WordPress as a CMS, easy as pie

It’s been a bit since the last time I posted about turning WordPress into a CMS. I’ve learned a bit more about WordPress, and some really great  plugins have come to my attention. WordPress has evolved a bit, and so have the types of sites I work on here in Benin.

The following plugins have a lot in common. For the most part they are:

• Activate and forget. We configure everything, and the client never even needs to know the plugin’s there.
• Simple to use. In many cases, we’ve sacrificed extensive features for ease of use. Clients don’t need a million different things to worry about—they just want their websites to work.
• Internationalized. Seriously, folks, it’s not that hard. Not all the plugins listed provide translations, but they are all translatable.

Useful, internationalized plugins for turning WordPress into a CMS

Akismet. Remarkably effective anti-comment spam measures. How did I forget this the last time? We set-up a wp.com account for our clients in order to get the API key, install, and then good-bye spam.

Get-the-image is a plugin by Justin Tadlock that automatically creates thumbnails. It’s an alternative to the popular thumbs.php, and has to be called from your template files. It’s proved invaluable when designing newspaper and magazine style sites for clients. There’s no longer any excuse for having to deal with custom fields to create article thumbnails. We add tags to the theme, and as if by magic, thumbnails appear where they’re supposed to.

Viper’s Video Quicktags is not the most powerful video plugin in the WordPress universe, but it is the most usable. It handles input from a few dozen different video hosts, and also does a great job with self-hosted content and MP3s.

Ad-Minister. My clients will never see another complicated ad plugin. Ad-minister isn’t feature heavy, but it is incredibly simple to use. Putting new ads on your site is now as simple as creating new posts, and uses the same familiar interface. This is crucial for clients who don’t want to mess with inserting HTML code into widgets, etc. and who don’t want to learn how to send files via FTP.

qTranslate has some limitations as a translation plugin, but it’s the absolute simplest to use. Each language has its own tabs in the post and page interface.

The search for easier continues

I’m always looking for easier ways for my clients to run their sites. It’s why we use WordPress. However, too often, ease of use comes at the expense of features. What are your favorite WordPress plugins? How do you balance usability with functionality?

Here in West Africa, there are two huge problems we face with our clients:

Internet illiteracy. Client training often starts with sessions on how the internet work and how to set-up a free Yahoo! France email account. From there, we’re able to make comparisons between saving a document in MS-Word and publishing a page using WordPress. In addition, we have a well developed written user guide that we distribute to each of our clients that details not only how to do basic tasks like adding and editing pages, but also how to manage their various plugins, like forums and polls.

Slow internet connections. Even the major newspapers we work with update their websites from slow CDMA connections operating at dial-up speeds. Since WordPress 2.6, Google Gears has been integrated, making an enormous difference in load times, but some of the plugins we use are still chosen with these slow speeds in mind.

Plugins for every install

Admin Management Xtended adds a lot of CMS functionality to the Manage section. As WordPress doesn’t provide any capacity to fine tune page display order, drag-and-drop page management is particularly interesting. Also incredibly useful for those of us using slow West African connections is the possibility to change page titles from the Manage menu, instead of having to access the Edit Page page. (Download)

Note: WordPress 2.7’s quick edit features are a huge improvement, but don’t cover 100% of the functionality that this plugin offers.

All in One SEO Pack seems to be more or less standard for fine tuning individual page and article SEO. Most sites don’t need this level of detail for all pages, but it’s often useful to set descriptions for major landing pages. (Download)

Note: Headspace2 has much better internationalization, but I’ve had a devil of a time getting it working correctly on the 2.7 betas. I’m waiting for the next release before switching entirely. (Download)

cformsII is a super-flexible form management plugin. While it’s probably overkill for simple contact pages, its flexibility and admin management makes it more useful than most WordPress contact plugins. (Download)

Note: our clients find this plugin’s configuration relatively difficult, so we take care of all the initial details on our end.

Enforce www. Preference does just what it says. (Download)

Google Analytics for WordPress. ‘Nuff said. (Download)

Google XML Sitemaps creates XML sitemaps for Google. (Download)

Sociable allows rapid sharing on social media networks. And it’s well-internationalized, which is super-important for all plugins that add text to the front-end. (Download)

Search Everything improves WP’s internal search functions, allowing search of pages, meta data, custom fields, etc. Because so many of our clients use WP as a CMS, this plugin is incredibly important. (Download)

Plugins for most installs

Subscribe2 sends out an email to subscribers each time a new article is published. This plugin isn’t a perfect solution to the newsletter problem, but it’s plug-and-forget, which is a huge advantage over its competitors. (Download)

WP-Email and WP-Print go together because we use them together. They allow users to email the article/ page to a friend and print the article/ page, respectively. (Download WP-Email Download WP-Print)

WP-Polls is another great Lester Chan plugin. It’s not the most robust polling plugin around, but it’s dead-simple to use and has excellent internationalization (like most of his plugins). (Download)

Simple Forums is exactly what it says. I prefer it to other forum software for several reasons, one of which is its excellent support and internationalization (do you sense a theme here?). (Download)

Custom Branding is used in two ways.

• If the client is a single-user site, we brand the installation for People Online because free marketing is awesome.
• If the client is running a multi-user or community site that requires Joe Schmoe reader to sign-up/ log-in, we brand it with the clients logo and colors.

(Download)

Note: we’re also experimenting with wp-adminimize.

There are a lot of other great WordPress plugins out there that we use occasionally. Role-scoper, which I talked about here is one, as is StatPress Reloaded, which we use because some clients find Google Analytics too complicated.

What are your favorite plugins? What do you use to make WordPress a better CMS?

Both systems have very basic authentication protocols, where you can hide posts from users who aren’t logged in, but neither have any sort of system allowing several levels of privileges (WordPress’s role system is geared towards posting rights, not reading rights).

Enter the Role Scoper plugin, by Kevin Behrens. It’s still in development, but it offers the level of control my client is looking for. And, after spending an afternoon playing, it’s relatively easy to set-up.

How to set WordPress categories to different members only groups

1. Create your categories and populate them with articles (even if they’re filed with nothing but random characters). This is helpful. Really.
2. Go to the “Groups” tab, and create your groups (e.g. a group for each class or membership level). Don’t worry about populating the groups with members just yet.
3. Go to the “Roles” tab, then the “Exclusive Sections” sub-tab. For each category where you want to limit who can read, check the box next to “Post Reader”. When you’re done, scroll back up to the top of the page, and make sure “ignored – equivalent section/object role required” is selected in the drop-down list. Click “Update.”
4. Go to back to the “Groups” tab, and click the “Section Roles” sub-tab. Check off one group in the “eligible groups” box (Membership level 1, for example). Now scroll down to the appropriate category, and check the box next to “Private Post Reader”. Scroll back up to the top and click “Update.” Do the same thing for each group.
5. Go back to the “Groups” tab and add/manage your members!

While there are other plugins out there that do similar things, Role Scoper offers the most granular control over who can see what on a WordPress site.

I’ll be even more excited when I get the French translation done.