Revolution Slider: A Premium Drag and Drop Slider for WordPress

by Craig Grella August 30^th, 2012 38 Responses

Revolution Slider is a new premium slider available in both jquery (for your standard html sites), and as a plugin for your WordPress powered website.

It offers an impressive feature set including:

Unlimited Slides
Unlimited Caption Layers
CSS Animation with a fallBack to jQuery
Vimeo & YouTube video
Drag and Drop layering

Here are a few examples of what Revolution Slider can do on your website:

Slide Editing
Revolution slider taps into your media library for photos, videos, or links placement inside sliders.

Plugins

10 Essential WordPress Plugins for a Political Website

by Craig Grella August 28^th, 2012 2 Responses

More politicians than ever are turning to WordPress for websites they hope will help them grow a support base, and, hopefully, win an election. From local city council positions to the biggest congressional races, the extensibility of WordPress is making it all possible.
Essential Elements of a Political Website
You’ll notice several elements which pop up on every successful political website. These are the things which the public has come to expect a candidate to provide – the snippets of information we all look for when making decisions on who to vote for.

Tutorials

How to Change the User Notification Email Address for WordPress

by Craig Grella August 23^rd, 2012 6 Responses

When a user registers with your single site installation or creates a new site inside your WordPress multi-site installation, he or she is automatically sent a new account email notice from the WordPress system containing that person’s login information, temporary password, and a link to login at your site. It’s a great internal WordPress feature that allows you to manage your user and site registrations almost hands-free.

But…when each user receives that email notification it appears to be sent by a stock system email address through your domain, and, even worse – the name used on that email is just “WordPress.”

Miscellaneous

4 Apps for Mobile WordPress Publishing

by Craig Grella August 20^th, 2012 1 Response

Mobile browsing is becoming increasingly more important to internet users and businesses, and for those who want to reach more viewers, you not only need to make your sites responsive, but also have the ability to update and post on the fly.

The following five applications help you do just that – update your WordPress sites from mobile devices, specifically IOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) and Android (tablets and cell phones).

Mobile WordPress

Plugins

Verify Your WordPress Users with a Text Message

by Craig Grella August 17^th, 2012 2 Responses

SMS Verification plugin from wedevs is a new plugin which adds member and user verification through SMS text messaging. It’s a great plugin to add an extra level of security and user verification, which works well with blogs setup as member sites, and is particularly useful for forum runners who need another level of spam deterrent.

The plugin works by hiding content behind a shortcode that is activated when the plugin is installed and configured.

Multisite Showcase, Plugins

Top 30 Google Plugins for WordPress

by Craig Grella August 16^th, 2012 12 Responses

Google offers so much more than just search and email with services like sharing calendars, user management, webmaster tools, analytics, amazing file sharing with collaboration…the list goes on and on.

Google also prides itself on making much of its code open source (except for the search algorithm, of course), and allowing access to its massive API, which lets developers create applications to bring all that googlie goodness to other platforms.

Miscellaneous

Perfect Post Box Formatting With Markdown Editors

by Craig Grella August 15^th, 2012 2 Responses

The visual post editor is a no-nonsense WYSIWYG editor which helps you easily add text to create posts and pages in WordPress. But its ease of use also makes it easy to make mistakes, which can wreak havoc on your post formatting, and in some cases even break your blog.
How the Visual Post Editor Works
The WordPress visual post editor is designed to look and work like a familiar word processor. It takes the text and format items you type and turns that into HTML, which your browser (and every other browser) uses to display your content for the web.

WordPress Formatting with Markdown Editors

Opinion

Top 3 Myths When Choosing the Perfect Domain Name

by Craig Grella August 14^th, 2012 3 Responses

There are thousands of articles on the web listing steps you should follow in choosing a domain name for your blog or business website. Many of those articles focus on search engine optimization and industry niche names, but recent changes in search algorithms have rendered those procedures obsolete.

Your website is still the first (and sometimes only) impression you will make on viewers and potential customers, and choosing a domain name is the one of the most important decisions you’ll make in determining success.

Opinion, Plugins

5 Reasons You Should Lightbox Your Post Images

by Craig Grella August 13^th, 2012 Leave a comment

The saying “a picture tells a thousand words” was never so true as it is in blogging. Using images in your posts takes your blogging to another level. Images can be used functionally – to break-up long blocks of text, and they can also be used to improve your blog’s aesthetic – high res images complement your text with dramatic flair.

But just adding an image through the post editor is not going to give your blog any razzle dazzle. For that, you’re going to need a lightbox; and here are five reasons why.
1. WordPress Stock Image Formatting is Weak

Plugins

7 Plugins to Boost Your Blogging Productivity

by Craig Grella August 9^th, 2012 7 Responses

We have websites because we want to share content with the world; be it a blog, online magazine, e-store, nonprofit site, or community forum. WordPress gives us the ability to publish that content efficiently, and to reach the masses with relative ease.

But sometimes we get caught up in the back-end things that take time away from publishing content or delivering our services; like backing up WordPress, making sure the cache runs smoothly, including post attachments that actually link up to the right files, and figuring out that darn image uploader!