WordPress Asylum » ACE

pageMash

Sallie Goetsch — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:00:06 +0000

If you’ve ever used WordPress to manage a site with more than two or three static pages, you’ve experienced the amazing awkwardness of the built-in method of ordering pages:

That line about “We know this is a little janky, it’ll be better in future releases” has been there for as long as I can remember. As far as I can tell, fixing it has not made it anywhere near the top of the core development team’s priority list. (I haven’t been over on the forums pestering them for it, though, so I suppose I’m not in a position to complain too much.)

Organizing pages by going back and forth between them and sticking a number in that box was more than just “a little janky.” It was ridiculously clumsy, particularly before the “Quick Edit” option got introduced.

Fortunately, enterprising plugin developers are out there to help those of us who want to use WordPress to run multi-page sites. I’ve used a couple of different plugins for this over the years, but so far pageMash is my favorite. Even though it’s only officially compatible with versions of WordPress up to 2.71, it’s worked just fine for me up to 2.8.6, without causing any conflicts.

Not only does pageMash let you rearrange pages by dragging and dropping them, but it can display many more pages on one screen than WordPress is willing to, both because of its efficient layout and because WordPress likes to show you items in groups of 15. (I understand there are ways around this if you’re geeky enough to go tinkering, but so far I haven’t been.) And it gives you a graphical representation of sub-pages (a.k.a. child pages).

What’s more, you can use pageMash to hide pages. I’m not sure whether this just invokes the “private” function or does something more, but if you don’t want your blog page to show up at all, this is an easy way to do away with it. (And you can still use the posting function to create dynamic pages using tools like Advanced Category Excluder or Blog-in-Blog.)

Where I’m Using It

Primarily on Author-izer.com, where I have a lot of static pages. Right now this site doesn’t have enough pages to need it, and the Podcast Asylum site hasn’t been converted entirely to WordPress yet. I built the FileSlinger site before discovering pageMash, and don’t really expect to add more pages to it. This is becoming a plugin I install on client sites very early in the process of setting them up, however.

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Author-izer

Sallie Goetsch — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:05:30 +0000

Site

www.author-izer.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

The Author-izer is Sallie’s other business.

Theme

Authorizer2 by Sallie Goetsch, created with Artisteer

Active Plugins

November 12, 2009

Notes

The plugin that deserves honorable mention here is Redirection, because I installed it on my old authorizer.fileslinger.com site to redirect the original Author-izer blog to the new author-izer.com location. Depending on the kind of 404 messages I start to get from SEO Ultimate (I just switched from All in One SEO Pack), I may install it here, as well.

I did more than move the Author-izer site from a subdomain, however. I expanded the static pages from three to 26 (at last count). That makes a plugin for organizing pages absolutely critical. PageMash works wonderfully. It makes the back end of WordPress look a lot more like the mind map I used for my site redesign.

Another great tool for a large site is Dagon Design Sitemap Creator. Where Google XML Sitemap Creator builds sitemaps for search engines, Dagon Design builds them for humans. You insert one short code phrase into the HTML editor of your sitemap page, and it does all the rest.

I used Podcasting rather than PowerPress mostly because I had never tried it before. As a podcasting consultant, I thought I ought to know how the plugin worked, even though PowerPress is now the podcasting plugin of choice. It works, but I won’t be switching any of my other sites over to it.

Query Posts lets me show recent posts without including the posts that are just collections of Delicious bookmarks inserted by Postalicious. (It lets you do other things, too, but it’s very handy for excluding certain post categories.) While I think it’s useful to have those links collected in my blog, I don’t think they’re the items of most interest to visitors.

I may be taking the Collapsible Archive Widget out, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but just because the current thinking seems to be that including your archives takes up space you could use for something more interesting to your readers. (Also, a colleague told me that all those links to archive pages can slow down your page loading.) Expect to see some updates in the plugin list.

Conscious Beauty

Sallie Goetsch — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:32:54 +0000

Site

www.consciousbeauty.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

Client (The amazing Kathleena Gorga is Sallie’s stylist, if you were wondering where that red hair came from.)

Theme

Conscious Beauty 2 (created by Sallie Goetsch with Artisteer)

Active Plugins

Notes

Converted from static site to WordPress in 2008 to make it easier for Kathleena to maintain and update her own site. The blog was secondary, but she’s starting to use it more. The Advanced Category Excluder plugin and a custom page template power the dynamic content in the Community page.

Looking at this list, I realize that I could simply have used text widgets to do what I used Quotes Collection and Random Image Widget for, since there’s exactly one image and one quote. I was new to widgets at the time, and the name “text widget” confused me. And since it ain’t broke…

I tested a number of gallery plugins on this site, and Kathleena and I preferred the effect of Lightbox 2. I know everyone loves NextGEN, but it creates multiple copies of everything and puts them in strange places.

As for the cache plugins, Conscious Beauty is hosted on GoDaddy, which is known to be a bit sluggish as a WordPress host. (I have some of my own sites there as well.)