When you have a new web-project just about to be started, you frequently face the problem of the CMS selection – ‘Which CMS is better’? There’s a hundred and more various CMS out there. To name just a few – PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, e107, XOOPS, Nucleus, Typo3, Xaraya, YACS! (visit http://www.opensourcecms.com/ for much more and try for yourself).

If you gooogle this problem, you will get loads of forums discussing topics like ‘Mambo vs Drupal’, ‘PHP-Nuke vs PostNuke’ etc. But, to be sure, this ‘source’ of information is not likely to really help you choose. What you need is a good in-depth overview of the systems.
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This is the plugin you may find useful if you want to keep visitors to your blog for more than just one-post-reading-time. This plugin will provide to the user entries, which have some common/similar words in the post/page title.

Installation is as always easy. Most probably you will want to put these ‘related entries’ into yours ‘sidebar.php’ or ‘right-sidebar.php’ (if you have one), and your code may well look like this (I assume that in ‘Plugins’->’Related Posts Options’ you set the pre/post tags to ‘<li>’ and ‘</li>’):


<?php if ( is_single() || is_page() ) { ?>
<ul>
<li><h2>Related entries</h2></li>
<?php related_posts(); ?>
</ul>
<?php } ?>

The block of PHP code above the actual insert determines whether blog visitor is on the post page or blog page – this way ‘related entries’ will not be shown in listing pages. If you want, you can leave only is_single() in place, for related entries to appear only in posts, and not in pages.

Finally, plugin home is: http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/archives/2006/02/02/wordpress-related-entries-20/

If you want your visitors, arriving from the wrong or just outdated links to find what they might be looking for, it will be a good idea to check Related posts for your 404. That plugin adds an extra function related_posts_404(), which you should put into your ’404.php’ template file. Now, when someone gets to your 404 page, they might as well get a list of close hits from your blog, and stay longer.

After installing WordPress, the first thing I was looking for was improving my personal WordPress experience with plugins – for extended functionality, usability, and pleasure of use .

Here I will present (and regularly update) the list of plugins I looked at and installed.

The first plugin I installed is WordPress Database Backup – we all know, how painful can the data loss be. Installation is easy (copy-activate), and on-demand database backup is immediately available in Manage -> Backup menu. Plugin automatically pre-selects all default database tables, and allows you to select any other tables you happen to have in your database – these can be, for example, tables of your WordPress plugins. I would recommend saving all the database tables, except if you know that there are tables not related to your blog (you can tell this usually by the table prefix – which is ‘wp_’ by default).

After you are done with the selection of plugins, you can choose to download the backup, email it, or to store it on the server in a backup folder (plugin handles the creation of the backup folder for you).

After pressing ‘Backup’, you will see a nice progress bar, and if you had chosen to download the backup, you will get gzipped backup file.

Updates on other useful plugins coming soon… stay tuned