WordPress Plugins – To Install or Not to Install

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No Shakespeare intended

When many new users to WordPress understand the benefits of plugins it’s not uncommon for them to go on somewhat of a shopping spree, which is not entirely true considering most of what they usually aim for is the free plugins.

Then their site has tons of new and cool features, though as time continues some bad stuff starts to happen to their site, either as a new WordPress update is released or sometimes at what seems to be a seemingly random time.

First off, plugins are pretty cool and I hardly ever build a site without a use of at least a few favorites, though they can pose some very real security risks as well as slow-downs due to multiple jQuery calls or just a high amount of different ones.

In the end, I really liked a chart Six Revisions made in a recent post and wanted to share it. Go check out their full post for more extensive details on this topic too!

WordPress Plugins install questionnaire chart

Personal Example

I recently had an issue with one of my larger WordPress sites and my host kept suspending my accounts about once every week due to excessive bandwidth drained by this site. In the end, disabling some of my not-as-necessary plugins ended up solving the whole issue.

PayPal iPhone App – Multiple Notification Problem

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paypal-app-logoWhen I first downloaded the PayPal app on my iPhone I enjoyed it very much. I set it to alert me when certain online purchases went through to my account and even set up a unique ‘cha-ching’ sound effect on my iPad for fun.

Unfortunately the golden days for this app seem to have ended. Strangely, after a certain update I failed to make note of, I started receiving double updates. These were quite annoying, though I could at least recognize them fairly easily as they happened instantly at the same time. I did have to turn off my sound effects though because it was quite annoying to hear the same sound effect go off twice, sometimes spaced out a little to add some premature happiness.

Well Paypal has made a series of updates and with every one I get excited to see a possible fix. I’m not sure if they are simply oblivious to the problem or just don’t care… or heck maybe they hired some 3rd party company to save money and that team is totally botching things up.

Whatever the case may be, it has only gotten worse. Now notifications don’t even come sometimes, though most of the time they do, but are still double notifications and strangely spaced out. By strangely I mean they can occur almost simultaneously, a minute after one another, or at time well over half a day after the other… I mean up to 16 hours (my current record).

If getting notifications with the iPhone app is important to you in deciding to download this then I’d say go ahead and still do it, but beware… and don’t give in to premature excitement, you will only be let down :( .

WordPress Statistics

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WordPress has been growing in popularity from the very beginning, though far more-so in the last several years. Over 54 million sites use WordPress globally now, and though not a perfect CMS for any task, the CMS is far more capable then many competitors out there with a far larger developer community than most to boot. It’s also significant to note that though it did start out as a blogging platform it has certainly evolved far past that now.

It’s visually stunning to see a live feed of current WordPress activity worldwide. Click the screenshot below to see the live feed and more stats, including international use, and company use.

Live Global Map of WP Users

The Market of Responsive Themes

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Anyone in web design knows that not only are responsive web designs a very cool new feature, but they are in VERY high demand. A recent blog article by the popular online & software training site, lynda.com, illustrated this with some very nice charts in a recent blog.

Responsive Web Design

Some cool responsive RapidWeaver themes:

Cabernet 2 by 1LDCabernet 2 RapidWeaver Theme by 1LD

Carbon by NCD Carbon by NCD

Internet Explorer 6 Simulator

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It’s nothing new for web designers and developers to claim a unique hatred from internet explorer, with an even hotter burner rage for IE6 and earlier. Thank goodness IE6 has been discontinued and has a greatly decreased amount of users.

Regardless, whenever IE is made fun of I can simply not resist to post something about it.

The latest joke is an IE6 simulator. That’s right, no matter what browser you are running, thanks to the power of javascript you can simulate the identical experience all IE6 users are so very familiar with.

Begin the simulation!

Adding Class to First Child Only with jQuery

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This blog is inspired by my decreasing, yet existing, frustration in styling drop-down menus using unordered lists. Don’t get me wrong, they are my HTML call of choice when it comes to building a drop-down menu, but still they find a way to confuse me from time to time… and suck up my time.

If you’re styling them in flat HTML files this isn’t as difficult as you can add classes to any submenus you want, but when using most Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, RapidWeaver, etc… well it’s a different game. RapidWeaver for example allows you to add a class to the <ul> tag, but will add that class to every child <ul> inside as well, which can be a major problem for many jQuery drop-down menus.

For SEO purposes one of my favorite drop-down menus is SuperFish, though it doesn’t always make me very happy when I’m trying to style it. SuperFish does not like inheriting it’s required class tag in every single <ul>, but rather just the first one.

To fix this problem I went back and undeclared the class in my plist and added it in jQuery instead. Keep in mind that this should be added in the footer of your HTML document and not the header, or it will declare ahead of time and pretty much do nothing.

$('#nav').find('ul').first().addClass('sf-menu');

Note that the #nav is a div tag that I made containing the drop-down menu, and sf-menu is the default class assigned by SuperFish… replace as necessary.

The Countdown Is Almost Over for IE6

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Internet ExplorerThe worldwide usage of IE6 was almost 12% on July 25, 2011. Now, almost a year later, that number has split in half down to a miraculous 6.3%.

The USA has dropped from 2% of users to 0.6%, but China still hangs on only dropping from 33.8% to 22.4% – still a significant improvement. All other nations range on average between 1 – 3% in most cases.

The question for most designers these days is no longer “Should I support IE6,” but rather “When does the IE7 Countdown begin?” No word on it yet, but likely no time soon. Despite the fact, it’s far more simpler to compensate for most of IE7′s flaws that IE6… or even worse IE5.

If your curiosity remains or if you find slight joy in the death of this abomination of a browser then stay up to date with the IE6Countdown.

My Favoriate Permalink Structure in WordPress

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In WordPress permalink structures control how the URL strings will be formed for the blog section of your site. By default the string appears more as code and not as an intelligible sentence. I strongly prefer it to appear as a readable sentence so users can understand it more easily and because search engines strongly consider them for search queries.

Begin numerically

WordPress can be a little temperamental with how it stores and retrieves your blogs, which are organized in a mySQL database. If the first URL section is not numerical your site can experience major downloads, though it isn’t very likely until you have a large amount of posts.

The permalink structure I prefer most as it begins numerically by also containing valuable data is as follows:

/%year%/%category%/%postname%/

This can be broken down into its three sections separate by the slashes.

  1. year
  2. category
  3. postname

The year is just that and for some blogs that have very frequently submissions you can also add %monthnum% before or after the year, providing even more data to users and search engines. %monthnum% will display the number of the month that article or blog is published.

Category is self-explanatory. Postname is the name or title given to the article. Note that you can manually change the Postname in any blog, which is located directly below the title and has an edit button to its right.

%post_id% vs %year%

Some prefer to use %post_id% instead of %year%, which displays the number assigned to the post. However, I prefer %year% in most cases as it has some actual meaning and is not just randomly assigned.

Penalty on long URL strings

Note that Google does begin decreasing the value of words in strings longer than 3 words and likely penalizes words further down the string. This doesn’t hurt the value of the string, but rather just the words further down the string. Still this is very important to consider.

Sub-categories

Another way WordPress works, and I’ve never entirely understood why, is that if you check only the sub-category then your URL string will display both the parent and the child category; However, if you check both the parent and the child category then only the parent will display. I don’t know why this is and if anyone else does I’d love to hear it.

For a complete list of Permalink options in WordPress check out the Codex.