wordpress

DavePress WP Plugin-orama

WordPress is the best, we all know this. As well as the amazing free themes that are available, there are also tonnes of plugins which make your blog do interesting and cool stuff that it can’t do out of the box.

The other great thing about WP plugins is that they are so easy to install – just FTP the files into the right spot on your server, then hit the ‘activate’ link in the plugin screen of the admin panel. Even I rarely get this wrong, it’s so simple!

Here’s a list of the plugins I use here. Anybody got any suggestions for stuff I really ought to be using?

1. Akismet

Akismet is spam blocking par excellence. There isn’t anything to touch it, in my opinion.

2. Google Analytics

Make setting your blog up on Google analytics a breeze with this plugin. All you have to do is supply it with your Analytics code and it places it in the best spot on your blog for you.

3. Democracy

A cool way of putting little polls into your sidebar, and even on individual pages. You can also create an archives page of past polls too!

4. Feedburner Feedsmith

Pipes all your RSS traffic to FeedBurner. This means you can use FB’s feed tracking stats, which isn’t currently available with other WordPress stats systems.

5. All in one SEO pack

Gives your site and everyone of your posts accurate meta-data, from tags and categories. Watch your blog shoot up in the rankings once this plugin starts to work its magic.

6. Subscribe to comments

Mega useful for both you and your readers, this lets folk get email updates when people respond to their comments on your blog. You can also examine the stats, see who is subscribed to what and who is subscribed to the most posts.

7. MyBlogLog

More of a sidebar widget than a proper plugin, this enables you to display who the recent visitors were to your site with an avatar. Nice to see who’s reading your blog.

8. Easytube

WordPress isn’t great at handling embed code, even in HTML view editing. This plugin takes the pain out of posting YouTube videos.

9. Google XML sitemaps

Creates a sitemap for your blog that meets the Google standards, making it more search engine friendly.

10. Sphere

Allows you to present a link next to your posts which readers can click to find content on similar lines elsewhere. I haven’t yet added this to my new template on DavePress, but keep your eyes peeled…

11. Twitter tools

This is a cool plugin that does a number of things: posts to Twitter when you publish a new blog post; add your latest tweets to your sidebar, post tweets from your admin panel; and post a daily log of your tweets. You can turn on different bits of functionality as you please. Great stuff.

12. Slideshare

See EasyTube, this does the same for Slideshare embeds.

13. WordPress.com stats

My favouritest plugin ever. I am addicted to this. It gives the same stats as WordPress.com users get: how many visits you get, which posts are most popular, what people are searching on Google to find you, which links people are using to get away from your blog.

14. ShareThis

Another great one, this provides a handy javascript pop up thing allowing people to bookmark your posts on a number of services, like Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us to name just three. Like Sphere, I haven’t worked this into my template yet, but will be here soon!

Polling day

DavePress pollEvery day, WordPress and the community around it manages to surprise and delight me more. I have mentioned how it can be used to consult before, specifically by using the amazing CommentPress theme. But you can also create small polls to run on your site too, whether on a page of their own or by running in the sidebar.

This is done using the Democracy plugin, which is really easy to set up and deploy. It allows you to set the options, or give voters the ability to add their own. IP addresses can be logged to stop multiple votes, and you can store an archive of polls on a page.

I am running a quick example on this site asking readers how they access the content on this blog. OK, so it probably isn’t very scientific, but it’s fun, and another great example of the flexibility, and sheer genius, that is WordPress and the people that use it.

WordPress is a platform

WordPressSimon Dickson points to a new theme that turns WordPress into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. This confirms to me something that I have been thinking for a while that WordPress is no longer a blogging system, nor a content management system, but actually a platform upon which applications can be built.

Let’s take the evidence:

  • CommentPress turns WordPress into a super consultation platform by allowing readers to comment paragraph by paragraph on documents presented as posts on the blog
  • Prologue turns WordPress into a Twitter clone, allowing users to post very short messages as a cool way of keeping people in touch with one another. If you want to engage with Twitter-lke technology then this is a great way of being able to do it on your own terms
  • Now WPContactManager, as I mentioned above, turns WordPress into a CRM.

This is the advantage of open source software, of course, that because people have access to the innards of the system, they can understand how it works and put it to innovative uses. Of course, the flexibility of WordPress certainly helps, with themes and plugins being used to achieve much of these innovations.

It will be interesting to see what other applications based on WP start to emerge.

Redesigning DavePress

I have been wanting to give this blog a redesign almost ever since I started it. For some reason I just haven’t taken to the Mandigo theme I was using – a bit dark, maybe? I do think that darker themes are less forgiving of some of the clutter that we bloggers like to fill our sidebars with.

So, I have settled on PopBlue, by Bob, which is a much lighter theme and hopefully the single sidebar will focus attention on the content rather than the widgets and other crud. I ‘designed’ a quick logo, using an icon from the free Crystal Clear set and a bit of text.

Couple of jobs to get done though, including:

  •  Sorting out the CSS for images so that text floats nicely  around them in posts (any help gratefully received…)
  • Making blockquotes stand out a bit more
  • Replacing the standard search bar with my Google CSE one

So, there is plenty to be done…

New Wales Office Website

Thanks to Simon Dickson, the Welsh Wales Office website has had a real facelift. It looks really good, nice and clean layout and a smart news layout. Simon covers it all in more detail on his blog.

And the best bit? It’s running on WordPress. Great work, Simon!

(And if any other government departments would like a WordPress site of their own, you know where I am 😉 )

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