The Normal Person’s Guide to WordPress Plugins
September 14, 2008
We’ve looked at how to install WordPress and how to make it pretty; today I want to look at making WP do more.
Plugins are additions to the basic WordPress functionality, which allow you make it do just about anything you can imagine, from adding polls to your posts to controlling banner ads. Find them in the official WordPress plugin directory. Like themes, they’re extremely easy to add to your WP install.
The least you need to know
- Download and unzip your chosen plugin
- Upload the plugin folder or single .php file to /wp-content/plugins/
- From your dashboard, click on ‘plugins’, and ‘activate’ your chosen plugins.
- Find where the plugin management is hiding, and make any customisations you need.
Managing and updating plugins
Most plugins will come with some kind of customisability or options that you can change to suit your particular requirements. The link to manage these options might appear under “manage” on your dashboard, or under “settings”. A few show up on the top of the plugin management page. Some even add their own top-level link to your dashboard. I think WordPress might do well to add a “plugin management” tab and have all plugins work from there, because as it stands, it can be rather confusing. Don’t be afraid to do a little searching about if your plugin management page doesn’t appear where you’re expecting first-off.
Like the core WordPress install, plugins change: new features are added, security is updated, incompatibilities are ironed out. WP will tell you when one of your plugins needs to be updated: just watch out for the bubble on your dashboard. Most plugins can be automatically updated from within WordPress: there’s no messing about with FTP here.
If it all goes wrong…
… don’t panic. Sometimes some plugins conflict with others you already have installed; even more rarely, they’re released prematurely and don’t work correctly. Normally, you can just go to Plugins on the dashboard and disable the guilty party. If you can’t get access to your dashboard, deleting the plugin file from /wp-content/plugins/ via FTP should resolve the problem.
And to give you a flavour of what can be done, here are ten of my ‘must-have’ plugins for any WP installation:
3 plugins to stop comment spam
I love blogging and I love WordPress. And so do comment spammers. If you’ve got a brand-new blog, you’ve probably got a month or so before the spam comments advertising everything from pharmaceuticals to porn start. Here’s how to keep them off your blog.
- Akismet looks at the content of comments left on your blog, and analyses their spamminess. Comments it believes are spam don’t appear on your site; instead, they’re moved to a ’spam queue’, where you can delete them all at once, or even let Akismet delete them automatically for you. Akismet ships with WP, though has to be activated before it will actually start to work. For small and new sites, it’s probably all you need, but as your blog grows more popular and becomes more visible to spammers, you’ll need to use additional plugins to keep spam under control.
The problem with Akismet is the ‘false positive’: comments it thinks are spam, which in fact are legitimate. It’s always worth checking your spam queue for these before deleting it all, but if you have dozens or hundreds of spam comments every day, it becomes impossible. You need a couple more plugins to stop spammers before they even get to Akismet.
- Comment Timeout allows you to close posts to new comments after a set length of time. Comment spammers tend to target older posts, so by shutting off comments, you significantly reduce their opportunities to spam. The plugin has some neat configurable features, including the ability to leave comments on selected posts open indefinitely, and to designate posts with high numbers of comments as ‘popular’ and entitled to have comments left open for a longer period of time.
- Bad Behaviour… ah, what can I say about Bad Behaviour? It saved my sanity. Rather than looking at the comments themselves, BB looks at the thing trying to leave the comment, analysing if it’s a human, or a spam-bot. If it’s a spam-bot, it’s blocked from even accessing your site; not only does this block the spam, it also stops email address harvesting, and saves you bandwidth usage. If I could only pick one plugin to take to a desert island, it would be Bad Behaviour.
Using these three plugins together, TameBay has gone from receiving over 1000 spam comments per day, to almost zero: comments in our spam queue these days are more likely to be false-positive matches, than real spam.
3 plugins to help manage your blog
- WordPress DB Backup Back up. Back up often. We all know we should; this makes it easy, with full database backups which can even be emailed to you, at intervals of your choice. If your server melts down or is eaten by hackers, you’ll be glad you did.
- WordPress Automatic Upgrade means you can install the newest version of WordPress from within your dashboard in just a few clicks. It adds another nagging message to WP’s own “please upgrade”, which should mean your installation is always the newest and most secure.
- All In One SEO Pack It must be said that a vanilla install of WordPress is pretty search-engine friendly. Google likes blogs, for one thing. But AIOSEOP adds some useful tweaks to meta tags and page titles, allowing you more control over the information presented to search engines.
4 plugins to make your readers happier
- WP Ajax Edit Comments allows commenters to edit their comments for a specified length of time after posting them, and also allows blog admins to edit, delete and mark as spam from the blog page, without needing to go into the dashboard. It’s a courtesy to your readers, and will cut down the number of “oops, I meant…” follow-up comments, which don’t improve anything.
- Photo Dropper allows you to add free photos to illustrate your blog posts from within the WP interface. Photo Dropper imports pictures from Flickr which have been tagged by their photographers as available for public use under a Creative Commons licence. It will add the picture to your blog post and provide the appropriate links and acknowledgements without you having to write any HTML at all. If you’re running a commercial blog, the plugin will look only for pictures which aren’t marked for non-commercial use only.
- ShareThis is a great way to let your users share your posts on the social site of their choice, without cluttering up your blog with a million different icons. They support 36 different sites, including Facebook, Stumbleupon and Digg. ShareThis also offers reporting, so you can see just how your posts are being shared.
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (so named because there are a few plugins that do a similar job) shows a list of links to other posts on a similar topic on your single post pages. This is useful for stories or themes that run across more than one post, and generally to get readers to dig deeper into your site, highlighting older posts they might otherwise miss.
There you go: ten of my favourite plugins. If you’re running WP already, what else would you recommend? Leave us a comment.
The Normal Person’s Guide to WordPress Themes
September 6, 2008
Last week, we looked at installing WordPress’s blogging software. If you’re playing along, you should have a WordPress install that looks something like the screenshot on the left. As well as starting writing, one of the first things you’ll probably want to do is to change the look of your blog. This is done with something WP calls “themes”.
A theme is a collection of files which modify the appearance and layout of your blog. WordPress separates the files that make your blog pretty from the files that make it work - so that you can change the appearance easily and quickly without needing to rebuild the core functionality of the program.
The least you need to know
- Find a theme you like
- Download and unzip it
- Upload the theme folder to wp-content/themes/
- Activate it in the Design section of your dashboard.
What to look for in a theme
Choosing a theme can be a overwhelming process. There are literally thousands out there to choose from, so where do you start? Think about what you’ll need from a theme first:
- do you want a casual feel, or something more formal and business-like?
- do you have a specific image you want to portray - sporty, fashionable, healthy - or will you be more abstract?
- what colours do you like? does your blog theme need to match branding you have elsewhere?
- what content will you have other than blog posts? do you need space to pimp your eBay listings, your website, or for other advertising?
- do you need space to import content from Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, elsewhere?
- how do you want the header to look? do you need space for your logo? or photographs? or do you want a very minimal header that leads straight into the main content?
- are you picky about which side the sidebar(s) go?
- where do you want the navigation placed: across the top, down the side, a mixture of both?
- do you like fixed-width layouts, or fluid-width which stretch to the full width of the browser window?
- do you want a reverse-chronological theme where the newest post is always at the top, or something more magazine-like and organised by category?
Many people begin with their colour requirements - “I want a red theme” - but as colour is one of the easiest things to change, it makes sense to start with the more fixed elements, like layout, sidebars, space for advertising, first. Pick a few themes that might be what you want, and preview them all on your own blog (see below): it’s surprising how different a theme can look when it’s using your own content.
Finding themes
The official WP theme directory has just started up again; it’s a little thin right now, but expect to see it grow rapidly. In the meantime, there are dozens if not hundreds of lists of WP themes for your perusing pleasure: here are a few I like:
- Smashing Magazine’s top 100 list with lovely big preview graphics
- WP Themes 360 has some nice designs
- WordPress.pro has a few designs which seem to have business potential
- Brian Gardner’s themes which include Revolution, on which TameBay was built
- Pingable’s list of 20 free magazine themes, some of which were nearly TameBay
Premium and sponsored themes
Most WordPress themes are free, donated to the community by their creators. A few are “premium”, that is, paid-for themes. Although these have the disadvantage that you have to pony up some dough, they have two advantages: firstly, you’re unlikely to find as many people using them as the popular freebies, and secondly, you may get some form of support from the designer, which you’re less likely to do with free themes.
Sponsored themes are a little more invidious: they are supported by advertising links in the footer and/or sidebars. Some people object to this, and some don’t, but it’s something to be aware of: you should know what you’re advertising on your own blog.
Making your own theme
It’s outside the scope of this blog post, but if you’re reasonably confident in HTML, CSS and PHP, you can make your own blog theme . This can be particularly useful if you want your blog to fit the design of a larger site, for example if you’re integrating it with your ecommerce store. WordPress give some advice to those embarking on this path.
Installing a theme
- Download and unzip your chosen theme
- Upload the entire theme folder (not just its contents) to /wp-content/themes/
- Click the “Design” tab on your dashboard
- Click the thumbnail of your new theme to preview it with your blog
- If you’re happy, click the “Activate…” link from the top right
Just testing
It’s easy, so test out a few themes you might like:
Next week, we’ll be looking at WordPress plugins, essential add-ons to make your blog a better place to play.
The Normal Person’s Guide to Installing WordPress
August 31, 2008
because there are no dummies or complete idiots around here. 
This post is for Lynne, and a lot of other people recently who’ve asked me how to install WordPress. I’ve assumed some basic knowledge of t’internet and web hosting here, including how zip files and FTP work. If anything needs more clarification, leave me a comment.
Why WordPress?
There are lots of blog management systems, and not all of them take effort to install like WordPress does. If you use BlogSpot, for example, you can be up and running in a minute or two. But WordPress more than pays off a little effort to get started:
- the content stays on your own server and can be backed up, by you, so you know it’s always going to be there,
- the sheer range of stuff you can do with WordPress is unmatched by any other BMS I’ve seen,
- the community around WP is a great place to be,
- and it’s free.
So lets get started.
The least you need to know
- Download the latest version of WordPress from wordpress.org.
- Edit wp-config-sample.php with your own database details, and save as wp-config.php
- Upload to your hosting
- Open /wp-admin/install.php in your browser, and follow the instructions from there.
Sounds easy, yes? Lets look at each stage in detail.
Hosting
You will need some web hosting to run WordPress. The up-to-date minimum requirements are available via WP’s site: they’re pretty basic, and most web hosting accounts will be adequate. If, for example, you’re already running your own ecommerce site, you can almost certainly run a WP blog on the same hosting. If you’re not sure, WP provide a handy email to copy to your hosts to check.
If you don’t have hosting yet, WP have a number of recommended hosts: they’re all in the US, but that largely doesn’t matter, and several of them offer one-click WP install. This can be an advantage getting started, but do check that the version you’re being offered is the most recent one, and remember you’ll have to keep it updated yourself when new releases come out.
Get the software
You can always find the latest release of WordPress via wordpress.org. If you downloaded it a while back but haven’t installed it yet, check that there isn’t a newer release before you go any further: new releases add security features as well as functionality, so it’s important to keep your WP install up to date.
Once downloaded to your computer, you’ll need to unzip the software. If this doesn’t happen automatically (and it should), there are any number of free utilities to do this for you. Save everything on your PC somewhere where you can find it again easily.
Edit wp-config-sample.php
This is the file that gives WordPress the specific information about your own database installation. You’ll need to edit the bits in red (be careful you don’t delete any inverted commas by mistake):
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
The bits after // on each line are comments to help you.
Where do you find this info?
- Your hosting package may come with a database already set up. Check your control panel or the welcome email you received when you opened your account.
- You may need to manually set up a database yourself; look on your control panel for something like database or MySQL management.
- If in doubt, your hosts will be able to give you the information.
In the same file, you’ll see three “secret key” phrases: change these to something long and nonsensical.
Use Notepad or another plain text editor, *not* Word, to edit PHP files. Save the edited file as wp-config.php (.php is the file extension: if your text editor tries to call it wp-config.php.txt or similar, override that).
Upload WordPress
You now have a folder on your PC called Wordpress, with all the WP files in it: you need to upload the *contents* of that folder to the directory on your server where you want the blog to appear.
So now you need to decide what you want the URL of your blog to look like.
- If your blog is part of a larger site, you might want it in its own directory, for example www.domain.com/blog: upload the WP package to that directory.
- If the entire domain *is* your blog, then upload to the root public HTML directory (which might even be called public_html, depending on your hosts).
Don’t upload the WordPress folder itself, only its contents, or you’ll end up with URLs that look like www.domain.com/blog/wordpress.
Once the upload is complete, open [your blog directory]/wp-admin/install.php in your browser, and follow the on-screen instructions. You’ll need to tell WordPress the title of your blog and your email address, and then it will install everything for you. At the end of the installation, you’ll be given an admin password. This should also be emailed to you, but make a note of it now - WP generates some fantastically random passwords, so I’d make the next thing you do…
Set up your admin user account and password
Click the “users” link from the top right, and then the “admin” user name. You can fill out some important details here including how you want your name to display on your posts (unless you want to be called “admin” forever), and also change your password to something you can remember.
Now would also be a good time to bookmark your admin dashboard: it lives at /wp-admin/ if you forget.
And we’re done!
You should now have a plain-vanilla install of WordPress, that looks something like the screen shot to the left. This is now functional, and you can start writing: click “Write” from the top of your admin dashboard to write a post. WordPress comes with one post and one comment “pre-installed”; you probably want to delete these, so go into “Manage” to remove them.
It’s worth taking a bit of time to look around the WordPress dashboard at this point: generally, things you might want to use often (Write, Manage, Comments) are the big links on the left, and things you’ll use less often are the smaller links on the right. It can look a little daunting at first, but once you get used to what lives where, it’s really pretty straightforward.
Next weekend, we’ll be looking at making things pretty with WordPress themes.
Putting Flickr photos in your blog’s feed
June 28, 2008
I took a lot of photos of eBay Live (and even more of Chicago), and now of course I have the perennial problem of just what to do with those holiday pics. Sticking them in Flickr and forgetting about them is one option; publishing great long blog post galleries so that everyone has to suffer looking through them seems to be the alternative. 
Feedburner has come to my rescue. They have a new trick called Photo Splicer, which allows me to pull in Flickr photographs as entries in my main blog RSS feed. It’s a neat way to bring together a personal blog with your photographs, or of course to show more product photos to subscribers to your business blog. You’ll find Photo Splicer under the Optimise tag.
There’s also Link Splicer which allows you to pull in bookmarks from del.icio.us, Furl, Bloglines, Digg and ma.gnolia (sadly the two I actually use, StumbleUpon and Google Reader’s shared items, are not available at the moment). Links can be spliced either individually as you bookmark them, or as a once-a-day summary.
For those wondering exactly what Feedburner is, it’s a way to distribute the RSS feed from your blog which provides all sorts of information for stats-obsessives (like me) about how your feed is being read, and all sorts of useful tricks for your subscribers, like being able to subscribe via email. If you have a blog, give it a go.
Blog 101 : getting started
March 30, 2008
Sometimes you get asked the same question over and over again. Starting blogging has been one of those questions for me recently, so I thought over the weekends, when there isn’t much eBay news, we’d take a look at getting started on a blog of your own.
One of the reasons blogging has taken the internet by storm is that it’s so easy to get started. All you need is a bit of software, plus something to say. I’ll assume for the moment you can supply the something to say yourself; if not, you might want to reconsider whether a blog is what you really want.
Today I’m going to consider two of the biggest blog management systems, Blogger’s Blogspot and Wordpress. Not because they’re the biggest, but because they represent the main choice you have to make: quick and easy and absolutely free, versus good.
Blogspot
Blogger is one of the longest established blogging services there is. They’re currently owned by Google, and Blogspot is their free hosting service. Getting started with Blogspot is incredibly simple: a few clicks, select the name of your blog, pick from one of a dozen or so free styles, and you can start posting. It costs nothing and you don’t need to sign up for any web hosting: you can literally have a blog up and running in a couple of minutes.
Blogspot is amazingly easy to use, but it has two huge disadvantages. Firstly, the commenting system is a nightmare. Click on the “leave a comment” system on any Blogger blog and you’re taken off the blog you’re on, and onto a Blogger branded page. The original post you’re commenting on has disappeared, and you have a tiny little window to type into. It’s not pretty, and you can’t *make* it pretty.
Perhaps even more importantly, with Blogspot, I’m always aware that my content is at the mercy of Google. I don’t know that they’ve ever lost content, but if I’ve put effort into writing the words, I want to know they’re safe. That means keeping them on my server, and backing them up on my PC, neither of which Blogger wants to let me do.
WordPress
WordPress, on the other hand, takes a little more effort to get started. You need to download the software from their website, and upload it to your own web host. Then you need to install it. If you’ve done this kind of thing before, perhaps with forum software, it’s not difficult, but for the resolutely non-techy, it can be daunting. (WordPress do offer a hosted service too, but I am assuming for most of our readers, this will of no use as you are not allowed to post any commercial content.)
Is it worth the effort? Absolutely. Blogspot does exactly what it says on the tin: it takes your posts, and it publishes them. But if you want to go beyond that, I cannot recommend WordPress highly enough. Want comments that live on your blog? WordPress does that. Want to back up your blog on your own computer? WP can do that. Want polls in your posts? Built-in “about me” or other static pages? built-in stats? clickable smilies? galleries of pictures in your posts? WordPress can do all of that, and much, much more.
So which to choose?
For me, the choice is pretty straightforward. If
- you’re new to this whole blogging malarky and don’t know if you’re really going to stick with it
- you’re terrified of anything technical
- you’re really, really skint and can’t afford even the cheapest web hosting
and your blog is only going to be about you talking - perhaps a “new products and special offers” section on your website, or just a personal diary where you don’t even want any interaction - then Blogspot will do.
But if
- you want real interaction with your readers by way of commenting and more
- you want more than just a list of posts
- you want to own and keep your own words
then for me, WordPress is the only way to go.
How about you? If you have a blog, what does it run on? Are you happy with that? Leave us a comment - and a link.
