WP Plugin Roundup

This will be an on-going project. I just started so there’s not a lot there right now; I’m going to create some blog posts (hope to use category hierarchy … that’s new for me) child pages and index them using this page.

• Sub-pages:
1. Running Now or In Test
2. To Be Explored
3. Needs Improvement
• Links »
• From Codex:
• Managing Plugins
• Plugin Resources
• Writing a Plugin
• Plugin API
• Plugins Directory at Extend » Highest Rated
• Tags cloud | Popular Tags »
• admin (804)
• comments (614)
• google (451)
• images (470)
• links (435)
• Post (1062)
• plugin (855)
• page (432)
• posts (779)
• rss (364)
• sidebar (725)
• twitter (424)
• widget (1425)
• This is really appalling … does nobody use this stuff? Mis-direction, demos that don’t demo, link-loops … I’ve wasted my time on 5 or 6 plugins in a row, and I’m not picking them at random. This ain’t link-rust, this is folk not giving a shit. Sadly: business as usual.
Advertisements

WP references / tutorials

Section 9.3. Tutorials, References ripped from How to make a child theme for WordPress: A pictorial introduction for beginners – op111.net. (“Reasonable use”, yes?)

• codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development – Has a short section on child themes.
• extralogical.net/2008/08/theme-inheritance – In WordPress 2.7 you will be able to do more things with a child theme. The creator of the theme Tarski talks about the possibilities opened.
• htmldog.com – “The Best Practice Guide To XHTML and CSS”, by Patrick Griffiths. It really is the best!
• htmldog.com/reference/cssproperties – “Information about all of the valid properties belonging to the CSS 2.1 standard”.
• htmldog.com/reference/htmltags – “Information about all of the valid tags belonging to the latest version of strict XHTML”.
• reference.sitepoint.com/css – SitePoint CSS Reference.
• themeshaper.com/how-to-protect-your-wordpress-theme-against-upgrades
The author of the theme “Thematic” explains how to make child themes. — The alliteration is unavoidable!
themeshaper.com/functions-php-wordpress-child-themes – Another article by the author of Thematic: How to use custom PHP functions in your child theme.
wangenweb.com/2008/07/creating-wordpress-child-themes – Another how-to on child themes, this one by the designer of Basic2Col.

10 – X Best Plugins for Comments

10 – 4 …. I found six good ones from this list.
*ripped from 10 Best Plugins To Get More Comments [Makes me crazy when folk say “Check here” and they aren’t even using the plugins they just pimped … insanity, pure and simple. -bdt]

Here are the ones that really caught my eye (not confirmed/verified):

• WP Ajax Edit Comments (for WP 2.1+) allows users and admins alike to edit comments on a post Yesss, gawd, please … like yesterday.
  Ajax Comment Posting by Alex … I suspect this might interact with other things, so it’s not priority, but schweet!
• NicEdit is a Lightweight, Cross Platform, Inline Content Editor … not at all sure this would work. [Toooo funny: couldn’t find any docs for use in a WP theme so I went to forum and searched. I got this: “The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: wordpress.” Oh, right, fine, shurr *D’uhh!*]
• Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith Posilutley and thanks kindly!
• Brian’s Threaded Comments 1.5.9 … looks fine. Parsimonious, too. (That’s another word for “simple“. You know, kinda like “economical”.)
• Recent Comments Plugin / Widget … mmmm, I guess. *shrug*

Came across this one while rummaging around: Top Commenters Plugin / Widget.

Ok … I just couldn’t quit; here’s a whole other set:

• AJAXed WordPress (AWP) – “harnesses the power of both AJAX and WordPress to improve the user experience, the administration capabilities and the design potential of any WordPress based blog. Some of AWP’s features include loading posts inline, inline comments, threaded comments, AJAX comment submission, AJAX Navigation, live comment preview and much more. All aspects of the plugin are easily customized through a single Administration panel.”
• Category Posts Widget 1.3 – “Category Posts Widget is a light widget designed to do one thing and do it well: display the most recent posts from a certain category. Features: Specify how many posts to show; Set which category the posts should come form; Optionally show the post excerpt
• Insights – “brings a powerful new way to write your blog posts. With Insights you can very quickly (in couple of seconds) do the following: Search your blog for posts, edit them or insert links to them into the current post; Insert Flickr Images; Insert Youtube videos; Search and link to Wikipedia; Search Google; Insert a Google Map”
• In Series – “lets you write series of posts in WordPress, without having to deal with the hassle of manually writing up tables of contents or “next” and “previous” links in each post. It adds a new set of controls to the post editing screen, allowing you to add the post to a series (new or existing), re-order the post within a series it’s already in, or remove the post from a series entirely.”
• MultiPage ToolKit – “the ultimate companion for people who use the multi-page capabilities of wordpress. Easy to use fully integrated in to the wordpress visual editor (tinyMCE) (WordPress 2.5 and above) and simple to use options page to create great navigation links. No coding required !!!! Using the nextpage button in the editor or the <!–nextpage–> quicktag you can create multi-page posts, and this plugin gives you three functions that extend this functionality even more!!”
• Rob Marsh’s Recent Posts – “displays a list of your blog’s newest posts. The output can be customised in many ways.”
  • Also by Marsh, and related: Similar Posts – “displays a list of posts which are related or similar to the current post.
• andre renaut’s MyCaptcha (I almost forgot about this!!) “Allows you to display a captcha on your comment form to avoid spam.”
• list of posts by category – “displays a list of the posts from each category of your WordPress installation. It can be added to a post or page, or used directly in a template file.”
• Of special interest to my uses: AZIndex Plugin – “or generating alphabetical indexes of your weblog’s posts. Enhance your WordPress blog by creating multiple, three-level alphabetical indexes of your posts based on any combination of post title, author, extract, or custom fields of your choice. Select which posts are included in your indexes using a combination of categories and tags, display them in up to four columns on a single page or over multiple pages.” see Demo1 and Demo2

Grande finale: a fabulous list of plugins; WordPress Plugins I Use from Vladimir Prelovac’s site.

Let the love-in begin! 2.5 shout-outs

• 5 things we love about WordPress 2.5 | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone (This reads like it was knocked off by someone who was wey wey rushed … I think that’s kinda rude.)
• Matt’s 2.5 write-up at .org/development/ – (233 pingbacks already; 4PM MDT 31MAR08) 1,422 “blog reactions” listed at technorati

-more to come-

Bits and Pieces Today

First off, “More Than Blogging Software « WordPress Publisher Blog”
from Lloyd Budd’s “Publishers Blog” at Automattic.com, about “WordPress being used as more than blogging software”. A nice selection including Raj Dash’s “48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress” at Performancing.com.

Joost de Valk’s contact form plugin … provides a nice little reader feedback form

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator plugin, “generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap”. Maybe not mission-critical, but this deserves to be on the ToDo list.

In the news department: Matt announces that Andy Peatling has joined Automattic and the company is now backing Andy’s project, BuddyPress

Nip & Tuck for WP2.5 Plugin Styles

WordPress 2.5 Plugin Settings Pages Style Guide – Joost de Valk’s SEO Blog:

“Fellow plugin authors beware! Your plugin settings pages might look pretty awful in WordPress 2.5’s new admin theme… Currently, I’m working on making all my plugins work and look good in it, and I had to do a bit of research.”

Migrating plugins and themes at WordPress codex

Buffer Dump 18JAN08

• AJAXed WordPress (AWP), – “AWP’s basic features include inline paginated posts, inline comments, threaded comments, the ability to submit comments with AJAX, pagination of your homepage, live comment preview and much more”
• Adding an Author Page to a Multi-Author Blog” – “This will display whatever is in the description field, as well as a bulleted list of all their posts.
• drop down navigation menu using JQuery – demo
• categories in a horizontal dropdown menu.
• Tips for Improving Your 404
• restricting pages to logged in users only
• Customizing Permalinks
• Bersih- 2 column Widget and Adsense Ready WordPress Theme promotes “featured” category into header

 

In the OpenID department: Social WhiteList with OpenID
Also: “OpenID Delegate WordPress plugin will add OpenID delegation abilities to your blog, thus allowing you to sign in to various OpenID supported sites using your blog’s URL.” and “WordPress YADIS/XRDS is a WordPress plug-in to aid in delegating your OpenID to another server.”

Buffer Dump 17JAN08

First and foremost: a plugin that seems to hit the nail on the head when it comes to “taming WP WYSIWYG” (thanks to Stephen Cronin for the heads up on this):

“Raw HTML Plugin for WordPress” – “To prevent some part of your post or page from being processed and “texturized” by WordPress, wrap it in <!–start_raw–> … <!–end_raw–>” by Janis Elsts at W-Shadow.com

By way of context: I’ve been having an on-going exchange with Stephen Cronin in his blog about WYSIWYG being over-bearing and also I’ve put together what I hope is a pretty comprehensive resource list at codex.wordpress.

Update: the plugin’s author answered my inquiry with this:

The plugin doesn’t “tame” the editor in any way (that’s why I say that using the visual editor is “not recommended” in my post).
Actually, it only runs when a post is <em>displayed</em>. The plugin intercepts the content surrounded by the special tags and saves it in internal variables before WordPress can “prettify”. Then, after WP is done messing with the rest of the post, it adds back the “raw” content in the right places.
So the visual editor is still at large

---

WP-chgFontSize allows readers to change the page’s font size dynamically , storing their selection in a cookie. “It can be used as a widget or directly as a PHP call in the theme.”

13 plugins that will make WordPress into a CMS

“WP PHP 101”

“the quickest, simplest PHP tutorial around, and the only PHP tutorial written specifically for the average WordPress user, covering only the minimal amount of PHP necessary to competently modify your themes (and maybe even to modify plugins).”

Buffer Dump 1JAN08

Happy 25th Birthday TCP/IP! (born 1JAN1083)

“Filosofo Home-Page Control is a plugin that lets you: * put pages on the same Permalink level (or higher) as the blog’s directory and * set which page you want to be the >home< page.”

Creating a Static Front Page at codex.wordpress

“Wysiwyg Editor Plugin from SemioLogic lets you override the default rich text editor with FCKEditor, which is used in enterprise production environments by Oracle among others.” [updated to v2.4]
Also from SemioLogic:

• The “Silo Web Design” plugin introduces a single widget, Silo Pages.; Silo Web Design is now v.1.2.
• “External Links” lets you process outgoing links differently from internal links; now v2.9
• “Bookmark Me” lets you easily add links to social bookmarking sites to your entries; now v.2.1.

The Custom Query String (CQS) plugin – writeup at Technical-Itch.co.uk; “that well known, this is a powerful plugin offering functionality I have been seeking for ages on my blog. The plugin allows you to specify how many pages to display on different sections of your blog, such as 5 posts on your home page, 10 posts on your archives, 30 posts on your search results, etc.”

Also of interest, “No Free Lunch; A Fundamentl Turn Towards Concurrency in Processing” explains why we don’t have 10GHz processors, not even 4GHz.

p.s. I’m also 1) updated my WYSIWYG codex page and 2) created a “The Loop” resources page there
cheers
–bentrem

Buffer Dump 27DEC07

An editor that blows away markup and an RSS system that blows away feed data … ain’t it fun to be working with toys instead of tools? (Hint: no f’n way.)

Looking through my backup material (including a set of OPMLs) I came across this swath of links … it’s crude to just paste, but I’m tired and a tad bummed out. (Hard to do work when high-ridden folk are trashing your stuff.)

So, without more prelude, a slab of links.

A list from Graphic Design Blog | “WordPress as a CMS – Content Management System”:

• Five WordPress Enabling Plugins
  This article from Blaze Media talks you through 5 WordPress Plugins which make it easier to use WordPress as a Content Management system
• Creating Custom Templates for WordPress
  Charity at Design adaptations gives a step by step guide to creating template pages in WordPress –
  “One of the ways I use WordPress as a CMS is by way of custom templates. The kind of pages which can be added using template files that you define are virtually limitless. Say you want to showcase your Portfolio. You might need a layout vastly different from your default pages.” Charity has several other articles about using WordPress including Configure WordPress as a CMS.
• 5 Reasons to use WordPress as a CMS
  David Peralty at Blogging Pro shares his 5 reasons that WordPress should be used as a CMS.
• WordPress Ecommerce Plugin
  A plugin from Instinct.co.nz which brings ecommerce to WordPress. (as mentioned above by Jennifer)
• How to Install WordPress Locally on Windows
  J David Macor gives a step by step guide on how to get WordPress running locally on a PC, ideal if you want to test your WordPress website before releasing it publicly.
• How to Install WordPress Locally on a Mac

  Michael Doig gives a step by step guide on how to get WordPress running locally on a Mac, again ideal if you want to test your WordPress website before releasing it publicly.

• Using WordPress as a CMS
  Blog helper has several different articles about using WordPress as a CMS including how to use WordPress to create a portfolio site
• The Revolution CMS Theme
  Brian Gardner has created a premium WordPress theme called Revolution – a magazine style CMS theme.
• Another to Adaptations to WordPress to Use it as a CMS
  This article from pqdb.com gives more information about working with categories, adding a FAQ page, a contact form and making sure the whole WordPress website is searchable.
• WordPress Sandbox Theme
  The Sandbox theme at Plaintxt.org is a very minimalistic theme ready to be styled in any way you wish. If you are looking for a fairly blank canvas to start your WordPress CMS website and know a bit about CSS it could be a place to start.
• Customise your WordPress Login
  David at David Airey has an article on how to customise your WordPress Login page. This could be useful if you are using WordPress to build a CMS website for one of your clients and want the login page to fit in with their corporate look.
• How to hide pages and rearrange your menu in WordPress
  Randa at Randa Clay Design discusses how she worked out how to rearrange wordpress navigation and hide elements she did not want to appear.
• Using WordPress as a CMS
  Char at Essential Keystrokes talks you through how she made a website using WordPress as a Content Management System.
• From Weblog to Cms
  This article by John McCreesh at Onlamp.com can show you how to create a static home page if you are using an older version of WordPress.
• How to Create a WordPress Theme
  An article by Jonathan on how to put together a WordPress Theme from scratch.