Working with WordPress and its Plugins

If you visited this web site over the weekend, you have probably noticed that it hasn’t been well – even though it hasn’t been out of action. It’s my fault entirely. I spent the whole week-end (apart from necessary time out) working on the web site. I’ll be honest. I didn’t mean to be doing that at all, but it ambushed me. To understand, you have to understand how the underlying technology to this web site, WordPress, works, so I’ll explain as briefly as I can.

Themes

WordPress is a content management engine that stores and presents web pages, and allows you to create new ones, change pages and accept comments from site visitors. The look and feel of the web site is not determined by the WordPress engine. The primary look and feel of the web site come from a “theme” which is actually a “plugin” to WordPress. There are thousands of WordPress themes, built by hundreds of theme authors, who are programmers.

The theme I use is Talian 1.0, but not in its native form. I’ve messed with it to make it do a few things that it wasn’t designed to do. That was all well and good, but as I wrote last week, I’ve been upgrading WordPress. The outcome was that the photogallery I use, the NextGEN image gallery, no longer worked properly and all the images were in a mess. I’ve been gradually fixing the images ever since and I’ve nearly finished work on that.

But while I was doing that I also decided to do something about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and I therefore downloaded a WordPress tagging plugin Simple Tags. Having implemented this, I realized that I needed to do a proper tagging job on all my postings which now amounts to more than 600. This is a boring background task, but I could combine it with changing the images on all postings.

Plugins

As I was adding plugins I surfed through the very many plugins that WordPress offers to see if I could find other useful plugins and I found quite a few. But it took a long time and there was a good deal of trial and error. And here’s a point:

One of the defects of the whole plugin idea is that there is simply no easy way to sort out plugins that will be useful to you and plugins that will not.

This situation is made worse by the fact that there is no easy source for recommendation and some plugins really do undersell their usefulness. So I have decided to set up a web page which partly addresses this. Click here if you want to visit it. I’ll name specific plugins, what I use them for and why I think they are good.

So the weekend concluded with me discarding a highly functional AJAX plugin because it simply messed with my web site and I couldn’t quickly fix it. (I’ll come back to it because I want AJAX working properly on the site.) I also discovered another really useful plugin called  “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” which, after a little trial and error, I concluded was the best Related Posts plugin. It now provides three related postings at the bottom of every posting – however implementing it forced me to do some instant redesign of the posting footer. And that caused me to rethink the way I’m using the Talian theme and that’s why the web site has been a mess over night…

Another Apology

I apologize to anyone who visited the site and found it to be only half-working. I threw in the towel at about 2.00am knowing that I’d left the style sheet in a hardly functioning state – and to be honest I shouldn’t have been working on the “live” site, but it suddenly became much quicker to do it that way, for reasons are too complex to explain here.