Online Calendar with Upcoming Events

If you’re promoting events, courses, workshops, timetables or online seminars etc on your website, then a calendar is a ‘must-have’. There are a lot of WordPress calendar plugins out there but my favourite is the Calendar Plugin by Kieran O’Shea.

The Best Calendar Plugin for WordPress

Not only does it display a great looking calendar on any page/post you can also…

• Include a widget to show upcoming events in your sidebar (you specify how many days ahead)
• Include a widget to show today’s events in your sidebar (only appears if there are any)
• You add event categories and assign a colour to each. Events show on the calendar in the color of their category.
• You can easily add repeating events by choosing the number of times an event happens and how often. ie. At 7pm, every Tuesday for 8 weeks
• Events can span more than a day and you can have more than one event on a day
• You can link an event to a blog post/page or another website.
• You can give others login access to add events to the calendar

See the calendar in action – Smart Fitness Timetable [Read more]

Create a Watchlist of Favourite Posts

The ‘My Favourite Posts’ plugin lets your audience save a list of their favourite posts with one click. They can then login at any time and view their list as well as add/delete items.

Download ‘My Favorite Posts’ Plugin…

When you have hundreds of tutorials, property listings, shopping cart items and other types of blog posts on your website, it becomes more and more difficult to ensure that your readers can find the post they need quickly and easily. This way people can save relevant posts and listings as they browse, then review and link to them again whenever they choose.

Screenshot below shows Watchlist link and saved posts as seen by logged in user.

View Watchlist in Action [Read more]

Multiple Category ‘Super’ Search Box

On large websites where posts are listed under many different categories, it makes sense for readers to be able to search several categories at once to narrow down their search. The Multiple Category Selector Widget does exactly that whereas the default WordPress search widget only lets you type keywords into a box, then searches your posts and pages for these keywords.

This plugin is perfect for Real Estate websites, Car Dealer websites, shopping sites and any other website with a lot of blog posts (like mine).

See the Multiple Category widget in action at www.goodground.co.nz

Plan Your Category Hierarchy

When you add categories to your WordPress website, decide on the main (parent) categories first, then add your sub categories, each with a parent category selected. In a drop-down list in either a navigation bar or search box, the sub-categories will appear under the parent category. Here are some examples of category hierarchies:

Real Estate Website
Parent Category: Property Type    Sub-categories: Residential, Bare Land, Coastal, Lifestyle Block

Car Dealer Website
Parent Category: Make    Sub-categories: Toyota, Mazda, Ford, Holden, Volvo

Add Super Search to Your Sidebar

1. Click Plugins – add new and search for Multiple Category Selection Widget
2. Upload and activate on your plugins page
3. Go to Appearance – Widgets and drag the widget into your sidebar
4. Add the id numbers of any Parent Categories you don’t want included in the search box
5. Select the parent categories you would like readers to be able to search
6. Select ‘all’ as the default if you only want results displayed when every category selected matches
7. Select ‘any’ as the default if you want results displayed under as many as possible of the selected categories

Search Box Design

You can easily change the spacing and layout of your search box by adding a little piece of css to your theme’s style sheet. Follow these instructions from StudioPress’ Brian Gardener to add a custom heading to your search box like the one I’ve created at www.goodground.co.nz

If you love this plugin and it really changes your website for the better, consider making a donation to the plugin, author, Isaac Rowntree. Click the PayPal link on his plugin showcase website.

When I design myself a new website, this is one of the first plugins I’m adding to help you all sift through the millions of WordPress posts I’ve written.

Expanding Text for FAQ Pages

Frequently Asked Questions pages are difficult to handle well. They tend to be long which means readers have to scroll a lot (not good web practice). As readers are usually looking for the answer to only 1 or 2 questions, ideally you should have  just the questions displayed where they can easily be seen without too much mouse work.

The Expanding Text Plugin from DagonDesign lets you hide the answer until someone clicks on the question. Once you click on a question, the answer text appears underneath, click the question again and it disappears. Your page looks clean and organised, your answers are easy to find and you don’t have to think about creating new pages for each answer  and linking each one.

View this plugin in action at www.orbisflash.com

Create Expanding Text

1. Download the Expanding Text Plugin
2. Rename the file with .php on the end instead of .txt
3. Using ftp, upload the file to your plugins folder
4. Activate the plugin
5. Click on the html tab (top, right of your post’s content box)
6. Use the following code around each question you want to expand

Click on the questions below to see the plugin in action.

How do I create a monthly newsletter showing my WordPress Posts?

What are WordPress Plugins and what do they do?

What should I include on my homepage?

Other Uses for this Plugin

This plugin would also work well for pages listing distributors or branches by region, staff directory pages, product pages, testimonial pages, basically any page with a lot of information grouped with headings and summaries. Let me know how you’re using this plugin to improve your website.

Online Forms Plugin for WordPress

The Gravity Forms Plugin for WordPress works for almost any form you can dream up, is unbelievably easy to use and has so many extra features I am planning several more articles dedicated to this plugin.

You do have to pay for this plugin but the $39 is well worth it. Click on the banner below to purchase or find out more.

Why Use Forms?
Forms are very “take action now”. If a potential client is visiting your website, reading about your product, you don’t want them to have to wait until 9am to call you or print an application to post/fax because chances are they never will.

Important Form Elements
Online forms should be easy for clients to fill in but include enough fields to provide you with the basic information you need. Once sent you should receive the information via email and your client should receive an email with your personal message as appropriate to the form they filled in.

My Favourite Gravity Features

• Linking to MailChimp to add newsletter opt in to all forms
• Being able to personalise the user confirmation email with their name etc
• Using post fields to create a form which becomes a blog post

More posts on these features and more coming soon!

How to Use Gravity Forms

Purchase and download the Gravity Forms Plugin. Upload to your plugins folder and activate. Instructions and screenshots below.

[Read more]

WordPress Posts to E-Newsletter

MailChimp lets you send daily, weekly or monthly e-newsletters containing your blog posts. It is all done using their ‘RSS to Email’ function (Translation: Blog Posts to Email Newsletter).

Email Newsletters with MailChimp

Once you have setup your free MailChimp account and customised an email template with your logo etc, just create an rss campaign. Enter your website’s feed address (if you use WordPress you have one), decide whether you want to show entire posts or just summaries of each, then select how often you want your newsletter to send. Any fresh content/blog posts you’ve published since the last newsletter will slot into your branded template and send automatically every day, week or month. If there is no new content, the newsletter wont send.

How to Create an RSS to Email Campaign

Unless you want to change the frequency of your newsletter or layout at some stage, this is the one and only time you will need to do the steps below. Everything after your rss campaign is scheduled is automatic.

1. Get a free MailChimp account.
2. Design/customise an email template – Before you create your campaign, you’ll want to customise one of MailChimp’s email templates with your colours, logo, links to your website, images etc. This is all done on site and is easy to use.
3. Add a Subscriber List - Add any email subscribers you already have by importing the entire list or adding them one at a time.
4. Create a new RSS Campaign – Choose your saved template and subscriber list. Edit the content section of your template and insert an rss merge tag (you’ll see the link to this) to display either post excerpts or full posts. You can also insert your Twitter feed, Flickr photo feed and all sorts of other info and links.
5. Send Yourself a Test – You can also pay to have your campaign checked on a variety of email clients.
6. Schedule Your Campaign – Select the date you want the first one to send. Eg. Mine is monthly and sends on the 2nd of every month. [Read more]

Create WordPress Posts from Flickr

Linking your Flickr account to your WordPress blog means you can turn any Flickr image into a blog post without even leaving Flickr. Just create a photo category on your website and make it the default category, add your blog to Flickr, then click on the ‘Blog This‘ button above any of your images to create a new post.

You can also add your Twitter account for tweets directly from Flickr. If you take lots of photos but aren’t much into writing blog posts, this could be the perfect way to keep your blog fresh and up to date. It is also a great way to bring your readers attention to your images.

Step #1 – Create a Photo Category

1. Login to your WordPress website/blog
2. Create a new post category for photo posts
3. Go to Settings/Writing and select this category as the dafault post category
4. Further down the page, tick the XML-RPC remote publishing
5. Save Settings

[Read more]

Media Player Inside WordPress

Wordtube is a WordPress plugin which works with the JW Flash Video Player allowing you to embed videos, music and other media files on your website. It is easy to use and looks clean and professional.

Website visitors can view the files without leaving your website or having to download any special software. Your website could be playing:

• your own music
• Your own video clips
• audio/visual presentations
• graphical presentations

Media Player with Custom Skin

The file above was created by Los Chicos as a learning aid for children learning spanish. I have added the Comet skin to change the look of the player.  See the standard player layout at www.loschicos.co.nz.

Like Your Own ‘YouTube’

Once you have activated the plugin on your WordPress website, you can upload all sorts of files including streaming video formats (Format .flv or .swf), sound files as MP3 and JPG, GIF or PNG graphic files. Sort the files into playlists, then insert the individual files or playlists into your sidebar, a post or a page.

Customizing Your Player

Below are just some of the add-ons available to make your media player really work for you:

• Skins – purchase separately to change the look of your player
• Advertising – monetize your site by showing ads or display your own ads
• Sharing – allow others to share your files on social media sites such as Facebook & Twitter or embed your video on their own websites
• Analytics – see whose viewing your video content on your Google Analytics account

Wordtube Setup

1. Download the Wordtube Plugin for WordPress
2. Add to your plugins folder and activate
3. Go to Wordtube under Settings and enter preferred screen sizes
4. Under Layout tab, add link to custom skin if you have downloaded one.
5. Go to Media section at top and click on Wordtube link to add files

If your website is for profit, you need to purchase a JW Player commercial licence. You can do this after setting up the plugin on your site.

Upload a new media file

1. In website admin, go to Media, then wordtube
2. Click Insert New Media File button under list of files
3. Give file a title and add author
4. click on browse to select file from computer
5. Tick relevant playlists
6. Click on Add media file button at bottom

This can take a few minutes depending on the size of the file. Once successfully uploaded, you will see it in the list on the main wordtube page.

Create a new playlist

If you have a lot of files, you will want to group them into playlists before adding them to your pages. The Los Chicos website has a playlist for each term of spanish lessons and each adult learning module.

1. Login to website
2. On the left sidebar, go to Media, then wordtube
3. Click on Edit Playlist link at bottom of the page
4. Give new playlist a title and decription.
5. Click on Add Playlist button.
6. You can preview all your playlists at the bottom of the Wordtube admin page

Insert file/playlist on a page/post

1. In Website admin, go to Pages/Posts
2. Click on title of relevant page/post or add new
3. Click on green icon on same line as bold, italic etc
4. Choose playlist tab & select relevant playlist to insert
5. Save page or click update button on right

Integrating WordPress & Twitter

To keep your website really fresh and your readers/followers up to date, use the Twitter Tools Plugin to completely integrate your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

Some of the best features of Twitter Tools are:

• New blog posts automatically tweeted on your twitter account
• Add your latest tweets to your website sidebar or a page of your choice
• Automatic weekly digest post of all your tweets
• Send tweets to your Twitter account from inside WordPress

Download the Twitter Tools Plugin…

My Latest Tweets

Create a Latest Tweets Page

Once twitter tools is activated and your Twitter account details are entered on the settings page,  show your latest 5 tweets on any page or post on your WordPress website (like mine above)  just add this code where you want the tweets to display. Just change the 5 to show a different number of tweets.

[Read more]

Add Subscribe to Comments Option

Everytime you write a WordPress post, you have the potential to turn it into a discussion by allowing people to comment/ask questions then reponding or replying yourself. Your comments and readers comments you have approved appear on your website below the post they relate to. The dilema is always whether you should email the commenter with the answer to their question as well as posting the answer in your comments or just hope they will return to your post to check if you have answered.

Keep Readers Up to Date on Posts of Interest

The Subscribe to Comments plugin solves this problem by adding an option to your comments form so that readers can receive email notification of any comments added to a post they are interested in. From the reader point of view… you write your comment/question below a post and tick the subscribe button if you want to be emailed the answer.

Why Use Your Comments Form

The comments you receive on your posts and the answers you give go a long way to building your website’s credibility and establishing yourself as the expert. In addition to this relevant comments can attract search engine listings in their own right. I often use the comments form myself to add updates and additional info to my WordPress posts.  Readers can then keep up to date with changes to a plugin, a better technique or a link to another relevant article by subscibing to comments. [Read more]

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