Useful WordPress Plugins

Collection of useful WordPress plugins I use. Includes plugins for stats, SEO, mobile display, page speed, spam control and contact form.

Scribe SEO WordPress plugin

1. ScribeSEO – Premium plugin that gives search engine optimised copywriting advice.

2. Yoast SEO plugin – Best and exhaustive WordPress SEO plugin. Better than All in one SEO plugin.

So Simple : Minimal WordPress

So Simple is a minimal WordPress theme from Jason Schuller, the creator of Press75 WordPress themes. From the theme’s page:

In a flooded marketplace of overly complex WordPress themes, the So Simple theme has been created for those looking for something different. By eliminating all of the unnecessary elements found in typical WordPress themes, So Simple allows you to focus on beautiful words and nothing more. So Simple is minimalism at its best, providing a distraction-free writing and reading experience for less than a cup of coffee.

The WPCandy Quaterly

The WPCandy Quaterly is the first and only print magazine exclusively covering the WordPress world. It comes from Ryan Imel who made the popular WordPress blog WPCandy.

What I liked best about the magazine is that it shows the human side of WordPress world. Justin Tadlock shares how he learnt WordPress. Gautam Gupta shares his experience on visiting the Googleplex at the age of 15. There are tens of full page colorful pictures from Word Camps. Noel Tock and Brian Richards explain how they built their WordPress based businesses happytables and Startbox from ground up. These are certainly inspiring.

The magazine design and print is of very high quality. I felt proud and happy while holding it. The second issue is well underway. Go grab it now.

P.S: There is an iPad only WordPress Design magazine coming soon at http://wpdm.co/

Test drive premium WordPress themes and plugins

Did you know that you can test drive some premium WordPress themes and plugins ? Here you go:

Test drive WordPress themes

* WooThemes

* Headway Themes

Test drive WordPress plugins

* Carrington Build

* Gravity Forms

Please let me know if you know any other WordPress shop offering such demos. Thanks.

Drag and drop WordPress Plugins and Themes

Are you new to WordPress or web design
? Do you need help designing your own theme with unique page layouts? Here are some helpful drag and drop plugins and theme:

Drag and Drop WordPress themes

* Builder from iThemes – The power of Builder starts in the layout editor. Choose from the building blocks of a great web site by inserting modules: header, images, navigation, content area (with or without sidebars), widget bars, HTML areas, and a footer. Complete flexibility without code.

Best WordPress Permalink structure

The best WordPress permalink structure depends on your needs. This post analyses different permalink structures, their pros and cons and recommends best WordPress permalink structure for blogs, news portals and websites for better SEO and performance.

When you install WordPress, the default permalink structure you have is http://example.com/?p=123 . You can retain this structure if having the shortest URL possible is your priority. Else, you need to change this for better SEO.

WordPress automatic Thumbnail issue with Hostgator

Are you in Hostgator and having problem with WordPress automatic thumbnail generation? Contact their Live Chat support to get it fixed.

If you are hosted with, you may have a problem with theautomatic thumbnail generation feature that many WordPress provide.

Free WordPress site review for Non Profit Organizations

Are you a NPO running a WordPress site and looking for some help to improve it?

I would be glad to offer free site reviews and resources for FIVE organizations this year. I can help you with better
SEO, page load time, design and WordPress usage.

Interview with Jonathan Tittle of Nodeki Hosting

We host most of our network blogs with and we find their service excellent. I like Nodeki for its fanatical customer support, fast loading times, cost effectiveness, simple design and offering lifetime package. So, I got Jonathan Tittle, the founder of Nodeki to answer some of our questions.

WordPress Video Tutorials

Sites offering WordPress Video tutorials

* WP101 – This is the most popular WordPress video tutorial site. Has a members forum too. The videos are of top quality but I find the collection very limited and strictly only for beginners. They also provide white label versions to showcase in your site and a WordPress dashboard plugin. Because of this, you may find the same videos in various sites

* wpLifeGuard– Pretty similar to WP101. Has written manuals for assistance. Also offers the tutorials through a plugin.

WordPress web hosting survey

We resell Hostgator shared hosting at MilkHost. Though people love it for its pricing, support and features, shared hosting does have its limitations. Once your WordPress site starts attracting huge traffic, Hostgator shuts down the site. Outages, database connection errors and occasional sluggishness can hurt a business dependent on it. At the same time, the pricing and WordPressinstall limitations offered by most of the managed WordPress hosts is simply beyond the reach of many.

Managed WordPress Maintenance and Support

If you are a busy / technically naive blogger or a business using WordPress, you may require professional help to maintain your WordPress site.

Maintaining your WordPress installation includes:

* Regular upgrades for WordPress, themes and plugins.

* Having scheduled backups for database and media.

* Monitoring the site for security breaches.

* Monitoring and optimizing the site for performance, page load time.

WordPress and business opportunities

I gave a talk on WordPress and business opportunities at the Open Weekends event at Chennai on May 25th, 2013. I explained the WordPress ecosystem comprising of premium themes and plugins, managed and hosted services and freelancing opportunities with WordPress. I followed it with a demo of using WordPress insisting on the use case that WordPress is just not a blog but a CMS that can be extended with custom post types. I was quite surprised that only a handful of the quite knowledgeable crowd were aware of WordPress software. Awareness about WordPress.com was better.Following were some of the questions that followed:

Premium Real Estate WordPress Themes

Collection of premium real estate WordPress themes to compare features, price and demos.

1. AgentPress Real Estate WordPress theme

The AgentPress theme is an ideal solution for real estate agents looking to market themselves and rise above competition.

Business models for premium WordPress plugins

Are you considering to sell premium WordPress plugins? Here are some existing business models.

Sell support

Easy Digital Downloads provides basic support for free and offers priority support for monthly and yearly price.

Premium WordPress themes and plugins in my collection

When we started using WordPress in early 2007, we never imagined we will buy a WordPresstheme or plugin. But when we started freelancing in 2009, we needed to distinguish myself from the competition and started offering premium theme designs as part of the packages we provided. This turned out to be very attractive for my prospective clients. Since then, we started collecting themes from various theme clubs.

WordPress 3.5 features

WordPress 3.5 has been released.
Here is a feature roundup as highlighted in the official About page you will see in the Dashboard.

New Media Manager

Beautiful Interface

Adding media has been streamlined with an all-new experience, making it a breeze to upload files and place them into your posts.

WordCamps in India

Forthcoming WordCamps in India

None announced yet. Track the WordCamp Central schedule for more WordCamps in future.

List of past WordCamps in India

2013 January – Baroda WordCamp
2013 February – Pune WordCamp
2012 October – Mumbai WordCamp
2012 March – Cuttack WordCamp
2011 October – Jabalpur WordCamp

2009 February – Delhi WordCamp

WordPress Theme Frameworks and Starter Themes

_s or underscores

Underscores is a starter theme for WordPress made by Automattic claiming to provide a 1000 hours head start. It is a theme meant for hacking and best not used as a parent theme.
Here’s what’s currently in _s:

• A just right amount of lean, well-commented, modern, HTML5 templates.
• A helpful 404 template.
• A sample custom header implementation in inc/custom-header.php that can be activated by uncommenting one line in functions.php and adding the code snippet found in the comments of inc/custom-header.php to your header.php template.

Selling WordPress businesses

The WordPress economy is maturing now and we are starting to see more acuisitions, mergers and sale of whole line of products and brands.

DevPress and Themelab got sold out recently.

Press75 tried selling unsuccessfully through Flippa

https://flippa.com/3056892-pr-6-site-with-13-621-uniques-mo-making-5-268-mo-selling-wordpress-themes