Code Snippets To Customize Jetpack

How to customize the Jetpack WordPress plugin

Automattic’s Jetpack plugin has come a long way! It’s been much-maligned in the past for being bloated and slow and for that reason many developers wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot keyboard. These days it’s much better – it’s more truly modularized to give you more control over exactly what’s activated. From the code side of things, developers will be pleasantly surprised to discover that it has been sprinkled with lots of actions and filters. So, while Jetpack is still generally marketed to entry-level end users, there are actually some nice Easter eggs for developers who want to customize things a little bit for their clients.

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How To Make Sure Your WordPress Site Looks Good on Facebook

how to make your WordPress site look good on Facebook

Here’s an interesting factoid for you. Approximately once every 13 seconds* another blogger posts on an internet forum or group a variation on the following question: “Why does Facebook always show the wrong image when I post a link to my blog ?!!”

This post is a guide to what’s going on and how to make it right.

I preface it with this caveat:

Facebook is a mean ole bully and often changes the way that it operates suddenly and without warning. What works today could become obsolete tomorrow. Today, this is what works.

Get To Know The Open Graph Protocol

The Open Graph Protocol is a particular set of meta data – that is, information about your site, that goes into the code of your site. Both Facebook and Google Plus look for this meta data in order to learn about your website.

When it’s all present and correct your site looks lovely in Facebook.
When it’s not there, they make stuff up based on whatever they can grab.

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Getting The Word Out With Jetpack: Sharing, Subscribers, Social Media Networks

Jetpack WordPress Plugin Social Features

This is a guest post from my friend and super-talented WordPress developer, Suzette Franck. I’ve mentioned the Jetpack plugin before and in this post Suzette will take you deeper into it’s social marketing features.
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Let’s face it, no matter how pretty your blog or website is, people come back for fresh, compelling, unique and informative content. While there are various services that will accomplish the same functionality, never before has posting to all the networks simultaneously been make simpler than with the magic of the plugin Jetpack. Jetpack is chock full of goodies like the Publicize, Sharing and Subscriptions features that can help the most amount of people see your unique content in your social network. Support for posting to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn,  and Yahoo, as well as share buttons for the major networks are all included in this no cost but priceless plugin.

What is Jetpack?

Jetpack (latest version is 2.0) is a free add-on suite of plugins once only available to WordPress.com users made available for your self-hosted blog. If your blog is hosted at WordPress.com, you do not need this add-on to access these features, but if you are self-hosting your blog, for example, at Media Temple, WPEngine, HostGator, Blue Host, etc. you will need to download, install, and activate this plugin to have it provide the features we will be covering, Also, you will be required to have a WordPress.com account, so that all of your subscriptions and stats can be accessed centrally right form the WordPress.com dashboard. I will walk you through the installation and configuration process and get you up and running in no time posting your unique content to your followers. 

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Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins For Beginners

The Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins for Beginners

Ah contact forms….such as a standard feature of a website aren’t they? One would think that WordPress would have tons of great, easy-to-implement choices for this. And indeed there are TONS of choices, it’s just that most of them have pretty cryptic interfaces, especially for newbies.

For contact forms and anything data collection oriented I prefer Gravity Forms but it’s not free and for some bloggers there really wouldn’t be any point in buying it. But a basic contact form is something most WordPress users want so it’s important to find a good, simple and easy to use solution. And by “easy to use”, I mean something that can be figured out by a new blogger fairly easily. Not the kind that’s “easy to use” once you’ve spent hours figuring it out.

So I’ve done some testing of some of the most mentioned contact form plugins – the ones that show up in the plugin directory search, along with ones mentioned by other bloggers. Honestly, most of them made my skin crawl. They called themselves things like “fast” and “easy” (which sounds like a recipe for a great time) but hurt my brain to look at them. Instead of list them anyway (it is, after all, my job to filter the chaff on your behalf), I’ve picked just a couple that I think are actually useful.

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Should You Use the Jetpack WordPress Plugin?

Jetpack WordPress Plugin

What Is Jetpack?

Jetpack is a plugin created by the team at WordPress.com. It is one super-plugin that contains a whole suite of features – mini-plugins, if you will. It was created to make available to self-hosted WordPress users some of the convenient features that WordPress.com users enjoy. Some of the features that Jetpack includes are:

  • a widget to display your latest Tweets
  • WordPress stats about traffic to your blog
  • Email subscription to blog posts and comments
  • Facebook Like box widget
  • mobile theme
  • “Carousel” to turn image galleries into slideshows
  • image widget – to easily add an image to your sidebar
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