One of the reasons why WordPress is so awesome is because it makes building powerful websites pretty easy. Pick a theme, add some content, hit Publish and there you have it. Lack of technical know-how is no longer a barrier, and the array of shiny, sexy themes that are available along with the inexpensivenss of it all can make it dangerously easy to under-think the process of building a website. But while WordPress and its eco-system have made many parts of the process simple and taken the grunt work out of making a site, the one thing that YOU still have to do, is the analytical thinking and planning behind your site.

For your site to be an effective business tool, it must reflect the core goals and missions of your company. Whereas many of us start the planning of a site by looking at the available WordPress themes and letting those designs sway our decisions, we really need to be starting from a more strategic point of view and making decisions about themes, plugins etc, based on the bigger picture.

So before you put pixel to screen, or start buying themes, consider the following.

1) What are the values and overall mission of your company?

For your website to ‘feel’ right at a fundamental level it must be a reflection of the driving force behind your business. What are the values that you want to convey? What is it about your business that keeps you motivated to run it every day? What is it about your business that your customers connect with?

2) What are the business goals of the company?

This is a key point that should influence everything from site development to marketing strategy . Get clear on what the specific goals of your company are. Sure, everyone wants to increase sales and profits but perhaps there are specific areas of your business that you are trying to grow, or areas you are moving away from. Your goals may change over time, so it’s good to review them periodically and make sure your site is still in alignment with your business goals.

3) Who is your desired clientele?

Do not try to be all things to everyone. Just because you CAN provide a certain service or make a certain product doesn’t mean you should prioritize it on your site if it’s not what you ultimately want to do. So focus on catering to the customers you really want to attract to ensure you are building a business that will serve you financially and emotionally.

4) If your site was an employee, what would its job description be?

In order for you to know whether your site is successful, it has to have a clear purpose with defined outcomes. How will you know if your site is working for you? What would the results be? More product sales? More leads? More email subscribers? etc Outlining clear goals and benchmarks will help craft the site and provide focus for design, content and tracking results.

5) What do you want visitors to do at your site – what are the actions that count?

Considering points 1 – 4 above should have brought you clarity on the purpose of your site, and therefore what steps you actually want your visitors to take upon arriving at your site. Your website should always be guiding your visitor toward what you want them to do next. Knowing what actions you would consider to be significant and tracking them, will help you understand if your site is effective or if it needs tweaking.

6) Your homepage is only one page, not the entire site.

Your website is more than just your homepage. Your homepage should provide guidance for those who land there, but it is not the be all and end all of your site. Not everyone will come to your site through your homepage – internal pages will act as landing pages for search engine visitors, so make sure that no matter what page people land on, you are providing the appropriate message and information for that visitor to take the next step.

Once you are clear on these points, the theme, graphics and text that you use will end up serving your purposes precisely. The more clear your sense of direction, the better result you will get out of your site.

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluekdesign/4890727263/

I teach people on a daily basis how to use WordPress, from the ground up. A few face-smackingly simple issues come up time and again.

1) Pasting from Word will make your posts look funky

Anytime you copy and paste directly into the WordPress editor, from Microsoft Word, another website, or any other outside source, you run the risk of it looking, well,  a bit funky ,when you publish it. This is because other applications, especially Word, have their own set of formatting that gets carried over when you copy/paste. Usually this ends up conflicting with the formatting and styling of your theme. You may not realize there is an issue until you publish the post and something looks off – the fonts don’t quite match, or the spacing is strange. 9 times out of 10 in these cases, it’s because you copied/pasted from Word. To avoid such issues, simply use the 2 clipboard buttons on the second line of the post editing toolbar with the T and the W on them.

Wait, you only have a single toolbar? Make sure to click the “Kitchen Sink” button – the last button on the right of the toolbar.

Ok, now in the middle of the brand new toolbar you will see the 2 clipboard buttons I am talking about:

The “Paste from Word” button (clipboard with a W on it) will attempt to strip away any junk and leave you with clean text – it will generally retain basic formatting you may have done, such as bold, italics etc. If you still have problems when using this, then try the Paste as Plain Text option (clipboard with a T on it). This will strip away all formatting from the source, so you will need to re-format your text using the WordPress editor.

2) “How do I make a line break dangit?”

When you are typing in the WordPress editor and you hit the Enter key, WordPress will create a Paragraph break (the equivalent of <p> in HTML), which means it will leave an empty line between the place where you hit Enter, and the new cursor position. Sometimes this is infuriating when you just want the cursor to go to the next line. This is a regular line break (<br> in HTML) rather than a paragraph break, and is easily accomplished by holding down Shift when you hit Enter.

3) “My homepage is a static page, so where do my blog posts go?!”

When you use a static page as your home/front page in WordPress, all you have to do is then create a new Page called Blog. Leave this blank – it basically just acts as a container in the WordPress system to indicate where your blog posts will be displayed. In the WordPress Reading settings (Settings > Reading) , choose this Blog page under the Posts page dropdown menu. Then add the Blog page into your menu bar. Magically, this will become your blog homepage and when you click on “Blog” WordPress will automatically display your blog posts.

One caveat to this, is if you are using a Premium theme which has a special homepage layout, which you configure in the theme’s options panel. In the WordPress Reading settings, it will still show that your homepage is showing blog posts, even though it may not be, depending on the theme. In this case, the theme probably provides a Blog page template, so you would again create a Page called Blog, and make sure to select the Blog template under Page attributes.

4) “I tried to install a theme I bought, but I’m getting an error message that the theme is broken”

The most common cause of this I have seen is that theme developers have hidden the actual theme folder within another folder in the zip file you purchased. When you purchase a premium theme, you download a .zip file. If the theme developer is being user-friendly, you would simply upload this same zip file into your WordPress dashboard. However, what frequently happens is that, if you open up the zip you downloaded, you will find another zip within that main folder. THIS is the .zip you need to upload. WordPress cannot detect it if it’s hidden in this way. In the first image below you see the initial .zip file I downloaded upon purchase. If I uploaded this as-is, I would get an error message.

In this second image, you see why. I unzipped this folder and you see that there are several other files in there, including another zip called ‘striking’ (the name of the theme) – this contains the actual theme files and is what you would need to upload.

5) “How do I turn on/off the comments for a certain page/post?”

In one of the recent versions of WordPress, they decided to clean up the writing interface. In reality, what happened is that they hid a bunch of stuff under the obscure label “Screen Options” at the top right of your screen. The ability to turn on or off comments for a particular page/post, stumped newbies and experts alike for a while – where did that control go? So if you are missing this feature, try clicking Screen Options and then check the box for Discussion. This will reveal the box to control comments. Note that the box called Comments, doesn’t provide access to control the ability to comment – it only shows what comments if any, exist for that post/page.

6) “There are things showing up in my footer/sidebar but I can’t find when to change them!”

If you seeing what appear to be widgets in your footer, sidebar or any other widget area – ie. Category lists, Recent posts etc, but when you go to Appearance > Widgets, those sidebar areas appear to be empty, you are most likely seeing default fallback widgets set by your theme. Some themes are set up so that if you have not added any widgets, it will automatically display a Category list or some other default content. All you have to do is add a widget to that section, and it will override the default, and you will only see the widget you have set.

Are there any other apparently simple but infuriating WordPress issues you have come across?

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/2192192956/

I had a client recently who needed to create private, password-protected sections on her WordPress site. She wanted each of her clients to have a private page with information related to what they were working on together. Easy! Password-protection is an in-built feature of WordPress, in case you didn’t know.

When creating a page, you simply click “Edit” next to Visibility in the Publish box on the right. Choose “Password protected” and set the password as you choose.

But what if you want to create a series of pages for the same client to access? This would mean you would have to create a password for each new page which seems a little cumbersome.

Fortunately there’s a handy plugin called Password Protect Children Pages which will automatically password-protect the Child pages, ie. sub pages, of any password-protected Parent page. Additionally, if the correct password is entered on the parent page or any of its children pages, all related pages will be viewable to the user, so the experience is smooth for your client.

So the next question is, how to provide an easy way for your client to navigate the private area you have created for them?

A simple solution I found is courtesy of another plugin called List Pages Shortcode. As the name suggests, by placing a shortcode in any page or post, it will display a list of your pages.

If you were to use the basic shortcode:
[list-pages]
You would display a list of ALL your pages. Of course you only want to display the pages for that particular client or section.

So instead use the shortcode:
[child-pages]

to output the subpages you have created. You can also modify the order the pages are displayed in. For example, the following will output the child pages with the newest first:
[child-pages sort_column="post_date&show_date=created"]

As an example I created a main/Parent page for Client A, with 2 subpages. On the Parent page for client A, I use the short code plugin:

And the result is a simple way for my client to navigate their private section on my site:

In addition to private client pages, what else might you use this for on your site?

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/holster/195031415/

Tweet Blender is tag-aware and has support for multiple authors, lists, hashtags, and keywords all blended together. The plugin can show tweets from just one user or a list of users (as all other Twitter plugins do); however, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twitter hashtag or keyword. But there is more! It can also show tweets for multiple authors AND multiple lists AND multiple keywords AND multiple hashtags all blended together into a single stream.

The output is pretty slick looking too….

After you install the plugin you’ll find a pretty comprehensive set of options under Settings> Tweet Blender, but the real action happens on your Widgets screen. You’ll find several new widgets available that have Tweet Blender functionalities, as described above. Another widget not mentioned above is one called “Tweet Blender For Tags”, which “Shows related tweets by searching Twitter using tags of your post as keywords.”

Find out more at: WordPress › Tweet Blender « WordPress Plugins.

What are your favorite Twitter plugins?

WordPress makes most things easy but, sometimes the in-built editor just won’t comply, especially if you’re trying to do something like align pictures next to each other in the same row, perhaps place 2 videos next to each other, or various other things that seem like they should be simple, but are maddening to attempt. You’ve probably also noticed that even if you try and get clever with the spacing, by adding extra line breaks or empty paragraphs, to get things laid out the way you want, WordPress will inevitably toss such cleverness aside and strip out your spaces.

Basically the WordPress editor by default is just not good with allowing you to do anything column or grid-based, unless you hand-code the HTML which defeats the purpose.

Fortunately there are a couple of simple ways to get around this problem that will give you much more flexibility with your page and post layouts AND make you look like a genius.

WP Post Columns

The first, and preferred option is to use a plugin which allows you to set up columns with the use of shortcodes. The first one I came across is Sam Burdge’s WP Post Columns plugin.  I was a little wary of it because it hasn’t been updated in a long time, but it actually works just fine and is pretty easy to use.

The format to create a 2 column layout is:
[column width="67%" padding="6%"] Column 1 content goes here. [/column] [column width="27%" padding="0"] Column 2 content goes here. [/column]

And you can use that format to create as many columns as you need. Here’s 3 columns:

[column width="30%" padding="5%"] Column 1 content goes here. [/column] [column width="30%" padding="5%"] Column 2 content goes here. [/column] [column width="30%" padding="0"] Column 3 content goes here. [/column]

As you can see, by playing with the column widths and padding you can create a custom layout to your liking.

In the screenshot below (click for full size image) I used the 3 column layout to create this magazine style look.

WP Easy Columns

A similar and in some ways more flexible plugin is WP Easy Columns 

The nice thing about this plugin is that it gives you a toolbar button with lots of preset layouts to insert with one click. It also gives you additional ways to style the output which is useful for designers.

In the screenshot below I used a 1/3 + 2/3 row to layout the caption to the left of the video.
The next 2 rows are 1/2 + 1/2 to show videos with the captions below.

A bonus of both plugins is that you can use shortcodes within shortcodes – another issue that can be problematic in WordPress. But in these examples, I used a shortcode to insert the videos and it worked perfectly.

Tiny MCE Advanced

An alternate method to these plugins would be to use the TinyMCE Advanced plugin which has an Insert Tables feature. This is what I used to use before discovering the above plugins. It’s a decent solution, if a little finnickety to deal with, and of course HTML tables are pretty much considered dinosaur code these days, but it’s still a possibility if for some reason the above plugins don’t work for your situation.

So now you can go be fancy with your post layouts – have fun!

The other day a friend asked me about styling the various parts of the Thesis comments display and when trusty Google didn’t come up with a fast answer, I was forced to delve into some CSS with the aid of Firebug to determine the solution.

If you use the Thesis theme, on your homepage you may display the number of comments for a post, like so:

So the question is, how to change the colors of each of those elements – the word ‘comments’, the curly brackets and the number of comments. You can simply copy/paste the relevant code snippet from below into your custom css file to achieve the desired result. I’m using the color #000000 in the code samples, but you can pick out your own colors here.

Change bracket and comment number color:

.custom .format_text .to_comments span {
color: #000000;
}

Change just the word ‘comments’:

.custom .format_text .to_comments a {
color: #000000;
}

Change just the color of the brackets:

.custom .format_text .to_comments span.bracket {
color: #000000;
}

Change only the color of the number of comments:

.custom .format_text .to_comments a span {
color: #000000;
}

As an extra bonus, here’s how you can change the background color of your own comment box, so that your responses as the author stand out from others:

/* this controls the background that holds your name and the date of the comment*/
.custom div#comments dt.bypostauthor, #comments dt.bypostauthor div.format_text{
background:#FFFFCC;
}

/* this controls the background that holds your comment text*/
.custom div#comments dd.bypostauthor, #comments dd.bypostauthor div.format_text {
background:#FFFFCC;
}

/* this controls the color of your comment text*/
.custom div#comments dd.bypostauthor, #comments dd.bypostauthor format_text {
color:#000000;
}

So there you go, now you can get fancy with it….

In recent days a significant WordPress security threat has emerged. The root of it is the ability for unsavory types to compromise a very common image resizing script called TimThumb which is used in many WordPress themes and plugins. Through a security flaw, hackers can find a way into your site and cause havoc. Or, in more specific terms according to Vaultpress:

“The vulnerability allows third parties to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code in the TimThumb cache directory. Once the PHP code has been uploaded and executed, your site can be compromised however the attacker likes.”

Are you at risk?

The list of themes and plugins that use this script is too long for any one source to have catalog-ed as yet. Securi has a partial list here. In my own researching I’ve found several major theme vendors to be vulnerable (WooThemes, Themify.me, Headway) although they have acted quickly to update their themes.  WebSite defender has a list of plugins and themes they know to be using timthumb.

If your theme uses multiple sizes of the same image in different parts of your site, such as thumbnails,based on one image you’ve uploaded into a post or as a featured image, it could be using the timthumb script to generate the other sizes.

If you’re using a plugin that generates different image sizes, for use in, for example a list of recent posts with a thumbnail image – this plugin could be using timthumb.

How to check if your theme uses TimThumb

1) The easy, but not foolproof way

In your WordPress admin, go to the Appearance menu and click on Editor. Look in the list on the right for a file called either timthumb.php or thumb.php – this is generally what most themes call this file. This will let you know if your current, active theme uses timthumb. However, if you have other themes installed, but are not active, you will have to select those from the drop-down menu and check them one-by-one.

It is entirely possible a theme creator is using the script but just named the file something else such as img.php, thumbnail.php etc. So to be sure, you can open any file you come across that you suspect may have something to do with image resizing, and at the top you may see something like this:
TimThumb script created by Ben Gillbanks, originally created by Tim McDaniels and Darren Hoyt

This lets you know that it’s the same timthumb script, regardless of the filename and so the fix still needs to be applied.

2) The super-novice way

Another way you can check is to right click on an image on your site (one that you think could be being automatically generated by a theme or plugin). Copy the image url into a text doc or your broswer and look at the whole thing. Do you see something like this in the url:

thumb.php?src=

or

timthumb.php?src=

click image below for full size:

If so, that means your theme is using the script to resize that image and you must take the security steps below.

3) The only way to know for sure

Additionally there are cases where a theme could include the script in a subfolder which would NOT show up in the WordPress theme editor. For example, in the Headway Theme, they named the file thumbnail.php and it’s about 2 subfolders deep so you only see it via FTP. Fortunately they issued an update to the theme in the past few days which addresses the issue.

So the only way to know for sure is to thoroughly review your theme files using the FTP File Manager in your hosting account, or an FTP program.

What should you do if your site is at risk?

1) Check if your theme provider has handled the issue.

If your theme has issued an update in the past few days it could well be to take care of this issue – check the details of the update and if it’s related then update your theme immediately. Visit the website of your theme vendor and check their blog and support forums for information on the topic. If in doubt, send them an email. WPMU has a note on some of the major theme shops and how they have handled the issue.

A note about Thesis – this popular theme does use a version of the TimThumb script but it does NOT include the ability to use images from external sites (which is where the security flaw is), so unless you’ve hacked this script yourself, Thesis users should be fine.

I noticed that themes from Themify.me are vulnerable and they have issued updates to their themes, but the strange thing is that they don’t seem to push the update to the user by way of a notification – you actually have to check your version of the theme with their website to see if you have the latest, and then go and download and re-install the newly updated theme – not very convenient.

2) Fix It Yourself

An updated and secure version of TimThumb has been released so you can fix the issue yourself by replacing the old version in your theme with the new code. You can download the newly updated version here:
http://code.google.com/p/timthumb/

If you are using the WordPress editor and have located the old version of timthumb there, you can simply copy the code from the new file above and replace everything in the old file.  You can also do this via FTP if you know how to use it.

For extra security make sure that the line of code allowing access to external images is set to false, not true. It should look like this:

define( 'ALLOW_EXTERNAL', false );

Secondly look for this code:

$allowedSites = array(
'flickr.com',
'picasa.com',
'img.youtube.com',
);

Replace it with this code:

$allowedSites = array();

3) Clean up your site
If you have old themes that you’re not using sitting on your server that may be using the script, you should either update them all or just delete them.

If you need help locating or fixing a vulnerability please let me know.

** header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mamchenkov/302301657/

This past weekend I had the pleasure of speaking at the first ever WordCamp in San Diego. It was an amazing experience for many reasons. I delivered a presentation entitled “Treat Your Blog Like A Business: Which Monetization Strategy Is Right For You?” (I’ll get around to posting up the slides soon….) and received some encouraging feedback on it throughout the day. Being a total intovert , any kind of public speaking is a bit nerve-wracking but I like to challenge myself. A couple of years ago I spoke at Orange County WordCamp and in comparison I felt much better prepared and more comfortable with it this time. Thanks to all that watched and spoke with me afterwards!

As I have experienced with other WordCamps, WordPress has the best community I think I’ve ever been a part of. I didn’t know anyone when I went to San Diego this weekend, but by the end of the day I had connected with several incredible people and felt right at home. This is another huge reason why WordPress is so powerful. I’m not sure that any other technologies or industries have this kind of community aspect. If you have any interest in WordPress I highly recommend attending WordCamps – you’ll meet knowledgeable and friendly people who all want to help you and spread the WordPress love! You’ll also learn tons from the talks and get an even larger picture of the scope of WordPress and the many diverse ways in which it can be used.

Here’s a few other tidbits from the day:

Matt Mullenweg
Having the co-founder of WordPress present was a huge coup for WCSD. Now I’m not one to be starstruck, so I thought “Oh that’s cool” when I heard about it, but not much more. However I was introduced to him during the day and heard him speak at the townhall session later on and was totally struck by what a sweet and genuine guy he seems to be. He has a very unassuming air about him, but he’s a real visionary. Experiencing this firsthand really made me feel even more proud to be part of the WordPress community.

WordPress For Photographers.
William Bay’s presentation was focused on WordPress for photographers. I learned that plugins aren’t always the answer to achieving cool photo galleries and other effects. William recommends finding existing JavaScript galleries and integrating them into your theme directly. An example would be the Galleria image gallery. You’d have to be comfortable with code to get something like this running, but I think many people found it reassuring to hear that it wasn’t their fault that they just hadn’t been able to find the perfect plugin for this! Definitely a common problem for these types of sites.

Sheri Bigelow discussed hidden gems of WordPress which revealed a couple of new little tricks. Did you know you can easily paginate a long blog post by inserting the <!– nextpage  –> tag into the HTML view. Really nice little trick. Also, if you change the permalink of an existing post, WordPress will automatically redirect the old one to the new one. SUPER USEFUL!

I didn’t get to watch Cody Landefeld’s presentation on “Designing Success for WordPress” but it seemed like it was well received, so check out the slides.

Matt Browne’s presentation on “Comments Are King” raised some interesting points. Your commenting system needs may change according to what stage of development your blog and audience are at. Can you dictate that the conversation happens on your blog? Or perhaps you should consider using a system that pulls in Twitter comments, such as the plugin Tweetbacks, if that’s where your audience is already talking about your blog posts. Facebook has a commenting plugin that allows people to comment on your blog if they are logged into Facebook, but the jury seems to be out on whether that encourages or deters commenting. Disqus and Intense Debate also offer plugins that provides an enhanced commenting system above and beyond the default WordPress comments functions.

There were many other presentations that I didn’t get to see, but here’s links to the slides I could round-up of some of the others:
WordPress as a CMS – Matt McInvale

Introduction to Child Themes – John Hawkins

Chris Lema – Launch Your Blog

Check out Wordcamp central to find a WordCamp near you!

WordPress – The Next Steps – Intermediate Level Class

Saturday July 23rd, 1:30pm – 4:30pm
@ Blankspaces

5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea)
Los Angeles,
CA 90036

free parking is available – see Blankspaces website for details.

You have WordPress installed and you’ve built at least your basic site and are comfortable creating content. What’s next?

How do you take your WordPress site from being ho-hum, to being an effective business & marketing tool? Get a deeper understanding of what WordPress can do in this intermediate level class.

We’ll look at some bells, whistles & plugins for both the front and back end, look more in-depth at themes, and answer your questions.

This class is not for beginners – an understanding of the basics of WordPress is required. Bringing your laptop is recommended. Note that this class focuses on self-hosted WordPress – it’s not appropriate for WordPress.com users.

Some of the topics we’ll cover include:

• “There’s a plugin for that” – what crucial plugins do you need? From social sharing,  tracking web traffic and embedding video, to SEO and integrating Facebook, I’ll share with you the plugins that will help achieve your site’s goals.
• Backing up your site
• Understanding RSS and offering subscriptions
• How to collect email addresses for marketing
• A demonstration of some premium themes and their various features/capabilities
• Basic theme customization and best practices when tweaking/hacking
• Custom Q & A session based on attendee questions.

When you register for this class you’ll be able to submit your burning questions, problems, or requests for plugin needs and I’ll answer them during class for everyone’s benefit. You can submit several questions – I’ll make sure to cover at least one per attendee.

Google Recipe View

Since Google introduced their Recipe View it was only a matter of time before the WordPress community rose to the occasion with plugins to help non-code-geek bloggers take advantage of the development.

So far I’ve found 3 plugins that will help make your recipes Google Recipe View friendly. However based on what I’ve read online, you will also have to submit your site to Google and then you are in for a wait as to whether they actually include your site in their Recipe results or not. It seems to be a laborious process and skewed heavily in the favor of major players like Food Network et al. I would imagine they will smooth out the process eventually, but who knows when?  In the meantime I suppose it doesn’t hurt to get your blog nice and ‘microformat’ ready.

The 3 plugins I tried are hRecipe, EasyRecipe and RecipeSEO. They are all easy to use and quite similar, although there are a couple of important differences I will highlight.
For testing purposes I used a recipe for Avocado on Toast with Truffle Salt from Dorothy Reinhold’s Shockingly Delicious (although I made up some of the info such as cooking times, calories etc for testing purposes).

After implementing one of these plugins you can use Google’s Rich Snippets tool to test how your recipe would look in Recipe View. It will alert you if information is missing or if there are errors. I found that there seems to be a bit of a discrepancy between what Google states as the minimum necessary info to generate a preview, and the reality. They say:

“In order to generate a preview, at least 2 of the following fields are needed: prep time, cook time, total time, calories, rating, review count, or image.”

However during testing I found that I sometimes needed to add more than 2 of these fields to generate a preview, such as adding a calories field in addition to prep and cook times.

hRecipe

hRecipe has been around for quite a while, compared to the other 2 plugins which are very recent.

How it works:

After installing the plugin you will see an hRecipe submenu under Settings. You can use the plugin without touching this menu, but you may want to adjust formatting (such as whether to use bulleted or numbered lists). There’s also an option to change the background color of the generated recipe. However I had no luck with getting that part to actually work.

When in the post editing screen you’ll see a new button in your toolbar with a wee fork and spoon on it. Clicking it activates a lightbox that allows you to enter all the information about the recipe which is then inserted into your post. It’s easy to use, and had the best implementation of a rating system of the three plugins – allowing you to give a recipe a number of stars out of 5.
Cons:

• As I mentioned earlier I tried to change the background color in the settings but didn’t seem to have an effect
• Once you’ve inserted a recipe, you can edit the contents in the post, but you can’t add a new field using the tool. If you click the toolbar button again, it starts the process again, so basically, if you want to add additional info, you have re-enter your recipe and delete the original one.
• One major drawback is that there is no field to upload an image and when testing in Google’s rich snippets tool, it did not pick up any images I added to the post.
• There’s no field for Calories
• A minor drawback was that it seemed to add bullets even into my dashboard – for example next to all the categories when editing a post. It didn’t affect the functioning of anything, it was just strange.

How it looks:

EasyRecipe

As with hRecipe, you’ll find EasyRecipe settings as a submenu of Settings. Here you can choose the background color and border style of the recipe box, and these settings do actually work.

Usage is similar to hRecipe. You will see a new button in your toolbar which looks like a little face wearing a chef hat. Clicking it activates a pop-up in which you input your recipe. It seems to have a thorough set  of fields for you to add info, including author name which is a nice touch.  Once you’ve inserted a recipe, you can easily edit it, unlike hRecipe.

The one really STAND OUT feature of this plugin is that when I uploaded an image into the post (not via the recipe entry form, but in the regular manner), it was clever enough to wrap it in a tag that Google can use to generate an image in the recipe preview. This is HUGE because neither of the other 2 plugins did this, and all food bloggers know how crucial images are. The  plugin documentation did not make it clear that this would happen, I just stumbled upon that by accident  - the developers should really highlight this feature though!

There is also a handy toolbar button which will take you directly to Google’s testing page to see how your recipe will show up.

Cons:

• I did not see a field for Rating.
• There is an in-built Print feature, which might be good for some, but may also conflict with or duplicate an existing print option you may already have. Would be nice to have an option to remove that (besides editing it directly out of the plugin files).
• The text at top of box is very small and you would have to edit the plugin code to change that.

How it looks:

RecipeSEO

RecipeSEO is similar to the previous 2 plugins except that you’ll find its icon on the “upload/insert” line in your post editor, rather than in the toolbar. It has a quite extensive set of field for different types of info to include with your recipe including a field for rating but that just displays as plain text rather than a nice star system like hRecipe. A couple of other drawbacks are the lack of image support and no way to choose a different background color for the recipe, without doing your own CSS styling (although according to the plugin site that feature is planned).

How it looks:

Conclusion

Based on my initial testing, EasyRecipe seems to come out the winner, mostly because it includes the ability to include an image, and a background color/border. Those of you familiar with CSS may appreciate the stripped down nature of the other plugins because you could easily style the elements yourself.

For more discussion, useful info and the geeky, code-y way to make your recipes compliant without using these plugins, check out Cafe Liz’ post on the topic.

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodthinkers/4581978811/in/set-72157622783030440

Have you used any of these plugins or found any other ones? I’m especially interested in hearing from bloggers who have actually been able to get their blogs included in Google’s recipe view, or your experiences in trying to make this happen. Leave your experiences in the comments!