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Part of Wordpress’ popularity is the wealth of plugins available to add all sorts of functionality. This extensibility allows the Wordpress user admin afford a very rich environment for their users. However, as the title suggests plugins are a two edge sword. While they deliver new capability, they also deliver upgrade and version control headaches.

This is because plugins are a voluntary effort. They invariably start as a effort to provide functionality to the author’s own site as well as sharing with others. But over time maintenance of plugins becomes a lower priority over making a living.

If you have a large site that depends on stability and performance for a living, the rule of thumb for Wordpress Plugins is less is more. Job number one is stability ahead of functionality which sits just behind performance.

Job one includes making sure you regularly upgrade to maintain the security of your site. If you need to add a plugin, make sure that it can survive upgrades or discard them. Remember, the more complex the plugin the more things that can go wrong.

Secondly, have a test site. I can’t believe the number of bloggers who do not maintain a test site to test upgrades, plugins, theme changes etc. This sounds like a lot of work, but believe me, when your site crashes in the middle of the night and the complaints roar in, you will thank your ability to quickly recover.

Thirdly ask the hard question, do I really need that plugin or is it just vanity. Quality content is really the key to traffic.

The Wall St Journal has an interesting article today on people who blog for money. According to the lead, 452,000 people claim that blogging is their primary source of income:

Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as “spokesbloggers” — paid by advertisers to blog about products.

This is a lot higher than I would have though this number should be but it suspect it also includes those who blog corporately or blog for high profile sites like Huffington Post.

One of the questions we get regularly asked is “how come my post looks wrong and the fonts are screwed up” or something similar. Our response is usually to ask whether or not you cut and paste from Word or another word processor.

This is because Word uses a lot of inline style code that when you cut and paste it will follow you to Wordpress. If you want to see that, you can click on the HTML tab in editor and you will see lots of <div> and <span> tags.

However help is at hand. Here is a good post on the subject from Rubiqube.

As part of job we run into many first time bloggers and web presence new persons. As you would expect, they spend a lot of time being preoccupied with what their site looks like. We understand this and can appreciate that it a personal expression and why it would be an important, the completion of your website design is only the end of the beginning.

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If you run lists pages like we do then you will know doubt curse at the process you need to go through with Wordpress to add the link to the text in question.

For example.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/automatic-links/

We curse no more, because there is a plugin that will automagically add the correct link into your page.  You should now see that the above link is linked, which also is the link to where you can get the plugin.

Wordpress is not known for it’s ecommerce prouess but there is a plugin that adds a shopping cart to Wordpress. That plugin is called the Wordpress eCommerce Plugin from Instinct Software.

The WEP is a wordpress plugin, so it installs the same way that your would install a normal plugin. WEP integrates with Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.net, Payment Express and many other trusted payment processors. WEP has a classic shopping cart as well one-product-click-through-to-pay system that you see on other ecommerce systems.

It is fully tailorable and templatea-able the same way that you do for Wordpress so you can integrate it seemlessly into your existing blog.

While the core WEP version is downloadable for free, additional modules are charged for. You can find a full list of modules to purchase here.

The WEP plugin solves a real need for bloggers wishing to integrate ecommerce into their site. We think that the ability to sell ebooks and other digital products will be a real revenue stream for our partners and customers.

So start thinking about that ebook you want to sell.

This is part three of a series on Google Page Rank. You can start here.

Inbound or back linking is the most talked about aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and has a material effect on your Page Rank. As we discussed earlier, your PR can only be maximized in one of two ways, firstly by correctly structuring your internal links to the new and increasing quality content and secondly getting people with PR to share their vote with you by linking.

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I want to spend some time better understanding page rank before we move onto how to make your site PR friendly. In the first article we discussed what Page Rank was and where it came from. We tried to make it a primer, but there was still some confusion, so lets break it down further.

• A website has a maximum amount of PageRank that is distributed between its pages by internal links.
• The maximum amount of PageRank in a site increases as the number of pages in the site increases.

These first two rules are important. Your internal site rank is based upto a point on the amount of quality content you have on your site, but there is a maximum amount of PR you can have.

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We get asked that question a lot. Just how do you get information on a blog. It is of course useful to understand what goals you should be looking at. One should always be realistic what they can achieve given their niche. Obviously entertainment rags (eg Perez Hilton), techno-geek sites (Techcrunch) and big news aggregation (Huffington Post) sites get big rankings so they are difficult to compete with, but it is very possible to get good traffic in your own area such as opinion on politics and the law.

The is one reliable source and that is Technorati. As you can see above Blogcritics, which we write for from time to time, has a weekly page view of 1/2 million so 2 million per month. You can find it at http://beta.technorati.com.

Head over and wander around, it is very enlightening.

Wordpress 2.7 introduced a new feature that better manages multiple numerous comments on a post. They created multiple pages to delineate the comments. Below is an example:

http://example.com/my-post-permalink/

http://example.com/my-post-permalink/comment-page-2/

However there is a problem with this, Google will look at this as multiple pages with duplicate content. And as we talked about here, that is behaviour that can get you penalized.

However there is a plugin that will put an extract on each of the subsequent comment pages. “It is in the repository under SEO for paged comments”.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-for-paged-comments/