167 Administration Tools These plugins provide CMS-like functionality to the WordPress Admin area. • WP-CMS Post Control http://digwp.com/u/55 Provides complete control over the Write-Page and Write-Post areas of the WordPress Admin. Enables you to hide unwanted items, disable the Flash uploader, kill post revisions, and even add a personal message. • WP-CMS http://digwp.com/u/56 Transforms the Admin area to focus more on page creation and less on post creation. Designed to simplify the whole process for your newbie clients. You can even disable the blog functionality entirely. • Flutter http://digwp.com/u/57 Enables you to edit posts without leaving the post page and also provides custom write panels that enable further publishing functionality. • Supple Forms http://digwp.com/u/58 Enables you to create custom write panels, as well as format and insert values into posts using shortcodes and snippets of HTML. • Custom Write Panel http://digwp.com/u/59 Enables you to create additional write panels with customized input fields. Add textboxes, checkboxes, radio-buttons, dropdown menus, and more. User Role Management • Members http://digwp.com/u/145 Comprehensive user-, role-, and content-management plugin that was created to make WordPress a more powerful CMS. Provides more control over your blog with an extensive collection of component-based features. • Role Scoper http://digwp.com/u/60 Provides you the ability to specify different permissions levels for different WordPress roles. Also provides options for implementing user groups. 168 • Disclose-Secret http://digwp.com/u/61 Enables you to hide specified posts from users unless they meet certain criteria. • Page Restrict http://digwp.com/u/62 Enables you to restrict specified pages to logged-in users. Navigation • WPML http://digwp.com/u/63 Provides complete support for CMS-style navigation for your site. Includes dropdown menus, breadcrumb trails, and sidebar navigation. The current iteration of this plugin is actually much more full featured and helps turn sites into multi-language sites, and all the navigational stuff is included. • Breadcrumb NavXT http://digwp.com/u/64 Enables you to customize navigational breadcrumb trails for your site. This plugin provides everything you will need to create the perfect breadcrumb menu. Ordering, Filtering, Limiting and Displaying Content • AStickyPostOrderER http://digwp.com/u/65 Enables you to customize post-display order for category views, archive views, and even sitewide. • Advanced Category Excluder http://digwp.com/u/66 Provides advanced content separation and category management for WordPress. Exclude any number of categories according to your needs. Also provides control over feeds and search results. • Custom Post Limits http://digwp.com/u/67 Provides control over the number of posts that appear on the home page, in various archive views, and in search results. • Custom Query String (CQS) http://digwp.com/u/495 The ultimate (and original) plugin for controlling the number of posts displayed on just about any type of page view possible, including archives, months, 169 categories, home page, search, and many more. For more information on CQS, check out the popout on page 112. eCommerce and Shopping Carts • WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart http://digwp.com/u/68 Displays an “Add to Cart” PayPal button to your posts and pages, shows the contents of the cart, and even allows users to update/edit/delete any items. • eShop http://digwp.com/u/69 Provides shopping-cart functionality that includes customizable product listings, multiple product options, advanced payment options, basic statistics, and more. • WP e-Commerce http://digwp.com/u/70 Provides an “elegant and easy to use fully featured shopping cart” that claims to be the “most complete and powerful Shopping Plugin you will find for Wordpress.” • YAK for WordPress http://digwp.com/u/71 Provides basic shopping-cart functionality that associates products with blog posts. • Quick Shop http://digwp.com/u/72 Adds a sidebar widget that displays cart contents to the user and enables easy item removal. Also enables you to easily add products to your posts and pages. • Shopp http://digwp.com/u/73 Full featured shopping cart transformation for WordPress. This is a paid premium plugin, starting at $55. Email Mailing List and Newsletter Plugins • WP-Campaign-Monitor http://digwp.com/u/74 Provides email newsletter and SMS functionality for WordPress. Enables users to send campaigns, track results, and manage subscribers. Even includes a plug-n- play sidebar widget. 170 • PHPList Form Integration http://digwp.com/u/75 Enables users to easily subscribe to your newsletter or RSS feed from any page on your blog. Designed to work with PHPList, an excellent open-source newsletter manager. • WordPress Double Opt-In Manager Widget http://digwp.com/u/76 Enables users to subscribe to your mailing list by way of a double opt-in method that includes the email form and a confirmation email. • MailChimp http://digwp.com/u/466 MailChimp is a third-party email newsletter sending service. They have an official plugin to help integrate with WordPress. Language Translation • WPML CMS http://digwp.com/u/77 Transforms your WordPress-powered site into a “fully featured multilingual content management system.” • Sunday Morning http://digwp.com/u/78 Not WordPress-specific, but a pretty interesting JavaScript method for translating content on-the-fly, utilizing Google Translator Comprehensive CMS Transformation • Pods http://digwp.com/u/79 Provides comprehensive CMS functionality for WordPress, enabling you to create, manage, and display custom content types. Enables automatic pagination, public-form filtering, access control, menu editing, and much more. Miscellaneous CMS Plugins • ProjectManager http://digwp.com/u/80 Enables you to manage any number of projects with recurrent datasets. Great for portrait systems, music and DVD collections, and just about anything else imaginable. 171 • WP-PostRatings http://digwp.com/u/81 Enables users to rate your post content. Highly customizable. One of the best. • TDO Mini Forms http://digwp.com/u/82 Provides highly customizable forms that enables non-registered users to submit their own posts and links to your site. 5.6.3 Using WordPress as a Forum Although forum functionality is not currently built into the WordPress core, implementing a forum on your site is easily accomplished with the help of these awesome plugins. • bbPress Forum http://digwp.com/u/119 bbPress is simple, fast, and elegant forum software from the same people who make WordPress. bbPress is focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed. • WP-Forum http://digwp.com/u/147 A simple discussion forum for WordPress that provides some basic forum functionality. The author of this plugin provides free help via support forum linked to from the plugin page. Script and Style Script & Style is a WordPress powered site that features links to Design and Development related articles. Links can be submitted by anybody via a form powered by TDO Mini Forms More Forum Plugins Here are two more useful forum plugins for WordPress: Tal.ki Embeddable Forums http://digwp.com/u/472 Zingiri Forum http://digwp.com/u/473 Both include great features and look like great forum solutions. 172 • Simple:Press Forum, aka Simple Forum http://digwp.com/u/148 A feature-rich forum plugin for WordPress that fully integrates into your WordPress-powered site. Fully customizable and includes plenty of skins and icons to get you started. 5.6.4 Integration with Third-Party Forum Applications While some of these packages offer almost the same in terms of functionality as the major stand-alone forum packages out there, many do not. If you want to combine WordPress with a stand-alone, third-party forum application, here are some good ways to go about doing it: • Integrating phpBB with WordPress http://digwp.com/u/150 The phpBB forum application is widely used and heavily documented. There are many plugins, extensions, and modifications available, and there is plenty of documentation to help with implementation, customization and maintenance. There are a couple of great ways to integrate phpBB with WordPress. The first is WP-United http://digwp.com/u/151, which is free and easy to set up and includes many options for complete customization. Another great tool is the WP-PHPBB WordPress plugin http://digwp.com/u/152, which provides simple integration of phpBB with WordPress. The only downside to this plugin is that phpBB must use the same database as WordPress. • Integrating Invision with WordPress http://digwp.com/u/153 The Invision IP.Board is a for-purchase community discussion forum that provides many great features including a default theme, report center, reputation system, friendly URLs, and much more. One of the best ways to integrate IP.Board with WordPress is the InvisionBridge Wordpress-IPB Bridge http://digwp.com/u/154, which combines login systems and includes some useful options in the free version and extra options in the paid version. 173 • Integrating vBulletin with WordPress http://digwp.com/u/155 vBulletin is a professional, affordable community forum solution used by many industry-leading companies. Its key features include fast, efficient database backend, template-driven interface, powerful search engine, language system, custom user-fields, and much more. Integrating vBulletin with WordPress is accomplished very easily with the vBulletin plugin and the instructions available at vbulletin.org http://digwp.com/ u/156. • Integrating SMF with WordPress http://digwp.com/u/157 The SMF (Simple Machines Forum) is a free, professional-grade forum software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes. SMF uses a powerful, custom-made template engine that puts you in full control of the message-board layout using unique server-side includes. Features include advanced permission and user-management, multiple- language support, built-in security features, multiple authentication options, and tons more. The easiest way to integrate SMF with WordPress is to use the WordPress SMF Bridge plugin http://digwp.com/u/158, which combines login systems and enables cross-posting of threads, display of SMF statistics, and other useful features. 5.6.5 Multiple Blogs with WordPress MU Prior to WordPress 3.0, you could use a separate set of software called WordPress MU http://digwp.com/u/159 to operate multiple blogs off the same single installation. Now, with WordPress 3.0, this functionality is built right into the core software and is called MultiSite. Features of WordPress MU include: • All of the great functionality and features of regular WordPress installations • Robust scaling to tens of millions of hits per day 174 • Virtually unlimited numbers of users and blogs • Advanced permissions systems enabling different permissions for different blogs • Shares 99% of the same codebase as WordPress To learn how to setup and use WordPress 3.0’s new MultiSite functionality, check out Chapter 12.2.5 to get started. But wait, there’s more… Truly, there is no end to the ways that WordPress can be extended. In this chapter, we have seen how to extend WordPress with plugins, theme files, custom functions, and the advanced functionality available in WordPress itself. Yet even with all of the possibilities explored thus far, there is still another powerful way to extend your site’s potential. WordPress’ powerful content-syndication system enables you to share your content with the farthest reaches of the Internet… 175 hMAG is a great example of how WordPress can be used to build a site that trancendes mere blogging. This is a fully blown multi-author news and membership based community site loaded with content. Not to mention very cleanly designed. http://h-mag.com 176 When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution isn’t beautiful, I know it is wrong. – RICHARD BUCKMINSTER FULLER . provide CMS-like functionality to the WordPress Admin area. • WP-CMS Post Control http://digwp.com/u/55 Provides complete control over the Write-Page and Write-Post areas of the WordPress Admin checkboxes, radio-buttons, dropdown menus, and more. User Role Management • Members http://digwp.com/u/145 Comprehensive user-, role-, and content-management plugin that was created to make WordPress. third-party email newsletter sending service. They have an official plugin to help integrate with WordPress. Language Translation • WPML CMS http://digwp.com/u/77 Transforms your WordPress- powered