Extend WordPress | WordPress Training for Website Managers

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

December 17th, 2009 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

Using these WordPress plugins can make your blog more interactive, sticky to keep visitors coming back for more and used by novices and power bloggers alike. Not all of these plugins need to be used on a single blog, depending on the focus of your site.

Where there are multiple options to perform a single task, I like to spread them out across several blogs to see which ones work best, or fit the look and feel of that site. I use every one of these plugins on various sites, except the eCommerce plugins. Those will come later as those sites are built. The ones listed are the best I found and tested in the WordPress Plugin category. Since this was originally posted on Feb 14, 2009, the list has continued to grow. Read the rest of this entry »

How To Publicize Your WordPress Posts

October 10th, 2009 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

There is a lot of publicity lately with a WordPress plugin that allows you to tweet your WordPress posts automatically with Publicize. That only works with WordPress.com though. For self-hosted WordPress blogs, there are other plugins you can use.

If you want to get the most out of publicizing your post, there is a more involved method that works even better than a single plugin. Using the steps below, you can make sure your posts are announced on all the sites you belong to. This will take you less than 30 minutes and well worth the effort!

Register for Ping.fm and choose all the sites where you want your posted.
Get a HootSuite.com account and add your Ping.fm application (API) key in the Settings.
- The API key is obtained by clicking on Application Keys from your Dashboard
Install the WordTwit (or your favorite Twitter announce) plugin on your WordPress blog

Now when you write a post, it gets sent to Twitter, which is picked up by Hootsuite, passed on to Ping.fm, then sent to all the sites you have enabled there (Facebook, LinkedIn, Plurk, Yahoo!, MyBlogLog, plus many other sites). Sounds complicated, if you spend 30 minutes to set up, you will achieve greater results.

If you know of a better way, let us know.

WordPress Plugin Post Announce Made Easier

May 9th, 2009 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

The WordPress Post Emailer (Post Announce) plugin by Worldwide Creations will allow you to notify users who subscribe to your blog when a new article is posted. The default method of adding it to your blog is not user friendly because it requires you to edit the PHP files.

The original instructions are:
1. Upload the post-announce.php file to your plugins directory.
2. Activate Plugin.
3. Change the settings in Options->Post Email Settings.
4. Somewhere in your template (i.e. sidebar.php) add this:

There is another way to do the last step though, using the Widgets in your WordPress Dashboard. Since most widgets will not execute PHP, you can use the form below as a text widget in your sidebar.

Remember to change the items in [square brackets] to yours and the message to entice visitors to subscribe.

<form action="http://[YOUR_URL]/wp-content/plugins/post-announce.php"
method="post">
<span style="font-size:9pt">Be the first to know when new
[ARTICLES, TIPS, ETC] are added.
[You can also use the RSS Feeds.] </span>
Email: <input name="EMAIL" type="text" />
<input name="action" type="hidden" value="subscribe" />
<input type="submit" value="Add Me!" />
</form>

Note that Post Announce is no longer supported. When you visit Worldwide Creations the link to download WordPress Post Emailer links to a plugin called Post Pinger, that updates the RSS feeds instead. You can still get Post Announce here, including the minor modifications we made and additional instructions.

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Jim Hutchinson has studied WordPress from both the user and technical angles and now teaches others how to build their website presence using WordPress. Visit Website Managers for more information on Blog Training
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Copyright © 2009 Website Managers, LLC. You may reprint this article providing that this copyright notice and resource links all remain intact.

WordPress Plugin – SEO Smart Links

May 3rd, 2009 | Author: Jim Hutchinson

Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words or phrases to link to what URLs. It also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” commands for the links.

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. It also lets you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

Once you upload and activate SEO Smart Links, go into the settings and select your options. You will see a box to put your list of words and phrases that you want linked. You can combine multiple words and phrases on one line so they all lead to the same destination.

Adding the links is easy. Here is an example entry: word1,word2,phrase1,URL
For best results, avoid putting spaces before and after the words and URLs. If you already use the sh-autolink plugin, which only replaces single words, deactivate it and use SEO Smart Links exclusively.

I am very happy with this plugin, since adding, editing and removing links is so easy. Many others are posting their comments and getting help from both the author and other users by placing comments on the SEO Smart Links blog.