WordPress Hacks » WordPress Plugins

WPTouch: Creating a WordPress Mobile Theme

Kyle Eslick — Sun, 29 May 2011 20:50:12 +0000

Thanks to the huge success of the iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, and other mobile devices, Apps have become all the rage. The problem for many webmasters and WordPress users is that most smaller WordPress websites/blogs can’t afford to have a custom app developed for their WordPress site.

Of course, thanks to beauty of the open source nature of WordPress, WordPress users have access to all sorts of great WordPress plugins. I recently found myself debating whether or not to develop an app for WordPress Hacks and decided that first I would look into what free WordPress plugins were available. My goal was simply to find one which would display a WordPress blog to mobile browsers in a mobile friendly format.

Based upon roughly 2 million downloads plus great reviews, far and away the best plugin I’ve found to accomplish this is one called WP Touch. For those that haven’t heard of WP Touch, this WordPress plugin automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, and will display this theme when your WordPress blog is viewed from an iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile device!

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your WordPress website to mobile visitors, all without modifying a single bit of code or making any changes to your standard WordPress theme. The mobile theme also includes the ability for visitors to switch between WP Touch view and your site’s regular theme if that is what they prefer.

If you are looking for a more feature-rich product, I discovered that users can also purchase a Pro version of WP Touch which includes a slew of new features like more style, color and branding customizations, themes, 10 languages, more advertising options, web-app mode, and even iPad support.

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Jetpack: Supercharge Your Self Hosted WordPress Site!

Jacob Zarobsky — Wed, 04 May 2011 20:02:30 +0000

This guest post was written by Jake Zarobsky, a blogger for Today’s iPhone, custom theme developer, and an amateur photographer. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

Ever notice how many features the standard installation of WordPress lacks? YouTube embedding, stats, and even a specialized Twitter widget? Well, if you have a self hosted blog at WordPress.com, these features are all given to you. In fact, many of these features are forced upon you by the sponsoring company, Automattic. Wanna learn how to get all of that “cloud-power” for your WordPress site?

If you are one of the people who would love to have these features at your disposal and already has a WordPress.com account, keep reading. Otherwise, you’re losing out on a great plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites!

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Read the rest of Jetpack: Supercharge Your Self Hosted WordPress Site! (327 words)

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How Long Should You Wait to Upgrade WordPress?

Kyle Eslick — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:35:58 +0000

With the recent release of WordPress 2.8 this past week, there has been a number of complications and/or frustrations from the WordPress community, leading to a lot of discussion about how long you should wait to upgrade WordPress when a new branch is released. Historically the WordPress team has always done a great job of testing their releases, which I think lead to a strong confidence from the WordPress community when it was time to upgrade. Combine that with the one-click upgrade option that is now built into WordPress and the annoying tag reminding you to upgrade, and you’ve got a huge number of people who upgraded to WordPress 2.8 immediately upon its release.

Unfortunately, with each new WordPress branch comes changes which sometimes break WordPress plugins, create problems with the WordPress theme you are using, and usually includes changes to the code. If you upgrade before the themes or plugins you rely on have been updated, this can cause problems. The iThemes team recently touched on this subject with their post, When Should I Upgrade WordPress? Their post also includes five helpful things that need done BEFORE you do your one-click upgrade:

Make a backup of all your site data
Upgrade of all your plugins
Visit plugin and theme author websites
Disable all plugins
Ask yourself if you need to upgrade now

I also recommend waiting a week or so to view feedback before upgrading.

I know several of you haven’t upgraded WordPress to 2.8 yet. How long do you plan on waiting until you upgrade your WordPress installation? Please include which version of WordPress you are currently using with your comment!

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Automatically Tweet WordPress Posts with WordTwit

Kyle Eslick — Tue, 05 May 2009 09:00:44 +0000

Twitter has exploded in popularity over the past year as many mainstream media sources have been using the service to communicate with their readers/viewers, but did you know that bloggers can now use Twitter to promote their content as well?

While searching for a WordPress plugin that could automatically publish my blog posts on Twitter, I was thrilled to discover the WordTwit WordPress plugin. With this plugin, simply upload and activate, then enter the Twitter login information for the account you want the tweets to appear under. Once done, all your WordPress posts will start to appear on your Twitter account (almost instantly from my experience).

[Download the WordTwit WordPress Plugin]

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Tools & Resources for Multi-Author WordPress Blogs

Kyle Eslick — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:00:45 +0000

When setting up a WordPress blog that allows for multiple authors, it seems many people think all that is involved is to setup additional author profiles and/or start accepting guest posts. Unfortunately, it really isn’t that simple if you want to create a high quality WordPress blog.

Setting up a multi-author WordPress blog may require you to use a number of WordPress plugins to support a variety of functions. Ideally you’ll also want your theme to be hacked to help maximize the exposure your authors get. Examples include creating a “Write for Us” page, creating author profile pages, setting your theme to display the author’s profile below their posts, etc.

Multiple Author WordPress Plugins

Here are a couple WordPress plugins that we’ve covered in the past that are ideal for multi-author WordPress blogs:

Author Exposed – Adds a full featured display of the authors profile.
Role Manager Plugin – Allows you to control what the various WordPress user roles can and cannot do.

And here are a few other WordPress plugins that you may also have an interest in (we use a few of these here at WordPress Hacks):

Author Advertising – Plugin that allows you to share Google AdSense income or other advertising between multiple authors.
Blog Metrics – Collects blog metrics based upon the author of the posts.
List Authors Widget – Displays a list of authors in your widgets panel linking to the authors.php page.
Multiple Authors – Allows multiple authors to be listed for an individual WordPress post, automatically keeping track of who has edited the entry.

Multiple Author WordPress Hacks

Here are a few WordPress Hacks we’ve published in the past to help you hack your WordPress theme to be more multi-author friendly:

I’m sure there are also some WordPress plugins or WordPress hacks which aren’t listed above. Have any multiple author tools or resources you’d like to add to this list? Let us know in the comments so we can update our post!

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Optimize Your WordPress Database with Optimize DB WordPress Plugin

Kyle Eslick — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:49:33 +0000

If your WordPress blog has been around for awhile, chances are there is some clutter in your MySQL database. For these situations, Joost De Valk of Yoast.com has an easy to use WordPress plugin called Optimize Database.

This free WordPress plugin simply needs activated, then whenever you click Optimize Now, the plugin runs an optimize table command on your WordPress tables, effectively defragmenting it. This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated. If you’d like to learn more about why this WordPress plugin might be necessary, you can read more information on this post.

Great plugin Joost!

[Download the Optimize Database Plugin]

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WordPress Backup Plugin by Blog Traffic Exchange

Kyle Eslick — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:57:06 +0000

About a year and a half ago we wrote about how to backup your WordPress blog. In that post, we covered a few different WordPress plugins to manage your database backups, and explained why that was so important.

For the record, the plugin I primarily recommended back then and still prefer today is the WP-DB Manager plugin. This plugin allows you to backup and restore databases, as well as delete database tables, giving users full control over their database backups.

Unfortunately, that plugin only creates a backup for your database. What about everything else? WordPress blogs have a theme (or multiple themes), many use several WordPress plugins, and most bloggers use images that you’ve created to help draw attention to your posts or to illustrate a point.

Blog Exchange Traffic decided to fix this with their WordPress plugin release, the WordPress Backup plugin. This plugin backups up your themes, plugins, images, and gives you the option to download these backups or have them emailed to you (this only works if it is a smaller sized backup). WordPress Backup also works along side the WP-DB Manager plugin mentioned above, so it is recommended that you use both.

What do you use to manage your WordPress backups?

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Alternate WordPress Themes with the LP Jumper WordPress Plugin

Kyle Eslick — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:32:54 +0000

If you are an affiliate marketer, I’m sure you will be able to see the tremendous value in a new WordPress plugin (which was just released today) known as the LP Jumper WordPress plugin. I’ve been working with the author of the plugin for over a year now on various affiliate campaigns and was thrilled to be able to get a sneak peak at the Landing Page Jumper plugin a day early and try it out.

With the LP Jumper WordPress plugin, the concept is really simple. All you have to do is upload and activate the plugin. Once activated, you can control all the WordPress themes in your theme directory from the settings panel, setting rotation percentages (percentages much total 100% in order for the rotation to work properly). Once done, the theme displayed will change each time the website is refreshed based upon the percentages you set.

Here are some of the features of this premium WordPress plugin, which are any affiliate marketers dream:

Rotate Multiple Landing Pages from One Traffic Source
Find Out How Many Times the Specific Landing Page was viewed
Give Specific Priority to a Landing Page base on its Performance
Ability to Test your Current Landing Page Layout with Different Color Variations
Easily Create One Campaign and Utilize One Traffic Source to Test

If you’d like to learn more, you can read about the LP Jumper plugin here.

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Get Started with IntenseDebate

Alex Denning — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:00:58 +0000

WordPress’s default comment system isn’t exactly the greatest, and whilst you can improve the comment system manually, not everyone has the time or skill to do so. Thankfully, one of Automattic’s recent acquisitions, IntenseDebate can help.

Before we dive into installing IntenseDebate (which is really easy!), here is why you should use it, according to the IntenseDebate website:

So IntenseDebate is pretty much everything you could want from a comment system, so next we’re going to walk through the installation.

First thing is to go to www.intensedebate.com and signup. Next you’ll be asked to enter the URL of the site you want to install IntenseDebate on. Do so and click next. Assuming you’re running WordPress, you’ll be told you need to install the plugin:

Before you intsall the plugin, make sure you backup your database.

Once you’re backed up, follow the instructions above to step four. Once you’re at the tab, login with the account you just created, and then on the next screen click the big ‘Import Comments’ button. Sit back whilst your comments import themselves. When it is done, this screen will appear:

You’ll find a whole load of options to fiddle around with, so fiddle away, and then you’re done. Told you it way easy!

This was a guest post by Alex Denning, a WordPress power user, web design freelancer and Twitter fanatic (follow him here!). You can check out his site, Nometet.com here. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

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AntiSpam Bee: A Possible Akismet Competitor?

Kyle Eslick — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:00:26 +0000

Akismet has long been accepted as the most popular spam fighting WordPress plugin, closely followed by both Bad Behavior (which can be used along with Akismet) and of course Spam Karma 2. However, one interesting WordPress plugin I recently came across is the AntiSpam Bee plugin, which was designed by the author specifically to be a competitor with Akismet.

The interesting thing is that this WordPress plugin actually replaces the comments field completely, making it so spammers can’t find it. Some other listed features:

Quick & Dirty: activate, done!
Spam may be marked or deleted immediately
Saves no data in the database, accordingly no connection
WordPress 2.7 ready: Design and as well as technical
Very, very fast execution
No need to adjust any templates
Clean up after uninstall the plugin
Anonymous and independent

Has anyone tried this WordPress plugin yet? I’d love to some first-hand experiences from people using it.

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