October 2011 Meetup Slides: Galleries, Slideshows & Photoblogging
October 16, 2011 in Meetup Slides by Sallie Goetsch
Jan 2012 Meetup Slides: Themes for Developers
Anca Mosoiu of Tech Liminal gave us an overview of how WordPress themes work, including the wp_posts
Dec 2011 Slides: How to Save Your Hacked WordPress Site
Adria Richards gave a great presentation on what to do if your site has already been hacked. I’
December 2011 Meetup Slides: Securing WordPress
Bill Davis led us through the basics of protecting WordPress sites from malware and other attacks.
October 2011 Meetup Handout: Themes & Plugins for Slideshows, Galleries, and Photoblogging
October 16, 2011 in Meetup Handouts by Sallie Goetsch
Gallery Plugins
jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries
Makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox script called ColorBox to display the fullsize images.
Extremely simple, but this plus the built-in (a.k.a. native) galleries in WordPress is enough for many purposes. See for example Around the World in 180 Days. (For a tutorial on using the native galleries in WordPress, see this post.)
Photonic
Photonic lets you use the WordPress
galleryshortcode and ramps it up with a lot of added functionality. It adds support for several new parameters to enhance your galleries. It supports Flickr photos, Photosets, Galleries and Collections, along with Picasa photos and albums.
Used to produce a slideshow with a native gallery on Sallie’s personal blog.
Used to embed Picasa photos on the Congregation Beth Israel website.
Requires a Flickr API Key (easy to get). Also, you need to be sure to get your Flickr ID from http://idgettr.com/ and use that, not your Flickr username. Using it to display Stefan’s Flickr photos of me on my personal blog.
Awesome Flickr Gallery
Warning! Does not play nicely with Multi-site. (Or conflicts with something I have on my multi-site install, even if that isn’t activated.)
Installed a test link to my anemic Flickr galleries on the VQS Test Site. Note that even if you use the gallery post format with Picasa and Flickr, they don’t display as WordPress galleries (with a thumbnail and list of photos).
NextGEN Gallery
This is probably the biggest and most popular gallery plugin for WordPress. It has about a billion add-ons. I never got along with it. Weirdly, the plugin’s home page still uses Kubrick.
Portfolio Slideshow
Easily add a clean and simple javascript slideshow to your site. The slideshow integrates well into any design, supports fluid-width themes, and offers lots of options for power users, too.
Recommended by Steve Caramia.
Mouseover Gallery
Shows thumbnails on the right and the main image on the left: when you mouse over a thumbnail, it displays that image in the main image area. Ron Richardson installed it for his client Monica Mroz.
Bookmarks:
Slideshow and Slider Plugins
Rotates background images for your whole site or just a single page or post, automatically adjusting them to fill the browser screen. The plugin author’s demo site will make you crazy, because there’s another slideshow (in the header) and also a rotating text box, which is way too much movement. Pretty cool plugin, though. Requires keeping your background slides in a special folder, so you need FTP.
WP-Cycle
Dead-simple photo rotator. You can link photos manually to a URL. Used here in the Office Thieves page.
Easing Slider
Another dead-simple slider. Not many options, but easy, good-looking, and your clients can use it.
Flex Slider
One of the few responsive sliders out there. There’s a WordPress Plugin, Flex Slider for WP Rotator. It requires WP Rotator, which itself requires a custom post type or some other tinkering with your functions.php file. Not the most user-friendly thing on the planet. More should come along soon.
Header Image Slider
Uses Nivo Slider to create a slider of your header images. Adds this option to Custom Headers under Appearance. Not recommended for use with WP Supersized, unless you want your site visitors to get dizzy.
Featured Content Gallery
The standard plugin for showcasing your posts visually. Shows featured images, captions, post titles, and links to posts.
SSP Director Tools
Formerly SlidePress, this is the WordPress plugin for SlideShow Pro Director, a cool tool for building slideshows. The plugin is free; SlideShowPro Director costs $59 for a single user and the SlideShowPro Player for Lightroom costs $35 for a single user.
Bookmarks:
Photoblogging Themes
Graph Paper Press
Free themes include Mansion, Modularity Light, Work-a-holic, Visualization.
Photocrati
Gorgeous premium theme for photographers. Includes a built-in shopping cart for selling your photos, and copy protection as well.
Autofocus 2.0
(Previously Autofocus+, a child theme of Thematic).
Free (lite) and pro ($25) versions. Based on an 800px, 8 column grid. Automatically arranges your images, which are also your posts.
StudioPress photography themes
Bookmarks
September 2011 Meetup Slides: Connecting WordPress to Social Networks
September 18, 2011 in Meetup Slides by Sallie Goetsch
Here are some screenshots of plugins for connecting WordPress to social networks, or embedding content from Facebook, Twitter, etc. in your WordPress site. For links to the plugins, see the Handout page.
September Meetup Handout: Connecting WordPress to Social Networks
September 18, 2011 in Meetup Handouts by Sallie Goetsch
A brief overview of social media plugins for WordPress.
- Twitter Widget Pro (Displays your latest tweets in a widget, with lots of options.)
- Tweet Old Posts (Posts links to your older blog posts to Twitter, with optional prefix or suffix. Can be used to post recent posts, too.)
- WP to Twitter (Occasionally problematic with the newest version of WP; used to post links to
- Blackbird Pie (Attractive HTML display of tweets you want to quote)
- Embed Facebook (Great for embedding Facebook galleries on your WordPress site.)
- Wordbooker (Posts from WP to Facebook, including featured images.)
- Simple Facebook Connect (Not really that simple: you have to create a Facebook application to get it to work. Used to allow people to sign in to your WP site with their Facebook login.)
Sharing Plugins
- Share and Follow (puts links to your social profiles in a widget or floating box; adds sharing links to end of posts)
- Digg Digg (nice display for Tweet, Like, etc buttons, vertically beside or horizontally above your posts; shows count of tweets, likes, shares, etc.)
- Social Media Widget (simple clean display of your social media profile links in a widget.)
- Social Plugin for WordPress (allows people to log in to comment using Twitter and FB; integrates with MailChimp)
- AddThis plugin from AddThis (collects your information, but gives you statistics)
- AddtoAny Share/Bookmark/Email (provides an expanding share button at end of posts)
- Sexy Bookmarks (animated icons for sharing sites)
Outside Services
- Twitterfeed (posts any RSS feed to Twitter)
- LinksAlpha (publishes RSS feeds to multiple social networks)
- Ping.fm (updates multiple social sites at once)
- Hellotxt (updates multiple social sites at once)
JetPack
A plugin bundle from Automattic that includes the Wickett Twitter Widget and ShareDaddy, as well as other WordPress.com tools. (Oh, and if you don’t want JetPack and it’s nagging you, uninstall it via FTP: just delete the directory.)
