Archive for the ‘Wordpress Plugins’ Category

Having your website done in WordPress is great for a number of reasons including all of the plugins that you can add to your site to make it better.  There is a plugin for just about everything these days. Some are better then others and some like WP Super Cache are must haves.

WP SUPER CACHE

Sometimes having a lot of graphics and items on your site can make them load slower. This WordPress plugin makes your pages load way faster and since it stores static versions of your site, it requires much less CPU processing than using WordPress all by itself.

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users, but because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment those requests are handled by the legacy caching engine. Static files are served to:

1. Users who are not logged in.
2. Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
3. Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

99% of your visitors will be served static html files. Those users who don’t see the static files will still benefit because they will see different cached files that aren’t quite as efficient but still better than uncached. This plugin will help your server cope with a front page appearance on digg.com or other social networking site.

Visit WP Super Cache wordpress site to download

If you have a contact form on your lawyer web site or legal blog, then odds are you have gotten your share of spam contact form emails. If you dont have proper CAPTCHA Security, then you might get 1000′s of spammer contact form emails, which are really irritating. You can beat the spammers easily by making sure you have the latest wordpress contact form plugin with captcha security.

WHAT IS CAPTCHA?

A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t:

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University.

So the bottom line is that you want to have the Captcha security feature on your contact form.

If you have a WordPress site, then it can be much easier to set this feature up.  Most of the contact form plugins today have some sort of Captcha security you can setup that forces the user who filles out the form, to have to put in the 4 digit code before hitting submit.

CONTACT FORM 7 – Download it here

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

This is a pretty simple form and one that Ive used in the past but sometimes I have found that if you dont update the plugin or the Captcha plugin, spam can sometimes still get through or an error message will come up on the captcha portion of the form.

SO I would now recommend using the contact form plugin below, the Fast Secure Contact Form.

FAST SECURE CONTACT FORM – Download it here

This plugin allows a webmaster to easily create and add contact forms to WordPress. The contact form will let the user send emails to a site’s admin. An administration panel is present, where the webmaster can create and preview unlimited forms.

Features a super easy admin panel, multi-form feature, autoresponder, no templates to mess with, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. Includes CAPTCHA and Akismet support to block all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem.

This is a VERY GOOD contact form solution.  You can create multiple forms, you can add them to pages and to your sidebar easily as a widget.   You can setup a confirmation page that the user is taken to after filling out the form, this is a good idea for multiple reasons. Once this is setup, you can then setup a Google performance goal in Google analytics or a conversion in Google adwords.

If your site is not in WordPress, then there are other ways to add the Captcha security feature.  Don’t let the spammers win! Upgrade your site today, and as long as you have this form, you wont get many spams via the contact form, its a great solution.

Clever Tweet is a wordpress plugin that will display your twitter feed in a sidebar widget and it has a cool scrolling effect.  This is just another way to include your twitter feeds in the sidebar but I like how its setup and easy to use.   You can see this action on the right sidebar…

Clever Tweet will give you the following features:

• Customizable amount of tweets to display
• Onmouseover stops animation
• Option to show retweets (RT)
• Option to show mentions (@username)
• Customizable jQuery animation interval
• Clickable hashtags
• Clickable urls
• Cache for faster loading and less requests to Twitter
• Integrates well with all different templates.

You can download Clever tweet at WordPress

It is very important that WordPress is upgraded regularly as old versions can leave you prone to attack.  A lot of people will just never upgrade and this can leave some security holes, so its key to upgrade your legal WordPress site or blog on a regular basis.

Its pretty easy to upgrade WordPress by just downloading the software and then following the basic instructions, but it’s even easier with this auto upgrade plugin!

WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

WordPress automatic upgrade upgrades your wordpress installation by doing the following steps.

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

The plugin can also can be run in a automated mode where in you do not have to click on any links to go to the next step.

Go here to download this plugin now

Creating your lawyer website using WordPress has many advantages including the ability to setup plugins that add different functionality to your site. Its pretty easy to setup plugins, you basically download it, then transfer the plugin to your sites plugin directory and then activate the plugin from within your wordpress admin panel.

One plugin that is very useful is the Broken Link Checker.

Sometimes, links get broken. A page is deleted, a subdirectory forgotten, a site moved to a different domain. Most likely many of your blog posts contain links. It is almost inevitable that over time some of them will lead to a “404 Not Found” error page. Obviously you don’t want your readers to be annoyed by clicking a link that leads nowhere. You can check the links yourself but that might be quite a task if you have a lot of posts. You could use your webserver’s stats but that only works for local links.

FEATURES OF BROKEN LINK CHECKER

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
• Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
• Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.
• Also detects redirected links.
• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
• Link checking intervals can be configured.
• New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
• You view broken links, redirects, and a complete list of links used on your site, in the Tools -> Broken Links tab.
• Searching and filtering links by URL, anchor text and so on is also possible.
• Each link can be edited or unlinked directly via the plugin’s page, without manually editing each post.

Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks (AKA blogroll), etc and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take from a few minutes to several hours. When parsing is complete, the plugin will start checking each link to see if it works. Again, how long this takes depends on how big your site is and how many links there are. You can monitor the progress and tweak various link checking options in Settings -> Link Checker.

The broken links, if any are found, will show up in a new tab of the WP admin panel – Tools -> Broken Links. A notification will also appear in the “Broken Link Checker” widget on the Dashboard. To save display space, you can keep the widget closed and configure it to expand automatically when problematic links are detected.

Download the Broken Link Checker

Your WordPress database contains every post, every comment and every link you have on your blog. If your database gets erased or corrupted, you stand to lose everything you have written. There are many reasons why this could happen and not all are things you can control. But what you can do is back up your data. After all, it is important. Right?

Some people might not even realize they need to backup the site or that its even possible. Usually you can do it from the web hosting control panel, but its somewhat complex and technical.  Yet like most things in WordPress, theres an easier way to get it done using a plugin.

WordPress has plenty of information on how to backup your WordPress site and how important it is here.

There are plenty of free plugins available to backup your wordpress sites but I am using one that is a paid plugin called Backup Buddy and its very easy to use and works well.  Hopefully you will never need to know if it works but it’s important to have this done. Also when you backup your files, you should have them on a different server then your site is on, in case something bad happens to your existing web server.

BACKUP BUDDY PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS:

BackupBuddy is an all-in-one solution for backups, restoration, and migration. The single backup file created by the plugin can be used with the importer script to quickly and easily restore your site on the same server or even migrate to a new server with a different domain and database. Whether you’re an end user or a developer, this plugin is sure to bring you peace of mind and added safety in the event of data loss. Our goal is to keep the backup, restoration, and migration processes easy, fast, and reliable.

You can find more about it here

Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. The button comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing and usage history.

The E-mail tab makes it easy to share via Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL, and any other web-based e-mailer or desktop program. The Add to Favorites button (or Bookmark tab) helps users bookmark using any browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.).

Individual service icons let you optimize your blog posts for specific social sites. Choose from over 100 individual services.

Download it here

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your
WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as
well as custom ones.

Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap
is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap
protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified
about the update.

This is a great plugin and its important to create a site map for you site. This way Google can index all of the pages within your site.

Download this Plugin

One of the great things about using WordPress is that you can add "plug-ins" which are programs that add functionality to your wordpress blog/site. There are 1000's of different wordpress plug ins and they are free and usually very easy to install and setup.

You can goto the WordPress plugin directory to find all the different plugins that are available.

One of the first plugins you should have is the Akismet anti spam plugin.

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you
review the spam it catches under your blog's "Comments" admin screen.

This plugin really works great once installed because it captures all the spammer comments and if you don't have this in place, you will get bombarded with spammer comments that you will have to weed through in order to get to the regular non spam comments.

Download this plugin now.

You'll need a WordPress.com API key to use it.