My Favorite WordPress Plugins

Posted on February 3rd, 2010

One of the key features of WordPress is the ability to use plugins to enhance the functionality of your WordPress site. However, you often have to sift through a number of plugins that either don’t work or don”t do exactly what you are looking for before hitting on the right one.

So to hopefully save you a little time and frustration, here are a few plugins I am using that I’m very happy with:

Contact Form 8 – This contact form is easy to set up and fairly easy to customize.

Exclude Pages from Navigation – Frankly, I’m surprised this isn’t part of the basic Word Press page setup. If you want to set up a page to link to from your sidebar or another page, but don’t want it included in the top-level menu, you can just uncheck a box that says “Include this page in user menus.”

Collision Testimonials – I had to go through several Testimonial plugins before finding this one, which lists a random testimonial or reference in your sidebar and changes from page to page. This plugin also allows you to create a page with all the testimonials listed. The only thing it doesn’t have is a “View More” link after the testimonial in the sidebar which takes you the full Testimonial page.

NextGEN Gallery – this is an awesome gallery and extremely easy to set up. Gone are my days of setting up galleries manually or using third party services such as Jalbum. This plugin enables you to click a button from the function bar above your page, and voila…you get thumbnails and a gallery/slideshow of your photos. Couldn’t be easier.

NextGEN Resize - a companion to the gallery that automatically resizes oversized photos.

Calendar – a simple plugin that allows you to specify events for a specific date and displays them in your sidebar.

Quick Subscribe – this adds a field for visitors to subscribe to your blog using their email.

Redirect – redirects a page to another page within the site or an external link. This is useful for when you don’t have any content for a top-level page and want to direct visitors directly to the submenu pages.

I will add more as I find them. I hope you will find these useful.

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WordPress for the New Year

Posted on January 8th, 2010

My new year’s started with a foray into the WordPress world, which has been both exciting and challenging. WordPress is an open source blog publishing application that is entirely database driven. There is a bit of a learning curve by trial and error, and a learning to relinquish a bit of control for someone like me who is used to hand coding. But the benefits truly outweigh the challenges. Built-in widgets and plugs enhance the functionality and usability of your site, without having to know much PHP, if any. A knowledge of CSS is helpful though if you want to customize your site a bit.

My interest in WordPress was piqued after looking at the new site for Figure Skaters Online, the umbrella site for websites that I design for U.S. champion figure skaters. The webmaster gave the site a complete face lift with a ton of added functionality to satisfy fans of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.

For those non-designers or coders who just want to set up a blog, WordPress offers an intuitive graphical user interface. Designers and coders who want to delve in more deeply can use WordPress to set up complete web sites and e-commerce stores.

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