TJ Crawford's Abstract Ideas

So for my job I was working with Josh Kenzer on the plugins we have found and what would bring our clients the most value for their WordPress install. I have included a list of the ones we came up with along with a short description of why it’s cool and a link to an example or screen shot. Some were listed in a post last week but I think they definitely warranted an update/explanation.

• Crossroads – Same thing as the above plugin except for your Flickr photos. Example of 3-4 Sets being pulled in. Also uses the the WP Lightbox plugin below to do some pretty cool transitions.
• FCK Editor - I know HTML pretty well but this WYSIWYG makes it super easy. Very much like word and doesn’t take much to train someone how to use.
  
• Google XML Sitemaps – Great plugin that will build XML sitemap for your blog and send it to Google, Yahoo & Ask.com. Tons of specialized configurations for even the pickiest expert.
• TubePress – This plugin lets you display videos or playlists on any page or sidebar. Here is an example of a playlist being pulled in. uses WP Lightbox to produce some cool transitions.
• TwitterTools – This one is a little cooler than I first thought. it is widget ready so it can be placed just about anywhere within a compatible theme. There are some great configurations that let you create a post or daily digest from your tweets, tie the tweets to a category, place your tweets in the sidebar and configure the number of tweets for display. It also gives you the ability to write a tweet from within WordPress (character count and all). For an example just check out my right hand sidebar. Configured to show the last 3 posts within this widget.
• WordPress Reports – Lets you tap into your Google Analytics and Feedburner accounts and view a stats dashboard from within WordPress. it’s super simple to get this up and running. Setup a Google analytics or Feedburner account and just give WordPress your user and pass for Google and the url of your rss feed for Feedburner. A nifty little feature for Google is that with a few check boxes this app will install the google tracking code, track outbound links and will exclude your traffic as long as your logged in as an admin.
  
• WP lightbox 2 The YouTube and Flickr plugins use another plugin that does the pop-up and transitions

So the biggest gripe I have had with YouTube is the slow & cumbersome uploader. They have released the Multi-Video Uploader now and it is a first step in the right direction. A small install is required and only for Windows, sorry Mac users. It gives you the capability to select multiple videos at a time, give them a Title, Description and Tags. Also the 1GB file size is a huge improvement over the previous and 100 meg size limit.

I will have to say its more like a que than a multi-file uploader. Only one file uploads at a time and its still a bit slow, but it definitely helps when you want to upload a handful of videos from one screen. Place as many videos as you want in the uploader click a button and come back later to find all of your videos uploaded. No more babysitting the uploader to do one video at a time.

So it was Blog update night (and morning). I went in to update a theme and ended up compiling my blogroll, updating several plugins and changing my Twitter widget from a Flash based on to an HTML and Javascript version for improved search and find-ability. I did give myself a scare when i updated my Akismet plug-in because I just overwrote the current plugin folder. Not so good an idea. It totally broke the backend and front end with a PHP error. Noooooooo. Easily enough fixed though. I edited the Akismet.php file and hard coded my wordpress API key. Crisis averted.

I had someone ask me about a plugin I used so I’ll take the liberty and list all of them and give some credit to some great developers.

I made some updates to my blogroll on the right side. I added a few blogs and some links to a Flicker group I created. Check them out!

So I have been using Picnik.com for a while to correct some of the photos I post to Flickr.com, because it has a direct integration. The only issue I had in the past is that it could take a while to download and upload photos. I think a few things happened in the past month that makes this much less painful now. One I upgraded our Internet connection from 3meg to 5meg, VROOM, VROOM. Also Picnik officially lost it’s BETA status and I think they rolled a number of speed optimized features and possibly added some more hardware and infrastructure themselves. Either way it’s working great.