Notes from November’s OKC WordPress User’s Group Meeting

By Wesley Fryer On November 30, 2009 · · Add Comment

These are my notes from our November meeting of the Oklahoma City WordPress User’s Group. MY COMMENTS AND THOUGHTS ARE IN ALL CAPS

Several of the websites mentioned by attendees tonight:
– http://jcriley.com/
– http://jfsays.com/
– http://menonpurpose.com/
– http://becoming.followersof.com/

First preso tonight by Bert Boan
– my theme is a free one by ThemeShift

iPhone plugin first: WP Touch
– strips your theme out and makes a basic, text-page for mobile phones
– one of the best things about it: there is a toggle switch at the bottom of your browser so you can turn it off and see the regular site too
– for WP pages, has dropdown menu at the bottom to select
– doesn’t require a theme to be installed too (LIKE THE ONE I USE NOW, WORDPRESS MOBILE EDITION)

The website http://iphonetester.com/ will theoretically show you the iPhone/mobile version of a website dynamically…

Maintenance Mode adds a splash page to your blog when your blog is down for maintenance
– people with admin rights can see the actual site, others see the splash page
– simple settings to customize splash page
– very handy when you are developing a site but don’t want the world to see the “live” version

Bert also uses the Featured Content Gallery plugin for WordPress

My question was if the iPhone plugin Bert uses conflicts with a cache

David North uses WP Super Cache and it doesn’t conflict with WP Touch

Now hearing from Tim Priebe

T&S Web Design’s Favorite WP Plugins

Contact Form 7
– this just wants to take data from a form and send an email

Pros
– free
– can handle uploads
– customizable error messages
– can use HTML elements
– emails are fairly customizable
– handles multiple forms
– highly rated
– regularly updated
– lots of downloads

If you want to “go ghetto” and make an online form to solicit emails, this works great

Cons
– have to know basic HTML
– maximum of two emails sent
– can’t load a different page after submitting, uses AJAX
– takes a bit of work to setup emails

don’t change the field name for email, leave it as “your-email”
– rest of the fields looked fine

can’t use PHP in code

Aside: Tim’s favorite Muppets YouTube video: Bohemian Rhapsody

Now discussing: AWS Easy Page Link
– purpose is to make it easier to insert links to your pages

TinyMCE editor is the one WordPress uses
– has built-in feature that lets you include preset links (pre-populates links)

This pre-populates the editor with your page links
– does hard code the URL of the site
– this can be a problem for sites in demo locations

Now discussing: Shadowbox JS
– used with images, sound files
– is an AJAX popout for images
– automatically works for photos
– works iwth videos, music and YouTube Google Videos
– Works with individual pictures or galleries
– regularly updated
– highly rated
– plenty of downloads

Another aside, James Deaton (who attended this meeting virutally) shared this link comparing different VPS services

Other WordPress Plugins we use
– Role Manager
– WP-Polls
– Search Excerpt
– MyCaptcha
– ShareThis?

Now David North showing pagemash plugin
– gives you an alternate view of how to see pages

If I was sharing plugins tonight I’d share as my top 5:
– Simple Trackback Validation
– Comment Timeout
– PageRank
– ReCaptcha
– Subscribe to Comments

I’M HAVING TO LEAVE EARLY AGAIN TO PICK UP BOY SCOUTS! 🙂

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