Every now and again we need to go through our list of plug-ins for WordPress to make sure we have the ones we need. It is a good idea to collect and organize them for ease of use when they are required rather than to have to hunt for them when you need to do a particular thing on your blog. This way you also get familiar with how they work prior to having to the job that requires immediate attention. I recently went through the list and downloaded some that had been updated and some that I hadn’t seen before..

WP-DB-Backup

Backing up WordPress and your data files is always important. With the internet so prone to attack you can never tell when your site might be hit. While we all try for the very best security there are times when something slips through. This is a time when it is vital to have your backups ready. Instead of having to recreate the site from scratch all you have to do is log in and upload your replacement with the backup. I have several different versions of backups and it’s a good idea to do them often. You can even have this one sent to you by email which means you can hold it on yet another server. It’s always important to hold the information in more than one place. Although the chances of being hit in more than one place are remote, one can never be too safe.

Tidy Up

Scripts of your source code can become extremely untidy and unwieldy and it’s a good idea to run Tidy up to clean up your code and make sure its optimized. In addition to uses the Tidy conversion tool from WC3 which means it validates your XHTML.
This automatically does an update of your database with the new clean data.

Form Builder

Forms are a part of the internet life nowadays. It is far easier to have a form on your site than delete 600 spam emails a day. Form Builders enables you to build even really complex forms without knowing how to code. There are even pre-made forms on this that you can use just by changing a few items. There are all sorts of built in sections to prevent people from spamming which is an excellent idea. It can also be used for several different languages. With this plug-in forms are built quickly and easily and cam be easily inserted into your blog. I would recommend you to always use one for your means of contact.

Theme Preview

When you are building a theme it is annoying to keep having to activate it which means it’s live. Wit Preview you can now view it prior to going live. It is an excellent alternative.

WP Debug

WordPress might not have many bugs but when you have one you really need to know what is going on. With this plug-in you can see behind the walls and get to the basics of what is needed to be fixed.

A new source of plug-ins for WordPress is always interesting to look at. The ingenuity of developers is a delight to behold. This is no exception I have a collection of new plug-ins that range over the spectrum. This time the range is extremely interesting as we go into areas not often examined.

Language translations

This plug-in gives your blog the opportunity for your visitors to translate your blogs into 52 different languages. Just imagine how many extra people your blog will be able to be read by if all the content gets translated. Its just so interesting when you think about it, most of us write in English but what percentage of isn’t actually English when the most spoken language is I am told Spanish. And that is just a small percentage of the world population and now this plug-in offer’s to translate into their own language automatically. It is available to download from WordPress and works with 3.02

WordPress WPML Multilingual CMS

Similar in operation as the last one but it apparently turns the actual site into a multilingual webpage. This has a full CMS navigation with all sorts of things like sidebars and drop menus.

qTranslate

This is another plug-in for languages which is a little simpler than the previous two. This will translate the site into a completely language translated site and they suggest using a separate URL per language. As you write, so this plug-in translates it. You have some languages already built in. Others are also available.

Indoeurropean

This translates a whole lot more languages and also has a no-follow rule in the code so you don’t loose you page rank. This actually is an important factor. Seems to have good ideas and might be a good way to go for your translation. With the amount of people you are missing in the world by not translating you really do need a plug-in to do translation.

Xili Translation

Another translation plug-in but it is a “on the fly” translator. But the actual theme has to be checked for the languages. You need to make sure your theme is “internationally compatible”

Buddy Press

For this plug-in you need to use WPML API language. It uses this plug-in to perform the actions of the translation and links the plug–in to the language of choice for the searcher. You need to switch the language director on in the in WPML. There is a language switch in the menu bar of Buddy Press.

Transposh

This can be a Buddy Press integration and also translates link Tags and titles.
There are 57 supported languages with this plug-in and it is said to increase your exposure for SEO.

Mlanguage

With this plug-in you need to tag the various languages and then it displays the various language flags. There is a good example of it at Gronmx. The flags can be changed under the options and you can add to and delete various Language tags or even change one to the default one. As yet there is no data on whether or not it works with WordPress 3.02 or not.

Every now and again we need to go through our list of plug-ins for wordPress to make sure we have the ones we need. It is a good idea to collect and organize them for ease of use when they are required rather than to have to hunt for them when you need to do a particular thing on your blog. This way you also get familiar with how they work prior to having to the job that requires immediate attention.  I recently went through the list and downloaded some that had been updated and some that I hadn’t seen before..

WP-DB-Backup

Backing up WordPress and your data files is always important. With the internet so prone to attack you can never tell when your site might be hit. While we all try for the very best security there are times when something slips through. This is a time when it is vital to have your backups ready. Instead of having to recreate the site from scratch all you have to do is log in and upload your replacement with the backup. I have several different versions of backups and it’s a good idea to do them often. You can even have this one sent to you by email which means you can hold it on yet another server.  It’s always important to hold the information in more than one place. Although the chances of being hit in more than one place are remote, one can never be too safe.

Tidy Up

Scripts of your source code can become extremely untidy and unwieldy and it’s a good idea to run Tidy up to clean up your code and make sure its optimized. In addition to uses the Tidy conversion tool from WC3 which means it validates your XHTML.
This automatically does an update of your database with the new clean data.

Form Builder

Forms are a part of the internet life nowadays. It is far easier to have a form on your site than delete 600 spam emails a day. Form Builders enables you to build even really complex forms without knowing how to code. There are even pre-made forms on this that you can use just by changing a few items. There are all sorts of built in sections to prevent people from spamming which is an excellent idea. It can also be used for several different languages. With this plug-in forms are built quickly and easily and cam be easily inserted into your blog.  I would recommend you to always use one for your means of contact.

Theme Preview

When you are building a theme it is annoying to keep having to activate it which means it’s live. Wit Preview you can now view it prior to going live. It is an excellent alternative.

WP Debug

WordPress might not have many bugs but when you have one you really need to know what is going on. With this plug-in you can see behind the walls and get to the basics of what is needed to be fixed.

E commerce requires a shopping cart and finding the best one isn’t always the easiest thing. With many of them you need considerable knowledge on how to hack the code to make them work as you want them to. This is a daunting task for many would be e commerce owners with hardly any knowledge of code or how to set about it. I think in actual fact it has chased off many a would be site owner.

There are several carts available and some already on the servers of the hosting company but installing them in the WordPress theme can be another story.
I am going to show you a few that are available and tell you some of the experiences that people have had with them.

Ecwid Shopping Cart

This is a free shopping cart from WordPress. You can do drag and drop with it which is useful. It can also be used in Facebook which is something different. They say it can be installed in 5 minutes which I very much doubt. I have found when they say 5 minutes it tends to be between 5 hours and 5 days for me. But then I can be real dumb on things. The entire card is created in Ajax which is supposed to be very fast. So far there are not many reports on this cart. You can use it for downloadable products and there are three available products the one being free and then the next one up is $17 a month. There are restrictions on the free one, one of which is the fact that the powered by ecwid appears on the site. It is usable with Pay by Check, PayPal, Authorize.Net, Google Checkout, and well as more available options. It appears to be a good option and being available as a free version to be able to try it out before paying for the extended option seems well with the trial.

Try out EShop

This is also a free option and again so far the reports are good. You can customize it to your needs and the two people who I spoke to that are using it have had no problems. The biggest problem with it appears to be the amount of payment options. Although it does use Paypal and several others it doesn’t use Google check out as yet. There also can be conflicts between this cart and other plug-ins that can cause the cart to empty prior to it reaching the checkout. Another possibility is that you might need to change the path of your session.save in the hosting. I would check with your hosting server as to what it should be. Other than those couple of problems which were easily fixed, it seems to be working pretty well. You can’t print your invoice on Paypal unfortunately but I believe this problem is being worked on.

WP e-Commerce

This shopping cart hasn’t received good reviews recently as many folks say you can’t get it working properly unless you do considerable hack on the actual cart itself. After the number of negative reports I have had on it I can not in fairness recommend it to anyone.

Have you ever considered how long it took your to get your theme exactly how you wanted it? You got all the plug-ins and widgets you wanted and you put up the theme and altered with your logo and the kind of text you wanted. You took time and trouble over getting everything in the dashboard and you were hooked up to your twitter and your facebook as well as your RSS feed and whatever else you had. And then comes along some hacker and destroys it in an instance. Did you create a full backup? Or is it disaster? The importance of keeping backup files off line or in a safe place can never be emphasized enough. Without them you will take days or weeks to be back on line and in the meantime you are loosing followers or even customers.

With this in mind we are going to take a look as some of the available options for making backup data to keep you up to speed.

The first one we are going to look at is WP DB Manager

This does more than back up your data it actually will repair, restore and optimize it. The backing up can be automated. More and more people are finally realizing the advantages of using backups.

WordPress EzBackup

This is a plug-in which will create a complete backup of your site. This includes your MySQL Database. By doing a backup like this you will be safe if you remember to do it regularly. Sites do change. You have new posts and you add new programs and new links. All these need to be backed up. Make a day to log into your WordPress Admin Panel and do the backup at least once a week.

DBC Backup is next

Here we have an easy way to enable us to take daily backups of the database by using a WP Cron System. You have the ability to schedule your daily backups in one of three different formats. The back is hash key protected. This one uses Php to run the program.

BackWPup is yet another solution.

This plug-in does more than just backup files it also repairs & checks you data. Your date can be stored in a number of places and can send it by email.

There are a number of online storage places you can utilize.

Drop box is one of them as is idrive.  Both of these offer you storage on line and will hold your backup files.

Humyo gives you 5 gig of free space for your backups but there is also a pro option which will increase this to 100 gig and enable you to do far more with it. This is a secure site.
Binfire is another site that does this and will store up to 10 gig.

If you are actually running a business you need more security and a continual backup and to enable you to do this you will probably need a online Backup Service.

There are several of these available but one specializes in Word Press and this is Online Backup for WordPress.

Keep safe and back your data up.

With the way the mobile industry is exploding left right and centre with all the iPhone, Ipad’s, Blackberry’s, etc it’s a wonder they don’t already have a fold out typing keyboard so you can actually see what you are typing. I mean what would it take to make a touch keyboard on one of those fold up screens and attach it to the phone? Those midget buttons are not for fat fingers. One of the great things about the new internet ready phones is the way the developers of software have sprung to the fore and written programs to will enable the phones to actually see websites that are written specially for them but taking the information from the blogs or websites. There are several different programs available each of which has merits of its own.

The first we are going to take a look at is Mippin WordPress plug-in

Here you have the opportunity to create a blog on a phone using the identical URL as your blog but specially designed for a web enabled phone. Basically your URL is uploaded to the Mippin plug-in rendering and encoded for a cell and off you go. There is an additional service available as well.

WPhone is next

This plug-in is designed to sort out which type of phone is trying to connect and then decides if it will use the lite version of the plug-in or the heavier one which is meant for high end phones. This application won an award for its ingenuity.

Mowser is clever

Mowser detects automatically that the person is on a phone or any other kind of mobile device when they log in. Once it ascertains that it will send the signals to the plug-in for the mobile version of the website. It decides what theme to use for the phone that is logged in and what widgets can be available. It’s well thought out and very clever.

Wetomo is similar

Wetomo was based on the Mowser plug-in but has been modified but also allows for mobile adverts to be displayed according to your publisher settings.
The download is freely available under the GPL license and there are full instructions on the website.

WP View Mobile is last on our list

Excellent advice is given on this website with regard as to how to make your website more server friendly to a mobile phone. Phone costs can run high if you are using your mobile to surf the web. its far better to be on websites that have been properly optimized for both cell and PC surfers. Heavy graphics and flash websites are not something to be seen on a phone as they would take ages to load and eat up your mobile plan minutes. Things like the size of a screen have to be taken into account and necessary for these sorts of things to be resized to suit a mobile device. All this is taken care of by this plug-in.

Enjoy finding the right mobile plug-in for your blog.

Its incredible how many things can be done on the internet while never leaving your blog. Work out how many web sites you visit on the internet on a daily basis and see how many can actually be plugged into your dashboard and done while sitting in your blog and never ever leave. It’s actually incredible how many items have been configured into plug-in for WordPress to enable you to work things direct from your blog without ever leaving it.
If you sit down and work out exactly what you want to manage directly from your blog to save you time and then start to look for the plug-ins you will find that at least 80% of the items can already be done and probably about another 10 % wont be far off.

Do you want to do your bulk email from your dashboard?

Yes believe it. Both Google Analytics and Mailchimp can be done directly from your dashboard. Other services are offered to you by Mailchimp which you can incorporate into your WordPress. One is almost like an auto responder.
This means you can keep the addresses and mail direct to the people who are your faithful followers.

Do you want to keep tabs on your Google adsense?

Download and install and get all your daily weekly or monthly summaries at your fingertips. If you have monetized your site it’s nice to see how the money rolls in.  I wonder if they have one for Facebook adverts too.

Full comments from dashboard as a Plug-in

Yes you can reply to your comments directly from your dashboard without any problem if you install this plug-in.  Reading just a short section was never any good, now you can read the whole thing.

Of course you want Twitter at your fingertips

What would life be without Twitter. It’s the first thing anyone does if they see something happen. Grab their phone and tweet. It’s actually quite incredible how casual about life in general they have become in the race to be the first to tweet about it. With this plug-in your two accounts are totally intertwined.

Backup
An excellent piece of advice is that you do regular backups before installing any additional item to your blog. And by that I mean each and every time you install something. I have recently been going through several sites and notice how many have been hit with a Trojan or a virus.  Without a back up your site can be down for months while you try to reassemble all your items. Always backup and preferably keep in a storage area off your pc as well.

With the increasing amount of mobile online phones, it’s important to make sure that your website, blog or your WordPress presence of any description, be made available for people who are web searching by phone. To enable you to do this, you need a special plug-in for your blog or WordPress application. With this in mind I have done a little online research to show you just a few of the applications available for you to use.

WordPress Mobil-edition is up for review first

When you are looking for a plug-in got your mobile edition it makes sense to go with something actually recommended by the basic program makers. The author of the code for this plug-in is Alex King.org. The browsers themselves are automatically found and you can actually customize them on the settings page. The FAQ answers a lot of additional queries.

The dotmobi Pack

This is a complete pack for a mobile extension to your blog or site. It even contains a admin panel to enable you to post on the run. Its widget enabled and you can even extend your theme. Of course it picks up immediately that your visitor is on mobile. It even enables you to monetize your mobile site.

The WordPress Mobile Pack

WordPress have put their name to this plug-in to enable you to to have a toolkit for your mobile application needs. The pack has several different themes available and an admin panel. There are addition widgets available and you can also blog on the run. Interestingly this enables a listing on Mpexo which indicates that you have a site that is mobile friendly. This is for you to enable via your dashboard settings. It can be integrated with WP
Super Cache. It is ready for your download for WordPress 3. Several grades of Themes are available because not all mobiles are high end. This means that not all will be able to see the high end themes, which is something to take into account when choosing the mobile theme you decide to use.
If you want to know your mobile stats there is an analytics section included in this pack. There is also colors change available if you are using CSS. It is a good idea to stick to PHP5 for this.

MobilPress is next up

This is an Open Source program for integration with your WordPress Blog. It was written to work with Aduity to be a monetized site. Several themes are freely available and they also include instructions on how to create your own theme.

The iPhone Mobile / Admin service

With this plug-in you have both the iPhone and general mobile plug-in included. It is possible to customize this for any particular phone type you want to include. It includes a dashboard the ability to manage posts and profiles as well as the classy business of being able to go back and forth between the two admin views: Both the mobile and the normal. It is also compatible with a large quantity of plug-ins.

Hope you managed to find one to your liking amongst those.

Mostly people concentrate on the well known and well advertised plug-in to enhance their WordPress. This person tells that person about a really good program which they have tried and it becomes a favorite by word of mouth. Sometimes there are programs out there that are just as good if not better and because they aren’t given the right kind of introductions they tend to get neglected. Today we are going to take a look at a few of these and give them a little of the attention they deserve.

Custom Query String

How many of you have struggled to get different posts on different pages. You want only two or three on the main page and many more on different pages of you blog. Well it’s not easy or it wasn’t until this plug-in came to light. With this you can organize what goes on what page with little to no problem. If you want 15 on one page and three on another that is totally possible.

Meta Tags

For years we have carefully described our key words etc in meta tags. Well it’s made a little easier for us with this plug-in. There are four different configurations that can be done to enable the meta tags. It uses inserts the correct meta tag according to the post you are making.

Clean Archives Reloaded

Cleaning up your archives is important if you don’t want to use up major resources. This plug-in uses Java and both expands and contracts the archives listed by month and makes your server much lighter on queries.

Exec-PHP 4.9

If you are running static pages you need this plug-in as it enables you to run php on html pages. This is an extremely stable plug-in and has a huge amount of well documented information available to explain exactly what this plug-in can do for you. Quite simply, though, if you want to have some dynamic function on a static page this plug-in will allow it.

Redirection

This item is very useful especially for SEO as it redirectors when someone inadvertently leaves out the www.  It’s something that helps when you SEO a website. The amount of items this plug-in does easily for you like redirect a visitor according to whom it is.

WP Chunk 2.0
The download takes some finding so make sure you check the name. Basically what this plug-in does is condense the URLS into small sizes. You can even tell it how many letters is the maximum.

Keyword Plug-in

Keyword get plugged in with this little plug-in and it was written for WordPress 2 but it still supposed to work. There are full and detailed instructions on the site.

WP Cache is the last on our list

This one increases the speed of your access and storage of your web pages making the making them into static pages by replacing the PHP. All this makes for faster timing of your loading and serving and its less strain on the server.

All these are worth a look at and I think you will be pleased with what you find.

Being up to date with your security on the internet is a full time task nowadays. Just when you think you have the whole thing wrapped up, out comes another threat to attack the internet. Quite frankly I don’t see what fun they get out of it. I mean it isn’t as if they can see what they are doing and do they ever think of the person on the other side?  That might be their only connection to the outside world. Be that as it may there are so many viruses Trojans worms and other junk on the band waves it is hard to keep up with them all. To this end we are going to look at a few plug-ins that we can add to WordPress to help keep us a little more secure.

The first we are looking at is Limit Logins

With the standard WordPress, people can try an unlimited number of times to login into your blog. But if you introduce this plug-in into your WordPress you will be able to limit the attempts before they are locked out for 20 minutes or whatever time you decide on. You can decide how many times they can try before they get locked out. There is an additional option you can implement whereby they can get an email notification of their password. You can also opt to be advised by email of continual attempts to log in. Should you lock yourself out by mistake you would have to FTP into the site and change a few items. The fixes for this are on the download website.

Keeping Spam bots at Bay

We all know what spammers do. Well when spam bots are on the loose and enter our blog they can cause untold havoc. To stop them entering and to tone down the harm they can do, we require the following plug-in to keep them at bay. It is called Sabre. Sabre has numerous features you can implement from a captcha code to making the registration email verified. All in all there are 19 options you can implement with this plug-in.

Semisecure is next

This plug-in uses an encryption method to encrypt the chosen password used by the visiting party. This requires Java.

Bad Behavior

This is a way of preventing denial of service attacks. This plug-in even goes as far as looking to see what kind of software your potential visitor might be using. You would need to check with your server as to whether this requires special permission although the program itself is free and open source. You would require PHP5.

Secure WordPress

Secure WordPress aims keep your blog safer. What you can do with it is take out any error info that appears on your login page. It will also install and index.php section in the plug-in directory. The version of WordPress that you are using is removed except in your admin area. Information for people about stuff in the actual theme and program is removed and not available to those who are not administrators. Simple discover is taken out as is windows live writer. In addition the URL’s are removed from things like scripts and or style sheets.

That’s all for today folks.

Social networking and the keeping up with social statements are all part and parcel of blogging. This is the way the word spreads about your blog. People get to know you and what you are about. What your interests are and how you invest both your time and your energy in what you do. To enable you to do this with easy and to use this to your advantage you need to work out where and how you are going to be using your social skills. By having plug-ins in your blog you can enable yourself to do this with far greater ease.

Let us take a look at a few of the plug-ins available.

Sharebar

The first one we look at is called Sharebar.  This gives you the whole gamut of the available social networking sites. You can install it to provide either horizontal or vertical dependent on the size of your page. It can have both large and small buttons on your page. A very useful way of having your social networking buttons displayed. Full instructions are available from Dev Grow.

Follow Me

The second option we have is a plug-in called Follow me. You can stick a widget on the side of your blog, which enables large icons to be displayed as a popup. There have been several updates of this plug in with each one adding more functionality to the plug-in.

KnxDTBookmarks is next

This plug-in allows for you to put in your bookmarks at the bottom of your blog for that page. Besides the social network buttons, it allows you to share using Feedburner by email. This product is also available in Spanish.

A little extra flair has been added to the next one

It is called Sexy bookmarks. They are apparently very successful in getting people to pass on your articles, which is interesting. They have a whole array of bookmarks for you to display.

Share and follow is up next

This one sticks more or less to the more prominent of the social sites. 52 of them, in fact, and the list is growing. There is a video here for you to view, which enables you to see how share and follow works. It is available in several languages and has 5 different sizes of icons.

This following one is directed at Facebook
It is called Simple Facebook connect.  This posts to your facebook profile or fan page and uses shortcodes and has a fan box widget.  It does require PHP5 and is best with WordPress 3.

Get Social is a box that floats on the side of the blog

This has the major social sites lists and sits on the side of your blog and floats with the text as the visitor scrolls down the page.  When choosing a theme to add this to its important to make sure that the side of the page is left free of writing, or it will be hidden by the floating bar.

I hope that helped you to decide how to add your social media to your blog.

Sometimes you just have to do the review of what you have and what you don’t have on your blog. New items are coming out for WordPress so often one can almost get overloaded with plug-ins and widgets. When you look at it with a new eye you can strip down to the essentials making your site more easily accessible and faster loading. This means it also uses less bandwidth, which is an advantage if you have a limited bandwidth available.

Essential 1

WP Super Cache is your number one essential plug-in.  This replaces all other versions which should be removed. There are also certain other files which you need to remove from you WordPress before loading the new plug-in.  Basically, what WP super Cache does is it optimizes your files into HTML without the use of php at all. This speeds things up tremendously and uses up less bandwidth.

Essential 2

Spam in any form is abhorrent.  To overcome this pest from being a nuisance on your site you need to install the next item.  Akismet works to reduce the amount of spam that gets through by using a known list of spammers to stop them from being a nuisance on your website. I have never understood what joy people get out of spam. To me, it is just a time waster. Akismet download.

Essential 3

There is another out there that stops spam dead in its tracks. And that is WP SpamFree. They have an option to save you from receiving spam in your contact form as well and also one to save you from spam comments on your blog. I think there is someone else out there that hates spam as much as I do.

Essential 4

If you have been on the net for any length of time you will know how essential a site map is. This is what leads the search engine spiders around your website. As Google has the major market share of search engine traffic it makes sense to keep them happy. They have offered a free site map product to help you get the most benefit out of doing your blog or website to suit their spiders. Although it is free they do ask for a donation if you can afford it.
This plug-in also pings the major search engines when any new posts are made.

Essential 5

Everyone has heard about SEO and how essential it is. Well, SEO comes to you in the form of the All in one SEO pack. This plug-in even creates the correct Meta tags for your site. It does the goodies to the headings and optimizes them for the search engines, and it works with other plug-ins to extend their functions as well. They do request you back up your data prior to installing. If you really like it you might consider upgrading to the Pro version which is also available. This is available at $39 as a special right now and is advertisement free.

Essential 6

Page navigation is always essential on any good website. And to make it an easier task WP Page-Navi plug-in is available. It does require that your server is running PHP5 to work correctly. It can be installed automatically by using the WordPress admin section.

Wishing you happy blogging