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For those of you out there interested in seeing a genealogy site built using ‘mostly’ WordPress, please visit ManyRoads.  Obviously the site is one of mine (my family genealogy).  However, I think it provides a pretty decent example of what you can do to slice and dice a ‘bunch’ of information into a ‘pretty useful’ format.

I have tried to use a plugin for the genealogy database backend (TNG).  Security remains a problem for that plugin, in that it does not work for me.  However I do have a single set of logins between the two systems and databases when used in the manner seen on the site. As is likely obvious, the ManyRoads site uses a large number of plugins including (Revised list as of 29 January 2010):

  • Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin.
  • All in One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. Options configuration panel | Upgrade to Pro Version | Donate | Support | Amazon Wishlist
  • AStickyPostOrderER - AStickyPostOrderER lets you customize the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all, in WordPress 2.3+ blog. Useful when using WordPress as a Content Management System. Now with pagination of post lists.
  • AVH First Defense Against Spam - This plugin gives you the ability to block spammers before content is served.
  • Bad Behavior - Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
  • Category Order- The Category Order plugin allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop.
  • cforms- cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. Features include: comprehensive SPAM protection, Ajax support, Backup & Restore, Multi-Recipients, Role Manager support, Database tracking and many more. Please see ____HISTORY.txt for what’s new and current bugfixes.
  • Collapsing Blogroll- Output the built-in blogroll where the shortcode [collroll] is placed in the post/page. The categories can be collapsed.
  • Count Per Day- Counter, shows reads per page; today, yesterday, last week, last months … on dashboard and widget.
  • Dagon Design Sitemap Generator- Generates a fully customizable sitemap
  • EG-Series- Better organize and highlight your posts by grouping them into series.
  • Enhanced Links- Allows to get better control over the links listing. Also provides a widget view of the links. Please make a donation if you are satisfied.
  • Enhanced Recent Posts- A plugin for wordpress which enhances the built-in “Recent Posts” widget. Please make a donation if you are satisfied.
  • Exclude Pages from Navigation- Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.
  • Flexi Pages Widget- A highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. User friendly widget control comes with various options.
  • Global Post Password- Enables you to define a global password for all password-protected posts. Click here to change the password.
  • Google XML Sitemaps- This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
  • Hana Flv Player- The best way to embed Flash Player and Flash movie in your WordPress Blog. Includes GPL Flowplayer and OS FLV player. Usage: [hana-flv-player video='/source_video.flv' /]
  • Hungred Feature Post List- This plugin is design for hungred.com and people who face the same problem! Please visit the plugin page for more information.
  • Just One Category- On a category’s archive page do not show posts from that category’s children categories unless those posts are also a member of the original category in question. Based on Front Page Categories by Ryan Boren.
  • List category posts- List Category Posts allows you to list posts from a category into a post/page using the [catlist] shortcode. This shortcode accepts a category name or id, the order in which you want the posts to display, and the number of posts to display. You can use [catlist] as many times as needed with different arguments. Usage: [catlist argument1=value1 argument2=value2].
  • My Page Order- My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. The default method of setting the order page by page is extremely clumsy, especially with a large number of pages.
  • NextGEN Gallery- A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the Web 2.0.
  • OpenBook- Displays a book’s cover image, title, author, and other book data from Open Library.
  • p2pConverter- This plugin allows you to easily convert a post to a page and vice versa through an easy to use interface. You may either click on your Manage tab in Administration, and you will see a Convert option under Posts and Pages sub-tabs, or click Convert while editing a post or page in the bottom right side bar. A p2pConverter role capability prevents unwanted users from converting pages (i.e. only Administrators and Editors have this ability), which can be adjusted by using a Role Manager plugin.
  • Page Links To- Allows you to point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. Good for setting up navigational links to non-WP sections of your site or to off-site resources.
  • pageMash- Manage your multitude of pages with pageMash’s slick drag-and-drop style, ajax interface. Allows quick sorting, hiding and organising of parenting.
  • PollDaddy Polls- Create and manage PollDaddy polls and ratings in WordPress
  • RB Internal Links- Link to other blog posts and pages without specifying the full URL. Uses a UI to ease finding the post or page you want to link to.
  • Redirection- Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors
  • Secure WordPress- Little basics for secure your WordPress-installation.
  • SEO Smart Links- SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
  • SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam- Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. This prevents spam from automated bots. Also is WPMU and BuddyPress compatible. Settings | Donate
  • SidebarTabs- sidebarTabs allows you to easily widgets into Tabs
  • Simple Tags- Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.8 and 2.9 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags !
  • Snazzy Archives- Snazzy Archives is a visualization plugin for your WordPress site which creates completely unique archive pages.
  • Social Bookmarks- Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. Use the plugin options under Dashboard > Social to configure it.
  • Subpage Listing- Displays a directory-like listing of subpages where <!–%subpages%–> exists in the content of pages. It will be displayed if a page is blank. txfx_wp_subpages() can be used to display subpages in the sidebar. See this plugin’s site for details.
  • TNG WordPress Integration- Integrates TNG (The Next Generation of Genealogy) with WordPress.
  • Topsy Retweet Button- Provides a Twitter retweet button powered by Topsy.
  • TreeMagic-Cypress- Way of making Internet and Intranet information easily accessible
  • Visitor Maps and Who’s Online- Displays Visitor Maps with location pins, city, and country. Includes a Who’s Online Sidebar to show how many users are online. Includes a Who’s Online admin dashboard to view visitor details. The visitor details include: what page the visitor is on, IP address, host lookup, online time, city, state, country, geolocation maps and more. No API key needed. Settings | Donate
  • WordPress Download Monitor- Manage downloads on your site, view and show hits, and output in posts. If you are upgrading Download Monitor it is a good idea to back-up your database first just in case. You may need to re-save your permalink settings after upgrading if your downloads stop working.
  • WP-phpMyAdmin- Provides phpMyAdmin from the WordPress admin console
  • WP-PostViews- Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. Modified by David Potter to include options for when and where to display view counts.
  • WP-Print- Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.
  • wp-scanner activator- This Plugin adds <!- wpscanner -> to enable wp-scanner to scan your blog.
  • WP-SpamFree- An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.
  • WP Render Blogroll Links- Outputs your Blogroll links to a Page or Post. Add [wp-blogroll] to a Page or Post and all your WordPress links/Blogrolls will be rendered. This extremely simple plug-in enables you to create your own Links page without having to write a custom template.The output can easily be styled with CSS. Each category with its links is encapsulated in a DIV with a classname called “linkcat”. All the links are attributed with the class “brlink”.
  • WP to Twitter- Updates Twitter when you create a new blog post or add to your blogroll using Cli.gs. With a Cli.gs API key, creates a clig in your Cli.gs account with the name of your post as the title.
  • YD Zoomify- This WordPress plugin allows for simple insertion of a Zoomify zoomable web image in a post content, page or template.

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Most of these pointers are courtesy of: http://mywebresource.com

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CSS: Style Sheet Guidelines

Web applications should always adhere to W3C standards and validate correctly. Numerous excellent CSS style Guides are available that discuss the how-tos of achieving these objectives, below are a few:

References:

Tutorial:

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Over the years we have come across numerous useful websites; sites that communicate useful information on web development, standards implementation and more. A few are listed here (we’ll update this list as time goes on…)

Standards

The following sites provide detailed information on web standards. Please remember that all of sites should adhere to applicable web standards! Use these sites to ensure your code complies with the relevant standards.

Tools

Tutorials

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Suggested alpha Standards

  1. alpha Review is final internal review of a website for the purpose of internal quality inspection
  2. all local coding is completed and local developer reviews are completed
  3. the developer believes that the product will meet call client requirements and will pass management examination and sign-off
  4. alpha sites still run on development servers and have not been published to the internet

alpha Readiness Checklist

Please note that all the below criteria, in the checklist, must be met before considering the site as being ready for alpha Review.

Checklist for main page of web site

Does the page have the following?

  1. a name of index.html or equivalent (ie. home.php for WordPress) ? By naming your main home page index.html, users will be able to access your site without supplying a filename at the end of the address.
  2. a title which contains the name of your web site followed by “, CompanyName LLC “. For example: CompanyName LLC
  3. the CompanyName brands used correctly!
  4. the full name of the person to contact regarding your web site .
  5. an email link behind the name of the contact person with an ” @ mail.com ” email address. For example, in the link Sue Jones, the code ” mailto: sjones @ mail.com ” is stored behind the Sue Jones link. If you need an alias for your email contact, contact: webmaster @ CompanyName.com.
  6. META Tags to identify your web site to search engines. We recommend that you use the author, keyword and description META Tags

Checklist for each page of web site

  1. tables
  2. Use sparingly and with caution! Avoid table use in documents whenever possible.
    Table use in CSS or base html should be prohibited!

  3. animated images
  4. Design an animated image so that it stops animating after a few seconds and doesn ‘ t loop continuously. Images that flicker (with a repetitive strobe) should be designed so that the frame rate is not faster than two frames per second. This is especially important for larger flickering images or images which flicker between highly contrasting colors.

    To check a web page for accessibility issues, use a tool like the free tool named A-Prompt Toolkit.

Checklist for your entire web site

  1. Have you changed all link references to www.CompanyName.com?
  2. Remember any copied links must be reachable.

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For the future, to add presentational effects and Web page style, validate documents at the HTML 4.0 level (for the cleanest possible markup), so pages contain little or no HTML 3.2 presentational markup or proprietary stylistic hacks, and use the World Wide Web Consortium ‘ s Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) language to add stylistic effects to your pages.

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From the original article by:
Russ Weakley
13-August-04

Web standards – more than just ‘ table-free sites ‘

The term web standards can mean different things to different people. For some, it is ‘ table-free sites ‘, for others it is ‘ using valid code ‘. However, web standards are much broader than that. A site built to web standards should adhere to standards (HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSLT, DOM, MathML, SVG etc) and pursue best practices (valid code, accessible code, semantically correct code, user-friendly URLs etc).

In other words, a site built to web standards should ideally be lean, clean, CSS-based, accessible, usable and search engine friendly .

About the checklist

This is not an uber-checklist. There are probably many items that could be added. More importantly, it should not be seen as a list of items that must be addressed on every site that you develop. It is simply a Guide that can be used:

  • to show the breadth of web standards
  • as a handy tool for developers during the production phase of websites
  • as an aid for developers who are interested in moving towards web standards

The checklist

  1. Quality of code
    1. Does the site use a correct Doctype?
    2. Does the site use a Character set?
    3. Does the site use Valid (X)HTML?
    4. Does the site use Valid CSS?
    5. Does the site use any CSS hacks?
    6. Does the site use unnecessary classes or ids?
    7. Is the code well structured?
    8. Does the site have any broken links?
    9. How does the site perform in terms of speed/page size?
    10. Does the site have JavaScript errors?
  2. Degree of separation between content and presentation
    1. Does the site use CSS for all presentation aspects (fonts, colour, padding, borders etc)?
    2. Are all decorative images in the CSS, or do they appear in the (X)HTML?
  3. Accessibility for users
    1. Are “alt” attributes used for all descriptive images?
    2. Does the site use relative units rather than absolute units for text size?
    3. Do any aspects of the layout break if font size is increased?
    4. Does the site use visible skip menus?
    5. Does the site use accessible forms?
    6. Does the site use accessible tables?
    7. Is there sufficient colour brightness/contrasts?
    8. Is colour alone used for critical information?
    9. Is there delayed responsiveness for dropdown menus (for users with reduced motor skills)?
    10. Are all links descriptive (for blind users)?
  4. Accessibility for devices
    1. Does the site work acceptably across modern and older browsers?
    2. Is the content accessible with CSS switched off or not supported?
    3. Is the content accessible with images switched off or not supported?
    4. Does the site work in text browsers such as Lynx?
    5. Does the site work well when printed?
    6. Does the site work well in Hand Held devices?
    7. Does the site include detailed metadata?
    8. Does the site work well in a range of browser window sizes?
  5. Basic Usability
    1. Is there a clear visual hierarchy?
    2. Are heading levels easy to distinguish?
    3. Is the site’s navigation easy to understand?
    4. Is the site’s navigation consistent?
    5. Does the site use consistent and appropriate language?
    6. Does the site have a sitemap page and contact page? Are they easy to find?
    7. For large sites, is there a search tool?
    8. Is there a link to the home page on every page in the site?
    9. Are links underlined?
    10. Are visited links clearly defined?
  6. Site management
    1. Does the site have a meaningful and helpful 404 error page that works from any depth in the site?
    2. Does the site use friendly URLs?
    3. Do your URLs work without “www”?
    4. Does the site have a favicon?

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Drop-down menu

Earlier I made some modifications to a WP-plugin for Drop-Down Menus.  I have placed the cleaned up code on this site for any/all to use. You should find it in the Downloads are.

The original plugin is: Copyright 2007 – Zoute snor

css cleaned up and validated by Mark Rabideau — 26 Nov 2007

All rights reserved by Zoute snor. You are free to use this software and redistribute it for free but may not include it in any commercial distribution without prior written permission.

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TreeMagic Cypress

TreeMagic Cypress is a new lightweight browser plugin for WordPress. Install, configure, then double click any word, or select a group of words on the page. On mouse-up a small popup appears adjacent to the selected text that gives you instant access to define, expand and explore related resources. It does not replace or interfere with existing hyperlinks, but adds an instant and powerful reference compliment to all your texts, regardless of formatting and styles.
Read the rest of this entry »

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WordPressHelp.org features

WordPressHelp offers several handy features to authors and readers. We have selected a few plugins that help to create increased readability and connectivity within the post contents. Here is a brief summary of plugins used, what they do and how to use them Read the rest of this entry »

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