Darren Hoyt has written an amazing, concise and easy to read WordPress “tutorial” on using the template tags to customize your Wordpress theme in creative ways to achieve the layout you desire - in this case a magazine style layout.
Before reading it will help if you have a familiarity with WordPress of course, but I think anyone who’s just dipped their toes in a WordPress template will be able to understand and use this article to stretch their imagination to create a complex theme.
(Don’t miss the first part of these great series!)
In no particular order - these are tenthirteen (of a very long list) of my very favorite underrated (underused?) Wordpress Plugins.
Spotplex is a digg-like system where your blog’s articles are ranked on the amount of views they receive (which are counted by a Spotplex provided code). Every time someone “reads” (views) your post it is counted by Spotplex propelling that article up the popularity ladder.
From Spotplex:
Spotplex is the only online content aggregation service that dynamically provides an instant, impartial ranking of popular Web content. With Spotplex, Internet users are not required to change their behavior to generate content rankings. By eliminating tagging and voting, Spotplex more accurately reflects what people read most today.
Based on an algorithm-based measuring system that analyzes readers’ behavior in real time, Spotplex’s popular content rankings come from actual impressions, or “reads”. This impartial process gives every blogger a better opportunity to be heard. Spotplex also uses a relative popularity measure by which article reads are measured relative to a site’s overall traffic, rather than by volume alone. This evens the playing field so all blogs can compete equally in the Spotplex rankings, regardless of readership size or subject matter.
At DailyblogTips they have very good advice on why you should remove the meta section from your blog’s sidebar.
The Meta section includes some admin links like “Login” or “XHTML Valid.” While those links might be useful for the owner of the blog, they offer no value at all for the reader.
I’m a little late with this, as I’ve completely stopped using MT on all of my sites, but I just saw that Sixapart has released a beta version of Movable Type 4. The new interface looks kinda sweet actually.
Sixapart touts that MT has 50 new features, including a new easier setup that will have you up and running in minutes. Also very interesting is the summary of how your blog(s) is doing with some pretty cool stats built right in.
It’s worth another try I suppose, and I’m going to give it a test go and see how I like it.
The real question is whether or not this new version (or any subsequent ones) will be enough to win back the hearts of many MT fans who jumped ship to Wordpress. Is it too little, too late?
