Plugins referenced:
- Toolset ($150)
- Gravity Forms ($199/year)
Plugins
I’ve always wanted to try making a WordPress plugin. And while I’ve had a bunch of ideas for very complex plugins I thought it’d be fun to start off with something ridiculously fun & simple.
So here it is, friends. Our first plugin, totally free!
Hello Darth
Download & Install from the WordPress repository
Description
This little plugin is in homage to my geek friends who love to hate Lord Vader. When activated you will randomly see a quote from Darth Vader’s IMDB page in the upper right of your admin screen on every page.
How Does it Work?
- After you install and activate the plugin it’s super simple.
- All it does is add a Darth Vader quote to the top of your admin area, it’s like a subversive joke celebrating your dominance over the internet.
Screenshots
Future Development
Other than adding a bunch of additional Darth quotes, I’m not sure how I could improve it. But I’m open to ideas!
HT to Matt Mullenberg for the original code.
Problem: Thesis, by default, disables the WordPress default featured image feature.
Solution: Buy Thesistut’s WordPress Featured Image plugin ($15)
Trust me, I spent 10 hours trying to create workarounds for that $15 plugin. You want it, you need it, you want some more of it.
Questions about this tutorial? Leave me a comment.
Today, we launched ObesityRx.net.
The complexity of this project went well beyond WordPress as we also created the branding, design, and online strategy. But let’s look at the WordPress build.
- Theme built on the Thesis Framework
- Edit flow used to allow for user submissions
- Gravity Forms handles the contact page; the user registration add-on handles new sign-ups
- Login Logo customizes the login/logout page for those who find themselves there accidentally
- Members, for creating custom user groups and permissions
- Sidebar Login brings a simple, sexy login widget to the sidebar
- Thesis Openhook helps me with customization along the way
- Tweet, Like, Google+, and Share is a simple plugin which allows me to add social sharing functions on a per page/post basis
- Tipsy adds outgoing links to social media sites on the sidebar, simple and sexy.
Note: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. But hey, I’m just sharing stuff I use. If you buy it why not hook me up with a little slice of that pie?
This has been a huge week of building. We have several sites about to launch and several more queued up to be built. That means we’re out looking for solutions right now BIG TIME!
Here’s 5 Great WordPress Plugins I discovered recently. (If you want more stuff like this sign-up for my Tips & Tricks newsletter, which is starting in September.)
1. Slick Social Share (free)
This plugin mounts a little social share “dock” on the right or left side of your site. Once you install it you just go to the settings page for the plugin and select how you want it to work. Quick and simple, takes minutes to set up.
2. Edit Flow (free)
If you run a multi-author site but want to build a little editorial review and professionalism into your life… this is a great little plugin for that. Essentially, it takes advantage of the default member groups. So Contributors can save their post as a “pitch” (or however you’d like to call it) and you have the ability to have some internal comments and edits before the administrator schedules the post to go live.
3. Travelmap (free)
This plugin is perfect for travel bugs or authors and bands on tour. It documents the when/where in a tidy list and displays your criss-crossing of the globe with a sweet Google Map.
4. Horizontal Scrolling Announcement (free)
This plugin grabs content from your site and places it into a widget which slides up, down, left, or right. (The developer has many cousins to this same general idea.) This would be great for a magazine styled site or even a great way to highlight backlogged content. Might also be good if you know your readers have the attention span of a sand flee.
5. Simple Pull Quote (free)
I love this plugin! Sometimes on a longer post it is great to use a pull quote to draw your reader back into the post mentally. This plugin allows you to do that very easily from the editor. Literally, just highlight the copy in your post you want to put in the pull quote and push the button. Done.
Blog-in-Blog is a great little plugin. It allows you to slice and dice your blog and put certain posts on different areas (pages) of the site depending on the category.
So you can have all of your regular blog posts go onto a blog page but redirect all of your podcast posts to a special podcast page. As a bonus you can even exclude that category from the RSS feed so that your podcast doesn’t go out to your regular RSS feed unless you want it to.
As a developer I know I could do the same thing by coding the template in PHP, but a plugin is so much faster for me, and I don’t have to worry about WordPress later changing the way the code might work.
Now here’s what I learned– Making it work, and making it look good are two different things. While it would make sense if the plugin natively called the CSS for the activated theme, it doesn’t because nearly every theme has a special way to call for the themes CSS.
So here’s how you make it pretty:
- Navigate to the Blog-in-Blog settings.
- Click on the Template Tab
- Scroll down and click “Add new user template” and name it “podcast” (Or whatever you’re going to use it for)
- Copy/paste the code into the HTML box from below, customize the CSS however might match your site best. (Note: I’ve removed the avatar)
- Save changes.
- Navigate to the page you’d like to drop the code. Then add in the shortcode, adding the template tag: [blog_in_blog template='podcast' category_slug='podcast' num=10] Save your changes on that page.
- Presto! Done.
Need help or want me to help you customize this more? No problemo. Just leave a comment!
Getting started with WordPress can be intimidating. With thousands of templates to chose from and thousands of plugins to consider it’s hard to know what to do.
Allow me make it easier.
Here are the first 5 WordPress plugins you need for your site
- Askimet – There’s a reason this plugin comes pre-packaged with WordPress. If you set it up properly it will almost completely eliminate trackback and comment spam. Tip: In the settings, select “Auto-delete spam submitted on posts more than a month old.“
- Subscribe to comments – This simple plugin allows your commenters to indicate if they’d like a follow-up email when other people comment.
- Contact Form 7 – Simple contact pages are just a few clicks away. This plugin allows you to create simple fields for your form, then delivers a short code to place on a page or sidebar.
- WordPress Mobile Edition – By default, your theme might not look great on small screens. This plugin solves that problem and helps mobile visitors read your content better.
- Jetpack - This is Automattics’s latest toy du jour. It’s really a plugin with several pre-loaded plugins. The most important of which is a stats page for your dashboard. But there are promises and rumors that other, even more useful, plugins are being created for Jetpack. I suspect that within the next year Jetpack will be folded into the WordPress core.
What are your favorite plugins?
Intense Debate. Disqus. Facebook. Or WordPress’s native commenting?
That’s the quandary bloggers are facing. How do I handle my comments properly while still taking advantage of all the viral possibilities out there?
There are upsides and downsides to each option. And with WordPress apparently adding better social sharing into an upcoming release of the new WordPress.com commenting into the WordPress.org self-hosted blog community via Jetpack, bloggers will have to wrestle through the positives and negatives of each option.
My advice?
I wouldn’t recommend any comment feature that doesn’t add people’s comments on your blog into your mySQL database. While I’m happy to install Disqus or Intense Debate for a client, my recommendation is always that your safest bet is to use the native WordPress commenting platform because that’s the only way to guarantee that your comments stay with your content.
Which do you use? Why?
Need help with commenting plugins? Create a topic in the Help Center and I’ll be happy to get you going.
