I’m listing here significant tools that I use in the WordPress environment.
WordPress Theme:
TwentyTen Theme: I use the TwentyTen theme. It is simple and produces a clean presentation. There isn’t anything that I have wanted to do that I couldn’t figure out a way. I did add Responsive TwentyTen to improve presentation of the site on smaller screens (tablets and phones). I also added Custom CSS to make pages without the sidebar widget full width, and I modified some PHP (see Metaslider below).
Photos and such:
TablePress: To provide a way to present a list of all hikes with relevant data, I chose TablePress. It was simple to set up, is easy to update, presents a clean listing of the hikes, and gives the user abilities to filter the list on key words, to re-sort the list on a column. And I can download the table as a .csv file, which I can then open in a spreadsheet to do some analysis (such as total miles per year, total elevation gain per year, etc.). I did add a number of the TablePress Extensions to, among other things, make it responsive.
NextGen Gallery: I’ve experimented with a few photo gallery plugins, but settled on the NextGEN Photo Gallery. I use it’s basic settings, upload photo files at 1600 dpi, put then into a Gallery, and voila, the thumbnails are in the post and a <click> away from a slide show.
MetaSlider: For the slider of photos in the header I use MetaSlider. Again, I played with a number of options, but chose this one because I could find a way to put it into the header of the TwentyTen theme. Getting it into the Theme did require modifications to header.php, so clearly I needed to set up a Child Theme, which I did with the help of Child Theme Configurator.
Flexible Map: This tool does wonderous things. First, it connects to GoogleMaps and permits adding “markers” that are of interest to the web author. Further, it will draw the definitions of the “markers” from a .kml file. I maintain such a file with the starting location of all of our hikes which, when ‘digested’ by Flexible Map shows the location of the hikes and includes a link for each to the Journal post for the associated hike. Way cool.
Site Performance and Maintenance:
Jetpack: This plugin provides a number of services, but for my use it’s greatest value is in tracking activity on the Journal site.
Updraft Plus WordPress Backup: My choice for backing up the site. Hiking in New Mexico has become very large, a lot of work has gone into it, and at least to me the data it contains is valuable. Updraft Plus has given me confidence that I can recover from a disaster on my ISP, BlueHost (who have given me great service for over 20 years). I perform a backup whenever I’ve made significant changes, and keep the backup files on my GoogleDrive (a no brainer with Updraft Plus).
WP Optimize: Added to improve performance of the site.
Simple Download Monitor: Jetpack tracks visitors and views but doesn’t track downloads of my track files. I enlisted SDM to perform that task for me. The statistics are interesting, allowing me to see what hikes have attracted sufficient interest to download the .kml files.
Update 2021: An update to SDM provides a means to display download count for a specific filter. Since then I’ve been adding that shortcode to the download buttons on each post.
FaceBook Button by WebSoft: Today, everyone uses social media on one way or another. I, too, wanted to provide an easy way for folks to share, or even tell me the Liked what I’ve been publishing. This plugin made it easy to add clean buttons to all my pages and posts.
Classic Editor: With the update to WordPress Version 5, a new scheme for editing pages and posts was introduced. As part of the update, the editor was changed dramatically. I don’t need (nor understand adequately) the block-oriented approach dictated by the new editor. Wishing to still use the old, familiar editor, I installed this plugin to easily restore the Classic Editor.
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