This article will show you what wordpress plug-ins are a must have to have installed on your blog and why.

If you are not familiar with WordPress, it is an open source project that lets users use the program for free. You can learn more about and get your own WordPress blog by visiting WordPress.org today.
In case you don’t know, Plug-ins are tools that extend the functionality of WordPress and offer custom functions and features so that each user can tailor their site to their specific needs. A list of Plug-ins can be found under the Extend heading at the WordPress.org website.

Installing the plug-ins in not to difficult. After the plug-in is downloaded, it the has to be uploaded to your blogs plug-in folder via a FTP site. If you are unfamiliar with this then check with your hosting company, as they usually have some kind of guide to help you.

Now lets discuss the plug-ins that you must have.

All in one SEO Pack – This plug-in will give you the edge at making your site Search Engine Optimized. It allows you to add custom title, description and keywords into the header of your posts and pages.

Akismet Spam Filtering – Akismet is a must if you are going to allow comments on your blog. It does a fine job at separating true comments and spam comments. If you seen a blog with a bunch of spam comments, then you know what kind of trash this plug-in will keep off of your blog.

Sidebar Widget – The sidebar widget allows you to move other widgets in and out of your sidebar like a category list or blogroll. Very handy indeed.

AdSense Manager -  As the title says it helps you manage your AdSense on your blog. Comes in handy if you us AdSense.

These are a just a few of the hundreds of plug-ins that are available to incorporate into your WordPress blog. Feel free to explore and have fun with them and make the best blog you can.

Craig S. Andrews
http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/wordpress-plugins-you-must-have-699179.html

Technorati Tags: Akismet, Articlesbase, blogging, Craig, Custom Functions, Fun, Functionality, Hosting Company, Incorporate, Open Source Project, Org Website, Plug Ins, Site Search Engine, Title Description, Tools, Trash, True Comments, Widget, Widgets, Wordpress Blog

How can i do this? Is there a widget, or something?

Please help.

You can just add a forum like phpBB within a different directory and link your Wordpress to it. I can’t think of a way to actually have the two integrated unless you can find a plugin for wordpress.

Technorati Tags: Directory, Forum Discussion Board, Phpbb, Widget

As WordPress and blogging become more and more popular, the list of customization options continues to grow. One can attribute that to each user wanting his or her blog to be unique or very much personalized. Who knows, one day a theme can be just as unique as the blog’s author! The following is an overview of the latest developments on WordPress themes.

WordPress Widgets

The blog software developer has recently come up with an edition of this plug-in for the full-version WordPress. A Widget here refers to those tools you can use to modify your site—its sidebar, design, or general layout—without having to know and use HTML codes. About a hundred Widgets are featured in the WordPress Widgets blog, and they are classified in categories such as photography, music, discussion, video, income, and links, among others. It is a fun and easy way of customizing your site, so that it features everything you care about, and nothing you don’t.

Not all themes are ready for these Widgets, however, and some modifications need to be done to include this fun feature in the sites that make use of such themes. http://Automattic.com gives full instructions on how to go about making your WordPress site Widget-friendly. WordPress is continuously adding to their already-vast selection of Widgets to suit their user’s whims and personalities.

Canvas Plugin

This blogger-friendly plugin has recently allowed blog users to create their very own theme for their WordPress blog. The good news is that this plugin allows users a pretty good level of customization without them having to study and use codes. The result: a site that looks very professional built within the range of a few minutes to a couple of hours. Even better news is that this plugin comes for free.

This stand-alone plugin opens up to a bare starting point, with a selection of blocks that you can include in your layout by drag-and-drop method. Among the many features of Canvas are Banner, RSS, Static Text, Feature, Digg, Flickr, Random Tagline, Comment, Category List, Asides, Archive, Description, Calendar, Search, Post, and Navigation functions. Meanwhile, an Ink tab gives the user the freedom to determine the styles to be used on the page, sans the need to check the actual stylesheet. This tab proves to be quite useful for beginners, because it features help links that corresponds to each theme component, the style of which you may be about to identify. These links load the template with an indication of the part in question, to give the user a clear idea of what effect the change will have.

“Being Moderated” Notification

It does not come as a surprise that some comments are being moderated by the recipient blog’s owner or moderator. However, it would be nice for you to let your eager comment writers know that you have received their comment, when the system is programmed to delay posting of comments on your blog until it has been read and approved by you. Without this notification activated, some of your readers may think that their comment just got lost and they’ll have to write their comment all over again, when in fact your blog has secured it and it’s only waiting for your approval. However, the blog author may need to be familiar with code to activate this feature. Nevertheless, it is one way to deter comment spammers from infiltrating your blog. Your may also word the notification in your liking. Here’s an example: “Thank you for your comment. It may take a while before your comment may be published. Please check back later.”

More Themes to Match Content

While it is all up to the blog author to decide, it would be quite useful to have a theme that will give first-time readers of your blog a pretty good idea of what to expect by simply looking at the design in use. For this reason, wordpress theme designers are coming up with more specific themes to match a variety of specific types of content. Experts say that the first several seconds spent by a visitor on your blog determine the impression they get of your site. So if your site fails to capture attention right away, then it’s most likely that you’re losing potential repeat readers or site visits.

When designing your site or choosing the appropriate theme, keep in mind that the first concern of a site visitor is whether or not the site has the kind of information needed by him or her. The visual elements, being much faster to grasp than the textual, will help in a big way. If the theme you choose does not correspond to the general content of your site, then attracting more followers will need more effort. Whether we like it or not, looks matter for a lot of people, as this is how beliefs and opinions are initially formed.

WordPress Theme Contests

To ensure your steady stream of new themes, WordPress and certain partners have organized theme contests to discover and recognize the best themes that have cropped up lately. Last year even saw several competitions that attracted theme creators and users alike. This year, however, the WordPress camp has witnessed a slowing down in the production of themes, perhaps due to the fading novelty of it all, not discounting the fact that a lot of those who submitted themes before did it for free.

Nevertheless, customization of WordPress blogs still holds quite a lot of promise, with the arrival of new customization features, such as the Canvas and Widgets plugins. It also promises more highly-customizable themes in the future. For now, you would already be missing out on a lot if you are not already trying out the latest WordPress customization plugins. You can also try modifying some basic features, such as whether your front page should show excerpts or the full blog entries, or changing the number of posts that will show up on your blog index, or both. Whatever you choose, there are hundreds of themes available and other options for you to use, to get as close as ever to your most desired look for your blog.

Danny Wirken
http://www.articlesbase.com/communication-articles/the-latest-on-wordpress-themes-69797.html

Technorati Tags: Blog Software, Canvas, Customization Options, Drag And Drop, Few Minutes, Fun Sites, Html Codes, music, Personalities, Photography, Sidebar Design, Software Developer, Static Text, Text Feature, Whims, Widget, Widgets, Wordpress Blog, Wordpress Themes

http://www.balkhis.com/web-designs-resources/how-to-add-a-dynamic-sidebar-in-wordpress/

Duration : 0:3:14

Technorati Tags: computer, dynamic, in, ready, science, Sidebar, sidebarwidgets, Widget, wordpress

facebook:
http://www.landtrustalliance.org/images/social-media/findonfacebook.jpg

Technorati Tags: Badges, Beautiful, Com Blog, Icons, Images, Quot, Widget

In the sources below is the link to my design blog in case you need some more help, a link to my demo blog with the plug-in working and then the link to the plug-in’s home.

Best of luck.

Technorati Tags: Best Of Luck, blog, Demo, Drop Down Menu, Sidebar, Variety, Widget, Wordpress Theme Viewer

You have 2 ways to solve your problem:

1. the easy, lazy way: go to http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ and find another theme. This is the Wordpress themes repository, all themes are verified by Wordpress guys. All the themes listed here are fully optimized for widgets.
There are lots more websites to download themes from but I can’t guarantee they are widget ready themes

2. the "wordpress expert" way: start coding your theme so that it becomes widget ready

Technorati Tags: 2 Ways, Appearance, Dashboard, Expert, Quot, Repository, Sidebars, Suggestion, Widget, Widgets, Wordpress Themes

Widgets are a very useful feature of most new wordpress themes. These are called “widget enabled” or “widgetized” themes or “widget enabled” or “widgetized” sidebars. They allow you to add custom content to your sidebars with little or no knowledge of HTML or other code.

In an earlier tutorial, I showed how to add Flickr photos to a WordPress sidebar using the Flickr photo widget.

The example I use in this tutorial shows how to create a custom text box with a short biographical note and part of that text is a link.

In PART TWO of this tutorial, I show how to insert an image into the same custom sidebar box, along with a LinkedIn profile “badge”.

You can use these techniques to put whatever you want into your own WordPress sidebar.

Duration : 0:6:21

Technorati Tags: html, Image, markmclaren, mcbuzz, Sidebar, text, tutorial, Widget, widget-enabled, widgetized, wordpress

Making “child” pages (subpages) is useful because you may not want all your pages to show in the main page navigation of your wordpress theme. In most themes, only “main” pages (pages that don’t have a “parent”) show up in the main page navigation. In some newer WordPress themes, child pages show up in a popup menu that appears when you roll over the main page link. And in some themes, sub-subpages show up in popup menus as well. These are sometimes called “cascading” navigation menus: sub-subpages show up in a popup menu when you roll over a subpage link.

The second part of this tutorial shows how to hide (or “exclude”) a link to a page that would otherwise appear in the links of the Pages sidebar widget. This is useful for a number of reasons. One is that when you make a static page your Home page in wordpress, some themes will show the link to this static page as a second home page link in your main navigation. By making the Home page a subpage and excluding that link from the Pages sidebar navigation, you can eliminate the double Home page link.

Duration : 0:10:39

Technorati Tags: child, exclude, hide, howto, link, markmclaren, mcbuzz, menu, navigation, page, pages, parent, Sidebar, Subpage, tutorials, Widget, wordpress

If you have a suggestion besides using wordpress or joomla (that’s a free alternative), then please let me know! Thank you!

Here are some plugin which you can use for your own newsletter system.

http://www.sendblaster.com/wordpress-newsletter-double-optin-widget/
(if you want to see demo of this plugin, you can see my site at http://reena.in )

News Letter system from Google
http://code.google.com/p/wp-ajax-newsletter/

Technorati Tags: Ajax, Create A Newsletter, Create Database, Create Newsletter, Demo, Google, News Letter, Newsletter System, Party Newsletter, Reena, Suggestion, Third Party, Widget, WP