Five New WordPress Plugins I’ve Recently Used

Blog•on January 19th, 2011•1 Comment

WordPress PluginsHere is a list of 5 plugins I’ve used on recently-designed websites. They are not new as in just released, but rather are new for me.

Events Manager Extended
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-manager-extended/
I’ve been looking for a good WP Calendar function for a while and think this one does a good job of allowing the client to easily update events while providing multiple display options.

Dave’s WordPress Live Search
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/daves-wordpress-live-search/
This plugin adds a live drop-down menu under your theme’s search bar that shows search results as the user types.

Multiple Category Selection Widget
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/multiple-category-selection-widget/
Great way to provide additional options for your user to search by category. Great plugin if your blog utilizes multiple categories.

Simple Google Map
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-google-map/
If you’ve ever tried to add a Google Map to a sidebar widget as a text addition, you find that it is near impossible. Either the bubble is too big or some other problem occurs. This widget alleviates that and makes it very simple to add a Google Map to your sidebar.

Vimeo Sidebar Widget
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vimeo-sidebar-widget/
This one is rather straightforward. It allows you to add a Vimeo video to the sidebar. All you need to do is add the Video ID. Place a video you have created or one that is relevant to your website.

Advanced Search using WordPress

Blog•on January 5th, 2011•1 Comment

I’m currently developing a website for a client where advanced search capabilities are a going to be a key function of the website. This site will include a number of different categories, authors, and book that all need to be searched from a main “browse” page. Here are the main plugins I used to take advantage of some advanced search functions available for WordPress:

Search Everything
This one is pretty basic. It opens up the WP search capabilities beyond the regular limits. With this plugin, you can also highlight the searched term within the results. This is a nice feature so your users can see the searched term within the actual text.

Dave’s WordPress Live Search
This plugin utilizes the existing Search widget to either pop-up or down search results as the user types. This is a neat feature and should really be used on most of your websites to speed up the search result process.

Multiple Category Selection Widget
This plugin sets up the ability for you to have drop-down menus for each of your main Category types. For instance, someone could choose an author from the author category drop-down and a specific category in another drop-down and all books by that author within that category will show up on the search results page.

While these plugins are great, the most important part of creating a functioning WordPress website with advanced search functions is to set up your categories in the correct manner. I found it easiest to create categories and subcategories. So for instance, if you have a number of authors you would like to list, create Authors as a category and then the names of the authors as sub-categories. You can easily do this as you add a new category by assigning that category a Parent item.

Now, when you use advanced search features, you can have the results funneled into category parents. Another great use of categories is in the updated menu feature for WordPress 3.0+. You can now create menu links that are categories. That means that any time a user clicks on that link, he/she will go to a page listing all posts associated with that category name. One thing you could do with this is set up a website where a number of different bloggers could have their own page on the website through the use of categories.