As more and more people start to use Wordpress as a CMS (Content Management System) instead of a simple blog, the need to have more control over page layout, and link names and positions etc increases. This brings me to my recommendation today of My Page Order.

This simple plugin makes setting the order of your pages in the menu a breeze. Simply drag, and drop the pages into the order you want, and that’s it, job done. Having recently built a site for a client that had no blogging element at all, just a series of about 20 static pages, split into sections, this plugin was a lifesaver.

Download it HERE

This must be the best WP plugin developed in the last few years, especially considering how everyone is preoccupied nowadays with search engine results and rankings in the quest to get onto the fist page of Google.

I think it’s a real neat tool, flexible as well as easy to use…and you can SEO either pages or posts.

What did we do before this plugin came along? Well, we used wordpress just as blogs, their original intention with no thought to optimizing or meta tags or descriptive text, yep…just plain old blogging.

Now you can create ebay sites with WP, or incorporate ecommerce shopping cart software, add flash, advertising rotators and other monetizing widgets and plug ins.

Certainly WP templates have come a long long way from it’s humble beginnings and, with the arrival of the ‘All In One SEO’ plugin, has put it on par with more conventional website design software and to my mind…maybe even better!

I found a great little plugin this morning, so I had to write a quick blog post about it. It’s called html for pages, and it does just that, adds an .html extension to Wordpress pages. By default, Wordpress will only add this extension to posts, if you set it up in the permalinks section, but pages don’t have it added to the end. This little plugin solves the problem.

As I have mentioned before, I sometimes acquire sites that have an existing Goole Pagerank, but I want to change the content, but keep the PR. This plugin solves that problem nicely.

I recently acquired a site will some PR 5 internal pages, and they all had .html URL’s so I needed a way to re-create the URL’s in Wordpress. All I needed to do initially was create a page with the correct URL, so that I could use the PR, Wordpress doesn’t let you do this with pages, so I went looking for a solution.  I soon found this little plugin, installed it and that was it, all done, a nice .html added to the end of all my pages, which now carry the PR from the old site.

Download it HERE

This plugin was developed by us, in house because we couldn’t find anything else to do the job. We had some quite high PR blogs running nicely, and wanted to pass some of the PR onto other sites. However, we didn’t want the same links on all pages, as those had different PR’s.

What we wanted to achieve was to place some links on our PR5 home page, but different links from a PR3 or PR4 internal page. As we were unable to find a solution, we developed our own plugin.

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This is another one of my favourite Wordpress Plugins. I came up with the idea a while ago, that I might like certain posts to stay on the front page of my blog, until such time as I decided that I didn’t want them there. This obviously enables you to do some good keyword/key phrase optimisation if you wish, instead of relying on each post to contain the keywords you are targeting.

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Without doubt, this is the most time saving plugin I have ever used. As someone who looks after around 60 Wordpress blogs, keeping them up-to-date is an almost impossible task. I have blogs from Wordpress 2.1 right up to the current latest release, and this plugin as a huge time saver.

Simply upload the plugin as normal to the plugins directory, activate, and then go to “Manage”. There you will seem some very simple “Click Here” type instructions to guide you through the upgrade.

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It is no fun at all having to go back to an older version of wordpress when you have gotten used to all the new goodies that the last few versions of wordpress offer its thankful user community.

We are forced to use version 2.1.2 for a clients site because of hosting issues that are beyond our durisdiction. I hate it! Stuff that I have gotten so used to with all the pluggins become jobs that require hard coding. Many pluggins that used to run on 2.1.2 have been updated to run on the latest versions, but the pluggin coders have not left a downloadalble version of 2.1.2 compatible wp!

Now that is frustrating.

Well, it appears I must have been pretty busy (or really poorly organised!). It has been a year and I have yet to start on this site.

Well, I think that is going to start changing shortly. I have recieved multiple emails expressing an interesting in the domain name. I guess it helps that this site has been live for a year, thought admitedly without any real content. I have beening working quite a lot with wordpress sites again recently and that has helped me to get my focus back on this site and what I hoped to do with it almost a year ago!