WordPress plugins

Trying out Social 2.5

A few days ago, Alex King announced the release of the new version of Social plugin for WordPress. It’s one of those that can broadcast your blog posts to Twitter and Facebook. But not only that. It can also synchronize Twitter re-tweets and replies and Facebook shares and comments back into your blog, as comments. Now that sounds pretty interesting.

I’ve installed the plugin and connected it to both Twitter and Facebook easily – no need to create your own apps or anything like that. But given that I already have some sort of synchronization between Twitter and Facebook, I wonder how weird things will go.

This is a test post.

Update #1: Social plugin seems to work really well.

Update #2: Disabling broadcasting to Twitter from Twitter Tools plugin should decrease the amount of dups posted.

Updated #3: It is still not obvious how to keep the synchronization between Twitter and Facebook while avoiding dups.

Why you should teach yourself WordPress taxonomies

Alex King has a blog post describing the major differences between using custom fields and taxonomies in WordPress. If you are familiar with the WordPress database, and if you think about it for a couple of minutes, you’ll probably realize why taxonomies are a better choice than custom fields for those situations where you can use both.

The reason to favor a custom taxonomy in these situations has to do with the WordPress database structure. Queries by taxonomy are well optimized as this is a primary front-end presentation feature in WordPress core. Conversely, querying by custom field key and value is slow. The value column in the custom field table is not indexed – you are basically doing a search through data that is not intended for that purpose.

The problem is that too many people, even those who are very well familiar with WordPress database structure, never really think about it. And since custom fields are an older way of solving problems, many go for them without proper consideration.

Jetpack by WordPress.com

Here comes yet another product from Automattic and WordPress.com team – Jetpack.

This is a WordPress plugin that brings WordPress.com goodies to your self-hosted WordPress site. The project is starting off with just a few, most requested, bits of functionality, but according to this blog post more is coming.

For launch we’ve brought eight of the most-requested features into Jetpack as one easy bundle: Hovercards, Stats, After the Deadline, Twitter widget, shortcodes, shortlinks, easy Facebook/Twitter/WordPress sharing buttons (Sharedaddy), and for our fellow math nerds, LaTeX. We’re excited about this initial set of features, but we’re even more excited for what’s coming down the road.

How not to spoil a spoiler

Here is something that I am trying to figure out – movie spoilers. Since I now like how my movie reviews are listing, I want to write more reviews. But even with the ones I already wrote it’s difficult to remember specifics of each movie. “good movie” and “bad movie” only work in reviews for so many times.

What I want to do now is to actually have a brief story of what the movie was about. This should give me more grounds to cover for review, as well as make the review easier to read, and what’s more important – it will simplify the decision of whether or not to see the movie, at least for those (three) of you who trust my opinions enough.

The problem with putting the story in the review is that it can often spoil the movie experience. Not everyone wants to read the story before they see the film itself. For that, of course, there is a technical solution. My blog runs on WordPress software, which has tonnes of plugins. For example, there is an Easy Spoiler plugin and even an Advanced Spoiler plugin. If I install either one of these plugins and then mark the story in the review to be hidden, then those of you who’d like to read everything will be able to do so with just one click.

But it’s not that easy. There are people who read reviews off the front page of this blog. And there are those who read them via RSS feed subscriptions. To deal with those people, I’d probably have to structure a review in a such a way that only a part of it appears on the front page and in RSS feed, and whoever wants to read the whole thing will need to click through to the full text. It is still a possible solution, easy on the technical side, but I already dislike it a bit. I like things in simple, and this doesn’t look so anymore (from the reader’s perspective).

On top of that I worry about the structure of the review. It seems like too many elements are in free format. A full review in this scenario consists of a excerpt that is shown on the front page and in RSS, spoiler-covered text of the story, and then the actual review. There are plugins for WordPress which can help me add more structure (especially now that WordPress supports custom post types). And I know how to use them. But a re-structure like that will render all previous reviews weird. And that I don’t want to do. On the other hand, I’ll never find the time or will to re-adjust them. After all, I am still in the process of reorganizing them from my old tag-based system to the new category-based system.

I’m still thinking about the best way to do this. I still haven’t decided. If you have any input on this issue, please let me know. I’m interested.

AgentPress – WordPress theme for real estate websites

Some time ago I mentioned StayPress plugin for WordPress, for those people who need such functionality on their real estate web sites. Today I have something else to talk about – AgentPress theme for WordPress designed and implemented by awesome people at StudioPress (too much Press in this sentense, isn’t it?).

AgentPress is a commercial theme, but at a reasonable price of $99.95 USD. StudioPress themes are built on top of their own Genesis theme framework, which provides a nice separation of code into a parent and child themes. Child themes are small and manageable. Genesis, by the way, is included with your AgentPress theme purchase.

What I liked about AgentPress theme was that it doesn’t only provide the design for a real estates website, but also an administration interface to manage the properties. It uses standard WordPress posts for properties, with some additional fields. You can control which fields you want to have and in which order. There is a way to have both public and private fields, in case you don’t want to display everything. It’s also easy to expand the functionality using the WordPress categories and tags.

The front page of AgentPress theme is awesome. You have options to provide navigation either via pages or categories or both. There is a nice looking slider with selected properties. There are featured properties. And you can even have featured articles there as well. AgentPress theme supports multi-agent web sites, but I haven’t tried it, so I won’t say much about it. There is a simplistic property search, which is good enough if you have up to a hundred properties or so. The theme has a number of widget areas, so it is pretty easy to control what goes where.

I tried the theme before a much improved WordPress 3.0 came out. So I hope StudioPress will update this theme to utilize a number of the new features in WordPress, such as customizable menus and custom post types. If they do, it will be much easier to extend the theme to your liking, with, for example, advanced search. You can do things now as well, but some of them are no trivial.

Overall, if you are looking for a solution to a real estates website, I suggest you have a closer look at AgentPress theme. There are plenty of options in both Genesis framework and in the theme itself. It does the job and it takes seconds to setup. At least you can buy yourself some time to build a more customized solution.