Tag Archives | Ajax

Why should you use plugins for WordPress

By Randy R on November 22, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Why should you use plugins for WordPress?
The default WordPress comes with only basic features. Thus to make your blogs more colourful and attractive, there is a large variety of plugins available to suit what you want and your taste. These plugins will not only enhance your experience as the owner and the blogger, but also to make it more pleasant for the readers to read your blogs, leave comments or to link to your blog site.
Some of the useful plugins for WordPress users are listed as below. One of the useful plugin is WP Cache. This plugin works by caching WordPress pages and storing them in a static file for future use. It is very useful especially if you have a site with low performance server or high traffic. Instead of loading and compiling the whole PHP code before building a page from the database, WP Cache will use the files stored in the static file when needed to save more time.
For those who are selling things on their blog sites, WP eCommerce is an useful plugin. It is easy to use and you can setup the shop within a few minutes through the Admin panels. It is a shopping cart plugin for WordPress users who are selling products or services on their blog sites. There is a wide range of setting for your product or service such as downloadable products, promotions, coupon codes or product variations.
Intouch Ajax contact form is another plugin for WordPress blogs. This contact form has been known to be useful and it filters all spams. Apart from filtering all spam messages, it has the option where you can customize the email subject, addition of form fields and thank you messages. It allows you to insert a custom-made contact form and the information will be sent via email.
Ajax Post Rating plugin adds a 5-star Ajax rating system to your pages and posts. It allows readers to rate your pages and posts either daily, weekly or monthly. Another similar plugin is Ajax Polls. This plugin is very flexible with lots of features. Other option available for this plugin is it allows you to archive the polls and the layout is customizable via Admin panels.
Another useful plugin is Ajax Comment plugin. It is a simple but effective comment plugin as it checks whether all fields are filled correctly, makes sure that there is no duplication of comments and it has flood protection capability too.
Digg This is another WordPress plugin which detects incoming links from Digg.com website to your WordPress posts. It will then automatically display a link to the post from Digg.com so that people will be able to digg your story. An email will be sent to the admin of the site once a dig is recognized.
The above are only a few of thousands of plugins for WordPress bloggers. It is worth the time to research around to search for plugins that will enhance your blogging experience. Plugins are a necessity not only for the blogger, but also for the readers.

Top Seven WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

By Randy R on November 14, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Top Seven WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

Many bloggers are using WordPress and with good reason. It is the most popular blogging software in use today and one of the biggest reasons is the ability to add functionality through the use of plugins. Plugins can turn your run-of-the-mill blog into a high powered online tool capable of bringing traffic and profit to your site. Consider using the top WordPress plugins on your current WordPress blog or on a future blog. You won’t be disappointed. Happy Blogging.

7. Page Mash

This is a simple WordPress page management plugin. The Ajax interface allows you to drag-and-drop the pages into the order you like, modify the page structure by dragging a page to become a child or parent and toggle the page to be hidden from output. You can also see the id of the page which is often helpful for theme developers. If you have a WordPress site with more than just a handful of pages, PageMash is extremely helpful.

6. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engine by allowing you to fine tune things like your page title and meta tags. This plugin is extremely easy to use as it works great straight out of the box. If you are an advanced user, you can customize virtually everything. And if you are a developer, this plugin has an API so your themes can access and extend the functionality of the plugin.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Perhaps the most downloaded WordPress plugin, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin not only automatically creates a site map linking to all your pages and posts, it also notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com when you make changes to you site. If you want to include pages that are part of your site but not part of you WordPress managed content, you can do that to.

4. WP Super Cache

If you have a popular WordPress website you should seriously consider running WordPress Super Cache to improve the performance of your website. If you are not caching your pages, then every time a visitor comes to your site, WordPress has to pull together various pieces of information out of a database to put your page together. If you have a high traffic site, this is can really become a problem. WP Super Cache will store a copy of each of the pages on your website so that after the page has been assembled from the database once, WordPress can rest and just keep serving the static html copy of the page. This might be a bit techie, but the idea is you can dramatically speed up your site and reduce the load on your server by using WP Super Cache. If for no other reason, use this plugin so you don’t have to panic when your friend says, “”I just Dugg your site.””

3. NextGEN Image Gallery

If you want to display a photo gallery, show a series of product images, or just publish a slide show from your most recent vacation, the NextGEN image gallery is the plugin for you. NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Among the many features, NextGEN Gallery includes a thumbnail generator, sortable albums, and a water mark function.

2. cformsII Form Plugin

If your looking for a free form management plugin, cformsII is an extremely powerful plugin for setting up contact forms on your WordPress site. You don’t need to know any PHP or write any code. You can visually build forms in the WordPress admin panel. Then, navigate to the page or post where you want to use the form and there is a button in the WYSIWYG editor that you click and up pops a list of forms that you have made. Simply click on the one you want and your form is inserted into your page. Update your page and you the form is live. You can specify required fields, default values, and there are plenty of styles to make your form blend in perfectly with your site.

1. Gravity Forms

If you want the best forms plugin WordPress has to offer, you need Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is an amazing plugin for managing online forms. Some of the incredibly useful features include conditional form fields which means you can show or hide a field or entire sections of the form based on a value selected in another field. You can pre-populate form fields using querystring, shortcode, function or hooks.You can even schedule when forms are available by assigning a start date and end date for when your form is live on your site. Supposed you want to run a contest where the first 50 people that fill out the form win a prize. Gravity Forms lets you set a limit on the number of entries a form can receive. Pretty much anything you ever wanted a form to do, Gravity Forms can do it.

10 Classic WordPress Themes For Your Blog

By Randy R on October 9, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

10 Classic WordPress Themes For Your Blog

If you do a search for WordPress themes it will display thousands of results. Some of the themes will be dull and some are really inspiring. There are so many but these are 10 that I liked –

GridFocus Public

This is a three column WordPress theme. The navigation bars can be found at the top and bottom of pages in order to provide which provides the visitors with ample opportunity to continue exploring. It’s very clear in structure and hierarchy.

Copyblogger

This is one really cool WordPress theme. You can visit Brian’s copyblogger website for the demo.

With the Copyblogger Theme for WordPress, you’ll be able to modify colors, fonts, and even the tiniest details by utilizing the custom stylesheet solution that is included with the theme download. Also, thanks to the wonders of open source development, you can take advantage of add-on styles that others release for use with the Copyblogger Theme.

Jello Wala Mello

Jello-Wala-Mello is a news and magazine-styled WordPress theme created for multi-media sites. Some of the positives of this theme are 1) Beautiful colour scheme 2) Subtle design touches 3) Not difficult to start using.

K2 is an advanced template for the blogging engine WordPress.

K2 also has the following AJAX-powered features:

1. Live Commenting lets readers leave a comment without having to reload the page.

2. Livesearch lets you type your search query and instantly have the results at hand. Better yet, it integrates directly with…

3. Rolling Archives is a navigation system designed specifically for K2, which allows you to navigate through archives and search results without having to reload the page.

Whyte

Who says monochromatic themes have to be boring? Theme features include: AdSense-Ready; Widget-Ready; Recent Entries; Comments, trackbacks, and pings separated on post pages; Option to include your own logo; Active navigation states for posts that appear in Recent Entries. Download the theme from the link below :

Vertigo

Vertigo is a modern, 2 or 3-column Widget-ready theme created for WordPress.

GridLock

Gridlock is cool because it doesn’t look like a blog, also because an HTML help page is included with Gridlock’s download file, which is very rare because most WordPress theme don’t have such a guide

Longhorn

Longhorn is a minimalist two column WordPress theme. Its design is simple and I have used it in this blog. Longhorn WordPress theme is compatible with the following browsers:

1. Internet Explorer 6 and 7

2. Opera Browser

3. Mozilla Firefox

4. Apple’s Safari.

LightBreaker

Here’s another great make money online WordPress theme. It’s really cool with a good design for placing advertisements.

BlueBird

If you are looking for a classy little design for your personal blog then 3-column BlueBird fits well.

lynda.com Tutorial | WordPress: Creating Custom Widgets and Plugins—Exploring WordPress plugins

By Randy Roedl on July 25, 2011 in Randy Roedl

Watch the entire course at www.lynda.com In WordPress: Creating Custom Widgets and Plugins, Drew Falkman teaches PHP developers how to create custom functionality for WordPress 2.0 through 3.0 using widgets and plugins. This course starts by installing and setting up WordPress 3.0 on both Mac and Windows, then provides an in-depth look at tasks related to these WordPress add-ons: installing and administering, building and customizing, creating editable options and database tables, working with posts and pages, and utilizing jQuery and AJAX. There are also tutorials dedicated to promoting a widget or plugin, adding security, and localizing the interface.

Of WordPress and Widgets

By Randy Roedl on May 9, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

Of WordPress and Widgets

One of the world’s largest blog hosting sites, WordPress, achieved its status by offering users with loads of features, apparently more than its competitors do. However, one feature that truly sets them apart from the rest is WordPress Widgets which is quite simply, the use of widgets on WordPress blogs.

Widgets are basically plugins or tiny applications which can be placed on your blog’s sidebar. In WordPress, the most convenient aspect of putting up widgets is it is easily done without the need of html or web page editing expertise. With the ability to add and arrange widgets at your fingertips, it’s you can get your blog to look the way you want it to be making it a personalized one indeed in no time at all.

There are also huge amounts of widgets available online apart from those available in WordPress and can be obtained from websites such as www.widgetbox.com. Other than providing you with widgets of all sorts, they provide you guides on creating your own widgets to truly add a touch of personality and originality. These guides are even handy for the really tech-savvy individuals like developers and theme and plugin authors. Widget creating is important for them who work for WordPress as they have to keep tabs on the thousands of people from over 130000 blogs many of whom are constantly downloading WordPress programs each day.

With the use of Javascripts as well as Ajax, widgets are quite simply little boxes which represent content elements located within the sidebar of your theme. One downside to this is that once the widget is what it is, its look and the way it works can’t be modified. Among the elements which come as standard are;

Archives – A collection of links for older posts sorted by month.

Blogstats – A display of statcounter as well as a record of the amount of traffic coming into your blog.

Calendar – A calendar which dates can be used as links if there were any entries posted on that date.

Categories – A list of categories for post sorting and searching purposes.

Links – Quite simply, a blogroll arranged according to their respective categories.

Pages – A list of links to every page.

Most Recent Posts & Comments – A list of the most recent posts as well as comments that have been approved.

Meta/admin – A collection of links directing you to meta functions such as logging in and logging out, entries and comments RSS, Site Admin and WordPress’ homepage.

Search – A search tool to search within your blog.

Text – A feature allowing the insertion of HTML, Javascript or simply any form of plain text and can open up possibilities for miscellaneous text widgets.

Another interesting thing is the ability to add RSS feeds sourced from elsewhere using the new widgets available. With functions like these, the uses of widgets encompass almost every thinkable thing where only your imagination is the limit. However, too many widgets may not only cause your blog to slow down, but may end up spoiling the look of your blog as it is never advisable to have too much of a thing and this includes widgets.