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

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!

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

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.

The plugin is installed in the usual way and once activated it will show in your settings as WP Blogroll Control. Navigate to the page, and here you can select the initial blogroll to show by default on Posts, Categories, Pages, Tags pages, and of course the Home page. These can be set to a specific blogroll you have already created, a random blogroll or to display no blogroll.

From then on you have total control, each new post, category, page etc, has the option down at the bottom of the page, to pick the blogroll you would like to display on that page.

Download Ultimate Blogroll Control (7.12 KB)

Installation is a simple matter of uploading to your plugins directory, as with all others, followed by the normal activation.

Once installed you have a couple of options to play around with, but nothing very complicated or exciting, it just works.

From now on, when writing a post you have an additional option down at the bottom of the page, enabling you to set the post as a sticky. This means it will remain on the front page of your blog, at the top of the list, with other future posts, appearing below it.

Simple and effective, just like all good plugins should be!!

Download Wordpress Sticky (11.3 KB)

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.

The plugin creates a backup of the database, and site files as you go through the steps, and you are given the opportunity to download these if you want to (I would recommend that you do, although I normally don’t).

The plugin de-activates all the plugins for you, and downloads the latest version of Wordpress from Wordpress.org. You will at one point be logged out so that the database can be upgraded, and you will need to log back in once this has been done.

The only problem I have ever had with this plugin, is that for some reason, it never re-activates the plugins that were active before the upgrade. This isn’t a show stopper, but is a bit annoying, especially if you have quite a few, some of which you don’t use. My advice is to take a screen grab, or write down, which ones are active before running the upgrade.

Overall this Wordpress plugin is a huge time saver, and is highly recommended.

Download Wordpress Automatic Updater (98.99 KB)

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, 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!