Plugins 014 – NextGEN Gallery Plugin

Today we’re covering the  NextGEN Gallery WordPress plugin.

The NextGEN Gallery plugin adds image gallery functionality to your WordPress blog. Click here for a demonstration.

Features include:

  • Flash Slideshow
  • Flash Viewer (as an additional addon)
  • Templates
  • CSS styling
  • Watermarks
  • JavaScript Effect (Web 2.0 feel)
  • Custom Media Gallery RSS feed
  • Sidebar Widget
  • Tag images
  • Detailed descriptions
  • Multi-language support
  • Administration
    • Copy/Move images
    • Upload zip file of multiple pictures
    • Integrates to Post/Page editor (TinyMCE)

The NextGEN Gallery plugin makes it easy to add a modern gallery to your blog. Users knowledgeable in CSS and HTML can take further advantage of this plugin, though knowledge of CSS and HTML is not necessary to use this plugin.

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about the NextGEN Gallery plugin, please go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/.

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Plugins 013 – Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin

Today we’re covering the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.

Google Analytics is a free web site statistics service provided by Google. This plugin allows you to easily add the Google Analytics tracking code to your WordPress blog.

Features include:

  • Easily set your Analytic Account ID
  • Disable tracking of outbound clicks and downloads
  • Set the extensions of files to track as downloads
  • Sub-domain tracking
  • Track AdSense

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin makes it easy to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog and to configure custom features in Google Analytics. If you do not need any of these custom features and you’re comfortable with editing your theme, you can simply add your Google Analytics to the footer of your theme rather than use this plugin.

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, please go to yoast.com/wordpress/google-analytics/.

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Plugins 012a – MailPress Plugin

MailPressToday we’re covering the MailPress plugin to quickly add a newsletter mailing list to your blog.

Features include:

  • Newsletters for (users can subscribe to)
    • Each post
    • Daily (digest of posts each day)
    • Weekly digest
    • Monthly digest
    • Comments
  • Manually send newsletters
  • Detailed logging of sent messages
  • Themes for Email newsletters
  • Add-ons (Sort of like plugins for this plugin)
    • Bulk import tool (comma separated list of addresses)
    • Import data (csv, XML sample, other WordPress plugins from database)
    • Mailing lists manager
    • Newsletter categories
    • Synchronize WordPress accounts with MailPress Users
    • Add roles and capabilities (Special User Roles to apply to WordPress accounts)
    • Custom Fields

The plugin is very powerful which makes it very complicated to setup and configure. It definitely helps to read all of the documentation and have previous knowledge of how to edit source code before attempting to use this plugin.

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Advanced

To learn more about MailPress, please go to www.mailpress.org.

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Plugins 011 – Search And Replace Plugin

Today we’re covering the Search and Replace plugin to find and replace text in your blog.

The plugin allows you to find and replace text found in many of the database fields including:

  • Content Body
  • Titles
  • Excerpts
  • Meta Data
  • Comments
  • Tags
  • Categories
  • Category Descriptions

The plugin permanently changes text in the database. It is highly recommended that you first backup your database using the WP DB Backup plugin before proceeding with this plugin.

Show Feedback

Gene inquired about using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin (covered in episode 5) for multiple WordPress blogs located in sub folders on one web site domain. By default the Google XML Sitemaps plugin will create the sitemap within the root folder of the WordPress installation. Since Web Crawlers look for the sitemap.xml in the root folder of your web site, Gene was wondering if the plugin was intelligent enough to merge each blog’s sitemap into one in the root folder.

Unfortuantely, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin isn’t designed for managing multipe blog installations. Luckily, there is another solution to this problem. Setup a sitemap index as your root sitemap.xml file that links to other sitemaps on your web server. Here is an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/blog1/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2008-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/blog2/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2009-01-01</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

More details on sitemaps is available at www.sitemaps.org.

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Plugins 010 – Contact Form 7 Plugin

Today we’re covering the Contact Form 7 plugin to add custom contact forms to WordPress.

Key features include:

  • Solid set of field types (radio, checkbox, dropdown, listbox, email,  etc…)
  • Email admin(s) of form submission
  • Ability to attach files
  • Captcha image to prevent SPAM form submissions
  • Easily customizable (as long as you know html/css)
  • Translated to over 30 languages
  • Works with WordPress 2.7 (latest version as of this writing)

The plugin is developed by Takayuki Miyoshi. To learn more about Contact Form 7 plugin, please visit http://ideasilo.wordpress.com/2007/04/30/contact-form-7/.

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