Wordpress As A Social Media Platform

Last week in a meeting with other social media consultants, we talked about how far Wordpress has come in the last year. With a thriving ecosystem of themes and plugins, the open source blogging software has turned into a serious content management system (CMS) but is still relatively easy for anyone with reasonable technical abilities to administer.

We also noted that all the required social media services are supported making Wordpress a great platform for conversational marketing. So I thought I would revive my earlier series on Wordpress over the next few weeks and take a deep dive into exactly how a winery can build their website using this free software. Along the way I’ll build a demo site here giving you a place to kick the tires and decide if this will work for you.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a couple plugins that I’ve recently implemented on my wine blog that show the potential for Wordpress as a social media platform:

• Lifestream – Provides a running list of links on your sidebar as you post to various social networks or sharing services.
• Facebook Connector – Implements Facebook Connect to send blog comments to your Facebook profile and also provide an easy way for your Facebook friends to interact with your blog.

I’ll spend more time in future posts showing exactly how these plugins are configured.

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Getting Ready For Wordpress 2.7

The Weblogs Tools Collection blog posted a nice overview of the new features in Wordpress 2.7 yesterday so I wanted to get my hands dirty and get ready for the release scheduled for sometime next month. So I installed a test version here and loaded up my normal batch of plugins and a few themes. The plugins did pretty well with only a couple not working. Not so good with the themes but I’ll still be working with them over the next few weeks before 2.7 is released as the next stable version.

But the biggest change with 2.7 is the administrative user interface which gets a complete overhaul. I’ll be doing a screencast in the next week or two highlighting the differences from 2.6.x but you can get a sneak peak by logging in with the username and password of “demo” (no quotes). It’s a limited account but you can see some of what is in store for the future. As usual, it looks very interesting and another step forward for the Wordpress platform.

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Build A Website With Wordpress, Part 4

Last week we completed our discussion of plugins and we are nearly ready to start to create great content and launch our Wordpress website. But there is one major consideration left to deal with; look and feel.

Luckily, there are plenty of free themes available for download that can be further modified to meet your needs. The best place to start is at the Wordpress themes directory.

Another alternative is to start with blank theme templates and match the look and feel to an existing website. While this requires some knowledge of CSS, it is not too difficult once you understand how to change elements. I use a Mac application called CSSEdit to work with the existing website CSS file and TextEdit to edit the blank template file. You can check out my handiwork at the new Israeli Wine Direct blog.

The last option is to purchase a commercial theme. There are many sources for these but the only two I’ve worked with are Brian Gardner Media and Solostream. Both offer great looking themes with extended features for $50-80. Brian also has several very nice free themes like my current favorite “Revolution Blog.” Once you have your theme in place, you are ready to create your page and blog content.

Next week I’ll cover categories and tags which determines your site’s taxonomy.

Related Links

Part 1 of this series

Part 2 of this series

Part 3 of this series

Build A Website With Wordpress, Part 3

When I left off last week, we had just covered my “must-have” Wordpress plugins and I promised a list of favorites for adding more functionality to your website.

The following are presented in alphabetical order as I look at what is installed on this site but I’ll add a few niche plugins at the end for special circumstances.

Easy Gravatars – Ever wonder how you get those little avatars by your blog comments? They are Gravatars and this plug-in is the easiest way to add them. For more advanced users, the classic Gravatars plugin from Automatic might be more your speed. I’ve used them both and they work great.

Event Calendar – Have events that you want to post to your blog? This is the best of what is out there for integration although I’ve been embedding Google Calendars directly into some blogs for those who have more than just a couple events. Since the current version requires a hack to work properly in Wordpress 2.5, I’ve posted an archive here to save you the work of extracting from SVN.

Executable PHP widget – There are times when you will want to run PHP scripts on your sidebar. This adds a widget that will let you do so.

iWPhone – One of the first themes for iPhone formatting is still the best from my experience. All it does is turns your blog into an iPhone web application.

My Category Order – The first of three handy plugins for controlling the order of categories in your sidebar.

My Link Order – This one controls the order of your blogroll links. Handy if you don’t want alphabetical order.

My Page Order – This plugin controls the order of your pages. I use this all the time to reorder site navigation.

Page Links To – Ever want to link a menu item to someplace outside your Wordpress installation? This handy plugin lets you do this on any page.

PHP Speedy WP – A performance tweaking plugin that I only use when necessary. A bit geeky to setup but improves blog performance quite a bit.

Postalicious – This plugin allows me to post my del.icio.us links every so often very quickly here. I recommend you set this to post to drafts so you can make sure everything looks OK before posting live. Also posts links from Google Reader, ma.gnolia, Reddit and Yahoo! Pipes.

Redirection – After blogging for a number of years you will probably have several redirected links to deal with. Instead of wrangling with your .htaccess file, just use this plugin to manage redirects.

Search Regex – Adds search and replace across your Wordpress posts, pages, comments and meta-data. Very handy for making global changes quickly.

Subscribe To Comments – Gives your readers email notification of new comments since they posted theirs. One of the best ways to encourage reader engagement in your comments.

Viper’s Video Quicktags – Although the standard tools built into Wordpress are pretty good for handling media, I still use this plug-in for embedding YouTube and Google Video files. Just click on the icon in the post toolbar and add your link to embed.

WeatherIcon – Want to put your weather on your blog? This is the plugin to use to add this but make sure you click over to the version 3 beta.

Wordpress.com Stats – Adds basic stats to your Wordpress dashboard. Requires a Wordpress API key but you already got one when you activated Akismet.

WPhone – A lightweight interface built for smartphones like Apple’s iPhone. Also works with other mobile browsers to allow for blog access on the go.

Plugins for Special Occasions

BDP RSS Aggregator – There are times when you will want to aggregate RSS feeds on your sidebar. This plugin is the best for such when you want more than what the standard RSS widget offers.

Democracy – Handy for posting simple polls to your blog sidebar or in a post.

Global Translator – Is your blog of interest to those who don’t speak English? Then add language translation via this plugin.

Members Only – Want to protect parts of your site? This plugin will let you lock down pages, posts and even your RSS feed requiring a user login to view.

NextGEN Gallery – The easiest and best photo gallery for Wordpress integration I’ve found.

podPress – If you have a podcast, you’ll want to use this plugin. Handles Flash players in posts and all your iTunes tags in your feed.

Video commenting plugin | powered by Viddler – If you want to take your comments to the next level, this is the plugin for you. Allows for readers to leave video comments but I’d suggest you moderate all of them before they appear on your blog.

Next week I’ll cover Wordpress themes to control your site’s look and feel.

Related Links

Part 1 of this series

Part 2 of this series

Build A Website With Wordpress, Part 2

When I left off on my first post about building a website with Wordpress, I had just installed and slightly configured the software. The next consideration is what features you will need which are extended using plug-ins. Wordpress ships with two plug-ins, the must-have SPAM filtering solution Akismet and the frivolous Hello Dolly (which posts random lyrics from that song to your administrative interface).

There are thousands of others to choose from at the directory kept by the Wordpress developers but which are right for your site depends on what your needs are. Another thing to keep in mind is these plug-ins tend to effect your site’s loading times and overall performance. The more plug-ins activated, the slower your site gets and some plug-ins are not as efficient as others. Finally, some plug-ins cause issues with Wordpress and/or other activated plug-ins. So keeping the minimum number of plug-ins to meet your requirements is the name of the game.

In my experience building and managing dozens of Wordpress installations the following plug-ins are my “must-haves”:

Akismet – Essential SPAM protection from Automatic the developers of Wordpress. Get your API key for free at Wordpress.com (pass on getting the blog; all you need is an ID there).

All in One SEO Pack – The name really says it all. An plug-in which give you complete control of your search engine optimization settings.

cformsII – Every website or blog should have a contact page and this plug-in gives you complete control over fields, layout and much more.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – The first of two metrics-related plug-ins, this works with your free Feedburner account to make sure new subscribers are counted by the service.

Google XML Sitemaps – The easiest way I know of to generate and maintain Google Sitemaps. Set it and forget it but make sure you also link to your Google Website Tools.

Simple Tags – The built-in Wordpress tagging system is pretty basic so this plug-in adds the missing features to make tagging, well, simple.

Sociable – I’ve tried a bunch of other social media bookmarking plug-ins and this is my current favorite. Make sure you configure and delete the large text that this plug-in generates above the images of all the social sites. I also add and subtract from the default selection of social sites the plug-in provides.

Twitter Tools – Full integration with Twitter. It automatically posts a tweet with each blog post and can be used in the other direction, as well.

Ultimate Google Analytics – The second of the two metrics plug-ins, this simply adds your Google Analytics code to each blog page.

WordPress Database Backup – We all mean to backup our MySQL database regularly but often don’t get around to it. This plug-in lets Wordpress do this task for you on the frequency you choose (you can add more options with the WP-Crontrol plug-in if the default intervals are not exactly what you had in mind).

WP Super Cache – This plug-in significantly improves your site loading times and reduces the amount of calls to your MySQL database by creating a cache of popular pages.

In my next post in this series I’ll highlight my favorite task-oriented plug-ins to add additional functionality to your site.

Choosing Social Sites

During my seminars in Napa and Sonoma last April I covered a number of social sites but really didn’t make recommendations on which of these wineries should choose for their online activities. In setting up a couple of new clients recently I’ve looked at the long list of sites I’ve used and pared it down to what I think is the right number for wineries to start with:

Blog – I like the capabilities of Wordpress and install this on client servers as the cornerstone of their social media activities. You could certainly also use the Wordpress.com hosted offering or Tumblr and point these free services to your custom URL as an alternative or to get started.

Twitter – As I mentioned the other day, this micro-blogging-messaging service can be used to drive traffic to your blog, web store or both. Even with the current growing pains, I still recommend this service above Pownce, Jaiku and Plurk.

Flickr or Picasa – I started with Flickr and continue to recommend this service but Picasa is a worthy alternative. Every winery should have a number of photos to share from events or taken for their website and print materials. These are easily linked back to your blog via widgets for visitors to follow. Bloggers and online journalists will also use these to illustrate posts about your winery.

del.icio.us – There are a number of ways to use this social bookmarking site but I use it to share links of articles, blog posts and reviews found online. Like Flickr, this can be placed on your blog sidebar as a widget so visitors can discover what other people are writing about your wines but much of the benefit will be realized on the del.icio.us site itself.

Facebook – Over the past two years, this social network has become the standard for all age groups although it still skews to younger audiences. This makes it a bit tricky for wineries to exploit but still a key component in a winery social media plan. In the future, the majority of your customers will use this service to share recommendations with their friends. It’s best to get a page going there for early adopters in your customer base to link on their profile.

YouTube – This is still the best site to share video which can easily be embedded into your blog. Not all wineries produce video but if you do, share them here.

Friendfeed – This aggregation service allows you to roll-up all your social media activities into one site/RSS feed and allows for threaded discussions on each post. This might also be the next big thing if Twitter does not improve their service up-time.

That’s it… yes, there are plenty of other sites you could add to the mix but I think 80%+ of your social media results will be derived from these seven. If you are a winery who has had success with other services, post your experiences in the comments.

Build A Website With Wordpress, Part 1

Wordpress has been the standard-bearer in blogging software for some time but over the past year this open source content management system (CMS) has really come into it’s own as a viable tool to build full websites. This site, for example, is totally built using this free software and I am recommending it’s use increasingly for client work.

So I thought it was time for a series of posts on how to use Wordpress as the basis for your website. The point of view I will take is from a winery viewpoint but the techniques covered could equally apply to any website project.

First off, you will need to download and uncompress the latest release of Wordpress from their community website (it’s the .org and not the .com site). Verify that your web host meets the minimum requirements and set-up a MySQL database noting your username, password and internal hostname to add to your wp-config.php file. Next, sign on with your FTP tool of choice and upload all the Wordpress files to the location chosen on your server… for a full website, this would be the root. Next, open wp-config-sample.php and add your database information, then save as wp-config.php and upload to your Wordpress install.

So now comes the 5-minute install and configuration which is done via your web browser. Just hit your site URL and fill out the fields requested and then log into your new Wordpress installation. Now the work really starts as the configuration and design takes a bit of time.

I start by changing the permalinks (under the “settings” menu) from the ugly and non-SEO friendly default to something more sensible. I use “custom” and just “/%postname%/” if doing a website (no quotes); “Month and name” if doing just a blog.

My next step is to make the home page a static page and not a blog. First create a page titled “Home” and put whatever content you want on that page. Make sure you turn off the comments and pings before publishing. Next, create another page called “Blog”, leave it blank and publish. Then, go to “Settings > Reading” and set the front page to “Static” and choose the “Home” page you set up before. For “Posts page” choose “Blog.”

Now you have a simple website but you will want to add additional pages, style the site with a theme and activate a bunch of plug-ins to add features. My next post in this series will take on the plug-in question.

If you don’t want to do this all yourself, we offer website building services for a fraction of what a standard website costs. Contact us for more information and a free quote.