Retina Display, Task management, Content, Comments, and more on Episode 75 WordPress Plugins A to Z

http://www.johnoverall.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Episode75-WPPlugins-A-to-Z.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS | More

It’s Episode 75 and we’ve got plugins for Retina Display, Task management, Content, Comments, and more. It’s all coming up next on WordPress Plugins A-Z.

This Podcast Can now be found at WPPluginsAtoZ.com

>>>>>>>>>>Self Promotion From John an Marcus<<<<<<<<<<<<

Johns WordPress training classes starting soon, almost ready with seminars online training and for those in Victoria classes that will starting on a regular basis here… As well as WordPress Emergency WordPress support you know when you see the ever favorite White Screen of Death. Marcus Offer SEO listen for details.

John’s Rant:

I have recently started seeing some real pain in the ass emails for what I consider stupid shit. I received an email this past week from some twit who was asking me to remove some very old links from an old website. Seems once upon a time I had used articles from a article directory on a niche site I built a couple of years back. Now that Google is getting all the paranoid to help clean up the web these folks who had done some of their marketing via these articles are scanning the web and making lame threats to get folks to remove the links like this but monkey who had sent me this email. I did remove his content but I also sent him a worded email about how you can get better results by asking and not making false threats like a lawsuit because I was linking to his site. Seems I was correct in remembering that the courts have upheld linking to a website that is publicly available cannot be controlled. After all this it does dawn on me that if you work for the dark side you have some major opportunities to destroy your competition through negative SEO though.

Now that that fun is over on the plus side I have been pretty busy this week seems when it rains it pours. Just as I thought I had hit a wall of slowdown lots of great folks started asking for some work to be done on their sites. Good timing also as I am about to launch a new major project I was wondering if I would be bored for a few days but no longer The work is lining up again thanks everyone and a few of you even listen to the show so thanks.

Also I have been seeing an increase in articles about how you should avoid Free WordPress themes. Something to think about..

Plus the spammers of domain sales have hit an all time low.. I own a domain called tamethewildweb.com which is due for renewal and they are trying to sell me my own domain name at a reasonable price…

Also as a warning to others if you are planning to move to a new host don’t tell the old one until you move. Ran into an issue helping a client move this week when as a nice guy he told the old host he was planning to move and they lock his account before we could get al his files and now he has to get them to unlock everything thus delaying the move.

Some notes on Managewp.com seems it is actually pretty nice, listen to the show for all the details. I had 30 min before show so set it up and configured 5 sites This is something I think would be great if you have similar sites, but it does have the ability to control site by site. Plus you can clean your database as well as spam comments plus deal with comments for approval.
Something interesting, on one site it did the update and crashed then when I did the plugins it righted itself. Probably because I did WordPress update before plugins but because I was doing plugins from this dashboard I was not locked out until I fixed issue

Plus 3.4 downloads now over 3mil

Shout Outs:

Oliver over in Denmark –Thanks for the great email encouragement and comments… Look forward to you dropping us a Speakpipe message.. You will be getting a response to your questions shortly and next show I’ll share with rest of listeners.

World of WordPress News and other interesting WordPress related posts:

Well if you waited just over a week as usual you can now upgrade to WordPress 3.4.1 the patch release that usually follows pretty quick after a major release. http://www.ghacks.net/2012/06/28/wordpress-3-4-1-maintenance-and-security-update-released/

Plugins Reviewed by John

SEO Facebook Comment 1.4.5.1

Version: 1.4.5.1
Author: Fabio Zaffani
Last Updated: 33 days ago
Requires WordPress Version: 2.9 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.3.2
Downloaded: 65,698 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:
This is a pretty nice facebook integration of your comments, it still leaves all you original comments in place as well as your regular commenting system. You do have to go and create a Facebook app to use it but that it not that difficult to accomplish. I found the setup to be pretty straight forward. From what the author says this is different in that is plus facebook to your database and then displays it all and not just in an iframe so you will get the seo benefit of the comments. It also give the commenter the option to post to facebook or not, plus when making a comment if you manage many pages you can choose who to be when creating the comment.
Rating 4 Dragons

And The Winner Is… 1.1.1

Version: 1.1.1
Author: Spencer Sokol
Last Updated: 354 days ago
Requires WordPress Version: 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.2.1
Downloaded: 6,629 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:
So I had a client that wanted to run a contest where they would read about it in print then have to go to the website and answer a trivia question from the print publication and then get entered to win a prize. They would get entered right or wrong but they still wanted to direct them. I have come up with a solution involving Gravity forms but they discovered this plugin and asked me to use it instead so here is my impression of it.

What it is designed to do is change any post into a contest where all the comments become entries and then the plugin will do a random selection of the winner at the end date of contest. Set up is easy It seems to work out ok and has an easy to select the winner so we are running it and if I run into any issues will report back.
Rating 3 Dragons

Content Scheduler 0.9.8

Version: 0.9.8
Author: Paul Kaiser
Last Updated: 325 days ago
Requires WordPress Version: 2.9 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.3.2
Downloaded: 7,640 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The lowdown:

I have actually been using this plugin on another client's site for sometime now and had to use it again for the one above. The reason of course was to stop publishing of the contest post without having to get in there and remember to do that in case they cannot get in and select winner on the end date and had to come in a couple days late. I have found this to be working pretty nicely and does a nice job of stopping posts publication either by making it a draft or private.
Rating 3 Dragons

Plugins Reviewed by Marcus

Title Split Testing for WordPress

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/title-split-testing-for-wordpress/

If your headline sucks, no one will read your article. Split test titles to find out which ones attract the most readers.

Newspaper editors have known for generations that a great headline sells papers. If the headline sucks, then it doesn't matter how good the rest of the article is, because no one will read it.
Top newspapers like The Huffington Post now apply this principle to their online publications by testing different headlines for the same story, live on their website.
However, if your not a multi-million dollar news corporation, you can't afford to develop proprietary testing systems. That's why we created the Title Split Testing Plugin for WordPress so that you can do the same simple tests for FREE.
It enables you to create a number of different titles for each article, and randomly display different titles to different users to find out which title achieves the highest click-thorugh rates. After a few hours of testing you can then select the best title to be shown to all visitors. It also helps you to learn what type of titles get the best reaction from your readers. Do they like short titles or long titles, funny titles or serious titles. Take the guess work out of your article titles and use this plugin to measure real user behaviour.

Marcus’ Take: This is a great and simple way to split test your titles to see which is the most compelling from a traffic and conversion standpoint.

Rating: 4 Dragons

—-

Maintenance Checklist
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/maintenance-checklist/

Introduction

When supporting WordPress websites, a necessary evil is the tedious tasks of on-going maintenance. Tasks that fall under on-going maintenance are backups, spam & trash comment removal, database optimization, and much more.
What Maintenance Checklist provides is an easy to understand checklist for things that need to be completed on your WordPress site. These tasks will keep your WordPress website running at optimal performance.

Who can benefit from this plugin

Bloggers
With the default installation providing you a checklist of crucial tasks, you can see what needs to be done for your blog to keep it running perfectly. All you need to do is check off the task once you completed it.
Developers
With the “Add Task” feature, you can add tasks for tracking. You may have tons of sites to maintain with each site having special maintenance needs. Just add the task to that site, choose how often it needs to be done, and the Maintenance Checklist Plugin will remind you to do it.

Features

Track tasks and check them off when completed.
Automatic un-check when task needs to be completed.
Add custom tasks for tracking.
Delete any tasks.
The “Feel Good Engine”. When all tasks have been completed, we make you feel good
for all your hard work!

Marcus’ Take: great way to centralize your tasks. Would be a lot better if this could output or feed from RSS, giving you a full scope of your tasks on all sites.

Rating: 3 Dragons

—

WP-Retina 2X
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-retina-2x/

This plugin creates the image files required by the Retina (high-DPI) displays and it displays them to your visitors accordingly. Your website will now look beautiful and smooth on every device.

In the case the resolution of the original images are not high enough, you will see a warning in the Media Library where you will be able to re-upload bigger images.
It handles two different methods (for now) to serves the images to your visitors. Pick the one that works best with your hosting and environment.

Marcus’ Take: Really cool “developing technology” that you might want to try with your retina display devices.

Rating: 3 Dragons