SEO Update

5 Useful And Creative Ways To Use WordPress Widgets

If you’ve been reading some of the previous WordPress-related articles here on Smashing Magazine, you’ll know that WordPress is much more than a blogging platform. It can be used as a CMS, too. And WordPress widgets are a powerful tool in your WordPress development arsenal.

When you think of WordPress widgets, you may think they’re just a way to rearrange various items in your blog’s sidebar without touching any code. Sure, that’s nice and all, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg of all the things WordPress widgets can do.

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Moving Your wp-content directory

As of WordPress version 2.6, you may change the default location of the wp-content directory. There are several good reasons for doing this, including enhancement of site security and facilitation of FTP updates. Here are some examples:

// full local path of current directory (no trailing slash)
 
define('WP_CONTENT_DIR', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/path/wp-content');
 
// full URI of current directory (no trailing slash)
 
define('WP_CONTENT_URL', 'http://domain.tld/path/wp-content');

You may also further specify a custom path for your wp-content directory. This may help with compatibility issues with certain plugins:

// full local path of current directory (no trailing slash)
 
define('WP_PLUGIN_DIR', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/path/wp-content/plugins');
 
// full URI of current directory (no trailing slash)
 
define('WP_PLUGIN_URL', 'http://domain.tld/path/wp-content/plugins');

via WordPress Configuration Tricks.

Here are my five favorite RSS plug-ins for WordPress:

Subscribe Remind by Trevor Fitzgerald – places a small reminder at the end of each post to remind readers to subscribe to your RSS feed. Check out the below screenshot’s very last line after the related posts. (11,689 all time downloads from the WordPress Plug-in Directory)

subscriberemind

WP Greet Box by Thaya Kareeson – This plugin inserts a welcome note with a link to your RSS feed at the beginning of a blog entry very similar to what the Subscribe Remind plugin does. However, this plug in is setup for referrals from Twitter (pictured below), Google, Yahoo!, Digg, sSumbleupon, Technorati, etc. Plus it has a admin page where you can create your own welcome message for other services. (26,352 all time downloads from the WordPress Plug-in Directory)

wpgreetbox

RSS Footer by Joost de Valk – This is another plugin that adds an extra line to your blog posts that invite your visitors to become subscribers of your RSS feed. Very nice admin interface which allows you to customize the text and its location in your blog post. (22,671 all time downloads from the WordPress Plug-in Directory)

Extra Feed Links by scribu – This small plugin adds auto-discovery links for RSS feeds based on what type of page and content is displayed. It then shows that RSS feed to your browser and it will then add links to those various other RSS feeds for category, tag, search, author and comments. More options to subscribe will usually result in more subscriptions. (2,411 all time downloads from the WordPress Plug-in Directory)

Feedburner Email Subscription Form in a Sidebar Widget. This one is not actually a plugin but a way I get an email RSS subscription form in my sidebar for visitors to sign up for email based delivery of my sites RSS feeds.

To get this form in the sidebar I simply choose a Text widget in the appearance admin panel and then paste in the email subscription form code from Feedburner’s website into its text area and save it. After that I now have the below text box in my sites sidebar.

emailsubscriberssfeeds

via Five Tools to Increase the RSS Subscribers for your WordPress Blog | Weblog Tools Collection.

3. Show related post based on search queries

When a visitor comes to your site through a search engine, they are looking for something very specific. If they land on your site and do not immediately find what they are looking for, they are as good as gone. It would be smart for a blog to detect these search terms from search engine visitors and display a list of posts that closely matches these terms. That way if the current post is not what the visitor is looking for, they will be tempted to visit other posts relating to their search terms before they leave your site.

To implement this, all you have to do is install either WP Greet Box, Referrer Detector, or Landing Sites WordPress plugin.

4. Thank a first time commenter

Most people love human interaction. I love reading blogs because I know that there is somebody on the other side that I can email and chat with. A good way to gain loyal readers is to thank first time commenters for contributing to your blog. This helps you breaks the ice and assure your new reader that you are there if they ever want to email you.

For this feature, you can use the Comment Relish WordPress plugin.

via 9 Ways to Make Your WordPress Blog “Smart” | Weblog Tools Collection.

Introduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are powerful but still yet quite unknown WordPress functions. Imagine you could just type “adsense” to display an AdSense ad or “post_count” to instantly find out the number of posts on your blog.

WordPress shortcodes can do this and more and will definitely make your blogging life easier. In this article, we’ll show you how to create and use shortcodes, as well as provide killer ready-to-use WordPress shortcodes that will enhance your blogging experience.

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Currently the following referrers are installed by default, but you can easily create your own if your favorite referrer is not on the list!

• del.icio.us
• delicious.com
• digg.com
• google.com
• yahoo.com
• stumbleupon.com
• technorati.com
• twitter.com

Download plugin

How does it work?

This plugin allows you to show 1 or more ads in a specific part of your site. The ads rotate randomly and there is no limit to the number of ads that can be put into rotation.

For example…

Let’s say we have a 468×60 ad spot we want to fill and we have 3 different 468×60 ads that we want to randomly show in that spot.

Those ads are:

1. Google Adsense
2. An affiliate banner
3. A house ad

Simple Random / Rotating Ads Plugin for WordPress.

At first glance, it seems convenient that WordPress automatically creates category pages, tag pages, and just about every other type of page you can imagine1. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that this form of page bloat is a remarkably poor site-building practice—it’s a condition that should be avoided whenever possible.

What Every Blogger Needs to Know About Categories — Pearsonified.