Category Archives: Wordpress Plugins

Tried and tested wordpress plugins that have proven themselves to be effective and in certain cases, essential for wordpress deployment, development and maintenance.

Manage Facebook tabs and iframes with a wordpress plugin

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Some of you may be aware that Facebook have been threatening/promising (depending on your point of view) to change their current setup , again, by removing the FBML (Face Book Markup Language) and instead reverting to the use of iframes.  this is for a few reasons that we dont really care about as what matters to use is:

  • Will it make life harder or easier
  • How much harder or easier
  • Can I do it myself without paying vast sums of money?

The answer is…maybe. But if it is difficult this rather cool wordpress plugin will help. Called the FaceBook Tab Manager it allows you to configure a tab for Facebook in WordPress and then copy and paste it into Facebook.  This should allow WordPress lovers a much more familiar and convenient way of managing a Facebook page (we hope!)

Heres how it looks :

Manage Facebook tabs and iframes with a wordpress plugin

And heres the official description:

The Facebook Tab Manager allows you to create landing pages and other types of content to be displayed within Facebook, particularly within the tabs that appear on Facebook business pages and pages for other types of organizations. This provides a way of putting more interesting layouts and functionality into your Facebook pages, without the need to get too deep into fancy programming.

The Facebook Tab Manager was specifically designed to take advantage of a recent Facebook page redesign that added support for iframe tabs on Facebook pages. Optionally, you can now also specify content to be displayed on an associated canvas page.

Tab content can include any WordPress content, including output from Shortcodes and other plugin functions.

Nice one!

Upgrade WordPress plugins in one click

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I have various WordPress sites, I run a few and maintain and admin many others with friends, clients and colleagues alike and once the main bulk of the work is complete I think all the users of WordPress will agree that the single most annoying this is the updating and upgrading of the wordpress plug-ins. The current method requires you to click on each single plug-in and wait for it to upgrade and if you happen to hit it unlucky (like after the WordPress Core has been upgraded) then you might be there for some time and that’s just one site.

I did some searching for a plugin and did see one called One Click Plug-in Updater and decided against it as it required permissions to be changed (my perception was that it would be to difficult for non tekkies to sort out) so I asked around on Twitter and Rob McGuire came back to me and recommend I try that plugin out, so I did.  And it worked a treat!

Grab the One Click Plug-in Updater and try it yourself (hopefully you wont have to mess around with permissions on the server to make it work!).

But wait! Theres more!

This might be surprising to regular users of WordPress as it certinaly surprised me.  Seems it slipped though the cracks at one point in all the new upgrade notes.

Have you noticed that when you upgrade WordPress Core to a new version that there was an option to select all plugins and upgrade them simultaneously but you never knew why that option wasn’t available on the plugins page?  Well check this out.

Glenn Murray from Divine Write saw me asking on twitter about this one click upgrade and he referred my question to Paul Cunningham from Blogging Teacher who suggested I do this.

When you see a plugin or a series of plugins need to be upgraded try this

  • On the left sidebar go to Tools
  • Select Upgrade
  • Select all plugins
  • Click upgrade

Well dont I feel like a right idiot now?  It was there all along and I just never noticed it. Maybe you didnt notice it either but, hey! Now you know. A big thanks to all mentioned who helped me figure this small, but really rather precious nugget out.

Different Sidebar on each page or post in wordpress plugin

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I have wondered about being able to display different sidebars before, conveniently I suppose  is the keyword here, as I know full well that this can be achieved with custom templates and managing a theme code and design but didn’t know that there was a plugin for that. At least until today (hat tip to Andy Beard the Internet business System man for the find).

Turns out that their is an easier way to make posts or pages (or even Tags and Category pages) display a custom sidebar, or at least a custom set of widgets in the preconfigured sidebar set via a WordPress plugin called Shiba.

The usual method of installation is used with the plugin added to the WordPress plugins folder and activated via the admin panel and once this is done the admin of the widgets is quite simple.  Indeed, reading through the Shiba Sidebar Plugin site the plans for future development are quite interesting with widget exports and better widget management options that will no doubt come in very handy in the future.

Word of warning at the time of writing, the developer says that the current version is fine for WP 2.9.2 but if your playing on WP3.0 hes aware of bugs and issues and is working on a fix. Thanks ShibaShake and keep up the good work.

You can custom grab the WordPress custom sidebar plugin here.