Boom!

Wordpress Plugins on RRR

In case you find it useful, here’s a list of the plugins I use on RRR’s Wordpress installation and an example of how a couple work together.  I’m inspired to post this after following the tips provided by Dreamhost on fine-tuning a Wordpress installation to speed it up dramatically.

ADMIN (make it easier to manage)

• Ajax Plugin Helper - activate, deactivate, and upgrade plugins without leaving the plugin screen.
• Simply Show IDs - displays the IDs for posts, pages, and categories plainly on the “edit post/page/category” pages.
• Maintenance Mode - allows me to work on the site while showing a temporary “Site down” message to all visitors.

PERFORMANCE (reduce page load time)

• WP Super Cache - reduces hits on the MySQL database.
• JavaScript to Footer - for plugins and template pieces I can’t or don’t want to move manually, moves javascript calls to the footer section of the page, which speeds up page display.

SEO (make sure people find us)

• Redirection - redirects old/broken links and whips up magic using regular expressions (see example below).
• All in One SEO Pack - used mostly for page/post titles and descriptions.
• Google XML Sitemaps - in case it helps.

DISPLAY (make things functional/easy/pretty)

• Audio player - for playing single files that aren’t uploaded to SoundCloud.
• FAQs - handy FAQ manager for our growing FAQs.
• Flexi Quote Rotator (temporary) - used for showing a rotating crop of quotes. Not ideal but it works when I need it.
• List category posts - on static pages, displays a list of all posts by title within a stated category or categories, with links to the original posts (see example below).
• Shadowbox JS - lightbox funcationality for pictures, videos, audio, html, etc.
• Exec-PHP - enables execution of PHP on a Wordpress page.

Each has its own usefulness, but combining them in interesting ways also made my life easier when it was time to set up the album/collection pages.

Each song exists in multiple categories of song collections; e.g., “Layers of the Earth” is in the science album, the Earth Day collection, and the box set.  It would be a pain to configure automatically-generated category pages to show custom descriptions, embedded audio players, purchase buttons, and more for each unique cluster.

Instead, I set up static pages that hold everything but the list of posts in each category.  Then I set up each song to display its categories.  Using Redirection, I pointed each category listing on a song page to the matching Wordpress Page with matching slugs.  (For instance, the category “earth-day” redirects to a music page with the same slug).  Each music page then automatically lists any tracks assigned to a category via the “List category posts plugin”.  You can see it in action on the Layers of the Earth page and any of the collections it links to near the top.

RRR + JamLegend = free fun

We’re always surprised by what songs catch on in certain forums or at certain times of year.  Never would have predicted Declaration of Independence would be the top hit here.

educationalrap:

This summer we heard about a free web application called JamLegend that’s sort of like Rock Band but on the computer. The kicker: any artist can upload their music and have it turned into a game. Count us in! Intrigued, we uploaded a few songs in every subject area to see what happened, and the results surprised us: our social studies songs took off.

Try it yourself here with Declaration of Independence or visit JamLegend to see the full edition.