March 1st, 2010 in
Wordpress |
28 Comments
Polls are very useful way to get in touch with your readers. Polls can be used to get your readers’ opinion and even new article idea.
There are various websites that let you setup your own polls. Once you insert the given code, you will be able to start using the polls immediately. PollDaddy is one of the great free online polls and serveys.
However, if you are a person who not really familiar with HTML, PHP, CSS or JavaScript, inserting these codes will probably takes the whole day. Furthermore, you probably don’t have all the features for a free account,or you probably just want a really simple rating feature.
If you are a Wordpress user, then you are lucky. There are a lot of useful Wordpress poll and rating plugins where you can download and use freely. Here, we share 9 useful Wordpress poll and rating plugins with our readers.
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January 27th, 2010 in
Wordpress |
38 Comments
Contact Form is one of the most important page for all websites. If you are running an e-commerce website, you need a contact form so that your potential buyers can reach you to get more information. Even if you run a personal blog, you will also need a contact form so that bloggers from same niche or advertisers can contact you easily.
There are some great online form providers such as Wufoo and FormSpring. These services allow you to create contact forms, survey forms and registrations form easily without knowing much about web programming languages.
If you are using Wordpress, then you can use Wordpress plugins to build your contact form easily. However, there are a lot of Contact Form Plugins in Wordpress Plugin Repository. Some of the plugins are rather too old, not able to support the latest version of Wordpress or just having too little features.
So, we decided to gather 18 Best Wordpress Contact Form Plugins that will suit everyone needs. These plugins are tested by us and support Wordpress 2.9.1.
cforms is a highly customizable Ajax driven contact form plugin. It lets you to create multi page forms or multiple forms on one page easily. They are few more cool features such as Role Manager support, Tell-A-Friend, Fully localization, Backup and Restore. Antispam is also supported by using CAPTCHA or Q&A.
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In a recent post, We touted the benefits of hacking WordPress over the installation of plugins. One of these benefits is that plugins can cause your blog to become bloated. Among other issues, a bloated blog takes longer to load. With the blogosphere being saturated with content on virtually any topic you can think of, making your blog as visitor friendly as possible should be one of your primary design goals.
While I certainly promote the use of hacks over plugins, I know that part of the beauty of the plugin is so that a blogger can create a fully-functional site without having to get their hands dirty with the code that drives their blogging software. Instead of looking at hacking the code, let’s take a look at a few plugins that can help build a more usable blog for your visitors.
Usability
The best definition of usability I have seen comes from the Base One Agency who states that “usability refers to how simple it is for customers to perform the desired actions on a website. Good usability can improve the conversion rate of a web site.” So in addition to how long it takes to load a WordPress blog, to achieve usability, you would need to look first at what the desired goals of your blog are. Is it to drive sales? Then your content needs to establish trust among your readers. For a more detailed look into the psychology behind usability, have a look at our previous post that covered Webpage Usability.
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December 13th, 2009 in
Tutorial,
Wordpress |
6 Comments
It’s amazing that in my own non-scientific poll, half of those who work in some technology field still get the term hacker confused. A hacker is not someone who is leering in cyberspace ready to infiltrate their unsuspecting victim’s computer and pillage any information of use from its hard drive. A hacker is someone who looks for ways to manipulate things to make them work better. So when I speak of hacks for WordPress, I am looking at ways to change the code to make the application work better for us, not how to scrape content or steal log in information.
Hacks vs. Plug-ins
There are many different plug-ins available to help manage content on a WordPress blog so why would we want to mess with the code?
For starters, getting our hands dirty with the code of WordPress gives us a much better insight as to how the software works. As we become more comfortable with the source that powers our blog, we gain a better understanding of how to secure it from malicious attacks.
A second reason to avoid turning to a plug-in as a first resort is that an accumulation of plug-ins causes your blog to become bloated. Eventually, this bloat may begin to affect the way your blog loads and delivers to your audience.
Finally, if you pride yourself on going green or you just want to do what you can for the environment, you may be interested to know that code bloat can unnecessarily burden your server’s CPU. Making your server work harder uses more energy. Cooling a hard working CPU uses even more energy. Reducing code bloat saves energy.
Instead of relying on plug-ins, we are going to look at a few hacks that can help better manage a blog’s content. Each one of these hacks requires a bit of PHP knowledge and the ability to upload to your server.
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December 10th, 2009 in
Wordpress |
6 Comments
Just recently, Wordpress released 2.8.6 with a critical security update that patches a cross-site scripting vulnerability found by Benjamin Flesch. That’s right, the same kid who discovered a way to patch your Wordpress blog by exploiting a similar XSS vulnerability has found another.
Cross-site scripting
When I started working more with web application security, I was amazed at the amount of web developers who are unaware of all the possible entry points the applications they develop have. Of these vulnerabilities, cross-site scripting (or XSS) still leads the pack according to WhiteHat Security.
A cross-site scripting vulnerability takes place when an attacker injects a client-side script into a web page. This attack can be used to bypass access controls, steal cookies, and hijack an active session to steal sensitive information.
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November 1st, 2009 in
Wordpress |
53 Comments
If you are using Wordpress as a CMS, then you probably want to present your content with multiple languages. Recently, I came across a Wordpress blog that presents their content with three different languages, so I decided to investigate the methods and plugins to turn Wordpress into a multilingual website, and share my findings with WDB’s readers.
Maintaining a multilingual website is not easy. The best way to present multilingual content to your visitors is to allow them to switch between different languages anytime. So, the plugin needs to take care of this and links different languages’ content together.
Beside linking the content, the URL of the translated content also important. There are two different ways to present your URL:
- You can have the same permalink for the translated content, and add a language flag at the end of the URL (ex: www.domain.com/multi-language-article/?lang=en, www.domain.com/multi-language-article/?lang=es, www.domain.com/multi-language-article/?lang=zh).
- The translated content will have absolutely different URL.
So, how to choose your URL is yet another main consideration before you launch the multilingual website? In SEO point of view, having an absolutely different URL will gain better advantages Later on, we are going to look into 5 different plugins to manage your multilingual Wordpress website. These plugins have their pros and cons, so choosing the best plugin that suit your needs in the most important.
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October 4th, 2009 in
Wordpress |
70 Comments
Wordpress has a lot of powerful plugins that will add extra functionality to your blog. There are more than 6k plugins available in Wordpress Plugin Directory when this article is written.
Different Wordpress plugins surf their own purposes, and installing too many plugins will slow down your system and increase the loading time. So, how should we choose the necessary plugins for our blog? Most of the new Wordpress users will ask this question.
In this article, we will list down 10 essential Wordpress plugins for a new blog. These are common plugins that will help you to secure your Wordpress blog, fight spam, and increase your search engine ranking.
Akismet is a powerful anti spam plugin for Wordpress. It comes with your Wordpress installation, but you need to register at Wordpress.com in order to get your unique API key and activate the plugin. Some Wordpress users choose to review the spams, because sometimes Akismet will incorrectly marks a legitimate comment as spam.
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September 29th, 2009 in
Wordpress |
38 Comments
Facebook is one of the most popular social networking websites. There are a lot of information exchanges happen daily through Facebook. So, some serious bloggers start paying their attention on Facebook and threat it as a medium to promote and share stuffs with their friends.
If you are a Wordpress user and looking for Wordpress plugin to connect, integrate or share stuffs with Facebook, then you had came to the right place. Today, we are going to look into 12 useful Wordpress Plugins for you to work with your Facebook account.
Add To Facebook is a simple plugin which will add a link at the bottom of the current article, so that your readers can easily share the article with their friends on Facebook.
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September 25th, 2009 in
Wordpress |
55 Comments
As a famous open source and feature-rich blogging platfom, Wordpress requires a stable and good hosting environment. There are a few recommended hosting providers listed on the Wordpress official website. These hosting providers meet the minimum system requirements of Wordpress. However, there are a lot of potential providers that meet the requirements. WPWebHost and Exabytes are among the great Wordpress hosting providers.
Bloggers can actually optimize their blogs to consume less server usages and less bandwidth. There are different ways to do the web optimization for Wordpress, for example you can install plugins to monitor, tweak and speed up the loading speed of your Wordpress blog.
Besides installing the plugin, you can tweak your theme and remove the unnecessary features so that your Wordpress system consumes less resource and load faster.
In this article, we are going to look into 15 different plugins and tips to optimize your Wordpress site.
Wordpress Plugins To Monitor, Cache And Speed Up Your Blog
WP System Health can display basic server info and Wordpress PHP memory usages. Besides these, the plugin will shows the PHP information that related to Wordpress and Wordpress database table utilization status. By using the WP System Health, bloggers can easily detect the Wordpress system misconfiguration and memory race issues. Wordpress blog’s administrators can install this plugin to easily track the system health status and help them easily identify the problem.
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September 10th, 2009 in
Wordpress |
41 Comments
There are thousands of spammers flood your blog everyday, and spam comments is a serious problem for all bloggers. Everyday, we need to go through the comments and read them to make sure these comments are not spam. These spam comments not only waste our time, but also the internet bandwidth.
Today, we are going to look into 12 great Wordpress anti spam plugins, which will save your time by blocking spam bots to comment on your blog, prevent them from stealing email address from your articles, and help you fight against these spam bots.
Akismet is the most popular anti spam plugin for Wordpress. In order to use Akismet, you have to register an account at Wordpress.com and get the API key. When new comment come to your blog, Akismet will check the comment through the web service to determine if it is spam. Suspected comments will be marked as spam and users can go through them later.
This plugin has a different approach to check spam. When visitors come to your blog, this plugin will first check their IPs, to see whether these IPs exist in the database served by stopforumspam.com, the Project Honey Pot or a local blacklist. By this way, the spammer can be blocked before the content of your site is served.
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