However, when Automattic purchased After the Deadline (AtD) last year, I knew it was important. This was reaffirmed when Matt Mullenweg said, when referring to the plugin, “When I first tried After the Deadline I was blown away; it was so much better than other checkers I’d used.”

Though AtD is already standard for all WordPress.com blogs, many self-hosted WordPress users (.org users) are unaware of it or its free plugin and aren’t using it.

With that in mind, here is a quick overview of AtD and why it should be in almost every bloggers must-have plugin list.

What it Does

The idea behind AtD is a relatively simple one, rather that merely checking for spelling errors, AtD looks at grammar and style errors that bloggers often make.

Once you install AtD a “Proofread” button is added to your “Add New Post” page in the formatting bar. It appears in both the HTML and the Visual editor. Once you’ve finished typing your post, you simply click the link the AtD goes to work, analyzing your post for any potential mistakes.

Those errors are broken down into three kinds:

1. Spelling Errors: Highlighted in red, these mistakes are the same ones your default browser spell checker is designed to find.
2. Grammar Errors: Highlighted in green, these are errors in grammar such as punctuation mistakes, subject/verb agreement and so forth.
3. Style Errors: Highlighted in blue, these are not necessarily mistakes but are passages that AtD believes can be written better, either simplified, clarified or tightened. Includes unnecessary phrases or and overly complex expressions.

The goal of AtD is that, if you use it, not only will your writing be more correct, but actually better and easier to read. By working to improve your spelling, style and grammar, it helps you write a more clear and concise post.

How Well it Works

AtD is an amazing plugin but its far from perfect. All it does is offer suggestions, you still have to provide a human analysis of those recommendations and, at times, ignore ones that are off-base.

For example, when I use it on Plagiarism Today, AtD often guesses wrong when dealing with discussions about the law as the terminology often times throws AtD for a loop. Despite that, If ind myself agreeing with about 75% of the recommendations of AtD, including style ones.

The biggest drawback to AtD is that, unlike inline spell checkers, it does not run automatically as you type. Though you can set it up to automatically check posts and pages upon submission, it requires activation on your side to run. This causes many to forget about it or rush through it.

However, that is a limitation of the plugin caused by the fact it isn’t native to your browser and there isn’t much that can be done about it.

The plugin also isn’t always the fastest. Since it sends your text to the AtD server for checking, it often has to wait a time before it provides suggestions. With shorter articles it is barely noticeable, with larger ones it can seem like a drag.

But despite these rather small limitations, AtD is an invaluable tool and I can say comfortably that it has greatly improved my blog writing and should, if possible, be a plugin every WordPress user has at their disposal.

Bottom Line

Editing your own work, even for the best writers, is almost impossible. Though you can reread a work multiple times and even use tricks such as reading your work aloud, it doesn’t always help and mistakes seep through. AtD may not catch all of those errors, but it certainly will reduce them.

If you bear in mind that AtD is not a substitute for human judgement, as no spelling/grammar checker should ever be, but it can be used effectively with it.

If you are smart about how you use AtD, I can almost guarantee it will make you a better writer, or at least help you create better writing.

Considering that the plugin is completely free and there’s no risk in trying it, there’s no reason to not set it up and give it a shot. The worst that can happen is you learn you are a grammar genius with no need for outside help.

That’s certainly not something that will ruin your day…

After The Deadline: Much More than Spell Checking


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

If you’re looking to open up an affiliate store with your website but don’t know where to get started with the coding, you may want to take a look at WP Shopping Pages. This premium plug-in makes it very easy to sell products on the Internet without having the actual products in hand.

Shopping with Amazon and eBay Affiliates

Using this WordPress plug-in, you can easily populate your website with all sorts of products available for sale through Amazon and eBay.

While there are certainly other solutions that simply provide you with a basic affiliate link or perhaps an ad banner, this powerful affiliate plug-in can actually provide you with free, rich content. It will look as if you created these pages from scratch, but the wizard walks you through the process in an easy-to-understand manner.

WP Shopping Pages allows you to tackle any range of keywords. If you want to sell golf equipment, you can do so. If you’d prefer to focus on digital cameras, you do can do that. Either way, WP Shopping Pages will add keyword optimized content to your site with the click of a button.

Control Panel for Options and Configuration

There are three main pages that are made available through the WordPress user dashboard after installation of WP Shopping Pages.

The main admin page displays all the shopping pages that you have created thus far, as well as the utility to create additional shopping pages. You can define the page title, keywords, page template, Amazon options, and eBay category.

It is on the options page that you define your Amazon and eBay affiliate IDs (you’ll need to sign up for their programs accordingly), as well as other information related to their use like search method, reviews template, and eBay auction caching.

Through the templates page, you can define the different page templates that you’ll be using with WP Shopping Pages. This template is then used for each of the products you feature through the pages that the plug-in generates.

Seeing WP Shopping Pages in Action

If you go to the main page for WP Shopping Pages, you’ll see that you can see some samples by clicking on the links near the top.

Here is an example of an affiliate page for an Asus notebook. As you can see, the template grabs a full title, description, specs, rating and list price, as well as a link to buy from Amazon.com and a product review. This is just one template option and you can modify it as you see fit for both Amazon and eBay.

WP Shopping Pages is regularly listed at $89, but it is currently available for introductory price of $69. This includes an unlimited personal license, instant delivery, and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Link: WP Shopping Pages

* This was a Paid Review. If you are interested in having your site reviewed on Blogging Tips, please check out our Advertising Information Page.

Open an Affiliate Store with WP Shopping Pages


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Here is the Issue

When you simply install TweetMeme and you don’t get into the settings then every RT will show up as “RT @tweetmeme… your blog post and link“. So, when someone re-tweets your post you don’t get the mention in the twitter stream. So their followers don’t know that you were the one who wrote the post. If you want the credit then you need to change the attribution field in the TweetMeme settings to your twitter id. That way when someone clicks the TweetMeme Retweet button you see “RT @BenSpark… my post and link“.

Edit your TweetMeme Options in WordPress

I wrote about this on my blog BenSpark.com in post titled You Are Using TweetMeme Wrong. That post explains thoroughly how to make changes and edits to TweetMeme on your WordPress Blog. After I wrote that post I was on a mission to educate as many people as I could about this error that many were perpetuating. The thing is, many people are using TweetMeme on Blogger. With Blogger things are a little different. I didn’t know how to make things work in Blogger so I went and looked into the issue.

Edit your TweetMeme Options in Blogger

I believe that this will work for any blogging platform that you use where you post this TweetMeme code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script>

However, if you simply attach this code then you get the same issue as I described above. You have to add some additional code to make this TweetMeme button your own.

All you need to do to get the TweetMeme button is install this code below:

<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_source = 'tweetmeme';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script>

Once you install this you just need to change this line of code tweetmeme_source = ‘tweetmeme’; to tweetmeme_source = ‘Your Twitter Name’. Once you do that you are good to go. Now when people use your TweetMeme button you will get the credit for the posts that you write.

For more options to edit the code for the TweetMeme button please check out the TweetMeme help page.

Take a Minute to Fix your TweetMeme, Now.


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The most obvious one being presentation. The link www.bloggingtips.com/go/websitename looks much better than something like www.websitename.com/4567hgf&id=bloggingtips&bnad=5. Some URL cloaking scripts also allow you to track the number of impressions and click thrus.

The best URL cloaking scripts are written in PHP or CGI or another general purpose scripting language like that. Though I prefer to keep things simple and use a plugin when cloaking links on a WordPress blog.

You can of course use a url shortening service such as TinyURL but your readers may not be aware of the service and may think the link looks spammy, so I tend to avoid using them. Plus, it’s always better to control how links redirect yourself rather than using an external site.

Simple Link Cloaker

I started a new WordPress powered site the other day and was on the lookout for a good cloaking script. In the past I have used the Cute Links plugin which came packaged with Super Affiliate Blogger. Unfortunately, that plugin suffers from a problem which most WordPress cloaking plugins suffer from. That is, they clash with the permalinks structure.

Because these plugins use htaccess to redirect links, they often clash with WordPress if you are using SEO friendly URL’s. For example, if I cloaked an affiliate link to promote Coca Cola and set it to www.bloggingtips.com/go/cocacola and then wrote a page about the product at www.bloggingtips.com/cocacola, then the cloaking would not work. The cloaked link, i.e. www.bloggingtips.com/go/cocacola, would simply redirect to the article. Clearly this isn’t what you want.

For some reason I was having more problems with this than usual with the cloaking plugins I usually use. Fortunately, I found a plugin called Simple Link Cloaker. I don’t know what this does differently from other cloaking plugins but I have had none of the problems stated above when using it.

The script doesn’t track hits or impressions but it is perfect for cloaking links and is very easy to add, edit and delete links. Best of all, the plugin is free!

If your cloaking plugin is not clashing with your permalink structure then you might want to check out more advanced link cloaking plugins which have more tracking options. However, if you find that your affiliate links are redirecting to your blog posts because the linkname is the same as the post name, I strongly recommend you to try this plugin out.

I can’t guarantee that it will work for all of you. All I will say is that out of the several cloaking plugins I installed, this was the only one which didn’t clash with the WordPress permalink structure.

Info: Simple Link Cloaker
Download: ILWP Link Cloaker

Simple Link Cloaker for WordPress


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

There are numerous backup plugins for Wordpress to help you tackle issues of this sort. Instead of going through the trial and error method to choose the right one for you, let’s make the choice easier! Here is a little review of the three most popular backup plugins: DBC Backup, WP-DBManager, WP-DB-Backup. It was decided to rate them according to the following requirements:

• Plugin should be easy to install.
• Plugin should provide automatic backing up feature.
• Interface of the plugin should be user-friendly.

WP-DB-Backup

This one is probably the most popular WordPress backup plugin. Installation is relatively easy if your ‘wp-content’ inside WordPress directory is writable. If it is not, you will have to temporary modify the permissions of this directory to make it writable so that the plugin can create a directory to store backups in. The latter is named ‘backup-*’, where “*” is an arbitrary number which solely purpose is protecting the folder from being randomly guessed. This folder is automatically created with permissions 755, owner ‘apache’ and your user as group (e.g.: drwxr-xr-x apache username backup-56025).

Figure 1. WP-DB-Backup menu.

Additionally, an empty ‘index.php’ file is placed inside the directory to prevent its content from being listed in a browser and a random hash is added to a name of a database dump file when it is created. This makes the operation of the plugin relatively secure. Even though reading permissions for backups are granted to the public, it is almost impossible to steal the backups. Simply speaking intruders don’t know neither the name of the files nor the location they are stored in.

Options available in the WP-DB-Backup plugin are shown in figure 1. The interface is friendly and easy to use. The amount of WP-DB-Backup capabilities is relatively small but sufficient for occasional backing ups.

In my opinion, the main disadvantage of this plugin is that it only allows automatic backing up to your e-mail address, rather than the server itself. In case the backups are large, this option becomes useless, as mail size restrictions will prevent file delivery to your mail box. Therefore, this plugin is good only in case you intend to regularly backup the blog manually, or if the size of your database backups is small.

WP-DBManager

This is a sophisticated database management tool providing therefore a large list of handy features. You can perform various database operations using this plugin such as viewing general information, optimization, backing up, running SQL queries, dropping tables and repairing your database. As a matter of fact, this is almost a built-in PhpMyAdmin.

Figure 2. WP-DBManager database options menu.

Installation, however, isn’t quite simple. You need to know the location of ‘mysql’ and ‘mysqldump’ on your server (see figure 2). Without paths to these programs the plugin will not work correctly. To obtain this information, you will need to contact your hosting provider. In order to improve security you will need to copy the ‘.htaccess’ file from the plugin folder to the backup location. This file will prevent public from accessing this directory. Besides disabling listing of the backup directory this tweak will also restrict access to it via HTTP.

With help of this plugin you can fully automate the backing up process of your blog’s databases. You can even schedule their optimization. Parameters you can control are shown in figure 2. Interface of the plugin is very well structured for such a large amount of features available, but it will take you some time to explore all of them. This is definitely a good choice in case you need automatic backups in conjunction with enhanced database management features

DBC Backup

This is the best tool if you need to make automatic backups only. The installation is extremely easy and requires no sophisticated actions. Only in some rare cases you will need to change the permissions for your backup folder, but it is likely that the plugin will succeed in creating this folder on its own with appropriate access parameters.

Figure 3. DBC Backup Menu

DBC Backup uses the same security mechanism as WP-DBManager – .htaccess file located in the backup folder restricts http access to it. But unlike WP-DBManager, DBC Backup creates it automatically and needs no input from the user.

The interface is very simple and friendly. All you need to specify is:

• the folder you want to backup to;
• whether you want this done automatically (including the schedule);
• whether you want to delete the old backup files when new ones are created.

All DBC Backup options fit in just one window (see the figure 3).

Bottom line

All three plugins can come in very handy for your Wordpress blog. Still they differ in capabilities according to introduced rating requirements. So far the best plugin is the DBC Backup, because it meets all three requirements; it is very easy to install and use and it allows scheduling automatic backups to the server Wordpress is installed on. Moreover all important plugin related system messages are displayed on the same page as the options themselves, which is very convenient for monitoring.

WP-DB-Backup is relatively easy to install and use, but it doesn’t allow automatic backing up to the server your blog is hosted on. Manual backups can be performed to your local PC, server or mail with the help of this plugin. Therefore if you are ok with manual backups or have a blog small enough to send its backup to an email address, then this solution will suit you well.

Even though WP-DBManager plugin is harder to install and configure it provides a lot more functions. This plugin is great for general database management. It has full backup capabilities, including automation, and also allows automatic optimization of your blog databases. This is a great choice if you intend to do a lot of database management and are willing to spend some time configuring this plugin.

Links:

• DBC Backup
• WP-DBManager
• WP-DB-Backup

Choosing a Wordpress backup plugin that is right for you


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

I was speaking with my friend tonight about the site. He still needs to add content to the site but he wanted to setup some email addresses. After showing him how to do that he asked if we can put up a Under Construction message until he has written all the content for the site.

To do this I simply added a basic index.html file to the server with a coming soon message and a copy of his logo. This is what I usually do with sites which aren’t yet finished. However, this isn’t that practical as it means my friend can’t work on the home page. This is not a major issue for me but I’m sure it’s confusing for someone not familiar with WordPress.

Therefore I did a quick search for a suitable plugin. To my delight I found the perfect plugin within seconds of searching the WordPress Plugin directory. The plugin is called Custom Coming Soon Page and was developed by Mohit Aneja from CSS Jockey.

I was just looking for a basic coming soon landing page however this plugin offers so much more. You can customise the page very easily through the plugin options area and you can also add additional information to the page like your Twitter, FaceBook and RSS details.

Here is a custom page I developed for BloggingTips. This literally took me 10 seconds to setup!

If you are launching a new site or need to close down a new one temporarily I highly recommend using this plugin. You can edit the text displayed on the home page and the meta information too so you can use it as a temporary coming soon page for just about any reason. You can also collect email addresses in the meantime and set the launch date of your site.

Link : Custom Coming Soon Page | WordPress Plugin Download Page

Custom Coming Soon Page for WordPress Blogs


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Today I will be looking at WordPress Affiliate, a WordPress plugin launched today which easily integrates ClickBank products above or below your blog posts.

Like all WordPress plugins, installing WordPress Affiliate is just a matter of uploading it to your blogs plugins folder and activating it. Once activated, you can setup the plugin in the settings area.

You need to enter your ClickBank ID and your affiliate TID, which is a unique code which will appear in your ClickBank stats so you know what referral link generated a sale. Next you need enter some keywords. These keywords will determine what products are listed on your blog.

You can determine if your ads are displayed on the home page of your blog or just in your blog posts and can decide whether to post the links above posts, below posts or both. You can set how many ads appear too. Once you have entered all of these details, you simply save your settings and your blog posts will be updated with ClickBank products related to your chosen keywords.

The good thing about WordPress Affiliate is that the related products link changes for every article (assuming that there are many products related to your keywords).

You can also control the way the links are displaying via the admin area. You can change the type and size of font and the colour of the links. Alternatively, you can use your own custom css code.

WordPress Affiliate really is very easy to use. It only takes a minute or so to setup and be active. I wish there was more control over where the links were placed though. With basic designs it’s perhaps not a big issue as the links are automatically placed underneath the post however on BloggingTips this didn’t blend in well.

Hopefully they add a feature in the next version which allows you to insert the code manually into your template.

Overview

If you are looking for an easy way to integrate random ClickBank products into your blog then you should definitely look at WordPress Affiliate. I do think however that it could be improved in a few ways.

For example, it would be great if it showed you impression stats of what products have been displayed, the click throughs they generated and which ones converted to sales. And perhaps an option to integrate products which are converting well into the random list too. WP comes with free upgrades for life so perhaps customers will see this in the future.

WordPress Affiliate retails for $94. The plugin can be used on an unlimited number of domains and all customers get free technical support too.

Link: WordPress Affiliate.

* This was a Paid Review. If you are interested in having your site reviewed on Blogging Tips, please check out our Advertising Information Page.

Integrate ClickBank Products On Your Blog With WordPress Affiliate


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Before you add one more plugin to your WordPress blog, you should check out your analytics.  If you use Google Analytics than check out the reports under Visitors.   Then look under Browser Capabilities for reports on Browsers, Operating Systems, Browsers and OS and Screen Resolutions.  When you see lots of activity from mobile visitors than you will know it is time to explore mobile.

While the numbers are still small, I was surprised to see even this many visits for a site I manage, as shown in the Google Analytics report below:

While WordPress does not allow you to to have two themes at the same time, the following plugins read the information in a browser and when they detect a mobile browser they replace the current theme.   Your desktop users will not notice anything different.

Wptouch

WPtouch is an entire theme package for your WordPress website.  This theme is modeled after Apple’s app store design.  WPtouch makes your WordPress website load fast on mobile devices and shows your content clearly, without interfering with your regular theme.  Wptouch was reviewed on Blogging Tips awhile back in WPTouch: Make a mobile app from your blog – but there are even more features today.

Many WordPress sites are making use of more and more plugins which significantly increase the load time of pages and make your site very hard to use on mobile devices. WPtouch has focused on a  lightweight, fast-loading, theme.

WordPress Mobile Edition

WordPress Mobile Edition offers a mobile/phone/PDA friendly interface for your blog with some enhancements for advanced mobile browsers.  You can preview the advanced mobile theme here and see it from a desktop browser.

Both of these plugins have tens of thousands of downloads from wordpress.org with 4 star ratings and will make fine additions to your blog – when it’s time for you to go mobile!

Make Your WordPress Blog Mobile Ready


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Word Wizard Plugin: If you love words or you think that you have the best vocabulary in the world, install Vocabulary Words to your blog. This simple WordPress plugin gives you a new word five days a week and by the time the week is over, you and your viewers will be that much smarter.

Synonym Lover? So you’re tired of saying “said” in your writing, try the Thesaurus WP plugin. Just download the plugin and start finding the best words to replace the boring words you use everyday. If you’re looking for “Said”, it will generate a list of words including but not limited to, “say, growled, yelled, whispered, shouted, implied,” etc.

Get Noticed NOW! If you want to get noticed, your writing anyway, try the All In One SEO Pack. What does it do? It makes your life a lot easier and a whole lot less complicated by giving you a simple way for searchers to find you. It helps with keywords, descriptions, titles, and even protecting you from creating duplicate content.

Like it Fancy? Okay so maybe columns aren’t really that fancy, but they sure do look neat and give the reader a break from the long one column article that you’re reading now. Try WP Post Columns, it’s easy to install, just like everything (for the most part) with WordPress, and it takes your blog to the next level.

The best part about these plugins, other than the fact that they are flipping cool, is that they are all free. There are so many free plugins on the web that it makes sense to use what you can get at your fingertips without wasting a dime. Download one today and let me know how it goes!

Plugins for Nerds


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Here is a full list of the plugins features:

• Easily Embed a Form into Posts & Pages
• Create Autoresponder Emails to Users
• Integrate with Other Plugins Using Hooks
• View Entry Summaries from the WordPress Dashboard
• Visually Create Forms with Our Sleek Editor
• Prevent Spam with Built-In reCAPTCHA Protection
• Allow Users to Automatically Create a Post
• Manage Entries from the WordPress Admin Panel
• Easily Export Form Entry Data to CSV Format

The plugin was developed by Carl Hancock, Alex Cancado and Kevin Flahaut from RocketGenius. I spoke to Carl today and he was more than happy to answer a few questions for you all. Enjoy

What encouraged you to develop a premium WordPress Form plugin?

We have a combined 30+ years experience building web sites, and one of the stumbling blocks we always encounter when building a site for a client are forms. Not only building the form, but managing the data and notifications that are generated as a result of the form being submitted.

We have been using WordPress as our CMS of choice for client site development but were completely unhappy with the available form solutions for WordPress so we decided to build our own.

Did you find any inspiration from the form plugins which are available in the WordPress plugin directory?

Our inspiration came more from hosted applications such as Wufoo, FormSpring, and Icebrrg. If we were inspired by any of the available solutions for WordPress we probably wouldn’t have built Gravity Forms. We are bringing the ease of use of hosted solutions such as FormSpring to the WordPress platform… without a monthly fee that is typically charged by the hosting solution.

How do the forms cope with spam?

Spam is a problem for any online form that can be accessed via a browser. Unfortunately, spammers are relentless. We chose to implement reCAPTCHA for spam protection. reCAPTCHA is a free captcha service from Carnegie Mellon University that helps protect your forms from spam and at the same time it helps to digitize old books and newspapers in the process.

Did you at any point consider releasing the plugin for free, or perhaps a free version with less features?

Months of planning, development and testing went into the creation of Gravity Forms. While we would love to give it away for free, the fact is we couldn’t continue developing or support the plugin if it was free. As time consuming as development is, providing high quality support is just as time consuming.

Have you ever used a WordPress plugin that you loved but the developer fell off the face of the earth, is no longer updating the plugin and it quit working with the latest version of WordPress? This is exactly what we don’t want to happen with Gravity Forms and why we chose to make it a commercial product.

What type of blogger do you think will be interested in purchasing a Gravity Form?

While Gravity Forms is very useful to just about any type of blogger, is is most useful for bloggers that need to easily handle user submitted data and businesses using WordPress as a CMS.

What new features can we expect to see in Gravity Forms in the future?

We have a long list of features we plan on adding to Gravity Forms.

Tighter integration with WordPress, integration with third party services such as Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, Freshbooks and Highrise; and payment processing integration for single page order forms are just some of the features we plan on introducing in the future.

Thanks to Carl for taking part in this interview.

Gravity Forms currently costs:

• Single Site Support License = $39
• Multi Site Support License (5 sites) = $99
• Developer Support License (Unlimited sites) = $199

When you consider how important your blog contact form is to receiving information from potential customers, advertisers and fellow bloggers, $39 seems like a bargain for a plugin of this quality. If you have been looking for a good form plugin for your blog, I recommend checking Gravity Forms out.

You can find out more about this versatile plugin at Gravity Forms. Make sure you check out their tour video

Gravity Forms – Premium WordPress Form Plugin


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Hope you enjoy the list

Restricted Site Access

Jacob M Goldman from C Murray Consulting has developed a WordPress plugin which helps you set up a secure private blog.

Restricted Site Access is a WordPress plug-in that allows you to restrict access to logged in users and a set of IP addresses with flexible restricted access behavior.

This is not a plugin for the masses but I am sure that some of you will find it useful. For example, it could help you create a private blog for you and your friends. Or if you have several bloggers writing for your blog, you could set up a blog to keep them updated with news and restrict access so only your authors can see it.

There are other ways to make a private blog but by restricting ip addresses this plugin will make your blog much more secure (e.g. more secure than relying on passwords).

Link : Restricted Site Access

WT Co-authors

Eugen Rochko from Anime2 has recently released a simple plugin to help blogs with collaborated posts. It adds a custom key called coauthor which allows you to list everyone who helped write the post.

If you regularly work with friends on blog posts, I am sure you will find this simple plugin very useful

Link : WT Co-authors

No More IE6

Internet Explorer 6 is is an incredibly buggy browser. Released in 2001, it made web designers lives a nightmare due to the way it renders CSS (amongst other things). Which is why the IE6 No More is supported by so many webmasters.

Andy Stramer has developed a great little plugin to help with this campaign. The plugin displays a banner at the top of your blog which encourages any visitors viewing your blog with IE6 (or below) to upgrade to a modern web browser like FireFox 3.5, IE8, Safari 4 or google Chrome.

The banner can be closed by the user so it shouldn’t intrude the user too much. With millions of people still using this outdated browser, it could be worthwhile installing this plugin (particularly if you are like me and you hate your blog being rendered improperly).

Link : No More IE6

3 New Interesting WordPress Plugins


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The widget is called Gravatar Widget because it displays the users Gravatar image and puts it in the about box.

Many themes come with a standard About Me area which can be edited via the sidebar.php template however a widget is much more preferable as it allows you to switch between themes more easily (i.e. without having to hard code things again).

Here is what the configuration screen looks like:

This is a great little plugin which I’m sure many WordPress.com bloggers will use. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there is an equivalent for self-hosting WordPress.org users. The closest I found was the About Me plugin but that doesn’t offer the same functionality.

WordPress.com Gravatar Widget


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The plugin was designed to stop hackers from gaining access to your blog via trial and error, something which is quite common with WordPress blogs since most people use the default username login ‘admin’. The plugin lets you set a number of retries to login into your blog. If the user doesn’t enter the correct details they are locked out for a set period of time and their ip address is blocked.

Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery. Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. This can be modified via the Options panel. Administrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the panel.

This is a great idea for a plugin and one which I would like to see integrated into the official release of WordPress. Until then, I recommend all WordPress bloggers download Login Lockdown, as it could save you a lot of problems in the future

Link : Login Lockdown (via TechZoomIn)

Protect Your WordPress Blog From Password Hackers With Login Lockdown


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Documentation aside, WordPress doesn’t really give support to users, which you can’t really complain about since it is a free product. Though their forum is full of bloggers helping each other, whether it is with regards to themes, plugins or WordPress itself.

It is this community which has made WordPress what it is today. Without a doubt those who release quality themes and plugins to WordPress users have contributed greatly to the community. Though are they being rewarded for their efforts?

Plugin Developers

Kevin Eklund wrote a great post yesterday about this entitled ‘WordPress Plugin Developers In Dire Need Of A Sustainable Business Model‘. The article talks about how many developers are unable to give support for their plugins because of the time it requires and because they get little, if anything, back in return.

I released the Evolution WordPress Theme last year and it proved to be very popular. However, I didn’t realise how much time it would take to help users adapt the theme on their blogs (thankfully Sarah helped out). This was one of the reasons why we had to launch Blog Themes Club as a paid membership site i.e. we just couldn’t afford to spend time helping everyone for free if we were getting nothing in return.

Therefore I appreciate the situation that plugin developers are in. Infact, I’m actually quite surprised that some of the more complicated plugins have been released for free as the developers have obviously spent a helluva lot of time on them.

Most plugin developers have a paypal donate button on their website but you would be surprised at how little people actually give back (I include myself in this!). Kevin contacted a few plugin developers to see how if they were being rewarded for their efforts :

Last year I asked both Alex King and Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan if they knew the percentage of people that contributed a donation after downloading a plugin. Alex replied to my email and said, “I’d say maybe .5%? Maybe lower…” whereas Mr. Chan explained that, “I would say less than 1% based on my 4 years of doing plugin”.

Altogether both plugin creators currently have a combined total of 43 plugins (Alex King: 26, Lester Chan: 17) available for free download at the official WordPress plugin repository. Upon answering the same question, Donncha O Caoimh, of the popularly downloaded WP Super Cache plugin, replied, “I don’t have an exact figure but it’s probably far less than 1%”, “I’d be rather happy if each of them even donated a dollar!”. Alex Rabe, author of the heavily used NextGEN Gallery plugin, supplied me with some donation statistics saying, “Less than 1 percent for NextGEN Gallery, 800,000 downloads and approx. 200 donations”. That actually works out to be a donation rate of 0.025%! That’s completely ridiculous!

Plugin Business Model

I have no doubt that developers will continue to keep releasing plugins for WordPress, however I am concerned that if a good business model isn’t adopted by some developers, we may see a decrease in good quality plugins.

Kevin suggested 5 alternative modesl which developers could adopt :

• Premium Plugins
• Freemium Plugins (i.e. a premium plugin with a basic version available for free)
• Paid Support
• Ad Supported
• A Combination Model

I personally believe that more developers should start charging for their premium plugins, especially if it means more updates and better support. I know some bloggers may not be able to pay for plugins however I think most would be happy to pay for a plugin if it did exactly what they were looking for. No doubt it would cost less than paying a programmer to code something specifically for you.

I recently paid $99 for the Wishlist member plugin however I believe it to be great value for money because it does exactly what we want and the support is top notch. Obviously, not all plugins are worth that much. I’m sure many good plugins could be costed at $15 or less and still make the developer a lot of money.

What do you think about all of this – would you pay for a good WordPress plugin if the support was good?

You can read Kevins article about WordPress Plugin Developers in full at the link below.

Link : WordPress Plugin Developers In Dire Need Of A Sustainable Business Model

WordPress Plugin Business Model


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

A popular plugin for serving up star ratings to your visitors is WP-Post Ratings. Its easy to display the rating form with a function, and you can customize the rating images in a variety of colours and styles. Also, WP-Ratings allows you to filter the ratings by different groups like by author, category, month, or year. This would typically be the first plugin you would find searching through WP.org for any sort of rating system, but dig a little deeper and you might unearth some of these useful gems.

Vote the post – This is a simple plugin that doesn’t nag at you with a lot of options. It offers a simple, user-friendly rating system with votes like “Below Average”, “Needs Work” ,”Average”, “Very Good” and “Excellent”.

Post Star Rating – This plugin installs quick and easy. It shows the highest rated posted for the month. It also lists the most popular posts at the moment and moves them up and down the list in realtime.

Star Rating for Reviews -

Serving post ratings in your blog


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/