whatever reason, WordPress didn’t like it and had a “fatal error.” Ok, PadPressed support asked me to install the ZIP file via WP admin and that worked. Fair enough.

I’ve uploaded quite a few test posts to my test site at ipad.noelsaw.com but I am not sure exactly what to do next. The problem with this kit is a lack of documentation and it’s not easy to find – you have to login to their support site. There’s no mention of it in their “ReadMe” file. Once you’re in support, you’ll find a one page installation/reference guide but it’s not a real tutorial on how to use this “kit.” Until the PadPressed people write up a proper getting started tutorial, I really can’t recommend this one, therwise you may be pulling your hair out.

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WordPress theme/tools Bundle

The concept of “bundles” have been quite popular in the Mac community for the past 2 years, now we’re seeing it in the WordPress world. A website called “AppSumo” is offering $926 worth of WP themes and tools for just $32 (not a typo).  Luckily it’s not just a bunch of no-name companies participating. We have two of favorite WP theme design companies, WooThemes and Graphpaper Press offering at least 2-3 select themes each as part of the package. There’s also a theme designed as an iPad native app called “CoverPad” that actually is acceleraometer aware. I think I’ll spring for this and review it in the next few days. Get it: AppSumo bundle

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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.

 

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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.

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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