As many of you know, we have launched a new blog called List25. In the last month, we have been continuously working to improve that site. What appears to be a simple blog list on the front end has a lot of great little things that you never see. In this article, we'll take you behind the scenes of List25 and show you the cool plugins and tricks we're using to power that site. Maybe reading this article will give you some feature ideas for your own site.
List25 is a blog containing lists of intriguing, lesser-known information on a variety of topics. The purpose of this blog is to be a good fun read when you get bored while educating sometimes..
We have the site optimized for readers, so they can always find interesting content while on our site. We also have the site optimized for new authors, so they can easily adopt List25's style and writing format.
Here we go. People are always interested to know what plugins other sites use. Our goal when developing a site is to make things as easy as possible. Plugins are quite handy and save us a lot of time. We'll list a plugin and then share why we're using it.
Akismet - D'oh. We do not want spam comments. Every WordPress installation comes bundled with it for a reason.
Compact Archives:We are using the compact archives plugin to feed the dates area of the archives page. Having the year and months organized in a compact style not only saves space, but also makes it look good.
Featured Posts List with Thumbnails – We are using this to display our “featured” articles in the sidebar. Instead of using a popular views mechanism, we select these articles by hand. This allows us to control and moderate the flow of traffic to specific articles. You can see the live demo in our sidebar or see the image below.
Gravity Forms with MailChimp Plugin - We are using it to power our contact form. We are using the MailChimp plugin to collect emails from the contact form if the user chooses to subscribe. We have already written about Gravity Forms and its benefits in lead generation.
Lazy Load:This allows us to lazily load our images. Basically, when you install Lazy Load, it only loads the areas that are accessed immediately. So if you have a page with 25 failed GIFs, only the first images of the post will load. The rest of the images load as the user scrolls down. By using this technique, the perceived load time of the page is much faster.
MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate – Although we haven't done much affiliate marketing on this site. But we are using Ninja Affiliate to automatically replace some keywords with affiliate links in our posts. This hasn't generated much revenue for that site yet, but that's because it's such a new site.
Members:The Member plugin allows us to create new user roles and limit permission based on the user role. This plugin is a must for any multi-author blog.
No Self Pings - From time to time we link to our own messages. This pretty much tells WordPress not to send pings when we're linking to our own site. Because there is nothing worse than having your own site's trackbacks in your other posts.
Redirection:We are using the redirection plugin to track 404 pages and redirect them properly. It's a good plugin to have in general..
Regenerate Thumbnails – We are using the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin to generate additional image sizes. This allows us to have multiple sizes for design purposes (such as slider navigation, sidebar featured posts, etc.).
Simple Facebook Connect and Simple Twitter Connect – These two plugins are super powerful and are used for various purposes throughout the site. Its #1 purpose is to allow third-party login for comments. See the screenshot below:
Simple Facebook Connect is handling our Facebook Open Graph metadata details, so we have the correct image, title, and description when users share our articles on Facebook.
Twitter Simple Connect is also used to automatically link our Twitter usernames when you type @list25 or any other Twitter user. Because Twitter Connect is using the Twitter Anywhere API, we're also using it for the live tweet box on our Subscribe for List25 page. (This tutorial will show you how to create live tweet boxes on your WordPress site)
Subscribe to Comments – This plugin adds a small checkbox after the comment that allows users to subscribe to comments if they wish.
User Photo – The User Photo plugin allows each author to upload their own image instead of using gravatar. This allows us to moderate the images that appear in our authors' biographies.
VaultPress - We are using VaultPress for backups. It is a backup solution managed by Automattic. They make backup copies of our themes, plugins, posts and all other media files. This protects us from disasters. If something happens, we can always use VaultPress to restore the site to its normal state.
W3 Total Cache:This prevents our site from crashing. List25 is getting a lot of traffic and without this plugin our servers would crash every hour.
WordPress HTTPs – We are using this plugin to make sure our site server is protected. But more importantly, we are using it to host media files and serve them to our Facebook app which we have discussed in this article on WPBeginner.
WordPress SEO by Yoast – This plugin handles our sitemaps and all other on-site SEO like Meta tags, indexing, etc.
WP-Leads – We are using this plugin to add a small checkbox in the feedback form of our MailChimp list. It makes it easy for our users to subscribe to our daily newsletter if they choose.
WPTouch Pro – We are using WP Touch Pro to power our mobile version of the site. We created a custom theme for WP Touch Pro, but it didn't take long.
WP4FB Pro - This plugin is driving our Facebook Giveaway app. From what we have largely discussed about how to give Facebook gifts using WordPress.
That will conclude the list of plugins we are running. Now let's see some other cool tricks we have on the site.
It is important to emphasize that List25 is running on a custom Genesis Child theme. We have some pretty nifty features on the site.
I'm curious header button - When a user clicks on that, it redirects them to a random post on a site. It's essentially simulating a Stumbleupon-like experience. You can do this too. Check out our tutorial on How to Redirect Users to a Random Post in WordPress.
Custom Post Editor Design
The reason we have a custom post editor layout is so our new authors know exactly what kind of formatting we want. If you visit any of our posts, you will see how useful this feature can be. It requires some knowledge to create a custom post editor. Smashing Magazine has a tutorial on how to do this.
Slider
We are using the jQuery version of the SlideDeck plugin to create our slider. They have a WordPress plugin. Take a look at our step-by-step guide to creating a slider in WordPress.
That is all. We hope this has given you ideas for your own site. Let us know your comments and opinions. Oh, and don't forget to check out List25.
