Sometimes you find yourself in need for maps in your blog. here’s a list of the top wordpress and google maps plugins:

Google Maps for WordPress

This plugin allows you to easily insert Google Maps into your blog, making use of the new shortCode system in WordPress 2.5. The maps can be configured to offer directions to or from the location, show or hide the zoom/pan controls, show/hide map type (street view, satellite, etc), activate zoom using mouse wheel, and more. PHP5 Required.

URL

XML Google Maps

This plugin allows you to easily insert Google Map or Google Earth Plugin Maps into your blog. You just have to add a link to your self defined Map from My Google Maps, Picasa Webalbum Picture Map, any geoRSS Feed (like Flickr), your uploaded Google Earth file (kmz, kml) or any other dynamic or static Google Earth file (umapper.com, flickr.com, etc.)

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On the last two months we’ve been working on a huge wordpress website, soon i will be able to share it with you, it’s an old website, written in asp.net and one of the main targets was to transfer the CMS to wordpress while saving all the features from the old website. the main features were classifieds area, articles, not a complex but different registration from the one we familiar with in wordpress.

After two months I  can honestly say, each problem had a plugin to solve it. here is a list of the main plugins i used so far:

my first choice to handle the classifieds area on the website was to use Another Wordpress Classifieds Plugin, it turned out to be an excellent choice, very easy to manage and lots of features.

I had to add some extra fields to the user registration and some of the authors, i did it using the awesome plugin Cimy User Extra Fields, the option “can only be modified by admin” is very important if you want to add some hidden fields to the user. and to solve the captcha fields which Cimy User extra fields doesn’t have i used WP-reCAPTCHA.

I had to allow the users to login with their email and not UserName as wordpress always ask, for this i found Email-Login it lets the users login with username and email too. and just to make all the login / register pages more pleasant and well designed i used InsiteLogin.

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Here are some great links and news from the wordpressphera this week.

a very clever way to use widgets for text areas or text blocks in wordpress, let’s say you want to display some text in your sidebar, footer or CMS website homepage, you can do it like this: look-ma-editable-text-regions. until i read it I used to open category called, let’s say, “textareas” and to add posts to that category. and then pell the data with a single post plugin, like this one, Get A Post plugin.

A new movie called “phobidilia” is going to show on the toronto international film festival, as many films does, they promote themselves with a trailer and downloads website, this one used wordpress to do that. very nice work.

If we talk about speed, uptime and other issues on the minds of wordpress bloggers, here are some tips and plugins to keep your website optimized all the time.

Caching

wp-cache – WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

wp-super-cache – This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

W3 Total Cache – W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by caching frequent operations, reducing the weight of various theme files and providing transparent content delivery network integration. The goal is to improve the user experience for the readers of your blog without having to change WordPress, your theme, your plugins or how you produce your content. When fully utilized, your blog will be able to sustain extremely high traffic spikes without requiring hardware upgrades or removing features or functionality from your theme.

Performance

HyperDB – HyperDB is a very advanced database class that replaces WP’s built-in DB functions.

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http://jobs.wordpress.net/ – The official Wordpress jobs website, Post or browse jobs requiring experience with WordPress development.

http://jobs.wpfeed.com – Our newest service for developers, designers, bloggers or any other people looking for wordpress jobs, for freelancers and full time jobs also. come find the one.

http://www.wordpressfreelance.com/ – Wordpress Freelance is a “ONE STOP” full service site where a “Webmaster” can post a project for FREE and have one of our highly skilled “Freelancer’s” competitively bid on your projects.

http://www.indeed.com/q-Wordpress-jobs.html – A wordpress search query in the popular job board Indeed.

Every blogger and developers should know that immediately after installing wordpress activating some SEO plugins is necessary.

Wordpress by itself already doing 50% of the SEO work a website should have or do, most of the themes are very well coded, the system is very popular for its tags and categories and google tend to really like it.  the rest is on you.  Here’s a list of the top SEO plugins for Wordpress:

SEO Slugs

The SEO Slugs Wordpress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

For example, when you publish a post with a title like this:

“What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings”,

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Display status in your blog became very useful when you write often and want to update your readers what you do and where you are.

here are some great Status Bar plugins to add to your blog:

mystatus

This one is the easiest one to use, simply lets you add a status, divided to two parts, title (bold) and a text. great!!!

This plugin allows you to create a number of fields specifying your current status and easily insert them into your templates.

URL | DOWNLOAD

wp_twptter

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From time to time you need to change some things from the Wordpress default. One of the easiest hacks to do is creating double posts columns.

all you need is a bit PHP and some Css tweaking, here is the example:

CSS

.row {clear:both;}
.col1 {width:300px;float:left;padding:10px;}
.col2 {width:300px;float:right;padding:10px;}

* change the width of the columns according to what you need.

in your index.php (in the theme folder) look for the posts loop and before that paste this:

<?php $col = 1; ?>

after the loop begins add this:

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From time to time you get projects demanding multilingual websites, even if you’re not a developer, you can you use these multilingual wordpress plugins to reach more visitors.

WPML Multilingual CMS

WordPress is a great blogging platform with a potential of being an easy to use content management system. WPML helps it go the extra mile.

Features

• Multilingual content support based on Drupal i18n architecture.
• CMS navigation allows adding drop down menus, breadcrumbs trail and sidebar navigation (all wigetized).
• Creates internal Sticky Links so that they never break.

DOWNLOAD

xLanguage

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While working on an online shop using wordpress there are several important decisions you need to take.

The Plugins

WP-Ecommerce Plugin on wordpress.org The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online. WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind. Perfect for:

• Bands & Record Labels
• Clothing Companies
• Crafters & Artists
• Books, DVDs & MP3 files

you can download the plugin from here

WordPress eStore Plugin -

In a Nutshell… this plugin allows you to sell any form of digital products and services from your wordpress blog securely with complete automation. complete automation is that once you set it up the whole process (The buying and the delivering of the product without revealing the real URL of the product or redirecting the buyer to a web page) works on its own.

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