Posts tagged plugins

Contact forms for your blog:

Nov 23rd

Posted by alex in WordPress

No comments

You have a blog and want traffic don't you? Well of course, since that is what makes us blog in the first place! The readers might like to read our stuff, and many times they want to talk to us, and contact forms are really good at that ;)
What I mean is that it is no breaking news that contact forms are actually used, either by potential customers, readers that want to share/correct us or simply by someone who dropped by and wants to say "Hey, nice design".
Whatever the reason is, it is always good to have a contact form, and when I wanted to setup mine I looked for WordPress plugins to do it for me (I'm a bit lazy in that sense) and found some interesting stuff.

First of all we have cForms which if I had to explain it to someone that knew nothing about this I would simply say, "if you install cForms for your contact form is like wanting to buy a computer simply to browse the web and buying a gaming computer that is the closest thing to a supercomputer one could find". I mean by this that cForms is too much for the average blogger, it has too many things, the first time I saw it I just though "Can I just have a contact form please?", although I ended up liking it.

So if you just want a contact form, good and simple, there are many good plugins out there that do the job perfectly,

Contact Form ][:

Which, as they say, "[it] is a WordPress plugin, that offers a simple drop-in contact form in any new/existing post/page". It is a nice plugin although you will never get any support from the author, so be careful on this one.

Contact Form Plugin:

This plugin changes a bit how the contact forms work, instead of entering a tag withing the content of a page/post, you publish it, and then you paste the URL into the configuration page, a bit weird yes, but in the end it is just as simple.

There are of course many other options available, although this are the most varied ones. What is your favorite?

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Best wp plugins for administrators

Apr 24th

Posted by alex in Web-related

4 comments

As some of you might know, I've just "upgraded" my design, now it is completely different... Hope you like it ;)
And in the process I came along with many great plugins that really made my life easier in this task, so I'll post a compilation not only of those, but of the best administration plugins at the moment:

  • Design:
  • Maintenance/Upgrading
    • Maintenance mode - Put a splash page for all visitors except administrators. Great for testing new stuff.
    • WP Automatic Upgrade - Backup and Upgrade your wordpress version automatically.
    • Theme tester - Test your new themes without users noticing.
    • Role Manager - Edit the capabilities of each wp role (Admin, editor, author or suscriber) or even add new roles.
  • Security:
    • WP Security Scan - This great plugin checks for various vulnerabilities and either fixes them or tells you how to DIY.
  • Stats/Counters
    • StatPress - For me the best wp statistics plugin.
    • Download counter - Tired of not knowing if people really download your stuff? You'll love this plugin if that was the case...
    • Google Analyticator - If you want to stick with good old Google Analytics, then this is your plugin.
  • SEO
  • Comments:
    • Ozh' Absolute Comments - A great plugin to manage your comments, you should really try this to know what you are missing ;)
    • WP Threaded Comments - In addition to Ozh' Absolute Comments this will ease the way you deal with comments, allowing you to reply to messages in threaded mode right from the post itself.
    • Subscribe to comments - Give your visitors the opportunity to suscribe to the comments to get instant notification upon replies.
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My favourite WP Plugins

Mar 29th

Posted by alex in General talk

No comments

After searching around for a bit for useful and good plugins, I've found 13 plugins that I find crucial.
And so, here is my list, they are in alphabetical order:

  1. AddThis - Social bookmarking widget: Just scroll to the end of this post to see it in action ;)
  2. Adsense Manager - Put some ads here in the site, even though the revenue never amounts more than a dollar... :(
  3. All in one SEO pack - Generate the necessary meta-tags at the start of every page in your blog, very useful to be a little bit more "Search Engine Friendly"
  4. Code Highlighter - For programming blogs like mine this is a great plugin. Put all your code inside a pre tag, set the language to the corresponding one, and you've got it highlighted!
  5. Download Counter - When you offer stuff to download, like I do in my sample pages and stuff, it is always nice to have a counter of how many people actually download your stuff :)
  6. FeedBurner FeedSmith - Redirect your feeds to a feedburner feed, a very interesting option that allows you to use the feedburner feedstats!
  7. Google Analyticator - Insert your Analytics tracking code in your blog, to be able to access google's most powerful stats tool.
  8. Google XML Sitemaps - Automatically create sitemaps and notify several search engines with this great plugin
  9. Role Manager - Easily manage user roles and privileges with this amazing plugin. Great for blogs with multiple contributors, editors or admins.
  10. StatPress - One of the nicest blog stats tool, similar to google's analytics, but I prefer to have both, as each offers different information.
  11. Subscribe to comments - Give your visitors the ability to receive emails upon follow-up comments.
  12. wp-Cache - Easy caching for your blog, makes loading time faster, and reduces significantly your mysql queries.
  13. Typogrify - Correct some "aesthetic" issues regarding text, like thin spaces, widows, quotes and much more.

And of course the built-in great Akismet spam filter, which works astoundingly great, and some other "minor plugins" that I don't consider to be enough important to be here...
If you liked this list and you are a stumbler please consider thumbing me up ;) Thanks for your support!

If have suggestions on other great plugins please comment!

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