I’ve been hearing more and more about Pinterest so I decided to take spend some time with it over the last couple of days. It’s very addictive and it seems to be a social commerce site. And the commerce part seems to be working because one of the first images I clicked on was an item for sale on Etsy that was a perfect Valentine gift for my daughter, which I purchased. This intrigues me because I am not a shopper – I tend to think I have what I need, don’t want new clothes, don’t feel the need to upgrade my gadgets, etc. The only thing I willingly shop for is books. Anyway…

I decided to see what WordPress resources were available for Pinterest. Here’s what I found.

The Plugins

1. Pinterest Plugin for WordPress – This plugin will add a Pin It button to your WordPress site. In the Admin Settings, you can set where the button should appear. The plugin also provides a short code, if you only want to use Pin It with specific posts. This plugin works like Pinterest’s bookmarklet.
2. Pinterest RSS Widget – This adds a widget where the feed of a specific Pinterest user can be added to your sidebar. It includes the images and the size can be set. There is also a shortcode if you want to display the feed in a post or page. I wish it would also limit by board because most users have multiple boards and some would apply to the site more than others. If the images don’t display, check the FAQ on the plugin page.
3. Ultimate Photo Widget – This plugin will add a widget that you can add to your sidebar that will pull photos from Twitter, Flickr or Pinterest. Their are different layouts or the images can appear in a slideshow.
4. Pinterest Pinboard Widget – This plugin adds a widget to your sidebar of your recent pins on Pinterest that looks very similar to the Pinterest layout. It uses the thumbnails from Pinterest, which are cached every 15 minutes to help with the performance of your site. I would like for this to also have a shortcode so it could be added to a post or page instead of only the sidebar.
5. Pin It on Pinterest – This adds a Pin It button the the bottom of your posts and will show the number of times that the post has been pinned. The FAQ says that Pinterest has a bit of a lag time so it may take 15 minutes for the Post to appear on Pinterest. The plugin page includes a video tutorial.
6. Slick Social Share Buttons – This set of share buttons includes Pinterest in addition to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and more.
7. Pretty Pinterest Pins – This plugin will add a sidebar widget that displays thumbnails and captions from your pins. Any Pinterest username can be added in the settings so you can also display the pins of another user.
   
8. Social Discussions – This adds 10 sharing buttons to your posts, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest. It also includes the ability to auto-post your content to 30 social networks. The buttons can be added automatically or through template code for manual placement. The buttons can be used with and without counters.
9. Subscribe / Connect / Follow Widget – This widget creates a series of Follow Me icons in your sidebar for social networks that you participate in. Pinterest as well as Facebook, Twitter, and a number of other services are included.

Do you use Pinterest? What do you think of it? Have you added any Pinterest plugins to your site?

photo credit: ohmeaghan

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

9 Pinterest Plugins for WordPress

On January 24th, the US Senate is voting on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. While the bill may sound like a good thing – who likes piracy? But, this bill is really an Internet Censorship Bill that will negatively impact any of us who have websites. According to Boing Boing, if I wanted to link to a site I would have to make sure that there was no copyright infringement ANYWHERE on that site – not just the page I wanted to link to. I would potentially have to check thousands if not millions of pages to verify that I could link to that site. And, if I didn’t take this precaution my ad revenue could be shut down, my domain confiscated and my IP address added to a blacklist.

Does this sound like a good way to handle piracy and copyright infringement? Piracy is wrong but this will punish everyone and could potentially impact the way that we communicate and organize.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

In protest of SOPA, sites, including Boing Boing, Reddit and many many more, will be blacking out their sites tomorrow, January 18th between 8am and 8pm.

So, you would like to get involved but are wondering how you go about blacking out your site. Well, fortunately, for self-hosted WordPress users some plugins have already been created to make it super easy to participate. I was asked if there was a solution for WordPress.com sites but I haven’t come across one. If you would like to participate, I would post about SOPA on January 18th. Videos and other useful materials are available on the American Censorship site.

The Plugins

1. Censor Me – When this plugin is activated your site will be blacked out and will simply include a link that says Stop Censorship and links to the Stop American Censorship website. To stop the blackout, deactivate the plugin.
2. SOPA Blackout Plugin – You get set SOPA blackout dates with this plugin, configure who sees the message and the plugin says it is SEO friendly. This plugin will also allow you to customize the blackout message that is displayed and choose whether you would like to include a video with additional information about SOPA.
3. Simple Stop SOPA – this plugin will blackout your site between 8am – 8pm on January 18th. There are no admin settings – you activate it and that’s it.
4. SOPA Blackout – This plugin will add a 503 status and a customizable blackout page with a number of options to allow your site to participate in blackout day.

The good news is that is doesn’t look like the White House will support this bill – at least in it’s current form. I do think, however, that is important to express how we feel about this issue. Curbing the freedom of speech for all and internet innovation is not the right way to deal with piracy problems.

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

4 WordPress Plugins to Assist in Blacking Out Your Site to Protest SOPA on January 18th

The school year started a couple of months ago but the new semester will be starting soon. There are a number of WordPress plugins that can assist educators in setting up an online course management or lessons site. Most are geared for higher education but they can probably be adapted for other levels.

Most of them are for WordPress but some are specific for BuddyPress.

The Plugins

WordPress

teachPress – teachPress is a plugin that is course management system, which includes enrollments, and a BibTex compatible system for publication management. It is intended for professors and researchers. It also has an export feature for course lists, a sidebar widget for publications, and a shortcode that allows specific content to only be displayed to registered users.

mTouch Quiz – Quizzes can be added to an education site with this plugin. It is also mobile friendly.

PMID Citation Plus – With this plugin you can simply enter PubMed IDs (PMIDs) and have a references list automatically at the bottom of a post.

Digress.it – This plugin allows commenting at the paragraph level and is intended for in-depth conversations about longer documents. It can be thought of as writing in the margins of an paper based article. Blog style comment threads float to the right of the article and allow discussions on parts of the article rather than using the traditional comments at the end of the article. A number of institutions are using this such as Cornell and the New York Public Library.

WP Document Revisions – This is a document revision and version control plugin that contains three main components. 1. A document management system to track store and organize files of any format. 2. A collaboration tool that allows teams to edit and revise a document. 3. A file hosting solution to publish and securely deliver documents to clients, professors, or students. One important component is access control – each file is given a persistent URL that can be private, password protected or publicly available. This could be used for student papers or a thesis.

SP Courseware – This is a class management plugin. You can add schedules, manage assignments, add a bibliography, and manage general course information.

BuddyPress Specific

Learninglog – Learninglog allows teachers and students to use WordPress as an educational tool. With this plugin you can set up learning logs for students, create assignments for groups or individuals, and collect and review answers. It also includes privacy settings for each learning log entry.

BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware – ScholarPress Courseware is a full featured learning management system for the BuddyPress version of WordPress. Features include: a class dashboard, courses, lectures, blbliography, assignments, quizzes, gradebook, and schedules. There is a full handbook available online.

BuddyPress Docs – This adds a collaborative area to a BuddyPress installation and is part Wiki and part document editing. The author says it is similar to having Google Docs within WordPress.

photo credit: loop_oh

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

9 WordPress Plugins for Education Sites and Teachers

I accidentally came across a plugin that was perfect for a project that I was going to be working on. I liked it so much that I decided to try it out on this site.

The plugin is called Related Posts Thumbnails. It uses the featured image and will relate posts based on categories, tags, both or randomly. Typically, a plugin will related based on categories or by tags so it was great to find one that provided the option to use one or the other. Personally, I prefer to use categories because I currently have too many tags and I get better matching results when I use categories.

The Plugin

1. In order for the plugin to work properly you must be using Featured Images or Post Thumbnails, which became a feature in WordPress 2.9. When you upload a new image, you would click on the link ‘Use as Featured Image’ rather than ‘Insert Into Post’.
   
2. Install the plugin and activate. It should work immediately and add 3 related posts to the bottom of your article on the single post page. It looks like the following screenshot and you can also view it at the bottom of this page.

   
   
   As you can see in the screenshot, one of the related posts has a default gray image. That post must not have a featured image associated with it, which makes sense because I haven’t added one for all of my older posts. In the settings for the plugin, however, you can select the option to only use posts that have thumbnails.

3. Under Settings > Related Posts Thumbs are all of the settings for the plugin and it has a lot of useful options.
   

   As I mentioned earlier in the article, I like how you can select how the posts are related rather it being categories or tags like so many other plugins. There are also settings for the display of the related post thumbnail; the layout, colors, and more.

Hopefully this visual representation of related posts will encourage people to visit more of the content on your site and read more of your posts. What do you think? Would you like to use something like this?

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

Related Posts by Category or Tags with Thumbnails: WordPress Plugin

One of my favorite free contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7. It’s easy to use but also has a lot of features, it can handle file uploads, and you can create multiple forms, if you need more than one on your website.

On many themes, however, the checkboxes and radio buttons don’t line up properly when there are a lot of choices and are displayed horizontally rather than vertically.

The checkbox selections look like the following:

There is, however, a simple CSS fix for this.

Paste the following into the stylesheet for your theme. It is located at Appearance > Editor > style.css

span.wpcf7-list-item {
display:block;
}

The checkbox and radio button selections will then look like this:

Do you use a contact form on your site? Which one do you use? Do you like Contact Form 7?

photo credit: 22658750@N02

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Fix Checkbox and Radio Button Layout with Contact Form 7

Since version 2.9 WordPress has supported Post Thumbnails, which are used to assign an image to a post so they can be used in different parts of the theme and are frequently used in magazine style layouts. Prior to post thumbnails, custom fields were frequently used to do this.

I used to use the Thumbnails for Excerpts plugin to improve the layout of my search results page and my archives. For some time I’ve wanted to use Post Thumnails instead but the thought of adding them to all of my older posts seemed like a daunting task.

Recently, however, I added Post Thumbnails to my theme and deactivated the Thumbnails for Excerpts plugin even though many of my older posts would not have a post thumbnail image. I’ve added an image to some of the older posts and I’ve been adding them to all new posts.

This morning when I was walking home from dropping my daughter off at school I was thinking about Post Thumbnails (do I know how to have fun or what) because I’ve been asked a couple of questions about them. I then thought maybe there is a way to set a default image so if you haven’t added one to a particular post the default image will be used. And, of course, I located a plugin as well as instructions for adding a default post thumbnail to your theme manually.

The plugin

I did a quick test of the plugin, called Default Post Thumbnails (now, there’s a surprise), and it worked great.

1. Install and activate the plugin.
2. Go to Settings > Default Post Thumbnail.
3. The screen will show all of the images in your media library and you can select the one that you want to use as the default. If the image you want to use isn’t already in the media library, you will want to add it and then come back to this screen.
   
4. I decided to select a recent picture I took of a rainbow but your site’s logo might be another good choice.
5. In the Featured Image area of your Edit Post screen the featured image you have selected for the post will be displayed as well as the default one. The default image has a message saying it’s the default image that will be used if one isn’t selected.
   

Now when I go to my archives or search results page, posts without an image selected for the Post Thumbnail use the image with the rainbow that I selected. Here is an example of a search on the word facebook – if you scroll down, you will see that the oldest posts all use this image.

So, for now, my problem is solved. At least until I get motivated to add a Post Thumbnail to my older posts.

Do you use post thumbails? Has the issue for older posts kept you from using them? Do you think a default image is a useful solution?

photo credit: mikecogh

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Add a Default Image for WordPress Post Thumbnails

Save a tree!

Save that WordPress page or post as a pdf instead of printing it to paper.

Recently I’ve been been working on a personal project that will hopefully help me become more professional and organized when it comes to invoicing clients and sending proposals. I think I’m on the right track – the first proposal I sent via my new method was accepted in less than 30 mins. I’m going to write about the system I’ve been working on soon but am still working out the details for the article.

Anyway, one of the the things I wanted to set up was allowing the client to save the documents as a pdf. The project I’m working on doesn’t utilize standard WordPress posts and pages so only one of the solutions listed below worked for me. I did, however, test them on a regular site and they all worked as advertised.

Save to PDF Plugins

1. PrintFriendly & PDF – This is the solution I used for my project. They have a WordPress plugin as well as tools for Blogger and html websites. The plugin gives a choice of the style and location of the button. It makes great pdfs that can be edited before being saved – I’ve found the layout is better when images are removed. This plugin displays ads while generating the pdf but also has paid version for $4/month that is ad free. The website also has a tool where any site can be converted and saved as pdf by inputting the URL.
2. article2pdf – I like this one quite a bit but it isn’t as easy to set up. A piece of code needs to be edited to the templates where you want the link to be located. It also has A LOT of settings. This is good because it has a lot of features but it can be confusing to some uses because you will need to create directories on your server and you will need to know or figure out the absolute path to them. Once I got the settings straight, however, a nice pdf was created of my posts.
3. Joliprint – Joliprint is similar to PrintFriendly in that it can be used with different types of sites and they have a field one their site to convert any URL to a pdf. Their site also has a feature where you can create a mini pdf ebook with 10 URLs. I, however, could not get this one to work on either site I tested it on and got 404 errors. Others have been successful so maybe the issue was related to my server – I didn’t spend too much time trying to troubleshoot the problem because other solutions exist.
4. PDF24 Article To PDF – This plugin worked great and the settings are easy to use. It generated a clean pdf in a snap. On their website they have free pdf tools such as a pdf creator and an online file converter

Have you used any of these tools or plugins? Do you have a favorite?

photo credit: Ella’s Dad

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

4 WordPress Plugins for Saving Articles as a PDF

Last summer I wrote about the Redirection Plugin and how it can assist when moving a site to a new domain or directory.

Recently, however, I ran into an error where when a new blog post was published that post would become the front page of the site. I wasn’t sure how to fix it other than turning off the plugin, which wasn’t that useful when I had it set up to redirect pages so vistors didn’t get 404 errors.

Finally, I discovered the setting that I needed to turn off to avoid this problem.

1. Go to Tools > Redirection
2. At the top of the page are a group of links that say Redirection, Groups, Modules, Logs, Options, Support. Click on Groups.
   
3. Click on Edit Group to the right of Modified Posts
   
4. Uncheck the enabled box, which is turned on by default, and then save. This will stop new posts from being redirected to the home page.
   

That’s all you have to do to correct this problem but it sure had me stumped for awhile.

photo credit: purplemattfish

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

WordPress Redirection Plugin Causes Last Post to Become Front Page (and how to fix)

Earlier this week I reviewed the WP-Cycle plugin, which is an easy to use image slideshow plugin.

One feature that it doesn’t have is a random display of the images. The images are displayed in the upload order. This isn’t such a big deal, if you know this in advance, but I didn’t know a client wanted them displayed randomly until after I had uploaded 30+ images and I didn’t want to delete them and start over.

If you want the the images displayed randomly, you will need to edit the plugin file.

Here’s what you do.

Locate the following lines in the plugin file. In the current version, it started at line 811.

echo ‘<div id=”‘.$wp_cycle_settings['div'].’”>’.$newline;
foreach((array)$wp_cycle_images as $image => $data) {

In between the two lines add

shuffle($wp_cycle_images);

The code block should now look like the following.

echo ‘<div id=”‘.$wp_cycle_settings['div'].’”>’.$newline;
shuffle($wp_cycle_images);
foreach((array)$wp_cycle_images as $image => $data) {

The images will now be displayed in a random order. Before editing a plugin file, make a backup of it first.

Of course, if you upgrade the plugin, you will lose your customizations.

The WordPress forums are a great source of information for tidbits like this. I found the solution here.

photo credit: Artiii

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Randomize the Images with the WordPress WP-Cycle Slideshow Plugin

WP-Cycle is a WordPress image slideshow plugin that uses jQuery. It can link to any post, page or a URL outside of the site. It can be set to any size and has a number of other useful settings. I’ve used this plugin on a number of sites and really like it for it’s ease of use. It does, however, have the limitation of single use and all images added in the settings have to be used.

Installing and Using

1. Install and activate the plugin.
2. Go to Media > WP-Cycle

   

3. On the settings page you can upload images, set the transition effects, set the length of time the image appears, and set the size of the slideshow.
4. Once an image is uploaded, you can set the link for the image.
   
5. Please note that if the image is smaller than the size set for it in the settings, you will get an error message.
   
   If the image is larger than the size set for the slideshow, you won’t get the error. The plugin will scale the image down.
6. Add <?php wp_cycle(); ?> to your theme where you want the slideshow to appear.

As I mentioned earlier this plugin only allows for one slideshow and all images added will be used. The image will also be displayed in the order that they are uploaded.

Have you used this plugin or a theme that uses this plugin? Do you like it? Do you find it too limited? I like it’s because it’s easy for the end-user to use, it’s not tied to specific posts or pages and it can link to anything.

photo credit: Amsterdamize

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

WordPress Image Slideshow Plugin: WP-Cycle