Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the very fun experience of building a social network using BuddyPress. I was pleased to find that it all comes together easily and, with the help of some great plugins and custom code, it’s a very good option for any client who wants to create a niche social network. It’s also a great solution for internal networks - I can see how it would work well for a college, or any organization that wants to have a central meeting place for its members. If you haven’t heard of BuddyPress yet, head on over to BuddyPress.org to check it out.

I thought I’d share some of the plugins I used as well as some tips for creating the best user experience. (All of this assumes a good working knowledge of WordPress.) Read the rest of this entry »

This is just one of the tools I’m excited about in CS5. I can’t wait to play with it! I’m also looking forward to the Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop and CSS Inspect Mode with Live View in Dreamweaver. From what I’ve seen so far, this looks like an exciting release.

When you install a WordPress blog on your own server, you can install plugins to enhance the functionality and improve security. These are some of my favorites:

• Maintenance Mode - Nice plugin for displaying a maintenance message when you’re working on the site.
• Twitter Tools - for integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter account
• WP-SpamFree - Terrific anti-spam plugin
• Contact Form 7 - simple, flexible contact form plugin
• Platinum SEO Pack - Good search engine optimization plugin
• ThickBox - Add ThickBox galleries to your blog
• Multi-level Navigation - for accessible dropdown/flyout/slider navigation
• Google Sitemaps - Creates a Google Sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog
• Image Widget - Image widget for sidebar so clients can easily update images
• Rich Text Widget - Adds a rich text editor widget so your client won’t have to work with code in a text widget.

These are just a few of the plugins I use most frequently. There are many more available. If you can think of something that you’d like to do in WordPress, the odds are good that there’s a plugin for it. When you download plugins, there should be a readme.txt file with installation instructions and notes, but generally you can just add the folder to your plugins directory and activate it through the admin panel. Remember to deactivate plugins when upgrading WordPress and check to make sure that the ones you’re using are compatible with the version you’re upgrading to.