Get Free Content for Your Blog

Yes we are opening  up this offer again, so if you would like some free content, check this out now!

My colleagues and I want to write free articles for your website or blog.

All we ask is that we can link back to our site(s) in the “about the author” attribution box. Seem like a good deal?

If so, simply fill out this short form and we will be in touch via email if we have something for you. (If you have multiple sites, please fill out the form for each one).

Click here to add your details and be on your way to getting some free, expert content for your site!

We have already written guest posts for several happy bloggers. Obviously there are only so many topics that we can write about that will be relevant to the work Cogniview does, but we have so far written about software tools, PDFs and ebooks, business and productivity. So while we can’t guarantee that we will write something for everyone, we will think very hard to see if we can come up with something brilliant for you, so don’t delay, fill the form out now :)

Get Free Guest Posts for Your Site

My colleagues and I want to write free articles for your website or blog.

All we ask is that we can link back to our site(s) in the “about the author” attribution box. Seem like a good deal?

If so, simply fill out this short form and we will be in touch via email if we have something for you. (If you have multiple sites, please fill out the form for each one).

Click here to add your details and be on your way to getting some free, expert content for your site!

Obviously we can’t guarantee that we will write something for everyone, but if you don’t ask you don’t get, so don’t delay, fill the form out now :)

WordPress CMS: Custom Fields

On a lot of my sites I use WordPress not as a blogging application but as a CMS. As I might have mentioned here before, I have worked at companies that have charged 6 figures for far less functionality in a CMS than you get completely free with WordPress, so why re-invent the wheel?

A much overlooked feature of WordPress that can add a lot of nice touches to a site is the “Custom Field” option along with custom templates.

Say you wanted to show a thumbnail photograph to go along with a blog post, but not in the article itself but alongside the headline?

Or maybe you have a site where you want to link content to a certain product, but pull in details about the product from a database or feed rather than manually type the information in over and over as product details change?

Another option might be to change the look and feel of a page away from the default, for example change the color of just that one page, or different header graphics. Sometimes people will color code so people know which section of a site they are looking at for example.

All of these can be achieved with custom fields. Custom fields are just a way that you can add a “meta” value to a page or post, that is information “about” a piece of content rather than as “part of” the content. Yes we have the option of using tags or categories, but these tend to be visible, and not as specific as we would like. Custom fields can be used to link to a product ID, ISBN number, affiliate code, or image Src without cluttering up our tag database.

In your blog post/page editing screen there is a box containing the custom field information. There is first a dropdown containing the custom fields you have used before. This might well be populated if you use any SEO based plugins. That is how the custom title, keywords and description are added to a page.

Next you have boxes where you can provide a key and a value. So your key might be “ISBN” and your value might be a particular books ISBN code.

In your template you can pull out the value belonging to a particular custom field using the following PHP code:

<?php
 $custom_field = get_post_meta($post->ID, "key", $single = true);
?>

You can see this in action over at my credit card site where we pull in a single card details into a page by specifying the cards ID, in this case the Blue American Express card. All the other details are pulled from a separate database, and are refreshed from the source daily.

WordPress is much more powerful than people give it credit for. Really, I would choose it over software costing tens of thousands of dollars. You just need a little lateral thinking to make it really rock.

If you know of any innovative uses of WordPress, do share in the comments …

WordPress SEO Tips

I just got back from an excellent conference in London, the A4UExpo.

One of the best sessions was about WordPress and SEO by Joost De Valk. Check out the slides here:

WordPress SEO & Optimisation
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: plugin plugins)

Another fantastic resource for anyone using WordPress to create their sites and want to rank in search engines is the free guide about SEO for bloggers by Aaron and Giovanna Wall.

Between those to sites you should be well set up to rank your blog or WordPress based website :)

It often surprises me just how well WordPress sites perform in search engines. Even out of the box, with none of the recommended tweaks, you can find yourself appearing under searches within a few weeks of launching.

The most important factors are:

  1. Great content - Write about what people want to know
  2. Search phrases - Use the phrases that your audience is looking for, and also use keyword tools for research
  3. Interlinking - Link out, link to your own content, network to get links from other sites

All of these things happen very naturally with a blog, and can be easily implemented on a WordPress-based sites.

Add the recommended tweaks and plugins and you will have an even more search friendly site!

WordPress Based Membership Site

Since Brian’s Teaching Sells lots of people have been approaching me asking how they can make their blog into a membership site.

In the past I have had a straightforward solution, a combination of Amember and WordPress can work ok, and it is the basis for existing membership sites that I have built such as Performancing Hive, and so on.

Recently though I heard about a new WordPress plugin that aims to build out a WordPress blog as a member site directly.

Appropriately it is called “Your Member WordPress Membership Plugin“.

This I had to investigate!

Features include:

Obviously if you add this to an existing blog or site then you need to make sure a significant portion of it stays free to keep that search engine juice!

Admin Tour_demo

A word of warning to anyone who thinks of using this, take a look at what you see when you log in to their own site:

Cambridge New Media Services 203A Dashboard 2014 WordPress

Yup, the bog standard WordPress dashboard. Do customise the user experience otherwise you will lose the trust of your customer. This could set in some serious buyers remorse.

That aside, things look well with this plugin and at only $50 I will be trying it out for myself.

Manage Your WordPress Database

One of the problems with blogging on self-hosted platforms is maintenance. While the platforms are designed for non-technical users to operate, it is only the geeks who understand things like databases that work behind the scenes until something borks and brings the whole thing down.

When I set up a WordPress-based blog or website I usually install the Backup plugin. This emails the user a copy of the database once a week. That coupled with a good FTP download of the files means that at least it is possible to recover to a week old version, and with some swift copy and paste from the most recent RSS download maybe more.

There are other database aspects you might need though and that is where WP-DBManager supposedly comes in to play, but I have issues with it. First a description of what it does …

This plugin gives you a whole bunch of features that otherwise would be off limits, hidden away from the user in scary places like PHPMyAdmin, or the command line.

wp-dbmanager

Just like the other backup plugins, this will allow you to take a backup and email it. It also allows you to optimize and repair, and more dangerously empty or drop tables. While it does have a facility for running SQL queries, you can not run anything that returns a resultset which seems pretty daft.

Now my criticisms:

  1. It should allow routine scheduled backups and maybe optimizations - right now need two plugins when one could do both jobs
  2. As it is you would not hand it over, it is too dangerous - integrate with Role Manager to remove dangerous features
  3. SQL Queries is useless for end users - Make it so you can run queries and show results?

The repair feature could be a life saver, but as for the rest, while an excellent plugin, I think it could be a lot better.

Do you know an alternative database plugin for WordPress?

Customize Your WordPress Admin Interface

As more and more developers and designers are using WordPress as a CMS rather than just as a blogging platform, the demands from users grow and change.

For many end users the standard WordPress Admin is both over featured and scarily complicated.

standard write page

The experience of an overly permissioned user destroying a site will be one that is only too familiar, as is the experience of sites going unmaintained out of intimidation even after training.

What is needed is a tailored approach, to give users what they need and no more.

Enter a bunch of WordPress plugins that aim to do just that.

Cloak allows you to remove elements from the write screens that your writers do not need.

Cloak Options


Flutter allows you to create custom write screens, optionally forcing the new content into a certain category.

edit write panel

This is not just useful for limiting the user, you might also have created a site with content areas such as sidebar, featured posts, etc. Using category logic and a specific write form you could allow the site maintainer to enter content for these featured spots in the theme without having to remember which category does what. For example, below shows a form I built to allow the user to input reviews.

new write panel

Finally Role Manager allows you to completely remove options for certain users so they can only do what you want them to.

Role Management WordPress

Added: JonnyA from WP-CMS tells me you might already know Flutter as “Fresh Post”

Do you know of any other plugins that make customizing WordPress admin easy?

Bring FriendFeed Comments Into Your Blog

FriendFeed has been steadily growing in popularity, and has been given the blessing of the A-List, but in all the support and cheerleading there has always been one problem.

One of the big complaints about FriendFeed is that it pulls conversation away from your site into their venue.

If you want to grow a community then first of all you want the community to exist on your own site, so it can not be held to ransom. Secondly you need to engage that community with conversation. If you can’t see that people have commented then you can’t reply to keep the conversation going, or worse you upset the commenter who then thinks you are ignoring them.

For these reasons many people have avoided fully jumping into the FriendFeed pond, but worry no longer, an excellent FriendFeed Commentgs plugin has arrived.

What it does is pulls any comments or “likes” you gain in FriendFeed and publishes them onto your blog.

There are various options to configure and a tag to place in your theme so it knows where you want to display the comments, but essentially once the plugin knows your FriendFeed nickname the rest is pretty cosmetic.

friendfeed plugin

Get more details at the authors plugin page.

WordPress to Disable XMLRPC by Default?

Three different people have alerted me to a minor storm in a tiny teacup over the news/rumor/allegation that WordPress are to disable XMLRPC publishing by default

In order to protect the majority of blogs which don’t use these protocols against any possible security vulnerabilities we should disable them by default.

Really? Is this what we are supposed to be getting upset about? As westi says:

from WordPress 2.6 onwards you will need to go into the Settings->Write page and enable them individually if you want to use them.

That doesn’t seem much of an ordeal. I imagine half of the readers of this blog are saying “What the heck is XMLRPC?” and the other half are quite aware of what XMLRPC is and do not much care if it is off by default.

XMLRPC is the way that you can control your blog without using the blog user interface. It’s the method that offline blogging tools like Ecto and Scribefire use to add content to your blog. As you can imagine from my description, this is powerful stuff, and it is quite right that if they believe there is a security hole to be filled that they should turn their wary eye towards it. Many hosting companies have been wary of XMLRPC, even down to making it difficult for people to enable it.

I can certainly understand the remote editor community getting upset. For them it is an extra hoop for end users to jump through, their products are meant to make things easier and this will be a hinderance. As Daniel Jalkut (Marsedit) says

For users who would find value in a remote client, this decision will put one more roadblock in their way

My main question is, what exactly is the security concern they have with XMLRPC? Why now? If there is a clear danger, fair enough, but if this is the WordPress developer equivalent of security theater, well, let’s not bother eh?

A Better Blog Contact Form

As more and more blogs grow from being a one-person operation to a multiple blogger situation, and more companies bolt on a blog to their corporate site, the one size fits all contact form is not cutting it.

Consider the scenario where everything goes to one person. So all contact, from “nice article” to “I have a problem with the widgets you sell” all go to one unfortunate individual. Far better to sift and sort to the appropriate people, right?

I have been looking for a more capable contact form for clients and I seem to have found it in WP_ContactMe

contact form

  • Easy to add to post and pages with BBCode.
  • Easy to add to a sidebar with a widget.
  • Easy to add anywhere in a template with a function call.
  • Comes ready configured with a standard Contact form.
  • Has HTML/PHP templates to allow you to customise the form to collect what information you like.
  • Emails the poster of the page/post by default.
  • Allows you to specify the address to receive the message.
  • Allows the setting of subjects to allow dynamic selection of the recipient of the message.
  • SPAM Protection by an optional CAPTCHA question.
  • Optionally allows the sender to receive a copy of the message.
  • Collects standard information about the sender, such as IP , referrer etc.
  • Has its own theme independent stylesheet to allow styling without modifying your theme.
  • Has localisation to allow easy modification of all default messages.

As well as setting subject lines that appear in a drop down, you can also shoot off to different people depending on the different purposes, so you could have “General Feedback” go to Joe, and “Advertising” go to Mary. Or maybe have one contact form that lists all your authors.

contact emails form

Check it out over at the DCoda WordPress plugin page

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