I’ve seen a lot of “Best WordPress Plugins” lists, and there’s usually a lot of overlap on them. You don’t need me to tell you about Platinum SEO Pack, Simple Tags, and WP Super Cache. Here are a few plugins that I think deserve more attention. These will probably be more useful to power-users who really want to tweak their WordPress site, but I encourage everyone to get their hands dirty every once and a while and get creative with their installs. Unless otherwise noted, these should work with with both WordPress 2.92 and WordPress 3.0. Widget Logic This gives every widget an extra field in which you can specify WP’s conditional tags. What this means is that you can have certain widgets appear on certain pages but not others. For example, I have my blogroll set to only appear on my front page. SEO Friendly Images This plugin can […]

You might find yourself in the situation where you only want a script to run on a certain page. In fact, it’s good practice to only load your JavaScript files when absolutely necessary; loading the files on every single page is a big no-no (I’ve been chastised before for this). While on the blog’s front-end, WordPress makes it super-easy with its conditional tags. I’m not going to go over the conditional tags here, but here are a few you can take advantage of: is_home() is_front_page() is_single() is_page() And much more. While being selective on the front-end is relatively straightforward, the admin-panel is another monster. Sure, there’s the is_admin() conditional, but what if you only want to run a script in a certain section within the admin panel? One technique is to use the PHP reserved variable called $_GET. Say you have a plugin options page with a URL of: http://www.mydomain.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=my-plugin-file.php […]

When adding scripts to WordPress, you will inevitably run into a small, but painful, issue of localization. Localizing a plugin or theme is relatively straightforward, but JavaScript presents its own difficulties since we can’t easily call the PHP functions necessary (which is one reason authors embed JavaScript in PHP files). Since embedding JavaScript in PHP files is never a good technique, we use localization to save the day. With JavaScript localization, you can use PHP magic to build your localized strings, and then use JavaScript to read/parse those strings. What you do with them is only limited to your imagination. Furthermore, if you display anything with JavaScript, chances are your users will want the strings to be localized. Fortunately, WordPress provides the ultra-handy wp_localize_script function. wp_localize_script The wp_localize_script takes three arguments: handle object_name l10n Handle The handle argument will be the same handle you use for your script name. For […]

Starting in WordPress 2.1 (if I remember correctly), the awesome folks at Automattic gave us the even awesomer function of wp_enqueue_script. Before that, it was every plugin or theme author for himself. If you wanted to add in a script, it was hard-coded in. As you might imagine, this presented a ton of problems. Scripts were loaded twice, out of order, or even when they weren’t needed at all. Furthermore, some themes and plugins had the JavaScript embedded within the plugin’s or theme’s PHP file just to capture a few PHP variables. Not good! In order to add scripts properly to JavaScript, you must always keep your PHP and JavaScript separate. And by separate, I mean separate files. There’s just no excuse anymore (I’ll get into this in Part 2 of this series). The wp_enqueue_script function is the first step in loading your scripts properly. Not only can you add […]

Desk Mess Mirrored Marble desktop covered with a mix of old and new items, such as some vintage papers, a stainless steel pen, and, a hot cup of coffee! Now with threaded comments and sticky posts! Ground Floor Richly toned wood floor background with bare-earth colored widgetized sidebar and footer (six widget areas in total, as shown on the included widget-map.png). A strong theme to begin with; grow into; and, build on. FNext Business & Finance Theme Stylish wordpress theme with three columns, widget-support, twitter support Straight Blue Clean Blue and white theme with pale shades of brown. Great for adsense ads and other easy customizations. Director Director includes threaded-comments, sticky-post, theme-options and a unique amazing design

Google News Blog: Bringing Living Stories to WordPress: Google is releasing their Living Stories experimental format as a plugin and a theme for WordPress.  Living Stories is an experimental news format from Google. In the form of a plugin, each Living Story would be a WordPress category with the plugin allowing a blogger to add the stories themselves. An example would be nice to see but none is to be found yet. Thanks to a writeup on ReadWriteWeb I would love to see an example blog or screenshots.

I wrote previously on securing a fresh WordPress install. Today, I’ll cover several WordPress plugins that can be used with fresh or existing WordPress installations to enhance security. I’m not going to cover recovering a hacked site, or exploit scanning tools like Exploit Scanner or WordPress Antivirus in this tutorial.

New Plugins Incomment Referrer This plugin quite simply lets you know where the users entered your site when they leave a comment. A lot of people who joined the do-follow movement are listed on sites which are a target for comment spammers. To those who suffer comment spam can now find out the page they come from, and block accordingly. WP Hide Pages This plugin hides selected pages from menus which created with wp_list_pages function. Essentially it adds exclude parameter to wp_list_pages function but it’s so easy now. Pages to Page Create the contents of Recent Comments, Pages, Categories, Archives, Recent Posts and Calendar which are usually shown in the sidebar and insert them onto a post or page. eletro widgets It allows yout to use WordPress widgets to set up your home page (or any page) in your blog. You can configure and drag & drop widgets around right […]