Book Preview: WordPress Plug-in Development (Beginner’s Guide)

I still remember the very first day that I got started with WordPress. I had found the open source platform online and decided to get my feet wet with it. At the time, I wasn’t really aware of the true power of WordPress content management system. That’s just it. WordPress is not just a CMS but a community of people dedicated to making it better. Folks behind WordPress have given bloggers a platform to express their ideas easily, free of charge. But the community has pushed WordPress to newer heights by creating thousands plug-ins and themes for WordPress.

Learning how to use WordPress is not that difficult. There are many books out there that you can use to get started with WordPress. But learning how to write plug-ins for WordPress platform could be a tricky affair. First off, you need to be technical enough to code in PHP. You also need to know the base code behind the WordPress platform. If you are dedicated enough and have a lot of time on your hands, you can probably find resources online to teach yourself WordPress programming. But for the rest of us, I recommend WordPress Plug-in Development: The Beginner’s Guide.
Wordpress Plug-in Development guide is the newest WordPress book that targets folks who are technical enough to get started with plug-in development with WordPress. Developing free plug-ins is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your sites, and if you have the skills to pick it up quickly, you can gain a competitive advantage over most of your competitors. And let’s not foret that by creating plug-ins for WordPress, you help make the platform even better than before. WordPress Plug-in Development is hands on and shows you how to write 6 cool plug-ins for your WordPress blog:

• Digg-this: Adds a Digg This button to each post.
• Live Blogroll: Adds a recent posts popup for each blog in your blogroll.
• The Wall widget: Displays comments on the sidebar without reloading the page.
• Snazzy Archives: Presents your site archives in a unique visual way.
• Insights: Access your articles and Flickr images from within the WordPress edit page.
• Post Types: Provides pre-defined post templates to quickly add a photo or a link to your blog.

What I like about this book is the fact that the author doesn’t assume that you are an expert when it comes to WordPress code base. The plug-in architecture and the ins and outs of WordPress platform are all covered here. WordPress Plugin Development also covers different APIs that you can use to enhance the functionality of your WordPress site.

The book will be released on January 30th by Packt Publishing (who else?!). If you want to get your feet wet with plug-in programming for WordPress or you are just a programmer looking to pick up an in demand skill, you should definitely check this book out. But you probably want to read up on your PHP if you are rusty or fairly new to it.

Linkshare WordPress Plugin For Affiliates

There was a time where affiliates were ignoring the WordPress platform, sticking to simple HTML sites to earn money online. But in the past couple of years they have caught the drift that WordPress can be used for money making sites. While affiliates starting making the jump to WordPress in the past few months, affiliate networks such as LinkShare did not capitalize on that move, until now. LinkShare has just released a plugin for affiliate marketers that makes it easy to deep link or search for products right from your WordPress blog.

The plug-in is still in beta, but LinkShare has done a great job taking action to try to capitalize on affiliates’ move to WordPress platform. LinkShare WordPress plug-in can save you time putting affiliate links on your site, but I’d like to see more advertisers allow deep-linking on that platform.

Here is where you can download the Linkshare plug-in.

Urban Elements WordPress Theme

Urban Elements is the latest theme by Press75. This theme has been in the works for a while now, but after all the teasers that we have seen for Urban Elements, it has finally been released. Urban Elements is a slick WordPress theme designed for bloggers who have a good taste for design. Urban Elements is a two-column ad ready theme that is designed with easy-of-use in mind. It’s highly customizable and social media ready, and it takes advantage of threaded comments (available only on WP 2.7).

You get to customize the header right from your dashboard. In addition, you get your pages shown right below the header in form of dropdowns. You also get 4 125*125 on the right sidebar that you can use to attract sponsorships for your blog. There is also a 468 * 60 spot available right after the very first blog post. The back-end provides a lot of flexibility to configure sidebar items, ads, and even Google Analytics. You can also customize your social media section from the back-end. (more…)

Connect Your WordPress Blog To Twitter – Part I

I had a chance a couple of weeks to talk to a few WordPress bloggers about Twitter, Facebook, and everything social media, and I was surprised how some of them were still not linking their WordPress blogs with their Twitter account. A few of them complained to me about lack of time. They thought getting involved on Twitter would take a lot of effort and was simply not worth the time. But with all the Twitter solutions out there, there is simply no excuse for not linking your blog to Twitter.

Thankfully, you have two types of solutions here. You can either use a plug-in to update your Twitter posts (Part II), or you can use an external service to do it. Here is how:

In order to keep your Twitter account up to date, you want to post your blog posts to your Twitter account. At the same time, you don’t want to give the impression that you are using Twitter as a place to dump your blog posts. You obviously want to log on to you Twitter account once in a while and respond to replies you get. With the below solutions, you can get around the issue.

Tweet Later: Tweet Later is a great Twitter service that allows you to schedule Twitter posts in advance. You can also set up alerts on different keywords and get information from Twitter community in e-mail. Tweet Later also allows you to send automated “thank you” tweets to folks who follow you. (more…)

Debunking WordPress Myths

WordPress is a wonderful publishing platform. If it weren’t for WordPress, a whole lot of folks would’ve found it difficult to blog and share their knowledge with the world. OK. Maybe that’s going a little bit overboard, but there is no question that the good folks at WordPress have helped innovative minds bring their ideas and thoughts to the World, and we are all better for it.

WordPress is a potent content management system. It allows you to manage content on your website easily. You want to create a page, you click on a button. You want to change the look and feel of your site on all the pages, you can do it with WordPress. You want to manage comments, WordPress is your go to software. But it’s amazing how many misconceptions are out there about the platform. Let’s take a look:

• WordPress is a self-publishing platform: it’s true that WordPress allows you to publish your thoughts to the Web, but it is just a tool. It does not write your blogs for you. So if you are looking for a software package that writes your blog, you better look elsewhere.
• WordPress allows you to develop “special” sites: WordPress is flexible. I give you that. But a WordPress site is not different from a non-Wordpress site if you have the same content on it. Content is king not the content manager.
• WordPress helps you forget about SEO: not true. It’s true that the semi-optimized structure of WordPress makes it possible to get indexed quickly on Google, but there is no magic here. WordPress does not do your SEO for you.
• WordPress designs sites for you: WordPress is not a web design application. Having templates and themes makes it easy to change the look and feel of WordPress sites, but that’s all. WordPress doesn’t actually do anything but manage content.
• WordPress is a hackerproof CMS: Not true. In fact, far from it. Internet marketers love paying folks to write scripts that automate commenting on WordPress blogs. There are ways to protect your WordPress blog, but nothing is hackerproof these days.
• WordPress makes you a better blogger: this is somewhat true. It does make you more productive by allowing you time to focus on more important things. But it doesn’t make your grammar or ideas brighter.
• WordPress only manages blogs: WordPress is a blogging platform but you can create real sites with it. Many corporate sites are made with WordPress, so there is no reason to limit yourself to blog when it comes to using WP.

Did I miss anything?

Videoblog like a superstar with Video Elements Theme

Videoblogging is very popular these days. Text blogging simply doesn’t do it anymore these days. But finding a decent video-blogging theme is not that easy. Most coders are still coding for text bloggers. And those who are writing video-blog themes often ask for a lot of money. But Video Elements is one of those themes that is not only attractive but also very cheap ($75). (more…)

How To Optimize Your WordPress Blog for Search Engines – Part I

Running a WordPress blog is more than just writing great content and moderating your comments. If you don’t get traffic to your WordPress, you can have the best content, but no one will be there to see it. A few years ago, the notion was that if you write good content, Google will find you, and you will gain thousands of visitors a day without doing too much work. That can’t be further from the truth these days. Folks are now getting familiar with advanced SEO tactics, and folks with crappy content can outshine you on search engines by using SEO tactics that you are not using. You can always use Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing to drive traffic to your site, but that could get very expensive.

Driving free organic traffic to your blog is not rocket science. You need to write posts that are optimized for search engines. You should also pay attention to your keywords. Here is how:

1. Use keywords in your title tag: you have heard the chant, drill baby, drill? Well, when it comes to SEO, it’s title baby, title. Your title tag is the most important factor when it comes to optimizing your site for search engines. Use your keyword phrases early in your title tag and make sure you choose keywords that give you a realistic chance of getting ranked on Google.
2. Use keywords in your header tags: a lot of themes do come with h1, h2, and h3 tags. If you don’t have these tags in your blog code, you should try to add them somehow. These tags are highly regarded by most search engines, which means by putting your keywords in these tags, you can let search engines know what keyword phrases matter the most on your pages.
3. Use keywords in your URL: this is highly underrated, but still an effective approach. You get some benefit by putting a keyword phrase or two in your URL. Depending on your Permalinks settings, your WordPress blog may automatically insert your post title in to your URLs. Make sure you change those to make them different from your post titles.
4. META Description/Keywords: these tags are not as effective as used to be, but the way WordPress is designed, you could end up with duplicate description, keywords tags for all your posts. If you have too many duplicate description and keyword tags, you may end up in the supplementary index. You don’t want that to happen, do you? Make sure you use a proper plug-in such as All in one SEO pack to optimize your tags.
5. Link often, use Keywords in anchor text: you should link to other pages on your site, and do it often. You should also use keywords in your link text to make sure you are passing relevance to those pages. Simple, but not everyone do it.

There are millions of other things you can do for your WordPress blog to get free traffic for search engines. That’s why you should read the second part for more tips Stay tuned.