Flame Scorpion » Wordpress plugins

Contact Form 7

Alexandru — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:19:13 +0000

This is a really useful plugin. It’s quite necessary if you have any kind of website. I myself have used it on several occasions and I can honestly say you really need it.

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.

Try out this plugin if you haven’t already since it is really useful.

Theme-Check

Alexandru — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:06:34 +0000

The theme check plugin is an easy way to test your theme and make sure it’s up to specifications with the latest theme review standards. With it, you can run all the same automated testing tools on your theme that WordPress.org uses for theme submissions. That allows for a lot of power for your WordPress site.

The tests are run through a simple admin menu and all results are displayed at once. This is very handy for theme developers, or anybody looking to make sure that their theme supports the latest WordPress theme standards and practices.

You should really get this plugin for your website since it is really helpful.

NextGEN Gallery

Alexandru — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:57:24 +0000

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option. Before this plugin was created, the creator I studied all the existing image and gallery plugins for WordPress. Some of them are really good and well designed, but the gap the creator filled was a simple administration system at the back end which can also handle multiple galleries.

Features

Templates : You can add custom templates for your theme.
Media RSS feed : Add the Cooliris Effect to your gallery
Role settings : Each gallery has a author
AJAX based thumbnail generator : No more server limitation during the batch process
Copy/Move : Copy or move images between galleries
Sortable Albums : Create your own sets of images
Upload or pictures via a zip-file (Not in Safe-mode)
Watermark function : You can add a watermark image or text
JavaScript Effect : Use any available popular image effect : Shutter, Thickbox, Lightbox or Highslide
Multiple CSS Stylesheet : Use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file
Slideshow : Full integrated slideshow as jQuery or Flash solution
TinyMCE : Button integration for easy adding the gallery tags
Sidebar Widget : Show a slideshow, random or recent picture at your sidebar
Language support : Translated in more than 30 languages
Translation downloader : Download with one click the new translation file
Upload tab integration : You have access to all pictures via the upload tab
Tag support for images : Append related images to your post, create a image tag-cloud
Meta data support : Import EXIF, IPTC or XMP meta data
Sort images feature
Support for XML Sitemaps : Add Images to your sitemaps with the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin

WP Auto Affiliate Links version 2.0

Lucian Apostol — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 08:36:14 +0000

Last few days I’ve been busy working on a new version of the popular pligin WP Auto Affiliate Links . The latest version ( 2.1 ) is available for download on the wordpress plugin directory.

The purpose of the plugin is to automatically add affiliate links that you specify on all your articles, on keywords that you specify. It is avery handy tool if you have a lot of content and you don’t know how to monetize it.

Here are the most important features worked on recently:

Reworked the replacing logic to fix all reported and unreported bugs
Added a suggestion engine. It will scrape your content and find the most used non-common keywords from your articles and let you add them with 1 click
Now you have the option to select if you want the links to be added on the homepage of your blog too.

Make more money with your blog

Lucian Apostol — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:47:18 +0000

When you run a blog, you have probably hundreds or thousands articles, one longer than other. I bet that from all those articles there are a dozen of them which stand out, that were cited by a great blogger, or in a popular forum and receive a lot of traffic. There are posts that attract people to your blog, but if you analyze the entrance pages where people come for the first time on your website, you can notice that more than half of your first time visitors are on other articles, probably there are a few on each article but with all that content there is an important number of visitors that come, read and go.

These visitors are coming mostly from search engines because they typed in the search box a couple of words that are found on your page and probably in a simillar order. They are very targeted and focused, they know what they need to find out, they read what they want, they solve their issue and they leave. Most of them are leaving.

I bet that you asked yourself at least once: “How can I monetize this type of traffic?”. I’ve asked myself hundred of times, and finally I came up with an answer. You may think that the easy way is to place some ads that all visitors can see, but on a regular blog, ads are not working so wel and you may end up with few bucks at the end of the month. My solution was to place at least one relevant affiliate link in every old post that is attracting traffic. After I’ve added a link to 10 posts I stopped because it took too much time.

I didn’t quit trying and I came up with WP Auto Affiliate Links, a wordpress plugin that I’ve developed to meet my needs. The plugin automatically add affiliate links to keywords I specify. For example if I want to place a link to amazon to all posts that contain the “android” word, I go to the admin panel, write the keyword and link in the designed fields and that’s it, all posts will have the affiliate link on the “android” keyword. You can do it too, just download the plugin from the wordpress plugin directory and start to cash in.

BuddyPress

Alexandru — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:28:44 +0000

BuddyPress is a small plugin that allows you to build your own social network and integrate it in your website.

It is very useful if you plan to create your own network for a certain office space or a sports team or any other small to medium place that more people frequent.

Now it may not grant you the same advantages as a fully grown social network, but it does its job quite well.

If you need it for any project, go for it and get it. It costs next to nothing and its usefulness is uncharitable. It easily makes up for the price it goes for.

It can be downloaded from the official WordPress site.

I myself, highly recommend this plugin as it is one of the best.

WordPress Jetpack Plugin

Alexandru — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 09:26:11 +0000

The WordPress JetPack Plugin super charges your home built WordPress site so that it has almost the same power as the site built through WordPress.com.

It is a great plugin, a MUST even, for every site.

Features include:

Simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server. Previously provided by WordPress.com Stats.
The WP.me URL shortener.
Hovercard popups for your commenters via Gravatar.
Easily embedded media from popular sites like YouTube, Digg, and Vimeo.
For the Math geeks, a simple way to include beautiful mathematical expressions on your site.
A widget for displaying recent tweets. Previously provided by Wickett Twitter Widget
Your readers can easily share your posts via email or their favorite social networks. Previously provided by the Sharedaddy WordPress plugin.
Your writing will improve thanks to After the Deadline, an artificial intelligence based spell, style, and grammar checker. Previously provided by the After the Deadline WordPress plugin.
And MORE to come …

For more details you can either visit WordPress.org or you can visit Jetpack.me . Those are also the websites from which you can download this magnificent plugin.

Enjoy it as much as I have !

WPTouch

Alexandru — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:03:19 +0000

WPTouch

This plugin is very useful for the programmer on the go.

And already this is starting to look like and sound like a TV commercial, but I can assure you this is more than just that.WPTouch is a nifty little plugin that converts your wordpress website into something that ca easily be put on your phone and managed with extreme ease from there. So far, it is compatible with the iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

The Admin panel allows for such complex yet delicate and smooth control that you can modify every bit without touching even the smallest bit of code. It does nothing to affect the coding or the regular desktop appearance of your beloved website.

It also includes the ability for your visitors to switch between the classic theme of the website or browse it using the WPTouch view.

There is also a PRO version available out there ( that one has to be purchased )

You can download the free one from WordPress’ official website.

ENJOY !!!

Let your visitors to convert word to pdf on your website

Lucian Apostol — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 07:04:38 +0000

WordPress is so interesting because you can do so many things with so few clicks. Now, you can even provide your visitors with the ability to convert word documents to pdf with a simple and free plugin.

I know that it is very simple to do this on your computer by installing few programs, but it really takes more time to install a new program to your computer than to go to a website and use the tool. You keep your windows free of programs that you use only once, you save time and you can do it from everywhere.

The plugin I am talking about is WordToPdf and can be found in the wordpress plugin directory. More interesting, it is not just like a black box to put it on your website and you can never change anything. You can actually configure it for your needs, selecting the max upload file size, change the skin, and add it anywhere you want trough wordpress widgets.

Build a membership website with Wishlist

Lucian Apostol — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 12:15:00 +0000

WordPress is no longer a blogging platform. Now you can do almost whatever you want: real estate listings, social network, social bookmarking website, product presentation website. The most important is that you can do all of these with ease, because the wordpress community reached the maturity and there are all kind of plugins that will let you to drastically transform your wordpress into whatever you may think of.

I will show you how you can build a great membership website using Wishlist plugin.

Wishlist is a mature plugin that have been improved a lot since the first version. If you have something valuable that you want to sell to your users: a product, access to a tool, access to a forum, private consultations, you need a membership website that can handle the customers, payments, expiration dates and much more. Wishlist is the perfect plugin for this.

What you do is to only install it and to configure the membership levels, payment options ( works with paypal and clickbank so far ) and restricted content.

Main features:

Unlimited membership levels
Simple installation. You don’t need a fresh install of wordpress.
Free, Trial or Paid payment options
Sequential content delivery
Control restricted content
Login pages redirection

Wishlist is a quick solution to start selling subscription on any website. If you have a lot of visitors to your website that come to read your content you may start thinking to give some “premium” content to those who want it. From my experience, subscriptions are the best way to monetize a website. Advertising is going down: the number of websites built is increasing and advertisers will give less money that they were used to, the crisis teach them that they can’t throw money so easy. Affiliate marketing is good but you still have to provide a lot of quality reviews to earn good money. Direct advertising and link sales are very hard because the only thing that matters is the pagerank and there are a lot of webmasters that game the pagerank and they can sell links very easy, which will make it hard for you to do it.

If you set up a subscription based membership website, and you sell subscription for 9$ with a 1% conversion rate, you earn 90$ for every 1000 visitors to your website. How much advertising and links you should sell to make the same money ? If you have a quality website people will pay for your tools or your content. Apply the freemium strategy and start cash in.

To accomplish this you need Wishlist.