Need help learning some of the basics or even more advanced features of WordPress?
Here are two resources for tutorial videos:
Customizing WordPress page and post titles
I have previously written about customizing WordPress using a custom field function to change the title that displays at the top of a page allowing you to have, for instance, a link in the side bar to the home page called “Home” but a different title on that page such as “Welcome” instead of “Home”.
That was handy but took some modification of the theme template files. If you changed your theme you had to carry over those changes to the new theme to retain the custom page titles.
Now there’s a simple plugin that does all the work for you and adds the ability to customize the display titles of posts as well which I had not included in the original method and makes changing theme template files unnecessary.
The plugin is called WP-Title-2 and is one more tool in my WordPress as a CMS tool box.
For more plugins that help transform WordPress into a more powerful CMS platform you may be interested in my post: WordPress as a CMS and plugins that help.
A proper fix for PodPress in WordPress 2.6
The powerful PodPress plugin for WordPress seems to have a problem with the new post revisions feature of WordPress 2.6. For many the solution has been to disable the post revision feature — but I happen to think that the post revision feature is a good thing.
Go here for a post by Andrew Ozz that explains how to fix the problem. Note that if you’re using PodPress version 8.8 you’ll find the fix in the comments section of that post.
WordPress 2.6 gallery shortcode
One of the things that so nice about WordPress 2.6 is the ability to easily insert a mini photo gallery into your post. There’s also some handy gallery shortcode that give you options for the number of columns, the size of thumbnails and more.
WordPress 2.6 released
WordPress 2.6 has been released with several worthwhile improvements. Check out the brief tour video.
Why WordPress to manage your site?
WordPress is far more than a blogging platform and that’s why we’re so satisfied in promoting it as a wonderful tool for powering all kinds of websites. But sometimes people need convincing. Why use a content management system or CMS to power my site? Or maybe the question is why WordPress? ithemes.com offers 5 great reasons for using a CMS and they apply very well to WordPress.
WordPress Theme as a canvas for your site
You may not be a web designer but you want an eye catching website.
Thankfully there are thousands of free WordPress themes available that can serve as a canvas or starting point for your site.
This site illustrates my point. With a few subtle tweaks to a very simple theme developed by Upstart Blogger I’ve developed a look that’s given the site a unique design, which is less like a blog and more like the resource I want it to be.
If you are looking for WordPress themes to use as a canvas for your site you’ll find of few of my recommendations by clicking here.
WordPress 2.5 on the horizon
WordPress 2.5 is coming. Check out this screen cast showing the new image upload and gallery features.
WordPress as a CMS and plugins that help
ThemeShaper.com has a good article on using WordPress as a CMS and lists a few plugins that come in handy for this: Use WordPress As a CMS: Plugins, The Bare Minimum
I have a few recommendations of my own to add to the list.
- Feed Control is a plugin that lets you add your WordPress pages to your RSS feed, and will also allow you to remove pages or posts from your feed.
- Sitemap Generator is a good tool for providing a site map to your visitors.
- Order Pages is a plugin that allows you to easily and visually arrange the order of your pages in navigation bars and menus — you can certainly edit the “page order” number by hand for each page but if you have a lot of pages this makes ordering those pages a breeze. And the My Page Order plugin can do this well also.
- Category Order — while the above plugin arranges the order of your “pages”, this plugin arranges the order of your blog “categories” — which is handy if you are using your blog categories in an unusual way while using WordPress as a CMS — Category Order can be found near the bottom of the linked page here.
Update: Here is a great list that contains some very helpful plugins for leveraging WordPress as a CMS — Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins at Blueprint Design Studio.
Update: (Friday; April 11, 2008) — Obfuscate E-mail is a plugin I find I need on most WordPress powered sites I setup — you can post email addresses as links and this plugin will obscure the address in the html so as to confuse spammer bots.
Update: (Tuesday; May 6, 2008) — the Role Manager plugin gives fine control over which users have access to what features on your WordPress install.
Update: (Tuesday; October 21, 2008) — Search Unleashed – Advanced WordPress searches with highlighting as well as searching of pages and posts.