• 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 :

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!

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.

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.

Once it is installed it works automatically in the background and basically its aim is to remove unnecessary data from images and reduce them to the smallest file size possible while still retaining the quality. Recommend by Yahoo itself in the Yahoo exceptional performance series this plugin is a must have.

It works by stripping out small, if not minute, pieces of code in the images that have no real need to be there or which are unused and also may suggest converting the images to gifs, if required, although caution should be taken here incase quality is unintentionally affected.

Author: Dialect

Download the Smushit Plugin for WordPress.

Author: Jaimie Sirovich

Download the WordPress SEO Pager plugin

This isn’t good for two reasons.

Firstly, it won’t help search engines find the pages on your site because they are set in series by this method, therefore to get to the earliest posts the search engine spiders will have to follow and scan, follow and scan follow and scan in this method.  Cumbersome and not very friendly. Secondly, visitors will work in the same way.  They have no desire o cycle though 12 pages one at a time to reach a desired post.

What WP Page Numbers does is add a line of numbers (surprise surprise!) in one of 5 styles you can choose from, to the bottom of the page allowing spiders to reach all the following pages from one place, effectively opening up the site in a friendly manner and allowing them to search and scan in parallel rather than in series.

This is the same for visitors.

They can simply click the page numbers and skip to that page immediately rather than being forced to cycle through all the irrelevant content they have no interest in.

Not all themes will need this plugin, but if you realise that you do, it will require a little editing in the theme code in order to work so you may need som help to sort this out. Definately worht it on a search engine level and a usability level.

Author: Jens Törnell

Download the WordPress Page Numbers Plugin.

The beauty of this plugin though is that it can see where your visitor has come from and presents them with a greeting related to the site they originated from. For example, if a visitor has come from Twitter, the icon displayed in the box will be the twitter icon and the message will read:

“Hello fellow Twitter user! Don’t forget to Twit this post if you like it, or follow me on Twitter if you find me interesting.”

The great thing about this is it adds a little magic to the greeting by recognising where the visitor came from but also, because the messages are fully customisable you can change the greeting to suit your site and make the whole thing a lot more personal, allowing the visitor to feel just that little bit more special.

Greet Box Placement in Posts

One bit of advice I would give here is regarding the placement of the Greet Box.  Many people will be inclined to place the greeting at the top of the post due to the format of the message it contains but I would suggest that you use the options to have the box appear at the end of the post allowing the visitor to read your information and make a decision rather than asking them before they have even begun reading.

I think it is a little obnoxious to ask people to subscribe to your RSS based on the quality of the article before they have had that chance to decide from themselves, but thats only my opinion.

Simple to install and configure, this plugin is a no brainer!

Author: Thaya Kareeson

Download WordPress Greet Box plugin.

Recommended by the likes of Matt Cutts right down to yours truly, it is the essential tool to safeguard your site when it comes to managing and maintaining site stability when your traffic is high and your server resources are being stretched to the limit.

If, during the life of your site you should gain a traffic surge, for example you write something very in depth or challenging or insightful and your visitors decide to use the Digg button a lot, hence driving more traffic your way quaikly and in bulk, the PHP scripts that access the MYSQL database that your site runs off, will be stretched to and possibly beyond, breaking point and there is nothing worse than a dead site for new visitor!  The reason for this is that each time someone visits your site the page is served or “called” from the database on the request of the visitor via PHP.

Database Caching Explained

With a traffic surge or even consistently high traffic, this puts a lot of pressure on the database as it continually serves the page to each new visitor.  Imagine it like a restaurant that’s got one waiter and suddenly it fills up with a queue outside, each person must be seated, the order taken, served fresh food, which is freshly cooked and then shown out. The waiter would in this example be your blog and the cook or chief would be the PHP scripts. That’s not really the best way to run things is it and the inevitable outcome is disaster!

Now imagine that the waiter and chief where prepared in advance with a set menu and 1000′s of plates all ready to be handed out immediately.  There is no expiry date on web pages so don’t worry about hygiene or food poisoning :P. People would be surging into the restaurant and the chief and waiter would be able to manage and serve all their requirements, not without strain or pressure but certainly with more efficiency, speed and less chance of a meltdown.

WordPress Super Cache is Essential

That’s exactly what this plugin does for your blog. In technical terms it creates a cached version of your page in HTML without accessing the PHP allow your site to say live, serve visitors and do it quickly and with minimal problems.

Just to clarify, even if your site hasn’t got massive traffic, speed loading time is still a major factor and using this plugin will make the pages appear faster regardless of server load or the amounts of visits you have so even on a low traffic site it is still worth using.

Author: Donncha O Caoimh

Download the WP Super Cache Plugin

One of the most prolific and professional wordpress plugin developers his work is excellent and the WP DBManager is only one of a selection of plugins hes created that is absolutely fantastic.

A compliment to the WordPress-Backup plugin this is much more extensive at it serves to backup your whole database and not just the images, plugins and themes covered by WordPress backup.

Installing this particular plugin is a breeze (as usual) but the configuration does require some file moving and server administration to permit access to files and folders, so if you are unsure about this, hire someone to sort the plug-in out.  It goes without saying that you should be hiring a trusted professional as you will be allowing them access to moderate your server files, so expensive should not be a factor if you want this done correctly, its worth it.

The plugin itself covers allows you to optimize, repair, backup and restore the database, as well as delete the backup database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Most importantly for you, once it is configured it will run an automatic schedule to backup the database every 24 hours, ensuring that, in the event of a disaster, you will not have lost a massive amount of your time, effort and work.

Author: Lester Chan

Download the WP DBManager Plugin.

WordPress Backup makes this possible. Installing it is simple and it includes an option to have the backup files emailed directly to you for saving on your local computer but this may prove impossible as the file size grows.

Do not get caught out, back up your files!

Author: Blog Traffic Exchange

WordPress backup Plugin information:
Download the WordPress Backup Database plugin.