Due to pop­u­lar demand, I’ve added another list of pre­mier Word­Press CMS plu­g­ins for use specif­i­cally those trar­geted at tap­ping into the new 3.0 fea­tures we’re all so excited about. That’s right, I’m talk­ing built-in post types, the sliced bread for all you Word­Press CMS gurus.

Con­tinue Reading…

To help folks stay up to date with some of the lat­est and great­est CMS plu­g­ins I’ve decided to fea­ture new, up and com­ing Word­Press plu­g­ins on this post. Because these lists will be posted fre­quently, I don’t have time to review every plu­gin indi­vid­u­ally. I sug­gest using your judge­ment based on the repos­i­tory feed­back & rat­ing before choos­ing any of these as a devel­op­ment option in your next project.

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Flut­ter has been a great plu­gin for Word­Press, allow­ing CMS devel­op­ers to lever­age cus­tom post types and write pan­els through an easy to use GUI. Unfor­tu­nately over the past year or so devel­op­ment has slowed down some, and has even forked into other projects.

Con­tinue Reading…

It looks like the devel­op­ers who cre­ated More Fields have been hard at work in order to accom­mo­date the upcom­ing release of Word­Press 3.0. They’ve updated to more Fields Plu­gin to 1.5, adding some much needed bug fixes. Beyond that they have branched the More Fields project into a series of “More” CMS plugins.

Con­tinue Reading…

The Word­Press WYSIWYG/TinyMCE edi­tor is great but can’t ful­fill the needs of a robust CMS. When cre­at­ing a CMS with Word­Press you often find your­self need­ing to man­age detailed areas and mod­ules, and the cur­rent cus­tom field edi­tor doesn’t cut it in terms of usabil­ity for clients. Using the fol­low­ing plu­g­ins you can allow your clients to man­age con­tent using:

• Sin­gle line text
• Para­graph textarea
• Inline image uploader
• File attach­ments
• Date picker
• Dropdown/select fields
• Yes/no/multiple choice with radios or checkbooks
• Man­ag­ing slideshows
• Using more than one rich con­tent area (WYSIWYG)

I’ve writ­ten posts about this in the past, but things in the Word­Press world move fast. Below is my new evolved tool­box of go-to plu­g­ins I rec­om­mend using for your cus­tomized Word­Press CMS setup.

Con­tinue Reading…

I recently received this email from a reader, and wanted to address it here for everyone.

Hi Kevin,

Great site, port­fo­lio, and articles.

I had a quick ques­tion if you can spare some time…

I’ve worked with Word­Press for about a year now, and have lately won­dered if some­thing like Modx is more appro­pri­ate for larger sites.  I love work­ing with WP, but the approach with Modx is nice.  The only rea­son why I have wavered is that WP doesn’t seem as well geared to facil­i­tate a 200 page site.  Unless there is a hid­den plug-in that I don’t know about that allows for each page man­age­ment that you know about?

I’d like to con­tinue to work with WP because if a client wants to sell online, easy imple­ment.  Easy man­ag­ing of a lot of basic things like forms, media, etc.

But other things like mul­ti­ple fields, where Modx excels at out of the box, is always done with a plu­gin etc.  Or even the page man­age­ment that I’m talk­ing about, again, that modx does great out of the box.  It just seems like more of a real CMS to me, but Word­Press seems to have so many plu­gin solu­tions that make things very easy.

Any insight to this would be much appre­ci­ated.  I hate think­ing that I’m not using the best sys­tem and some­times its hard to find good com­par­isons online.  I was think­ing since you’re such an avid WP user, that you could sway me back toward WP. ;)

Thanks for your time Kevin,

Best Chris

I would like to start by say­ing that I have lit­tle hands on expe­ri­ence with MODx, but have used sim­i­lar options such as Sil­ver­Stripe, and believe that both are very pow­er­ful and well built tools in their own right. By no means do I advo­cate that they could not han­dle this job well, I am sim­ply stress­ing that Word­Press is capa­ble of han­dling many com­mon CMS sce­nar­ios as well. It doesn’t deserve the bad rep it get’s.

I con­stantly see crit­i­cism of Word­Press being strictly for blog use, and it really has great poten­tial as a CMS. With the most robust plu­gin library around, you can quickly bolt on func­tion­al­ity as needed.

Word­Press plu­g­ins are not “hacks”

I con­stantly see argu­ments against using Word­Press as a CMS because you need to “hack” it in order to make it work. I think this is a mis­un­der­stand­ing best explained by the bad taste left in your mouth after trou­bleshoot­ing issues that result from a faulty plug-in. The real trick is know­ing how to choose the right plu­g­ins for the job, along with gain­ing a thor­ough under­stand­ing of the Word­Press func­tions avail­able for use in your themes.

Choos­ing the right plug-in for the job

A few rules I live by when choos­ing a plug-in for a spe­cific CMS setup:

1. Be sure that it has a decent sized amount of sup­port­ers & users. This will tell you that most of the fre­quently encoun­tered issues you may face have likely been solved already. You can usu­ally gauge this by the num­ber of down­loads that plug-in has.
2. Be weary of using plug-ins with lower than a 3 1/2 star rat­ing. Take this with a grain of salt, as you never really know why those rat­ings were given. This is just a gen­eral rule of thumb I tend to follow.
3. Be sure that the plug-in is com­pat­i­ble with the lat­est build of Word­Press. This tell’s you that the plug-in is still being sup­ported and devel­oped. It prob­a­bly has a decent sized com­mu­nity of users behind it con­tribut­ing to it’s code too.

Con­tinue Reading…

If you’ve ever mod­i­fied a Word­Press plu­gin to suite your needs you know how frus­trat­ing the auto update fea­ture can be. I work with a team of Word­Press devel­op­ers and we’re con­stantly deal­ing with lost source code caused by clients upgrad­ing there plu­g­ins with the one click updates fea­ture that is now built into Word­Press. This is no fault of the client, as they should be able to upgrade plu­g­ins as nec­es­sary.  The ideal solu­tion would be to remove the auto update/upgrade fea­ture on a case by case basis as needed.

Until now I have strug­gled with cre­at­ing a solu­tions for this, but thanks to Mark Jaquith’s blog post, Exclud­ing your plu­gin or theme from update checks, you can now do this with ease.

Visit Mark’s site to get the code