Tag Archives: Plugins

WPMU’s Best in WordPress: Dec. 3rd – 9th

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We’re down to only a few weeks left in 2012, and the last one gone by has been a great source for some fantastic WordPress goodies.

This week on WPMU’s Best in WordPress, we bring you information on the new WP 3.5, web analytics and SEO, some responsive CSS, and tips on how to get more involved in the WordPress community. Enjoy!

WPMU Best in WordPress Logo1 WPMU’s Best in WordPress: Dec. 3rd – 9th

1. How to Become a Top WordPress Professional: SmashingMagazine

In this fantastic article, WP pro Siobhan McKeown shows you a number of ways to use your talents and get more involved in the WordPress community. In the process, you’ll learn how to drive more traffic to your own site, even make some money.

2. 10 Things You Need to Know about WordPress 3.5: Technosailor

Aaron Brazell writes about interesting things, and he writes well. In his blog, which you NEED to read, he gives valuable and honest input about tech and WordPress and, more importantly, how the two impact our real world. In this post, he covers 10 things you need to know about the new WordPress 3.5 released this morning. This post about 3.5 rises above most of the other update posts you might read over the next few days, which is why we highlight it here.

3. Web Analytics and SEO: WordCamp

Andy McIlwain covers web analytics and SEO at a recent WordCamp Toronto Event. He covers measuring your presence on the web with WordPress, plugins, and data. No magic tricks here, but a list of great resources you can use for actionable results on your site.

4. MyMail Newsletter Plugin:PippinsPlugins

A new mail and newsletter plugin on the market, reviewed by WP developer Pippin. It has some promising features and is a great option for those looking to integrate their website with their email lists.

5. Create Your Own Share Buttons

Another great post from Paulund about creating your own share buttons with Sharre from jQuery. If you are a developer creating custom sites you want to check this out. Sharre gives you the ability to create custom share divs on your site, and it taps into all the popular social networks. It has the look and feel of bootstrap components – but for sharing buttons. Love this!

6. Microformats and Why You Should Use Them: WP Mayor

If you’re not yet familiar with (or not yet using) microformats this post will give you a good rundown of the features and uses. It also gives you a good introduction to Google’s rich snippets tool and how to take advantage of them.

7. How to Split Long Posts Into Several Pages: Blondish.net

Have a long post and don’t want the infinite scroll? Split it into pages – a trick used by many popular news sites. There are advantages and disadvantages to using pages and Blondish covers them all in this post.

8. Create and Customize Responsive WordPress Themes

Part 4 of Patrick Cohen’s series on creating and customizing responsive WordPress themes takes you through the media queries in CSS, and continues his excellent post series on responsiveness in WordPress – and creating responsive themes the right way!

Remember, we’re always on the lookout for great WP resources. If you’ve written one yourself send us a note and if we like it you’ll see it right here in bright lights.

 WPMU’s Best in WordPress: Dec. 3rd – 9th

 WPMU’s Best in WordPress: Dec. 3rd – 9th

Add Personalized Messages To BuddyPress Friend Requests

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Today’s tip is something that could benefit friendship interactions in any BuddyPress community. Just last week, BuddyPress developer Brajesh Singh released a new plugin. The BuddyPress Extended Friendship Request plugin takes friendship requests to the next level by supplementing the “Add Friend” button with a bit of personalization.

Once installed, this plugin causes a click on the “Add Friend” button to pop up a little message window, enabling a user to send a message along with the friendship request.

Here’s a screenshot of the plugin in action:

screenshot 11 Add Personalized Messages To BuddyPress Friend Requests

A message can remind acquaintances of where they met, bring to memory a personal connection or describe two members’ connection to a friend of a friend. Little tweaks like this can inspire more communication and friendship throughout your community. Many thanks to Brajesh for creating this plugin. Download BuddyPress Extended Friendship Request for free from the WordPress plugin repository.

 Add Personalized Messages To BuddyPress Friend Requests

Cleaning Up WordPress Menu Admin with Screen Options

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If your site uses a few custom post types and those custom post types are viewable in the WordPress menu area, your admin panel can get messy quickly; making it hard to find categories or tags you actually want to include in your menus.

Of course you could alter your custom post type code to remove them from the menu item screen, but the easier solution is to use the SCREEN OPTIONS tab inside the menu admin area.

Screen Options Cleaning Up WordPress Menu Admin with Screen Options
Screen Options Panel in WordPress Menu Admin Area.

In the image above, you’ll see a screen options panel for a site that uses a WordPress ecommerce solution, an events calendar plugin, and Q&A forums. Each one of those plugins uses a custom post type that can be added to menus. Chances are your plugins which rely on custom post types include similar functionality.

The screen options drop down allows me to uncheck items I do not want on my menu admin screen, which I will do for events and products, two items I do not need to include in my main menu.

That makes my menu admin screen restrict available choices to just categories, tags, pages, and a few more standard options; and makes it easier to find what I need when I want to build out new menus.

screen options 2 Cleaning Up WordPress Menu Admin with Screen Options
A much cleaner menu admin area with only the necessary items.

 Cleaning Up WordPress Menu Admin with Screen Options

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