Razvan Antonescu » wordpress

How to manage multiple wordpress blogs

Razvan Antonescu — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 18:37:35 +0000

Today, by chance, I’ve discovered one of the greatest resources on WordPress that I’ve seen this year. I’m talking about Vladimir Prelovac, a croatian wordpress developer (and at first look a pretty darn good SEO guy). One of his biggest projects is ManageWp.com. What can you expect to find here:

add multiple (self hosted) wordpress instalations
create groups of blogs
quickly post articles / pages in one or more added blogs
quickly upgrade plugins / installations

For more details you can check this post.

Usage ideea:

If you are a freelance developer that has a focus on wordpress (or even if you are a web agency), create a sample wordpress install on your server and add all the plugins that you regularly use. Once you’ve done that, add the newly created blog to ManageWP.com. Each time you will need to create a new blog, just use the cloning feature and you are good to go. Now, 1-2 hrs of working have been reduced to a few simple clicks.

TIP 1: If you create themed wordpress installs (presentation, blog, CMS, ecommerce) make as many installs as you need

TIP 2: Before cloning make sure that all plugins and WPs are at their latest version

P.S. If you are worried giving to a third party your wordpress credentials, Vladimir is preparing a self hosted version of the plugin

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WordPress Plugin: Alphabetic tag index

Razvan Antonescu — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 11:14:23 +0000

WordPress › Multi-column Tag Map « WordPress Plugins

Multi-column Tag Map display a columnized, alphabetical and expandable listing of all tags used in your site. This makes it easier for visitors to quickly search for topics that might intrest them.

This is a plugin that I’ve searched for almost 2 years. Before this plugin, I have used static pages to list tags alphabetically but this was to hard to maintain (on an instance where you have more then 900 tags). Mostly is for WordPress CMS cases because it targets those users familiar with a certain niche and taxonomies within it, making it easy to locate a certain tag.

Use cases:

Music blogs where tags are bands.
Blogs about celebrities

In a few days I’ll post a link to a live demo

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WordPress plugins ep.1

Razvan Antonescu — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:01:01 +0000

I have always recommended (where it was possible) WordPress as a CMS platform. One of the main reasons is its extensibility and that for almost any task there is a plugin or one can be easily developed. I’m checking daily the WordPress Plugins section of WordPress.org and you can see my favorite plugins on del.icio.us. From today, I’m going to post them here too.

WP Download Codes

From developer:

The plugin enables to generation and management of download codes for .zip files.

Applications:

Use it for any limited downloads that you might have on your WP based website (EX: release a beta software to a limited number of users)

Booking Calendar

From developer:

Using this plugin, you can add booking service to your site. Your site visitors can make booking of one or several days. Its can be interesting for hotel reservation service, rental service or any other service, where is needed making reservation at specific dates.

WordPress 2.7 beta 1 is out now

Razvan Antonescu — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 10:47:37 +0000

This post is written from the new WordPress 2.7 beta 1 that was released a few hours ago. So far so good:

Upgrade was without issues
All my plugins work
The new backend is confusing for a few seconds but once you start using it feels great

On the bad side I’m so curious who was the genius that changed “Write Posts” to “Add New” and “Manage Posts” to “Edit”

So if you are eager to try it, go ahead and download your copy from here

Collect user feedback on your WordPress based website

Razvan Antonescu — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:11:15 +0000

When using WordPress as a CMS platform, sometimes you want to collect user feedback or bug reports. For this task, so far, I have used Kampyle which is the best product in its class and more important is totally free. But sometimes you want to keep it all in house. For that case, now there is a solution and is called WordPress Help Desk.

Seems to have a lot of features and quite a pretty good degree of customization. What I like about it and Kampyle doesn’t have is that you can create views for your user leveles and this is quite important for a team website.

Practical applications:

collect bugs
use it in education oriented websites (colleges, schools, training websites) to provide help for your users
e-commerce sites

Custom menus for WordPress CMS

Razvan Antonescu — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:59:51 +0000

Blogs in general don’t need custom or advanced menu. What comes by default in WordPress or custom themes is enough for most of the users. But when you try to use WordPress as a CMS platform for a medium size website you realize that’s not enough.

The challenge appears when you have too many static pages and you want to group them and show them to the visitors on certain conditions. In my projects so far, I have used GD Pages Navigator. This is a widget based plugin that does it job pretty fine.

Today I’ve stumbled across WordPress Menu Creator that resembles features of other CMS systems like Joomla or Mambo. The resemblance might help more some users and developers to transition to WordPress as a CMS platform. Haven’t used it yet, but I’ll sure give it a try on the next challenge.