wordpress Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Untame

Jun 21 2012
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5 Must Have WordPress Plugins

Posted by | Social Media, WordPress | No Comments

We already know that WordPress is an incredibly powerful Content Management System. With WordPress we have the power to create an awesome blog, photo gallery or portfolio with just a few clicks. However, sometimes vanilla WordPress is just not enough. Admit it, at times you just need to spice things up a bit, well we’re in luck! WordPress.org host a plugin directory featuring over 19,000 ways to spice up your new site and make sure that your users have a great experience. We are going to scrape off a few of our favorite plugins that you would be well served to install on your shiny WordPress powered site today.

Jetpack

From the Makers: “Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.”

Jetpack is a collection of incredible plugins all built into one. With Jetpack you can connect your WordPress.org powered site with WordPress.com and use their service to track site statistics and analytics. Moreover Jetpack allows you to leverage email blog subscriptions, social networking enabled comments, an awesome url shortener and tons more. Jetpack should definitely be a plugin that you immediately download.

Download Now

Visual Form Builder

From the Makers: “Visual Form Builder is a plugin that allows you to build and manage all kinds of forms for your website in a single place. Building a fully functional form takes only a few minutes and you don’t have to write one bit of PHP, CSS, or HTML!”

Forms are hard! But with Visual Form Builder, they don’t have to be. I use Visual form builder Pro almost exclusively. VFB allows users to take their contact forms into their hands. Would you like a few extra fields on your contact form? No problem! Visual Form Builder has you covered. What’s more is Visual Form Builder is completely free and full of features! However, I would recommend upgrading to VFB Pro if for nothing else than to reward its developer on a job well done.

Download Now

Akismet

From the Makers: “Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.”

Akismet is a lot like the best bug spray you have ever used. Think of the internet like a jungle, this time instead of poisonous plants there are thousands of Persian Prince’s desperately needing to offload millions of dollars to you (all of the time). Now, while flattering, we don’t necessarily need constant spam on our site, since we are hopefully trying to develop a community of readers, not robots. (Spoilers: They are not really Persian Prince’s) Akismet automatically runs each comment through their service and filters out the good posts from the bad.

Download Now

WP Super Cache

From the Makers: “This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.”

We have talked a lot about speed on Untame [Link]. Speed is important, and no one knows that more than the makers of WP Super Cache. WP Super Cache uses dynamic caching and static HTML display to make your WordPress site incredibly fast. Setup can be a bit complicated, but we will go into depth in a future blog post. However if you need help between now and then, just [let us know].

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All in One SEO Pack

The internet is a big place, huge even! You have taken the first step, put up a website or blog, produced awesome content and still only have a few visitors every month. You need the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress. This plugin will automatically submit your WordPress site and new blog post to popular search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and AskJeeves(just kidding on the last one. but it will submit to ask.com). Also, All In One Seo will help you identify good keywords and phrases within your posts and pages. All of this comes together to send interested readers to your site. SEO is not rocket science, and with All in One it can be easy.

Download Now

Jun 15 2012
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WordPress 3.4 is here! | What to Expect

Posted by | WordPress | No Comments

WordPress continues to get even better! The latest edition of the wildly popular content management system is out including several exciting improvements in version 3.4. Most of the changes are improvements to the WordPress core functionality and will require your theme developer to update your theme with the new functionality. Or if you would like to play with the update yourself, you could always just install a test version of WordPress and use one of the included themes such as “Twenty Ten.”

Check out this video for a short overview, and then we will discuss exactly how to update your WordPress install to 3.4.

Let’s Get You Updated!

Assuming that you already have WordPress installed (if you don’t, head over to our contact page and we may just be able to help out!) log into the admin area of your website, likely by typing “/wp-admin” after the core address. For example, if our domain was “www.testsite.com” we could log into our WordPress installation by typing “www.testsite.com/wp-admin”, entering our username and password and poof, we’re in!

Once you have logged in to your WordPress site, there will be a yellow alert bar on the top of the screen suggesting that you update to the latest version of WordPress. (Disclaimer: Before you update, please make sure that you have access to a backup of your site’s content) Now, click “Please Update Now” and proceed to the next page.

Notice that you should now have a couple of places to update the WordPress install. First, simply click to update the core install of the software. Once WordPress has successfully updated, return to the updates page and proceed to update any applicable themes.

Congratulations! You are up to date and ready to take full advantage of everything that WordPress 3.4 has to offer. Let’s dive in for just a moment.

That’s a nice theme you’ve got there

First, head over to the “Themes” area and click on the link that says “Customize”. If you are using the latest version of the Twenty Eleven theme then you will be led to an interface where you may customize the site to your liking. Backgrounds, custom header images, real time layout control … yeah, we’ve got you covered.

How about one more incredible new feature, automatic twitter embeds. In the post editor, simply drop in the embed url from a tweet the you would like to show off anywhere in a post. Simply click publish and Bam!

There you have it, an interactive twitter element for your published page. Here your users will be able to follow you directly, reply, retweet or favorite your tweet without ever leaving the site!

There is a mountain of improvements baked in to WordPress 3.4. I would encourage you to set up a testing site and tinker around as much as possible. Hopefully this post has familiarized you with the process of keeping WordPress up to date and will encourage you to try out its new functions. If you would like to read more about 3.4, check out the post over at WordPress.org

Jun 13 2012
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Go Faster: How To Speed Up Your Website With CloudFlare CDN

Posted by | WordPress | 2 Comments

Are you using a shared hosting server? Maybe you have wanted your site to run a whole lot faster, but you’re not quite ready to take the financial plunge of VPS or a dedicated server. Well, we have great news! There is a free way to significantly speed up your website or blog without having to dig deep into your wallet. Let’s get going!

What is Cloudflare?

“CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through their intelligent global network. CloudFlare automatically optimizes the delivery of webpages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. They also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.”

On average, a website on CloudFlare loads twice as fast for its visitors, sees 65% fewer requests and saves 60% of bandwidth. That is a pretty big improvement over simply relying on your shared host to serve up your content. And guess what, the baseline plan that CloudFlare provides is absolutely FREE… (As in Free beer Free (cool huh?))

Set up your new CloudFlare account:

Getting going with Cloudflare is easy, but first things first. Head over to the Cloudflare website and click Sign Up in the top navigation menu. Next, fill out your account details. After you fill out your details we are ready to put the pedal down to the floor! Once you create your account you will be led to the next screen wherein you can add your first web site (or as many as you would like… go nuts!).

After you add your website, Cloudflare will begin the scanning process by gathering the appropriate DNS records. Check through the list that is displayed and make sure that your records are correct.

Next, you will configure your individual domain settings. Here, select your Cloudflare plan, choose your performance settings and adjust the security. Now this is the part that I can’t quite tell you exactly what to do as your mileage may vary depending on your site’s requirements.

You’re All Done! (For Now)

Once you have successfully set up your domain on Cloudflare there is not much more to do than just sit back and watch as day after day your content is served up to more visitors, faster than ever!

Why Speed Matters

According to national surveys done by Gomez.com, if your website is slow to load you may be losing revenue and possibly customer loyalty. A recent study found that 78% of online consumers went to a competitor’s site due to poor performance at peak times. According to the study, nearly half of web users expect a site to load up in a matter of two seconds or less. If the site does not load quickly, visitors are statistically more likely to navigate elsewhere after three seconds. Moreover, according the the survey, 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online. Speed matters.

With CloudFlare CDN, you can make a significant speed improvement on the cheap. In a future post we will show you how to integrate the super speed of CloudFlare and power it up even more by pairing it with one of our favorite WordPress plugins.

Jun 12 2012
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What is the WordPress Loop?

Posted by | WordPress | No Comments

The WordPress loop is an essential building block when a web designer or developer begins to better understand how WordPress works and moreover, how they might manipulate a theme to fit the needs of a web site. The loop is a very simple concept to grasp once you understand its necessity. The loop tells WordPress to go get the content that you need. It is that simple, but lets take a stroll through some code to see exactly how it works in practice.

Relax: It’s easier than you think!

In order to get the loop going, we just need to accomplish a few simple tasks.

  • Begin The Loop
  • Do something to display the content we want
  • Close the loop (simple right?)

In order to perform these actions we will need to ask WordPress to play fetch! This is called the “Query”. So in order for us to get the correct content on the correct page the incredible guys and gals at WP ask that we just tell them what we are looking for. So without further ado, lets take a look at some code.

Begin the loop:

[crayon lang=”php”][/crayon]

ask WordPress to play fetch! …

So, in this simple line of PHP we are up to a few things, and it might be easiest to understand if we just look at it like a sentence. This statement first checks if posts exist on our website. Once we have found that there are posts, then we tell WordPress that as long as posts exist, we would like to display those posts.

Do Something About It!

Next, we would tell WordPress exactly what content we would like to be displayed from those posts. For instance, we could include items like our post title <?php the_title(); ?> or maybe our post content <?php the_content(); ?>.

After we have displayed all of our desired information we just need to close up shop (and tidy up a bit). It is always best practice, if not now entirely essential to close the WordPress loop in a clean manner, in case we want to fire up another content loop anywhere else in the page.

So to clean up, we will use the following code to stop our query.

[crayon lang=”php”]

[/crayon]

This snippet of code will essentially end our loop. Lets walk through this code step by step. <?php endwhile;else: ?> allows for us to tell WordPress to stop repeating the content loop of the queried posts. In the middle of that snippet you will find a helpful PHP bit that provides a helpful error message for users, just in case we didn’t have any posts related to our query. This type of message is a huge help in places such as search pages. After close out our cash register by ending our while statement, we simply turn out the lights by ending our “if” statement.

So our full beginners loop might look a lot like this.

[crayon lang=”php”]

Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.


[/crayon]

There! Wasn’t that easy? I hope that this post will make you a little more familiar with how the WordPress loop works. Admittedly, this is an enormously simplistic look at what can be a very involved function. But Hey! We need to start somewhere. Next we will start to take a look at how to eek out some neat loop functionality and eventually code up our own custom blog page.

Helpful Links:

May 02 2012
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Save and Post Your Favorite Concert Set Lists To Your WordPress Site

Posted by | WordPress | No Comments

If you’re a lover of live music, you probably go to as many shows as your schedule and wallet will permit. But if you’re a true fanatic about your concert-going, you just might be interested in tracking your musical experiences online, and in detail. What was that second encore Radiohead played in Kansas City? How did Phish open that third set on New Year’s Eve? If you are this kind of showgoer, trying to keep tabs on your experiences by scribbling set lists on cocktail napkins can be both inconvenient and easy to accidentally throw away.

Introducing SetList, a WordPress plugin that enables you to add any gig’s set list to your WordPress site’s posts, pages and sidebars. While other fans may only attend a show and then let the finer details slip out of memory over the years, SetList enables you to savor each track from your live music experiences by logging every live set on your WordPress site.

Here are some of the WordPress SetList plugin’s features:

  • Retrieve a set list by using the artist name and date of gig (in format DD-MM-YYYY) and optional venue name.
  • Widget for sidebars.
  • Shortcode for pages and posts.
  • Caching option to store set list data using the WordPress Transient API and reduce calls to the setlist.fm API.
  • Setting for cache expiry.
  • Default CSS stylesheet for styling the set list.
  • Option to add your own CSS to style the set list.
  • Setlist.fm API checker, as the API has had some downtime recently.
  • Plugin support section.

Setlist includes an options panel that shows you how to customize your shortcodes and allows you to configure the output of the plugin with custom styling:

SetList uses the setlist.fm API, so simply install the plugin and start taking advantage of the free wiki-like service for collecting and sharing setlists. You can browse and add hundreds of musical performances from around the world to keep your WordPress readers and visitors up to date with your true hipness. Give it a try and make sure to leave us a note in the comments below with your own review.

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