Main Street Open » Adam White

Searching Custom Fields

Adam White — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:56:57 +0000

I was disappointed the other day when looking into the query that happens on WordPress searches. It seems that WordPress by default will only search for your keyword or phrase in the title and body of the post. Not in related category or other taxonomies and not in custom fields. This could pose to be a problem for some users and how they layout their content.

With the latest release of WordPress (3.x) offering both custom post types as well as custom taxonomies, there will be a lot of users wanting to take full advantage of these features along with custom fields to create unique content along side their blog and static page content. I have found a plugin that has been around for a while now, but with the latest revisions to the core of WordPress, will become more and more essential to people utilizing these new features.

If you want someone to be able to search your custom fields and other taxonomies though the built in WordPress search then you need the plugin called “Search Everything” by Dan Cameron of Sprout Venture. It’s a simple and well executed method of adding specific elements to the main WordPress search query.

Search Everything’s Plugin Site

WordPress + Facebook App = Synergy

Adam White — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:29:44 +0000

If you are a facebook user, you may not appreciate the flood of apps and surveys that overwhelm your news feed every day. It’s true that the most popular apps are probably the most worthless. I recently had a project come up where we wanted to have better control over a facebook page, and have it feed directly from website data so the user wouldn’t have to keep up the content in different systems. The solutions came to me while reading the facebook app developer documentation. Facebook refers to running a “Canvas” application as an app that runs off your server and not off of the facebook code. A canvas app allows you to present content onto facebook from your site’s database. We take it a step farther and we can actually run the app from a page in WordPress running a custom theme page that includes the facebook API and a specific design to fit into the facebook canvas app. The possibilities of this integration are pretty extensive. Anything from simply presenting your site’s current data as the landing page for your facebook page to allowing facebook users to contribute and interact directly to your WordPress site. People are spending more and more time on facebook, so why not integrate your site with facebook in such a way to take advantage of this user base.

Multilingual Websites With WordPress

Adam White — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:12:18 +0000

There are a few different ways to offer multiple language translations for your website. Though new plugins may come out, the options simply break down into three types of solutions.

Automatic Translation
With this option you completely rely on software based translation to convert your content. Although it is an easy quick fix, these software based translations can produce translations that are not always accurate or in some cases, make no sense at all. This works best if you don’t care so much about how readable your site will be in other languages, but you want to increase visability or at least your perceived visibility.
Manually Override Content By Language
If you do have the resources to manually translate content on your site, at least for some of the content, then a plugin that allows you to manually override the content will give you a great solution. With some plugins you can get an automatic translation that you can over ride, and on other systems you will get the primary language unless the users specific language has been loaded manually. If you want to uphold the quality of your content but at the same time not commit to ongoing translations of every piece of content that you load, then the manual override solution will give you that flexibility.
Multiple Websites
If you truly want to build a audiences in two or more languages the ideal solution involves running multiple websites. This option allows you to completely customise the site to fit the audience and their language/ culture. The major benefit of running multiple sites is that you can improve SEO for both sites independently. With some of the cookie based solutions above, search enginges may never see the multi language content. It will also be easier for users to share links to your site in their specific language. Although it does require a little more configuration and setup, with the advancements in ease of posting content with WordPress, managing separate sites is not much more difficult then utilizing a plugin for the content.

Here are some plugins that you should look into when considering managing a multilingual site.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/global-translator/
This is an Autmotic translator although it has a pro version component that adds manual override as an option.

http://www.qianqin.de/qtranslate/
This is a manual overide translator that also has some neat SEO benifits. This is as close as you can get to running two seperate sites without actually doing it.

There are other plugins out there, but these two currently have the largest audiences and appear to have all the nessesary features.

Five Tools For Successful Web Marketing, Part 5: An Active Blog

Adam White — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:20:15 +0000

Many businesses wonder what the benefit is of adding a blog to their site. How is a blog different then the content I currently have on my site. The truth is, that to the outside world, it isn’t all that different. The main difference is the timeliness of the content. A blog allows you provide a constant flow of content to your site. Although, in order to do this, the content will probably not be as high of quaility as what you may be used to. For this reason, most blogs are written in first person and the author is identified in the post. It’s easier to compose content in first person and allows you to worry less about the composition and more about the content. When you are able to focus wholly on the content then you are able to contour your content around your keywords that you are wanting to be found under. The other element involved in blogging is the comments that you allow on your blog posts. Comments and ping-backs show the search engines that site visitors are interested in your content and gives you more credibility for the topic of that particular blog post. There are many different platforms on which you can blog, but the best system for SEO and customizable flexibility is WordPress. As you think about blogging, here are a few tips to go by.

Blog with purpose. More words are not alwasy better. Use words with purpose that enhance or build on those keywords you want to be found under.
Use your blog to establish you as an expert. Speak with authority and give away some of the expertise.
Develop your blog into a resource library. Try to realize while you are writing a post, how this post will be read a year from now. Organize timeless content separate from news that won’t be useful later. Make the timeless content easily accessible as a growing resource on your site.
Force yourself to blog. Set a frequency that you promise yourself to blog. If users see a regular stream of blogs they are more likely to subscribe or revisit your blog on a regular basis.
Link your blog feed to your social networks and allow users to subscribe to your feed or email updates.

Five Tools For Successful Web Marketing, Part 4: ShareThis

Adam White — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:32:22 +0000

Combing your website’s unique content with the popularity of social networks and social bookmarking sites can drive a lot of new traffic to your site. There are many applications out there for doing this, but the most convenient and well established is the ShareThis application. It is a customizable javascript that you can place on your site manually or through a plugin that allows visitors to easily share a link to your page on a wide variety of social networking services. The benifits of this should be pretty obvious. Here are a few tips on integrating a ShareThis bug on your site.

Place it close to the content they will be sharing, either at the top or bottom of the article, or even both.
Stylize it to match the look and feel of your site through your site’s CSS.
Simplify the options down to the social media tools you think your target market will be using.

Get the code for the bug from the website at http://sharethis.com/