Wuvving the Wonderful World of WordPress

Things have been going well throughout the year, with the exception of me completely forgetting/neglecting to blog about my experiences. I’ve been building sites and blogs for friends and a few actual clients, as well as doing more with it in my day job. It’s nice synergy between the three, as I get pushed to do new things in one arena and always end up saying “OMG that totally solves the problem with XYZ on the Solace site!”

Lately I’ve been finding more and more resources that help me efficiently build sites that meet the needs of clients, and make it easier for them to manage the contents. I plan on blogging about my favorites individually, as finding and picking plugins makes ALL the difference, but for now I’m just gonna mention and link to a few of the new ones I’m discovering so I don’t lose track of them.

(By the way, when I first built the Solace site I created this page to describe what I was doing and rattle off the key plugins that I was using to use WordPress as a CMS for a corporate web site. It’s a little out of date in terms of the plugins, but has good baseline info.)

Anyway, here’s some stuff I’ve  come across in recent months that is rockin’ my world.

  • WooThemes makes awesome pro themes that I’m finding remarkably powerful and easy to customize.
  • WPQuestions lets me ask urgent questions and get prompt responses from experts, for a fee that I’m more than willing to pay.
  • Powerful Plugins
  • Improved Include Page lets you add a simple snippet of code to your templates and have it pull in contents of other pages. Awesome for home pages.
  • Widget Context that lets me put different widgets on individual pages, every page of a section, whatever.
  • Enable Media Replace that lets me replace images in the media library without changing their URL. Best use is letting clients change images taht are hard-coded in the templates/themes I build them, like headers and backgrounds.
  • DM-Albums is an awesome image gallery tool that I like better than the ones most people recommend, Zen and NextGen
  • This article 10 Steps to a Client-Friendly WordPress CMS provides links to a bunch of plugins that do things I’ve long wanted to do. It’s dated as many of the links go down dead-end roads, but here are some gems I definitely need to keep track of. The most promising ones that do things I haven’t beenable to do thusfar are:
    • Navigation List plugin that makes your nav bar completely customizable yet client-editable
    • Flutter that lets you add custom fields to templates without programming
    • Side Content that lets you put page-specific sidebar content.

More to come…hold me to that. : )