WP is much more than a blogging platform.  It can be a full-blown CMS.  All it takes is some elbow grease.

With that in mind, the other great thing about Wordpress is open-source coding.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that 90% of the functions, designs, and layouts you want for your Wordpress site already exist somewhere else.  If you want it, chances are that someone has already made it happen.

When creating your template, do not reinvent the wheel.

My advice is to find a prebuilt template that accomplishes the majority of what you want on your site.  It does not have to be exactly what you want, just somewhat in the neighborhood.

Get that template in your hands (either paid or free), and use it as your “launch pad.”

Next, go out and find the missing elements that you want.  Perhaps there’s a cool way of displaying author information in your Wordpress posts, or a snazzy photo gallery function.  Just go out there and find it.

Then try to figure out how it was built.

If the template was built by a design shop, head over to that shop and see if you can buy the template.

You can also head over to the Wordpress support forums.  They are free and can often tell you exactly how to achieve a certain function.

Take those cherry picked items back to your site and incorporate them into the template you previously purchased.  Often, it is as easy as copy/pasting some code and doing some light weight CSS work.

That should cover 90% of your design needs right there.  The remaining 10% will be what you have to build out from scratch.

Instead of building 80% or 100% of your template by hand, you’ve just cut the workload drastically.  Now you can focus your energy on those totally unique customizations instead of stuff that has been built 100 times over by other developers.

If you have taken the plunge and hired developer to help you, the same exercise will come in handy.  Get out there and look for the things that you want to have on your site.  Find designs you like.  Share all of this information with your developer, and it will make their life easier.  You will get what you are looking for much quicker if the developer has samples to work from.

With that, here are the Top 5 Twitter Plugins for Wordpress.

1) Twitter Widget Pro:

This plugin creates a sidebar widget with tons of configurable controls to adjust the Twitter feed’s display.  You can also control things like showing the date/time stamps, etc.  This is great for pulling your Tweets right into your site, or pulling in Tweets from a group of people based on a subject.  It is also a great way to keep some fresh, active content going on your site until your next post.

2) Twitter Feed:

Got friends? Ha.  By that I mean do you have multiple people working on your blog?  Or do you have multiple Twitter followers/accounts that you would like to display on your site’s sidebar?  This is the plugin for you.  Easily pull in Tweets from multiple users and control the slick graphic display of them on your site.  Includes the Twitter user picture and more.

3) Twitter Friends:

Show the loooove!  This widget allows you to show who is following you on Twitter.  This is a great way to thank loyal followers and to encourage people to follow you.  This plugin will show the user’s Twitter photo, bio line, and most recent Tweet.  You can toggle on/off each feature as well allowing you to show more details about each person (or not).

4) Post to Twitter (and Twitter to Post)

Oh how magical a world it would be if you could somehow get your Wordpress posts to automatically show up in your Twitter account as Tweets?  How insane would it be if you could turn your Tweets into actual posts within Wordpress?  Dream no more my friends.  Post to Twitter does exactly that.  It allows you to control the direction of information  (Twitter to WP  vs  WP to Twitter).  Control the follow of Tweetalicious in either way you choose, or both!

5) Twitter Blaster:

Kind of a unique way to use Twitter and Wordpress.  This plugin allows your users to publish to your Twitter account.  Their Tweets get held as a “pending” post for your review.  You can then approve the Tweet and have it show up in your Twitter feed.  You can also approve the Tweet as a page/post.

Have one you really enjoy?  Tell me about it!

Post links to your favorite Twitter plugins for Wordpress in the comments below.

If you are not the tech savvy type, I’d be willing to bet your site loads slower than it should.  Most amateur bloggers (and some professional ones) are not very good developers.  Here’s where I would normally make the case for hiring a firm like BlogCraving to handle these things for you, but this time I will spare you.

Let’s just jump right to the point and find out if your site is a load hog.

The speed test

Head on over to tools.pingdom.com.  This site will tell you definitively how fast your site loads.  All you have to do is put in your website’s URL and run the test.  It will show you the load time for every single element on your site.

Then, just scroll down to the very bottom of the report to see the total load time for your site. 

How did you score?

Don’t be shy.  Was it a big number?  If you are like a lot of blogs out there, you are probably right around 8 to 15 seconds.  It may not seem like much, but that is dog slow.  And if you are over that, yikes.

Ideally, you want to be under 5 seconds.  That shows a snappy site that people will be likely to enjoy (from a technical experience perspective).

Sites that load quickly have proven to receive much higher pageviews than slow sites.  That’s because users are more likely to click around on a site that loads fast.  Most users will not go on to page 3 or the 4th photo in your gallery if each page takes over 10 seconds to load.  It just become less and less enjoyable with each click no matter how good the content.

What do you do?

The answer to this question is an entire series of posts that we will get into in the coming days.  In the mean time, I’ll give you some tips.

1. Optimize those post images. You should really spend some time learning how to optimize your images for web publishing before you even upload them into Wordpress (or your blog platform).  Lots of heavy images will surely kill your load time.  The Pingdom tool above will help you identify those big images.  Try Photoshop, Picasa, or even free services like SmushIt.
2. Cut back on external scripts and calls. We all know those free little add-on widgets are lots of fun to put on your site.  So are all those snazzy social media buttons.  Unfortunately, they can add a lot of load time because of all the external callouts they make.  The files/scripts themselves might even be a bit “beefy”.   Again, Pingdom will help you identify those problem services.  Once you know what they are, ask yourself how essential they really are and get rid of them.
3. Is it your host? Most basic blogs are hosted on shared hosting.  In other words, you share a single server with a bunch of strangers.  You have no idea who else is on that server with you and what kind of resource they are drawing.  Your host may have certain throttle points in place to scale down resource hogs.  Maybe you’re super hot site is one of the sites drawing too much.  If that’s the case, it may be time to look into alternative hosting solutions (this is a good problem to have because it shows that you are growing).
4. Dude, your theme is lame. It might be time to face the ugly truth that your site’s theme just isn’t that great.  Most free themes are free because they are not that great.  They may have some sloppy coding or CSS in them that do not make them scalable for growing sites.  They’ll serve you well to start, but as you become a bigger deal, your theme may end up holding you back.   If you’ve got some serious load time issues, I highly suggest you run (not walk) to check out the Wordpress Thesis Theme.  It is incredibly fast loading, easy to customize even for non technical types, and has great SEO features. More and more sites are headed to Thesis because of how well it performs.  It comes out of the box pretty plain, but you can quickly make it much more visually appealing.

Over the next few days, we will take a deep dive into some of these optimization techniques as well as discuss things like Cloud Hosting, CDN’s, template optimization, and a lot more.

You probably already know about your sidebar.php file that came with Wordpress or the theme you’ve purchased.  That file controls your main sidebar.

Logically, you’d think all you need to do is make a secondary sidebar.  That’s completely true.  Then  you just call it into the post template.

Here is how to have two separate sidebars without widget/dynamic functionality.  (Next, we will show you how to make your secondary sidebar widget ready so you can control it in your Widgets tool.)

For this lesson, we are going to assume that you want your post pages to have a different sidebar than your homepage.  The same instructions would apply if you wanted to have different sidebars on pages too.

STOP: Before continuing, make a backup copy of all your template files.  If you accidentally make a mistake, you can restore these files.

Basic Method:

1. Find your sidebar.php file.
2. Make a copy of it.  Name it sidebar-secondary.php.  Your second, third, forth, etc. sidebars all need to start with sidebar-NAMEHERE.php.  That’s part of the naming convention in Wordpress.
3. Make the content changes you need in secondary sidebar file.  This is where you make the secondary sidebar different.  Whatever it is you need to be different should go in this file.  Save sidebar-secondary.php and upload it to your server.
4. Locate your single.php file.
5. Look for a line near the end of the file that looks like this: <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
6. Change it to <?php get_sidebar(’secondary’); ?> (note, the ’secondary’ part should match the name of the new sidebar-secondary.php file).  The single quote marks ‘  ‘ are required.
7. Save your new single.php file and upload it.
8. Done.

You’ve now made two separate sidebars.  You then told your single.php file (single posts) go fetch a different sidebar file than your index.php (homepage) does.  Your homepage will pull in the old sidebar.php file.  Your single posts will pull in the sidebar-secondary.php file. Note: In your sidebar-secondary.php file, you will want to remove the dynamic sidebar components.  Otherwise, your homepage widgets will also show up on your inside pages.  Look for a line like this: <?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>. Only remove that line of code from the file if you do not need the new sidebar to have dynamic widget functionality.  Otherwise, if you would like to wigetize this sidebar, proceed to the next lesson.

How to make your new sidebar Widget Ready or Dynamic:

We have to do two things.  1) Register your sidebars to your Wordpress backend knows you have two ready for widgets.  2) Tell each sidebar.php page which set of widgets to pull in. Here we go: 1) Find your functions.php file. 2) Look for the register_sidebar section.  It will look something like this:

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) register_sidebar(array( 'name' => 'Homepage Sidebar', 'id' => 'homepage_only', 'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">', 'after_widget' => '</li>', 'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">', 'after_title' => '</h2>', ));

It may not contain all of the lines such as ‘name’ or ‘id’.  It may not even exist at all.  In the next step, you will overwrite the old version.  If you don’t have one, you will make one now. 3) Set one will control the homepage sidebar and should be setup to look like this:

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) register_sidebar(array( 'name' => 'Homepage Sidebar', 'id' => 'homepage_only', 'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">', 'after_widget' => '</li>', 'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">', 'after_title' => '</h2>', ));

'name' => 'Homepage Sidebar', will refer simply to the name of the sidebar that shows up on the Widgets admin page drop down list. 'id' => 'homepage_only', is a unique ID just for that sidebar set.  We will add this ID to the sidebar templates later. 4) Next, make the second set for the inside pages:

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) register_sidebar(array( 'name' => 'Inside Sidebar', 'id' => 'inside_only', 'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">', 'after_widget' => '</li>', 'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">', 'after_title' => '</h2>', ));

5) STOP.  This is how a section inside your functions.php file should now look:

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) register_sidebar(array( 'name' => 'Homepage Sidebar', 'id' => 'homepage_only', 'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">', 'after_widget' => '</li>', 'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">', 'after_title' => '</h2>', )); if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) register_sidebar(array( 'name' => 'Inside Sidebar', 'id' => 'inside_only', 'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">', 'after_widget' => '</li>', 'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">', 'after_title' => '</h2>', ));

6)  Continue. 7)  Locate your sidebar.php file. 8)  Locate the line that looks like this: <?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?> 9)  Make it look like this: <?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘homepage_only’) ) : ?> You have now told your single.php file to go look specifically for the widgets assigned to the homepage_only function. 10) Locate your sidebar-secondary.php file. 11)  Locate the line that looks like this.  If none exists, don’t worry. <?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?> 12)  Make the line look like this.  If you do not have this line, simply add it in the possition where you want your dynamic widgets to appear. <?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘inside_only’) ) : ?> 13) Upload your newly changed functions.php, sidebar.php, and sidebar-secondary.php files to your server. 14) Earlier in the basic method, we already changed your single.php file to pull in the sidebar-secondary.php file.  So at this point, you are all done. You can now log into your Wordpress Admin and go to the widgets section.  You will now see a dropdown menu with your Homepage Sidebar and Inside Sidebar listed.  You can add widgets separately to each sidebar.  When you save, the changes will update on your site.

This can be a little confusing.  All it takes is one little out of place punctuation mark to crash your whole site.  If you are comfortable with Wordpress, the previous intructions should get you by.  If it would be helpful to you to get some more details for each step including diagrams and images, fill out the form below.  We will send you the fully illustrated doccumentation immediately.

So why are you neglecting your photos?

Many bloggers are not as dilegant about maximizing the SEO potential of their images.  Actually, most bloggers do not realize that you can get a lot of search engine traffic because of your photos.

The obvious way occurs when other sites link to your great photos.  Clearly, that will help your SEO.

However, the images themselves can draw a lot of eyeballs, but you have to love your alt tags.  Take a look at this screencap to see what I mean.

When the search engines crawl your site, they are looking at your images too.  The alt tags are what Google uses to identify the subject matter of each photo.

So think about it.  If you’ve paid all this money for a great photo, don’t you want people to be able to find it?  Or what if these are great photos that you took, and no one else has them! This is how you’ll attract new visitors to your site, and you won’t have to reply soley on promotion from other sites.

Just think about how many times you’ve used Google’s Image search.  Now you’ll be a player in that space too.

Your alt tags should be just as keyword rich as your posts themselves.  Make sure to describe the photo and use the full names of the people in the photo.

There’s also a plugin called SEO Images that will at least do some of the work should you forget.  At least install the plugin to get you started.

Remember, spending a little extra time up front will pay off for you in the long run.

My favorites include the article edit logs.  You can now see what a post used to look like before you edited it.  Wordpress creates a log of each change.  You can then see the changes side by side, then restore an older version if you wish.

The image caption function now works as well.

Here’s a video of all the goodies.

Why just the geeks?  Well this release is expected to not have many visible changes.  A lot of those were made with the 2.5 release, so it’s time to catch our breath.

Instead, a lot of changes “under the hood” are being made to improve the usability and experience.  Here’s the list.

Caching of static files with Google Gears. Speeds up the backend for admins.  It’s cool and complicated at the same time.  In a nutshell, Google Gears is a little application you install on your computer.  It will then fetch the static files and information from Wordpress that rarely (if ever) changes.  That way your browser doesn’t have to download the item, object, or function every time, thus speeding up the performance.  You may have noticed in WP2.5 that the “Link” and “Add Photo” buttons can take a little time to load.  Well, after the first time it loads, each subsquent load will be instant because Gears will have saved the functionality to your local machine.

Drag-and-drop sortable galleries

Post Revisioning. Wordpress will now save all of your individual post revisions so that you can compare them side by side.  Red highlighted text will indicate text that had been removed.  Green highlighted text will show what was added.  You can then restore any older or previous version of a post from within the system.  Works great for group edited blogs.

A “Press This” bookmark button.

Theme previewing just like you see on WordPress.com

Improved image editing that lets you manage your photos, look, and feel in a more efficient manner.

Onboard word counting in the post editor…for those being paid to blog by the word.

Customizable default avatars. This way you don’t see the generic Avatar quite as often.  Gravatars has integrated with other avatar systems to pull in more globally recognized avatars.  Happy commenting.

Updated TinyMCE 3.1.0.1. The little editor tool you use when making posts.

and a lot more.

It has been a while since the last update…even since 2.5.1.  So I hope that means more of the bugs are ironed out before this launch.

The issue centers around placing images into posts with links to the image itself or to a page with the image on it.

After uploading in an image, you are given the option to place it with None, File URL, or Post URL.  File URL links right to the full size image by itself.  The Post URL links to a stand alone page with only the image on it.  None does exactly what it sounds like.

Well, in IE7, that doesn’t always work correctly.  As a matter of fact, it rarely works.  However, in Firefox and all Mac browsers, it works just fine.

It is a known issue:  http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6469

It apparently will be fixed for Wordpress 2.5.2

Wordpress and iCast Limited highly recommends upgrading your install immediately due to the discovery of a serious security hole associated with open registration.  The vulnerability will be published soon, so it is in your best interest to upgrade as soon as possible.

The full upgrade also has over 70 bug fixes!  So a lot of the little buggy issues we have been dealing with have been fixed officially, including image upload problems in 2.5 associated with Internet Explorer (IE).

Other updates:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

It seems to work fine with Firefox and on Macs, but PC’s running IE 7 are having issues.

To fix the issue, do the following:

1) Clear your browser cache more than once, then reboot your whole computer.

2) Download these files, and upload them where they belong in your install on your server.

3) Make sure you have the newest Flash plugin for your browser.

Then you should be all set until then next update.