Plugin Potluck
Boston WordpressMeetup
July 27, 2009
Who Am I?
Brian Krausz
A.K.A. “The Kid in the Brown Shirt”
Web Developer & Idea Man
By Day & Night
briankrausz@gmail.com
@bkrausz
Warning: I tweet about boring things
Straw Poll
Personal Blog:
Have
Want
Business Blog:
Have
Want
Write Code:
Can
Want to Learn
General Advice
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Wordpress+Plugins
Don’t be afraid to try things out
On a separate site!
Don’t go nuts with plugins
Can overload the user
Learn a tiny bit of PHP
Will help with installation of plugins/themes
General Advice (cont’d)
Try to find things for free
But consider donating
If you can’t find it for free
Consider paying for it
Ask me questions!!!
The Top 8
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/browse/popular
1) Spam
Activate Akismet
All done!
“But Brian, I still get spam!”
Consider reCAPTCHA (Google it!)
But be careful, can lose users1!
“But Brian, what about Honeypots”
Usually useless
Can solve very specific problems
1) ~3.2% according to http://www.seomoz.org/blog/captchas-affect-on-conversion-rates
2) SEO
All in One SEO Pack
Does exactly what it says
Google XML Sitemaps
Makes it easier for Google to parse your site
Key: Don’t try to cheat Google
Only try to make their lives easier
Do NOT pay to “get your site on the first page of
Google…guaranteed!”
3) User Feedback
Contact Form 7
Simple form for users to contact you
Less spammy than an email address
There are hundreds of plugins like this, hunt around for
what fits your goals.
Kampyle
Ask users directly “what can I do to improve the site”
4) Social Networking
Sociable
Provide links to share your posts
Also has hundreds like it
Some kind of auto-tweeter
Auto Tweet – Few options
Twitter Blog – Just released
5) Load
WP Super Cache
Can be hard to setup
Better: make sure your server can handle the load!
Cheap monthly hosting is just that: cheap
But expensive hosting isn’t necessarily better
Slow sites cost you users1
1) http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/bing-and-google-agree-slow-pag.html
6) Set It & Forget It
Plugin Manager
Automates plugin installation
No real reason to use this
“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a
man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”
Pay a kid to teach you to not need these types of
plugins!
Experiment on a separate website
7) Analytics
Google Analyticator
Or others…just get Google Analytics tracking
Feedburner
Track RSS feeds
8) Revenue
Easy AdSense
Use adsense ads
Don’t try to run your own ad network
If you’re big enough to need this, someone smarter than
me is advising you on what plugins to use.
Warning: Don’t blog to make money. It’s a losing
proposition
You can make money, but don’t expect it
Cool Ideas
or “Neat Things Brian Can Talk About”
Big Disclaimer
I sell plugins that do things here
There may be free versions
If they had the same features I wouldn’t have written my
version
The goal is to get the creative juices flowing
Not sell things
Taxonomies
Powerful and under-utilized WordPress feature
Examples: Categories & Tags
Other examples: Issues, People, Companies
Can associate anything about your post with any data
Custom Taxonomies (I wrote it, but it’s free)
Has a few bugs (some mine, some WordPress’)
Simple Taxonomies
More stable, fewer features
Newsletters
Assign posts to newsletters
Send out newsletters with summaries of posts
“Newsletter” Plugin
Only sends newsletters, not posts
Be careful about sending out a lot of email
Your host may get angry (consider MailChimp)
Don’t get blacklisted or spam blocked!
Observe double-opt-in & opt-out practices
Download Tracking
Offer downloads from your site
Require registration
Track downloads
“Download Manager”
Pretty featureful
No permissions
CMS
You just need a theme that emphasizes pages
WordPress has all the features needed for a CMS
Any Other Cool Ideas?
Questions?
Brian Krausz
briankrausz@gmail.com