One of the questions posed to me recently was what plugins I would use as a default set of wordpress plugins to ensure we had a standard base that met the following requirements:

• Security
• SEO
• Core functionality

I thought it would be a good idea to share this list so that others can throw in their 2 cents.

SEO by Yoast

Out of the box WordPress features very little in relation to SEO, the disadvantage of this is the average blogger may not realise they need an addon of some kind to allow them to feature more favorably in search engines.

SEO by Yoast adds the ability to easily customise several aspects that effect SEO, these include the title tags and meta tags.

ServerBuddy

ServerBuddy is a handy little plugin which does the simple job of ensuring your WordPress installation is setup correctly. This includes checking all your file permissions to check that you have set them up correctly.

Bulletproof WordPress Security

One of my clients once told me they did not want to use WordPress for their new site because they were concerned about security. With Bulletproof WordPress Security it gives you the extra control you need to be sure your site is as secure as possible, it does this primarily by using .htaccess security. This works because .htaccess files are processed before any other code on your site which means that they are able to stop malicious scripts before they reach WordPress.

Backupbuddy

This is a lifesaver if you ever want to move servers, restore a broken site (especially after a failed WordPress update), or even just move your site from your development environment to live. It backs up your entire WordPress installation, this includes your widgets, themes, plugins, files and the database.

Gravity Forms

Contact Form 7 has long been my go to plugin for forms until a friend told me about Gravity Forms. One of the core benefits of Gravity Forms is that it stores all the data from form entries into the database, has a really powerful visual form editor and allows you to create multipage forms. While it does have a license fee attached which would put many off, for 1 sites its only $39 (or $199 for unlimited sites) but its worth a look if you want more.

Post Credits

This post is based on some research Paul Halfpenny did and the discussions we had about this. Check out his blog www.paulhalfpenny.com if you want to hear his musings.

Today I started work on a new project (don’t worry I don’t plan to neglect my other projects), the new project is http://urlm.im/ which is a url shortener.

While I am very aware that their are lots of URL shorteners I just thought this would be an interesting project to work on and like all my projects I will in time make it completely open source. I will also look at exploring ways in which I can differentiate the site from other URL shorteners but my main aim is to ensure all the code is open source.

At the moment the site is barebones and the first port of call is for me to build the structure I am going to use for the code. It will try to maintain the same code structure I setup for qAdmin to maintain consistency across my projects.

Updated – Project created on github

I realised earlier that I haven’t been keeping people up to date with the latest developments I have made on my open source projects so I thought I would put together a quick update.

qAdmin

qAdmin is the primary project I have been working on in recent weeks and there have been some major developments. In case you havent heard of qAdmin, I developed qAdmin originally for a client I was working on but it was canned due to the client no longer wishing to capture data and the system being no longer needed. The idea behind qAdmin is that you can setup a website to capture data however you see fit, once this data is in a database it can be read by qAdmin, viewed by users with permission and exported to a CSV if necessary. To minimise the impact qAdmin makes on a database it only creates one table, future versions of the system will provide the option to store its user account information in flat files but the preferred option will be to keep the user account information in the database.

qAdmin recent developments

• The web application was completely re-written to be more expandable, the core of the HTML was separated out so you can now easily write custom themes, full skinning engine will be available in later builds.
• CSV export functionality was implemented
• foundation has been setup for adding additional users, interface is on the todo list

If you want to play around with the new version prior to me releasing it properly feel free to download it from my github repository.

I am hoping to release a official beta within the next 2-3 weeks. Prior to this I may be looking for a different name for the project due to the qAdmin.com domain already being taken (By a company that buys domains but doesn’t use them which is annoying).

jQuery Plugins

I have been spending some time developing a few new jQuery plugin but none are polished enough to release. More updates will come about this in the coming weeks.

I am happy to announce I have launched a new open source project, as of tuesday it can be found on github.

qAdmin is a admin panel for a MySQL database that you are already using to collect data from your websites and enables you to view the data in an attractive way. This can be easily added to any MySQL database by running the install.php page which will install the admin panel onto the database, this allows you to setup a username and password and then you are ready to go.

This project is very much work in progress, the first version currently on github was an initial release and has along way to go before we reach v1.00. Please comment on this post or in the git repository wiki on github with any comments you have.

Planned features:

CSV Export
PDF Export
Theming
User control