Category Archives: plugins

10 E-commerce solutions for WordPress

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One of the great things about WordPress is that it can serve as a platform to deploy a fully fledged site. I’ve just come across a blog post about 10 e-commerce solutions that can turn a plain WordPress site into a selling machine. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling ballet shoes or blu ray disks, an online presence is pretty important for your service and it’s important to make sure your site looks the best you can, and WordPress lets you do that.

Read about 10 Powerful Shopping/Ecommerce solutions for WordPress.

All you ever wanted to know about caching

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I came across a great article about what’s the best caching strategy for WordPress. It’s a run down of the top caching strategies for WordPress together with some pretty exhaustive testing and stats around which is best in which circumstance. Caching plugins are a pretty important strategy for making sure your site can scale. It’s not like you can give your site creatine powder to beef it up; these plugins are the best way to ensure your site keeps running regardless of whether it’s bombarded by hundreds or thousands of requests.

Read the post on WordPress caching and take what you can.

The Hacker’s Diet

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Here’s an interesting plugin for someone on a diet. The Hacker’s Diet is a WordPress plugin that helps you count calories and track weight loss. Whether you’re using fat burners or struggling to keep on the Atkin’s diet, this plugin helps you calculate where you’re going; figure out trends and predict future weight loss.

It’s great to see how you can get plugins to do pretty much anything you’d like to do. Don’t you just love WordPress, together with it’s awesome developer community!

Is it Christmas yet?

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A Danish Christmas tree illuminated with burni...
Image via Wikipedia

Well, there are mince pies in the shops already and I hear you can even get a Christmas tree if you know where to look. The problem is that it’s still September and there’s still some way to go till Christmas, but if you really want to crack out the C9 led christmas lights, the inflatable snowman and all the matching reindeer; well no one is going to stop you.

If you want to bling up your blog, well, check out WP Christmas, a special plugin that adds that festive spirit to your website.So, who else loves Christmas?

Auction plugin for WordPress

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Have you ever wanted to run an auction on your site? Well WP Auctions is the way to go. With a myriad of different features and multiple ways to run an auction experience, WP Auctions will keep your visitors on their toes; coming back to your site for me. It’s easy to use and you can use it to run auctions featuring anything from cheap cigars to luxury sport cars.

There’s a free version to try and choice of fully fledged versions. The premium version includes a multi-site license and bunch of add-ons to make your auctioneering more effective. Check it out!

Video on your website

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If you’re looking to embed flash videos on your website, here’s a plugin that might do the trick for you. FLV Flash Fullscreen Video Player is a plugin that lets you easily and quickly embed a Flash Video anywhere you like on your WordPress blog. Embedding a video is pretty simple, is uses a shortcode in this fashion:

[flashvideo video=demo-video.flv /]

It’s pretty easy to use and even allows your users to view your videos in full screen mode. So, if they wanted, they could rig up their computer to an LCD TV and watch them in their full glory.

Enjoy!

What’s the weather like?

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Here’s another good plugin that can fit quite a few websites. It’s called WP-Weather and lets you pop a weather forecast on your website with no effort at all. It uses the weather from weather.com and even generates an image that can be used on your site.

It’s a useful plugin that will work well on your site, regardless of whether it’s a hyperlocal site, or one that’s dedicated to rv insurance. You don’t really need an excuse really, but the weather display can be quite effective in making your site look a bit exciting.

Google Maps plugin

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Here’s a great plugin if you ever need a map on your website. The Google Maps for WordPress plugin lets you easily embed a map into your WordPress blog without having to mess around with code or embeds. All you need is a Google Maps API key and you can then use shortcodes to add maps to your posts and pages.

It’s a great tool to use on a blog which can be supplemented with maps. So, for example, if you have a travel website, there’s nothing better than a map to help someone out in a travel emergency. They say a picture can convey a 100 words, well; a map can convey just as many.

Affiliate plugin

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Have you ever used your affiliate links on your website? If you have, you should be looking at a plugin like WP-Affiliate. The plugin works by masking your affiliate links and make them seamless against the rest of your website. It also lets you use affiliate links like those generated by Commission Junction, which have are composed of Javascript code and are usually quite hard to embed on your website.

The great thing about the plugin is that you can use it for whatever affiliate link you like. Whether it’s for sears coupons or Amazon books, it’s always nice to get a bit on the side.

Coping with the load

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Are you ready for the big time? What’s the difference you may ask? Well, if your site gets really really popular you may be getting thousands of page hits an hour and unless your server is designed to handle the load, you may find your blog suddenly unavailable. Let’s say, for example you have a blog about consumer electronics, you know LCD TVs, Projectors and other such gadgets. One day you write a blog post with a review of the latest 3D TV and it gets linked to from a major website. All of a sudden, you have a deluge of traffic and your server just can’t handle it.

This is where a plugin called WP Super Cache can help. It builds up static versions of each of your pages so that your server can use them without having to process any PHP. It’s an essential tool for anyone expecting potentially large traffic spikes. So, install it and set it up, and feel free to write all the projector reviews you want; you know your blog can handle anything you can throw at it now.