Out of all of the sites I’ve developed so far, including this blog, I have been built from scratch. It has given me the perfect chance to learn and develop my PHP skills. I hope that these sites I’ve developed (trovster.com and “Explore”) all work pretty well, but they’re far from perfect.
For my new project I’ve been using WordPress. I have found it extremely easy to set up and pretty easy to modify, especially with some knowledge of PHP. Then there are endless supplies of plugins for the popular content management system. Here are the ones I’ve been using…
- Acronym Replacer
- A fairly self-explanatory plugin which I use to expand abbreviations such as HTML and CSS.
- Code Filter
- Another small, self-explanatory plugin. Simply surround code chunks when adding a new post and this function will add the pre element around the code and escape the tags correctly. It’s not perfect but works pretty well.
- Search Hilite
- Highlights the keywords from the search either within the site or from external search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
- Gravatars
- A superb plugin which associates Gravatar images with comment posts. A little complicated to get working but there is good documentation with it.
- My Comments
- Makes it possible to style your own comments in a different manner than other comments. Very useful!
- Polite-ifier
- Asteriks out swear words from a huge list. The actual word is still displayed as a tooltip.
- Dunstan’s Time Since
- A Binary Bonsai WordPress port of Dunstan’s original function. Generates time since readable dates for comments and posts.
- Contact Form
- A fairly simply plugin which is extremely well executed. Adds a page to the options in the administration area and simple code to add a contact page. However, the HTML could be improved a lot.
- ShortStat
- A great plugin to monitor basic stats for your WordPress install.
Finally, I installed “WordPress Administration Design: Tiger” from Ordered List. An amazing skin for the administration area of WordPress, designed to make it look more like a web application as opposed to a boring website. And it succeeds immensely. I thoroughly recommend this plugin to spurce up your management of your WordPress driven website.
Now… the project this is all for. You’ll have to wait to find out. It’s coming extremely soon.
Comments
Eurosickwitit
Website
Tuesday 26th July 2005
Yup I recently found wordpress powerfull as well. Im in the process of developing, or rather modifyin my wordpress theme, getting into php deeper and all that. I’m making sure its xhtml1.1 valid, and its hard to do especially if you have a lot of external scripts trying to embed into the page. But im glad there are people who search for different workarounds, etc. I was having a huge problem with embedding flash for my header but i made it xhtml valid somehow based on some research ive done. Anyway, not to bore you, i just thought i was going to drop a line because i recently decided to try wordpress. Have fun with it, can’t wait to see the finished product.