Wordpress Master » Wordpress Plugins

Thesis v1.7 is out! – New Features Inside!

Ed Gately — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 04:22:40 +0000

I decided to be adventurous tonight and be one of the first folks to install the v1.7 release of Thesis by DIYthemes. I’ve always been impressed by the code the team at DIY produce. This new version will not disappoint. Granularity of control seems to be the name of the game with this new release.

SEO goes to lightspeed

SEO for WordPress is going to be turned on its ear. You now have the option to apply custom and javascript settings for every post and page…. yes EVERY one. On top of that, you can also control ROBOT tages (noindex, nofolow, noarchive) for every post and page too! All of these options are no grouped on a new Thesis menu option titled PAGE OPTIONS.

Menu Layout Changes

I did have a moment of panic when I was looking to tweak the configuration of my Home Page meta only to find it missing from where I expected it. Version 1.7 of Thesis has had a reboot of the organization its menu. Items seem to be more logically associated.

There are 5 main pages now:

Site Options – organized for most of your top level configuration items

Design Options – organized to hold all items css type items

Page Options – new item holding page, post, category , robots and javascript customizations

Custom File Editor – virtually unchanged

Options Manager – AMAZING addition to save your config (Backup, Upload, Restore) crazy good for theme developers

Java Support

Poking around I noticed several check boxes for jQuery, jQueryUI, Prototype, MooTools, and others. This will be killer for removing the need for JS library folders. I can’t wait to get to playing with these.

Other feature ups

Easy 301 redirects for your affiliate links
New headline filter for creating diverse posts styles (think of “asides”)
Beefed-up Internationalization – better translation support
Improved core element defaults
Flexible new comment system – drag and drop display order of comments, trackbacks and comment form.

Installation was pretty painless. I would like to mention there is a slight difference between the Video Upgrade Tutorial vs the Written Upgrade Tutorial. I wound up making a small mistake following the written upgrade tutorial. (I will be posting an update on my little adventure with this later) Follow the Video Upgrade Tutorial and you will be golden.

Five Core Plugins every WordPress Needs

Ed Gately — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:48:12 +0000

I’ve been running many blogs, I have even built many websites for customers using WordPress. This includes using WordPress as a CMS, or as a blog system. In every case there are a few core features that each site needs, and the plugins I keep going back to deliver these features just simply work.

Here’s my list:

1. Akismet

This one is a no brainer, it’s already included in every WordPress Installation and the plugin works very well. Akismet has been key to blocking the spam on many sites I’ve had the pleasure of working on. It’s easy to use. All you need to do is activate it, and get a key by creating a WordPress.com account.

2. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

I don’t know if this plugin is necessarily the number 2 most important, but in the order that I get them installed this is number 2. Pinging your blog posts is kind of an overused feature that isn’t entirely effective anymore. But it’s still available and still can provide some benefits even if just a small amount of marketing. The best part about this WordPress plugin is that it ensures that you don’t over ping from your blog on accident. Any time you edit a post, or schedule a future publish date, your blog can be pinging the same posts over and over, or even pinging when the post hasn’t published yet. This plugin makes sure that it doesn’t happen, even provides a nice log so you can see it’s effect.

3. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

This is a WordPress Plugin that dynamically generates a visitor sitemap. It’s lightweight, looks decent on a fresh install. It’s easy to customize. Has a lot of settings on the admin such as being able to set up the pagination which I think is important for the search engines. This is not an XML Sitemap, this actually becomes a page on your site. Visitors can use it to see all your pages, and the Search Engines will crawl it and find a link to every page.

4. Supr by StumbleUpon

I really like this plugin. You can sign up for an account with su.pr add in your logins for Twitter and Facebook, then add the API keys into your WordPress Admin and every time you post it will automatically post the title and a shortened link to your Twitter account and Facebook account. If you are just starting out in blogging it can be a great way to spread what you are doing amongst your friends to support you. As a business it’s a great way to spread the word especially when starting out. Also from their control panel they provide tracking for the clicks, which is very handy to monitor the effectiveness.

5. TweetMeme Retweet Button

Here’s a plugin that adds a nice little graphic on your posts. It makes it easy for people to retweet your posts right after they visit your site to read it. It also shows how many times it’s been retweeted. It will always show 1 if you are using the Supr plugin because you tweeted it yourself, if you have a couple friends supporting you it’ll easily get tweeted a couple more times. It’s important to market your site, and your own group of friends can be a great place to start.

5.1 All in One SEO Pack

A quick bonus recommendation. Personally I prefer to use the Thesis Theme, which includes many SEO improvements already and this plugin isn’t necessary. But if you don’t have the pleasure of using a theme with these features built in, then I would highly recommend this plugin. It adds in canonical URL’s, allows you to set custom meta tags, custom page titles and the list goes on. This is also very valuable for CMS type sites.

Are you suffering from WordPress Plugin overload?

Ed Gately — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:10:21 +0000

I love it when I run across a certain kind of person. You know who you are. The type that has every possible FireFox plugin installed, some days just opening FireFox it takes 45 minutes to run through all the plugin updates.

One of the things I like best about WordPress is how lightweight it is. It’s simple, it does it’s job, highly customizable. Plus, even though it is simple it can be made to be much more complicated through the use of plugins. You can add just the features and abilities that you need for your site.

Something I dislike about other systems is maybe they are awesome because of the huge list of features, but those features can be a resource hog.

Quite awhile back I read an article that I can’t find right now to link. It talked about some load tests on a few of the “frameworks” that are out there for programming. One of them that they considered a programming framework was Drupal. They included this because even though it is a CMS type script, it’s so robust and feature rich and can really be used as a programming framework. The problem? Just to display nothing more than “Hello World” to a browser, it performed with a response time significantly slower than a lot of other systems to do the same.

I mean this makes sense in all reality. It has so much capability that it has to dynamically load tons of classes, functions, etc. even though all it’s doing is displaying “Hello World”. It’s fine if you need all the features and your site is going to use them, otherwise it’s just a disability.

WordPress is Lightweight, can you keep it that way?

That’s one thing that is really nice about using WordPress. It is so light. And the way that plugins integrate is really nice. You can add complete features with an upload and a click of the button.

Then I run into someone who asks me to help them figure out why their installation is so slow. I take a look at their plugins screen, they have 70+ plugins uploaded, 30+ plugins activated, but only about 15 give or take actually in use. The rest are just there because.

You know a spoiler might improve the performance of a race car, but not if you attach 15 of them.

There are always all kinds of reasons.

Well the reason I have 4 ad rotators installed is because I wasn’t sure which one I liked, and I tried them all out until I decided I liked this one

Here’s the thing, just by having them activated the functions that make up the plugin have to get loaded every single time a page loads. So maybe you are using one ad rotator, but enjoy the drop in performance of 4 just for fun!

Another point to be made, installing plugins always creates variables in your database. Some plugins don’t properly remove these variables when disabled. The larger your database becomes the slower it takes to pull content out of it.

How long will your visitors wait to see your blog content?

Keep your installations as clean as possible. Normally, I keep extra installations of WordPress around separate from my main. Any good host should have the ability to create subdomains. Install a plain installation there, or even make a copy of your installation, install the plugin there first. ESPECIALLY, if you don’t even know if you’ll want it long term.

If you decide you don’t want it there is no reason to ever install it on your main WordPress site.

Cause and Effect, chain of events. Doesn’t matter if your content is good, if visitors get tired of waiting for your pages to load.

The Hottest WordPress Theme on the Market just got Hotter

Ed Gately — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:14:11 +0000

I’ve been working with WordPress it seems like forever. I’ve tried so many different WordPress Themes that I couldn’t count them all.

You have free ones, and if you try them you know you get what you pay for. But free ones can still work if you are a developer, they’ll at least put you at a starting point to make your own creation.

There are a lot of paid ones as well. As in any market some better than others.

It’s all about what features you need, and how well each theme can fill those needs.

The best paid theme I’ve ever had the pleasure of using, is the WordPress Thesis Theme. There are many themes/templates out there that meet specific needs for a niche set of websites, but the Thesis theme is probably the most flexible theme I’ve found.

And they just released a new version with all new features:

custom file editor in your WordPress dashboard
dropdown navigation menu
comprehensive font color controls and new design controls

There are a lot of other improvements in regards to the general design of the theme as well. Plus what more could you want with the included SEO abilities. I think this one theme replaces the need for several plugins, which is very cool if you think of plugins in terms of overhead. (watch our blog for an article on this later this week)

About Thesis — Find out more about Thesis and the DIYthemes philosophy

Here’s their motto:

Thesis Theme Motto

They really meet this in my opinion. It’s always being improved upon.

I’m going to put together a video later this week to show off some of the Thesis features.

Make Your Own WordPress Plugins – Even With No Programming Skills

David Porter — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 05:06:13 +0000

Now this is CRAZY, and something I REALLY DO wish I had my hands on weeks, if not months ago.

See, I just recently WASTED $150.00 in programming fees to have a custom WordPress plugin made for me (going to be released soon)

Now, the money wasn’t really wasted. The programmer did a GREAT job and the plugin pretty much does what I need it to do. I just have to get into it and make a few little changes and that’s it.

BUT – I could have SAVED money on the programming fees!

I could have saved anywhere from $50 to even $75 on the programmers fees, IF I had this AWESOME new thingy I’m about to tell you about.

Okay, so last week I’m surfing around checking out some WordPress stuff, and I get this email with the subject line, “Make Your Own WordPress Plugins“.

Now, will that grab MY attention? YES! I do own blog called WordPress Master, do I not

Anyway, of course I go and check it out and man was I freakin’ pissed. I JUST spent $150 on something that could have been more like $75 bucks, if I had this new WordPress tool.

So, I bought it!

Go figure right.

Well, here’s what this thing is all about.

You really CAN start making your own WordPress plugins.

This new tool is called: WordPress Crusher

Basically, it’s 7 or 8 WordPress plugin TEMPLATES!

Yes, you read that right – plugin templates.

These are pre-made WordPress plugins that are designed to work right out of the box, or, you can edit the heck out of them and make them do what ever you want them to.

He gives full instructions on how to make some simple changes and even gives you videos to watch and follow along with.

I mean, how many times have you said to yourself, “I wish I could find a WordPress plugin that would do____“?

I’ve said it a tons of times. I won’t say it anymore now, but I have said it a lot in the past.

And here’s the really cool thing about this.

Even if you have NO CLUE how to make changes to PHP code, or you don’t want to even mess with making changes to PHP code ,this package is still a killer for your to get.

Think about this.

You can take these pre-written plugin templates and you go find a cheap programmer on a site like Rent-A-Code or Guru.com or eLance, then give the programmer the plugin template you choose, and it’s less work the programmer has to do.

What does that mean? Well, the less work the programmer has to do, the less money you will have to pay.

So even if you don’t know, or don’t want to know, how to mess with PHP and all of the other things needed for changing WordPress plugin code, you can still save 20% to 50% off your programming costs.

Anyway, I was so jazzed up about this thing that I had to do a blog post about it

I recommend getting yourself a copy of WordPress Crusher right away.

Here’s the web link for you.

http://www.wordpress-master.com/recommends/MakeYourOwnPlugins

What Plugins Does WordPress Master Use?

David Porter — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:18:11 +0000

I know when I go to another blog using WordPress, one of the first things that comes crashing through my mind is – “I wonder what plugins this blog uses“.

So, I thought I’d do a quick post here showing you what plugins I use on this blog.

Be warned though – there are a LOT of them, and more being added all of the time. See, I test plugins just about everyday. I want to see which ones actually help, and which ones are a waste of time and energy. As I test more and start using new plugins, you’ll be able to come back to this post and see which ones have been added, and which ones got the boot!

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