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A WordPress Plugin a day for 30 days

Chris — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:45:27 +0000

WordPress is one of the greatest blogging if not full fledged CMS tools you can find, it’s greatest strength is the ease of adding new functions via a plugin. Once I hit a list of 30 plugins I’m going to try and release a plugin a day every day for a month. Every day an unreleased plugin that tweaks your site in a variety of different ways. Whether you want to be a better admin, better with social media, or to provide cooler functions for your readers there should be a plugin you’ll want.

My current idea list:

refresh comments admin dashboard
A simple idea that adds “refresh me” to the recent comments widget on the dashboard, and uses ajax to only refresh that widget.
feedburner widget for dashboard
Integrated dashboard widget that shows the summary of feed data.
plugin compatibility checker
The idea is when you try and add a new plugin it will check your plugin list against the plugin compatibility checker to see if it will fail. This one is likely to not be done by me lol.
mint stats dashboard widget
I love Mint stats so much. I just don’t love always opening an external page to see it. Giving me my stats via the dashboard in widget form is a no brainer.
social media welcome mat with follow me message.
If people are referred by twitter the header would say “Welcome twitter users, Like what you see? Consider adding to get updated on new posts” or whatever the user decides to have the message say.
Referrer widget for dashboard
show your readers where the most recent hits came from.
WPMU plugin installer permissions
allow users to only install admin approved plugins from wordpress.org/extend/plugins gives users flexibility but protects your WPMU site (Not even sure if this one is possible or worthwhile)

Obviously this is just a very rough list and I’d love more input and more importantly feedback about what functions you want new plugins to serve. So take a moment and suggest something you’d like me to try and build.

Not my picture (again courtesy of the tagaroo plugin and Flickr).

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No Filter Fridays, a social experiment for the masses

Chris — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:14:59 +0000

So I’m a relatively wordy twitter user, as well as known for being exceptionally brutally honest and free with my opinions. I’ll usually try and color it with a healthy dose of humorso as not to be too mean but still it’s part and parcel of who I am.

Which brings me to a little experiment I’m trying out. Every Friday between 3pm and 5pm I will be engaging in #nofilterfriday. This means I’ll say whatever pops into my head and most importantly will honestly answer any questions that I’m asked. This will be difficult and I will honestly say there are very few subjects that I won’t respond well to (too private of info about my wife and kids for example).

I’ve already had a few questions asked in the original test #nofilterfriday.

sewmyheadon: @chrisorourke #nofilterfriday what pisses you off most about the iPhone?

@chrisorourke: @sewmyheadon The fact that a progressive forward thinking company like Apple did a deal with ATT. Apple could’ve been the first successful..
MVNO. Imagine paying your phone bill with itunes? Simple. Everything apple tied together. Really surprised they didn’t do it.

verso: @chrisorourke #nofilterfriday what is the thing from High School you look back on that still FULLY embarrasses you?

chrisorourke: @verso 1992: huge screwup during the ballad at the U of O marching band show during prelims. I played loud perc notes during flute solo.

Now those are just the first two questions asked. I’m opening it up to anyone every Friday between 3pm and 5pm. If you want to ask me a question just ask me here via comments or hit me up with a tweet and add the #nofilterfriday tag so I know to answer.

Now onto the experiment of the masses. All day every day people have to rein themselves in due to “cultural restraints” or really just to be a part of the social conformality. Take back part of your afternoon and participate in being totally completely honest with the world. Share the fun and get to know yourself a little bit better. Just add the #nofilterfriday tag and be honest.

Picture courtesy of the Tagaroo plugin and Sandcastlematt (and no it’s not of me).

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My Five Must-Have WordPress Plugins

Chris — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:14:13 +0000

So at last night’s Beer & Blog I asked Aaron Hockley & a few others to let me know their “5 must have WordPress Plugins”. I figured since Aaron is a die hard WordPress user like myself the list would be great and informative. His list was fantastic (led me to a new plugin that I had to have) and so without further ado here are my 5 plugins I install right away when doing a new WordPress install (I’ve done about 50 total installs).

1. Akismet - Comment spam filtering for the masses. Comes with every single WordPress install because it’s by the same wonderful folks at automattic who brought us WordPress. Currently it’s been responsible for over 23,000 comment spams caught on my blog. I’m in total agreement with Aaron that activating this is the absolute first step in deploying wordpress. Here’s what Akismet.com says about their plugin:

“You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again“.

Those last 7 words say alot about their confidence in their product. Are they true? Absolutely.
2. Sociable – A quick easy way to add social media buttons to your posts (or everywhere, easily changed from the settings page, not only that but it does so easily, and beautifully (see it in action at the end of this post and feel free to submit if you like).

I can’t imagine a easier to configure rock solid way to have the social media links I want all in one place.

3. Wp-Super Cache – This little plugin will help protect your blog from the Slashdot/Digg effect of huge amounts of links swamping your server. Here’s the description WordPress superstar Donncha O Caoimh (the author of this plugin) gave it:

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.”

So far I haven’t been slammed here but if it happens I can rest easy knowing that the guy who’s done most of the work on WPMU (the multi-user version of WordPress) built a plugin to protect a blog’s uptime, which is a pretty important thing for those folks for whom blogging is their life & work.

4. WP-DBManager – This is a pretty important one. I’m often forgetful about backing up my wordpress database before tinkering with it and so with one simple plugin I get nightly backups to my gmail account, scheduled optimization maintenance as well as the ability to repair it when ever I run into an early version plugin that may break something.

5. WordPress.com Stats – This is one that should be installed with every copy of WordPress. Quick clean easy to read stats that are supported from the WordPress.com website. Rather than rewrite what the plugin site has to say I’ll let the authors speak for themselves:

“Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.”

I love it and seeing that gorgeous little flash graph show the number of hits (right in the dashboard) at a glance is as easy as it gets.

6. Fluency Admin - I’m going to cheat and add this one these two to the list (it was a tossup between this one these two and Akismet since technically Akismet is already installed). Much like the author of Fluency says on his blog:

“Despite the huge overhaul that the WordPress admin interface has received its still not quite what I would really like. I had grown quite attached to the Tiger Admin theme by Steve Smith and when I found that it didn't work with WP2.5 I was a little disappointed. But this gave me the opportunity to do something different, my own admin theme. Fluency is the result.”

I loved the Tiger Admin theme and was going to write my own until I discovered Fluency. They made a massive amount of changes to the admin area in WordPress 2.5 and not all of them seem well thought out or right. In short I hate some of what they’ve done (but that’s a whole other post). This wonderous little plugin changes and reskins the whole backend to make it; clean, simple and flow just like it should.

7. Wphone – I love my iPhone and the ability to surf the net anywhere on it is great. Posting to my blog via my iPhone though had always been a chore. Along came WPhone allows you to use a custom admin interface while interacting with your WordPress install via your phone. It contains two versions of the mobile admin interface, a full iPhone version and a “lite” version suitable for most every cellphone with a built in browser. I just noticed that local plugin author Viperbond007 (who modified rewrote and made usable my own humble CDC Clean Archives plugin into the awesome jQuery based plugin I’m now running here.

Alrighty, that’s my list of must have/can’t live without plugins. I’ll be updating with links to the other folks I invited to share their Top 5 lists with as they post them. Feel free to let me know the ones I don’t know about or somehow overlooked (I’m currently using 13 plugins total and always looking for amazing time saving, information delivery improving plugins).

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