Word Press Interface

Tips and Tricks for the WordPress interface- and updates on revisions.
How to get the most out of plug ins- themes and the Word Press blog engine.

How to make your WordPress site work harder-

Found this article on 8 plug-ins for WordPress that can help you extend the functionality of your site.

One of the hardest things for us to keep up on is plug-ins, and how to separate the wheat from the chaff- some plug-ins can cause more problems than they solve (we found adhesive broke a google map plug-in for instance) and how some don’t work with certain themes (K2 doesn’t work with the google mapping plug-in either).

Another area where there seems to be a ton of options is Stats packages- right now we’re trying 3 different ones out.

So- here is a link to 8 invaluable WordPress plugins- and a brief quote-

PingMag – The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things” » Archive » 8 Invaluable WordPress Plugins!

WordPress in its default, out-of-the-box form can provide a good platform for your website, with a little tinkering you can increase the functionality of your site massively. And what’s the easiest way of tinkering? Plugins! Special files that you simply slot-in to your WordPress installation to get new features. Here are 8 plugins that I consider absolutely invaluable…

We’d love to hear what your favorite plugins are- so feel free to comment- we’ve got ours listed on our tools page.

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Interesting article on blog content structure and RSS

A common complaint we get about using WordPress to run a site is “I don’t want my site to look like a blog” which generally means- I want the same old content up – and nothing ever changes. Chris Pearson talks about the Information Architecture of RSS – and how it can stop readers from finding content- Pearsonified | Best damn blog on the planet.

It’s worth reading- as are the comments- but, here is what Chris is missing- there are only 3 ways people find your site:

  • You spend a ton of money building your brand and promoting your URL

-or-

  • They find your site through search- which means you have great content and great search engine placement

-or-

  • you’ve built great link networks, or are heavily linked to (hopefully not by spamming comments)

That’s it- once they find you- they either bookmark (favorite) you conventionally- or they subscribe to your feed. If they do the former- they may never come back- if they do the latter- hopefully, they’ll keep coming back as long as you deliver the content that interests them.

If they are smart enough to use RSS- then they know they can search your site for more data- a different layout, or navigation structure won’t matter at all.

However, after reading this, it made me want to add some plug-ins for most commented articles to The Next Wave site.

My solution, would be to use a variation on webstats to drive the most popular pages- not based on comments- or, to put some kind of rating system into the post options- so that you could use a theme switcher type plug in to re-order the site in different ways.

Either way- read what Chris wrote- it should get you thinking.

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Critical Announcement affecting ALL WordPress users

Dr Dave » Blog Archive » Critical Announcement affecting ALL WordPress users

Dr. Dave is the spam killing god.

When he says disable the “anyone can register” option under your options page- do it.

We are in the process of doing this on all our hosted sites.

Back to our regular programming….

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