WordPress is an amazing blogging platform, there are hundreds of ways to make your WordPress blog better and extend its functionality. WordPress community keeps on inventing new tricks, hacks and plugins to give you an opportunity to reach the unbelievable goals with your WordPress powered web presence.
I like keeping myself updated with the latest events related to WordPress, and I like keeping up to date with the most useful tricks and plugins WordPress community develops. Today I’m going to share 10 useful WordPress tools and tricks from my latest discoveries.
* Antivirus for Wordpress
This great tool will warn you of any possible attacks.
* E-Commerce Shopping Cart
You absolutely need this good looking and easy to maintain e-Commerce platform if you plan to launch an online shop on the base of your WordPress powered website.
* Broken Links Checker
Very good plugin that monitors your blog and looks for broken links.
* Random Posts from Category
You can display random posts from a category you choose. The plugin lets you choose the number of displayed posts. Plus you can tell it to show the excerpt or the full content in addition to title of the post.
* Dropdown Blogroll
This guide will teach you how to create a beautiful dropdown blogroll without javascript.
* Better Search Page
This great plugin will give you the complete control over the look of your WordPress search results page.
* Simple Post Thumbnails
This is a very easy to use plugin that will let you create thumbnails for your blog posts. There is no image editing required, the plugin will do everything for you.
* Vote Post Up/Down
Add some interaction with your visitors, let them vote and show how they liked your articles.
* Improve Page Load Time
This nice plugin will improve your page load time greatly. To do that it’ll combine and compress JS and CSS files.
* Spell, Style and Grammar Check
This smart plugin is a very handy tool that will find any writing errors at your blog entries and offer smart solutions.
Are there more new WordPress tricks and tools you use and would like to share with others?
Archive for the ‘WordPress tips’ Category
10 Useful WordPress Tricks
August 14th, 2009How to Add WordPress Plugin. Simple Guide
July 16th, 2009
Almost every post at this blog is giving you useful and sometimes not that useful but curious plugins. It never occurred to me that someone of you may not know how to actually add those plugins to your WordPress powered blogs. Thus I’m going to fill in the missed point and give you a simple guide on how to add a plugin to your blog.
There are WordPress plugins that require editing your WordPress Theme template files and ones that do not require such modifications. Both types are installed the same way, just follow these simple steps:
* Download the desired plugin.
* Log-in to your WordPress admin panel.
* Click on Plug-ins on the left side of your panel.
* Click on Add New and then on the Upload Tab.
* Browse the downloaded plug-in file at your computer and click on Install Now.
* After your WordPress finishes the installation process click on Activate Plug-in.
That’s it, your WordPress plugin is added and active.
Generally this is everything you’ll need to do when adding a plugin, if there are other requirements the developer will for sure specify them, so read the text files that come with your plugin carefully. Besides, some plugins may require configuration, most WordPress Plugin authors give clear step-by-step instructions of the required configuration, so read these carefully as well.
Is Your Blog SEO Friendly?
July 14th, 2009
We’ve discussed the importance of search engine optimization here more than once. But I think one more time won’t be a waste.
So, let’s revise what exactly SEO means and how it works.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a process of improving the volume and quality of your traffic received from search engines. To understand SEO better you should know how search engines work. This is pretty easy - such search engines as Google and Yahoo use a program called a “web spider”. These spiders crawl the web and collect info about the web pages (content, links etc.) and deposit this info to the search engine’s database. When you want to find something on the web and type your query in the search box the search engine has to do one simple thing - to find the most relevant info in it’s database. To make your blog more relevant to probable queries you should make it rank for the factors that form the search engine algorithm higher. This is where SEO will help you.
Here are things you should check and plugins you should add to make your blog SEO friendly:
* All in One SEO Pack
I already told you about this extremely useful plugin. It allows you to add meta tags, titles, descriptions and keywords to your blog posts.
* Google XML Sitemaps
If you want google spiders to crawl your weblog better you should help them - create a sitemap. This nice plugin will help you do the task easily and fast.
* Sociable
This is a great plugin I’ve already mentioned at this blog, it allows your visitors to bookmark your posts at 99 social bookmarking sites. Find more WordPress plugins meant to help you increase traffic. http://www.wpdaddy.com/blog/2009/03/increase-traffic-with-wordpress-plugins/
Things to check:
* Add Titles and ALT tags to the images you use in your blog entries
* Make sure your meta descriptions are unique and do not repeat your content
* Make sure your theme uses header tags correctly:
- Your blog title (your main keyword) should be placed in an h1 tag.
- Your post titles should be placed in h2 tags.
These are very basic SEO tips for beginners, if you have more simple tips feel free to share them in the comments below.
In nowadays world everything and everyone is moving fast and time becomes more and more precious. Small wonder that everything mobile is so popular. Mobile technologies give the opportunity to safe time on doing small but so important things like checking your email or reading updates of your favorite blogs. And as everything here is about WordPress and blogging you may guess what the point of this post is going to be - mobile version of your WordPress blog of course.
Remember my post about the WordPress version for iPhone? Well, I assume not everyone has iPhone, thus lets figure out how to create the mobile version of your blog for everyone - iPhone and not iPhone users. There are actually several ways to create beautiful and lightweight version of your blog for mobile phones:
#1 MoFuse
This service is a very simple way of creating a mobile version of your blog. All you have to do is to put your URL and complete the necessary registration and your desired mobile version is ready in no time.
#2 Wirenode
Pretty much the same service as MoFuse, creates your mobile version in about two minutes.
#3 Google Mobile Optimizer
Official mobile site creator from Google creates the version in seconds. All your content, links and images will be nicely put into your mobile version.
#4 UBIK
If you want to create a mobile blog from scratch without doing the initial coding this is a good solution. The site offers a number of customizable templates for mobile phones, the whole process of creating a mobile blog here looks pretty much like building a common blog - you select a theme and edit it to look like you want it to be. That’s it.
And here are some useful tutorials on the subject:
* Make a mobile version of your blog with Google Reader
* Create a mobile version of your blog with plugin
* Creating Mobile Version of your blog with branding and customize it
Once you have your blog mobile version created don’t forget to put a link to it on your blog or improve your code to redirect those visitors who browse your blog through mobile phones to the appropriate version.
Taking care of all of your readers you give them another reason to come back to your blog, thus do consider creating a mobile version of your weblog if you still don’t have one. : )
Do you know more ways to make a mobile version of a website?
WordPess plugins for Your Blog Security
June 23rd, 2009
We already discussed the protection of your WordPress based websites, but precautions can never be excessive, thus here are some good working plugins for you to secure your blog.
* WP Security Scan
Very good plugin, it scans your weblog backwards and forward for security issues, carefully checks passwords, database security, admin protection, file permissions.
* WP AntiVirus
This little helper carefully checks your WP theme for malicious code. If someone inserts anything malicious to your code you’ll be alerted. I recommend to enable a daily scan.
* Secure Files
With this plugin you are able to upload/download files from outside of the web document root, thus your blog will be more protected. You can restrict file downloads to logged in users.
* AskApache Password Protect
This powerful plugin will secure your WP Admin with htaccess password protection. No unwanted bot will be able to enter your website.
* Secure WordPress
Good working plugin that will hide your WP version info from non-administrators and your plugin directory from the visitors.
* Sabre
No bots will be able to register at your weblog with this plugin. Among other measures it adds image verification or math test to the registration process.
* WordPress Exploit Scanner
Searches your blog inside out for anything suspicious. Not only it checks your files, comments, posts and database, but also examines the list of your plugins for unusual file names
* WordPress Firewall
This cool plugin easily identifies and stops most obvious attacks. It detects suspicious parameters and responds with a 404 error page or a home page redirect.
Do share WordPress security tips you know at the comments below.
WordPress template tags and a small announcement
March 31st, 2009
Running a blog for a while you eventually come to a desire to change something in your theme. Show tags as well as categories, change the format the date is displayed in, these and alike small changes can easily be done with WordPress tags. A template tag is a php code that tells WordPress to “do” or “get” something, but you do not have to be a coder to use Templates tags.
These tags are extremely simple to use and very well documented at wordpress.org. Basically, if you want your title to be shown put “”, and you will get the task done.
Read carefully the documentation at the link above, it is clearly explained there. The most used template tags are:
- the_title() - outputs the title
- the_permalink - outputs the posts permalink, used with “the_title” usually
- the_content() - displays the post body
- the_category() - displays the categories you put the post in
- the_tags() - shows the tags of the post
- the_author - outputs the name of the post author
- the_author_url - outputs the link to the author’s page, usually used in a link with “the_author”
There are many more of them listed and explained at the wordpress.org. So go ahead and make your blog template more personal.
And in conclusion I have a little announcement here:
WordPress is participating in the Google Summer of Code for the third year in a raw and encourages college students to apply. There are 3 days left for you to roll in, the deadline is April 3, 2009. Check out WordPress Codex GSoC2009 page for more info and FAQ. There also are some projects suggested. To apply go to the Google Summer of Code application site.
So, what tags do you use?
