My Favorite Wordpress Plugins 2

Part II – Magazine Style Themes

To continue our discussion of my favorite Wordpress plugins, today I’m going to tell you about some plugins that work well with a magazine style theme. What’s a magazine style theme? A theme where the home page is arranged differently from the interior pages of the site, in that it shows excerpts from many different “sections” of the site. Some examples that I’ve designed would be:

• The Business Image Journal
• Linwood Farms HOA
• Long Island Community Fellowship

These themes pull posts and other information from within the site to the home page as “teasers”, just as a magazine or news site will do. The following plugins help your Wordpress magazine theme to function more smoothly, and help you control the content more efficiently.

Excerpts

The newest versions of Wordpress have an “Excerpt” area underneath the post content box. If you’re a planner, and have time to, you can easily create your own post excerpt using this box. There are also ways within the coding of your site to limit the number of words or characters an excerpt contains. If you are the end user, and want to do this yourself, the easiest way is to install the Advanced Excerpt plugin. This plugin allows you to set many different parameters regarding your excerpts, including: length (in word OR characters), html coding (for links, etc.), images, font coding, and more.

Featured Stories

One of the most popular ways to call attention to the Feature Stories of a magazine site, is to use the Featured Content Gallery. This plugin allows you to assign images that help convey your message to your posts, and then rotates them in a set area on your home page…all while linking to the post itself. (for example: The Business Image Journal)

Announcements

Announcements are the news items you really want people to notice, and you may have more than one. What better way to display them than to use a plugin that will scroll through a select number in a designated area on your home page?! The Announcement and Vertical Scroll News plugin does just that. After installing you can use the widget, or if you’re more code savvy, you can add a snippet of code to the appropriate area of your home page template.

Another simple way to add announcements to your home page or sidebar, is to use the Category Posts Widget, which allows you to select one category to show posts from in a section-and choose how many posts to show. Set up an “Announcements” category, and away you go.

Most Popular

It’s always a good idea to let your readers know what other readers like on your site. This is very easily accomplished automatically using the Popular Posts Plugin. You will also need to download and install the Post Plugin Library plugin for the Popular Posts plugin to work. Check your plugins, first, though…you many have already installed that one if you’re also using Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, or Recent Comments.

Forums or Message Boards

Do you also have a phpBB forum for your site? What better way to get your readers to join in on the discussions there, than to have the latest topics showing on your home page! By using the WP phpBB Last Topics plugin, you can easily insert a section into your home page or sidebar using a widget. Keep in mind…your phpBB forum must be in the same directory as your WP site for this to work.

Audio

Do you have mp3 audios (speeches, tutorials, etc.) that you’d like to share with your readers? In my opinion, the best player (and easiest to use) is the Audio Player plugin. It also allows you to change the color of the player to match your website (if you so desire), keeping the integration seamless. This player is designed to work within your posts and pages, not your sidebar, so keep that in mind. It also does not work for streaming audio or playlists.

If you do a Podcast, you might want to consider the Powerpress Podcast plugin.

Advertising

Most magazine sites offer advertising space. This helps the owner to offset the cost of running the site. In my opinion, the easiest way to add a rotating banner ad to your site (whether it’s in the header, on a page, or in the sidebar) is to use the Sponsors Slideshow Widget. It uses a link category (and those links’ images) to create a slideshow. The widget allows you to set the time between rotation, the fade effects, and more. You can also use multiple widgets within your site.

For classified advertising (whether paid or free), I prefer using Another Wordpress Classifieds Plugin. Readers can enter their own ads (with photos if you choose) for your approval. You can accept payments for the ads using your PayPal or 2CheckOut account.

 

---

By using these plugins in tandem with your Magazine style wordpress theme, you’ll have an incredible site that will keep your readers coming back for more!