Monthly Archives: January 2009

Turn WordPress into a Shopping Site

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An interesting plugin caught my eye this morning, one called WP E-commerce, a plugin which turns your blog into a fully fledged shopping system, with the ability to sell things straight off your website. Here are the key features:

  • Works with WordPress 2.5
  • Google Checkout – Level 2 Integration
  • DPS / Paystation Integration
  • PayPal IPN integration
  • Web 2.0 powered DropShop Shopping Cart
  • Web 2.0 powered Sliding Shoping Cart
  • Audio Player Module for selling MP3 files and digital downloads
  • Purchase records downloadable as CSV file
  • Support for USA & Canada Tax

I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s worth keeping in mind for the future. Regardless of whether you have a joke blog or an electronics blog, it’s nice to have the options to be able to sell things right off it.

WP Super Cache 0.9

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There’s been a new release of one of the more awesome plugins around: WP Super Cache. In case you’ve never come across it, it gives WordPress a boost by preparing static versions of pages when they are called so that the next time a user visits the site they don’t have to be generated again by WordPress. It’s one of the recomendations if you’re running a High Performance WordPress installation and absolutely indispensable if your server is struggling under the load (More indispensible that weight loss pills for a an overweight hippo!)

The new version has a number of bug fixes and also some new features, like the ability to detect mobile devices and serve them a separate page (allowing mobile plugins to work properly) and some improved efficiencies around cached page storage and garbage collection. If you’re blog is slow, check it out!

WordPress User Guides

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I came across a User Guide for WordPress 2.6 today and although we’ve moved on to a new version, it’s the most recent one I can find. Here’s a copy to read if you’re brand new to WordPress.

wordpress-26_user_guide_final

Now, as 2.7 has been released some of the sections in the document are a bit dated, but you can follow up by reading this WordPress 2.7 User Guide which can help you get your head around the differences in WordPress 2.7.

Above all, don’t be afraid to try new things. Remember, most changes can be rolled back . Given enough laptop memory and hard disk space, everything is possible!

High Performance WordPress

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High Performance WordPress
View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: wordpress scaling)

Interesting slide presentation down at WordPress.tv that talks about performance considerations for WordPress. I think the main message for most people is that if you’re serving less than half a million page views a day, you probably don’t need to bother too much about performance (that is, unless you’re sharing a server with others who are impacting you). If you are serving more than that than it’s time to crack open the diet pills as you need to make your blog as lean and mean as possible. A number of options are discussed, but I’ll leave you to look through the slides for yourself.

Where are you coming from?

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Interesting plugin review down at Weblogs Tools Collection about a plugin called Referrer Detector. It welcomes people based on where they are coming from so that you can always give them a warm welcome. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

It’s a nice idea which would work with most websites, regardless of if there are about satellite internet services or the Isle of Man. The nice thing about the plugin is that it’s driven by AJAX so it plays nicely with caching plugins (not like some other plugins I’ve used in the past).

Enjoy!

Add a TweetRoll to your blog.

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I’ve created a widget to make installing TweetRoll even easier on a WordPress blog. Here how you can do it:

Go to the “Add New” option under plugins and search for TweetRoll:
screenshot-0

Click Install and Activate the plugin. When you go to your Widgets page you’ll see a new widget called TweetRoll. You can add it to a sidebar and configure it by adding your Twitter username.
screenshot-1

That’s all you need to do. You should now be able to see your Tweetroll in your sidebar.
screenshot-2

Let me know if you have any problems.

The widget is actually processed on TweetBurn so it doesn’t affect your API limit. It’s actually quite cool and I had the opportunity to think a lot about caching and other techniques while writing it.

Hmm .. looking at my widget I think I may need to come up with a new avatar. Not sure if I should wear eyeglasses or contact lenses for this one though.

What to look out for in WordPress 2.8

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I missed this, but recently the WordPress theme held a survey as to what their priorities should be for the next release of WordPress. Their current thought are summarised as:

Right now, the lead developers are thinking the top priorities for 2.8 will be widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades.

Those are pretty good goals from where I’m sitting and it was only a matter of time before themes went down the route that plugins have gone. I’m not seeing the right amount of traction around their theme directory yet, certainly not as much as the plugin directory has had. I don’t know if that’s just a matter of time or that theme designers follow a different mind set to plugin developers. I certainly hope to see less theme clones (you know, where someone takes an existing theme, swaps the header image to one of Votive candle holders for example, and markets it as a brand new theme) and maybe having a centralised directory will help that issue.

I’ll let you know as soon as the results of the survey have been published.

WordPress: 1 million downloads (coming soon)

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MELKSHAM, UNITED KINGDOM - DECEMBER 01: A man ...

With the festive season in full swing, Christmas lights in everyone’s house, streamers hanging from the chandeliers and left-over bubbly in the fridge, there’s yet another cause for celebration. WordPress 2.7 has almost hit 1 million downloads.

I just checked out the WordPress Download Counter and WordPress 2.7 downloads are currently sitting at around 803k. It’s pretty impressive when you consider that it was only released 3 weeks ago. I’ll check again in a few days, but I’m pretty sure it will hit 1 million preeetty soon. Lorelle is actually taking bets on Twitter as to when the 1 million mark will be hit!