WordPress is a great blogging platform with a potential of being an easy to use content management system. This is the third article of our four-part series, “The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress”. We are taking a look at 40+ quality and useful WordPress Plug-ins that will turn a simple WordPress site into a blazing fast dynamic one, with easily managed content, that you and your clients will love to use.

Making Your Content Unbreakable

There is one big drawback to using WordPress as a CMS: the lack of custom content types/groups, an area where developers put restrictions on how clients insert content. This is fairly easy to do with some knowledge of custom fields, but can be a little complicated if your client is new to WordPress. Developers must create workarounds to keep the content clean, portable and relatively unbreakable.

1. More Fields Plugin

More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post. For example, if you write about books, you can add a box where you can enter title and author, etc. The boxes can be placed either to the right or to the left on the Write/Edit page.

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2. Creating Custom Content Type with Flutter Plugin

Flutter is made precisely for CMS-making, allows you to create custom Write Panel (Posts, Pages, and Theme Options). This, basically, is a custom content type in which you can add your own fields. So, if a WordPress installation gives you two different content types (Post and Page), Flutter enables you to add more Write Panels to your likings. You can create any type of field (File Uploads, Audio, Video, Checkboxes, Dropdowns) to make as simple as possible for your client or yourself to enter content.

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3. Post Templates Plugin

If you find yourself writing posts and pages on a regular basis which have the same structure, then this plugin would be a great addition to your WordPress plugin arsenal. This could be very useful for clients who have no idea how to get started to write a new page or post. Written by Vincent Prat, Post Templates plugin helps you save time blogging by letting you save and recall templates for writing posts and pages.

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4. WP-CMS Post Control Plugin

This plugin gives you complete control over your write options. It not only allows you to hides unwanted items like custom fields, trackbacks, revisions etc… but also gives you a whole lot more control over how WordPress deals with creating content! This helps you use WordPress more like a CMS, alowing you to totally customise what your authors see and use.

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Managing Users and their Roles

1. User Access Manager Plugin

This plugin is useful if you need a member area or a private section at your blog or you want that other people can write at your blog but not everywhere. Features include:

• User groups
• Set seperate access for readers and editors
• Set access by user groups
• Set access by post categories
• User-defined post/page title (if no access)
• User-defined post/page text (if no access)
• Optional login form (if no access)
• User-defined comment text (if no access)

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2. Role Scoper Plugin

Role Scoper is a comprehensive enrichment for access control in WordPress, giving you CMS-like control of permissions. Assign reading, editing or administration roles to users or groups on a page-specific, category-specific or other content-specific basis.

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3. Role Manager Plugin

This Plugin allows you to define and manage multiple subscriber profiles – called Roles and their Capabilities. Also you can create new Roles and Capabilities.

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4. Member Access Plugin

Member Access allows a WordPress administrator to make individual posts and pages accessible only to logged-in members. Member Access allows global configuration so that all posts or pages can be viewable by everyone (the default) or only by members, and it also allows each post and page to override the global setting.

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Better & Smart Navigation

1. WP-PageNavi Plugin

Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog. Example: Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » … Last »

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2. Wordpress Navigation List Plugin

The plugin gives you the ability to create unique site navigation from your pages, categories and users using a Drag ‘n Drop Interface; arrange the items within a group in any arbitrary order. Navigation groups may be composed of any combination of pages, categories, Authors, (Editors, Contributors, Subscribers), internal/external links and list dividers. This plugin has a lot of other great features, you have to check it out.

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3. Multi-level Navigation Plugin

Adds an SEO friendly, accessible dropdown/flyout/slider menu to your WordPress blog. The plugin generates the code necessary to create a Son of Suckerfish horizontal dropdown, vertical flyout or horizontal slider menu. The plugin produces W3C valid HTML and CSS and only requires Javascript to function for very old browsers such as IE 6. Check out the demo here. The options page allows you to choose from a range of options including:

• What content will be displayed in the menu
• Animation speed (how fast the dropdowns appear)
• Mouseover delay
• Hide delay
• Add a second menu

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4. Yoast Breadcrumbs Plugin

Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO”. They are good for two things: a) They allow your users to easily navigate your site. b) They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.

5. Simple Sidebar Navigation Plugin

This plugin adds a widget into the Widgets dashboard that allows in a simple way, without writing any PHP code on your part, to create custom navigation in any sidebar pre-defined by your WP theme. Features include:

• Flat and multi-level navigation hierarchy for existing pages and custom links.
• Very flexible conditional appearance options.
• Out-of-the-box Suckerfish support.
• Option to add navigation links with custom title, url and target attribute.
• Unlimited number of navigation widgets.
• Optional setting includes blog posts into the navigation selection list (only pages are available by default).
• Support for custom drop-down menus CSS.

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Having a Multilingual Site

Writing multilingual content is already hard enough, so why go extra mile without making sure you already have a good plan to manage translation on your blog. Check out the plugins below that will help you have a fully featured multilingual CMS.

1. WPML Multilingual CMS Plugin

Turns WordPress sites into a fully featured multilingual content management system (CMS). WPML helps it go the extra mile. Features include: 1) Multilingual content support based on Drupal i18n architecture. 2) CMS navigation allows adding drop down menus, breadcrumbs trail and sidebar navigation (all wigetized). 3) Creates internal Sticky Links so that they never break. You can read more about the capabilities of this powerful plugin here.

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2. xLanguage Plugin

xLanguage is a full featured plugin allows you to blog in different language, and allows user to select which version to read. It works for blog post, page, tags, categories. The user language preferences will also select the right theme and plugins MO files.

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3. qTranslate Plugin

qTranslate makes creation of multilingual content as easy as working with a single language. Here are some features:

• qTranslate Services – Professional human and automated machine translation with two clicks
• One-Click-Switching between the languages – Change the language as easy as switching between Visual and HTML
• Language customizations without changing the .mo files – Use Quick-Tags instead for easy localization
• Multilingual dates out of the box – Translates dates and time for you
• Comes with a lot of languages already builtin! – English, German, Simplified Chinese and a lot of others

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Easily Manage Categories, Pages and Posts

1. Idealien Category Enhancements Plugin

Manage category templates as easily as you manage page templates. Select which apply through the post > categories menu using file names that make sense, not category ID numbers. Now any views of the category (or sub-categories) will render the according to the category template selected. Posts in a given category can also use a category-based template.

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2. pageMash > Page Management Plugin

Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

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3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog.

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4. Exclude Pages Plugin

This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you un-check it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).

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5. WP No Category Base Plugin

As the name suggests this plugin will completely remove the mandatory ‘Category Base’ from your category permalinks ( e.g. myblog.com/category/my-category/ to myblog.com/my-category/ ).

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SEO

Wordpress by default is pretty decent at letting search engines see what’s going on. But there are a whole bunch of plugins that can be used to make your blog rank better.

1. Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

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2. All in One SEO Pack Plugin

Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines: page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.

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3. Redirection Plugin

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

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4. Permalinks Moved Permanently Plugin

If you just migrated your Wordpress blog from one permalink structure to another, and you don’t want to lose Pagerank or traffic that accesses your blog through the old permalinks, this is for you.

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5. SEO Smart Links Plugin

SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

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6. Platinum SEO Pack Plugin

This is an improvised version of the AllinOne SEO plugin. It does everything that AllinOne was doing and also some extra cool features. It takes care of pretty much everything, a bit more advanced than a basic SEO plugin but easy to use as well.

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Highly customizable Widgets

1. Widgets Reloaded Plugin

Widgets Reloaded replaces many of the default widgets with versions that allow much more control. Widgets come with highly customizable control panels. Each widget can also be used any number of times.

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2. Flexi Pages Widget Plugin

Flexi Pages Widget is a highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. Can be used as an alternative to the default ‘Pages’ widget. Features include:

• Option to display sub-pages only in parent page and related pages.
• Option to select and exclude certain pages from getting displayed in the list. Alternatively, only certain pages can be displayed by using the ‘include’ option.
• Option to include a link to the home page.
• Other options include title, sort column/order, hierarchical/flat format, show date.
• Multiple instances of the widget. Unlimited number of instances of the widget can be added to the sidebar.

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3. SidePosts Widget Plugin

With this widget you select the category you want, and all entries with this category, will be shown on the sidebar instead the main blog. You will have then a small blog on the sidebar for those special entries. For each entry, you have the link to the post page. You can select the number to post to show and if must show only the post excerpt or the full post content (Also excerpt with thumbnails can be shown).

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4. Query Posts Widget Plugin

This widget has everything you’ll ever need to show posts on your site without touching code. It’s like having a WordPress developer ready to do your bidding all wrapped up in a widget. All you need is a theme that’s widgetized.

It lets you displays posts by nearly any criteria you can imagine using the query_posts() function, except you don’t need to know anything about PHP to use it. You can do all kinds of neat things: Posts by tag, Posts by category, Posts by author, Posts by time/date, Posts by custom field key and/or value, Choose any number, Show pages, Show the full post, excerpt, or even order them in a list, and much more…

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Must Check Plugins

1. Search Everything Plugin

Search Everything increases the ability of the default Wordpress Search, options included: Search Every Page, Search Every Tag, Search Every Category, Search non-password protected pages only, Search Every Comment, Search Every Custom Field, Exclude Posts from search, Exclude Categories from search and more.

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2. Subscribe2 Plugin

Subscribe2 provides a comprehensive subscription management and email notification system for WordPress blogs that sends email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog. Email Notifications can be sent on a per-post basis or periodically in a Digest email.

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3. Exec-PHP Plugin

The Exec-PHP plugin executes PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets. Features include

• Executes PHP code in the excerpt and the content portion of your posts and pages
• Configurable execution of PHP code in text widgets (for WordPress 2.2 or higher)
• Write PHP code in familiar syntax, eg.

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4. WP e-Commerce Plugin

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

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5. NextGEN Gallery Plugin

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. It can turn a regular blog into a powerful photo-blog while giving you all the tools to manage it efficiently and easily.

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6. Contact Form 7 Plugin

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

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7. Viper’s Video Quicktags Plugin

Tired of copying and pasting the embed HTML from sites like YouTube? Then this plugin is for you. Simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more.

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(via Noupe)

Streamlining Your Social Web Presence in 6 Steps: “

Following the advice of social media and Web 2.0 experts, you have established your own blog and joined a number of social sites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LibraryThing, and Upcoming.org, among others. Now, the experts say you must add content to each of these accounts regularly to keep them dynamic. So, how’s this supposed to make your life easier?

Relax. With some careful planning, you can streamline the process of keeping all of your Social Web accounts fresh and engaging without breaking your back or the bank. The trick is to make your social accounts work together. Most social sites use the concept of open source to make it easy for developers to write applications that enhance the features of the site. For our purposes, we will look at applications that can help us streamline our existing presence in the Social Web.

To demonstrate what I mean about streamlining the process, I’ll start with an example. Imagine that you have the following social media tools and accounts already in place on the Social Web:

• A WordPress Blog
• A Facebook Profile
• A Facebook Page
• A MySpace Page
• A YouTube Account
• A Flickr Account
• A Twitter Account
• An Upcoming.org Account
• A GoodReads Account

Your 6 Step Plan to a Streamlined Social Web Presence

Step 1: Optimize Your Blog Feed

The very first step in streamlining your presence in the Social Web is burning your blog’s feed to Feedburner. This is a free service, and obtaining a FeedBurner account will help you to easily manage and track your feed subscriptions. Once you have burned your feed to FeedBurner, note the URL of your new feed, which will look something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyBlogName .

Step 2: Feed Your Blog Now

You want to make sure that you are getting the most mileage from your blog posts. To do so, feed your blog entries into all of your social accounts that offer blog feeding applications. Remember that each social site may provide its own different way of accomplishing this.

Facebook, for example, allows you to feed your blogs into the Notes section of your Facebook page. Click Edit in the Notes box of your Facebook page and find the option that allows you to import notes from an external blog.

Feeding blog entries into MySpace is a little different. Find and add the application RSS Reader. You can access many MySpace applications by clicking More/Apps Gallery from the main menu of your MySpace homepage.

It is possible to feed your blog posts into Twitter, but blog posts are typically too long for this purpose. If you read on, I will clue you in to a better solution for streamlining your micro-blog entries.

Step 3: Maximize the Use of Your Multimedia

Maximize the exposure of your images and video clips by adding galleries and badges to your blog or Website, and by feeding your images and videos into your social networking profiles and pages.

WordPress has many plugins available for integrating Flickr images. My favorite right now is Flickr Tag, a plugin that allows you to easily place your Flickr images right into your blog posts, and create galleries.

A Flickr badge is a snippet of Flash or HTML code that you can place on the sidebar of your Website or blog that will pull in and highlight random or specific photos from your Flickr account. Find out more by going to: http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne.

Similarly, you can embed video galleries into your blog or Website by using your YouTube channels. After you’ve added videos to your YouTube channel, you can generate code for a video gallery and place this code on your Website or blog.

To feed images from Flickr into your Facebook page and MySpace profile, find the appropriate application and add it. For Facebook, I use an application called My Flickr; for MySpace, use Happy Flickr.

You can place videos on your Facebook page by implementing an application called YouTube Box, and using the application YouTube Favorites, you can display video clips on your MySpace profile.

Step 4: Integrate Other Social Tools

The way in which you proceed in step 4 depends entirely upon which social tools and Websites make up your Social Web presence. In the example I have created, we have accounts with Upcoming.org (a social event calendar) and GoodReads (a niche book sharing and author site) that have not yet been integrated. By searching the applications in Facebook and MySpace, you’ll find that Facebook offers an application that allows you to integrate your Upcoming.org events, and both Facebook and MySpace include applications that allow you to display your GoodReads books and book reviews.

Step 5: Take Advantage of Streamlining Tools

Using the social tool, Ping.fm, you can add short posts to your mini feeds on Facebook, MySpace, and your micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Jaiku. Ping.fm is a useful tool that lets you post one brief entry, or often a status update, and feed it into a number of social sites.

Step 6: Research and Repeat

The very nature of the Social Web is connecting people through social platforms and applications; therefore, when deciding whether or not to invest time and resources into a new social tool, it’s best to research the ways that tool will accommodate your existing Social Web presence. Can you feed in your blog posts? Does it allow you to import images from a photo sharing site or video clips from from your video sharing community? Have sites like Ping.fm integrated the new tool yet, or do your existing social sites offer applications to integrate the new tool?

When you do decide to integrate a new social tool or Website, do so as best you can by repeating the applicable steps presented above.

By Deltina Hay

“

(Via KDI Media : Savannah, GA.)

Will Facebook give us cancer? Not if we browse it on an iPhone in the park! Such is the pseudoscience of health and the Internet.

A study in Biologist, a science journal, concludes that the less we talk to our families, the more likely we are to die young. Psychologist Aric Sigman writes that lack of social contact actually interferes with our blood chemistry and immune system and could lead to ‘cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia,’ according to a British tabloid’s summary. And Internet usage lowers social contact. Ergo, Facebook gives you cancer.

Yes, but what does that have to do with today’s Internet, a Guardian blogger asks. The study Sigman cites dates back to 1998 — before Wi-Fi, before pervasive social networking sites, before cheap laptops, before iPhones. The phenomenon of an Internet-obsessed dad avoiding his family in the basement doesn’t reflect how people use the Internet now. If anything, the contemporary Web affords an excess of social contact.

So, is it dangerous to use the Web? Yes, if you’re doing it inside. A recent study finds that access to nature improves health in all kinds of ways. Trees can even improve the symptoms of ADHD. And treeless urban environments increase aggression.

There’s an obvious conclusion: Blog if you must, but do it outdoors. And whatever you do, don’t be that guy reading FriendFeed at a bar instead of talking to your drinking companions.

(Via Valleywag.)

“Our USA is known around the world as the most creative and productive of the 20th Century.  I am convinced that it has been our heritage of individual liberty that has made it possible for us to show the world how to provide abundant prosperity for all.

If each of us can just see the future as positive and act accordingly, we’ll be fine.  It is not helpful to dwell on the dire aspects of today’s “Hard Times”.

Think about how much better things are now compared to the way they were described by Charles Dickens in the 19th Century.”

God Bless,

Keith Burk
AKA: ‘AncientFool’
Website: keithburk.com

The Pros and Cons of Using Video in Your Site or Blog: “

Last year I started experimenting with online video. I focused mostly on screencasts, doing some blog reviews and how-to videos. I liked to work with video, and found that it has many benefits. After some time I also realized that it carries some drawbacks, though. Below you will find what I learned from it.

PROS

1. Video sets your apart from the crowd. Most people are able to setup a blog and start writing text posts. Current blogging and publishing platforms make it a no-brainer even for 5-year old children. Video, on the other hand, requires a special setup (e.g., a video camera, screen capturing and editing software). Using video can therefore set your blog or site apart from the crowd.

2. Video appeals to a different audience. There is a great number of online users that prefer to watch videos over reading text content. YouTube’s popularity is no coincidence. Adding video to your site could widen your potential audience and bring new visitors aboard.

3. Video enables you to show rather than tell. Demonstrating things and explaining some concepts can be easier with video. Sites that have a good amount of how-to articles and tutorials could therefore benefit from the format.

4. Video can be more personal. Video will bring out your voice and possibly your face. Needless to say that this is a much stronger way to interact with your visitors. Secondly, if you want to develop your personal brand, video could help with that.

5. Video reaches different online channels. Given the immense popularity of online video sites, YouTube above them all, video could be used to tap into different marketing channels and new traffic generation opportunities.

CONS

1. Video requires more preparation. Casual videos can be shot on the spot. If you want to produce something more professional, however, you will need to work on the setup, script and related activities. In other words, you will need to work even before you start shooting the video.

2. Video takes time to edit and upload. Apart from preparing the video before you shoot it, you will also need to dedicate a good amount of time to the editing and uploading processes. Choosing the right format, video platform and player are also areas that will need attention.

3. Video is not optimal for search engines. Google and other search engines are evolving fast regarding how they index videos. That being said, text is still king if you want to optimize your site for organic traffic. One solution for this is to offer video transcripts, but this will require some extra work on your side.

4. Video is not suitable for all topics. Depending on the topic or type of content that you want to create, video might not be suitable at all. Lists of resources, extensive articles and detailed researches, for example, are better presented in textual format.

5. Not everyone likes video. While there are many Internet users that swear by online video, there are just as many that can’t stand it. Those are mostly people that don’t have too much time to surf the web, and who prefer to access the information in textual format, because it allows them to scan through the content, and filter only the bit of information that they need.

Overall I think it is worth a try though. Video is certainly going to be a huge part of the web in the coming years, and the sooner you get used to it, the better.

What about you, have you experimented with producing online video? What did you learn from it?

Got the Internet Marketing Newsletter?

The Pros and Cons of Using Video in Your Site or Blog

“

(Via Daily Blog Tips.)

Six years ago WordPress was born, according to Matt Mullenweg who founded and runs the company that makes it, Automattic. My blog here is hosted on WordPress.com and I couldn’t be happier. I can’t wait to see what Matt does in the next six years. He has a few ideas, as he told me recently in an interview I did with him.

(Via Scobleizer.)

Brainjuice just released version 1.2 of Blogo, a blog editor for the Mac. The updated software now supports all major blogging platforms like Typepad, Blogger, Wordpress, Typo, Movable Type, Drupal, Expression Engine (support just added), and even micro-blogging on Twitter, and cross-posting from Ping.fm.

The new release also adds comment moderation for Wordpress 2.7 or higher, improved Safari integration, and offline editing. We previously ranked Blogo as one of the 10 best Mac apps for bloggers, and we stick by that claim.

When I downloaded Blogo, I was immediately impressed with how easy it was to connect my blog and get started (just make sure ‘remote editing’ is enabled). You can expect Blogo to support all your platform’s existing editing features, but it also adds in a few extras like offline editing, a drop box for easily adding media, and a bookmarklet to help you add media to posts without adding HTML. Blogo also supports multiple accounts for multiple blogs, and you can use Blogo as a Twitter desktop client—the Microblog Viewer is like a cross between Twhirl and Tweetdeck, without the groups.

For Blogo newbies, watch the screencast above for a quick tutorial on how to create your first post. Additional tutorials are available via the Brainjuice Vimeo account.

(Via Mashable!.)

WordPress is quickly becoming the standard software for the majority of blogs. This fact makes every major release of the software seem like a huge event, but the thing is that this time it is. WordPress 2.7 comes with a huge number of changes, a good chunk of them making some older plugins redundant. This will be a huge upgrade for all blog owners.

The following lists 20 of the biggest changes coming, but all together there have been over 400 changes to the program this time around.Any way you slice it, there is a little bit of something for everyone in this release. Take a look through and you’re sure to find something that appeals to you.

Unfortunately this is only available for the blogs on WordPress.com for now, but it will be released for self-hosted blogs on December 10th.

What are the changes you are most excited about?

Comments

Close Comments On Old Posts – Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to continue letting comments come in on an old post, and it is a favorite trick of spammers anyway.WordPress 2.7 will allow you to close comments on older posts, eliminating the need for yet another plugin.

Comment Paging – Comments broken into pages instead of being a never ending bottom to your post.

Comment Replies From the Admin Section – A feature that has long been needed is the ability to reply to comments from your admin section without having to go to the front end of your blog.

Comment Threading – It’s not just admin comment replies that are getting love, but all comments will now be in a threaded format. Great for those long debates you get into about what ‘sux’ or why someone is a ‘newb,’ at last no one will be confused about to whom you are referring!

XMLRPC Comments API -Support for the XML-RPC protocol which is a simplified API that encodes your comments in XML and transports them via HTTP.

Keyboard Shortcuts For Comments -Once you’re in your comments, you can use the keys j and k to navigate through the comments. Once selected, some of the keys you can use will be ‘a’ to approve, ‘s’ to mark as spam and ‘d’ to delete.

Theme & Plugin Related

One-Click Plugin Installs – Another long time plugin favorite is going the way of the dinosaurs with the introduction of the ability to install plugins from the dashboard.

Plugin Browser – Browsing for plugins, one of the favorite pastimes of many bloggers, will be made easier by being able to do it without ever leaving your WordPress install.

Sticky Posts – There have been numerous WordPress plugins over the years to make a post ‘sticky’ so that it stays as the top post on your front page no matter how many posts you publish after it. The feature has now been built in to the core program.

Updating the Core WordPress – Yet another WordPress plugin finds its way into the core WordPress program. For those users who haven’t used something like Fantastico or Simple Scripts to install their blog, there will now be a more automated way for you to keep up with all of those pesky security updates.

Theme Update API Notices – You will receive updates when your installed themes are updated just like WordPress does now with plugins.

Greater Controls

Batch Editing for Posts – Ever needed to edit the tags for several posts, but couldn’t do it because of the work involved? Batch editing will now allow you to do mass edits of your posts so that you can make as many changes as you want to your blog no matter how old it is.

Column Control – On any management page that shows columns, you will now be able to choose which columns are shown and how.

Ping & Trackback Moderation – With the ever increasing wave of ‘splogs’ trackbacking your blog, there will finally be moderation of them in a more manageable, frame-like format.

QuickPress – Ever wanted to just do a quick post without having to load the entire write page? Now you can directly from the Dashboard page with QuickPress.

Recent Drafts – There will now be a module on your dashboard to get to your most recent drafts so you can quickly get access to your posts that are in progress.

Other Tweaks

Dashboard and Write Rearrangements – There have been significant redesigns to navigation and general layouts of the dashboard and write pages.

PHPXref – Ever go slightly loopy trying to make sense of PHP files? PHPXref will help you by making PHP into easy to digest documents that you can read through. All of this will be hosted on WordPress.org.

Image Size Tweaks – Thumbnail and Medium commands will stay the same, but Large will now be restricted to 1024 pixels, or the constraints of your theme. If you want no restrictions and post insane sized pictures, you will now be able to select ‘Full Size’ which will post your image at its original size. You will also now see the dimensions for each size next to the radio buttons.

Redundant Coding – Theme authors will be happy to see some changes to the wp_page_menu wrapper that will simplify their coding and add conveniences like making ‘Home’ part of the list.

Interested in more WordPress resources? Check these out:

WordPress Themes: ‘Top 12 Stunning WordPress Themes‘, ‘30+ WordPress 3 Column Themes,’ ‘20 WordPress 4-Column Themes,’ ‘30+ WordPress 1-Column Themes,’ ‘10 Unusual & Original WordPress Themes’

Plugins: ‘50+ WordPress Plugins for Multimedia,’ ‘30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics,’ ‘30+ WordPress Plugins for Comments,’ ‘30+ WordPress Plugins to Get More Blog Readers.’

Miscellaneous: ‘WordPress God: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog,’ ‘The 7 Weirdest and Wackiest Uses for WordPress‘

(Via Mashable!.)

“

(Via Ian Scott.)

1. Use Wordpress. No other platform is as flexible with all the plug-ins, in my opinion.
2. Post often. I usually default to one post per day, when I’m asked. I try to do at least one per day on this blog, except for weekends.
3. Use catchy blog post titles. Put yourself in the shoes of a person who is casually surfing the Internet, seeing your post along with hundreds of others. Will your blog headline stand out? Copyblogger is an awesome source for information on writing.
4. Ask open ended questions. One of the best ways to invite commentary on your posts is to ask for it. Ask your readers questions and tell them to answer in the form of a comment.
5. Comment on other blogs – often. I actually maintain a separate folder in Google Reader for relevant blogs I want to follow more closely than others. And, on those blogs, I comment regularly whenever I have something to say.
6. Use Twitter. You’ve GOT to be out there, being social. Friendfeed, too.
7. Use Twitterfeed to pipe your latest posts into Twitter. But, don’t ONLY use Twitterfeed. You’ve got to be a real person on Twitter, first and foremost. Twitter should not replace RSS.
8. Make your RSS feed obvious, above the fold, and preferably use the orange RSS icon.
9. Provide an RSS-to-Email option so people can subscribe to your latest posts without being forced to use an RSS reader. Many people still don’t use RSS. Feedburner provides a free RSS-to-Email service.
10. Use images in your posts. Images communicate on aesthetic wavelengths words cannot.
11. Use header tags to separate sections in your blog posts, where applicable. H1, H2, and H3 tags. And use good search engine keywords wherever possible in those headers.
12. Structure your blog posts for easy scanning. Use header tags, lists, etc. Avoid long sentences and long paragraphs.
13. Avoid Myspace-style blog designs. What I mean by this is super BUSY designs with too much on screen, animated graphics, etc. These things make your blog truly suck and makes your content too hard to pay attention to.
14. If possible, use a custom Wordpress theme. It is getting to the point where people can recognize cookie-cutter themes. It is OK to use one, but at least modify it so that you have a unique header design.
15. Start your blog’s mailing list as early as possible. The sooner you start, the longer you have to grow your list and, trust me, that list can be used to make money later. Jeremy Shoemoney made this mistake. John Reese used to hound him about building a list. When he finally got around to it, he realized how important it was.
16. Research and choose your mailing list option correctly the first time. I recommend Aweber. What you choose is up to you, however moving a mailing list later can be a huge pain. I know from experience.
17. When choosing a topic to focus your blog on, two things should be considered: (1) Your interest in the topic, (2) How MARKETABLE your topic is.
18. Learn to SELL. The way to a full-time income by blogging is to learn how to MARKET and sell things using your blog. Yaro Starak does a good job of selling via his blog, for example.
19. Don’t discount Facebook. It is a powerful networking tool and you should take the time to build your network, just as you might on Twitter.
20. Create a Facebook page. On Facebook, create a page for your blog or yourself and invite your readers and Facebook friends to become fans. This page can be your blog’s outpost on Facebook. Be sure to import your blog posts as notes.
21. Don’t Be a Me-Too Blogger. You don’t want to become a copy-cat news blog, where you type news-style posts about what is happening in a saturated market. In technology, this is common. Offer something unique that cannot be found everywhere else in your market.
22. Learn to think about your blog as a business. The blog is a promotional and delivery mechanism to your ultimate product or service.
23. When writing your About Page, pay attention to what you write. Don’t just rattle off some dumb, cookie cutter facts. Your About Page should tell a story of who you are and why your blog is worth reading.
24. Do lots of videos. Use TubeMogul to publish them in as many places as you can. And make sure your blog URL is not only in the video, but in the text description that accompanies the video.
25. When making videos, be REAL and be personable. Your videos are an important component to your blog’s brand. Don’t waste the opportunity.
26. Link to other, related blog posts regularly in your own posts. Not only your OWN posts, but the posts of others.
27. Remember, blogging is a SOCIAL business. Be accessible to your readers and proactively get out there and talk with other people in your niche.
28. If you can afford it, travel to blogging conferences. Not only can you learn a lot, but socializing with successful people often breeds so much motivation and success in yourself that is simply beyond words.
29. Write an e-book, create some videos – whatever – but the idea is to create something which is of value to your readers on your subject, and have it available to SELL to them on your blog.
30. Get involved as an affiliate and start linking to products relevant to your posts using your affiliate links. You are providing relevant links to your readers (valuable) while potentially making some money.
31. Don’t Post Low Feedburner Counts. Do not show your RSS subscriber count unless you have a high enough number (at least a few hundred). A low number acts as social proof that your blog has no readers, and that’s not good.
32. Install Popularity Contest or some similar plug-in which ranks your posts based on popularity. Whether you display this information in public on your blog or not, knowing which of your posts are most popular tells you that that particular subject material works and you should probably do more of it.
33. Put relevant keywords into your blog’s title. Use All-In-One SEO to have more control over the titles across your blog.
34. Use a Photo Gallery. People dig photos, so a photo gallery can be a great component to your blog. If you use Flickr, check out the Flickr Photo Album plug-in for Wordpress.
35. Create an RSS widget for your blog on WidgetBox and make it available for your readers to embed on their own blogs if they so choose.
36. Spend some time creating some killer posts for your blog, the link to them somewhere so that new arrivals can quickly see your best work. It is your best stuff which is going to sell them into becoming a subscriber.
37. Make Sharing Easy. Put options on your blog for your readers to share your posts across social media. ShareThis is a great option for this.
38. Share and share alike. If you submit your own posts to sites like Digg or StumbleUpon, be sure to also submit other posts. I might even recommend a 10 to 1 ratio of other people’s posts to your own posts. You do not want to develop a reputation on these sites as somebody who only submits their own content.
39. When you write a post for your blog, aim to be helpful. You want your visitors to come away with a solution to the problem they arrived with. Chris Brogan does so well because his posts are truly helpful.
40. Read other blogs often. When starving for ideas to write about, go to your RSS reader and read related blogs. Often, your own post can be a response to a post on another blog. In fact, this is usually a good idea.
41. Train your readers to do what you want, if needed. If you’re in a market where the people will not know how to use social media, RSS and some of these other things that help promote your blog, TRAIN THEM. Write posts or do videos which show your visitors how to Digg a post, use StumbleUpon, how to use RSS, etc. Perhaps you can educate them and they’ll become part of your promotion army for your own blog.
42. When starting a blog, decide on it’s mission. Your posts should, for the most part, center around a specific theme if you want your blog to really take off. If you run a personal diary kind of blog, where you write about anything that comes to mind, your blog traffic will always be limited because your blog will never attract any particular segment of people. Stay on topic. If you have no specific topic, that’s fine, but realize your blog is going to be more a hobby than a business at that point.
43. Don’t overload your blog with javascript widgets. These things slow down the load speed of your site. In fact, just recently I had to get rid of the MyBlogLog widget on this blog because it was having some effects on page loading time.
44. Use Analytics. I personally use Google Analytics as well as the Wordpress.com Stats plug-in on this blog.
45. Use Windows Live Writer. It is the best blogging client program out there. Even though it is a Microsoft product and a Windows-only product, it is also better than any Mac blogging client I have tried. And it’s free.
46. Be yourself. I believe it is a good thing to show personality on your blog. Don’t be a fake. People can see right through it. Chris Pirillo draws people to his blog and Ustream feed almost solely on personality alone.
47. Don’t write like you’re writing for Britannica. You want your spelling and grammar to be correct, but be colloquial. Talk to people like you would normally talk to people, not as if you’re writing a PH.D. dissertation.
48. Link To Your Social Profiles On Your Blog. Link your various social media profiles right on your blog so that your readers can connect with you outside the confines of your blog.
49. Go where your readers are. Every market is different. When I blog about blogging, I know most of my readers are pretty adept online and probably hang out in the social media space frequently. If your readers are young, they might be on Myspace. If they’re Linux nerds, they may be in the Ubuntu forums. Regardless, you need to maintain a consistent presence in the spaces your readers congregate. Be an authority and be helpful, and traffic will be drawn over to your blog.
50. Equal time reading and writing. You should probably spend just as much time reading and learning as you do writing for your blog. This is how you expand your knowledge, become a better blogger, and get new ideas for your own site. Blogging isn’t all about you. Remember that.

(Via David Risley.)

The Blubrry PowerPress plugin for WordPress version 0.2.1 is now available. The latest version incorporates a number of bug fixes and enhancements.

Here’s what’s new:

• Fixed itunes:subtitle displaying ‘…’
• Display itunes:summary in items option
• Add trailing slash to media url if not present
• Enhance ability to copy Podpress settings

Details are available at the Blubrry site.

(Via Podcasting News.)