Free Plugin: Exclude Pages from WordPress Navigation Menus

 plugins  No Responses »
Nov 032011
 

Creating pages easily is one of the best features of WordPress. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long before your navigation menu becomes cluttered and your site layout becomes full of links everywhere.

I use a great free WordPress plugin to easily exclude pages from navigation. Exclude Pages creates a checkbox on the side of page creation and editing areas that allows you to exclude the page you are editing or creating from the navigation menus.

I’ve been using the plugin for over a year and it’s been kept up to date. I feel confident you will love this plugin.

 Posted by Jay at 12:23 am

Recently Popular WordPress Plugin

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Oct 292010
 

Displaying and featuring items that are recently popular on your wordpress blog is generally more useful than showing the top viewed items of all time. Recently I’ve began to swap out my “Most Viewed” widgets with “Recently Popular” lists using the Recently Popular Plugin.

You can configure this plugin to show the recently popular pages, posts, or both. The plugin allows you to easily configure how far back it should check activity to generate your list – this allows you to set the widget to display the most popular posts over the past day, week, month, year, etc.

Recently Popular is super easy to setup and display in the sidebar. The author keeps it up to date. In 3 months since my first installation it hasn’t broken down on me yet (/me knocks on wood).

 Posted by Jay at 5:18 am  Tagged with:

Related Posts WordPress Plugin Review

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Apr 212010
 

wordpress-related-postsYet Another Related Blog Posts Plugin is one of the wordpress plugins I’ve used on almost every site I’ve put together over the past 2 years. It has a variety of configuration settings that allow you to determine the relevancy requirements for related posts to be listed in an area under each blog post on the single page view.

Showing Related Blog posts helps your blog in several ways. First, it allows users to find other content relevant to what they were searching for when they first arrived at your site, and your overall bounce rate will lower. Second, it helps search engine have more visibility into your site and pages. By having related posts listed for each single post search engines begin to group the posts together under associated topic weight.

Customizable templates allow you to change every aspect of the plugin’s display. You can easily disallow certain posts or categories from showing up as related posts. It’s one of my favorites and you should give it a try.

 Posted by Jay at 12:12 pm

cleanRoar Free WordPress Theme Review

 themes  No Responses »
Apr 212010
 

cleanroar-wordpressCleanRoar may be my favorite new free WordPress theme from the wordpress.org directory. This theme is ultra clean, something I’ve been leaning towards lately as overall the freely available themes haven’t been exciting me too much until the past few weeks.

Out of the box cleanRoar resembles a newspaper or blank WordPress theme. There are a few options to select pre-made stylesheets that will alter the style significantly (I like the red one, but Dave said it made him puke). The default colorless theme version is fine and it’s what I usually end up going with each time I’ve installed this theme over the past week.

Another option area in the cleanRoar theme configuration area allows you to choose the layout. 3 column, 2 column, and a few multiple configurations are possible. You may also add 125×125 sidebar ads through the theme manager if you choose.

It looks like they are keeping it up to date. After being launched 4 months ago wordpress.org is showing the last update was just a few weeks ago. It works fine everywhere I’ve installed it, so no special skills needed here.

 Posted by Jay at 11:13 am  Tagged with:

Contact Form 7 Pixel Tracking In Sidebar Widget

 plugins  1 Response »
Apr 202010
 

contact-form-pixelContact Form 7, a free wordpress plugin I’ve raved about for a long time (before I found cforms), has a great widget plugin that will allow you to post up lead generation forms in your blog’s sidebar.

If you decide to pay a certain amount for people who send you contacts through your website you will need to be able to fire a pixel as soon as the contact form has been successfully submitted. This is easy to do with Contact Form 7 if you’re using an image pixel.

Log into your wordpress admin area. Navigate to the Contact Form administration area in the bottom left. Click the name of the form you want to place a pixel in (if you have multiple forms setup). At the bottom of the form admin screen click the “Messages” tab.

Under the first message “# Sender’s message was sent successfully”, paste your IMG SRC image call html. Scroll to the bottom and hit save. Now submit your form and it should fire the pixel.

 Posted by Jay at 10:24 am  Tagged with: ,

How to Install WordPress

 Wordpress  No Responses »
Apr 132010
 

how-to-install-wordpressYou can Install WordPress in a few minutes with this quick guide.

Make sure you have the most recent version of WordPress. Download Area on WordPress.org

Once the zip file is downloaded to your local computer, then unzip the files

Upload the folders inside the /wordpress folder on your computer (from the inflated zip file) to your public html web directory on your web host.

Inside your hosting control panel, create a new MySQL database for the WordPress Installation

When the files have finished the FTP process and your database exists, navigate to yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ to generate your initial configuration file. Make sure to save the admin password that is auto generated by wordpress.

You should now be ready to start posting on your blog. If you have problems or need some to install wordpress for you, do not hesitate to contact me.

A few tips:
You may wish to create a blank file named .htaccess and also upload this to your public html directory, then CHMOD it 777. This will allow you to easily turn on permalinks.

I recommend using the custom permalink structure of: /%postname%/ . This will help keep your urls short, position keywords closer to your root domain level, and make navigation more user friendly.

 Posted by Jay at 12:17 am  Tagged with: ,

Photo Gallery WordPress Plugin

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Apr 122010
 

photo-gallery-pluginAfter months of trying various photo gallery plugins for my wordpress sites it’s clear that NextGen Gallery is clearly the easiest to install and configure while offering the most options.

You can allow registered users your blog to upload photos. You can decide if you require a review process before they are posted.

You can manage your own personal photo galleries easily with this script. You can create custom albums that contain galleries of photos you’ve already grouped together. The feature list is huge on this one.

There are other NextGen Gallery companion plugins (also free) that you can download to display the latest (or random) photos in the side bar, and many other cool features. Of course NextGen has a spectacular slide show and all the normal bells and whistled you’d expect with an over the top plugin like this.

I basically install this with my core group of plugins on any new domain. If you’ve found a better free plugin, or have ran into any problems getting NextGen Gallery to work, drop me a comment in the comment box below and I’ll get back to you.

 Posted by Jay at 10:06 pm

eDegree WordPress Theme Rocks My Socks Off

 themes  No Responses »
Apr 112010
 

eDegree-wordressThe eDegree WordPress Theme is another impressive new free wordpress theme that’s been freshly posted over at the WordPress.org theme directory. In my recent posts I’ve been talking about how great some of these new themes are, eDegree is no exception.

I’m using the theme on 2 sites currently. I’m having one heck of a time getting the featured content gallery plugin to work properly, so I just completely stripped it out for now (as you can see here on this blog currently).

Check out this link to see what eDegree looks like with the slider. Read more about this theme and download it yourself at the official WordPress Themes Directory listing.

 Posted by Jay at 10:59 am  Tagged with: , ,

G-Lock Double Opt-in Newsletter Plugin

 plugins  No Responses »
Apr 102010
 

wordpress-newsletterUse WordPress and need a free plugin to manage your newsletters subscribers? No problem. The G-Lock Double Opt-in Manager includes everything you need to collect and manage subscribers. Users must first confirm their email by clicking a unique link code sent to the email address they use to register for the newsletter. Once you’ve built a list, you can use the G-Lock interface to easily email all your subscribers at once.

Maintaining an active newsletter (or even better yet a trigger based emailing system) is one of the most effective ways to drive business for most websites. Special offers, customer incentives, and keeping your shoppers or subscribers up to date are just a few ways you can use a Newsletter to drive business.

This plugin comes with a handy widget you can place in any widgable area in your WordPress blog and immediately begin taking subscribers. Everything works straight out of the box, it couldn’t be more simple.

 Posted by admin at 9:40 am  Tagged with: , ,

iDream Free WordPress Theme Review

 themes  No Responses »
Apr 092010
 

idream-wordpressAfter several months of not being super impressed by any new theme releases on wordpress.org’s directory, I was very surprised this week to find several new flashy, modern, hot looking free themes.

I installed several of the new themes and ran into some problems right away with many. The iDream Theme really stood out as a solid performer and I’m using it on a few fresh site’s i’ve recently setup and am developing content on using WordPress.

It’s simple and clean, perfect for wireframing new sites before you want to spend money on design.

This theme is recommended primary for blogs.

You can preview it here, download it from wordpress.org, or just add it using your wordpress admin control panel.

Let me know if you run into any issues with this theme.

 Posted by admin at 3:24 am  Tagged with: ,
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