Plugins

Background

As we did not and don’t have any ways to earn money with this site the idea of one of our team members was to publish WordPress plugins to get some more exposure. So as we already used a plugin for sending the daily e-mail and did some technical on site search engine optimization that could be converted in a plugin we created two plugins until now:

  1. A mass mailer plugin with which html e-mails can be created and sent to a group of people in a WordPress database.
  2. A simple plugin to set the title tag, meta description and meta keywords tags for posts regardless of the title field etc.

Sending quotes

For sending our daily quote we have developed our own WordPress plugin. With this plugin you can maintain a mailing list and send e-mails in html format. For the html options you would need to have a little html knowledge, but it can also be used for plain text e-mails.

Just go to WordPress for the latest stable version: http://wordpress.org/plugins/ifs-simple-e-mail-management/. And you may want to know it took quite some patience and persistence to get this and the SEO plugin (see below) approved by WordPress.

Planned changes and enhancements are:

  • Support WYSIWYG as an option.
  • Option to include the firstname in the e-mail through the text [ifs-firstname].

Please note the version of the plugin we are using for the daily quotes is a slightly enhanced version of the standard version. And we are very satisfied with it, as it has not been changed for quite a while now as it is working very okay. If you want your own version of the mailer, please let us know.

SEO simple

Well, one of our team members is very simple about on site search engine optimization: just make sure you have good content on a page and set the title tag and meta description tag accordingly, based on the idea that normally the first thing people see of a page, yes a page, not a site, is the title and the meta description of that page.

So that’s what the IFS Simple SEO WordPress plugin basically is all about: setting proper title tag, meta description tag and keywords meta tag. And we use a feature that’s already available in WordPress, so the implementation was also relatively simple.

For download and instruction just go to WordPress: IFS SEO Simple or install from the plugins menu of your WordPress administrator section. Just go to ‘add new’ in the plugins menu and search for ‘ifs seo simple’.

Planned changes and additions are:

  • Make more detailed options for excluding pages to be indexed by search engines (as of now choice is only ‘all archive pages’ excluded.
  • Automatic turning on of the visibility of the custom fields in the edit screens.

2 thoughts on “Plugins

  1. Thomas

    Hi,
    Thanks for creating your IFS Simple Mass Mailer, it gives us an easy way to send newsletters to our subscribers.
    Some of them prefer plain text emails instead of html. How do we send plain text without the html code in the email?
    Best to you!
    Thomas

    Reply
    1. Guus Post author

      Hi Thomas,

      You made me think, but I don’t think I included that option. Shouldn’t be that difficult though, so I will think about it,

      Guus

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Inspiring HTML allowed. Comments are being moderated.