There are sites that we’ve built in WordPress that would be even easier to use if we had Boolean search capability. Real Estate sites in particular- where it would be great to be able to look at each post about each piece of property that falls into a certain price range, number of bedrooms, location etc. Or automotive sites- where you want Year, Make and Model search. While this is easy to do in Drupal or Joomla, they are a little more difficult for people to use. With the Pod’s plugin for WordPress 2.7 and above, it’s now easy to add categories of data to posts for searching and organizing.

Why Pods?

Wordpress is a great blogging platform. It lets you work with 2 main content types: blog posts and pages. However, Wordpress doesn’t allow users to define new types of content. This concept of “content types” is similar to that of Drupal (CCK), Expression Engine, Joomla, and other professional CMS (Content Management System) platforms. Pods allows users to create new content types (each content type consisting of a uniform set of fields). Wordpress, welcome to the next level.

via Pods » Why Pods?.

And to further substantiate why you should be active on other blog sites- this came to us through a comment on another site- via subscribe to comments. We had found information on similar plugin of this type called Flutter and another reader suggested Pods. That’s the power of Web 2.0 working for you.

iPhone view of www.esrati.com using WPtouch

There are thousands of plugins for WordPress out there- but few that we think are a must have. WPtouch has become one of our new standards- just because it brings instant elegance to your site when viewed on an iPhone or iTouch- or a phone running Google’s android platform.

While you could spend considerable time crafting an alternate theme and putting a mobile browser detector on your site, WPtouch does all this for you – with a ton of user configuration tools. They even provide a PSD template to make your own customized buttons.

From the site:

a complimentary theme installed as a plugin on your WordPress blog or website that will format your content with this Apple-inspired, full-featured theme when your visitors are using an iPhone or iPod touch.

WPtouch: WordPress On iPhone � BraveNewCode.

It’s currently at version 1.5 and still has a few things to watch for- like if you upgrade using the auto-upgrade, your custom buttons will be overwritten, so make sure to back up your install first.

The mobile market is growing, and those businesses that make sure that they have a mobile accessible site are going to see gains in business.

Just one more reason to use WordPress to publish your website instead of using plain old HTML.

Once your site gets popular, the next problem is comment spam. It’s all Google’s fault for giving points to inbound links- no mater what the connection (give or take). Spammers will say the stupidist things just to get a link back to their site- or even something innocuous like “Nice site, I’ll be back” or some other compliment that adds nothing to the conversation. These suck- because if you have people subscribed to comments- they all get these stupid messages as well.

Spam Karma 2 is still the mac daddy of all spam killers in our book- but, it’s lead developer, Dr. Dave has decided to throw in the towel- which is really too bad. Too many WordPress updates were making his life a living hell. It’s too bad the core dev team believes it’s their way or the highway- because his spam killer works better than Akismet (from the developers of WordPress, which has a funky license- it’s not quite free).

Mollom is in Beta- and my friend D’Arcy Norman is giving it a test run. So far, it’s not SK2- but, remember- that’s what Beta means. Here’s what they say on the Mollom site:

The web is changing. User contribution is now what makes or breaks a site. Allowing users to react, participate and contribute while still keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop comment and contact form spam. When moderation becomes easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your web community. Mollom is currently in public beta.

Home | Mollom.

There are different philosophies on comment moderation- we tend to recommend that you let spam filtered comments post automatically- as soon as they’ve been screened by your filter- no human intervention. Every once in a while something gets through- but, in general, the speed of conversation gets your network going faster than waiting for you to moderate.

Many corporations are scared to let the unmoderated comments post- but, that’s bunk. If they want to say something crappy about your brand- they’ll either say it on your site, or elsewhere- where you may not be able to respond or correct it.

We just found the new WordPress statistics plugin Cystats, and have fallen in love with it. This is a powerful little tool that we found  searching through the 83  statistics plugins listed in the Wordpress directory. It’s so powerful that it even has stuff that Google Web Analytics doesn’t have- and displays it all, in your dashboard to help you analyze your Wordpress site.

Cystats plugin is easy to install and set up;upload the files to your wp-content/plugins directory, and then activate it in the backend. You’ll immediately be able to see the most commented and visited pages and posts, as well as start recording visitor trending, searchbot visits, search strings, top referrers and more. There’s even a way to see the screen resolution and web browser that your visitors are using to view your website (mobile views should be going up too).

You can download Cystats by clicking the link below. Here’s a screenshot :

Cystats Plugin Download

WordPress is more than just blogging software, it’s a very extensible and easy to use Content Management System- that happens to get amazing Google love.

Everyday, we come across new extensions that turn WordPress into the perfect vehicle for some niche business. It doesn’t always mean all of the bugs are worked out- since this is Open Source Software- but it does mean we have a good start on customizing a tool into exactly what a client needs. Right now, we’re about to start work on an orthodontist’s site, and this online booking system extension might come in handy! It’s not quite out yet- but the preview looks interesting.

Clearskys.net Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing StayPress
StayPress is a collection of plugins that will turn a standard vanilla installation of WordPress or WordPress MU into a property management and bookings system. Of course when I say Property, I actually mean any bookable resource of which there is a finite availability. So the StayPress system will be able to manage property rentals, hotel room rentals, conference rooms and centres, B and B’s, training rooms, bands, etc…

The new StayPress system takes over from the previous clearskys.net collection of plugins and brings everything together into a more manageable and co-ordinated group.

Whilst there will obviously be a downloadable version of the StayPress plugins, we are also planning a hosted version of the system for those who do not want the trouble of running their own website.

Of course, if you are working with The Next Wave, we would be happy to configure and set this up for you.

It seems there is quite a bit of frustration with the new “Add media” controls in WordPress 2.5

The 2.5.1 update didn’t fix them- but, at this point, enough people have griped that the development team has to know they laid an egg with this part.

I just grabbed this whole post from the support site to give you the run down, the link at the bottom of the post is from someone who choses much more colorful language to describe his experiences-

WordPress › Support » Problems/steps backward with Add Media functionality
I was quite eager to try the add media functions in v2.5, but it seems either I am missing something or there are some fundamental problems.

Add Video
This seems fundamentally broken. I cannot believe that any user would expect that this would only create a link to a video rather than embedding the actual video. The only good news seems to be that using YouTubes embed code now works in a post without needing to use a plug-in like Easy Tube.

Add an Image
While this works–and the ability to upload multiple images is a plus–the interface to produce even basic functionality seems to have taken a step backwards. Case in point: I wanted to upload an image and have it right-justified with text wrapping around it. I had to go through no less than three dialogue boxes to achieve this.

Step 1: A box for uploading the image and adding ALT text.

Step 2: Requires the user to then click on Gallery for the ability to edit ALT text again, plus set image link, size and basic justification. I am not sure why this cant be rolled into the first step and I am not sure why all the options for justification cant be included here.

Step 3: In order to get the text to wrap, I then need to select the places image, click on the Image button, which pops up a dialogue box similar to what we had in the previous version, which gives the kind of control over the image that SHOULD be in Step 2. And, oddly, the justification selected in Step 2 is not reflected in this dialogue box.

With 2.5, its suddenly more clicks and LESS intuitive than it was before to perform a pretty basic use of an image in a post. It really does seem like at least one of these three steps could be eliminated. In the end, I can get what I want, but now its more involved than it used to be, with a workflow that is not at first obvious.

Add Audio/Add Media
I have not tried these yet, but fear that Audio will produce similar results to video. And its not entirely clear what “Add Media” is for. Flash content? Something else?

But my real issue is with video and these extra steps in just using simple images. Unless someone can show me that I am missing something here. Any help welcome.

If you follow the link, there are some good comments- including mention of the “Flexible Upload” plug in which we are about to start testing.

For the more colorful post- I can’t even post the link- go here.

Once you have a big audience, the question becomes how do you make it make you money?

The answer is to sell out- or at least sell space on your site. There are multiple options for where to get your ads from, and the preferred plugin to manage it is “ad sense manager” which is a bit of a misnomer since it supports a whole bunch of other sites:

WordPress › AdSense Manager « WordPress Plugins
Version 3.1.x now supports AdSense, AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Commission Junction, CrispAds, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN and WidgetBucks.

Automatic Ad Code Importer for all supported networks. Widgets & Sidebar Modules compatible (as used in the popular K2 theme). Automatic limiting of Ads to meet network T&Cs (Google 3 units/page)

Can’t tell you which ad network to go with- since much of that depends on the kind of audience you attract- but, it’s one way to make a living by blogging.

All of a sudden, you see your post and the previous posts all are in a different font, or your sidebar doesn’t appear in the right place. Did you just break Wordpress? Probably not.

What you most likely did was put code in your post that WordPress either doesn’t recognize or doesn’t like.  That’s because WordPress likes you to do the writing, and leave the formatting up to it. Here is some info on Validation from the WordPress Codex:

Validating a Website « WordPress Codex
Validation errors aren’t limited to your template files. They can also happen inside of a post. When you are writing a post and using HTML, WordPress might not recognize the HTML and convert it to a character entity, or you may have entered it wrong. If you have a page with a lot of HTML coding, validate it to make sure you have it all correct. And occasionally check random posts to make sure everything is still okay from time to time as part of your general housekeeping.

So, if you are trying to write about php code- WordPress will strip it out- thinking you are trying to run code where you shouldn’t. People who write about code, use a plugin to make code quotable.

The main problem is copying and pasting either from other sites, or from Microsoft Word. These pastes can contain all kinds of tags and formating that WordPress has no use for, or doesn’t understand, or conflicts with the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) built into your theme.

If you look to the right of your ? (help) icon in the toolbar- you will see the “Advanced Toolbar” button that will give you access to a whole bunch of formatting (and unformatting options). It’s here where you can underline text, add colors, use different heading tags- or remove formatting or clean up messy code.

So, if you see something looking wonky on your wordpress site, try the eraser tool- and remove formatting, before the panic, and try reformatting using only the tools that WordPress offers. If you are still finding errors- look in code view- and see if there are more than a few things that say MsoNormal, or Table or div or span in your code. Most of those are indicative of formatting problems.

One of the reasons people love WordPress is it’s simplicity. Another is the love that Google gives it. But sometimes doing things in WordPress is a bit of a pain in the butt-until some genius writes a plugin that makes things easy- really easy. Like so easy, I think I’m in love.

One of the things we’ve had on our site for a long time is a booklist where we suggested books that people may find useful. We’re not stupid, so we thought we’d make it easy to buy them from Amazon- and take a cut on the sales as well through the Amazon associates program. There are sites that make a living just off their revenue from Amazon, but, we had to admit that our booklist didn’t get updated often since making links through Amazon was a slow tedious process.

Not anymore! This plugin makes adding Amazon links and product pictures to your site so easy it’s a reason in itself to upgrade your install.

WP-Amazon « manalang
Have you ever wanted an easy way to link to a book, movie, or product that’s relevant to what you’re writing about? Typically, this is a pretty cumbersome task — open up a browser, go to Amazon, look for the product you’re interested in, copy the URL, then paste the link to your entry.

Not anymore. With WP-Amazon, the Amazon product catalog is available right from WordPress. This plugin will allow you to search Amazon as you compose your post or page entry. Check out the demo

This plugin is not only an amazing way to add interest to your site, but to also generate income. There are books and products to go with almost everything you write about.

We also have an affiliate program with iTunes- but that interface is even more complicated, and with Amazon now selling music, I think we’ll start using them for those links as well.

Today we got the notification that netenberg had released the Fantastico updates for WordPress 2.3.1 after having 2.2.2 for the longest time. We’ve recently started using Fantastico to set up our initial installs of WordPress, but had done upgrades manually. Today, we tried the auto update feature for the first time- and have this warning: MAKE SURE TO DEACTIVATE ALL PLUGINS BEFORE RUNNING UPDATE. We’re not totally sure this guarantees an un-borked update, but, we’re pretty sure it helped after we reinstalled.

Fantastico is a script that runs from Cpanel on our server to help you automagically install a whole bunch of different Open Source software. It’s really handy, but, be prepared to be at least 30 days behind on most update packages (37 in this case).

Our main reason to switch to 2.3.1 was to familiarize ourselves with the new version of WordPress before the next seminar, but, I’ll give you the immediate highlights:

• ST Visualize Advanced Features plugin  is no longer required- giving everyone access to different levels of CSS tags, the paste from Word function, clean up mess code function, type color, etc.  It’s been a plugin we couldn’t live without- esp. for the glyph finder- so it’s easy to find the ©®™½€ etc.
• The plugin list now tells you if there is a newer version! Long overdue.
• The tag feature helps you organize your posts and categories with yet another tool.

I’m sure we’ll discover other great features as we explore- but, as a warning to all- always disable plugins before updating.