I thought what better to kick start my blogging career, than to post about something I love…Wordpress!
I get asked quite a bit on how to do bits and bobs in WordPress, and the great thing is, there’s so many plug ins out there to help, you can practically do anything!
I thought I’d list a few of my most used plug ins and what they do, some you may know, so you might not.
So here goes…
1. NextGEN Gallery
So here’s a really useful slide show gallery. It has a range of effects for you to choose from, whether you use the slide show or go for the thumbnail gallery, it’s up to you. One of the best things about it is that it can be set up to be fully manageable by a client. All you need to do is add or remove images from the gallery section and your images are automatically added or removed from the gallery in site! Another great thing that seems to be around a lot at the minute, it works on iPhones!
2. Contact Form 7
Contact form 7 is a great way to host contact forms on your WordPress site. With it’s simple and easy to use interface, you can create the perfect form for your website. Whether you need drop downs, text areas, radio boxes, Contact form 7 has it all. It has simple on page validation and sends an email straight to the desired address. I have had a few issues with servers in the past, leading me on to my next plug in…
3. WP-Mail-SMTP
Now I’ve found in the past that when putting a Worpdress site on some servers that the contact form will not work. This could be for a number of reasons but I came across this plug in which solved all of my problems! All you have to do is configure the settings to the same as your servers, so it will send emails. This will all become clearer if you ever have this problem and need it fixing.
4. Custom Field Template
This is a great plug in which allows you to add more editable content areas in your WordPress theme. There some really good tutorials about on how to use it. Simply, with some php and easy set up, you can specify certain areas on your theme template pages to be editable in the back end of WordPress.
5. Custom Post Type UI
In WordPress 3 you have the functions to create custom post types. I’m not going to go into this in too much detail as my colleague has written a blog post about it before which you can find here.
So only a short list, but hopefully they have been of some use!
Please feel free to comment below if you have any questions or want to contribute some of your favourite WordPress plug ins!
