Digitalquill

Following my recent post about the ‘3 must have Media Centre Plugins‘ I thought that I would post about the three WordPress plugins that I consider a must have for all WordPress installs no matter what you use WordPress for, be that a Blog or a CMS.

I of course would promote my plugins at this point, however they are targeted at a specific niche on the WordPress users and as such do not fit into the must have for all WordPress installs category.

I also could go on about SPAM filter this, and SPAM filter that, but in all honesty that has been done so many times before and in my opinion most of the big SPAM plugins for WordPress out there work well so pick one and go with it.

My List is one that give practice benefit to you the blogger. They are all available for free on the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Search Meter

WordPress has a great inbuilt search facility, most if not all themes integrate with this to allow users of your WordPress site to search your content. This information is very valuable, especially if you are using WordPress as a CMS or as an ecommerce site, but also if you are a blogger.

To be able to have an insight into what your users are searching fo on your WordPress site gives you an insight into what they are interested in and as such you can tailor your future content to suit that, providing more content based on the search trends on your site.

Combine this with information coming from Google Analytics which will show you what keywords people used to find your site on search engines and you start to have a very powerful body of data at your disposal.

The Search Meter WordPress plugin records the searches made on your WordPress site and provides you with that information along with how many results those searches had on your site.

This allows you to start writing the content that your users want on your WordPress site.

All in one SEO

You can not have a list of WordPress plugins without the ‘All in one SEO plugin. By rights it should always be the number one plugin that you install every time you setup WordPress. In all honesty what should happen is that this plugin is taken on into the main code of WordPress and maintained by the WordPress developers.

The plugin improves the Search engine optimization of WordPress and allows you to control the meta tags created. Meta tags are things like the title of the page, hidden keywords and descriptions that can be picked up by the search engine spiders.

It is a must for all WordPress installs.

Keyword Density

Ok, so I said that I would not promote my WordPress plugins, what i really meant was I would only promote one of them! Seriously though, I do believe that this little tool is essential for everyone.

If you have done any research into getting search engine ranking, you will know that content is king. It does not matter what your site is, the most essential aspect is the content, its quality and its uniqueness.

The keyword density plugin aids you in writing this content to ensure that you get the balance of your chosen keywords in your text. It is a very simple plugin, you tell it to monitor keywords of your choice. If for example you have a blog about Cooking you may want to make sure that your content is rich with keywords such as ‘Cooking, cook, chef, recipe, kitchen, food, meal, baking’

This plugin tells you how you are doing with the balance of those keywords as you type your content. It also makes sure that you do not include your keywords too often as that would bee seen by Google as spamming the search engine.

I have today released a new version of the datafeed plugin for WordPress, this contains a minor bug fis for the URL cloaking or link masking system which when certain characters we entered into the post subject caused the link cloaking system to fail.

I have added script to handle this error which checks for characters that are not URL friendly and excludes them from the link masking system.

Please download a new copy of the plugin from the Datafeed Plugin for WordPress Website.

If you have any feature requests for the plugin or any other WordPress plugin that you would like to see please do not hesitate to contact me.

I have today released a new version of my Datafeed plugin  (also known as Multifeed plugin) for WordPress. This version includes link masking or link cloaking that makes affiliate links more search engine friendly and click tracking to allow you to monitor the click son your links, which are performing well and which are not.

If you are interested in more information about the plugin please go to the Datafeed Import Plugins website.

I have learnt one lesson from this release, that is never do a release when it is late in the day and you are tired. I accidentally uploaded the wrong file to the server and invited thousands of users to come and download it! Soon realised and rectified the mistake but still lesson learned!

You may also be interested to know that I am about to launch a new version of the Amazon Import Plugin for WordPress, this has been a major re-write of the plugin which is now packed with features and functionality.

I am also putting out another call for beta testers for my WordPress Advertiser plugin, if you feel that you can help please do contact me either by email or post a comment on this blog.

I have bought several domain names for use with my new WordPress projects, the WordPress Advertiser Plugin and my WordPress Blog Hosting project. I had bought the .com and .co.uk domains for both of these projects, but having visited the WordPress site it appears that they do not like you using domain names with WordPress in them and would rather you used domains with WP in them.

Strangely, if you already own them you can use them but they would rather you pointed those domains to a new domain that only has WP in it and not use the WordPress one as your ‘main’ domain name.

It will cost me a little to get new domains, however, it is better that I have found out now rather than 6 months down the line when I have promoted those products with the wrong domain name.

I have been using WordPress 3.0 for a little while now, mainly to test that the plugins I have developed still work in this new version. I am please to say that I have had very few problems.

I thought that I would give my first view of WordPress 3.0.

What is different in this version?

1. Custom Post Types
2. New Default Theme
3. Custom Background Support
4. Specific Templates for Authors
5. New Users Tutorial
6. Custom Woo Navigation added to the core
7. Merge of WordPress and the now defunct WordPress MU
8. Security Improvements with automatic creation of Security Keys

There are many other improvements, but these are mainly within the code and in the technical development of the software rather than up-front features.

The Install

WordPress can now be installed as a multi-site system very much like WordPress MU used to. I have yet to try this but will be investigating those features very soon as I use WordPress for many sites and it would be perfect if I can simply have one install to run them all rather than having to go through the process time and time again.

The normal WordPress install is very similar to the WordPress 2.x installs where it creates the configuration file, asking you for the username and password for the database and the database name. The main difference that I found was that it no-longer gives you a randomly generated admin password, but asks you to enter your password.

I think this is much better as it cuts out one step in the WordPress setup process, you no-longer have to go into the admin area and change the password to something sensible that you can remember. It does of course have the password strength indicator to ensure that you are not using a password of 1234!

The install still asks you for a name for your blog, but frustratingly does not ask you to change the Tag line. If this were added to the install process it would streamline the install even more. In my view if it added permalink settings as well this would be perfect and would mean that it is ready to go after the install rather than having to modify settings. I suppose the problem with this is that it would make the install process more cluttered but I would rather have that and know that once the install was finished WordPress was configured how I wanted it rather than having to go through the settings.

The WordPress install now checks the version of MySQL and PHP on the server. I always thought that this was something that it would do and it never occurred to me that it would not so this is very good news and long overdue. It is something that I have had in my plugins for some time now, checking to make sure that the server supports their requirements. This seems a basic thing that should have been introduced from the beginning of WordPress.

The WordPress Admin Interface

At first glance the WordPress admin interface looks very much the same. The theme has been updated a little, indeed the admin area is supposed to be easier to theme.

Updates: A large number of the changes included are the ability to do bulk updates, both WordPress plugins and themes now have the ability to have bulk updates, and the updates for WordPress its self have now moved onto the Dashboard.

Interestingly during the time it has taken since I installed WordPress 3.0 (2 hours ago) there has been an update, so I have gone through the update process to update WordPress to the latest nightly build and the process is exactly the same as the 2.9x automatically upgrade feature.

Custom Posts and Taxonomies: The introduction and improvement of custom posts and custom taxonomies will add much more functionality to WordPress and a huge amount of scope for building more advanced applications based on the WordPress Framework. I have not fully got my head round what is possible with these, but I intend to in the near future and I will try and post mu findings here.

Search Engines blocked Message: A very small but useful thing that I have noticed, as the install of WordPress 3.0 I have done is just a test install I noticed the box on the install which says allow search engines to see my blog, I now have a message in the top bar of the admin interface “Search Engines Blocked” a useful reminder, especially for me as I use many test installs of WordPress and am paranoid about domains or IP addresses being blocked for spamming when I am testing new scripts on those WordPress installs.

Revision interface: The interface that allows you to compare the revisions of a post within WordPress has been updated, the fact of the matter is that I did not know that this interface even existed, and when I compare the 2.9.2 and the WordPress 3.0 interfaces I can not see any difference, but this is defiantly a feature I will be using in the future.

Menu Management: WordPress 3.0 now has the Woo Navigation features integrated as core. This allows you to manage the menus on your WordPress via a drag and drop interface. It also means that you can make up custom menus that include both pages and categories, a very useful feature especially if you are using WordPress as a framework for a CMS or e-commerce site.

There are many other features and the list of new features for developers is apparently endless. I must get time to read the whole list and see what it means for WordPress developers and how I can use them to improve my WordPress Plugins.

Will I be upgrading?

Simple answer is yes, of course I will upgrade, the more detailed answer would be that I will upgrade my WordPress installs that have a blog on them such as this one, Earning From Affiliates and On the Allotment first. I will then start to move onto the other sites that use WordPress as a framework for e-commerce or affiliate sites. However, I want to investigate the multi site facilities before I do that to see if it is an easy task to move over to a single install of WordPress to manage all my sites.

Whats next?

You will have noted several times in this post that I have seen areas that I need to gen up on. Custom Posts and Custom Taxonomies specifically look like an area that will be of use to me in my WordPress Datafeed Import and WordPress Amazon Import Plugins. I have a load of work to do playing with these new features to discover what I can do, look out in the near future for exciting new features for my plugins.

The initial development on my new wordpress plugin ‘WordPress Advertiser’ that allows you to manage the process of selling and displaying adverts on your WordPress blog, has been finished.

I am looking for WordPress blog owners who are interested in the new plugin  to contact me. I need some people to try the beta copy of the plugin on their blogs and give it a test in a real life environment, to see how well it works and give me some feedback.

I have done a great deal of testing on the plugin in both wordpress 2.9.2 and wordpress 3.0.

I am in the process of writing the help files for it, when those help files are written I will send anyone who contacts me a copy, and then when I release the finished version of the plugin I will send you an updated copy.

Please post here if you are willing to help, along with the blog that you will be able to test it on.

I am also writing a new website for the WordPress advertiser plugin, this will be up and online by the end of the week, it will give you more details about what the plugin actually does and its features and functions.

Over the last 9 months I have been developing two plug-ins for WordPress plug ins. These plugins have been universally praised and far more successful than I had ever imagined they could have been. This has been one of the reasons why I took a break from blogging to dedicate the extra time required to developing these plugins.

As you will be aware I do affiliate marketing in my ‘spare’ time, one of the main issues with affiliate marketing and really the holy grail of affiliate marketing is the ability to rapidly create sites for your to be able to market other peoples products.

Until recently, I have been hand coding sites, and making custom designs for each, this took a great deal of time, time which I did not have, and time which I tended to get bogged down with making my affiliate projects stall before they were really launched.

I decided that there must be a solution so I employed my programming skills into developing a solution for wordpress whcih I could then use as a framework for all my affiliate sites.

The first plugin that I created was the Datafeed import plugin. Initially it was very basic, the ability to have oneaffiliate  datafeed and one template, the plugin then created a post in wordpress for each row in the affiliate datafeed.  Perfect, it allowed me to rapidly create sites in a matter of minutes rather than days.

I could also use other WordPress plugins such as the All in one SEO plugin and use the WordPress themes to make the sites suitable for the products which they contained. They were also fully search-able, menus and categories automatically created, functionality given by WordPress.

I then gave the plugin to another affiliate marketer friend who also found that it was a very useful tool so I decided to put the plugin out on to the open market or people to buy.

Since then I have made the plugin far more advanced, it can handle many datafeeds, each with their own templates, custom fields, advanced filters and automatic updates.

I have created a website for the datafeed import plugin where you can find more details

I then wanted to be able to easily import Amazon products as they are always very high converting affiliate products, so I have created a similar plugin that allows you to import and create posts from Amazon products based on a search term. This works very well and again as with the datafeed plugin I am working on more and more advanced versions of the plugin, the next of which is due to be released in the coming weeks.

Again I have created a website for the Amazon Import Plugin so if you are interested have a look.

I am currently looking at developing a wordpress plug-in, really for nothing more than my own interest. I have an idea for a plugin that monitors keyword density, which would therefore be a useful tool in SEO. The formula for working this out is relatively simple, however having never attempted creating a plug-in I really have no idea where to start… google and some tutorials I guess!