Saw this in use on The Gem City blog– and thought it was cool- it’s in his right sidebar. We’ll look at it some more- but, seems like a really easy way of doing what Dayton Most Metro has done with mapping- and this lets anyone and everyone post!

About – Platial.com
Platial enables anyone to find, create and use meaningful maps of Places that matter to them. We hope it can connect people, neighborhoods, cities and countries through a citizen-driven common context that goes beyond geopolitical boundaries. We are building it, because we adore Places

It works with other CMSs but- we are most likely to like it on WordPress.

Lorelle has an amazing post about plugins for handling pictures, well worth the time to investigate. I’ve found that many themes don’t handle pictures well, and trying to attach a caption isn’t really something that a stock WordPress install can do. Until we have time to check out some plugins with WordPress 2.1, we’ll just send you to Lorelle’s page:

WordPress Plugins for Images, Photographs, and Graphics « Lorelle on WordPress
WordPress offers fairly simple image uploading and the automatic creation of thumbnails, but there are a lot more you can do with your images with WordPress Plugins.

There are a lot of WordPress Plugins to help you upload, sort, arrange, enhance, edit, frame, popup, popin, lightbox, photo album, work with online image storage support and services, and manage your images.

Unfortunately, not all media-based WordPress Plugins, no matter how impressive and fun, are well supported or well documented. Creating an image-oriented WordPress Plugin is challenge, hard work, and takes a lot of maintenance as technology changes and WordPress upgrades. Many create these for fun and then let them go. I’ve done my best to only highlight the WordPress Plugins which feature strong documentation, easy instructions, and show recent activity and support.

One thing I can’t stress enough- remember to give your pictures great alt tags (title and description). Google will give a properly labeled photo great page rank if you have the search term in the alt text. A post I did with a photo of the band Supernova ended up number 4 in google for a bit- this was when the TV show was on and millions were watching.

If you don’t understand what to put in alt text, here is my rule- what would describe the picture to a blind person? Write a good description for a blind person- and you’ve got Google’s attention.

We’re not a big fan of guestbooks- but a client asked us about having one in WordPress. Right now, the WordPress world is in a tizzy over switching to 2.1 or continuing with 2.0- but here is one that claims to work with WordPress 2.1:

Alleba Blog » WordPress Guestbook Generator Plugin
Plugin Name: Guestbook Generator
Description: Generates a guestbook for WordPress blogs. Once activated, click on Options > Guestbook Generator.
Version: 0.8
Author: Andrew dela Serna
Notice: Compatible only with WordPress 2.1. Support for older versions will continue but updates/upgrades will be focused on the newest versions of WordPress. Scroll down to download Version 0.7 which is designed for Wordress 2.0.X.

Features:

1. No files to edit. Just upload the plugin, activate it then run the generator.
2. Guestbook template seamlessly integrates with your current theme.
3. When changing themes, simply run the generator to create the necessary files.
4. Like a true-blue guestbook, entries are arranged from newest to oldest.
5. Remember the time when guestbooks were the “in” thing? Hopefully this plugin will bring back the ol’ days. Hehe.

I don’t share the authors romantic view of guestbooks- for the most part, I find them silly. Comments are just as effective- and when using the amazing “subscribe to comments” plugin, you can actually carry on a great conversation on your site.

Please note- a lot of themes are behaving badly with WordPress 2.1 right now- so it may not be your plugin that’s broken- it may be the theme. It’s a trial and error world for a bit. If in doubt, stick with WordPress 2.0 if you aren’t ready to invest some time in the upgrade. Always remember to back up your complete database- and all files, before making a change.