I am playing around with using wordpress to set up a directory of places.  I know that WordPress can be a very robust platform by using the custom fields but I don’t know much about coding and how to use advanced features of wordpress.

I found this post (from Steve Taylor who is a WordPress Designer in London) that offers some very detailed information on customfields but also links to some plugins.

Here are a few of the plugins that work with custom fields:

• Magic Fields – this plugin has lots of options and the plugin developers have provided a getting started tutorial and wiki with additional info.
• Custom Field Template – this looks like it could be very robust – but the documentation is not in English so I wasn’t able to read more about it.
• Flutter – another plugin that Steve Taylor links to – it looks like this plugin is no longer supported and has not been updated for WordPress 3.0.  According to the WordPress Forums – some of the people who worked on Flutter are working on Magic Fields and there is a way to migrate from Flutter to Magic Fields
• Verve Meta Boxes – another plugin that lets you work with custom fields – provides lots of options and has some help info.
• Meta Extension – this plugin seems to be best suited to adding media and videos in the custom fields.  The website did not offer lots of documentation.

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I have been wanting to add threaded comments to the blog so that is possible to reply to a specific comment rather than the whole chain of comments. In the past I had used the Brian’s Threaded Comment’s Plugin. There have been some changed to WordPress with 2.7 and 2.8 and Brian’s plugin has some been updated since 2008. I started to search for another solution but I couldn’t find a plugin that didn’t require me to make changes to the template.

A friend suggested Disqus as a solution. Disqus is a service outside of WordPress that allows people to create a profile which can be used whenever they leave comments on a blog that has Disqus – you don’t have to have a Disqus plugin to leave a comment on a blog with Disqus. Continue Reading »

I have seen this feature on some other blogs for the past few months and I know that it has helped to generate some traffic back to my site so I have been looking for an easy way to improve my blogroll to display the most recent post below the link.

Here are 2 plugins that are available to spruce up your blogroll.

• What Others are Saying – this one has been around for a while and from the website it looks like there is tons of support for this plugin, but you have to add the RSS feed for each link to the link page for this plugin to display the links.
• Feed Reading Blogroll – this plugin will take your existing links, automatically find the rss feed and display the most recent post under the link name.  There are lots of option and you can customize the look of your links in many ways – including hiding link categories that you don’t want to display. You can also sort the bookmarks by last updated rather than name, which could be a nice way to keep your blogroll with fresh content.

Blogtelling is currently running Feed Reading Blogroll on the side bar – it was easy to set up and customize the look – I like that I can add how recently the post was updated.

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On my other blogs I use the plug-in Postalicious to automatically create a post from links that I have saved to delicious.  I have a delicious account for each of my blogs and this has been a great way to save and share revelant information.

But recently I have been using twitter to share links so I was thinking maybe there is way to create a blog post with recent tweets.  I did some searching and found this great list of tools from a marketing firm in Texas.  Here are 2 of the wordpress plug-ins that help you connect your blog to twitter.

1. Twitter Tools – here are a few of the features that I think are helpful to bloggers

• Create a blog post from each of your tweets
• Create a daily or weekly digest post of your tweets
• Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post
• Post a tweet from your sidebar
• Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens

2. Twittar – when someone leaves a comment – Twittar checks their email to see if they have a twitter account, if the person has a twitter account – Twittar uses their twitter avatar next to their comment.

I am going to try using twitter to share some links and then use the Twitter Tools plug-in to create a daily digest of those tweets.