I haven’t really minded or noticed the new WordPress administration bar that appeared after updating recently, save for on a few websites where it conflicts with the header in a really odd way. In these cases, I’ve had the need to disable the new administration bar entirely, which can be done by putting the following snippet in your WordPress theme’s functions.php file. You can access this file through WordPress’s Theme Editor.

/* Disable the Admin Bar. */
add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );

Last time, in WordPress on Steroids Pt. 1, I expressed the important of accommodating users who were accessing your website via a mobile browser. Now, let’s make the experience better for all of your users.

WordPress Optimization

Optimizing your website now prepares you for an influx of traffic in the future, as well as just making things run smoother (not to mention faster) in general. Optimization is an ongoing process that never really stops, but you can do one thing immediately, and that is to start using caching.

DB Cache is a caching engine that stores database query results as opposed to html output, resulting in less space on the disk that is taken up for cache storage. Your visitors always get real information while keeping CPU use to a minimum.

Leveraging Scheduled Posts

Most blog authors use the scheduled post feature to pre-load content into WordPress to be displayed at a future date. Why not build reader anticipation and generate hype for posts you’ve already scheduled? Well, it’s easy, with this little snippet. You can place it anywhere in your template files, or create an HTML Widget and place it in there.

$show = 5;
$q = new WP_Query('post_status=future&order=DESC&showposts=' . $show);
if ($q->have_posts()) {
    echo "<ul>\r\n";
    while ($q->have_posts()) : $q->the_post();
        echo "<li>";
        the_title();
        echo "</li>\r\n";
    endwhile;
    echo "</ul>\r\n";
}

Expose ALL Content to Readers & Search Engines

It’s very common to see a “Most Popular Posts” or “Featured Posts” widget on a blog, and yes, they are effective. However, this draws the reader to a very specific point in your site’s workflow, and this point is at the very end of the user experience. Why not highlight all of your content equally? You can do so by showing off random posts from your archive in your sidebar, with the Random Posts Widget. Who knows? You might have more diamonds in the rough than you think, and you could get your user stuck in an infinite loop!

I’d like to re-address the topic of WordPress plugins. Last time, when I shared with you my must haves for deploying WordPress based websites, I touched on the fundamentals. What I’m going to show you today is how to make your WordPress website soar above your competitors!

First, I must stress how IMPORTANT it is to have a MOBILE ENABLED website. If your website cannot be read easily on a web capable phone or mobile internet device, your website is CRIPPLED! You’re in a 100 yard dash and you’re JOGGING! If you’re equipped and capable enough to make your own mobile theme, the more power to you, for those of you who don’t have a designer’s or coder’s bone in your body, you have several viable options:

• WPtouch is a hybrid WordPress theme/plugin. It allows you to pick and choose what content you want to display to mobile browsers, and based on your formatting, plops your data into a beautiful, easy-to-read, mobile WordPress theme.
• Mobify is more of a manual tool, you kind of have to know what you’re doing, or at least have someone who does at your disposal. It has a web editor that allows you to style your mobile them yourself. Just using the default style it has after choosing your content won’t cut it. You have to work some CSS magic.
• WordPress Mobile Edition will give your website an iPhone-like makeover. Not much room for customization here, but you can add more mobile user-agents via the settings page.

Now, this last little tidbit isn’t a plugin, but it definitely helps amp up your WordPress. Encouraging communication between yourself and your readers is an endless task, so give them more reason to respond to you by reversing the order of comments, displaying the newest comments on top, right below your post. It’s just a simple setting change, go to your Discussion Settings in the administration area, and choose to display newer comments at the top of each page.

Remember, the internet is always changing, and so are the ways we communicate on it. Show your readers you are informed AND HAVE AN OPINION about current events in your niche, and they will be drawn to speak to you.

I set up so many WordPress blogs, for myself and others, so its really easy to overlook a step or two during the setup process once in a while. Let this post be a reminder to you, readers, and myself, to add these five nifty plugins. We do want our websites to be the best that they can be, no?

WordPress Automatic Upgrade
I definitely try to remember to install this on all of my WordPress blogs, it saves so much time when you have twenty or more blogs to upgrade when a new version comes around. WordPress Automatic Upgrade does exactly what the name details, automatically (well, you click a button in your control panel after it alerts you a new version is available) downloads the newest stable release of WordPress, and installs it. Perhaps we’ll see this plugin included like Akismet someday?

Live Comment Preview
Shows your readers exactly how their reply to your post will appear, in real time. Pretty neat feature that really increases the interaction between the user and your website.

WP Auto Tagger
WP Auto Tagger makes great use of the Yahoo! API to match search results against your current post’s content and provides relevant, popularly searched tags automatically. It doesn’t override any tags you suggest, either.

Nicer Trackbacks
The way WordPress displays trackbacks to your posts from other websites is kind of ugly, and kind of not that SEO friendly. Well, don’t forget to change all that to suit your needs with this WordPress plugin.

Most Commented Posts
Show your hottest topics with this plugin, which displays these posts in your sidebar much like the “Most Popular Posts” or “Recent Comments” sidebar items.

Don’t forget to bookmark the Five Most Overlooked WordPress Plugins, so you don’t forget next time!

Pretty much every blogger that utilizes WordPress for a blogging platform has a post that has a similar title to this one, so I decided, “Hey, why not join the brainless mass of sheep that grazes on the green grass of the web?” Just kidding. But seriously, I want to share with you what I feel are the three most useful WordPress plugins.

The first is included by default, but you must register with WordPress and get a WordPress API key to make it functional. Akismet is a spam countermeasure for your blog that filters and catches incoming spam comments and spam trackbacks, catching them and letting you delete them all, or if one comment is magically not spam (never happens) … allow it into the index.

Second is the no-www plugin. I believe eventually, the way the internet is headed, that we will do away with the www prefix before domain names. So I recommend you get to an early start and install this plugin today!

Last, but certainly not least, the All In One SEO Plugin for WordPress is definitely one of the most useful tools out there, and there really isn’t a comparable SEO plugin at all. This plugin lets you customize all aspects of search engine optimization on your website, such as your title tags, meta tags, and header tags. It’s also backwards compatible with other seo plugins.

Enjoy, and I hope your WordPress blog is better now that you have read this article.