Completely overwhelmed by the plug in list. Please help…

These are the ones I use / like / found helpful

https://www.aleeya.net/2005/10/18/wordpress-plugins-used-on-aleeya-dotnet/

*rolls eyes* The only plugins you need are the ones which optimize a functionality that you want. Try one at a time until you see what works with what, and what gives your blog a functionality that your users need and use.

I agree. WordPress itsself does not “need” any… its what you wanna do.

I chose the list based on my needs, and based on specific functionality that I don’t currently have, but want.

While I wish I had the luxury of ‘trying them one at a time’, I don’t. Sorry…I’m trying to be efficient, and this isn’t a ‘hobby’ project for me.

estjohn, thank you for your response. Your list is helpful.

honestly, you are going to want to try them one at a time.. if you install 15 plugns at once and 3 of them have a problem with each other or need soemthing inserted in the WP loop on the post.php page.. or if 2 of them are trying to grab css headers at teh same time.. or if out of 15 3 dont work, youll never know which has the problem.

The only SAFE way to install plugins is to do them one at a time and make sure it works, and you dont get any errors. Then move to the next. If the next conflicts, then remove the last one etc..

Otherwise you will most likely destroy your WP install and have to start all over.

If they were all just easy upload, click and it works .. then you probabally would have as many posts on this board.

Even out of all the ones I posted.. they all SEEM to work fine together for me, but I also spent hours configuring them for my WP isnstallation and making them work the way I wanted. Some of them I had to really edit the CSS or the PHP in the plugin. Many of them it would take me hours to figure out how to get the one plugin to work and look the way i wanted. Its not a quick upload, activate and they work process for a majority of plugins you will find for WP.

If you want to be efficient, then make sure you do them right the fist time.. one at a time.. or else effeciency will go out the window after the 10th time you have to reinstall WP. And I am not being light about this at all..

Just a heads up for you. There are some that are easy upload activate and its fine, but most of them .. even the ones you have listed.. are not.

healthgurl –

If you are trying to build a site, we’d need to know what functionality you are trying to get out of which plugins. For instance, you have three different Amazon plugins, which all overlap at some level. Depending on what features you wanted, I might suggest one of the three or even a fourth alternative (CG-Amazon). Same goes for ‘advertising’ or adsense stuff — depends on what exactly you want to do, and how you want to use it…

But without seeing your site, or knowing your features/requirements, there’s no easy way for us to necessarily suggest using particular plugins.

Well… okay, that’s not completely true. Something like Bad Behavior (I use my CG-Referrer to similarly block access) is a good start. You may find you don’t need HashCash and SecureImage — likely one will do.

-d
CHAITGEAR

Thanks for the advice, EstJohn…the ‘one at a time’ now makes sense, as it relates to compatibility issues.

David, one if the reasons for the ‘multiples’ is that I couldn’t tell from reading the descriptions whether one plug in would do everything I needed, making the need for others obsolete: (like Bad Behavior making HashCash and SI unecessary.)

My news designs are being done now, and I’ll be ready to deal with plug ins in a few. I was just trying to get a jump start, since the list was sooooo long.

Generally speaking I need:

Amazon:
– Something that inserts my Amazon ID into post links.
– Something that adds images from my wish list (Amazon Media manager sounds perfect

Adverts:
– Something that automatically adds adsense WITHIN posts, with the post text wrapped around it.
– Something that allows me to rotate other ads (besides adsense)

Comments
– something that controls spam
– something that controls foul language

Formatting:
– Title truncation
– Word Wrap
– Wysiwyg editor
– Smart/easy links (which might be easier with the wsyiwyg editor)

General:
– translation
– Yahoo smilies
– shoutbox
– blog roll
– SEO

Adverts:
– Something that automatically adds adsense WITHIN posts, with the post text wrapped around it.

You wanna be careful aobut that one! If you insert an add in every post, then you could have more than 3 ads per page depending on what page you are looking at – archives, front page, category etc. adsense says they will only accept 3 ads per page.

So, you wanna be careful where you turn off and on the ads. The best way i found to deal with it was post 2 ads on the side of the theme

and have a 3rd ad only display on a post WHEN it is views in full.

or 3 ads in side of template and none in posts

or ads between posts.

but not to display the add on every post. – unless you display only 3 posts per page… then you might be too short for word count to link ratio if , of if you use something like post teaser where it shows the 1st Xamount of words on a page till you click on the full page.

SEO is a whole horse of a differnt hue. i have been concentrating on that and learning, reading, researching, practicing it for the last few years..

content is the king no matter what you do, but a lot of the plugins I posted in that page earlier i use for SEO purposes.. I could write a brief page or two on that with wordpress if it would help. But, i am no 100% expert.

Re: 3 ads per page – I was planning on using the Teaser. You wouldn’t see the ad until you opened the entire article.

At that point, there will only be two on the page – the one in the leaderboard, and the one in the article.

In the past, I always used the ->more<- tag, but the teaser will make things easier for me.

I used to have my adsense on the side, and recently experimented with moving it to the center of the page (thanks to an email from google). This DOUBLED the CTR.

My content is related to another site I run, so it’s not really a ‘start up’ blog. (my other site is #3 on Google when searching on my relevant key words).

I’d love to hear your thoughts on SEO and WP.

Estjohn, do you find that ” WYSI-Wordpress” makes it easy for you to add images to your posts with ‘text wrap’?

healthgurl, I’m a bit of a plugin junkie! I find that I have an “itch” every so often for a good new one.

of your list I’m using (or have used):
SecureImage — I’m using CaptCha! instead, similar, easy to install
Subscribe to Comments 2.0
Email Notification v2.2
WYSI-Wordpress — I used this for a while but it was a tad clunky

You might want to consider adding a couple to your list:
Link Truncator — this is nice when newbs post a comment with a huge (non-TinyURL) link.
PXS Mail Form v2 — this is the easiest and most robust mail form I’ve found
Vipera€?s Plugins Used — this is a nifty plugin that displays all your activated plugins on a page or post. very handy for people like us to see how the site was built! check out mine

healthgurl: “I’d love to hear your thoughts on SEO and WP.”

One of these nights (maybe tonight) after I get home from work, I will sit down and write up soem stuff. Right now, I have

https://www.aleeya.net/category/seo/

Titles, Description, and Keywords is one that I have used some of the WP plugins to SEO optimize some things quite a bit.

The inner pages really havent been around long enough (This domain is one that I have had for years… but I recently split it up between 2 sites and gave it an overhaul) to do much with PR.. although I dont focus as much on page rank as I do true SE listings. I will sit down and see what I can put together on using WP and its SEO’nes.

my https://www.girlgeekette.net site has done pretty well for SEO and PR. it had a 6.o after about 2 weeks.. so I was pleased with it (being a brand new site.. I was very happy.. and the Aleeya.net site has been out for years, but when it comes to PR, I think Google still sees the old unSEO PHPnuke I used to use since it still holds a lot of backlinks to the old site which arent there.

“Estjohn, do you find that ” WYSI-Wordpress” makes it easy for you to add images to your posts with ‘text wrap’? “
That is kinda a hard question for me. I like WYSIWYG for just that.. text wrap, and it makes it quicker in a way.. but I have been able to use CSS to acheieve the same reults. As you can tell ont hat page, i need to work with Spacing and CSS to get the pictures padded between the wrapped text. I have been focusing on so many things.. I havent had a chance to add 90% of the books, dvds and awards I have. Comes from rebuilding the site. I guess I am concentrating on structure more than anything right now then will go back and add posts in each category after I get the structure the way I want it.

CG-Amazon is great if you want to insert product links within posts, like <!--amazon:B0007Y79AI--> (more options, but that’s the quick+basic tag using CG-Inline), also good for sidebar wishlists or now-reading lists, and along with my more recent CG-QuickPHP you can easily embed any kind of Amazon list/query into a Page or Post. Check out my site for some uses (including the Products section, which is included as a ‘sample’ script for more complex access to the stored database).

I use a combination of CG-Inline image tags (which I’ve never really pushed, but it’s entirely how my site functions…), and a bunch of important CSS, in order to get text wrapping around pictures. In addition, I then use the same CSS around more hard-coded HTML, could be affiliate links, could be adsense, whatever, in order to float other things in my text flow.

I actually had/have code that throws an adsense ad into the single-page content blocks, but turned it off as I found it wasn’t generating nearly the CTR of the side tower space (and it really made the articles difficult to read). Admittedly, I never tried the floated-right block, had only done the standard banner type. I also released CG-Inbetween to allow folks to pull in things like Adsense or other code at specified intervals, good for both single posts and multi pages — it needs more work, but it also needs more feedback!

Something like Bad Behavior is good for stopping scum at the gates. I might try it out at some point, but I’ve invested so much time into CG-Referrer (and it does search, bot, and other stat tracking) that I haven’t wanted to throw something ‘further in front’ of my code. But definitely worth it if you’re starting up a site. Definitely use an anti-spam tool of some sort as well, as BB only blocks certain kinds of things.

As for SEO, it works the same as any HTML. Content rules, and it doesn’t hurt to have your title, description, keywords, and H1s delivering key-word content to those engines that check it. I’ve also reworked templates to use H1/H2 for major titling on the page, whereas many default WP templates sometimes kick key content down to H3 — no clue if it makes a difference, of course! ?? (I’ve seen rumors that Google ignores much of the Meta tags these days…)

-d

I’m an SEO consultant and out the box WordPress is very good if you have the rewrote URLs. I have several blogs and https://www.morearnings.com/ has a reasonably well optimised template (minor editing really). Still got a few things to do.

Have rel=”nofollow” any links I don’t want indexing like the login links (basically everything under Meta on the menu). Just look for links that point to things you don’t want indexing like login and rel=”nofollow” them.

Also removed the name of the blog from posts so here https://www.morearnings.com/2006/05/08/adsense-revenue/ the title is >> Adsense Revenue rather than Name of Blog >> Adsense Revenue. This means the title is better optimised. To do this I created a new template page (header2.php) removed the blog name in the title and referenced it rather than header.php for the single post pages (this means all the other pages get the name of the blog in the title).

With regards adding Adsense to posts I added the code directly to the template. So editing singlepost.php I added-


<div style="float:right;">
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-8325072546567078";
google_ad_width = 250;
google_ad_height = 250;
google_ad_format = "250x250_as";
google_ad_type = "text_image";
google_ad_channel ="";
google_color_border = "E8E7D0";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "B96F17";
google_color_url = "B96F17";
google_color_text = "000000";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</div>


Directly below


<div class="postentry"


This means the Ad is within the text as the OP wants floated to the right. Should work on most templates and this means you only see the ad on the post pages, not index or archive pages.

David