Weaning yourself off LJ: Plugin-o-rama!
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Table of contents for Weaning yourself off LJ: a guide for fans
OK, you’re up and running with your Wordpress installation, and really you could leave it at that if you wanted to. But why limit yourself? One of the coolest things about Wordpress, as compared to just about any other blogging platform or CMS, is the wealth of plugins available for extending or customising your site.
I’m going to cover a handful that I think you’ll find particularly useful, but if you want more, just google “wordpress plugins” sometime and make sure you have plenty of time free.
Uploading plugins
Generally speaking, you have to upload plugins before you can use them, but if you got an account on Dreamhost and installed Wordpress there using their one-click install, you’ll have had some pre-installed.
I’m going to start out talking about the pre-installed ones, but at some point — straight away for the non-dreamhosters — we’re going to have to start uploading. So here’s how.
- Make sure you can use FTP to upload stuff to your web host. (Dreamhosters: in the panel, go to “Users”, “Manage Users”, then edit the user you created earlier when setting up your website. It probably has FTP turned on by default.)
- Get hold of an FTP client. I’m afraid I don’t know what’s cool these days1, but googling for “windows ftp client” or “mac ftp client” will probably get you something workable. (If you have a preference, feel free to comment!)
- Connect to your web host using your FTP client. In the Dreamhost panel, the “Manage Users” page tells you what machine your user’s account is on. Append “dreamhost.com”. In my case, the machine is called “ugh” so I would connect to “ugh.dreamhost.com”. Login with the username and password that you set up way back in first steps
- You should see your website directory on the remote machine.
- Meanwhile, you should have downloaded the plugin from the plugin author’s website. It probably comes as a zip file, so unzip it.
- Read the “readme” file that came with it — if any — or the installation instructions on the website you downloaded it from. It probably just tells you to upload into your plugins directory, but in some cases it will ask you to put files in other locations.
- Under your website directory, you’ll find your blog stuff. There should be a directory called “wp-content” and under that, one called “plugins”. For me, the directory is: aroomofonesown.org/fanworks/wp-content/plugins
- Upload the plugin files into that directory.
Activating plugins
Once your plugins are uploaded, you can go into your blog interface and click on “Plugins”. You should see a list of plugins including what you just uploaded. Click “Activate” to activate any given plugin.
Avoiding comment spam: Akismet
The first plugin I’m going to look at is Akismet, which is used to avoid comment spam. There are a number of spam-blockers out there, but Akismet seems to be best of breed. And trust me, you need a spam blocker, otherwise your blog can get completely overrun, and there are no abuse staff to clean up for you if that happens.
- If you installed on Dreamhost, this will be there by default; otherwise, download it from akismet.com and upload it as above.
- Activate Akismet as described above.
- Go to http://wordpress.com/api-keys/ and get a Wordpress API key.
- In your Wordpress admin interface, go to “Plugins” then “Akismet configuration” and enter your new Wordpress API key. It should say “This key is valid” in bright green if all is well.
- Now, under “Comments” in the admin menu, you’ll see a new menu item called “Akismet Spam”. This is where you can check the blocked spam and make sure it didn’t accidentally quarantine anything that should’ve got through. If you trust it, however, you can just leave it to run and never bother looking.
I’ve never yet known it to catch something incorrectly, though it can sometimes miss actual spam and let it through. Incidentally, to help avoid this, you can fiddle with the settings in “Options” -> “Discussion” to moderate comments from new users, or whatever other setup you prefer.
Tagging your posts
I’m a big fan of tagging. It makes it easier to find related stories, without having to have a Wordpress category for every single thing under the sun.
In my customisation post I recommended you set up categories for major types of fanwork (fiction, art, vids) and for each fandom you’re in. But when it comes to pairings, ratings, or fic genres (gen, AU, mpreg, etc) I personally think that tags are better suited.
What you want for this is Ultimate Tag Warrior. It doesn’t come pre-installed on Dreamhost, so you’ll have to upload it yourself.
Activate it via the “Plugins” list, then configure it under “Options” -> “Tags”.
The most important configuration point, if you want your tags to actually show on your site, is the bit called “Primary Content Tags”. Click on the thumbnail to see how I set mine up.
When you’re posting or editing an article, you’ll see a section below the main editing box called “Tags”. Add your tags here as a comma separated list — just like LJ — and they should now show up on your site.
Post to del.icio.us
Heaps of fans use del.icio.us to share bookmarks for their favourite fanfic. You can make it easier for them by installing Sociable. I use this plugin here on Infotropism; if you look at the bottom of any post, you’ll see the links to del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites.
The only configuration needed is to pick which bookmarking websites you want to show up as icons after each of your posts.
Posting WIPs and other serial articles
This article you’re reading is part of a series, and as you have no doubt noticed, there’s a table of contents at the top of each post, linking to all the other parts. I don’t do that by hand. I’ve got a plugin for it: In Series.
Once you’ve installed and activated it, you’ll see a new section on the right hand side of the “Write Post” page, called “In Series”. When you post the first part, just create a New Series. As you post subsequent chapters, simply choose that series from the dropdown and say that this chapter goes at the “End” of the series.
The only downside I can see is that there’s no real way to insert an article in the middle of a series. If you’re writing things out of order, this plugin might not work for you.
Welcomes and warnings
There’s a plugin called What Would Seth Godin Do? (aka WWSGD) that’s intended to present a friendly, welcoming message to new visitors to your site. Perhaps you saw it when you first visited Infotropism.
It occurred to me that you can use this for another purpose, too: as well as a welcome, it can serve as a warning/disclaimer regarding adult content on your fan archive. Here’s what mine looks like now:
Your most popular posts
Over on LJ, you judge your most popular posts by how many comments you get. On Wordpress, you can install the Popularity Contest plugin, and get all kinds of fascinating stats on which posts are most read, most commented, and more.
If you want to include links to your most popular posts in your sidebar, you can also install the JAW Popular Posts Widget and configure it under “Presentation” -> “Widgets”.
Themes: just like plugins (only not)
I told you how to upload plugins already. Well, it just happens that you can upload themes the same way, except that you put them in wp-content/themes instead of in wp-content/plugins. There are thousands of themes out there, available for free download, so if you don’t like the ones that came with Wordpress you can always find something you prefer and upload it.
After uploading, go to “Presentation” in the admin menu, and you should see the new theme in amongst the old ones. Just click on it to activate.
Customising your theme
If you’ve found a plugin that you mostly like, but wish that that blue bit over there was purple, or that the main column was a smidge wider, or you want to change the copyright notice in the footer, you can do it via the Theme Editor.
- Go to “Presentation” then “Theme Editor”.
- By default you’ll see the CSS style sheet, but down the right are a list of all the other included templates, including the header, footer, sidebar, and so on.
- You can make modifications to any of these files, and then click “Update File”.
- To change any images included as part of the plugin, simply upload new images over the top of the old ones in wp-content/plugins.
If you’re worried about buggering up an installed theme, take a backup via FTP before editing it.
Customising plugins
You can customise plugins in much the same way. Both plugins and themes use PHP to control their behaviour, but while you can customise themes quite extensively by fiddling with the CSS and uploading new images, you’ll almost certainly have to get into some real programming to edit plugins.
I’m not going to teach you PHP here — it’s way too big a topic — but if you want to do it, it’s said to be one of the easiest web programming languages for beginners to learn, so don’t let yourself be intimidated by it.
That’s all I’ve got on plugins for now, but I do want to reiterate that there are hundreds of the things out there, and that you can do just about anything with them. I’ll close with a handful of links to articles about recommended Wordpress plugins:
- Must-have plugins for wordpress
- Top 10 underrated wordpress plugins
- Plugins to improve “stickiness” (bringing people back to your site and keeping them there longer)
- Rich Lafferty’s favourite plugins (Rich is a friend of mine)
More than enough to keep you going til the next article, when I’m going to be talking about uploading posting artwork and videos.
Note 1: As a fairly hardcore nerd, I disdain FTP for being insecure. It’s probably OK for most purposes — millions of webpage owners use it with no frequent problems — but if you want to use something that encrypts your traffic and uses public key authentication, check out SFTP (secure FTP). You’ll need to make sure you have ssh access to use it. On Dreamhost, you do that via “Users” -> “Manage Users”.
11 Comments