pageMash Archive

Meetup Members’ Plugin Picks (June 2009 and Feb 2010)

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – March 25, 2010

Somehow the June Meetup notes with favorite plugins never got posted. There was another request for plugin recommendations in February. Here are two lists with some plugin suggestions from the two events.

June 2009

  • Google Analyticator for inserting your Google Analytics tracking code. It knows not to count your own visits if you’re logged in as administrator. (Still compatible with 2.9.2)
  • Calendar lets you insert a calendar for appointments using a shortcode. (Compatible up to 2.8; may or may not work with 2.9)
  • Bad Behavior helps keep out the spambots (and other malicious bots). (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • Contact Form 7 lets you build contact forms easily and insert them into posts and pages with a shortcode. Includes Akismet integration and captcha to keep you from getting overloaded with spam forms. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • FormBuilder is the plugin you want when you need forms beyond what Contact Form 7 can create. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • YSlow is a plugin for Firefox, not WordPress, and it’s actually an addition to the Firebug plugin, but you’re going to want both of them if you do any site development. They’ll help you figure out why your site (or someone else’s) is running slowly, and how to fix it.
  • All in One SEO Pack is still a favorite, though our SEO expert prefers Headspace 2 (see below). (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • Google XML Sitemaps makes it easier for Google to index your site. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • Shopp is a commercial (meaning you have to pay for it) e-commerce plugin to integrate a shopping cart and payment gateways into your WordPress installation. Many people prefer it to the free WP e-Commerce, which nevertheless has lots of features. (Both compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • WP Super Cache can help speed up your site and protect it from a sudden rush of visitors. (Compatible up to 2.9.2.)
  • WP Widget Cache does the same thing for your widgets. (Compatible up to 2.8.1)
  • WP Limit Posts Automatically gives you more control over where to use excerpts and how long they should be. (Compatible up to 2.3; I’d be surprised if it worked with 2.9, but you can always try.)
  • WordPress Mobile Edition automatically creates a mobile-friendly version of your site for smartphones. Last updated in June 2009 and largely superseded by other plugins; see my post on mobile plugins.

February 2010

  • Akismet. This goes without saying, or should, and comes installed with WordPress. Just don’t forget to activate it. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • Broken Link Checker monitors your blog for broken links. (Compatible up to 3.0 alpha.)
  • Headspace2 SEO has even more features than All in One. (Officially compatible up to 2.8.1, but works with later versions.)
  • Redirection is a lifesaver when 404 errors pop up or when you have to send someone from an old blog installation to a new one. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • Search Unleashed. Everyone knows the search engine is the worst feature of WordPress. This plugin helps. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • WordPress Database Backup is the first backup plugin I ever used and a good, solid, reliable one. I actually made a donation to the developer. On the other hand, it only backs up the database.
  • pageMash lets you arrange your static pages easily by dragging and dropping them. You can even hide pages. The new menu system in WP 3.0 might make it obsolete. (Officially compatible up to 2.7.1, but I’ve been using it on 2.9.2 with no troubles.)
  • Display Widgets lets you create custom sidebars for each page without having to create multiple sidebar.php files and multiple page templates. Amazing! (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • AnyFont lets you upload fonts and use them for headers. (It converts the text to images.) Not suitable for long blocks of text, but nice for those with typographic leanings, at least until CSS 3 is widely supported. (Compatible up to 2.9.2)
  • BackupBuddy is a new commercial plugin. It doesn’t yet work on all web hosts, but when it works, it’s amazing. Read my review here. (Compatible up to 2.9.2; requires PHP5; new builds at least once a week.)

Pete Mall, a WordPress core developer, has volunteered to speak to the Meetup about plugin development. Stay tuned for details.

Postscript 3/27/10

Two things I forgot to mention. One is the new Plugin Picks series from the WordCast Network, where Dave and Kym discuss a different plugin each Monday and Wednesday. Another is the Find Replace plugin, which sounds like a candidate for the Most Valuable list, though I haven’t tried it yet.

Kathleena Gorga

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – January 12, 2010

Site

www.kathleenagorga.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

Client. (The same client as for the Conscious Beauty site.)

Theme

Kathleena Gorga 1.0 (created by Sallie Goetsch with Artisteer)

Active Plugins

Notes

Kathleena wanted to duplicate the appearance of a site that had been created with a combination of PageMaker and Photoshop, but have the ability to add new photos to her galleries. Since I’m not primarily a theme designer (who am I kidding? I’m not a theme designer at all), this required a fair amount of tweaking, but the result is very close, with greater usability.

I used pageMash to hide the blog entirely more than for organizing the comparatively small number of pages.

The initial gallery page does involve a single table and a few absolute URLs—which tripped me up when it came time to  publish to the root directory. The actual galleries use Cleaner Gallery and Lightbox 2. Cleaner Gallery is wonderful for uploading whole directories of images at a time.

pageMash

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – November 12, 2009

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:

Page Attributes

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.

pageMash screenshot

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.

Author-izer

By
Sallie Goetsch
 – November 12, 2009

Site

www.author-izer.com

Relationship to WordPress Asylum

The Author-izer is Sallie’s other business.

Theme

screenshot

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.