Posts tagged Plugins
5 WordPress Plugins to Keep in Touch with Your Blog Co-Authors
Sep 10th
Maintaining multi-author blogs is hard but it definitely pays off. A multi-author blog provides the variety of insights, perspectives and blogs. Most feeds in my reader are from multi-author blogs – namely because I enjoy the daily variety they offer.
Creating the strong community of guest authors and contributors around your blog is gold: the guest bloggers would
- Come daily to comment their own (and each other’s) posts,
- Link to and cite their guest posts from many other places they contribute to,
- Share their guest posts across their social media channels, etc.
However building this community is definitely hard and takes plenty of time, effort and commitment.
No matter what type of multi-author community you are building (paid authors, regular columns, one-time guest contributions, etc), the following WordPress plugin will let you effectively keep in touch with your authors, invite them back to your site and develop stronger contacts with each other:
1. Email Users
Email Users lets you send a newsletter to all your registered authors (or even subscribers). How you use this plugin depends on the type of the blog you run and the type of relationships you have with your co-authors. Surely, I wouldn’t overuse it but it should work great for important updates and announcements.
As far as you can see from the screenshot below, the plugin supports a few mail formats and some variables. It also lets you choose the author names to send the newsletter to or just send to everyone:
2. Peter’s Collaboration E-mails
This plugin updates both the blog owner and the contributor on the submitted guest post status:
- When a Contributor user submits an article for review: The plugin e-mails a list of approvers of your choice, letting them know that there is a post ready for review, and giving them a link to edit the post.
- When a post is approved: The Contributor user gets an e-mail saying that their post has been approved and who it was approved by. If the post was directly published, the author is given a link to read the post as the whole world sees it. If the post is scheduled to be published, the author is informed of the time that their post will go live. When the post does go live, the author will get another e-mail informing him / her of that.
- When a post’s status is changed back to “draft” from “pending”: The original Contributor user gets an e-mail saying that their post has been reverted back to a draft, along with a link to edit and re-submit the post.
3. Peter’s Post Notes for WordPress
Peter’s Post Notes for WordPress: this plugin allows to post quick private notes to go with posts. It is thus a very handy collaboration tool as an editor can suggest a quick fix, the contributor can report a status or ask for the advice etc – and the whole conversation is forever saved with the post for you to refer to it whenever you need to. Besides, when used in combination with the above plugin, the note recipient will be updated of a new note via email.
The notes are added right to the extra panel added to the sidebar (once you save the draft or publish the post, the note is saved as well).
4. Admin Msg Board
Admin Msg Board is a plugin for WordPress that will add a messaging system in your WordPress admin area. Messages can have up to 140 characters (ala your own internal blog Twitter), and you can choose whether to send a message to all writers or select recipients
5. Private Messages For WordPress
This plugin allows users of WordPress blog send private messages (PM) to each other. The number of PMs can be controlled via the plugin option page.
Otherwise, an email will be sent to user when a new PM is received.
Do you run (or plan to launch) a multi-author blog? Please share your insight!
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
5 WordPress Plugins to Keep in Touch with Your Blog Co-Authors
View full post on Search Engine Journal
WordPress plugins to Automatically Watermark Your Images
Jun 9th
It’s been a while since I published my post on why and how you can watermark the images you publish on the web (this helps both for copyright protection and brand awareness).
One of my sites relies on images heavily and I decided to automate watermarking. So in this post I am sharing two WordPress plugins that automatically watermark the images you upload and publish.
Watermark Reloaded
Watermark Reloaded is going to be my favorite plugin when it comes to watermarking images in WordPress. It has plenty of options allowing to customize the watermark text and position:
- Specify the type of an image to apply the watermark to (thumbnail, medium, large, full size);
- Specify the watermark alignment and offset;
- Specify the watermark text;
- Specify the watermark text font size and color:
After that, the watermarked image is going to look like this:
Image Optimizer
While the above one is great if you want to watermark ALL images of the same type, this one can be used if you need to watermark selected / random images.
Image Optimizer: While you are not going to see all the listed features after you install this one, the watermarking ability is still there and working.
Just have the plugin installed and activated. Then go to “Settings” and provide the text you want to appear as a watermark:
After that (in the image uploading window) you will need to specify if you want the image and the thumbnail to be watermarked. The result looks like this:
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
WordPress plugins to Automatically Watermark Your Images
View full post on Search Engine Journal
3 WordPress Plugins to Tweak Your WordPress Blog Pagination
May 26th
Last week I came across a great post outlining the impact of pagination on SEO, so today I am sharing some WordPress plugins to help you tweak your WordPress blog pagination:
1. WordPress SEO Pager
Summary:
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Best feature: | SEO-friendly |
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Look and feel | Shows the last post date on hover-over |
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Customization: |
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Installation:
1. Upload and activate the plugin;
2. Go to the plugin settings and customize the look and feel:
3. You are done!
2. WP Page Numbers
Summary:
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Best feature: | Choose different themes (5 styles are available) |
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Customization: | Easily customize the paging structure, look and feel |
Installation:
1. Upload and activate the plugin;
2. Go to the plugin settings and customize the look and feel:
3. Use the following code wherever you want paging to appear in your template files:
<?php if(function_exists('wp_page_numbers')) { wp_page_numbers(); } ?>
4. You are done!
3. Paginator
Summary:
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Best feature: | The plugin is based on the scrolling technique |
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Customization: | The number of visible pages |
Installation:
1. Upload and activate the plugin;
2. Go to the plugin settings and set:
- Number of pages visible at once (before you scroll)
- The total number of pages:
3. Use the following code wherever you want paging to appear in your template files:
<?php if(function_exists('wp_paginator')) { wp_paginator(); } ?>
4. (Optionally) To change CSS style of Paginator, edit /wp-content/plugins/paginator/skin/paginator3000.css
5. You are done!
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
3 WordPress Plugins to Tweak Your WordPress Blog Pagination
View full post on Search Engine Journal
2 WordPress Plugins to Keep Track of 404 Errors
May 12th
We already know how 404 errors ruin your SEO and usability. And long ago I shared some ways to keep track of 404 pages that may occur on the site. Today I am adding two tools to your arsenal: for those who use WordPress to run their sites.
So here you go: two WordPress plugin that alert you once your blog visitor lands on an error page:
404 Notifier
This plugin sends email alerts once the visitor of your blog comes across a 404 page.
After you install it, go to the plugin settings and provide your email for alerts:
The email alert looks as follows:
The plugin also offers an RSS feed (if you don’t want to clutter your email inbox) tracking all 404 logs:
JH 404 Logger
This plugin adds a Dashboard Widget showing recent 404 urls. The widget is easy to use and Ajax powered.
Feel free to try any of the plugins. I’ve run both of them on my blog and then chose to go with 404 Notifier RSS option: the other options (email alerts and dashboard widget) triggered too much clutter.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
2 WordPress Plugins to Keep Track of 404 Errors
View full post on Search Engine Journal
What are the best SEO Plug-ins to use and what ones should I stay away from?
Feb 21st
I am looking for different SEO options and I have seen a lot of “SEO Plug-ins” for wordpress and such but there are so many to chose from I am wondering if anyone has had any experience with any of these?
