WordPress is probably my favorite tool for building web sites. It’s easy to learn and use, yet it’s incredibly powerful - so powerful that giant corporations like Sony and Ford use it for portions of their own sites. Best of all, it’s free.

In this area of my site, I’ll highlight a number of things about WordPress that might be helpful to you - things like the plug-ins I use here at 11Mystics.com, how to monkey with themes, how to edit PHP code and how to integrate it with other web applications. You may or may not be aware that my installation of WordPress is fully integrated with my e-commerce application, aMember. I’ll also provide some goodies for WordPress.

Plug-ins

Here’s a list of plug-ins I’m using at this site to make WordPress do some neat stuff. The plug-in functionality is endless. There are thousands of plug-ins you can download for free.

Add To Any Share/Save Bookmark: This is a great little plug-in that allows the visitor to easily bookmark the page with any one of many popular bookmark services such as del.ic.ious or Google. You’ll find the plug-in at the top of the About This Article section of every article or at the bottom of general pages.
aMember Sidebar Widget: aMember is the e-commerce solution I use and this handy widget is key to the entire integration. I can’t actually explain why or how… I just know it needs to be enabled and running :-/ I may have to write an article on how I integrated the two applications - the explanation certainly warrants more attention than this little blurb could give it.
Breadcrumb NavXT: This plug-in is what generates the breadcrumb link list near the top of the page. I love this one… it’s small, light and totally useful.
FeedBurner: I originally started using the Feedburner plug-in for WordPress because there was some kind of performance issue in WP that caused the feeds to be generated every time a user hit a page. I’m probably explaining that entirely wrong, but it was a problem… so much so that my web host told me my site was consuming way too many resources as a result. The FeedBurner plug-in resoved that. It simply reroutes your feed requests through their servers which off-loads the traffic from your site. FeedBurner also has more features for viewers.
GetRSS: This plug-in is what allows me to insert feed content from other sources into my own pages. I use this to fetch and display the last 10 topics posted at the Apple iWeb forums. You can see that in action on the iWeb page.
Lighter Admin Dropdown Menus: You won’t see this plug-in working unless you visit your blog account profile page and even then, there may not be much to see. If you run a WP site yourself, then this might warrant your attention. This is a nice menu plug-in that changes the default admin menus into dropdown-style menus. They’re very stylish and fast.
My Category, Link and Page Order: These are three different plug-ins that allow you to drag and drop the order of your pages, categories and links. No more fiddling with numbers :-/
NoFollow-Free: WordPress implemented a link tag that Google sponsored called rel=”nofollow”. If you add that to a link, it basically disables the link and takes the user nowhere. They did this to combat comment spam, but there’s debate as to whether this harms more than it helps. I’ve installed this plug-in to reverse the “nofollow” tag, allowing links in comments to act as they should. If you spam me, I will cast you into another galaxy anyway.
Search Everything: If you aren’t using this, you should. This plug-in adds search capabilities to your standard search function in WP. The standard function only searches posts. This plug-in makes it search everything you specify… pages, posts, comments, attachments, etc. Very nice.
Dagon Sitemap Generator: Need I say more? This is running on my sitemap page.
Subscribe To Comments: This plug-in is very handy. If you comment on an article, you can optionally select to be notified by email whenever anyone else comments on that article. It also have great “subscription” management tools for you to manage which articles you’re subscribed to and those you no longer wish to subscribe to. Great plug-in.
WP Ajax Edit Comments: I’m not sure how I survived prior to this one. This is the plug-in that allows you to edit your comments within a short time after posting. It also allows me to edit comments right on the article page.
WP Cache: You want a fast site don’t you? You should be using WP Cache. I run this on my entire site with the exception of a couple pages that need to be dynamic at all times. This will significantly improve page load time when enabled.
WP Contact Form: People ask me about this all the time… whether they can have a form like that in iWeb. Nope, not exactly. Contact forms require, in nearly all cases, a PHP-based system on which to run. iWeb doesn’t support that yet. This plug-in is for WordPress and it’s simple, quick and easy. I have the version with the math question to prevent autobot spam monkies.
WP-Snap!: This is a really cool plug-in that allows users to browse your blog articles by the first letter of the article title. For example, if you know the article is entitled “Learn HTML” you just click the letter L in the menu and WP-Snap! displays all articles that begin with the letter L. I have this running on my Advanced Search page.
UserOnline: This is another of my favorite plug-ins. You guys never see this one. I have it embedded in an admin menu only visible to me, but this widget tracks who’s visiting the site, whether that’s a registered user, a guest or a bod and it logs IP addresses and the URL’s they’re visiting. I caught a hacker on my site using this plug-in and was able to successfully capture all kinds of information about what he was doing! :-O I reported that to his host which was quite pleased at the level of information I was able to provide. That guy lost his account :)
WordPress Related Posts: This plug-in tracks which blog articles are related via their tags and will display a list of “related articles” when a user is viewing an article. You can see this in action on any article page in the About This Article section.