Smart pinging – plugin tip

This tip has less to do with church websites, but to do with blogging method.

Whenever a post is published the a ping is sent to rpc.pingomatic.com to let the updating services know that there is something new. Unfortunately, when a post is edited the updating service is pinged again on save. So that if a spelling mistake is noticed or a URL needs updating, this will result in a new ping. The reason that this is a problem is because if a pinging service receives overly-frequent updates, the website could be banned for spamming.

The smart update pinger solves this problem by only pinging update services when new posts are published, rather than on edits.

It does not require and configuration options and saves a considerable amount of worry about been banned for spamming.

The reason that blogging method is refered to above, is that different bloggers blog with verying techniques. Some do not update posts, but rather show corrections in the comments. Some are more careful about spelling mistakes. However, no matter how carefully you preview a post, mistakes only seem to show when the publish button is pushed.

Visitor contact form – plugin tip

For a standard blog, the author creates an article or comments on another article and provides a link. Feedback by visitors is then facilitated by the commenting and trackback mechanism. This allows the author and readers to enter into a dialogue.

But for a church website, while the commenting might be important when someone wants to identify a change in the schedule or correct a mistake, the commenting system would tend to be less important. This is because visitors may want to ask more general questions or perhaps do not want their comments or questions made public. Therefore it is important for church websites to provide another way for visitors to ask questions or give feedback.

WordPress does not, by default provide a reply form but any admistrator could make their email available for visitors. However, this has the unfortunate side-effect of inviting spam or unsolicited email. It is better to keep any email addresses private. One solution is to use a comment form on a contact page. One that can be recommended is Contact Form ][. It is easy to insert in posts or pages and customise by changing the CSS.

Verse of the day – plugin tip

Update: See the comments for information regarding a myspace verse of the day plugin

Perhaps one of the most common items seen on chuch website, is a verse of the day. But rather than having to change manually, there is wordpress plugin that can do this automatically.

Table of Contents – plugin tip

Following on from the last post regarding static pages and the comments that pointed out that church blog websites will naturally have more static pages than a standard blog. There is a wordpress plugin to help in the construction of table of contents for each of the pages. Also, the plugin can create table of contents for posts, not just pages. The plugin is called Table of Contents Generator.

Here are some examples of the plugin in use.

Static Pages – search tip

One of the key points to note for a church website is that there will be several pages that contain information that will not change, or will only change occasionally. For instance, a page with contact details, or directions to the church. And a page with more detail than the front page with regards a mission statement or statement of faith. With wordpress you can create static pages and these are then themed/styled just like you posts.

Problem: However, by default wordpress does not search these static pages.

Solution: A plugin called search static, that includes your static pages in the search.

So if you have any static pages outside of wordress on your site, change them to static pages and use this plugin. Then you will not need to use google with the site: limiter.