No matter what kind of website or blog you own, you’ll definitely find something that will make your site better. Just like with clothes some plugins are one size fits all, and other are quite specific. Almost every blog will encounter spam, security concerns and will want to expose their content to the largest audience possible. This two article series focuses on the most essential and useful WordPress plugins every blog will find useful. Whether you’re bored with the default comments platform, want to try custom fonts or just add neat social sharing options, continue reading to find the best WordPress plugins out there. The plugins are sorted into categories and only a few of them have the same features so you can find the very right ones for you.

The first part will cover optimization, forms, comments, site backup, posts, security, design & theme customization and media. Stay tuned for part 2 which will contain even more specific and targeted WordPress plugins.

The second part will cover ecommerce, SEO, social media, marketing and lot of great miscellaneous plugins.

Optimization

1. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

2. WP-Optimize

WP-Optimize is a WordPress 2.9++ database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn’t require PhpMyAdmin to optimize your database tables. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue and un-approved comments within few clicks.

3. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

Forms

1. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail content flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

2. Fast Secure Contact Form

A super customizable contact form that lets your visitors send you email. Blocks all automated spammers. No templates to mess with.

3. Gravity Forms (Premium –  $39)

Gravity Forms is hands down the best contact form plugin for WordPress. Build and publish your WordPress forms in just minutes. No drudgery, just quick and easy form-building.

4. AJAX Contact Forms (Premium – $10)

This is a jQuery based AJAX powered HTML / PHP contact form with Twitter Direct Messaging, easily integrated into WordPress via shortcodes and functions.

Comments

1. Disqus Comment System

Disqus, pronounced “discuss”, is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.

2. GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up an advanced rating and review system for post types and comments in your blog using single, multi and thumbs ratings.

3. Wizzart – Recent Comments

This plugin offers a highly customizable widget to show recent comments of your visitors in your sidebars.

4. Facebook Comments

Full Facebook Comments moderation and management for your WordPress site. Quick and easy to set up. Insert automatically or via a shortcode.

5. Thank Me Later

Automatically send a ‘thank you’ e-mail to those who comment on your blog. This plugin engages visitors by reminding them to check back for new comments and interesting content.

6. Disable Comments

Allows administrators to globally disable comments on their site. Comments can be disabled according to post type.

7. WP Customer Reviews

WP Customer Reviews allows your customers and visitors to leave reviews or testimonials of your services. Reviews are Microformat enabled (hReview).

Site Backup

1. WP-DBManager

Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of back ups, optimizing and repairing of database.

2. BackUpWordPress

BackUpWordPress will back up your entire site including your database and all your files once every day.

Posts

1. Editorial Calendar

The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog.

2. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

3. SimpleReach Slide

The Slide recommends related posts from within your site on a widget that “slides” in at the bottom of the page.

4. WordPress Popular Posts

WordPress Popular Posts is a highly customizable sidebar widget that displays the most popular posts on your blog. You can use it as a template tag, too.

5. Raw HTML

Lets you use raw HTML or any other code in your posts. You can also disable smart quotes and other automatic formatting on a per-post basis.

6. Auto Post Thumbnail

Automatically generate the Post Thumbnail (Featured Thumbnail) from the first image in post or any custom post type only if Post Thumbnail is not set.

Security

1. Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

2. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam

Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the forms for comments, registration, lost password, login, or all. For WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress.

3. Secure WordPress

Secure WordPress beefs up the security of your WordPress installation by removing error information on login pages, adds index.html to plugin directories, hides the WordPress version and much more.

4. BulletProof Security

WordPress Website Security Protection. Website security protection against: XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection hacking att

Design & Theme Customization

1. Widget Context

Widget Context allows you to specify widget visibility settings – you can choose to display them only on certain posts, front page, category or tag pages etc.

2. WP Google Fonts

The WP Google Fonts plugin allows you to easily add fonts from the Google Font Directory to your WordPress theme.

3. WP Maintenance Mode

Adds a splash page to your site that lets visitors know your site is down for maintenance. Full access to the back- & front-end is optional.

4. Genesis Simple Sidebars

This plugin allows you to create multiple, dynamic widget areas, and assign those widget areas to sidebar locations within the Genesis Theme Framework

5. Shortcodes Ultimate

With this plugin you can easily create buttons, boxes, different sliders and much, much more. Turn your free theme to premium in just a few clicks.

6. All In One Favicon

Easily add a Favicon to your site and the WordPress admin pages. Complete with upload functionality. Supports all three Favicon types (ico,png,gif).

7. Font Uploader (Premium – $10)

This plugin lets you upload your own font files and apply them to any element of your website without requiring a knowledge of html or css.

8. WPtouch

WPtouch: A simple, powerful and elegant mobile theme for your website. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress website into an application-like theme.

9. Widget Logic

Widget Logic lets you control on which pages widgets appear using WP’s conditional tags. It also adds a ‘widget_content’ filter.

10. WP Content Slideshow

WP Content Slideshow is the perfect Slideshow for WordPress. It displays up to 5 Posts or Pages with Tile, Description and Image for every Post.

Media

1. Easing Slider

The Easing Slider comes with various options that allow you to choose different sources to get the images from and also multiple styling options so that you”ll never have to edit any files directly & with ease. Create your own unique elegant slider.

2. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with dozens of options and features.

3. flickrRSS

Allows you to integrate Flickr photos into your site. It supports user, set, favorite, group and community photostreams.

4. WordPress Video Plugin

A filter for WordPress that allows easy video embedding of supported sites. Support for 65 different video sites.

5. oQey Gallery

oQey Gallery is a premium grade plugin for managing images and video, creating photo slideshows with music, photo & video galleries that works fantastic.

6. uBillboard (Premium – $20)

uBillboard is a Premium Slider for WordPress. It is a jQuery based slider with a multitude of transitions and options so you can customize it all you want without being overwhelmed with options you never wanted or needed.

7. WP Lightbox 2

This plugin used to add the lightbox (overlay) effect to the current page images on your WordPress blog.

Commerce

1. WP e-Commerce

WP e-Commerce is a free WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin that lets customers buy your products, services and digital downloads online.

2. Jigoshop

Jigoshop is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress developed by professionals with years of experience delivering online shops for global brands.

3. WooCommerce

Transform your WordPress website into a thoroughbred online store. Delivering enterprise-level quality & features whilst backed by a name you can trust.

4. uPricing (Premium – $15)

uPricing is the ultimate and unique solution for all your WordPress related pricing page needs. Creating pricing tables has never been easier. uPricing comes with easy to use jQuery powered admin interface that lets you create and edit your pricing tables.

5. PayPal Donations

Easy, simple setup to add a PayPal Donation button as a Widget or with a shortcode.

SEO

1. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is the best SEO plugin out there which will automatically optimize your WordPress blog for search engines.

2. WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

3. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

Social

1. Add Link to Facebook

Automatically add links to posts or pages that are being published to your Facebook wall, pages or groups. Simple one time setup and forget. The way links appear on Facebook can be customized.

2. WP to Twitter

Posts a Twitter update when you update your WordPress blog or post to your blogroll, using your chosen URL shortening service. Requires PHP 5 and cURL

3. Digg Digg

Digg Digg allows you to integrate popular social buttons into WordPress easily.

4. ShareThis

The ShareThis plugin seamlessly enables users to share your content through Email,Facebook,Twitter, Google +1, Like, Send and many more.

5. BuddyPress

BuddyPress lets users register on your site and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups and much more. A social network in a box, BuddyPress lets you build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community.

6. bbPress

bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress.

7. The Google+ plugin

The Google + Plugin integrates WordPress with your G+ Profile and Page – now with BuddyPress and Post Format support.

8. Twitter Widget Pro

A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including parsing @username, #hashtags, and URLs into links.

Marketing

1. Newsletter

This plug-in lets you collect subscribers on your blog with a single or double opt-in subscription process. Double opt-in is law compliant and it means the user has to confirm the subscription following simple standard instructions sent to him via email.

2. WP125

Easy management of 125×125 ads on your blog. Ads can be run for a specified number of days, and will automatically be taken down. Track clicks too.

3. s2Member

s2Member (membership with PayPal) offers powerful membership capabilities. Protect members only content. The s2Member Framework integrates with PayPal very easily and fully supports recurring billing.

4. MailPress

The WordPress mailing platform.

5. Subscribe2

Subscribe2 provides a comprehensive subscription management and email notification system for WordPress blogs that sends email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog.

6. MailChimp Widget

Adds a widget that allows your users to sign up for your MailChimp mailing list.

7. Simple PopUp

A simple, attractive, extremely fast and non annoying pop up box for your WordPress Blog. It’s power lies in its ease of use.

Miscellaneous

1. WP-PageNavi

Want to replace the old ← Older posts | Newer posts → links with some page links? This plugin provides the wp_pagenavi() template tag which generates fancy pagination links.

2. Jetpack by WordPress.com

 Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.

3. Exclude Pages

This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).

4. Broken Link Checker

This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.

5. ManageWP Worker

ManageWP Worker plugin allows you to remotely manage your blogs from one dashboard. You can read our review here.

6. Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache .htaccess files.

7. FD Feedburner Plugin

Redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed seamlessly and transparently to Feedburner.com.

8. Hotfix

Provides unofficial fixes for selected WordPress bugs, so you don’t have to wait for the next WordPress core release.

9. Google Analytics for WordPress

Track your WordPress site easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and page views.

10. WP-Polls

Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can also easily add a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

11. Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu

The lazy and the productive will love it : all admin links available in a neat horizontal CSS driven drop down menu. No need to click on “Manage” then “Pages” to edit pages. And plenty more space on your screen.

12. Pretty Link Lite

Shrink, beautify, track, manage and share any URL on or off of your WordPress website. Create links that look however you want using your own domain name.

13. 5sec Google Maps (Premium – $8)

Integrate Google Maps into your WordPress blog easily without using API or any code.

14. Advanced Access Manager

Advanced Access Manager is a new way of controlling access to your single blog or multi-site setup. This easy to use interface is a very helpful tool for experienced WordPress users.

Conclusion

Do you know and use any other plugins besides the ones we suggested here? We would really appreciate your feedback here, but we are pretty sure this list will be very comprehensive for you and will satisfy most peoples needs!

My friends, it has come to this. Many have asked for help and now I will walk you through it all, even without knowledge of coding you will be able to create a website in just one hour after reading this.

Say you have already grown tired of your Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress.com blogs and you want to move up the scale. What do you do next? Yes, you read this guide!

Remember, you can start your own blog/website now for as low as $10!

Things to know:

Before anything else, there are some small details that you will need to think about. Do you want to have a totally free website that has a fixed set of features? You probably want more power and the option tp tweak things, but are you willing to pay for these options?

First you need to decide whether to create a self-hosted website or not.

Free websites are hosted under a parent domain. For example, there are a lot of websites, or in this case blogs, out there that are used by people for their private ramblings like sampyourname.wordpress.com or testwebsite.blogger.com. These blogs are totally free, but the irony is you really do not have the freedom of bending it to your will. There are limitations involved. But the good thing here is that they are totally reliable and free, also you won’t need any technical knowledge of HTML and CSS, everything is already designed for you.

If your goal is to keep an online diary for your personal life or craft, just the basic things, then using free website/blog services like WordPress.com and Blogger.com, or even Tumblr.com, is highly suggested. You can keep your files safe, no worrying about down time, and most of all they’re totally free. But since they’re free, your site will always have the service’s name (site.blogger.com) attached to your domain and it doesn’t look very professional.

If your goal is to appear strong and professional, and have more control over most things, then your best option is to host a website yourself. Unlike a free website, a self-hosted website requires some technical knowledge, and that is the point of this whole guide.

When should you self-host a website? As mentioned, when you want to have a professional look and feel to your site. Most likely they will know that you are serious about running that website and updating it, since you’re paying for it. Most self-hosted websites are owned by people who are using it for their business, either to promote their skill and services or to make money with it. Just like 1stwebdesigner.com. This is exactly the reason why I decided to write this guide, because people with WordPress.com and Blogger.com blogs have contacted us about shifting to a .com blog. Admittedly, I only replied to a couple of them briefly pointing them to the correct services and websites to read. But now it is different, to avoid further confusing our first time readers I have written a guide to solve this problem!

If you’re still serious about creating a self-hosted website and spending some money, then continue reading.

Before Purchasing Anything

Before you purchase anything, please be sure that you have already decided on what to do. I know that many of the people that will read this are considering it and are not entirely sure about spending money. I know some students both here in the Philippines and elsewhere who are considering spending money to get a website, some have failed and regretted their decision.

Ask yourself, do you need a premium website design?

Choose a Content Management System (CMS)

As the name implies, CMS is software that manages a website’s content. This is actually one of the best inventions of all time. I daresay that 90% of websites in existence today are built over a CMS. Websites like 1stwebdesigner, TheNextWeb, TechCrunch, and a lot more.

I won’t delve too much into what a CMS is, since you’ll more than likely end up using WordPress. 1stwebdesigner is using WordPress to manage all of the photos, articles, and plugins used in this website. Without WordPress it would actually be hard to grow it as big as it is now. But this is just my opinion.

You can, however, choose a different CMS depending on your preferences.

Check out:

• 17 Free Content Management Systems For Better Content Handling
• Showcase of Small But Useful Content Management Systems

Choose a Domain Name and Web Host

Technically, you should be looking for a Domain Registrar to register a Domain name of your choosing. Usually domain names and hosting are purchased together, but in case you want to find cheaper solutions you can buy them separately.

Suggested Web Hosts

These are web hosting companies that I have firsthand experience with. No matter what you do, do not go to GoDaddy.

Below are three of my recommended web hosts. The process is linear. First you will be prompted to select a domain name of your choosing (the name of your website), then the package type, some add-ons, and finally the checkout process where you will pay.

HostGator –  cheap and has a one-click-install for WordPress and other CMS’s. The cheapest plan boasts unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space, and hosts one domain. The main take-away for HostGator is that you can actually host your website here for only $0.01 for one month! Provided you have already purchased a domain name which can cost from $8 to $10. Succeeding monthly bills would be around $8. But you can host your website here for one year for only $75.

Use coupon code: “1stwebdesigner” without the “” to get a $9.94 off of your bill!

Currently hosting 1 website here, no problems so far.

WPWebHost – priced just a little higher than HostGator, but the service is absolutely stunning. Their customer support can solve just about anything you can throw at them related to WordPress. One-click-install for WordPress is also available.

Hosting 1 website here too, still happy with it.

ASmallOrange –  for as low as $25 a year you can host a website. For $25 you will get 150MB of disk space and 4.5GB monthly bandwidth. Not bad if you’re planning on a text-based website with few images.

Use coupon code: “1stwebdesigner” without the “” to get a 15% discount!

Also happy with ASmallOrange.

After choosing your web host it’s time to wait. Yes, you need to wait for some time, at best your account is activated within 10 minutes, at worst it will be available after 48 hours (but trust me, I haven’t experienced this yet).

After your account has been activated, an email from the service should be sent to you with the account information with all of the login details for FTP, MySQL, cPanel, and some links to your dashboard. For now just focus on the cPanel.

Setting Up WordPress

First Step: Login onto your Control Panel

HostGator Control Panel

This is what HostGator’s control panel looks like. Do not worry, if you think this is too much to handle and there’s too many icons to click, you only need to worry about one..wait, no, you don’t need to worry at all.

That one icon you need to find? It’s the QuickInstall, just scroll down until you can see this:

After clicking QuickInstall you should see the image below. To the left is a list of software you can install, but our main goal now is to install WordPress. It’s the third item to the left. Just click on it and it will prompt you to continue, simply click on “Continue”.

After this you will receive an email with your login details for your WordPress dashboard. In order to login, go to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You will then be prompted with a login form. Just fill in the form and you’re good to go.

WPWebHost Control Panel

This is how WPWebHost’s control panel looks like.

In order to install WordPress, find Softaculous:

Click on it and a page similar to the screenshot below will load.

Click Blogs and the following will appear. Click on where the red arrow is pointing at.

Then the following page will load, and all you need to do is click the blue button saying “Install”.

Everything onwards is pretty easy to understand. A form will appear, asking for some information. I will no longer post a screenshot of it here because you will not need to change anything. Just change the Admin Account details for your user name and password, and an email address so that the system can send your details.

After this you will receive an email with your login details for your WordPress dashboard. In order to login, go to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You will then be prompted with a login form. Just fill in the form and you’re good to go.

ASmallOrange Control Panel

If you notice, most of the control panels look the same with only minor changes on the software/services available.

Once you can see the image above, scroll down until you find Fantastico De Luxe.

Click Fantastico De Luxe and you’ll be redirected to the page below. Click on WordPress, pointed by the amazing red arrow.

Click on “New Installation”.

Then you will be redirected to this page. Just fill in the user name and password, an email address and choose the domain you want to install WordPress to. Don’t forget to read!

After this you will receive an email with your login details for your WordPress dashboard. In order to login, go to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You will then be prompted with a login form. Just fill in the form and you’re good to go.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed WordPress by navigating through your web host’s control panel!

At this point everything is pretty much finished. But you will need to install a theme and some plugins to get your blog rolling!

Second Step: Configuring Themes

Why do you need to install themes? What are themes? Themes are like clothing for your website, each having their own design and features that you can use. There are hundreds of free themes out there that you can use for free, but don’t expect many features from them. Most likely if you are willing to spend more for the best themes you’ll go for premium themes.

Choose and download Free Themes here:

• Hot WordPress Themes For Freelancers For Personal Branding
• Graph Paper Press
• WordPress Free Themes Directory
• Fresheezy
• See more here (this is no longer updated, but most of the links shown here are still working)

For Premium Themes:

• 20 Premium WordPress eCommerce Themes
• 40 Premium Magazine WordPRess Themes
• The World’s Best Corporate WordPress Themes You Can Actually Afford to Buy
• 50+ WordPress Themes for Video BLoggers (contains Free and Preimum themes)
• ElegantThemes
• ThemeForest

Installing Themes

First login to your WordPress dashboard by going to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You will be greeted by this sweetheart, which you should familiarize yourself with because you’ll be seeing it often. Hover on Appearance and click on Themes.

It is important to note that all the themes that you will be downloading are zipped/rar-ed files. Just keep them that way. When the page loads, click on Install Themes and then click on Upload. Happily navigate through your folders to find the theme you downloaded, select it then upload it. After activating it, check your website and it should have a new design.

Congratulations! You have just installed a new theme! Now, what comes next is also crucial to your website’s success: installing plugins.

Third Step: Setting up Plugins

First let’s talk about the necessary plugins that you need to download and install. Note that this is only based on my preference. You can find your own plugins to install, but I’m just giving you an idea as to what kind of plugins to use. So, let’s begin!

Needed Plugins:

• Digg Digg or SharebBar for the social media buttons.
• All in One SEO Pack for SEO purposes. In the most simplest of all explanations, it enhances your visibility on Google.
• Quick Cache to speed up your page loads.
• Google Analycticator to easily install your Google Analytics to your website. Don’t have an account yet? Simply go to Google Analytics and sign up for one! By using this service you will know how many people are visitng your website, from where, and which content is visited by the readers.
• Search 1stwebdesigner for more plugins.

How to Install a Plugin

It’s very easy to install a plugin, either by uploading or searching the WordPress.org plugin directory. First go to the Plugins page by clicking on Plugins.

If you have downloaded a plugin, then you will need to click on Upload and upload the zipped file. If you want to search for the plugin, simply input the name on the search bar and search for the plugin. If you will use the search function, you will be greeted by this:

Simply click “Install Now” and the plugin will be installed. Don’t forget to check the Details to see if the plugin is compatible with your current WordPress version. Talking about that, be sure to always keep your WordPress updated! After installing, just activate the plugin and if settings are available, adjust the settings to your preference.

Congratulations! You have just installed your first plugin! Next and final step would be to add your content!

It’s not a website if it doesn’t have content. Be sure to write valuable information that people can actually use. Never steal content from other websites!

What do you think about this guide?

As always, don’t forget to share this with your friends who are in need, instead of telling them to “Google it!” And also share tips and techniques. Did I make an error somewhere? Please feel free to point them out!

If you are having trouble just write a comment below and I will be glad to help you. :)

There is hardly any niche website that cannot be powered using WordPress. Of late, WordPress is being employed to power different sorts of websites — video galleries, online portfolios, information directories and, more importantly, job boards! Job boards have become one of the most popular info-commerce centric websites. In this article, we take a look at the WP resources that are required to run a job board — plugins and themes.

Plugins for Job Boards

CareerBuilder Jobs

CareerBuilder Jobs plugin lets users search for relevant jobs and browse jobs on the basis of location or category. It can also suggest recommended jobs and power the application mechanism for each job. You will need a Developer Key in order to use the plugin.

Plugin Homepage | Download

CATS JobSite

CATS JobSite can be used to power a full fledged job board. Users can search, browse and apply for jobs as well as update their resume and skill profile. The plugin is supplemented by numerous built-in widgets.

Plugin Homepage

Job Manager

Job Manager is a simple job board and job application management plugin for WordPress.

Plugin Homepage | Download

Job Manager by Smart Recruiters

This plugin enables you to post jobs and manage applicants on your website. It also supports native integration with Smart Recruiters, an open recruiting service.

Plugin Homepage

My Job Application

My Job Application creates a job database and custom job listings for your website.

Download

WP-Simply Hired API

WP-Simply Hired API lets users browse jobs, apply for specific jobs, track pay-per-click jobs and perform many other functions. However, in order to use this plugin, you will need a Job-a-matic account.

Plugin Homepage | Download

wpCareers

wpCareers lets you create an online job/resume website.

Plugin Homepage

Zartis Job Plugin

Zartis Job Plugin can be used to add secure jobs and career pages to your WP website. It also supports excellent integration with social networking websites. Its basic version lets you create only one open job, and if you need more functionality, the cheapest paid license is available at $108 per year ($9/month).

Plugin Homepage

Themes for Job Boards

Jobpress Simple (Regular License: $79)

Theme Homepage | Live Preview

Job Board (Regular License: $65)

Theme Homepage | Live Preview

JobJockey (Regular License: $69)

Theme Homepage | Live Preview

Tapp Jobs (Regular License: $75)

Theme Homepage | Live Preview

9 to 5 (Regular License: $35)

Theme Homepage | Live Preview

Jobpress (FREE)

Theme Homepage | Live Preview

JobRoller (Regular License: $99)

Theme Homepage | Live Preview

ClassiPress (Regular License: $99)

Theme Homepage | Live Preview

What do you think of WP-powered job boards? Do share your thoughts with us in the comments!

In this article, we shall take a look at some of the specialized themes available for video bloggers, both and free and premium. So without further ado, here is the list!

PREMIUM THEMES 

(Free themes after premium)

1. Adventure (Regular License: $40)

Live Preview | Download

2. Black Label (Regular License: $30)

Live Preview | Download

3. Breeze (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

4. Especial (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

5. eVid (Club Membership: $39 per annum)

Live Preview | Download

6. Fast Blog (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

7. FolioFlip (Regular License: $30)

Live Preview | Download

8. Fresh>Trailers (Regular License: $39.99)

Live Preview | Download

9. Garnish (Regular License: $40)

Live Preview | Download

10. Gigawatt (Regular License: $50, Membership: $125)

Live Preview | Download

11. Groovy Video (Regular License: $70)

Live Preview | Download

12. Hash One (Regular License: $50, Membership: $125)

Live Preview | Download

13. Invictus (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

14. LeetPress (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

15. Live Theme (Regular License: $49)

Live Preview | Download

16. Magnifizine (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

17. MG Universal (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

18. Modularity (Membership starts at $49)

Live Preview | Download

19. MonstrFolio (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

20. Motion Picture (Regular License: $50, Membership: $125)

Live Preview | Download

21. Multimedia (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

22. MultiMedia Reloaded (Regular License: $25)

Live Preview | Download

23. MultimediaWP (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

24. MyStream (Regular License: $70)

Live Preview | Download

25. Nucleus (Regular License: $40)

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26. Object (Regular License: $70)

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27. On Demand (Regular License: $75)

Live Preview | Download

28. Parachute (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

29. Periodic (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

30. Pinotage (Regular License: $50, Membership: $125)

Live Preview | Download

31. Playtime (Regular License: $75)

Live Preview | Download

32. Premiere (Regular License: $70)

Live Preview | Download

33. Reflex (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

34. ReviewIt (Regular License: $45)

Live Preview | Download

35. Slide (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

36. Tarnished (Regular License: $35)

Live Preview | Download

37. TV Elements (Regular License: $75)

Live Preview | Download

38. Veddio (Regular License: $32)

Live Preview | Download

39. Video Elements (Regular License: $75)

Live Preview | Download

40. Video Flick (Regular License: $75)

Live Preview | Download

41. Videozoom (Regular License: $69)

Live Preview | Download

42. Vidley (Regular License: $75)

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43. Wave (Regular License: $35)

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44. WooTube (Regular License: $70)

Live Preview | Download

45. WP Color Video (Regular License: $30)

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46. WP-MediaMag (Regular License: $59)

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47. wpShow (Regular License: $25)

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FREE THEMES

48. Foxinni

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49. Selecta

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50. Smashing Multimedia

Live Preview | Download

51. Video

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52. Videographer

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53. WP Mods Video Theme

Live Preview | Download

With this we come to the end of the round-up. If you know any other noteworthy video themes for WordPress, feel free to mention them in the comments!

Well all those things break the standard, so people will see it as “impossible” to change. Should you put the following scripts on every page? No. That would be a waste of resources, since you’ll load a lot of useful things many times. Should you put them directly in your content (dear lord, please, don’t ever do this)? This would be really hard to maintain, since every simple change would be a big waste of time because you would have to make those changes post by post.

Let’s see a couple of ways to get this easily working.

1. Gallery inside any post

Let’s say you want to put galleria in a couple of posts (with no specific rule, could be any post, in any category).

Boolean custom field

Then your best option is to insert a custom field, and there just put any value, like “1″, so you’ll know that this one is a gallery post.

It’ll be something like this:

Now, little grasshopper, you may ask yourself why don’t we just put our script there, in our custom field, or even inside the content (argh!). We do it this way because if for any reason we change our script (like a plugin update, or change our theme) we can easily change it in a single place. Otherwise it would be way harder to make even small changes (like put a new color in your gallery).

Our single.php

Now we need to get this field, and then en queue our script! Just like that!

Where you have:

<?php
	get_header();
?>

You’ll replace with:

<?
	add_filter('wp_head','galleria_script');

	function galleria_script(){
		//we need to get our post ID outside the loop
		global $wp_query;
		$post_id = $wp_query->post->ID;
		$has_galleria = get_post_meta($post_id, "galleria", true);

		if ( ! empty($has_galleria) ) {
			echo '<script type="text/javascript" src="'.get_bloginfo("template_url").'/js/galleria/galleria-1.2.5.min.js"></script>';
			echo "\n <script type=\"text/javascript\"> \n
				$(\"#gallery\").galleria({ \n
					width: 500, \n
					height: 500 \n
				}); \n
			</script>";
		}
	}

	get_header(); ?>

Our images

Now we just make sure that all our images meet galleria’s specifications. You could even upload all your images via custom fields and use a shortcode to put them in place (so you won’t need to change the HTML at all). But for now we’ll do it with  HTML:

<div id="gallery">
	<img src="photo1.jpg" alt="" />
	<img src="photo2.jpg" alt="" />
	<img src="photo3.jpg" alt="" />
</div>

2. Syntax highlighter inside tutorial category

Let’s say that just like 1WD you publish a few cool coding tutorials every now and then. So it’s good to have a syntax highlight plugin, right?

If you just put it in your header.php every single post will have syntax highlight plugin files, even the non-coding ones. Like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-code-snippet/scripts/shCore.js"></script>
<link href="http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-code-snippet/styles/shCore.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<link type="text/css" rel="Stylesheet" href="http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-code-snippet/styles/shThemeDefault.css"/>

Category testing technique

Our solution this time is to use a simple category test. Let’s say that your coding category is “WordPress”. Then all you have to do is check if the post uses “word press” category, and then you’ll add syntax highlight scripts.

	add_filter('wp_head','syntax_script');

function syntax_script(){
	global $wp_query;
	$post_id = $wp_query->post->ID;
	$has_cat = in_category( "wordpress", $post_id );

	if ( ! empty($has_cat) ) {
		echo '<script type="text/javascript" src="'.get_bloginfo("url").'/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-code-snippet/scripts/shCore.js"></script>';
		echo '<link href="'.get_bloginfo("url").'/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-code-snippet/styles/shCore.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />';
		echo '<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="'.get_bloginfo("url").'/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-code-snippet/styles/shCore.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />';
	}
}

3. Demo inside tutorial itself

Another cool thing that you can do is to add demos directly inside your page. In order to get them working properly you may want to use iframes, so you ensure that the scripts and styles of your site won’t conflict with the ones from the demo.

URL custom field

What you need to do here is to add a simple meta with your demo URL:

And then you’ll just check in your single if there is anything in your demo-url. If there is anything it’ll show this url in an iframe, if not, it’ll just ignore and go on. Put this in the end of your loop (or any other place you want to display demo):

<?php
//loop stuff here
//still inside loop, otherwise $post->ID won't work
	$demo = get_post_meta($post->ID, "demo-url", true);
	if ( ! empty($demo) ) {
		echo '<iframe src="'.$demo.'" width="100%" height="300"><p>Sorry about that. Your browser does not support iframes.</p></iframe>';
	}
//now you can finish your loop!

4. Custom ads for every post

Well, despite of Google’s algorithm to recognize your post’s main topic and serve ads related to it, sometimes you may want to show different ads for different kinds of posts. For instance, you may serve affiliate links for “reviews”, Technorati ads for “funny” and google ads for “tutorials”.

This can be done with get_template_part function. With this function you can include external files inside your loop. So you just need to create a folder called “ads” in your template, set up your main files with the same name of your category slog.

Then at some point, your code will check which template part will be included, this way:

$cats = wp_get_post_categories( $post->ID );
foreach($post_categories as $c){
	$cat = get_category( $c );
	get_template_part( 'ads/'.$cat->slug );
}

So if you have a post that is “funny” and “review”, you’ll show 2 ad blocks.

Now it’s your turn!

So, what do you think? Could you think of other places, or different ways, to use these scripts? Hope you enjoyed my article!

In this article, we shall attempt to compare TextPattern and WordPress and see which one emerges victorious.

Before proceeding further, a short disclaimer: the division of this comparative review under multiple headings does not essentially have a logical explanation – I’ve simply attempted to compare it using four basic, but very important, categories, functionality and usability, mode of operation, extensions and plugins and finally, community and support.

Furthermore, I guess many users of WP and TXP will either agree or disagree with my views. To be honest, using a particular CMS also requires a certain amount of personal choice, what might work for me, may not work for you, and vice-versa. Differences in opinion are always welcome!

So without further ado, let us begin with our comparison.

Functionality and Usability

When it comes to functionality and usability, WordPress seems to win easily. While this does not mean that TextPattern is, in any way, less functional than WordPress, WP simply beats TXP in terms of ease of use! With the advent of version 3.x and higher, WP now boasts of a super organized administrative panel that lets you manage your website with ease. Don’t believe me? Take a look at WP’s admin panel. ‘Dashboard’, ‘Posts’, ‘Pages’, ‘Settings’ – which of these sections are not self-explanatory? Customizing the blog becomes a matter of few clicks. Take a look at the ‘Settings’ page of both the CMSes.

WordPress Settings Page

On the other hand, TextPattern’s administrative panel, though equally capable and powerful, seems ‘outdated’ in comparison to that of WordPress. Of course, TXP is equally robust in its admin panel, but overall the interface is not as easy to use and may even be confusing for beginners.

TextPattern Settings Page

Availability of Custom Plugins/Extensions and Themes

Apart from ease of use, the next thing that defines any piece of software is the availability of extensions for it. However, more often than not, there is a spiral between ‘ease of use’ on one hand and ‘extendability’ on the other. For instance, when it comes to mobile operating systems, Android is more popular than Samsung Bada. While this does not demerit Samsung Bada itself, Android’s popularity can be attributed to its ever-growing app market, which in turn is increasing because developers take an interest in it due to its easy extendability and wide usage, which ensures their efforts will not go unnoticed. Again, due to developers’ keen interest, the apps keep growing, and the users keep coming to Android.

Both WP and TXP support themes and templates as well as multiple plugins and extensions. However, WP has more themes and plugins then TXP. While this may or may not prove WP’s superiority, it surely plays its role in contributing to WP’s user base. Since many commercially viable tech blogs and websites are powered by WordPress (not to mention the millions of blogs at WordPress.com and Blog.com), it is but natural that WP has a large number of themes and plugins. Certain providers, such as WooThemes, offer themes for both WP and TXP. Yet, in this case too, WP dominates TXP in terms of the number of available themes.

If you have exemplary coding skills, fret not! You can easily tweak TXP and design your blog or website the way you wish to. But if you are an end user just looking to get a blog or website up and ready with as little technical expertise as possible, WP should be your safest bet!

Mode of Operation

Modus Operandi is by far the most debatable topic when it comes to comparing any two CMS’s, let alone WP and/or TXP.

To begin with, WordPress comes with a WYSIWYG Editor that makes editing posts and articles extremely simple.

WYSIWYG Editor in WP

TextPattern, on the other hand, has an equally awesome (though not so end-user friendly, as it takes some ‘getting used to’) editor, which can do almost anything you want it to, but will surely leave many beginners confused. In TXP, Textile and other related features can either be your best friends or your worst enemies.

Article Editor in TXP

In the admin back end as well, you will notice that mundane tasks such as updating the CMS, installing themes/plugins, or even navigating the back end – all seem easier on WP rather than TXP for a novice. However, the confusion vanishes once you get accustomed to the interface.

Community and Support

A CMS is only as good as its user base. Both TXP and WP have a good and fairly active community and many forums where you can seek support and advice.

In terms of documentation, TXP seems to win outright. WP is well documented, but it comes nowhere close to beating TXP – apart from the usual website, TXP also has its own User Documentation Website and another TXP Resources site.

Speaking of support, WP is updated on a more frequent basis as compared to TXP. However, this can be interpreted either way – supporters of WP will consider the frequent updates as higher level of activity at their developers’ end, while supporters of TXP can attribute the lesser updates to a sign of maturity of TXP in itself.

To sum it up

Before coming to a conclusion, let us recap each CMS’s pros and cons:

TextPattern:

Pros:

• Textile is a wonderful component, and if you get used to it, you will never, ever, miss WP.
• You can tweak your website as much as you want. There is negligible encapsulation done.
• Extensive documentation.

Cons:

• Admin back end looks outdated.
• Interface confusing for beginners.
• Lesser number of themes/plugins (as compared to WP)

WordPress:

Pros:

• Perhaps the easiest CMS ever
• Several themes/plugins
• Excellent update mechanism

Cons:

• WP is intended to power only one blog at a time (unless you’re using WPMU)
• With plugins/extensions, it may becomes bloated
• Editing article meta data is difficult
• Notorious for frequent security bugs and issues

And the Winner is…

As I stated above, using (or not using) a particular CMS is a matter of personal preference too. More often than not, our choice for a CMS is governed by our needs (and, perhaps, bias towards a personal favorite).

WordPress and TextPattern are both great at what they do! If you need a CMS just to power a blog or a small website, look no further than WordPress. If, on the contrary, you wish to run multiple blogs, or prefer to tweak your articles before posting them (or simply like to do things the geeks’ way), TextPattern might be your ideal solution. In simple terms, TXP should be chosen if you wish to define the dynamics of your website just as if you were ‘programming’ software.

Have you used WP and/or TXP earlier? Do share your experiences with us in the comments!

Yes, some of you might have already figured out what kind of service we’re writing about here. ManageWP is a service that allows you to manage all your WordPress websites from one single dashboard. What does it mean?

Lets quickly run over the main features:

• Firstly, that means that you no longer have to remember all logins and passwords for your sites or keep them in long spreadsheets. With ManageWP dashboard you can access all your websites with one click.
• Performing an upgrade of WordPress, plugins and themes across all of your sites is easy as clicking one ‘Upgrade all’ button. You can also install plugins and themes to multiple sites at once, from a variety of sources (your favorites list, WordPress.org, your computer or any URL).
• You can backup all your sites from ManageWP dashboard at any time or restore a previous backup. ManageWP can backup both your entire website or just the database. You can also set automatic scheduled backups.
• ManageWP allows you to set up a new, fully loaded, WordPress site in minutes. Or use ManageWP’s clone tool to clone any of your existing sites from one domain, subdomain or folder to another.
• With all sites under one roof, doing bulk operations becomes easy. Whether you want to post an article to multiple sites, manage your blogroll links or add users, ManageWP allows you to do it effortlessly across any number of sites at once.

How does it work? Do you have to provide them with all your passwords? The answer is no. Access to your site is governed by the ManageWP Worker plugin that you install directly onto your blog. That means that the only password ManageWP stores is the one needed for their central dashboard. So lets get started and take a deeper look into this service.

Features

Dashboard

Once you’ve installed the plugin and linked your website with ManageWP you can access all the features it offers. The dashboard is clean and easy to use. Plus it looks just like your casual WordPress dashboard so you don’t have to worry about adapting to a new and unfamiliar platform.

In the main view you can see which plugins or themes have an update available, below there are post revisions aka post autosaves and spam comments. You can also view the recent comments and posts. In the top right there is a pageview statistics graph and scheduled backups below it.

Manage Plugins & Themes

ManageWP dashboard allows you to instantly and simultaneously install themes or plugins for all of your websites. You can also opt to Activate plugins after upload. Looking through all the plugins is also made easy. In my opinion, the only drawback is the plugin horizontal layout so you have to scroll the window quite far if you’ve got a lot of plugins installed.

Backup

With ManageWP, you can set up scheduled backups to Amazon S3, Dropbox, your own server, any external FTP or an email address for all of your blogs with just a few clicks. You can choose between daily, weekly or monthly backups. Note – this feature is only available for the professional and business pricing plan.

Migrating/cloning sites.

This feature comes in handy if you need to setup a new network of identically modified websites. The theme and all plugins are installed automatically so you don’t have to spend time setting up every blog manually.

Bulk Actions

ManageWP allows you to bulk add/export websites, create new pages, posts and links for all of your websites.

It’s pretty clear with the pages and posts – although I don’t see a good reason why one would like to publish the same post on several blogs, the function does it’s job. Again you’re given the default WordPress text editor so there’s nothing unfamiliar to master.

The Bulk add users feature is bloody useful if you’re willing to add a writer for a set of blogs. You can find this feature under the Users section.

Note – all the bulk features are only available for professional and business pricing plan.

Self-hosted version

ManageWP also offers self-hosted version which allows you to run the service on your own dashboard. Self hosted allows you to have an unlimited number of blogs, host everything on your server and add your own features. It’s created for companies and organizations managing hundreds or even thousands of websites and is currently available only as Enterprise license.

Pricing

ManageWP will be offering three pricing plans where the price then depends on the number of websites you’ll manage (you can choose from a range between 10 and 500). The pre-order is launching on December 6th. All users that sign up now will receive a 30% life-time discount on any hosted service plan that they pre-order for as long as they maintain their service.

• 30 day free trial so you can test the service before paying for it.
• Free plan which allows you to use the Standard features for up to three (five, if you refer some friends) websites.
• Annual plans, and you will get two months free when you sign up for these.

Below you can see the pricing plans for 10, 100 and 500 websites.

10 websites

• Standard: $7/month
• Professional: $21/month
• Business: $42/month

100 websites

• Standard: $40/month
• Professional: $120/month
• Business: $240/month

500 websites

• Standard: $70/month
• Professional: $210/month
• Business: $420/month

Interview

Since this series focuses on the startups we wanted to ask a couple of questions to the founder of ManageWP Vladimir Prelovac.Vladimir Prelovac is the the CEO of Prelovac Media, an internet company located in Belgrade, Serbia. Besides ManageWP he’s also written a book on WordPress plugin development and created other stunning services and plugins.

1. There aren’t many alternatives who can compete with ManageWP. How did you come up with the idea of ManageWP?

As with most good ideas, it was a stroke of luck and a hint of opportunity. A friend of mine was rambling about how he had trouble managing his blogs, and I suddenly realized there is nothing like that available for WordPress, which is, after all, the world’s biggest internet publishing platform. The world needed something like ManageWP, so I decided it was time to make it.

2. As far as I understand ManageWP began in 2010. Why did it take so long to finish beta testing and establish a fully functional service?

ManageWP is an extremely complex piece of software. What makes it unique is that we really tried to make it run smoothly on literally thousands of different server configurations that WordPress would run on. That was our biggest challenge. Scalability was also an important focus for us — some of our users are managing thousands of blogs. But knowing that ManageWP can load data from 1800 websites in less than two minutes… it makes it all worth it.

There is also a list of spectacular features that we are pushing to integrate into ManageWP. Some startups, for example, are satisfied with only offering backup solutions for WordPress. But that functionality is only a tiny piece of the overall picture. Backup features are critical — and something we pride ourselves in offering — but it is only one piece of the 23 major features currently offered by ManageWP, with many more on the way. And with all the great ideas coming in from our beta users, we know that the value we can provide will continue to grow.

Another thing is that we had to ensure that ManageWP would work with services that WordPress users already deeply value. That’s why ManageWP now integrates with Google Analytics and AdSense. And that’s why we already have plans in place to integrate with SEO and uptime monitoring tools in the near future.

And then there is the fact that WordPress is constantly evolving. Adjusting to all the changes is a challenge unless you are willing to work hard to adjust to those changes. Thankfully, our team put in the effort to adapt. So that’s why it all took almost a year and a half to arrive at this point. (And the ride is not over yet!)

Ultimately, our goal is to create a dashboard so useful, so powerful that people will no longer need to log into their WordPress websites or other services. They will be able to log into ManageWP, and everything that the user needs to effectively manage their WordPress sites will be all right there at the user’s fingertips.

Above you can see a screenshot from Wayback Machine with the ManageWP website in 2010.

3. You’ve established a flexible and nice scheme where instead of following a strict milestone schedule the users themselves suggest the ideas you then consider. How did you come up with this method and has it brought the desired results?

Yes! I believe this is one of our strengths at ManageWP. Many of our features were suggested by our users, and that makes it a much more personalized experience for them and for us. After all, nobody could ever have a perfect vision of a product (except maybe Steve Jobs), so it was very important that we listened to our users early on in the development process. We already have around six or seven different ways for users to send us feedback, and I read all of it. The best ideas are sent off to the team for development.

Above you can see a screenshot from ManageWP Google group where users can suggest ideas which then are sent for consideration.

4. Since our series is about successful and fresh startups could you comment on ManageWP from this perspective? How has it grown as a project?

There are different ways to measure the success of a startup. At ManageWP, and from the feedback we have received, it would seem that we created a truly useful service that solves a problem that many people share. Some of our users were excited to learn when we intended to charge for ManageWP, but for the past 12 months, all we wanted to do was focus on creating a genuinely useful product.

And I think that is the most important thing — in order to keep the team passionate and the users interested, you need to have a great product.

5. Your blog says that the number of websites managed by ManageWP has hit 50 000. How do you feel about these results and what are predictions for the future?

Well, looking at numbers like these is always exciting. We hit 50,000 websites near the end of September, but we now manage over 80,000 WordPress blogs. So, when you put it into that perspective, you get really excited as you can see that your product is making a small but measurable change in how the internet works.

Somebody once said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it.

By having a clear vision of where we want to go and by keeping our customers happy, inventing the future is exactly what we are doing. It also helps when we are working with a strong and thriving publishing platform in WordPress. So, all things considered, I am very positive about our future.

Above you can see a screenshot with the exciting announcement.

6. Could you share some of your tips/business principles for others out there willing to make a successful startup?

There are couple of principles that I believe will make any startup’s journey easier:

First is that you need to have a cool product, one that you strongly believe in and you will want to use on your own. This also makes it so much easier to justify putting most, if not all, of your own time, money, and heart into it. You have to realize that there will be many hurdles along the way, as with all things in life, so you better have an idea of what you are doing and why you are doing it.

Second is to launch the beta as soon as possible. This allows you to start listening to your users and getting feedback. They will give great ideas on how to improve your product… for free!

Third is to not create a startup that relies on external funding to succeed. We are completely bootstrapped, which most likely forced us to create a significantly better product than we might have if we were basking in investment money. It motivates you to perform.

Fourth is the speed — making efforts to optimize your application and interface like crazy. Users have never been as impatient as they are today. Also, intuitiveness: the less the users needs to think, the better. You really need to watch other people use your product. You will be surprised by what you will discover.

Do the above things, and people will be drawn to your efforts and will help you to succeed.

7. Additional information

We are launching the pre-order on December the 6th. All users that sign up now will receive a 30% life-time discount on any hosted service plan that they pre-order for as long as they maintain their service, so come check us out! Finally, ManageWP is set to launch in early January.

Conclusion

ManageWP indeed is an amazing and one of the most useful services for WordPress. It’s also a great example of a fresh startup success story. You should definitely check out the free trial if you are running multiple WordPress websites. We’d be glad to hear your feedback and personal experiences. Stay tuned and wait for the next hot startup story.

Little explanation, what we’re doing here

This is something new we are trying out here at 1WD. We are searching for new startups, services we really enjoy and want to share with our readership! The idea is to give better visibility to some outstanding startups and give you a good understanding of what they do and why we think they deserve your attention. Also – we don’t earn anything from these reviews, we just find what we love and review it honestly in detail. When we can, we will always interview the people behind the startup, so you can learn from them, and they can share their passion and story.

I think this new idea and a little shift in focus here at 1WD will be really beneficial for You and feel free to critique what you didn’t enjoy in this article, what you want us to review next and tell us what we did right and if you want more articles like this!

We are very open and if you know about a cool service we could review – just write us in our contact form!

Dainis Graveris

Gamification is a whole branch in reader engagement which brings together game mechanics and marketing to create engagement and solve problems. What do we understand with game mechanics from a web standpoint? Well, that doesn’t necessarily has to be the traditional online games as we are used to seeing them. Gamification relates to things like points, badges, activity levels, leaderboards, challenges etc. Gamification is an excellent way to help shape user behavior and influence them to take actions. There are already lots of successful companies who’ve implemented these game mechanics into their services. Foursquare and Farmville are only two brilliant examples of efficient use of game mechanics.

How do you start then? While there are many ideas and tips to help you improve reader engagement this article focuses on tools and services that do the work for you. Polls, comment platforms, newsletter and gamification services – continue reading and check out these 15+ awesome tools to enrich the readers engagement. The post also contains some neat examples of user engagement and gamification techniques in use.

Tools & Services

1. Badgeville

Badgeville is the leading Social Loyalty and Smart Gamification Platform. Badgeville makes it easy to drive reader loyalty and increase retention by rewarding targeted behaviors, such as visiting, reading pages, commenting, and sharing links.

You can use Badgeville pertaining to retail & ecommerce, media & publishing, entertainment, health & fitness, education etc. Basically the principle stays the same. You implement a social rewards program into your website, in that way being able to offer a variety of rewards to make the experience more enriching.

The platform

Badgeville gives content, commerce and community brands the power to drive and measure user behavior with social game mechanics. Badgeville’s industry-leading customers are experiencing increases in key business objectives by more than 30%.

Dynamic Game Engine

Badgeville’s patent-pending Dynamic Game Engine (DGE) makes it easy for smart brand marketers and product leaders to use social game mechanics to drive user behavior across their web, mobile, and social experiences. Chosen by industry-leading brands, the DGE is the most flexible and lightweight gamification solution available on the market today.

Widget Studio & API

With the Badgeville Widget Studio, you have access to an extensive library of skinnable, turnkey widgets that make it possible to deploy a deeply integrated social loyalty program across your web experience in a matter of weeks. For additional customization, the Badgeville API can be quickly integrated into any digital property.

Social Fabric

Social Fabric is a groundbreaking technology that brings the social interactions found on Facebook, Twitter, and similar social sites to any web property, delivering relevant, real-time social experiences tied to site-specific user behaviors and content. Social Fabric offers real-time notifications, follow functionality, and relevant activity streams.

Engagement Analytics

Marketers can now take advantage of the same analytics that social game developers use to build compelling, revenue-generating user experiences. With Badgeville’s Engagement Analytics, you’ll gain deep, real time insight into the health of your user community, measuring daily active users, lapsed users, as well as a host of behaviors.

2. Polldaddy

With Polldaddy you can create stunning surveys, polls, and quizzes in minutes. Collect responses via your website, e-mail, iPad, Facebook, and Twitter. Generate and share easy-to-read reports.

Features:

• Create stunning online surveys. Use the survey editor to create surveys quickly and easily. Collect responses via your website, e-mail or on your iPad or iPhone
• Market-leading online polls. What does your audience think? Embed simple, one-question polls into your website to find out.
• Test their knowledge with an online quiz. The perfect tool for the classroom, colleagues or just for fun. Create quick and fun quizzes to test their knowledge.
• Get your content rated. Create simple five-star and Nero rating widgets to attach to your blog posts, images, videos, and more.

Pricing:

• Free (200 survey responses per month, 10 questions per survey): $0
• Professional (5,000 survey responses per month, unlimited questions per survey and more): $200/year
• Corporate (unlimited survey responses per month, unlimited questions per survey and more): $899/year

3. Outbrain

Outbrain is a simple way to increase engagement, generate new revenue and drive traffic to your mobile-optimized site. Outbrain automatically places your best content at the foot of your article to guide your readers towards more of what you have to offer.

Features:

• Improve site recirculation. Targeted content recommendations increase page views by 3-12% and move readers between your blogs, site sections, and other properties.
• Make money. Customers pay Outbrain to distribute great articles and content that they want read. When quality articles match your content, links to these articles may show and generate revenue for you.
• Editor friendly. With Outbrain, you decide which content sources will be recommended to your readers. You will also have a full control over the sponsored recommendations that drive you revenue.
• Extend to mobile platforms. Outbrain recommendations are a great addition to your mobile platforms.

4. Disqus

Disqus is a comment platform that helps you build an active community from your website’s audience. It has awesome features, powerful tools, and it’s easy to install.

Features:

• Realtime comment system. Comments become more like live discussions with realtime posting and updating.
• Notification and reply system. The notification system lets people know when they’ve received a response. Best of all, they can continue the conversation straight from the email.
• Inline media embedding. Full integration with media services such as Youtube, Flickr, and more. Attach media such as photos and videos right within the comments.
• Mobile commenting. Fully compatible with mobile websites for commenting while on the go.

5. The Slide

The Slide by SimpleReach recommends related posts from your site on a widget that “slides” in at the bottom of the page. You’ve seen a similar content recommendation widget on sites like NYTimes.com, and now SimpleReach is allowing anybody to take advantage of this awesome tool for free. The Slide uses ‘asynchronous loading’ and will not affect the load time of your pages.

6. Readability

Readability delivers a great reading experience that compensates publishers and writers without slowing down the web. Why would you want to use it as a publisher? 70% of all Readability membership fees are earmarked for writers and publishers. Every time a subscriber uses Readability on your site, a portion of that subscriber’s fees are allocated to you.

Features:

• Snappy auto-rendering of content on mobile & tablet devices.
• Innovative analytics that provide new insights into reading activity.
• A powerful API that is simple to integrate and build upon.
• Enhanced accessibility and instant printable + single-page views.
• A rich mobile experience — without installing an app.

7. Intervue

Intervue is a quick and easy tool for publishers who are looking to gather short video responses online from anyone with a webcam.

8. Zooshia

ZOOSHIA is a simple yet clever tool that arms websites and blogs owners with fresh content from across the social web. ZOOSHIA is the first and only social plugin that enables you to mix content that interests you and your audience.

9. BigDoor

BigDoor use game mechanics to increase user engagement, loyalty and monetization.It’s goal is to help web publishers, marketers and developers grow and engage their communities. BigDoor offers a cost-effective, flexible and easy to use suite of tools to quickly build game mechanics into your online experiences and applications.

Pricing:

• BigDoor is free as a widget and for developers, yet you have to pay for the enterprise service.

10. Bunchball

Bunchball is yet another gamifaction platform which allows you to influence users behaviour and optimize the way they interact with the website.

Nitro Platform is designed to make it easy for you to offer meaningful experiences to your users. Highly flexible and scalable, Nitro can be customized to your needs, but offers intuitive, easy set-up.

WordPress Plugins

1. Newsletter

This plug-in lets you collect subscribers on your blog with a single or double opt-in subscription process. Double opt-in is law compliant and it means the user has to confirm the subscription following simple standard instructions sent to him via email. Newsletter Pro can send emails directly from your blog, collect statistics, has a built in feed by mail service and an auto-responder for follow up you new subscribers.

2. Subscribe 2

Subscribe2 provides a comprehensive subscription management and email notification system for WordPress blogs that sends email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog.

3. GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin. Plugin includes advanced settings panels that will allow you to control many aspects of rating.

4. Sharethis

The ShareThis plugin seamlessly enables users to share your content through Email,Facebook,Twitter, Google +1, Like, Send and many more. You can customize the ShareThis widget on your site and register with ShareThis to get access to enhanced share related analytics for your site.

5. Quick Chat

Quick Chat is WordPress chat plugin with support for translation, chat rooms, words filtering, emoticons, user list, gravatars and more.

6. Gigya

The Gigya Social optimization plug-in aggregates authentication and social APIs from Facebook, Twitter, Google and other OAuth & OpenID providers, giving sites the ability to authenticate users via social network and OpenID providers and increase site traffic by enabling users to easily share content with their friends and followers.

7. Facebook Comments

Allows your visitors to comment on posts using their Facebook profile. Supports custom styles, notifications, combined comment counts, recent comments

Examples

1. Foursquare

Foursquare uses badges as a reward for challenges completed. Badges is a great way to engage users and keep competitive mood around them. Bagdes will be the stimulus for existing users to keep using service and an attractive detail for the newcomers.

2. Dropbox

Dropbox is another great example of efficient use of user engagement. They’re offering extra free space for completing challenges. One of the challenges include inviting friends so in that way the service is being popularized.

3. Tribesports

Tribesports is a social network for people interested in sports and an excellent example of website gamification. In the screenshot above you can see the user profile page. Tribesports have implemented the whole package – activity level, leaderboard and badges. One the main site’s features is challenges. You can take them., challenge your friends, create your own ones and see the progress of others.

4. Mint

Mint has this fitness feature which allows you to do drills, take challenges and view your progress.

5. Dribbble

Dribbble is also a nice example of user engagemenet. As you get the status and gain more exposure you’re also promoting your business. Plus the exclusivity of the site also plays a role in user engagement.

Facebook plugins are centered on users and their experience with your website, blog or Facebook Page. Plugins make interacting and communicating with your content simple by providing users with many reasons to share and interact, receive friend’s recommendations or “like” your Facebook Page.

Below are 15 of the top WordPress Facebook plugins in use today:

1. WPToFacebook

WpToFacebook can transfer your WordPress content (manually or automatically) directly to one or more tabs in Facebook.

Some features:

• Unlimited connections to Facebook
• Options to make content visible or invisible to fans
• Order content by title, date or in descending or ascending order
• Choose pre-existing templates or create your own
• Multi-language capabilities

2. JSL3 Facebook Wall Feed

This WordPress plugin displays a snippet of your Facebook wall on your website via a widget.

3. Add Link to Facebook

This plugin automatically posts your content from WordPress to a location on Facebook, whether your fan page, a group, or profile wall. You can customize the way links appear and choose to add your own image to the post on Facebook. If you do not choose an image, the plugin will display a default image.

With this plugin you can also display “Likes” for the post on the original content from WordPress and link comments from the two locations together. The comments and likes on the post in Facebook will appear on the blog post in WordPress.

This plugin also allows for remote posting from Android or iOS devices or by using Windows Live Writer, BloGTK or Blogilo.

4. Cardoza Facebook Like Box

The Cardoza Facebook Like Box is a visual box displayed on your website that introduces visitors to your Facebook Page. The box will showcase how many people “like” your page while showing your visitors which of their friends like it as well.

You can customize the Like Box to include your recent posts and allow visitors to “like” your page while remaining on your website.

5. Facebook Comments for WordPress

Your blog visitors may refrain from leaving comments because they do not want to take the time to register a new login for your site. This plugin will make commenting easier for your visitors by giving them the option to login and comment on your posts with their Facebook or Yahoo! account. If readers are logged into Facebook, they will automatically be able to leave comments using their Facebook profile without any extra effort.

You can customize the order of the comments, their visibility, and the manner in which you will receive notification when a user publishes a comment. The user will also have the option to publish the comment to their Facebook wall which can help to grow your business as well.

6. WP Greet Box

This plugin will help to increase awareness and readership for your blog. It targets visitors based on where they came from before landing on your website. With a greeting message you can customize it depending on the referring url. For example, if a visitor arrives from Twitter, you can create the welcome message about Twitter and include a link to follow or interact with you there as well. You can also set a default greeting message that is not connected to any referring url.

Some features:

• Auto-insert greeting messages at different locations in your post
• Customize user settings and whether or not user can close the greeting
• Plugin automatically detects visitor’s searched keywords and displays related posts under or above the greeting message
• Customize settings so visitors will only see the greeting message once, regardless of how many times they visit your site.
• Customize rules to exclude specific referrer urls
• Greeting message box is completely customizable (with CSS)
• Plugin includes long list of referrers with the ability to easily add more as you please

7. Facebook Share Button – NEW

This Facebook Share Button plugin is a new version of the old plugin. It allows blog owners to add a Facebook Share button to any blog post and now provides a count as to how many times your content is shared.

You can position the share button before or after your post or page by using the shortcode [fbshare] or by manually inserting it in the code. You can also customize the button using CSS and choose to opt out of displaying the share count. The plugin works with the Google +1 and Tweetmeme buttons as well.

8. Wordbook

Wordbook is a Facebook plugin that allows you to automatically post your blogs to your Facebook wall for your friends to view from their news feeds. Friends can also comment on your posts directly from Facebook.  

9. JanRain Engage

The JanRain plugin allows your visitors to login to your blog via many social networks such as Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, MySpace ID, Windows Live ID and OpenID (18 supported networks).

The users’ icons will be seen alongside the comments and users can also easily share the content with their friends on their social networks. Optional displays include share buttons on each comment or at the beginning or end of posts.

The plugin also collects email addresses if the login does not pass a verified email check.  Existing users can also login with their current account details.

10. Simple Facebook Connect

Simple Facebook Connect is a robust plugin that allows your visitors to comment on your content using their Facebook profile. In addition, you can automatically publish posts to your Facebook profile, fan page or an application.

Some other great features as listed on the plugin page:

• Enables your site to connect to Facebook with JS SDK
• Implements OpenGraph tags, entirely automatically
• Comment using Facebook credentials (with Facebook avatar support)
• Automatically Publish new posts to Facebook Profile or Application or Fan Page
• Manually Publish posts to FB Profile or Application or Fan Page
• Integrate comments made on Facebook back into your own site
• Login with your Facebook credentials, optionally using Facebook avatars instead of Gravatars
• New user registration with Facebook credentials (using the Facebook Registration Authentication system)
• Facebook Photo Album integration in the Media uploader
• Like Button and shortcode
• User Status Widget and shortcode
• Live Stream Widget and shortcode
• Fan Box Widget and shortcode
• Fan Count Chicklet and Widget
• Activity Feed Widget
• “Share” button and Shortcode (reworked version of Like button, as Share button is no longer supported by Facebook)

11. Facebook Fan Box

This plugin is another popular Facebook Like Box for your WordPress website. Display your fan page updates in real-time on your blog for your visitors. It also shows the number of fans and gives you the ability to customize the appearance, dimensions, stories and number of fans displayed.  

12.WP-FB-AutoConnect

The FB Auto Connect is similar to Facebook’s registration plugin. The plugin offers registration and login templates so your visitors can easily connect with your site. Users can login to your blog with either their Facebook account or WordPress details.

Some additional features:

• Full support
• Facebook profile pictures for avatars
• Fast page load time since connection with API is not needed after login is complete
• New user accounts retained even if you remove the plugin
• Notifications when user connects with Facebook
• Easy to customize

13. Gigya Socialize

Gigya Socialize gives users the ability to connect with your blog through many different accounts such as:

• Facebook Connect
• Twitter
• MySpace ID
• Google
• Yahoo
• AOL
• LinkedIn
• Any OpenID provider

You can also update your social sites and invite friends to visit your content via the plugin. It is easily customizable and helps visitors stay on your blog longer by giving them an array of easy login options. It also makes sharing your content very easy, which will help to increase blog traffic.

14. Fotobook

Fotobook imports your photos and your albums from Facebook. You can import photos from multiple Facebook accounts, insert single photos in posts or display photo albums on a WordPress page. The admin panel is easy-to use and widgets displaying random photos can be easily added to the sidebar.

15. Facebook Share Statistics

This is a great plugin to help you track your visitors’ activities on Facebook. The backend panel displays statistics and charts of the posts that have been shared or “liked” as well as the number of comments and visits from Facebook.

Do you use any of these plugins or have any other recommendations? Please share!

Our starting point will be a cool sliding tags design made by Thomas Bosée. Then we’ll learn how to use WordPress wp_list_categories function, how to edit its result, how to code CSS and finally a little of jQuery “Black Magic”.

So, let’s rock!

Demo first, please

So our goal is to achieve the effect seen on this demo. As usual you can download our sample files and edit as you want!

Wp_list_categories()

Wp_list_categories is a function that gets all categories and has a few useful parameters. We’ll be using a few of them:

• echo – whether the results should or shouldn’t be displayed. This is quite useful because we’ll have to adjust results a little bit
• show_count – this one toggles the display of current post count in each category
• title_li – since the default value is a big <h2>Categories</h2> we’ll change it
• depth – It’ll be better not to have children categories this time. But if you want it just put it as zero and change ‘hierarchical’ to false

Our php will be like this:

<ul>
<?php
	$args = array (
		'echo' => 0,
		'show_count' => 1,
		'title_li' => '',
		'depth' => 1
	);
	$variable = wp_list_categories($args);
	echo $variable;
?>
</ul>

And this PHP outputs this HTML:

<ul id="category">
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-8"><a href="#design">design</a> (17)</li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-6"><a href="#icon">icon</a> (9)</li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-7"><a href="#grid">grid</a> (3)</li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-9"><a href="#clean">clean</a> (25)</li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-1"><a href="#typography">typography</a> (8)</li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#minimal">minimal</a> (12)</li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#illustration">illustration</a> (1)</li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#high-resolution">high resolution</a> (6)</li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#iphone">iphone</a> (15)</li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#interface">interface</a> (21)</li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#grunge">grunge</a> (10)</li>
</ul>

Oops, HTML is not quite right yet

As you may notice, the default post count is simple text with parenthesis. Well, in our original design we have count as a separate element, so we’ll need to change this default behavior. A simple way of doing this is with str_replace, we’ll search for “(“, replace with “<span>” and then search for “)” e replace with “</span>”.

This is how your category listing function will be:

<ul>
<?php
	$args = array (
		'echo' => 0,
		'show_count' => 1,
		'title_li' => '',
		'depth' => 1
	);
	$variable = wp_list_categories($args);
	$variable = str_replace ( "(" , "<span>", $variable );
	$variable = str_replace ( ")" , "</span>", $variable );
	echo $variable;
?>
</ul>

And now we’ll have right HTML, as follows:

<ul id="category">
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-8"><a href="#design">design</a> <span>17</span></li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-6"><a href="#icon">icon</a> <span>9</span></li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-7"><a href="#grid">grid</a> <span>3</span></li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-9"><a href="#clean">clean</a> <span>25</span></li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-1"><a href="#typography">typography</a> <span>8</span></li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#minimal">minimal</a> <span>12</span></li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#illustration">illustration</a> <span>1</span></li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#high-resolution">high resolution</a> <span>6</span></li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#iphone">iphone</a> <span>15</span></li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#interface">interface</a> <span>21</span></li>
	<li class="cat-item cat-item-5"><a href="#grunge">grunge</a> <span>10</span></li>
</ul>

CSS, CSS, CSS

(A.K.A. CSS3. Yeah, a really bad joke)

Now we’ll do this with a few cool CSS3 implementations. This is what will help us:

• Before and after pseudo elements – instead of putting a lot of additional spans we’ll just use them to create pretty effects
• Border-radius - we’ll need slightly rounded corners
• Content - this CSS property will be especially useful because we’ll insert an image as content of before count and after count
• Element positioning - we’ll have to be aware of positioning since before and after have to always be with our main span element

Let’s go step by step. Basic CSS for background and main div positioning. Nothing really major in here:

body {
	background: url(bg.png);
}
	#container {
		position: relative;
		width: 500px;
		margin: 50px auto 0;
		padding: 10px 0 20px;
	}

With #category and li rules we’ll achieve that side-by-side listing.

#category {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	list-style-type: none;
	overflow: hidden;
}
	#category li {
		float: left;
		position: relative;
		padding: 0 10px;
		margin: 0 15px 10px 0;
	}

Our link styling will create that “white” part of our little tag. Background is a 1px wide soft gradient:

#category li a {
	float: left;
	padding: 4px 10px 0;
	height: 18px;
	font-family: "arial";
	font-size: 10px;
	color: #3f3f3f;
	text-decoration: none;
	border-top: 1px solid #d3d0cf;
	border-left: 1px solid #cac7c7;
	border-bottom: 1px solid #aeadad;
	background: url(bgTag.png) repeat-x;
	-moz-border-radius: 2px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 2px;
	border-radius: 2px;
}

Now we need to create the orange part of our tag. Since we’ll animate just the “middle”, we’ll have to do it in a way that our before and after elements will be “inside” of span but will go to right / left as our main element expands. So this will do the trick:

#category li span {
	position: relative;
	float: left;
	width: 35px;
	padding: 5px 0 0;
	margin-top: 1px;
	height: 18px;
	font-family: "arial";
	font-size: 10px;
	color: #3f3f3f;
	text-align: center;
	background: url(bgCount.png);
	overflow: hidden;
}
	#category li span:before, #category li span:after {
		position: absolute;
		top: 0;
		left: 0;
		width: 3px;
		height: 30px;
		content: url(bgBeforeCount.png);
		overflow: hidden;
	}
	#category li span:after {
		left: auto;
		right: 0;
		content: url(bgAfterCount.png);
	}

jQuery Black Magic

First of all, we need to include jQuery, right? So we’ll do it with a really cool technique that I’ve seen at jQuery boilerplate:

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">window.jQuery || document.write("\x3Cscript src='js/jquery-1.7.1.min.js' type='text/javascript'>\x3C/script>")</script>

We’ll try to get it from Google. Since almost everybody visits Google often we have a good chance of getting this right from the users cache. But if for any crazy reason Google is down (for instance, if we have been hit by a giant meteor just like our dino friends) it’ll get jQuery from our local file :)

Now we need to show / hide post counts when hovering over them, so our basic logic will be:

FIND all "#category span" tags
	animate their width to 0px
FIND all "#category li" tags
	WHEN mouseenter
		animate this.children("span") width to 35px
	WHEN mouseleave
		animate this.children("span") width to 0px

When translating this to jQuery what you need to be aware of is:

• When you animate item to zero jQuery will add ‘display: none’ to it (will hide our before and after tags), so we’ll animate it to 5px instead
• You have to chain selectors to get better performance, so we’ll find #category, then get each span, then go up a level (to li’s)
• When you animate several elements it’s good to “stop” them before animating so we won’t have a lot of “dancing” tags if user moves randomly mouse over elements

Our final jQuery code will be this crazy thing:

$(function(){
	$("#category")
		.find("span")
		.each(function(){
			$(this).animate({"width": "5px"});
		})
		.parent()
		.hover(
			function(){
				$(this).find("span").stop().animate({"width": "35px"});
			}, function() {
				$(this).find("span").stop().animate({"width": "5px"});
			}
		);
});

So, what do you think?

Hope you enjoyed reading. Don’t be shy and share your thoughts with us!