Archive for WordPress Plugins

WordPress 2.9 Coming Soon

Friday, October 16th, 2009

WordPress version 2.9 is expected to be released this year. The beta is expected to be available at the end of October, and if everything cleans up well, the final release is expected around early December.

What to expect in 2.9? Some pretty cool stuff is being promised:

  • Dedicated thumbnail images on posts. A separate image you can upload for use as a thumbnail.
  • Trash function for deleted items. Pages and posts that are deleted will go to “Trash can” and can be un-deleted rather than lost forever.
  • Basic image editing built-in. Uploaded images can be rotated, flipped, cropped and resized inside WP.
  • Widgets outside the sidebars. New functions will allow widget placement anywhere on the page.

Fun stuff! As usual, we don’t recommend our clients (or their clients) rush out and upgrade as soon as 2.9.0 is released. Let other people find the hidden bugs, and keep your site stable until 2.9 has been patched a couple of times.

After that, we think 2.9 will have some great new features that both WP developers and WP users will enjoy.

Automatically Update Facebook Fan Pages from Your Web Site

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Good news: each social media platform (ie. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) offers a new chance to meet prospective customers or partners. Bad news: it takes a lot of time to keep each platform updated with current info.

At MainStreetOpen we have a new application that will ease some of this burden. Our Facebook Page App will create a custom tab with dynamic content from your web site on your Facebook Fan Page. Our app pulls data from your web site – both static content (about us, contact) and dynamic (via your RSS feed) — and generates a custom tab with this data on your FB Fan Page.

The best part is that this information is updated automatically when you change the web site content. You NEVER have to update the Facebook Fan Page data. Our app will automatically keep it in sync with you web content.

The Facebook Page App is fully customizable. We can configure the content and graphics to match your site. This works with WordPress sites and any other content manager that generate an RSS feed.

Two examples:

http://facebook.com/ministrycom (Latest News tab) — data comes from http://ministrycom.org
http://www.facebook.com/pages/MainStreetOpen/40320181025 (Web Site tab) — data comes from http://www.mainstreetopen.com.

MainStreetOpen’s Facebook Page App starts at $300 plus customization. That’s a one time cost that will keep your Facebook Fan Page current without any effort from you. Contact Main Street for details.

Yet Another WordPress Security Update

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

wordpressWordPress 2.8.3 was released this week to fix a couple of security holes missed in the recent 2.8.2 update. If you are running any of the 2.8 versions we recommend you do the automatic upgrade from your admin panel.

Multilingual Websites With WordPress

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

flagsThere 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.

  1. 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. Read More→

Open Toolbox: WordPress Custom Fields

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

opentoolboxWe are excited to announce our new video blog: Main Street’s Open Toolbox. This video series will discuss tools and techniques for building better web sites. We will also include interviews with industry players and developers.

To kick off the series, we start with our own WordPress guru, Adam White, as he discusses one of WordPress’ most under-appreciated features: custom fields. If you’ve heard people complain that WP is not a “real” CMS, they probably don’t have a clue how custom fields can expand the functionality of your site.
Read More→