Plugins

January 16, 2012 by Patricia | 23 Comments

If you fol­low me, you might remem­ber this post. Here comes the page which will include all the plu­g­ins I might rec­om­mend in future posts, tweets, etc.

Stan­dard Plugins

Jet­pack is a Word­Press plu­gin that super­charges your self-hosted Word­Press site with the awe­some cloud power of WordPress.com.

It includes things like Word­Press Stats, the URL short­ener, E-Mail sub­scrip­tion (and com­ment sub­scrip­tion), and many more features!

Seri­ously. Who knows what you might do with your theme, but this plu­gin will always fix your RSS feed. You don’t need to worry about any­thing, because the typ­i­cal feed error “XML or text dec­la­ra­tion not at start of entity” or any­thing sim­il­iar to that will go away.

I don’t need to worry about any­thing with all my plu­g­ins, in case you haven’t noticed yet. Once you install this and tell the plu­gin to send you back­ups every week/two weeks/month, it will do just that and send you an email with your word­press plugin. Yay!

BEST. THING. EVER. (Or at least in the top ten!) This plu­gin will mon­i­tor your blog look­ing for bro­ken links and let you know if any are found.

For your Dashboard

This plu­gin has no options. It sim­ply adds a col­umn before the title (far left) the show’s the posts fea­tured image if it’s sup­ported and/or exists.

Add a defualt image sim­ply by fil­ter­ing you own image in. Usefeatured_image_column_default_image or fil­ter your own post_type by using featured_image_column_post_types.

Change the back­ground col­ors of the post/page within the admin based on the cur­rent sta­tus : Draft, Pend­ing, Pub­lished, Future, Private.

Admin Cus­tomiza­tion allows you to change the appear­ance of your Word­Press backend.

The plu­gin allows you to: change the back­end favicon. change the back­end logo. hide the admin logo text and / or logo image. change the logo text font size. change the login page logo with a logo of any width. change the admin footer text. disable dash­board widgets. hide update notices and plu­gin update count. turn on redi­rec­tion to home­page on admin­is­tra­tion pan­els logout.

Cal­en­dars, Events, Man­age your con­tent Plugins:

An easy-to-use visual com­mu­nity cal­en­dar that allows autho­rized users to add, edit, move, copy, resize, delete and fil­ter events into cus­tomiz­able cat­e­gories – sup­ports daily, weekly, monthly and yearly repeat­ing events. Cal­en­dars can be added to your site by typ­ing “[.cal­en­dar]” short­code in the body of a page, a post or a text wid­get. Event lists are sim­i­larly added via the “[.eventlist]” short­code. Both short­codes are highly cus­tomiz­able with numer­ous dis­play options.

As a book­blog­ger you know how hard it is to keep up your sched­ule– book releases, read­ing diaries, posts, inter­views, whatever.

Did you remem­ber to write a post for next Tues­day? What about the Tues­day after that? Word­Press doesn’t make it easy to see when your posts are sched­uled. The edi­to­r­ial cal­en­dar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be pub­lished. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the cal­en­dar, and man­age your entire blog.

You are a book­blog­ger! Plugins

This one is the work of paperthin.de, a very cool fel­low (Ger­man) blog­ger! You can add a pro­gress­bar to your side­bar (sup­ports ebooks, audio­books and phys­i­cal books) like this:

New ver­sion of Ajax Spoiler plu­gin renamed to ‘Advanced Spoiler’.

Show or hide con­tents (text, image etc.) with ani­mated effects wrapped by spoiler markup tag([.spoiler] Hid­den Text [./spoiler]).

Pos­si­bly help­ful plugins

On Word­Press it’s pos­si­ble for you to add other users. There are dif­fer­ent roles: Admin­is­tra­tor, Edi­tor, Author, Sub­scriber, .. And this plu­gin allows you to make the things they are not allowed to see go away. Just for them. It hides these dash­board parts. Very good, isn’t it? Espe­cially if you reg­u­larely have guest-authors.

It makes your site load faster, if you need it to. I haven’t installed it, because, well.. I often edit posts, because I’m almost famous for my typos. But it’s handy!

W3 Total Cache improves the user expe­ri­ence of your site by improv­ing your server per­for­mance, caching every aspect of your site, reduc­ing the down­load times and pro­vid­ing trans­par­ent con­tent deliv­ery net­work (CDN) integration.

Con­tent

Improve your web typog­ra­phy with: Hyphenation — over 40 lan­guages sup­ported; Space con­trol, includ­ing widow protection, gluing val­ues to units, forced inter­nal wrap­ping of long URLs & email addresses; Intelligent char­ac­ter replace­ment, includ­ing smart han­dling of: quote marks, dashes, ellipses, trademarks, copy­right & ser­vice marks, math symbols, fractions, ordinal suffixes; CSS hooks for styling: ampersands, uppercase words, numbers, initial quotes & guillemets.

Revi­sion Con­trol is a plu­gin for Word­Press which gives the user more con­trol over the Revi­sion functionality.

The plu­gin allows the user to set a site-global set­ting (Set­tings -> Revi­sions) for pages/posts to enable/disable/limit the num­ber of revi­sions which are saved for the page/post. The user may change this set­ting on a per-page/post basis from the Revi­sions Meta box.

The plu­gin also allows the dele­tion of spe­cific revi­sions via the Revi­sions post metabox.

Word­Press Related Posts Plu­gin will gen­er­ate a related posts via Word­Press tags, and add the related posts to feed.

Want to replace the old ← Older posts | Newer posts → links with some page links?

This plu­gin pro­vides the wp_pagenavi() tem­plate tag which gen­er­ates fancy pag­i­na­tion links. See the instal­la­tion instruc­tions for using it in your theme.

Add Post Footer auto­mat­i­cally add any cus­tom para­graph, html code, ad code, tech­no­rati tags and/or related links list to the end of every posts.

Easy Columns pro­vides the short­codes to cre­ate a grid sys­tem or mag­a­zine style columns for lay­ing out your pages just the way you need them. Quickly add columns to your pages from the edi­tor with an easy to use “pick n’ click” interface! For usage and more infor­ma­tion, visit affiliatetechhelp.com.

Com­ments Plugins:

Instead of get­ting spammed, this one will only send noti­fi­ca­tions if the com­ment itself has got­ten replied to, not ifANY com­ment has been left. I love it, it’s very good if you are a meme lover, and what the fuck, it’s just brilliant!

Next to all appear­ances of each commenter’s name in the admin, this plu­gin shows a count of their total num­ber of com­ments, linked to a list­ing of those comments.

By default in Word­Press, it is not pos­si­ble to tell via a sin­gle glance whether a par­tic­u­lar com­menter has com­mented before, and if so, how many times.

This plu­gin will visit the site of the com­ment author while they type their com­ment and retrieve their last blog posts which they can choose to include at the bot­tom of their com­ment when they click submit.

The Social Login Plu­gin is a pro­fes­sional though free Word­Press plu­gin that allows your vis­i­tors to com­ment, login and reg­is­ter with social net­works like Twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn, Pay­pal, Live­Jour­nal, Hyves, Вконтакте, Google or Yahoo.

Dis­qus, pro­nounced “dis­cuss”, is a ser­vice and tool for web com­ments and dis­cus­sions. Dis­qus makes com­ment­ing eas­ier and more inter­ac­tive, while con­nect­ing web­sites and com­menters across a thriv­ing dis­cus­sion community.

The Dis­qus for Word­Press plu­gin seam­lessly inte­grates using the Dis­qus API and by sync­ing with Word­Press comments.

Here is another post about inte­grat­ing it. And here is the Dis­qus Com­ments Importer.

Com­ment Rat­ing Field Plu­gin is a plu­gin which adds a 5 star rat­ing field to the end of a com­ment form in Word­Press, allow­ing the site vis­i­tor to option­ally sub­mit a rat­ing along with their com­ment. Rat­ings are dis­played as stars below the com­ment text.

Captchas:

Are you using your own Ama­zon links? Then using Akismet for free is kind of ille­gal. So, instead here are some plu­g­ins you might want to use:

Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam meth­ods to Word­Press forms for com­ments, reg­is­tra­tion, lost pass­word, login, or all. In order to post com­ments or reg­is­ter, users will have to type in the code shown on the image. This pre­vents spam from auto­mated bots. Adds secu­rity. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WP, WPMU, and Bud­dy­Press compatible.

Gab Captcha 2 is a sim­ple, easy-to-solve and effi­cient captcha plu­gin for fight­ing spam in Word­Press comments.

It adds an easy Tur­ing test before each com­ment form. The Tur­ing test con­sists of empha­sized char­ac­ters (red by default) that you must type in a text field. The plu­gin can be con­fig­ured in your admin­is­tra­tion area.

Captcha plu­gin allows you to pro­tect your web­site from spam using math logic which can be used for login, reg­is­tra­tion, reset­ing pass­word, com­ments forms. Added Russ­ian, Ger­man and Dutch languages.

Ani­mal Captcha is a light­weight plu­gin for Word­Press that adds a captcha con­trol on com­ments and reg­is­ter with a nice pic­ture of an ani­mal than any man knows, and yet a robot is unable to iden­tify. It’s nice, com­fort­able and very safe. Lan­guages: Eng­lish, Span­ish, Ger­man, French and Por­tuguese. Try a test.

This is the one I use. The prob­lem is that you’ll need to get your own Sweet­Captcha account, so you’ll spend some time with that. And it appears some peo­ple have had issues with it lately. ; (

Instead of ask­ing the user to input dif­fi­cult and bor­ing text, Sweet Captcha offers a cute and inter­ac­tive friendly user expe­ri­ence. The Sweet Captcha con­sists of a ques­tion the user needs to answer by drag­ging the cor­rect answer.

Add an ver­i­fi­ca­tion code when user post­ing a com­ment to keep robots away. You can use an image ver­i­fi­ca­tion code or a math equa­tion instead.

Robots may post lots of spam com­ments into your data­base. You can add a ver­i­fi­ca­tion code image or a math equa­tion to avoid this.

Cus­tom Post Types, Tax­onomies and Edit­ing these Plugins

If I were you, I’d ask me to do a cus­tomized plu­gin for you, because the Cus­tom Post Types UI plu­gin cer­tainly is cool, but if you do some­thing wrong, you might freak out. Any­way, you can add cus­tom post types and more impor­tantly tax­onomies to your web­site. (Tags and Cat­e­gories are taxonomies)

So instead of adding all the authors you’ve men­tioned in your post in the tag-area, you might add a tax­on­omy called “authors”. (If you want it, mes­sage me and I’ll do a plu­gin for you. It’s very VERY easy!)

Very impor­tant if you move from Blog­ger to WordPress! Convert exist­ing cat­e­gories to tags or tags to cat­e­gories, selectively.

f you need to reor­ga­nize your tags and cat­e­gories, this plu­gin will make it eas­ier for you. It adds two new options to the Bulk Actions drop­down on term management pages:

  • Merge – com­bine two or more terms into one
  • Set par­ent – set the par­ent for one or more terms (for hier­ar­chi­cal taxonomies)
  • Change tax­on­omy – con­vert terms from one tax­on­omy to another

It works with tags, cat­e­gories and cus­tom tax­onomies.

Adds friendly perma­link sup­port, tem­plate files, and a con­di­tional for pub­lic, non-hierarchical cus­tom post types.

Requested:

If you are search­ing for a plu­gin, ask me and I’ll search for some. Here are the ones I’ve found so far:

Sur­vey and Poll Tools

1. Word­Press Sur­vey and Quiz Tool

Allows users to cre­ate quizzes, sur­veys or polls hosted on their Word­Press install. Fea­tures: Unlim­ited Quizzes. Unlim­ited Sur­veys. Unlim­ited Polls. Unlim­ited num­ber of sec­tions for quizzes, sur­veys and polls. Auto mark­ing for quizzes with all mul­ti­ple choice ques­tions. Abil­ity to limit quizzes and sur­veys to one sub­mis­sion per IP address. Abil­ity to send cus­tomised noti­fi­ca­tion emails. Abil­ity to send noti­fi­ca­tion emails to a sin­gle email address, mul­ti­ple email addresses or a group of Word­Press users. Abil­ity to have noti­fi­ca­tion emails only be sent if the user got a cer­tain score. Abil­ity to have sur­veys and quizzes be taken by reg­is­tered Word­Press mem­bers only. Abil­ity to have quizzes and sur­veys with or with­out con­tact forms. Abil­ity to have cus­tom con­tact forms. Abil­ity to export and import quizzes,surveys and ques­tions. Abil­ity to have PDF cer­ti­fi­ca­tions using DocRaptor

2. Word­Press Sim­ple Survey

Word­Press Sim­ple Sur­vey is a plu­gin that allows for the cre­ation of a sur­vey, poll, quiz, or ques­tion­naire and the track­ing of user sub­mis­sions. Scores, Names, and Results can be recorded, emailed, and dis­played in the Word­Press back­end. The plu­gin is jQuery based which allows users to seam­lessly and in a graph­i­cally appeal­ing man­ner, take the quiz with­out reload­ing the page. Each answer is given a weight (or score/points). Once a quiz is sub­mit­ted, the user is taken to a pre­de­fined URL based on their score range; this page can be anyURL includ­ing pages setup in Word­Press that can con­tain infor­ma­tion rel­e­vant to the par­tic­u­lar scor­ing range, includ­ing the user’s score and answer set. The plu­gin can also keep a record of all sub­mis­sions and email results to a pre­de­fined email address.

3. Sur­vey­press / Lime Survey

Using this plu­gin, admin­is­tra­tor can inte­grate Word­Press with LimeSurvey,an open source pow­er­ful fea­ture packed sur­vey tool, which gives the capa­bil­ity of import­ing users from Word­Press to LimeSur­vey and reg­is­tered users of Word­Press site can see the pub­lic active sur­veys in there dash­board and take them as well! Fur­ther­more, grant some users the abil­ity to cre­ate sur­vey or man­age templates(if you wish!) on the basis of Roles or on per user basis! This plu­gin will be very use­ful for those who need a nice website/blog with the power of sur­vey man­age­ment.
Fea­tures: Import users from Word­Press to LimeSur­vey. Map the roles of users in Word­Press with user capabilities/responsibilities in LimeSur­vey. Allow other users to cre­ate sur­vey, man­age labels/templates, cre­ate user and so on in LimeSur­vey via this plu­gin. Make your sur­veys pub­lic (in LimeSur­vey!) so that users can see and take them directly through there dash­board in Word­Press. Cus­tomize the behav­iour of this plugin!

4. Poll­daddy

The Poll­daddy Polls and Rat­ings plu­gin allows you to cre­ate and man­age polls and rat­ings from within your Word­Press dash­board. You can cre­ate polls, choose from 20 dif­fer­ent styles for your polls, and view all results for your polls as they come in. All Poll­daddy polls are fully cus­tomiz­able, you can set a close date for your poll, cre­ate mul­ti­ple choice polls, choose whether to dis­play the results or keep them pri­vate. You can also cre­ate your own cus­tom style for your poll. You can even embed the polls you cre­ate on other web­sites. You can col­lect unlim­ited votes and cre­ate unlim­ited polls. The new rat­ings menu allows you to embed rat­ings into your posts, pages or com­ments. The rat­ing edi­tor allows you to fully cus­tomize you rat­ing. You can also avail of the the ‘Top Rated’ wid­get that will allow you to place the wid­get in your side­bar. This wid­get will show you the top rated posts, pages and com­ments today, this week and this month.

Word­Press Newslet­ter Tools

1. Post Noti­fi­ca­tion

Post Noti­fi­ca­tion. With each new post an email is sent to every reg­is­tered User in the Data­base. The email can be text or HTML.

Where you have to use the 1.1.x one, because every other ver­sion appar­ently is not com­pat­i­ble with the new Word­Press versions.

2. Subscribe2

Subscribe2 pro­vides a com­pre­hen­sive sub­scrip­tion man­age­ment and email noti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem for Word­Press blogs that sends email noti­fi­ca­tions to a list of sub­scribers when you pub­lish new con­tent to your blog.

Email Noti­fi­ca­tions can be sent on a per-post basis or peri­od­i­cally in a Digest email. Addi­tion­ally, cer­tain cat­e­gories can be excluded from inclu­sion in the noti­fi­ca­tion and posts can be excluded on an indi­vid­ual basis by set­ting a custom field.

→ 15 Plu­g­ins to Man­age Sub­scribers

23 Comments

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  1. Rishu
    January 16, 2012 at 3:20 pm

    Vie­len Dank für die tolle Auflis­tung! Einiges kan­nte ich schon, aber ich hab ger­ade auch noch ein paar hil­fre­iche Plu­g­ins instal­liert :D

    Reply
  2. Lady Jaye
    January 19, 2012 at 10:24 pm

    Patty — I am think­ing about mov­ing to word­press. I have to PAY to change fonts on wor­press — I thought it was free!

    Reply
    • Patricia
      January 19, 2012 at 10:31 pm

      @Lady Jaye: Oh, hell. I don't know if you saw my guide post (the new one) I listed some free hosts there, so maybe check them out and if you need any help, let me know! I would def­i­nitely switch to WordPress.org! Cus­tomiz­ing things on Word­Press costs if it's not avail­able on your Theme's Settings-page. And most themes don't have such a page and all these functions. ; (

      Reply
  3. Lady Jaye
    January 19, 2012 at 10:39 pm

    This is look­ing less prob­a­ble, Patty. I know I am cheap, but I don't under­stand why I have to pay $30 a year to change fonts or back­ground — espe­cially when it is sup­posed to be a free blog.

    Reply
  4. Lady Jaye
    January 20, 2012 at 12:58 am

    OH. I didn't real­ize. Thanks, Patty!

    Reply
    • Patricia
      January 20, 2012 at 1:04 am

      @Lady Jaye: Yeah, but that's a lit­tle more com­pli­cated and you'd need a host which is either for free OR costs money, too. So it really depends. If you want to, I can set up a test blog on my server for you to check out and if you like it, you can do your own. : )

      Reply
  5. Lady Jaye
    January 20, 2012 at 1:36 am

    Oh yes, i'd like that, please, Patty. I am think­ing about it, and it is some­thing I might just get off my cheapo bum and do any­way. THanks!!

    Reply
  6. Stephanie Sinclair
    February 28, 2012 at 9:58 pm

    Hey Pari­cia,

    Which sub­scrip­tion tool do you like best? We're using Subscribe2 right now, but I'm not fond of how it for­mats the email.
    Stephanie Sin­clair recently posted Author Inter­view with Kendare Blake and Giveaway

    Reply
    • Patricia
      February 29, 2012 at 1:10 pm

      Hey!

      I'm not so sure myself. I'm using the Feed­burner E-Mail sub­scrib­tion thing, but it's very unpre­dictable. With Jet­pack as an almost inte­gral part of the WordPress.org setup I'd gather that it sends the typ­i­cal Word­Press for­mat­ted emails, but I haven't checked that par­tic­u­lar fea­ture of the plu­gin out yet. I don't even know how the Subscribe2 emails would look like, because I fol­low my favorite blogs via RSS or Atom.

      I have heard, though, that some­times these emails are i.e. cut because you set your set­tings to "Show excerpt". Depend­ing on how exactly you set every­thing up, not only your blog-index-posts, but also your feed would be cut, mean­ing your read­ers would have to visit your blog in the usual browser, i.e. Chrome to actu­ally see all the con­tent so if that is what you were talk­ing about when you said you didn't like the for­mat it could be changed via three clicks or something.

      If you mean that the emails are dis­played in this html-ish form, so a stu­pid font, no real text-align, no pic­tures etc. then maybe check out the Jet­pack Sub­scribe fea­ture! I haven't found the time to sub­scribe to my own blog to see if everything's work­ing, but I'm pretty sure Jet­pack, com­ing from the Word­Press team, should send your fol­low­ers pretty decent-looking emails. *g*

      Urgh. I have a feel­ing that this didn't help at all. *le sigh*

      Reply
  7. Stephanie Sinclair
    February 29, 2012 at 2:28 pm

    No, you were very help­ful! We use the Jet­pack sub­scrip­tions instead of Feedburner's because, like you said, it's unpre­dictable. But for those that reg­is­ter with the blog, I don't think Jet­pack sub­scrip­tions work for them, which is why we have subscribe2. Now, I recently found out they do have an upgraded ver­sion that shows the post in the email cor­rectly, but you have to pay $40! No, thank you. Lol.

    I sub­scribed and reg­is­tered with the blog to see what the emails show up as and you're right about Jet­pack. It's just like the WP.com emails. Though, I think they aren't in excerpt for­mat. I don't know how to change that. There doesn't seem to be an option for it on the dash­board, but it's not a deal breaker.

    I'll just toy around with it until I find some­thing sat­is­fac­tory.
    Stephanie Sin­clair recently posted Author Inter­view with Kendare Blake and Giveaway

    Reply
    • Patricia
      April 18, 2012 at 1:11 pm

      They are in excerpt for­mat because you all of your posts in excerpt for­mat on the blog. You can change that in the Set­tings -> General/Reading or some­where around there.

      I seri­ously love what you to did with your blog. So. Good!

      Reply
  8. Joss
    April 18, 2012 at 5:41 am

    So I have a ques­tion: is there a plu­gin that makes helps with orga­niz­ing review archives by title/author/whatever?
    Joss recently posted Top Ten Tips for New Book Bloggers

    Reply
    • Patricia
      April 18, 2012 at 1:31 pm

      I am not sure if there is a free plu­gin that allows you to do that, but there is a very easy solu­tion for it. Just checked out your blog again to see if it's pos­si­ble for you..

      Okay, you have the cat­e­gory "reviews". That's per­fect! You can either make it even bet­ter to orga­nize them via title/author/whatever with the plu­gin "Types" or just sort them by the actual post-title or date. I'll talk about both solu­tions here and hope that is okay for you. Also, sorry if some­thing doesn't make sense.. My Eng­lish sucks even more today because I was at the den­tists yes­ter­day and am short on pain­meds. XD

      1. You install the plu­gin Types and cre­ate two cus­tom tax­onomies. One is called "Authors", the other one is called "Title". You could also go far­ther and just cre­ate one tax­on­omy called "Archive Tags". I'll go with Archive Tags for now, but the prin­ci­ple remains the same.

      1.1 You can also use the tags you already have, and not cre­ate a taxonomy.

      2. You now add Archive Tags (Authors A, Authors B, Authors C; Title A, Title B, Title C — as in "Author's last name starts with A") to all your reviews! I did that in my Time­line, which isn't fin­ished yet, though. I added Genre, Set­ting, Author, Title, POV, Con­tent, Release, Date I Read The Books, Source etc.

      3. You now cre­ate a .php file. Down­load the theme you use right now and copy the "page.php". Then open the page — Copy.php and change the name to "page-byauthor.php" and look at the actual file.

      It will say some­thing like

      < ?php
      /**
      * @package WordPress
      * @subpackage Yoko
      */

      get_header(); ?>

      < ?php the_post(); ?>
      < ?php get_template_part( 'con­tent', 'page' ); ?>
      < ?php comments_template( '', true ); ?>

      < ?php get_sidebar(); ?>
      < ?php get_footer(); ?>

      You will have to delete the part where it says

      < ?php the_post(); ?>
      < ?php get_template_part( 'content', 'page' ); ?>

      and exchange that for 26 cus­tom loops.

      Cus­tom loops mean that you access the query a sec­ond time, third, fourth time. You have already con­tacted your data­base and server and all of that, but need to do it again, to only dis­play posts that have been tagged, for exam­ple, "Authors A".

      For each of these cus­tom loops you will have to copy­paste and cus­tomize the fol­low­ing lines:

      < ?php $args = array( 'post_type' => 'book-archive', 'posts_per_page' => 500, 'book-tag' => 'authors-a', 'order' => 'ASC');
      $loop = new WP_Query( $args );
      while ( $loop->have_posts() ) : $loop->the_post(); ?>
      " title="" target="_blank">< ?php the_title(); ?>
      < ?php endwhile; ?>

      Things you'd have to change: Post Type. Your post type is prob­a­bly, duh, "post" and not "book-archive". You can also change the order, some­thing that is shown in the Word­Press Codex, and obvi­ously the "book-tag" thing. If you need help with this (if you even want to do this) let me know and I'll set up the whole page for you. :)

      Depend­ing on how you want this all to be dis­played you could use list-items, tables, pic­tures and so on.

      HOpe that helped a lit­tle. Also hope that the codes will be dis­played prop­erly. If not, I'll edit it later. *g*

      Reply
      • Patricia
        April 18, 2012 at 1:34 pm

        Okay, that arse­hole edi­tor totally messed the code up. If you want to know how to do it, I'll send it to you, but I'm too lazy to look for a HTML con­verter atm. *rubs her cheek and whines a little*

        Reply
    • Patricia
      April 18, 2012 at 10:21 pm

      So, I just wrote a tuto­r­ial. If you're inter­ested check it out, if not.. then well, not. *grin* Here it is: http://www.bookexhibitionism.de/wp-article/tutorial-set-review-archive-custom-loops/

      Reply
  9. Joss
    April 20, 2012 at 7:10 am

    I have another ques­tion for you: I see on the main page there are entries that say things like "Just read [book]". How is that done?
    Joss recently posted Review: Cin­der by Marissa Meyer

    Reply
    • Patricia
      April 20, 2012 at 7:48 am

      Let's see.. Ah, right! This is a cus­tom post type. I don't know how much you know about Word­Press, but it offers you by default the post types "post" and "page" (actu­ally also "media" and so on) and then the pos­si­bil­ity to add your own post types.

      You add a cus­tom post type (either in the functions.php or via a plu­gin, e.g. the plu­gin Types) and then you'd want those to appear in your indes/archive tem­plates, right? You can either just show the titles like I do, or the title and excpert, the full post, the thumb­nail etc. I picked the title and put a "Just Read:" in front of it.

      To enable Word­Press to actu­ally show this in the index/home/archive pages I had to cus­tomize three files:

      - functions.php
      – index.php
      – style.css

      Argh. I have to delete most of the php stuff because Word­Press doesn't like me any­more. Okay, this code gives Word­Press more func­tion­al­ity. It goes into the functions.php (hah) and says some­thing like "Don't just dis­play nor­mal posts in my home and archive page, add the cus­tom post types I want to be dis­played, too.

      So, for now all we have the POSSIBILITY to add them to your index page. We still have to do that, though and that's the trick­ier part.

      In the index.php you would want the book-posts to be dis­played dif­fer­ently. So you'd use con­di­tional tags. They go like "IF this and that hap­pens, do that. If not, do some­thing else." It's sim­ple PHP, actu­ally, but while Word­Press suports many things I'm not so sure if there is a "If it's a cus­tom post type called book"-version, so I'll go with the safer option.

      Let's say our cus­tom post type is called "books" and it has a cus­tom tax­on­omy called "gen­res". To make Word­Press process that you only want "books" to be dis­played dif­fer­ently, you'll say "If this post type has any item that belongs to the tax­on­omy 'genre' do this. If not, do some­thing else."

      Again, I'm not allowed to post the php code here. I can send it to you via email later, but it basi­cally says "Dear Word­Press. If it has any book-tag terms, dis­play it like I told you to. If it doesn't, then do the usual stuff."

      Now all that is left to do is adding some stuff to the style.css:

      .justreadouter {
		width:99%;
		margin-bottom:30px;
		padding-bottom:30px;
		border-bottom: 1px dotted #ddd;
		}
.justread {
		background: url('custom/teatime.png') #fff;
		background-repeat: no-repeat;
		margin: 2px 0 2px 0;
		padding: 2px 2px 2px 25px;
		min-height: 22px;
		max-height: 30px;
		font-size: 1.3em/1.4;
		font-weight: bold;
		}

      As always, if you don't really know how it works, send me your theme and the names of your tax­onomies and post types and I'll set it all up for you. :)

      I fear my expla­na­tion wasn't very good, too. Sorry for that. I'm hav­ing prob­lems think­ing straight with my head & teethache, plus the pain­meds I've taken. v_v

      Reply

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