There are sites that we’ve built in WordPress that would be even easier to use if we had Boolean search capability. Real Estate sites in particular- where it would be great to be able to look at each post about each piece of property that falls into a certain price range, number of bedrooms, location etc. Or automotive sites- where you want Year, Make and Model search. While this is easy to do in Drupal or Joomla, they are a little more difficult for people to use. With the Pod’s plugin for WordPress 2.7 and above, it’s now easy to add categories of data to posts for searching and organizing.
Why Pods?
WordPress is a great blogging platform. It lets you work with 2 main content types: blog posts and pages. However, WordPress doesn’t allow users to define new types of content. This concept of “content types†is similar to that of Drupal (CCK), Expression Engine, Joomla, and other professional CMS (Content Management System) platforms. Pods allows users to create new content types (each content type consisting of a uniform set of fields). WordPress, welcome to the next level.
via Pods » Why Pods?.
And to further substantiate why you should be active on other blog sites- this came to us through a comment on another site– via subscribe to comments. We had found information on similar plugin of this type called Flutter and another reader suggested Pods. That’s the power of Web 2.0 working for you.
iPhone view of www.esrati.com using WPtouch
There are thousands of plugins for WordPress out there- but few that we think are a must have. WPtouch has become one of our new standards- just because it brings instant elegance to your site when viewed on an iPhone or iTouch- or a phone running Google’s android platform.
While you could spend considerable time crafting an alternate theme and putting a mobile browser detector on your site, WPtouch does all this for you – with a ton of user configuration tools. They even provide a PSD template to make your own customized buttons.
From the site:
a complimentary theme installed as a plugin on your WordPress blog or website that will format your content with this Apple-inspired, full-featured theme when your visitors are using an iPhone or iPod touch.
It’s currently at version 1.5 and still has a few things to watch for- like if you upgrade using the auto-upgrade, your custom buttons will be overwritten, so make sure to back up your install first.
The mobile market is growing, and those businesses that make sure that they have a mobile accessible site are going to see gains in business.
Just one more reason to use WordPress to publish your website instead of using plain old HTML.
Once your site gets popular, the next problem is comment spam. It’s all Google’s fault for giving points to inbound links- no mater what the connection (give or take). Spammers will say the stupidist things just to get a link back to their site- or even something innocuous like “Nice site, I’ll be back” or some other compliment that adds nothing to the conversation. These suck- because if you have people subscribed to comments- they all get these stupid messages as well.
Spam Karma 2 is still the mac daddy of all spam killers in our book- but, it’s lead developer, Dr. Dave has decided to throw in the towel- which is really too bad. Too many WordPress updates were making his life a living hell. It’s too bad the core dev team believes it’s their way or the highway- because his spam killer works better than Akismet (from the developers of WordPress, which has a funky license- it’s not quite free).
Mollom is in Beta- and my friend D’Arcy Norman is giving it a test run. So far, it’s not SK2- but, remember- that’s what Beta means. Here’s what they say on the Mollom site:
The web is changing. User contribution is now what makes or breaks a site. Allowing users to react, participate and contribute while still keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop comment and contact form spam. When moderation becomes easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your web community. Mollom is currently in public beta.
There are different philosophies on comment moderation- we tend to recommend that you let spam filtered comments post automatically- as soon as they’ve been screened by your filter- no human intervention. Every once in a while something gets through- but, in general, the speed of conversation gets your network going faster than waiting for you to moderate.
Many corporations are scared to let the unmoderated comments post- but, that’s bunk. If they want to say something crappy about your brand- they’ll either say it on your site, or elsewhere- where you may not be able to respond or correct it.