Marius Milcher » Web Design http://www.mariusmilcher.com Just another WordPress site Mon, 10 May 2010 16:30:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Essential WordPress Plugin Kit. My 15 most used and vital plugins http://www.mariusmilcher.com/2010/01/essential-wordpress-plugin-kit-my-most-used-and-vital-plugins/ http://www.mariusmilcher.com/2010/01/essential-wordpress-plugin-kit-my-most-used-and-vital-plugins/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:37:29 +0000 admin http://www.mariusmilcher.com/?p=294 This is a ‘Techie’ post. One for the script junkies! A collection of some of my most used and vital plugins for WordPress. This collection includes Image Galleries, SEO improvements, Rating and Contact Plugins. My essential kit for WordPress. All of the featured plugins are free and available directly through the WordPress Extend repository.

1. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemap Image

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

2. All in One SEO Pack

Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

Features

  • Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
  • Generates META tags automatically
  • For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
  • For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything

3. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Before I start writing the plugin I study all photo and picture plugins for WordPress, I figure out that some of them are really good and well designed, but I missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple photos, galleries and albums.

4. Sociable

Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites! WordPress 2.6 or above is required.

5. Infinite Scroll

Infinite Scroll adds the following functionality to your wordpress installation: When a user scrolls towards the bottom of the page, the next page of posts is automatically retrieved and appended. This means they never need to click “Next Page”, which dramatically increases stickiness.

6. WP-PageNavi

Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

7. WP-Cumulus

WP-Cumulus allows you to display your site’s tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but is more visually exciting. Clicking the tags can be a little hard (depending on your speed setting) but does work a treat. See it in action on my sidebar.

8. Executable PHP widget

The Exec-PHP plugin executes PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets.

Features

  • Executes PHP code in the excerpt and the content portion of your posts and pages
  • Configurable execution of PHP code in text widgets (for WordPress 2.2 or higher)
  • Write PHP code in familiar syntax, eg. <?php ... ?>
  • Works in your newsfeeds
  • Information about which users are allowed to execute PHP with the current security settings (for WordPress 2.1 or higher)
  • Configurable user warnings for inappropriate blog and user settings (for WordPress 2.1 or higher)
  • Restrict execution of PHP code in posts and pages to certain users by using roles and capabilities
  • Update notifications through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress if a new version of the Exec-PHP plugin is available (for WordPress 2.3 or higher)
  • Internationalization support (english and german included, many more available)
  • Comes with documentation

9. Maintenance Mode

Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.

Visitors will see a message like “Maintenance Mode – SITE is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Please try back in 60 minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

10. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

11. Improved Include Page

Improved Include Page is an expanded version of the original Include Page developed by Brent Loertscher and it was developed to add some features I needed.

Features

  • page title display with optional HTML code,
  • content display with different styles (full, teaser, custom ‘more’ link),
  • WordPress filters applied to both the content and the title,
  • supports WordPress 2.5.x Shortcode API

12. WP e-Commerce

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind.

13. Page Protection

This plugin adds optional per-page user name and password protection, implemented using standard HTTP protocol authorization headers, thus triggering the standard user/password dialog of the browser, and making it possible to make the browser store the credentials.

Subpages of a protected page are protected with the same user name and password as their parent.

Protected pages and their subpages do not show up in menus, search results and page lists.

14. GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin. Plugin includes advanced settings panels that will allow you to control many aspects of rating. Plugin also supports multi ratings along with thumbs based ratings. Plugin supports use of cache plugins and dynamic loading of data using ajax.

Supported languages: english, serbian, spanish, german, italian, french, ukrainian, belorussian, russian, polish

15. G-Lock Double Opt-in Manager

This mailing list management plugin allows the visitors of your blog to subscribe to your mailing list using a double opt-in method. The plugin sends an email with the subscription confirmation link to the user and if the user confirms the subscription, it sends a welcome email to each new subscriber. The details of new subscribers are saved to the internal WordPress database. You can manage the mailing list inside WordPress and export the list for the further use in your email marketing software. You can also use the plugin to convert your blog RSS feed into an email newsletter and send it out to your subscribers. You can design the style and content of your email newsletter yourself and you can schedule your email broadcast weekly, monthly or as soon as you add a certain number of new posts to your blog.

Suggestions and feedback welcome, comments available below

]]> http://www.mariusmilcher.com/2010/01/essential-wordpress-plugin-kit-my-most-used-and-vital-plugins/feed/ 1 McDonalds & Google: User Experience Giants http://www.mariusmilcher.com/2009/10/mcdonalds-google-user-experience-giants/ http://www.mariusmilcher.com/2009/10/mcdonalds-google-user-experience-giants/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:47:21 +0000 admin http://www.mariusmilcher.com/?p=128 Cheeseburger

Oliver Reichenstein, of the iA design agency, describes how McDonalds is the ultimate User Experience. Its similarities with Google and how observing his child breastfeeding gave him a better insight into interfaces than he could have possibly imagined.

In his article: Brand = User Experience: The Interface of a Cheeseburger. Reichhstein offers a truly insightful article which I highly recommend. Also, the first article of real depth to appear on Smashing Magazine. Nice!

]]> http://www.mariusmilcher.com/2009/10/mcdonalds-google-user-experience-giants/feed/ 1 Having embraced WordPress, here's my first post. http://www.mariusmilcher.com/2009/07/embrace-wordpress/ http://www.mariusmilcher.com/2009/07/embrace-wordpress/#comments Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:29:05 +0000 admin http://www.mariusmilcher.com/wordpress/?p=1 Yes, OK… So I am a little late in my conversion. But finally, after several half-arsed attempts, I have dived into the world of WordPress and what a wonderful world this is…

WordPress, as Wikipedia puts it:

…is a free and open source blog publishing application and Content Management System.

It has been around for several years now. Previously I had felt like a kid trying to get the square peg in the round hole in my attempts to understand it. However as the platform has matured and the documentation grown, I felt that now it was finally time to grab the bull by the horns and embrace it.

With more clients requiring content management and my spare time shrinking, it was a simple decision.

It didn’t take long to grasp the basics and ‘port’ my personal site over. Using this excellent article and the corresponding example template on the Web Designer Wall. I spent an entire day geeking out, examining the code and cross referencing the WordPress Codex and then, Bingo!

I do not claim to be a WordPress guru…yet! Nor is my site an example of the finest WordPress design…yet! But be sure to venture back here in your cyber-travels to see how it progresses.

The three most useful codex articles I found where:

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