WordPress editorial calendar; What Does It Do?

The WordPress editorial calendar allows you to setup a schedule of posts to publish or write in the future.  It also allows you to create a schedule of posts that are in outline or draft that you intend to write at a later date.

A new tab is added to the posts menu called calendar, and underneath that you have a wordpress editorial calendar layout of posts, these can be draft, scheduled or published.  You can editr you posts from this screen but I don’t recommend this, rather use editorial calendar as a drafting tool and edit your posts from the normal post editor.

The Problem Is Solves

I often get excellent ideas for a blog post and I immediately drop it into WordPress as a draft post, it will sit there for some time and often it is forgotten about.

Once it drops off the front page of the list of posts, that idea is lost, but with editorial calendar I can set a time when I want to write that post and I’m reminded about it from the visual editor.

I can drag and drop my ideas to different dates if I change my mind, a great post publishing tool all in all.

If you have time sensitive offers or content that needs to go out at a particular time of the year the WordPress editorial calendar will be an excellent tool for you.

Imagine sitting down at the start of the year and planning out all of your content and dropping it into the editorial calendar.

Here’s What It Looks Like

Click for full size image

How I’ve Been Using It

I use it to draft out an idea, and drop it into a publishing slot, you can then spread your ideas out over a period of time.

I brainstorm lots of posts and leave them as drafts and the trouble I have is that they drop off the front page of the post editor and they are lost.

I have not been scheduling my posts through it, but I can see how that would be very useful if I had time sensitive content that I could write now and drop into a calendar in the future (of course you can also use the schedule date function on the normal post editor).

Get A Copy

Editorial calendar is a free plugin available at the plugin repository at this URL

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/editorial-calendar/

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Plugin Review: WordPress Editorial Calendar

I’ve been called in by a number of clients recently to build these types of sites and I want to share with you the easiest way to do this.

Multilingual Plugin

There are a couple of techniques to build multilingual sites, but by far the easiest is to use the premium plugin available from WPML.org.

This is a brilliant little plugin that does most of the heavy lifting for you.  It’s a premium plugin at $29.00 for the blog license, this is the cut down simple version or $79.00 for the full monty CMS version.  I’m going to talk about the $79.00 version in this post because of the powerful theme and plugin localization functions.

Install and Config

It’s just like any other plugin to install, you download the file(s) from WPML.org and upload them to your site.  Because it’s a premium theme you need to add a license key into your config so you can obtain updates.

Once installed the next step is to select the desired languages you want to support.  You will have a default base language, for example English, and other supported languages such as French

Language Switcher

Once the plugin is installed you need to give the option to switch languages, and wpml gives you a language switcher widget, this can be installed in your sidebar, in your header or can be coded into your theme.  Check out this site I worked on for an example of what the switcher looks like.

Once your site visitor selects their desired language, WPML is aware of that language setting and displays the corresponding content, see below the types of content you can translate.

Post and Pages

Once WPML is installed you are given the option to then create a translation of all your posts and pages, once it is translated, the appropriate version will be displayed to your site visitors.

There are tools to manage the translation process and ensure all of your content is multilingual.  There are filtering systems so you can not bogged down by the many versions of  your content.

Internationalize Your Theme & Plugins

WPML comes with a brilliant tool called the string translator.  What this does is give you a list of strings it finds in your plugins and themes.  You can then set the appropriate translation

An Example: it’s probably easier to give you an example.  Perhaps your theme comes with a widget to show calendar dates, and the title of that widget is event calendar and that displays in the sidebar in English.  Using the string translation tool you would search for event calendar, this would return a hit from your theme files, you are then able to add translations into this tool so that if italian were selected the string calendario eventi would be returned.

Using the string translation tool you can go through all the plugins and theme items to ensure all content not just your posts and pages are translated

CAVEAT: I have found that certain dynamically generated content is not translated. for example if your theme pulls data back from a database table it sometimes struggles, in this event you can hard code items in your theme or plugins using this simple code

if (ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE == ‘en’){

do the english version

}

if(ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE == ‘fr’){

do the french version

}

Repeat this process for all languages you support, there are more elegant solutions to coding up themes, if you are a developer you may want to check out http://wpml.org/documentation/support/creating-multilingual-wordpress-themes/ but the solution above is the quick and easy way.

Many theme developers are making their themes WPML ready, check out this list http://wpml.org/documentation/theme-compatibility/

Menus

WPML CMS comes with an in-built feature that lets your code up multilingual menus.  So the idea is build a base menu then duplicate this changing strings and pointing to different pages or custom links depending upon language

Once the language selector is made the appropriate translated menu will be shown.

Sidebars

WPML comes with it’s own set of text widgets so you can control what text aspects are shown for which language, but if you want to set how other widgets display, check out widget logic.  Using this you can set which widgets is displayed depending upon conditional logic.  For example if you wanted a particular widget to only display to german readers set the following in the logic box

ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE == ‘de’

Comments

WPML will give you a translated comments box too so your none base language readers can understand how to join the conversation and leave comments for you.

Translation Services

The company behind WPML Icanlocalize has also embed professional translation tools in WPML, using this service you can get your content translated for you at what seems to me a pretty reasonable price.

You set the posts or pages (or strings translations for plugins and themes) into a queue, these are sent off to the translation service and your text is re-written for you and added back into your site.  I’ve not used this function other than to checkout the workflow, but it looks like a great solution to get your copy in a foreign langauge if you don’t have the resources to do it yourself.

Other Bits and Pieces

I’ve found the google translator service to be invaluable, whilst not 100% correct, it has helped me to translate menus and certain plugin strings http://translate.google.com/

Here is a list of the international language codes http://webpageworkshop.co.uk/main/language_codes

The WordPress Dashboard

You can set your dashboard to display in different languages too, so if you have a team of writers using different languages, the back end menus can be translated too.

Wrap up

WPML.org. is my recommended plugin of choice for multilingual sites, check it out.  If you are a bi-lingual country like Canada (En, FR), or live in a region with many people who have english as a second language (Southern US states En, Es) or are competing in a market where many languages are spoken like European Union (bg,cs,da,nl,en,et,fi,fr,de,el,hu,ga,it,lv,lt,mt,pl,pt,ro,sk,sl,es,sv) this may be invaluable to you.

I carry an official contractor status from WPML, so if you need help creating a multilingual site, check out this page for details

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Case Study: Creating A Multilingual WordPress Site

I thought a plugin review was due.

What Is Cart66

It’s a plugin that allows you to sell physical or digital products.  It also allows you to create membership sites and protect content.  I’m not using that function, so I’ll just concentrate on the e-commerce side of things.

Lite and Pro

There are two versions of the plugin, the lite free version and the premium version with more functionality.  The premium version starts at $89 for a single license and goes up to $299 for a developers license.

Minimal and Simple Setup

Some of the e-commerce plugins I have used are a little unwieldy, but cart66 is very minimal, I plugged in a couple of details like my paypal information, create some products and I was good to go.

I like low overhead simple plugins like this.

Downsides

It doesn’t have as good a set of product display options, so you need to create post or pages for your products and embed a buy now button.

This is not that bad, the way I have overcome this is to create a course category, and list all of my courses with a category link wpdude.com/category/premium-courses.

Cool Features

What set’s it apart from the other e-commerce plugins in my mind are some of the cool feature they’ve built into the plugin, see below a few that I’m using:

Paypal Express Checkout

Using paypal express checkout you can complete the payment process and stay on your own site.   By adding a couple of API keys I can keep people on my site and not send them away to paypal to complete the checkout.

Amazon S3 Integration

I’ve written about amazon S3 a number of times in the past, but it’s a great and cost effective way to store large files.  The beauty of Cart66 integration is that it allows me to store my large course zip files on Amazon S3 and then serve them up only to people who have bought them.

Mailchimp Integration

I can automatically add people who buy from me into a Mailchimp list.

Digital Product Delivery

Built in to the system is the ability to host and download digital products upon checkout.

Wrap Up

I’m really happy I’ve chosen Cart66 to manage my new store, it a simple yet incredibly effective solution.

Check it out cart66.com (aff link)

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Plugin Review: Cart66

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

Update

This post has proved very popular, and lots of people are asking me more about WPML, as a result I thought I would run a course to show people how to build a multilingual site.

If you are interested, please leave your details below, and I will send you details when the course is ready.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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/

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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.

Image by kevinzhengli

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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.

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

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