'Net Features : wordpress wednesday

Top 3 Favicon Plugins for Wordpress

Michael Garrity — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 19:30:00 GMT

As I sit here typing this, I have three different browsers open with at least 10 different tabs up in each one (and that’s being conservative). Luckily, I have no problem opening up the right tab each and every time thanks to the Web’s unsung hero – the favicon.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, favicons are small 16x16 pixel icons associated with a particular website (or page) that show up primarily next to the URL in the address bar, next to the page name in a browser tab and/or next to the page’s name in a bookmark list. For instance, if you look up at this tab or next to this page’s URL in your address bar (depending on what browser you’re using), you’ll see a tiny version of our classic “WM” icon that indicates that you are, in fact, on a WebsiteMagazine.com page.

If you’re the proud owner of a WordPress website, it’s probably a good idea for you to have your own favicon(s) that can help users identify your site and ensure that they’re in the right place, while also building your brand and making it easier for visitors to come back in the process.

However, it’s safe to say that favicons probably aren’t top of mind for busy individuals trying to get a website off the ground. To simplify favicon creation for your WordPress site, check out these three great plugins that can do the job for you:

Shockingly Simple Favicon
This plugin changes the favicon of a WordPress blog without requiring users to edit their theme files. It will also put a WP icon in the administration interface, making it easy to find the tab in a browser. And fortunately for those of us who aren’t code-savvy, the changes are all fixed, so you won’t have to go back and alter them if/when you change your blog’s theme.

All in One Favicon
Users can either use favicons that they’ve already uploaded or upload a new favicon into their WordPress installation with a built-in upload mechanism to add a favicon to their site and admin pages. All in One Favicon supports three different favicon types: .ico, .png and .gif, which includes animated images. It also supports Apple Touch icons.

Favicon Generator
With support for .jpg/.jpeg, .gif and .png images, Favicon Generator allows users to upload an image. Then it will automatically convert that image into a unique favicon-formatted file. This file will then be placed in the user’s WordPress root dictionary, and the plugin will add a link tag to the HTML output.

WordPress Wednesday: Top 10 E-Commerce Plugins

Michael Garrity — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 22:30:00 GMT

So you want to run your own e-commerce website, but you also want access to the convenience and simplicity of the WordPress platform? Never fear, because there’s a plugin for that.

Well, actually, there are a lot of plugins for that, but here are 10 of the best WordPress e-commerce plugins to help you get started making your fortune selling junk online in no time at all.

WP E-Commerce

Probably because of its easy-to-search-for name, WP E-Commerce is among the most popular e-commerce shopping cart plugins for WordPress. Although, I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that it’s simple to install and works with any WordPress theme. Users can customize the shopping experience for their customers with product widgets, free shipping options and quantity discounts. The plugin even offers search engine-friendly URLs and a feature that allows for product-specific sales.

Ecwid

This free, robust shopping cart plugin (a portmanteau of “e-commerce” and “widget”) is easy to install and maintain and is totally customizable, so users can adjust the appearance to match the look and feel of their sites. Ecwid also comes with seamless upgrades, meaning you don’t have to wait around or update it every time new features are added; they’ll just show up one day.

Cart66 Lite

Despite its “lite” modifier, Cart66 is still a very powerful e-commerce plugin. It comes with multiple shipping and currency options for transacting international business, custom product fields and inventory tracking. However, the coolest thing about Cart66 is its Amazon S3 integration, which allows users to sell digital products in addition to traditional physical products.

WooCommerce

This plugin from WordPress theme publisher WooThemes includes local and international delivery options, extensions for creating personalized products, Google Product Feed, inventory management, thorough shipping and tax options, marketing tools and reporting features. Moreover, it focuses on a clean, beautiful design to compound its robust functionality with startling elegance.

WP Auctions

Arguably the best auction plugin for WordPress, WP Auctions comes with three different bidding engines, as well as features for registered only users and reserved prices. Users can use their WordPress blog or website to host auctions (as many as they’d like) and sell anything without any fees. It’s incredibly easy for users to edit, end or delete their auctions. You can even use PayPal to accept payments. And speaking of PayPal…

PayPal Payment Terminal WordPress

In less than five minutes, users can start accepting PayPal payments on their WordPress-based e-commerce site with this plugin. Then, they can view all of their transactions and sort their transaction list as needed. It will even send the purchaser and merchant automatic notifications during the purchasing process. This particular premium WordPress plugin costs $12.

WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart

However, if you don’t want to pay for PayPal functionality, then maybe you should consider this plugin. It allows users to put an “Add to Cart” button and display the shopping cart on any of their blog posts or site pages. This will show customers what items they currently have in their carts (and remove it, if they want). Users will get access to the PayPal sandbox to do testing, as well.

eShop

This free full service shopping cart option provides a simple administration area that makes it super easy to add products, review products and check site statistics. It’s also highly customizable, so you can definitely make it reflect the tone of your brand. Mostly, this solution is ideal if you want customers to create a profile to make purchases on your site.

YAK for WordPress

Merchants can use this open source shopping cart plugin to create products from pages or blog posts, so that the post ID becomes the product code. YAK handles different kinds of products through categorization, and includes a basic XML feed. It also offers a variety of customizable purchasing options, including checks or deposits, credit cards, Google Checkout, PayPal and PayPal Payments Pro and Authorize.net, as well as a configurable shipping address feature.

Shopp

Shopp is an excellent, albeit somewhat pricey (starting at $55), premium e-commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress. Easy to install and begin using, Shopp provides a clean user interface with strong customer support, including a user forum on its official site. After buying the initial single license for the software, users can build upon the Shopp platform by purchasing additional plugins like payment gateways, shipping modules and priority customer support.

Take Your WordPress Site Mobile

Michael Garrity — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:15:00 GMT

Much of the appeal of the WordPress platform is that it makes it easy to create an affordable, functional, and often feature-rich website without requiring extensive knowledge of the “nuts and bolts” of website development.

So when it suddenly became important to have a mobile-optimized website to stay competitive, many business owners or bloggers who aren’t necessarily experts in the field probably felt a pang of dread. However were they supposed to create another version of their sites that could work on an array of mobile devices?

Over time, a natural demand for easy-to-use mobile Web design solutions led to the creation of platforms like DudaMobile, which helps webmasters quickly and efficiently build a customized version of their websites that is optimized for most mobile devices. When DudaMobile noticed that a significant percentage of its customers were working with WordPress-powered websites, it seemed like a natural decision to streamline the optimization process by creating the DudaMobile WordPress plugin.

Released just last month, the new DudaMobile plugin saves WordPress users a significant amount of time and effort. It also makes it easy to optimize WordPress blogs with unique mobile-friendly templates, in addition to a number of useful add-ons and features for business websites that help them leverage the power of the mobile Web sooner, rather than later.

The plugin is easy to install and activate, and after that, it’s just one click to get started. DudaMobile will automatically render an “initial version” of a user’s mobile site and provides previews of what it will look like on the four major mobile operating systems (Android, iOS, Blackberry, and Windows Phones). These previews can always be accessed during the optimization process to allow users to examine their changes as they make them.

Once the initial version is rendered, users can customize their mobile site in just four steps. The first is to choose a theme. When the site is first created, it uses the original template employed by the site, but for the mobile version, users are able to select a brand new website or blog theme.

The second step is the most involved and deals with the majority of the editing and customization. Users are able to totally customize the site’s header and logo, navigation menu, background and text, and footer, as well as add a home icon or remove content. (The options are slightly different for blogs, allowing for customization of the header and logo, home page, blog posts, comments, and the footer.) Perhaps the most important aspect, however, is the ability to add widgets, which greatly increase the functionality of the mobile sites.

This additional content is split into three categories for Business, Design, and Social features, including the ability to insert images or a photo gallery, a mobile map, a restaurant menu, PayPal functionality, a click-to-call option, and much more. However, it is important to note that many of these features are only available with a premium mobile site (more on that in a second).

After the site is customized, the third step is to take it live. Here, users can choose between the free basic plan and the premium plan, which costs nine dollars a month. The premium plan provides a wider range of features than the basic option, including Google AdSense integration that lets users to monetize their mobile sites. Premium sites also get a unique “m.” mobile URL, while the basic users receive a standard DudaMobile mobile URL.

When the mobile site is live, all that is left to do is redirect the URL so that the mobile optimized site is loaded in mobile browsers. This is literally as simple as clicking “YES” to confirm the mobile site URL at the end of the process.

As you can see, with the new DudaMobile plugin, it’s cheap and easy to take your WordPress website or blog mobile. In just a few quick steps, you can begin leveraging the power of the mobile Web, and you can always go back and edit, customize, or add features to your mobile site as needed, which is especially helpful since DudaMobile will be adding new capabilities to the plugin every three weeks.

WordPress Wednesday: Themes of a Social Nature

Michael Garrity — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 19:15:00 GMT

When Facebook burst onto the national scene and stopped being the exclusive domain of college undergraduates, its biggest selling point (and the attribute that helped propel its phenomenal success) was a clean, straightforward design.

A far cry from the cluttered, disorganized social profiles of the earliest years of the 21^st Century, Facebook’s first priority was simplicity and readability. Now, thanks to some fanboy designers, you can adapt that same aesthetic for your WordPress site.

Check out these Facebook-inspired WordPress themes:

If you like your social networking a little more bite-sized, here are a few Twitter inspired themes:

And, of course, for both of those huge Google+ fans out there:

Plus Theme

WP Plus

WordPress Wednesday: Facebook for WordPress Plugin

Michael Garrity — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Facebook is undoubtedly the driving force behind the rise of the social Web, and the social network is increasingly becoming a vital component of ‘Net success for online retailers, content publishers and pretty much anyone else working on the Web.

For many, this means finding ways to integrate Facebook functionality directly into their website(s). A recent Pingdom survey of the world’s top 10,000 websites reveals that nearly a quarter of them (24.3 percent) feature some type of official Facebook integration on their homepage, and when one considers “regular” links to Facebook, the number shoots up to 49.3 percent. This integration can be anything from widgets to social plugins.

Now, WordPress website owners can harness the power of Facebook by adding the officially sanctioned Facebook for WordPress plugin to their site, with no coding knowledge required. In addition to offering a range of Facebook functionality, the plugin also supports internationalization and mobile sites, and is WordPress.com VIP approved.

Whenever one publishes a new page or post on their WordPress site, they will have a number of options for distributing it directly to Facebook. This includes the ability to mention specific friends or pages on the social network, as well as add a message that will be posted with the content. Then, once it is published, the content will appear on the friends and pages’ Timelines, and the mentions will also show up in the post on the WordPress site.

Author’s can alter the plugin’s settings so that the post shows up on their Timeline as an Open Graph action, the Timeline of any friend or page mentioned as part of the post and any Facebook page the author chooses that automatically publishes the WordPress site’s content once it is live.

Facebook for WordPress also offers users a variety of social plugins that they can easily enable on posts and pages. This includes Like, Send and Subscribe buttons, comments with SEO support (meaning they can be indexed by search engines) and a Recommendations Bar that lets users start getting recommendations, “Like” content and add what they’re currently reading to Timeline.

Finally, the plugin features a number of WordPress Widgets with drag-and-drop functionality that allows users to include social features like recommendations, recent activity and Like, Send and Subscribe buttons in their sites’ sidebars.

Click here for instructions from Facebook Developers on how to install Facebook for WordPress to your site.

Best WordPress Comment Plugins

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Few things signal the quality of a blog better than its comment activity. It's not always easy to draw users into your blog who are capable of sharing their high-quality insights (or those that are interested, for that matter) but once you've got a few reliable members participating in this on-site social community, there are myriad benefits.

Comments have a bad wrap, however, and many believe that it's directly attributed to the poor experience associated with not just leaving comments but managing them too - it's time to change that. In this edition of Website Magazine's WordPress Wednesday, let's look at a few of the best comment plugins available today.

Those looking for more than just a few unique twists and tweaks to their commenting system should consider adding solutions such as IntenseDebate, Disqus or LiveFyre, which act as full-on replacements of the built-in comment engine of WordPress.

IntenseDebate Comments: IntenseDebate comments enhances and encourages conversation on your blog. Build your reader community, increase your comments and boost pageviews. The IntenseDebate plugin has over 400,000 downloads to date.

Disqus Comment System: The Disqus comment system, which boasts nearly 700,000 downloads, replaces the WordPress comment system with a full-featured comment system hosted and powered by Disqus. The plugin can be a little tricky to implement in my experience, but once it is working well, supporting a comment-supportive environment is a breeze.

Livefyre Realtime Comments: Livefyre is a real-time comment solution that centralizes conversations from around the social Web back to your content, while encouraging live engagement between users on your site.

Disqus, IntenseDebate and LiveFyre might be the most well-known comment plugins, and some would also argue the best, but there are numerous others plugins for WordPress blogs to deploy and improve the user experience of commenting. Here are several others that have caught our attention recently.

Facebook Comments for WordPress: Allows your visitors to comment on posts using their Facebook profile. The plugin supports custom styles, notifications, combined comment counts, recent comments and has over 350,000 downloads. Another Facebook related commenting plugin is WordPress is Facebook Comments by Fat Panda, which replaces WP commenting with the Facebook Comments widget.

WP Ajax Edit Comments: It's not uncommon for users to want editing capabilities of their comments after they have been published. This plugin enables users to edit their own comments for a limited time, while administrators can edit all comments. The plugin has nearly 230,000 downloads.

Better WordPress Recent Comments: A common tactic to elicit more comments is to showcase the current commenting activity on a blog. This plugin displays recent comment lists at assigned locations, and features comprehensive support for widgets. Even though the plugin works well, it does require some extensive configuration, one possible reason it has generated just over 12,000 downloads since launch.

Greg's Comment Length Limiter: Some blog commenters can take advantage of the forum you provide in your commenting system. This plugin solves that problem in part, by providing a configurable limit on the length of comments left in the comment form, with a dynamically updated character count displayed for the user. Also see Greg's Threaded Comment Numbering plugin, which numbers comments sequentially and hierarchically; handles comments which are threaded, paged and/or reversed.

Top Commentators Widget: Why do users comment? Sometimes for the link, but sometimes for the glory. For those valued blog commenter's, you need to do something special. This widget can be added to the sidebar to showcase the top commentators in your WP site. The widget currently has over 98,000 downloads.

Wizzart - Recent Comments: Another sign that a blog is open for business is the recency of comments. The Wizzart plugin offers a customizable widget to do just that, showing recent visitor comments in the WP sidebar. Output is completely customizable with features including custom tags and styling.

One Click Close Comments: Blogs are targets for spammers, but this plugin could eliminate much of the problem. From the admin listing of posts ('Edit Posts') and pages ('Edit Pages'), a user can close or open comments to any posts to which they have privileges to make such changes. This plugin should have far more than the nearly 17,000 downloads reported. A similar plugin to explore is Extended Comment Options, which allows bloggers to close or open comments (or pings) on entire batches of posts (which can be scheduled automatically too).

SEO Super Comments: If search engines crawl comments - and you know they do - why not consider optimizing the content within those comments? This plugin turns blog comments into entirely new, dynamic, standalone pages that hold the actual comment information without requiring the WP database. The plugin has over 38,000 downloads.

Subscribe To Comments Reloaded: Need to increase the amount of return visits a post is receiving? This plugin enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries, and includes a full-featured subscription manager that commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts or suspend all notifications entirely. Another option to consider is the Subscribe to Double-Opt-In Comments plugin, which allows reader to receive notifications of new comments posted to an entry with offers a double-opt-in feature.

MSMC - Redirect After Comment: If a blog visitor takes the time to write a comment, they are likely very engaged with what you're discussing which means they might just be interested in what you're selling. The "Redirect After Comment" plugin allows blogger to automatically redirect users to a predefined page after they leave a comment.

Twitter Mentions as Comments: While I've never been a big believer in Twitter, I can see that it has its merits and commenting is likely one. This plugin scans Twitter for people talking about blog posts and inserts their Tweets alongside existing comments, leveraging the power of WordPress's built-in commenting system. The plugin has nearly 20,000 downloads.