My client is based in Canada, so he needed a site which was accessible to English and French speakers, I got my first chance to use an excellent plugin I had seen in passing.

Introducing WPML

The plugin I used is WPML, this allows you to create content, and then to add a translation of that content. Then when the language is selected on the front end of your site the appropriate translation is provided. Very neat and very easy to implement.

The plugin can be downloaded from wpml.org, it also supports multiple languages as you would expect so you can see the plugin in action.

Installing The Plugin

The installation is just like any other install, add the plugin and activate it.

Once activated you need to add your language support.  This involves setting the base or default language, in my example this was english, then you need to add your additional languages.

You can select multiple additional languages, and there are many to choose from.

The Language Switcher

There is a widget which can be added to your sidebar which provides a drop down to select your desired language.  There are a couple of styling options to add flags to represent languages.

Adding Translated Content

Here is the function I thought was really handy.  Instead of adding additional blog posts, you add a translation to an existing post.  This keeps the management of your content very neat. When someone switches language, then that version of the content is displayed.

There is also a switch on your dashboard which switches the admin languages excellent if you have site contributors working in different languages.

Translation Services

The company behind WPML Icanlocalize also provides professional translation services, so if you want to provide multi language support but do not have the expertise to create the content, there is a service for this.

It’s A Big Old Plugin

I’ve only scratched the surface of WPML, there are many other features such as supporting themes, and plugins in multiple languages, if you have a requirement for multiple languages, I highly recommend this plugin.

Here’s the link again wpml.org

 UPDATE 13/09/2011

WPML recently went premium, you will have to pay $29-$79 for this plugin

Want Help Building A Multi Lingual Site?

My name is Neil Matthews and I am a WordPress consultant, and I am here to help support your site.

I’m an approved contractor for WPML, so I’m sure  can help you to build out your multi language site.

Here Is The Problem I Solve

I can take any issue you are having building a multilingual site and turn it around into a solution as painlessly as possible for you, be it a problem with plugins, trauma with themes or dilemma with databases.

You don’t need to explain it in any technical detail, I will do that for you, just tell me what you need and I can solve that problem.

How Much Does It Cost?

I work on fixed rate quotations, tell me all you can about your issue using the form below and I can prepare a quote for you. What I quote is what you pay, no price creapage, just a flat rate.

Get a no obligation quote to see what it will cost to fix your problem.

Guarantee

You only pay once the project is completed, so you can feel happy that the work has been done to your satisfaction. I will send you an invoice using my Freshbooks system which can be paid online with Paypal.

If I cannot solve your problem, I also offer a no fix no fee guarantee

Get A Quote

Use the form below to raise a call with me and get WordPress technical support

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How To Create A Multi Lingual WordPress Site

Free For First 2000 Signups

I bet that caught your attention, yes Mailchimp is completely free for the first 1000 subscribers you have.  You can send out 6000 emails per month, with a cap on 1000 emails in any 24 hour period.

This is great if you are just building your list and don’t want to be hit by the fees other email providers impose.

RSS Integration

One of the great featured of Mailchimp is the ability to create a recurring campaign based upon the RSS feed of a site.  I use this for my weekly newsletter.  I publish my content at my blog, then once a week, my RSS feed is automatically packaged up as a newsletter and sent to everyone on my list.

Easy Integration With WordPress

There are an array of plugins out there to integrate WordPress and Mailchimp.  I use a combination of Gravity forms and the Mailchimp integration, but I have also used this excellent one from Mailchimp themselves http://www.mailchimp.com/plugins/mailchimp-wordpress-plugin/ which allows you to create an easily customisable widget in your sidebar.  There is also a function to call which allows you to place the code anywhere in your theme files.

Integration With Other Systems

Mailchimp and a lot of the other software as a service supplies are working together to make integration very easy, for example I used Freshbooks for my invoicing, this integrates with Mailchimp so I could export data from one system into another

There is a big old list of integration providers, check out this page http://www.mailchimp.com/features/extras/

Ease Of Use

I’ve tried systems like Aweber, Constant contact and found them to be pretty un-intuitive, Mailchimp has none of those problems, I found it very easy to use, and they have some very good online training and documentation.

CAVEAT: I found it pretty difficult to get my head around the concept of groups within a mailing list, watch the videos before segmenting your list with groups.

It Does Everything You Would Expect

It has all the other good things you would expect from an email provider, autoresponders, list segmenting, reporting on your campaigns, import lists etc etc.

Give It A Go

I cannot stress how important my email list is to my business, it is the most important way to contact your clients or followers (if you are a pure blog) in a manner that they will give you their attention.  The sooner you start an email list the sooner you will see real growth in your business because of the offers you can make.

Sign up for a free account

Disclosure

If you sign up for Mailchimp I will receive something called monkey rewards, these entitle me to free upgraded on my Mailchimp account.  I can exchange monkey rewards for things such as spam checks, and an increased number of daily sends.

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Why I Use Mailchimp As My Email Provider

What Does It Do?

Serverbuddy collects a series of server configurations from your hosting setup and makes them available for you to review them.

This is very handy if you are troubleshooting setup configuration issues such as out of memory problems.

It also gives you a dashboard and highlights any problematic configurations it finds, the dashboards and ranks them like a traffic light green being good, yellow being suspect and red as a problem (see screen dump).

Click for full size image

How I Use It

I use it in a number of ways, here are the main things I do

• Memory Usage and Available Memory
• Quick security check on file permissions
• Check The PHP config of a client site
• Check the cron for upcoming items.

Get A Copy Of ServerBuddy

Serverbuddy is a free plugin from the premium plugin shop http://pluginbuddy.com, you can download the plugin from the WordPress.org plugin repository at:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/serverbuddy-by-pluginbuddy/

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Plugin Review: Serverbuddy

The majority of crashed sites I am called upon to fix are caused by plugin problems.  The good news is that there is a community moderation process so you can get other WordPress users’ opinions on particular plugins.

Only Get Plugins From WordPress.Org

The community moderation only happens on WordPress.org, and my recommendation is that you only download or install plugins from that site not a plugin authors site.

If a plugin is not hosted on Wp.org this should raise a red flag in your mind, why are they not submitting their plugin for peer review, is it of poor quality, does it contain malware, legitimate plugins will be on WordPress.org.

The exception to this are premium plugins, they will generally not make their plugins freely available on WordPress.org

The Moderation System

On WordPress.org next to each plugin held in wordpress.org/extend/plugins you will see the moderation system,see the screen dump below to see how you can check on a plugins quality.

Click to see full size image

WordPress Version

YOu can check to see if the plugin you are about to use is compatible with your current version of WordPress.  This is a good indicator of the on-going development of the plugin.  If the author is not keeping their plugin in line with new releases of WordPress this could be an issue.

Around about WordPress 2.5 there was a fundamental change in the core WordPress files and I saw many plugins fail because their authors did not keep their plugins in line with WordPress releases.

Last Updated

If a plugin is not being actively developed and frequent updates uploaded to WordPress.org (be it bug fixes or new functionality).

A plugin more than 12 months without an update should make you cautious.

Number Of Downloads

High quality plugins are downloaded more frequently as word of mouth marketing gets out about a plugin and more people opt to use  it.

Average Rating

This is the key community indicator in my opinion, this is the average rating of a plugin.  Visitors to WordPress.org leave a rating from 1-5 on the quality of that particular plugin

On another note, please register and start leaving votes for your favourite and less than favourite plugins so the number of valid votes help to increase the voting population to give more accurate results.

Forums

The majority of plugins available to download from wp.org also have their own support forum on wp.org, visit the forum and get a feel for the support available. Ask yourself the following questions

• Are replies timely
• Are replies courteous, or are they brusque expecting a certain level of expertise
• Are problem being fixed or do people come back complaining
• Are requesting going without a reply/solution
• Are there a large number of requests

You can get a good feel for the quality of a plugin and it’s authors suport from teh support area.

Authors Site Forum

Sometimes you will see that plugin authors host their own support forums on their own sites, it is well worth this trouble to check this forum too.

In the case of premium plugins this is crucial, you are paying for support as part of the ourchase price, check that the support is frequent and of good quality, are people waiting a long time for responses?

Compatibility Voting

A second way wordpres.org visitors can vote on a plugin is to leave a comment if a plugin works or is broken at a particular version.  Check to see if other people are experiencing problems at teh same WP version you are using.

There is always more than one Solution

There is always more than one plugin to fix a problem, if you find a plugin and any red flags are raised, move on and find another.

Installing Over The Net

If you install your plugins from your WordPress dashboard, you also have access to the modeation system, and you are also assuring your self that you are downloading code from WordPress.org.  If you search and install over the net, please use these processes to check the quality of the plugins you are about to install.

Plugins Are Free

Plugins are suppplied as is, and at no cost you should not expect support, but the majority of plugins are well supported by their authors.

The WP Owners Club

I have an entire module all about understanding plugins and a video demonstrtation of the concepts I talk about here.  The WP Owners club is my WordPress support and training community, you can get more details including how to join at my WP Owners Club Page.

Image by andymangold

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Validating Plugins

What It Does

Once you have installed WP_Overview it give you a new dashboard widget which gives you a point in time report on memory usage, and various other configuration options for your site.

Download WP-Overview

You can get a copy of wp-overview from the following URL

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-overview-lite/

Installation

There is no special inssallation instructions for this plugin simply upload or search for wp-overview

Here’s What You Get.

Here is a screenshot of wp-overview from my site.  I’ve blank out some of the sensitive information

Click on image for full size view

How I Use WP-Overview

I use it on performance or memory troubleshooting projects.  This give me a feel for the available memory and how much is being allocated to WordPress.

WP Troubleshooting

There will be a detailed video on using wp-overview in my WP Troubleshooting course along with detailed instructions on how to diagnose memory errors.

Image by wilcozpics

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Plugin Review: WP-Overview

I think the post still stands and I want to update it by telling you about a new plugin I have been alerted to.

Plugins Garbage Collector

The plugin I have found is called Plugins Garbage Collector, it can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/plugins-garbage-collector/

It’s an incredibly useful plugin that helps to find redundant tables in your database which can then be tidied up.

What It Does

This clever little plugin references your installed and active plugins looking for table references, it then matches known and used tables up.  The remaining tables are marked as suspect and a list of tables you can delete are offered.

Running The Clean Up

A new menu option is added to tools-> Plugins Garbage Collector, click on scan and a list of suspect tables is presented.

Click to see full size image

Select the tables you want to remove and click on the delete button at the bottom of the page.

Backup Backup Backup

It does without saying (hopefully!)  that you should backup your database before running a plugin which will delete data from your site’s database tables.

For example the tables used by my theme headway have been flagged up, if I deleted them my site’s look and feel would be corrupted.

Follow the wise words of Spiderman “with great power comes great responsibility”.

Wrap Up

If you need help identifying if your tables are valid or not give me a shout. Hat tip to Michael Martine at Remarkablogger who brought this to my attention.

Image by paulk/

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New Year Blog Tidy Up 2011 Version

WTF Give me Some Examples

It’s probably easier to use examples to explain what the plugin can do:

• You may only want an email sign up widget to appear on the home page
• You may only want your twitter link to display on a blog post not a page
• You may want your categories widgets to appear on your contact page (running out of examples already)

WordPress Conditional Logic

Sorry but this plugin requires a little understanding of WordPress conditional logic to work, but once you have mastered that you can control which widgets appear where.  Full details of WordPress conditional logic can be seen using the following links

http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags

Some Examples

Here are some examples of the logic in action

• is_home() – this will check for the home page
• is_page(‘contact’) – check for the page called contact
• is_sigle() – this will check for an individual blog post

Hello Operator

There are a number of operators available in WordPress so you can join logical statements to create more complex tests, here are some example operators.

• && – and
• || – or
• ! – not

So you could say I want to display a widget on the home page or the contact page, the statement would look like this

is_home() || is_page(‘contact’)

Installation & configuration

The plugin is install as any other plugin, once activated a new form field is added to the bottom of your sidebar widgets.

Compose a logical statement and add it to the widget logic form field and you will only see that widget when the conditions are met.

Wrap Up

Widget logic is an excellent plugin to help control where widgets are displayed, if you are using WordPress as a CMS, and not a blogging platform this is an excellent tool to add to your toolbox.

If you need help building your logical statement you know which link to follow hint this one http://wpdude.com/wordpress-technical-support

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Plugin Review: Widget Logic

Here is the download link http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/myftp/

What Is MY FTP

It is a plugin that creates an FTP console inside of your WordPress dashboard.  FTP standard for file transfer protocol, and once this bad boy is installed you get the ability to navigate your WordPress file system, upload files and even edit files.

One limitation of MY FTP is that it uploads only, there is no download function.

The Real Power of MY FTP

The real power of MY FTP is not it’s FTP capability, rather it is that is allows you to edit WordPress files without the need to have FTP credentials.

Imagine you need to edit the wp-config file and don’t have ftp access to a site, just install MY FTP and there you go, open up the file browser, navigate to the file in question and click on the edit button, excellent.

Imagine you need to add some plugin code to a theme file, but cannot get access to that file because it is buried deep in the file system, bingo fire up MY FTP browse to that file and make your changes.

Installation

The plugin has a standard installation, either search for “my ftp” note the space there is a clone with no space from the plugin dashboard or download it from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/myftp/

A Word Of Warning

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, you can really screw up your site with MY FTP if you don’t know what you are editing. Use it with caution, if you don’t know what you are doing, call in the experts, you have been warned.

Wrap Up

As I have said MY FTP has gotten me out of all sorts of technical support pickles, check it out.

Image by trainor

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Plugin Review: My FTP

This is my first attempt at screen casts to demonstrate plugins, please let me know how this format works for you.

About Login LockDown

Security plugin to stop mullitple unauthorised access attemps

Download from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-lockdown/

Image by chrissy575

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Plugin Review: Login Lockdown

What is wp-malwatch?

It’s like an anti virus scanner for the files on your WordPress install.  So if someone has hacked your site and installed malware code on your system, wp-malwatch will help you find it.

Installation

wp-malwatch is much like any other plugin, you can either search for it and install it or download it from here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-malwatch/

Configuration

Once installed there are a number of config options, plus one special hint I will give you.

To configure the plugin goto the wp-malwatch-> configure option.

bizarrely, not all of the options are enabled, I say switch everything on.  See the screen dumps.

Keyword scan – this check inside of your WordPress files for particular strings, as you can see from the screen dump I have added base654_decode.  An increasingly popular way to hide hackers code is to encrypt it, if you see files with base64_decode and huge strings, this is probably malware code.

Hidden files scan – hackers often setup hidden files which contain suspect code, this option will find those files.

.htaccess scanning – another trick is to add malicious re-directions to .htaccess files, wordpress normally has these files, but you should be wary of the contents of these files, and any additional .htaccess files you find

uploads directory – this is a favoured technique to hide php script files deep within your upload file structure, this is not an easy thing to find, but this excellent plugins searches for the miscreants.  This has found issues on a couple of my clients sites and saved me hours of searching.

File pattern scanning – like virus signatures, some hack attacks have specific file patterns, these are the known attack signatures.

Locale scanning – the file locale.php is often targeted by hackers and rogue redirects added, this needs to be scanned

Running the Scan

A widget is added to the dashboard home page of your site, or you can run the scan from wp-malwatch->detailed report.

IT WILL RETURN HITS DON’T PANIC

The plugin will now return a list of files which are suspicious, review each file, and view it’s contents.

False Positives

WP-Malwatch errs on the side of caution and brings back anything matching  your search patterns, which is good, but requires that you have the ability to review and understand what it has returned.  There will be some false positive results.

For example there will be a .htaccess file in the root of your site, this will be flagged up.

Remove Malware Files

If you have been infected, I recommend re-installing a clean version of WordPress, and any plugins or themes that have been infected, and deleting any files which should not be there for example in the uploads directory.

Then change all of your passwords; database, ftp and WordPress users.

How Often should Your Test Your Site

I recommend once a week, it does not take very long.  A function I would like to see on the plugin is an automated weekly or monthly check that send you an email of the results, but hey you cannot have everything in a free plugin.

My  Results Are Freaking Me Out!!

If you need help translating the results of wp-malwatch to see if you have been infected, why not book a coaching session with me and I can take you through the results.

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Plugin Review: wp-malwatch

Google Analytics

I have google analytics installed on my site, and I will use this less than once a month.  It gives you very detailed and in-depth stats about your sites, and I DO recommend that you use GA, it’s free and easy to install, but for at  a glance day-to-day stats I want something less detailed and easier to use.

WordPress.com stats

I have the wordpress.com stats plugin installed on my system.  This plugin was developed for hosted wordpress.com blogs, but has been made available to the wider WordPress community.

You install it like any other plugin, and it gives you a dashboard widget and a more detailed site stats page.

The plugin can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

API Key

The stats program uses your wordpress.com api key, the same one used by Akismet.  To get an API key visit wordpress.com and sign up for a free account, then go to the dashboard and retrieve your API key.

It is not he easiest thing to find, have fun.

So what does it give me?

Using WordPress .com stats I can get an “at a glance” overview of my sites performance.  I can then drill down on the various stats to get more details information.  My at a glance screen gives me

• Total site visitors for the last 30 days
• Top ten referrers (where the  traffic came from) for yesterday and today
• Top ten posts or pages for yesterday and today
• Top ten search engine terms for yesterday and today
• Top then click aways (useful for people watching affiliate sales) for yesterday and today
• Recent incoming links

For me this is more than enough information to get a quick overview of how my site is working, if a new blog posts is resonating with people, if my marketing is bringing people to my services page.

Check out these screen dumps for an idea of the graphs and stats http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/screenshots/

You can click into any of the stats and get more detailed over time results.

Give It A Go

It is not the most powerful stats package out there, if you need details such as bounce rate or segments from where your visitors are coming from you definitely need something like google analytics, but a quick check to see if people are reading your stuff, and wordpress.com stats will suit you down to the ground.

I’m keen to know which other stats packages people use, drop me a line in the comments if you are using something not mentioned.

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Lightweight WordPress Visitor Stats

You Can Have Site Visitors Create Blog Posts from Contact Forms!

How cool is that, in the past I have done this type of work in a very convoluted manner by setting up post by email, but all you need to do when you have Gravity Forms is setup a form, and using the special form fields, you can pull together all of the

User Generated Content

If you have a lot of guest posts or for some reason need user generated content, then this may be for you.

How It Works

You setup a contact form as normal, but using the special fields in Gravity form, you add post title, post content categories tags etc (see bottom of this post).

A visitor to you site can now add a blog posts from this form without logginng into your backend dashboard.

Approval Process

Once the post has been added it is held as a draft and then an admin or editor level user needs to approve it before it appears on your site.

Check Out Gravity Forms

If you want user generated content, but don’t want to give users access to you backend dashboard, then check out gravurity forms for this task.

If you found this review useful please use my affiliate link – buy Gravity Forms.

Write A Post

If you feel like writing a guest post for me, please use the form below

Oops! We could not locate your form.

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Using Gravity Forms to Create Blog Posts

People will make a snap decision about your site, if it is not looking at it’s best you risk loosing that visitor as a subscriber or as a customer for your products or services.

Guess what there is a plugin to solve this problem.

Maintenance Mode

My favourite plugin to solve this problem is called maintenance mode http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/maintenance-mode/.

This plugin allows you to intercept all visitors to your site and display a maintenance message to them letting them know your site is offline for a short period of time.

How It Works

The plugin checks to see if the site visitor is logged in, if they are, they can see the site as normal, if they are not logged in, a special message is displayed, telling people the site is offline for essential maintenance.

Set Your Own Splash Page

The message displayed to visitors is completely configurable, but be aware this is an html page so some understanding of the markup tags is required.

There is a default message you can tailor.

Options

There are a number of options for this plugin including:

Make certain pages / posts available during your maintenance mode.  This is very useful if you have vital pages you need available during your downtime.  An example of this may be your services sales page if you are running an advertising campaign.  You don’t want to pay for advertising clicks that cannot connect to their target page

There is an option to set a search engine friendly 503 service not available code, this tells the search engines your site is down for maintenance and not to attempt to re-index.  This may protect your site rankings if you are planning to take your content offline for an extended period of time.

Disable back end access to admins only.  If you have users on your site, if they login they could get access to your content, if you want to lock everyone out, use this option.

The Nagging Message

One great feature of maintenance mode is the red nag box, it is very easy to forget that your site is locked down when you are logged on and can see the site as normal

I have fallen foul of this a number of times, please remember to deactivate the plugin as soon as your site is back up.

See it In Action

I am currently working on a project with Jonathan Woodward , we are not ready to take the covers off our venture, so the site is wrapped with maintenance mode.

I customised the message by adding a sign up form for our email list.

Get an idea of what the plugin looks like at premiumheadwayskins.com

Wrap Up, Keeping It Under Wraps

If you have a need to stop access to your site for a short period of time, consider using the maintenance mode plugin.

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Plugin Review: Maintenance Mode

DISCLOSURE: links to gravity form are affiliate links.

What Was I Using

I was happily using contact form 7, an excellent and slick little plugin which provides most of the contact form requirements I need, but there was still the last 20% i needed which  couldn’t get from my current plugin.

What Was The Problem

I need a little more from a contact form than contact form 7 supplies me.  I needed the following:

The ability to capture the php referer variable and the query string to see where my contact requests were coming from, is something I really wanted, there is no simple way to code contact form 7 to do this.

Redirection to another page upon completion.  I need the redirection to enable a conversion tracking script. I was able to hack the plugin and re-code it to do this, but every time I updated the plugin, I had to re-code it,what a pain.

What Gravity Form Brings To The Table

Gravity form is a premium plugin that meets my needs and then some, using Gravity form will greatly streamline my service business estimation process by adding new clients to my Freshbooks system, and creating a draft estimate, add all new potential clients to my mail chimp mailing list, let me capture where my leads are coming from, let me automate my referral payment system, redirect to my conversion script page, send out an autoresponder message to my clients to let them them know they are in the system, I am one happy bunny.

This is one feature rich plugin,a full list of Gravity form features can be seen at Gravity Forms.

Integration Movement

There is an excellent thing going on in the software as a service industry which allows service to integrate with one anther, this is where Gravity Forms really won me over was that I can integrate a contact form with the other systems I use to run my business.

From one contact form I can:

1. Add the person to my mailchimp email list
2. Create a new user and prepare a draft estimate in my freshbooks account.
3. Capture the querystring – I use this to mark my estimates with affiliate IDs (want to join my affiliate system)

This may not seem a big deal to you, but I prepare quite a few quote each week for my services business and having to re-type contact details into freshbooks and then importing these contacts into my email list is a time consuming and dull, and if you are anything like me dull tasks get overlooked.  As a result I was not recording new clients some of the time.

Cost

This is a premium plugin,but I think the functionality it adds over free plugins makes it worth the while.

• single site: $39
• multi site: $99 (up to 5 sites)
• developers: $199 (unlimited sites)

Need A Better Contact Form?

I purchased the developers license of Gravity Forms so I can build my clients cool interactive forms, request a quote for me to do this for you on my WordPress helpdesk (powered by Gravity Form)

Alternatively why not buy a copy if you found this review useful please use my affiliate link – buy Gravity Forms.

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Plugin Review: Gravity Forms

When I shake my fist at the universe and have a good old grump on Twitter, I usually find someone who will tell me a solution, this time I was not disappointed.

Stop The Presses

I have found a replacement for the standard visual editor spell checker, and this is called After The DeadLine.  The name comes from a review process the Times runs which picks up and highlights typos, grammatical errors and style errors which have gone to print, the deadline has gone, so the errors were published.

Letter To The Editor

After the deadline has been acquired recently by Automattic the lovely people who wrote WordPress, so you know it is going to be good.  I’m reading between the lines here, but I guess they saw the need for a better spell check solution.

You are not going to cough up your hard-earned money to buy a solution if it is not up to par.

Hold The Front Page

After the deadline is a spell check and  plugin for WordPress with a little more added on, it also has a grammar checker and a style guide.

You are probably familiar with spell checkers and grammar checkers, but style guide for those of you who have not studied journalism is a standard style of writing something so it is consistent across your publication.  For example if you date style if October 21st, an incorrect style would be 21st of October.

Is Your Source Reliable?

You can download After The Deadline here http://afterthedeadline.com/

Installation Insanity Ensues

Installation is a standard affair, upload th plugin to your wp-content directory and activate it.  The plugin requires an API key, this is where I cam a little unstuck.  I presumed since it was an Automattic plugin it would be the usual API key I use for Akismet and WordPress.com stats, but no it is a separate api that you need to register at afterthedeadline.com to retrieve.

Come on Automattic, how you make my life difficult, I am of course joking,I am sure this will be transitioned in due course, this is a fairly new acquisition for Automattic.

What The Plugin Does, More On Page 13

The plugin is a direct replacement for the existing spell checker and is activated from the visual editor by clicking on the spell check icon

The plugin will underline the perceived errors, red for typos, green for grammar and blue for style issues.

Clicking on teh highlighted word or phrase provides a drop down of suggested replacements, standard fare for a spellchecker.

My Two Cents The Weekly Column of WP Dude

I really like this replacement spell checker, it has a slicker interface, and a bigger database of words.  As an Englishman, is appears to cater for my spelling style (s instead of z in words like utilise) and the style guide will help to keep my “blog voice” standardised.

Using After the deadline is more like the spellchecker of a word processors than an after thought to the visual editor.  Check it out you will not be disappointed.

Other Plugins By Automattic, Struggling to Get A Print Journalism Cliche in Here

Here are some of the other excellent plugins supplied by Automattic

• Intense debate
• Akismet

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Plugin Review: After the Deadline

In this post I want to talk about what WordPress membership plugins do, the criteria I use when selecting a plugin and lastly I stack three popular plugins up against each other using my criteria to see how they perform.

What Is A WordPress Membership Plugin?

A WordPress membership plugin is an extension of your existing blog which allows you to protect certain areas of your blog and only let registered users read or download content. You can then charge for that content, whilst giving away other posts for free.  This is also know as the freemium business model.  This is great as you can prove your authority over time with quality free blogs posts and then create a premium section.  Your existing readers are already sold on your knowledge and are likely to take up the premium section.

Why is this good for bloggers?  Well you can create your own products to monetise your site rather than relying on adsense or other peoples affiliate programs.  This creates an income and increases the value of your blog if you want to sell it on in the future as a going concern.

The plugin will deal with the complex process of signing up new users, integrating with a payment processor such as Paypal, granting access to content and protecting content if someone leaves your membership site.

These plugins are inevitably premium and you should expect to pay in the region of $50-$100 for your membership site config.

What To Look For In A WordPress Membership Plugin

I have worked with quiet a few membership site plugins,  here is my shopping list of features you should look for:

Payment Processing

You want to look for a plugin which can handle the major payment gateways, by that I mean Paypal,1Shopping Cart, Clickbank etc.  Your plugin developer should already have done the hard work integrating with a credit card processor, you should only need to supply your credentials so money is deposited to your account.

You should also look for a membership site plugin which will deal with cancellations of the recurring payment on you site and automatically remove premium content from users who do this.  An example of this is Paypal IPN integration.  If a user creates a subscription and then cancells it, there should be a system in place for paypal IPN to contact you site and mark a user as unsubscribed and be removed from access to your system.

Affiliate Marketing.

Ideally the plugin you choose should allow you to record affiliate sales.  Affiliate sales are when you partner with other site owners to promote and sell your membership site.  In return you will pay them a commission for each sale made.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful way to market your site to a wide audience, and since a membership site is a write once, sell many model, you can quite happily sell in bulk and pay your affiliates a decent commission.

The way an affiliate marketing system works is that your partner will signup and be given a specific URL to direct people to your site e.g.

wpdude.com/?aff=bob

Your affiliate software will pickup that the visitor is from Bob’s site and setup a cookie, if a sale is made, another script is run, if the cookie is set then a sale is attributed to bob.

The thing to look out for in your membership plugin is the ability to run that second script which records the sale. There is an alternative to this, and that is to use a payment processor which has an inbuilt affiliate system such as Clickbanks or 1shoppingcart

For more details on affiliate marketing, I suggets you read Darren Rowse’ category on affiliate programs http://www.problogger.net/archives/category/affiliate-programs/

Protecting Content

Your membership site must have the ability to protect content from none paying site visitors, this is an obvious thing, but content can be protected in a number of ways.

Protection of pages – restrict if a visitor can see a particular page

protection of posts – have the ability to mark a particular post as premium content

Partial protection of posts – Does you plugin have the ability to provider a teaser of a page or posts content and have the rest password protected.

Categories – Other things you may want are to protect whole categories

Downloads - If you site has multimedia content, you may want to protect what can be downloaded from your site, check to see of your plugin of choice can protect a link to a file on yoru system.

Membership Levels

You may want various levels of content protection in your program for example there may be some free basic protected content and then a gold level membership.

Another area to consider are free trials, does your plugin give you x days free before locking down asking for payment?

Integration with email autoresponders

Conventional internet marketing wisdom says get someone onto your email list and you can convert that users much more easily, so is there the ability to integrate your membership site with an autoresponder?

Sequential content delivery

Membership sites attempt to retain members for as long as possible and recharge them with a recurring subscription fee.  I like a membership site config which allows me to drip feed users with content allowing a controlled delivery of content rather than informaiton overload which can cause people to drop off your membership site.

After sales support

These types of plugins are complex.  You need to have confidence in the after sales support of the team who developed the plugin.  You are fundamentally changing the way your site works when you install a membership site plugin, can you be confident that there is support at the end of an email to help you out of your site goes phutt once the plugin has been installed.

The Plugins I have used And How they stack up

I have worked with three of the top wordpress membership plugins, they are:

• Your Member
• WP-Member
• WishList Member

Here is a matrix of how they stacked up using my critera above:

My Recommended Plugin

I recommend wish list members, it is a very close call with Your Members, but the after sales support is more slick.  It is the most expensive, but the native Aweber support makes up for that cost.

Need Help Building A WordPress Membership Site?

If you need help integrating your blog with a membership site plugin, I would be happy to give you a quote, please visit my service page and let me know your requirement.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

WordPress Membership Plugins