By Greg Boggs on Oct 13, 2010 · 1 minute read in Blog
The short list of Plugins I’m excited about:
I’ll keep adding to this list as I find more plugins to play with.
WordPress automatic silent updates could mean and end to WordPress security problems and kill the need for WordPress security plugins. While this solution has it’s drawbacks that could cause your website to white screen of death, silent updates have the potential to finally make WordPress a secure platform. This change, planned for November, would make my WP security scanners obsolete including my own WordPress Security Scanner because every website running WordPress will, in theory, be secure.
I was recently asked how I would generate thumb nails in WordPress. WP has gone through ALOT of changes around images and thumbnails since I first started using WordPress. The current best practice for thumbnails in WordPress is described here: http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/new-in-wordpress-2-9-post-thumbnail-images/
The theme I use for this website creates a blog by using a separate category in WordPress for blog posts. Normally I prefer to use static pages for non-blog pages, and rely on posts for the blogging feature. This method is easy to set up and creates an easy to manage, less confusing installation. However, category-based blogging came built into the theme, and tearing it out would be a lot of wasted effort.
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlejohncollection/ The popularity of WordPress makes it an amazing tool for making successful websites. However, WordPress does a terrible job at cleaning up their plugin and theme directory. So, finding good plugins is challenging. One of the most common services I do for my clients is select plugins. As an example, searching for SEO plugins brings up 30 pages of plugins or over 600 plugins! Fortunately, the plugin most people use, All-In-One SEO, is near the top.
WordPress relies on themes to allow users to align images and create captions. If your theme doesn’t support alignment or captions, you’ll find adding images to WordPress to be very frustrating. WordPress provides documentation to fix this problem, but it’s requires that you edit your theme’s CSS file: .aligncenter, div.aligncenter { display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } .alignleft { float: left; } .alignright { float: right; } Backup your Theme First Before you edit your WordPress theme, always make sure you have a backup because WordPress editor does not allow you to undo mistakes.
An amazing start-up that I provide consulting for recently used WordPress to build user-generated consumer complaints feature. The idea behind ConsumerBell is to empower consumers by grouping their complaints together and giving them leverage. For ConsumerBell to work, they need complaints! So, they built a beautiful feature for users to submit and publish their complaints. There are several ways to publish moderated user-generated content in WordPress. ConsumerBell built a custom plugin, but I’ve found some other interesting ways to solve the problem of generating user created content without programming.