Rob Barrett

The Makings of a WordPress Design Blog

Posted on October 22, 2008 at 7:31pm

This is somewhat of a follow-on from Jacob Cass’ article, 29 Great Wordpress Plugins That I Personally Recommend.

Jacob posted his article just as I was putting together this version of my website, and it helped me a huge amount in finding the right plugins to do what I wanted my site to do.

In that spirit of helping, I thought I’d follow suit and publish my own list of must-haves. So, without further ado, here’s a list of resources that I found helpful in putting the Rob Barrett Design website together…

Tutorials:

• So you want to create WordPress themes huh?
  Wpdesigner.com’s helpful tips on how to build a WordPress theme from scratch. It does assume you know almost nothing about web designing, which is obviously helpful for many, but there’s a lot in there that can be skipped over — just make sure you don’t miss the important parts.
• How to highlight author comments in WordPress
  Pretty self-explanatory — how to set a specific CSS class for any comments made by the post author.
• The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Conditional Tags
  Very useful for serving up different content for different pages, while keeping the number of page templates to a minimum. For instance, I use conditional tags to highlight the navigation tabs when you’re on the relevant page.

Plugins:

• Better Comments Manager
  Admittedly, as I’m writing this, I don’t yet have any comments (can you hear the violins?), so this plugin hasn’t helped much yet, but from various recommendations I’ve read, and the little playing around I’ve done, it’s apparently very useful for following and managing comments when they start to rack up.
• cformsII
  A quick and easy way to create custom forms. You create the form in the backend, set the style you want (I disabled this and used my own CSS stylesheet), and then you simply have to referenced the form number to place that form on a post, page or template.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
  Very simply create a user-friendly and search-engine-friendly sitemap of all pages and posts on a WordPress site.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
  This plugin makes sure that no matter how users might try to access your RSS feed, they’ll always be forwarded onto your FeedBurner feed, making it useful to track subscribers and for any future redirection.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  A very easy, one-click plugin to create and submit an XML sitemap to Google, MSN Live Search, Ask.com and Yahoo!
• NextGEN Gallery
  The pop-up lightbox that I use for the images on my Portfolio. I don’t quite use it with out-of-the-box functionality though. This plugin auto-creates thumbnails by resizing the image — I didn’t want that, so I show a load of thumbnails uploaded to a different directory, and add the following code to the link to make it pop-up.

<a href="/wp-content/gallery/portfolio/FULLSIZE-IMAGE-NAME.jpg" id="thumb6" class="thickbox" rel="portfolio"><img src="THUMBNAIL-LOCATION.jpg" border="0" /></a>

Note the id=”thumb6″, class=”thickbox” and rel=”portfolio” — that’s what makes it work with this plugin (in this case, 6 is the Gallery image number; this needs to change for each image).

• NoFollow Free
  This enables me to enable the rel=”follow” attribute on links, which means search engines are able to follow them… Which means any commenters get rewarded with a search engine boost!
• One Click Plugin Updater
  Makes updating WordPress plugins a great deal easier.
• Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu
  This makes the WordPress admin backend a lot more user-friendly, in that I can access various options with one click instead of two or three.
• Preserve Code Formatting
  A bit of a legacy plugin, but I find it useful when displaying code (like the section above for NextGEN Gallery), so that it doesn’t get auto-formatted by WordPress.
• Search Unleashed
  The search box I’m currently using. Has more functionality than the standard, in that it allows wildcards, logical operations, and highlighting across posts, pages, comments, titles, URLs, and meta-data.
• Subscribe To Comments
  Another pretty self-explanatory one — allows commenters to receive email announcements of any subsequent comments.
• Twitter updater w/ TinyURL
  Makes an automatic announcement to my Twitter about any new posts that I publish.
• Ultimate Google Analytics
  A massive hassle- and time-saver! This plugin not only automatically adds the Google Analytics tracking code to every page, it also adds the tracking script to every link, allowing me to track downloads and outgoing links as well.
• wp-cache
  This caches the dynamically generated output of my WordPress site, reducing strain on my server, and reducing the load time for my visitors. It’s got a handy snippet that you can add to a page to exclude sections from the cache (I use this on my Twitter feed in my sidebar).
• WP-PageNavi
  A quick and easy way to add a more functional multi-page navigation, as seen at the bottom of my homepage.
• WP Dash Note
  Adds a handy ‘Post It Note’ section to the WordPress Dashboard — handy for keeping a To-Do list for my site! I’m not a fan of the default appearance, but it’s easy to change if you know a little CSS.
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
  Why go to the hassle of downloading, unzipping, overwriting and reuploading your WordPress files just to upgrade, when this plugin takes out all of the hard work?

That’s the lot that I use at present. I’m sure as my blog grows that list will very likely change, if not grow as well.

Whether you’re just starting out with your WordPress site, or you’ve been going for a while, I hope you get something helpful out of the list.

I’d be interested to hear what essential plugins and/or resources you use for your site, and if you’ve got any suggestions for improvements on my chosen few!

Update (12/11/2008):

There’s been a few additions and changes to my Plug-Ins list recently, so here’s what’s different:

• Gravatar
  Adds gravatar support for my site’s comments.
• Platinum SEO Pack
  Allows me to set the meta descriptions for each page, to boost the likelihood of getting picked up via search engines.
• RSS Feed Signature
  Specify content to be shown at the bottom of each RSS feed entry — for instance, a site banner, contact details, etc.
• Twitter Tools
  A replacement for the Twitter announcer that I was using previously, which had the problem of immediately announcing posts upon clicking ‘Publish’, even if the publish date was set to the future. This alternative plug-in waits until the post is public, plus with a small modification to the code, I’m able to point people to my Design Float account at the same time.

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