Fresh

Who has a phone with a mobile browser? Um…EVERYONE! Yeah, nowadays, people don’t just have cell phones, they have a mini computer in the palm of their hand able to find anything online within seconds.

On the top of everyone’s priority list, in the web world, is how to go mobile. One option is to build a whole new version of your site so that it will look good on a mobile device, but not everyone has the time and/or budget for that. If your site is already in WordPress, then you have another option…plugins!

There are several handy plugins that will make your current site mobile friendly. I’ve been tasked to find a plugin for our blogs here at eROI. After doing my research, I’ve found a few that seem to top the list and do a great job out of the box.
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In yesterday’s post I hit upon two major developments happening with WordPress this year: the merge of WordPress MU into WordPress, and better support for custom post types.  But there’s more! Here are just a few more advancements in the WordPress world that I’m looking forward to this year.

New 2010 default theme

Kubrick: klassic, but old and krusty. At eROI we’ve discussed creating our own default/starter themes that contain all the basic essential functions for a blog or a non-blog website. Many theme developers just getting started in WordPress (or even those who’ve been at it a while) take the default theme and tweak it to fit their structure/design.  Oftentimes this leads to having extraneous code that isn’t really needed or even code that has been deprecated. Having new default themes with up-to-date functions, heavily commented HTML and CSS, more basic HTML structures and without functions we don’t use often will help new members of our team learn theme creation faster.

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Like most cool technologies, this WordPress plugin was developed out of necessity for a client project. In a nutshell it works very similar to the way sifr works only without involving flash in the process. Instead, the plugin relies on php and the GD graphics library to dynamically replace html tags with images of true type typography.  As it is heavily inspired by the Signwriter drupal module, it is clearly not a novel method, however, in the spirit of open source it seemed natural to port the functionality to WordPress.

In brief, once installed, the plugin will act automatically, relying on CSS classes to target content. Typography styles are defined using a simple rule syntax not at all unlike CSS allowing for versatility and flexability all from within the wordpress dashboard. Since it is a server-side technology, the method is truly cross-platform and allows license-burdened fonts to be secured to prevent download.

Download the plugin here.

Although I love WordPress, I always wished it provided a better way to have custom page types with their own custom fields.  The built in “Posts” and “Pages” work great for regular blogs, but for a more complex website they aren’t enough.  What about “Portfolio Items”, “Job Listings”, “Events”?  And for a basic brochure site you don’t even need the “Posts” and its placement in the nav just serves to confuse whoever has to manage the website.  Often I will use a “Post” as a different type of page content – but I always have to explain to clients that they have nothing to do with blog posts, so just ignore the name and ‘imagine’ that it’s called something else.

Last year I saw a demonstration of the Expression Engine CMS presented by Josh Pyles of Pixelmatrix Design.  I drooled over its ability to create different page types with their own custom fields, all presented in a beautiful UI.  I ogled and stared and sighed and wished that WordPress could do the same thing.  One of my favorite plugins, More Fields, could add some of that custom field functionality, but without custom page types and the beautiful UI. (more…)

I’m getting ready to build a sweet new WordPress site, and to prepare I decided to create a little bookmarks folder for all the plugins I use on every single WordPress install.  In the folder I put links to all the WordPress plugins I use on every site, so I can right-click on the folder (which I named “WP Plugins XTREME”)  and select ‘Open All in Tabs’ and then start downloading the latest versions of them all in one swoop.

I know I already wrote a post listing ‘plugins every WordPress site should have‘ but there were quite a few I didn’t mention – just because I personally like the plugin and use it every time doesn’t mean it works for everybody in every situation.  But I love these SO much and I’m just worried that some poor WordPress developer doesn’t know about them, so what else can I do but write about more plugins?

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Everybody loves WordPress here at eROI, and over the past year we’ve fully embraced using it not just as a blogging platform, but as a full blown content management system.  But although it has so many great features built-in (and more to come with WordPress 2.7), there are certain plugins we always add on to bump it up to the next level of CMS greatness.  They mostly work in the background, doing all the hard work and not getting much credit.  Our clients may not necessarily notice they are there, but they would probably notice if they weren’t.

There are a few categories of plugins that are essential (or at least extremely beneficial) to any WordPress-as-CMS installation:  SEO, Spam Prevention, Tracking/Analytics, and Feeds.

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