Wordpress installation

Wordpress is a very comfortable, powerful and user-friendly blog system. It’s currently the best IMHO. Here’s a recommendation how to make the basic installation even more powerful using plugins.

Embedding Flash Videos

Embedding Flash videos with the Flash Video Player which is based on the famous JWPlayer. To embed a video in your Article, just insert

[flashvideo file=video/video.flv /]

Securing your Blog

Force Login

If you don’t want all blog posts to be public to everyone, the following plugins are for you. A 100% private blog needs the Force User Login plugin. This will give you the login dialog right after you enter the blog. Users need to register in order to see anything. The plugin comes with only one PHP file which can be edited to define the landing page after successful login.

Content Control

If you want the full control, you should install the Social Privacy for wordpress. It comes with a set of plugins to

• restrict users to see only defined article categories
• support permission-based RSS feeds
• send out email notifications to subscribers based on their permissions

It gives you great control to allow users to read only posts they should be.

Single Sign On with OpenID

Some users might be annoyed to create a new account on your blog. The OpenID plugin helps. Users can login to your blog using any OpenID provider. Providers are for example Google Mail, Yahoo, MySpace and many more. After you installed the plugin, your login dialog is extended by the following line.

An OpenID is a URL. If you want to to login with your GMail account for example, put the following URL in the field

www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

During the login process, it will redirect you to the GMail login page and ask for confirmation.

Image Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a great image gallery plugin. You can create galleries by uploding zip files or bulk-uploading images via Flash-Uploader. It automatically creates thumbnails and resizes the images if needed. Easily include slideshows, albums, image lists into your posts. Absolutely hassle-free.

Sending Welcome Emails

The SB Welcome Email Editor allows you to change the ugly default mail that wordpress sends out when a new user registers.