February 13th, 2011 by Mike

If you have, manage or support multiple WP sites then you should look at www.managewp.com. It is a free service that provides you a clean management interface to all your sites on one page. You can view version info and daily stats. It displays available plugin updates as well as for WP itself. You can push the updates directly from the interface – totally sweet. You can view/edit/create pages/posts. You can manage users, backup and clone sites. The service requires a plugin (worker) be installed on each site you wish to manage and again, any updates can be pushed once activated. The only thing I found it didn’t do, was if you wanted to access the site, it open a new tab to the Login page for the site, but, didn’t populate the UN/PW for you. This info was necessary to bind the interface to the site so it would save time if it simply populated the un/pw and landed you at the dashboard. This would eliminate the need to remember all the logins for each site. Maybe it will happen on an upcoming update.

February 13th, 2011 by Mike

If being able to post on the fly, or when you have down time away from the computer, the WP plugin is great. In fact I am using for this post while I sit on the mall bench as I candy shop and the wife is shopping. Setup is a breeze, allowing XML-RPC (settings-write) inside WP site and entering blog info on the app. The app provides the basics for mobility. No plugin functionality, or update capabilities, but having the ability to view and edit post/pages and moderate make it a great tool.

February 5th, 2011 by Mike

Once again, I have stumbled upon a great plugin. I was updating a clients site, and just happened to look at the “New Plugins” window on the Dashboard. I noticed one of them had to do with FAQ’s. Now, this client had no need for the FAQ, but, it wasn’t to long ago that I converted a Cold Fusion Webiste to WP. Now, the old site had an FAQ page which employed JS. Well, I simply ported the js code to WP and made it work. The only problem was that editing the Q and A’s required editing the external JS pages. Which rendered the modification of the Q&A’s on me. Not a real big deal as they didn’t require much modification. Never once in the conversion did I think about seeing if there was a plugin. Who knows, may back then there may not have been. But there is now. And that is the good news.
So, I installed and activated the “new” plugin. But, found it lacking in all aspects. But, that only got me thinking if there is one, maybe there are more. So, I did the customary search and found a few. Low and behold I came upon one that not only provided a means of easily adding Q&A’s, but did so using posts. This allows your Q&A Content to be search-able, tag-able and everything else that comes with posts. It even provides the ability to hide/show the answers. The only tweaking was to add a few CSS styles to make it work.
So, if you need an FAQ page, search for Q & A by Dalton Rooney.