Shailan

Top 10 Wordpress Plugins You Should Have

shailan — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:24:34 +0000

Alright, you have installed wordpress, made your settings and now what? You gotta complete it with great plugins to your use. Here is a great list of plugins that you should have with all your wordpress installations:

1. All-in-one SEO Pack

Although this is a complex plugin, it is really useful for your site. Once you made the settings, your site becomes more lovely for search engines. Search Engines will love your site more ;)

Download All-in-one-SEO Pack

2. Contact Form 7

This simple plugin allows you to add contact form(s) to your site. It is really weird that contact forms doesn’t come packed with wordpress. This plugin fills in the blanks!

Download Contact Form 7

3. WP Audio Player

This simple plugin comes with a super-duper audioplayer button. And allows you to add a customisable audiplayer to your site. You can either use the button interface or you can use shortcodes to add your media.

Download Audio Player

4. NextGEN Gallery

This is rather a complex plugin. It allows you to create and edit photo galleries on your site. You can create galleries, ftp upload your photos, and you can easily create slideshows!

Download NextGEN Photo Gallery

5. Simple PAYPAL Shopping Cart

You want to use wordpress as an e-commerce site? Then this plugin is made for you. It allows you to add PAYPAL specific shopping cart, you can add this cart to your posts and your pages. It is great if you want to sell your stuff online!

Download Simple PAYPAL Shopping Cart

6. Sexy Bookmarks

Well, this is one of the most popular sharing plugins. My choice of sharing plugin is “Add to Any” but this one has really sexy buttons supporting nearly all popular sharing platforms.

Download Sexy Bookmarks

7. WP-PageNavi (Must have!)

This plugin creates handy and SE Optimized page navigation for your blog. It should be packed with default wordpress installations i think. Remember to add the template tag after you install the plugin. It’s not fully automatic yet.

Download WP-PageNavi

8. Tweetmeme Button

Want to get hits through twitter? This plugin allows users to easily tweet your posts, makes sharing really easy. There are lots of buttons like this, but i think this one is best!

Download Tweetmeme Button

9. Wordpress Related Posts

This plugin adds related posts at the end of your posts. It has options for displaying on feed also. It also has a sidebar widget that displays on single post pages.

Download Wordpress Related Posts

10. Popularity Contest

This plugin gives your posts and pages points for each visit depending on the visit channel. And calculates a total point used in popularity contest. Really great plugin to display most popular posts on your site.

Download Popularity Contest

BONUS PLUGINS:

1. WP Easy PAYPAL Payment Accept – You can easily add Donate / Subscribe buttons with this plugin

2. WP-DB-Backup – You can backup all your wordpress database with this great plugin

3. WP-Print – Makes your site more print-friendly. No need to think about printing styles. Just install this plugin and it’s done.

4. WP Greet Box – This plugin displays custom messages to your visitors depending on the referring site.

Want more? You can check my wordpress plugins page. I’m sure you will find something handy.

What’s your most popular plugin? Discuss on comments

Get your countdown widget now!

shailan — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 22:49:40 +0000

Late for the new year maybe, but i created a flash [tag]countdown[/tag] widget today. It allows multiple instances and you can customize colors and the event text on the fly! Just drag and drop the counter to your sidebar and fill in the event details. For now it only counts down, but later maybe i can add “since” also. You can preview the widget live on my sidebar → until the 2nd of January. Hope you like the new [tag]widget[/tag] ;)

Click here to get your own Wordpress Countdown Widget!

NEED HELP WITH WORDPRESS? Click here to get PROFESSIONAL SUPPORT!

New plugin! Subpages

shailan — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:11:31 +0000

Subpages widget [tag]plugin[/tag] is available for download now. This plugin shows subpages of the current page making it easier to surf through your wordpress blog. It also allows you to easily list subpages of a page with its powerful shortcode [subpages]. It is great if you like using wordpress pages for your site content. It will be an automatically updating index on your top level page. See my wordpress page for a preview of the shortcode in action.

Click here to download subpages widget right now.

The way to use a widget whereever you like

shailan — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:40:25 +0000

Since 2.8, Wordpress allows us to use widgets whereever we like. This made creating websites easier as well as creating professional themes. Now we can use any widget in our headers, footers or our page templates even if we don’t have a sidebar there.

Here is how to embed a widget in our template:

Open the file we want to embed widget. (Eg. “header.php” or “page.php”)
Paste this code whereever you like!
Now we have to find widget classname for the widget we want to embed. You can ask the developer if you are not comfortable with php. Or you can manually search for the widget class name. Here is an example of what it looks like:
```
 class shailan_DropdownWidget extends WP_Widget {
```
We can create the_widget code with default arguments like this:
```
 
```
But that’s not what we intend for. We want more control!

Now lets find supported widget arguments. Usually this could be documented by the author, if not, we can find the arguments in the widget function.

 function widget($args, $instance) {
        extract( $args );
        $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title']);
	$type = $instance['type'];
	$exclude = $instance['exclude'];
	...

Here is the final result with custom arguments:

All my widgets use the new Widget class which makes them usable with the the_widget function.

WANT A WORDPRESS EXPERT TO HELP YOU?
Contact me now! I am available.

New dropdown theme!

shailan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:08:26 +0000

Added a new theme to Dropdown Menu Widget. This new theme is based on Wordpress default and makes a good couple with All-Widget Default Theme; a fully widgetized theme with Header and footer widget areas. I am working on more themes but will need some more time before releasing them. I gotta add more widgets, make things easy for the bloggers. Any ideas?

Wordpress dropdown menu widget

shailan — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:38:14 +0000

First release of dropdown menu widget is ready. The plugin allows you to add CSS based high quality drop down menus. It supports multiple instances. You can create your pages menu or categories menu so easily with this plugin. You don’t have have to write any code, plus it comes with 5 beautiful themes. In order to use this widget you need a wordpress theme with a widget area on the header. You can download the first release of dropdown menu widget here.

How to get/save favicon of a site

shailan — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:59:47 +0000

With the help of google you can easily save favicons of your favorite sites. You can also use this link for your link lists so that they will display favicons of your sites next to your blogroll links.

Here is how to save a favicon:

Step 1. click here : http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.google.com

Step 2. Change the domain at the end of URL. (eg. http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=mail.google.com)

If you would like to use favicons for your blogroll / wordpress links you can use this URL as image url also. See the example below:

Random posts:

WP Developer? Do yourself a favor now..

shailan — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:36:11 +0000

Well, i have more than 5 sites now and i am constantly changing them, posting things and stuff. I know a developer needs more time (especially for fighting those little coding bugs!) on working. So why not consider enabling gears and get rid of wasting time on wp-admin refresh. To enable gears on your wordpress follow those simple steps:

Login to your wp-admin
Expand Tools menu and click tools again.
You will see the Enable Gears button. Just click it now.
And you are done!

Now you have more time to waste on fixing things ;)

Random posts:

How to add text to every post in your feed

shailan — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:48:46 +0000

You can see some blog sites include related links, advertisements, and post relevant tags in their feed. This is very useful for your site’s popularity and increasing page hits. You can also add copyrights to your blogfeed to prevent RSS theft. Here i will explain you how to add any text in your wordpress feed.

You can easily do that using wordpress filters. Start with a new php file that you can use as a plugin file or theme functions file. Add the following line:

this code makes sure everytime content is needed your function will filter it.
so we need to code our filter now:

function your_function_to_add_text($content) {
// if we are not in feed then
// skip and return content as it is.
	if ( ! is_feed() ) return $content;
// tip: you can use funtions to generate text
	$pcat = " Categories: ".the_category(' ')." ";
	$content .= $pcat; // adding text to content
	$content .= "
";
   return ($content);
}

It’s all done! This tiny function adds post categories to the end of content when reached using a feed reader. You can add copyright, related post titles, ads and footers to every wordpress post in your feed using this simple filter.
Happy blogging!

Wordpress 2.8 Released!

shailan — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:42:03 +0000

Wordpress announced 2.8 Release named “Baker“. This new version has tons of features you wished for and they really made a great new widget system. Now you can install themes easier with the theme browser! See the video below for a quick overview:

-> You can download wordpress 2.8 here <-

Shailan

Top 10 Wordpress Plugins You Should Have

Related posts:

Get your countdown widget now!

Related posts:

New plugin! Subpages

Related posts:

The way to use a widget whereever you like

Related posts:

New dropdown theme!

Related posts:

Wordpress dropdown menu widget

Related posts:

How to get/save favicon of a site

Random posts:

WP Developer? Do yourself a favor now..

Random posts:

How to add text to every post in your feed

Related posts:

Wordpress 2.8 Released!

Related posts: