A whole lot of WordPress love, and some plugins too

I love WordPress. I really do. I love WordPress 3.0 especially. I love the greater control I have over menus straight off the shelf. It means a lot less dropping into code to manage navigation, and it means I can pass more control over to my clients. My clients don’t really care about WordPress all that much, but they do love not having to call me up to make pretty rudimentary changes. I love happy clients, and that’s another reason to love WordPress right there.

I love  WordPress’ simple, functional, well thought-out and elegantly styled interface. I love it’s simple structure of pages and posts. I love its infinite extensibility and massive plug-in repository. I love it’s recently added features like featured images just as much as I love it’s old ones like being able to organise a collection of Links. I love that it’s nearly ideal for SEO right off the shelf, and I love that it’s got powerful built in commenting features and user registration. I love the dedicated team of geniuses (is that the right plural?) that constantly deliver above-expectation improvements in every iteration. And I love the dedicated community of geniuses that put together impressive free and premium themes in every layout configuration that you could possibly consider. I also really love the other dedicated community of geniuses that build powerful extensions like MU and BuddyPress.

I love using WordPress as a core or a component of more complicated projects like simple e-commerce sites, digital download sites, and online magazines. I love that it’s too advanced to be a straight up blogging tool, but neatly understated and lightweight enough to be dismissed as a full blown CMS.

But more than anything I love that I took the time to learn how to use it way back, and that the big investment in understanding how to get the most out of it is, for the most part, over and done with. Ultimately I’m glad that I didn’t go down another route like deploying Joomla or Drupal for clients regularly, both of which are respectively good solutions for different styles of project but at the same time frankly cumbersome, poorly designed and shameful in comparison to WP’s finesse.

I’m about to embark upon a project involving a deployment of Umbraco as a CMS on an asp.net platform. It’s not ideal from a personal point of view but I’m not involved in the development or site integration and using it seems pretty standard so I’m sure it wont be hard to learn. It seems that running a big Microsoft enterprise stack might well be a really solid solution, but it sure does limit your access to open source software. Write off PHP/MySQL integration sitting alongside a transactional site for security, and that limits you to very few low-cost solutions. Still, I’m looking forward to learning some more about Umbraco.

You know what? I’m pretty glad that I don’t have a stack of sites built using legacy platforms that require a lot of project history knowledge before jumping in to update them. Or having a stack of custom code built on a legacy platform that is just too massive to be brought up to date.

No, instead I have a pretty little WP auto-updater that makes sure my clients are well serviced at the core level, making their projects easy to work on when they need additional work completed or a template design freshened up.

I still sometimes work on sites built with static CSS/XHTML pages and some includes / dynamic content brought in with some simple PHP+MySQL, and it feels like I’m back in 1998. It’s like I should be making lozenge style buttons for navigation using Paintshop Pro while I’m at it.

Working with WP now feels like the default – it IS a website for me. When someone asks for a fairly standard site I immediately build it’s deployment into the project cost unless the client has a specific requirement that rules it out, and I discount that deployment pretty heavily because I’m now very accustomed to working with it.

Are you feeling the WordPress love? If so I’d like to hear about some of the projects that you’ve been working on using it, especially anything out of the ordinary. I also want to hear what you’d like Automattic to include in their next major release. I’d like better off the shelf mobile content delivery from WP, but I’m also interested in hearing what you think the future of the platform will be over the coming years.

Not feeling the vibe? Let’s hear why! Rip it to shreds if you like. Let’s get some facts on the table.

Plugin love

For those of you who work with the tool day to day, and for those just starting out, I thought I’d share a list of 6 plug-ins that I use regularly to extend a default WordPress install to bring a whole set of common features into action:

• StatPress – Almost always my first install, this is a simple visitor stats monitor. I use Google Analytics for the real work, but StatPress provides real-time reporting so it’s useful to watch the direct effect of your social media campaigns, etc, as you run them.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – Visitor stat work horse. But now without having to add code to your header/footer, etc. Just pop your API key in and link it to your account.
• Contact Form 7 – Create multiple, easily customised + css styled forms to allow users to collect user submitted data. Incorperates Captcha and Akismet integration too for a solid layer of spam protection.
• Widget Logic – Use WordPress’ inbuilt Conditional Tags to set rules to determine when sidebar widgets are displayed. I’d like WordPress to include this off the shelf really, but until then this is a good solution.
• WP-Polls – A super-simple polling widget that lets you setup custom questions with multiple answers and run several polls simultaneously. Even pick which poll is displayed randomly.
• PHP-Code Widget – Similar to use as the Text widget, this plugin allows PHP code to execute from within sidebar widgets giving you some powerful functionality.

I should probably send Matt Mullenweg a box of chocolates or something because I have a lot to thank this guy for. I’d go so far as to say he’s really changed the face of the net thanks to WordPress’ impressive success. As a tool for users to deploy simple sites and blogs in a hasstle-free way, and that’s not even mentioning the hosted service, it really excels, and is kind of a good stepping stone marking the maturity of the web away from old school crap like Geocities and, (dare I even mention it) Angelfire. WP is obviously less prolific when compared to social networking Facebook and Twitter but it is definitely up there in importance with those guys. It totally shames stuff like Blogger. When you get high profile guys from Google like Matt Cutts actually deploying WordPress for his blog rather than using a proprietary Google service then that’s really saying something.

All the best of luck with your next WordPress project! Enjoy!

Drop a comment if you’d like to recommend a plugin and include a link to your blog, I’d love to check some new ones out.

Featured photo courtesy of Lovelihood