Archive for WordPress Plugins

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→

New Google tool helps optimize download speeds

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

page-speedGoogle has released a new Firefox add-on called Page Speed. This tool analyzes your web pages’ download speed and makes recommendations to improve it. Page Speed reads your web page coding and runs several tests on it. The test are based on a set of “best practices” known to enhance web page performance.

The Page Speed analysis will show you what changes you can make to your site to make it load faster and reduce your bandwidth usage.

Page Speed requires the Firefox FireBug plugin. Give it a try. While some of the optimization tips probably won’t make a significant increase in load times, it does give a thorough review to your site coding style and makes some eye-opening suggestions.

Cool Plugins – qTranslate, multi-language websites made easy

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

436457_guidebooksOne my clients brought this plugin to my attention. Although running a multi-language site is a major undertaking, this plugin does a good job of simplifying the content management for a multi-language site. Some customization is required for other plugins and widgets to be integrated for full multi-language appearance, but if multi-language content is a hot item for your site, then this plugin may be worth a look.

Plugin Homepage
http://www.qianqin.de/qtranslate/

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feedmeOnce when working on two separate sites that would run off two separate domains, I was looking for a clean solution to have the two sites offer the same news. I knew the solution would be in using the RSS feed of one site to post to the other. There are a few aggregation plugins out there and after experimenting with them I found FeedWordPress to be the most flexible and easiest to manage. With a multitude of options, there are a number of uses for a tool like this. The best part is that when posts are created from a feed, the plugin attributes serveral aspects of the source in custom fields with that post. This allows you to develop your theme to attribute sources and provide links to the original content.

Plugin Homepage
http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress

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