I like kids, I couldn’t eat a whole one but they are cute and fun to play with and it is possible to be this way with all kids and me only because I give them back to their parents.

It’s kind of like that with another blog. It’s great fun to try and put different posts up but tedious after a while. It’d be nice to do the fun bits (for me as a geek) and leave the telling the stories to someone who is experiencing them. I tried having two blogs and more but all would suffer from me being stretched between them all but, it’s nice to build a site and get it traffic and commenters and be able to share something with someone, anyone, it doesn’t matter! but, it gets hard to constantly come up with one blogs posts let alone 3!

Luckily, my best mate Diego has been pressganged into serving on the Royal Caribbean Cruise liner, “The Brilliance” and will be out of my hair has decided he wants to start a blog about his adventures around the Mediterranean Sea and I thought, “Great! makey makey, codey codey and I don’t have to worry about the updates to the posts!”

I’m probably going to have to train him by video step by step on how to do it the WordPress way so what better way of doing than sharing it all here over this blog? In a couple of weeks, there’ll be some tutorial videos made mainly for my mate of spanish blood but also good enough for your average newb to learn how to setup and create a blog.

He’s already written the first two posts and sent them to me ready to load up on the new site, they’re good reading and I think with a healthy supply of photos taken from all the major tourist ports of Europe and surrounding coastlines it’ll be a great place to see nice things and funky places to go if you’re ever in a city like Palermo or Venice or the South of France.

Funky passive advertising opportunity on the horizon!! toot toot!

I’ve been away from fiddyp for a while but not away from wordpress as I’ve been working really hard on some WP based sites that have turned out pretty well using WP as a CMS combined with some useful and custom plugins.

It’s pretty amazing what you can do with some customized templates and a bit of hacking the code here and there so I thought I’d list some of the useful tools I work with to make life a little bit easier.

Cforms II

This is a really easy plugin to use straight out of the box just by entering <!–cforms–> onto a post or page where you want the contact form to appear.

Select which fields you want in the options page and you can’t get a simpler contact form made on WordPress!

It can be used in a more complex way too, it has options for AJAX, custom fields and even a file upload function. Get into the code some more and there are ways to generate custom contact forms within the wordpress template code so for example, you could generate a “request more information on this product” form on a product listing which has the product code automatically inserted as a hidden field which will be sent along with the contacts details and message.

You can read more about Cforms II and download the latest version at
http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin

It works well and is constantly being updated with new features and options.

Search Everything

This is a useful plugin if you use custom fields in your posts that need to be searchable, this plugin can be configured to search all different parts of your WP content.

* * Search Every Page
* * Search Every Tag
* * Search Every Category
* * Search non-password protected pages only
* * Search Every Comment
* * Search only approved comments
* * Search Every Draft
* * Search Every Excerpt
* * Search Every Attachment
* * Search Every Custom Field (metadata)
* * Exclude Posts from search
* * Exclude Categories from search

You can download it from the authors page http://dancameron.org/wordpress/wordpress-plugins/search-everything-wordpress-plugin

Fluency Admin

This plugin will completely change the look of your admin dashboard. It looks wonderful in Firefox and gives a much more proffesional look to the dashboard. I like to put this on sites that have been developed as a simple CMS or mainly static content. Create an author account and give that to the client, they’ll log in to a nice looking dashboard and have access just for managing posts.

You can see more screenshots (plus one below) and download the plugin here
http://deanjrobinson.com/projects/fluency-admin/

Dashboard Editor

This is another useful one for improving the clients experience, it allows you to remove any and all of the items you usually see when you first log in to the dashboard.

You can enter your own html and widgets which is really usefull for putting up instructions and videos for your client to use (see the enlargement of the picture)

You can download it from here
http://anthologyoi.com/plugins

I guess I should have shown you this one first because it makes the installation of plugins and themes so so so much easier!

Once installed and activated, you can install new plugins simply by pasting the url to the download location into the box of the plugin page, choose if it’s a theme or plugin and it’ll pop off and download and extract the zip file to the correct location leaving you only needing to activate the new plugin.

Even easier is using the plugin with a firefox extension which lets you right click a plugin download link in your browser and choose to install it direct to your wordpress site (provided you set the url to your site in the addon options)

You can download it here
http://anirudhsanjeev.org/oneclick-plugin/

Instant Upgrade

This plugin will take all the pain out of upgrading your WordPress version, it’s always a good idea to back up fully before doing any upgrade but this plugin takes all the pain out of deleting your wp files and updating with the new version. I’ve managed to upgrade all the way from 2.0 with this without any problems..

You can download the plugin here
http://www.zirona.com/software/wordpress-instant-upgrade/

That’s it, my list of plugins that always get installed on a new WP install if I’m designing for a client. Check them out, I’m sure you’ll find one or two of them useful..

Here are a couple of plugins that have really saved me some time since I installed them.

1. One Click Install

Install and update plugins and themes with one click of the mouse.

2. Absolute Comments

Reply to comments directly from the dashboard or email.

The first one, One Click Install, is a great little plugin that works with a Firefox extension enabling you to install a plugin or theme by right clicking a link to it’s zip file.

I didn’t install it at first because I felt I had enough plugins already but, this is especially useful for updating plugins from within the WP dashboard. Whenever I saw a plugin that needed updating on the plugins page I would make a mental note to visit the plugins’ page, download the zip file, extract it to my hard drive, upload it with ftp and finally check that it shows as activated on the plugins page.

9 times out of 10 I would forget the mental note until such a time where I would be missing one tool required for the update process (at work or on the road). Now it’s a simple process, to get started install the plugin and the OneClick Install Firefox Plugin. Do the Firefox restart that is required after installing an add on and then visit your WordPress plugin page to activate the One Click Install plugin.
Next, visit the admin page for the plugin at Dashboard/One Click Install

And look at the bottom of the page for your oneclickURL

Paste it into your Firefox addon by visiting Tools/Addons/ and selecting the Oneclick Installer for WordPress addon ‘options’ button.

And you’re ready to install any updates to plugins that you have. Visit your dashboard and check the plugins page for any that need updates (WP2.3 and up)..

You can see the message saying “There is a new version of..” and a link to the official WordPress plugins page, click that and you get to the plugin’s page at WordPress.org.

Then just right click the Download Plugin button and choose to install as plugin..

As long as you’re logged in to your WordPress, you will be taken to the Oneclick page and informed that your plugin was installed successfully.

Yey! note: you don’t actually have to use the Firefox addon, you can just paste the zip file URL into the box on the plugin admin page and install it from there or upload a zip file from your computer by clicking the ‘browse’ button and selecting it that way.

Very useful! Nice one Anirudh, thanks for a truly useful plugin.

The other plugin to save time especially if you get a lot of comments on your blog is the Absolute Comments plugin. I really like this one because it allows you to reply to comments directly from the comments page of the dashboard. No more do I need to visit each individual post to reply to comments! You can even reply from a comment notification. I haven’t used this part though as I have always got access to the dashboard if I have access to my email.

Just click on ‘reply’ from within the comments dashboard page..