WPVerse – Page 12 – Your guide to the WordPress universe

January 18, 2011January 22, 2012

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

January 15, 2011

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.

January 15, 2011

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

January 14, 2011

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.

January 13, 2011

PadPressed grows up – Raises $1 million

Remember our PadPressed usage update from last week? It’s a good product but we were slightly surprised to hear through WooTheme’s Adii on Twitter, that they have raised $1 million dollars and have transformed themselves onto a new company called “OnSwipe.” With the new onslaught of tablets coming out this year, they have a solid chance to capture some tablet publishing market-share. There’s also a good article on TechCrunch with more details on the $1 million investment.

It’s encouraging to hear that a company based around the WP platform could raise a decent amount of capital.

January 12, 2011

Offline WP editor: Mars Edit

In the past, I’ve mentioned tools like Scribefire that work within your web browser to help you quickly post WordPress content. I’ve been using it for a while and I like it minus the occasional hiccups when it doesn’t clear the previous content and I accidentally overwrite an existing post. You could probably chalk some of that up to user error/impatience.

I always think there’s ten different ways to do something and sometimes it’s good to reduce the so-called “background noise” by just focus on the writing and not have all the crazy visual distractions of the web in front of you. Enter Mars Edit 3 by Red Sweater for the Mac, an elegant off-line blog editor that works with WordPress (of course) and other blog systems. You can use it to manage multiple blog sites on multiple platforms.

Mars Edit lets you create new posts and pages while having the ability to edit existing ones too. It gives you almost the same editing capabilities as WordPress’ built in editor including creating categories and tags. You can also upload pictures and media through the Mac interface.

One neat touch is that it will auto-detect URLs in your clipboard and automatically paste them in when you insert a link.

One interesting incident during my testing that may also throw off new users. I saved a draft of this post and thought it would be uploaded to my site as a draft but instead it saved this post locally as a draft file. Not a big deal, after I found the draft but for a few moments, it was a yikes moment. It would be nice if it gave you the option of uploading a draft since some users may choose to leave their computer at home and finish the rest of the post on say an iPad on the road.

I also wish it had better media management as currently local file pictures show up only in a thumbnail view. It does have a quick search feature to drill down by file name but it’s too bad it doesn’t have a list view sortable by date. It would also be nice if Mars Edit integrated with some of the WP picture lightbox plugins so when you add a picture, the image style gets incorporated automatically.

To be entirely fair, Mars Edit wasn’t designed to be just a WordPress editor but it also works with Tumblr, Squarespace, and other blogs. Overall, it’s a well designed product and I’ll be buying Mars Edit very soon. In the meanwhile, if you’re interested there’s a trial version you can download.

Get it: Mars Edit 3

January 11, 2011

Cheat Sheet: Anatomy of a WordPress theme

If you’re learning how to create your own WordPress theme, check out this succinct but informative cheat sheet called “Anatomy of a WordPress Theme” over at Yoast.

While this is not a tutorial or a detailed how to, this will give you a big picture overview of how WordPress works.

The only thing we think it’s missing is it doesn’t talk about page templates.

January 10, 2011

Theme of the Week: Spectacular from Smashing Magazine

Looking for a WordPress theme that’s slightly retro and sepia or paper bag brown color ready to go out of the box? Check out Smashing Magazine’s new and best of all, free theme called “Spectacular.” There’s a large site name area above to proudly brand your site. The home page layout is interesting with a large main feature area that shockingly doesn’t have the trendy Jquery slider. Check out their live demo.

Get it: Spectacular Theme

January 7, 2011

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