TechCats » Plugins

How To Install BuddyPress On WordPress CMS?

Rajesh Kanuri — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:30:33 +0000

BuddyPress is social networking CMS which can be added on top WordPress and built to bring people together. It works well to enable people with similar interests to connect and communicate. Some of the fantastic uses might be:

A campus wide social network for a university, school or college.
An internal communication tool for your company.
A niche social network for your interest topic.
A focused social network for your new product.

Read : BuddyPress Review

How To Install BuddyPress on WordPress?

Installing Buddypress is similar to that of installing a plugin in wordpress.

1. First download the BuddyPress plugin from the official website.

2. Login to the admin dashboard of the WordPress and Navigate to Plugins –> Add New –> Upload

3. Upload the plugin and select install now.

4. Activate the plugin and to start using the Buddypress plugin.

5. Activate the default theme or upload a new theme of your choice for Buddypress.

6. Start exploring the Buddpress by navigating to Buddypress –> General Settings.

7. Start enjoying your own social network with Buddypress.

Note: One can install any other WordPress plugin following the steps mentioned above.

WordPress Plugins To Celebrate Christmas On Your Blog

Rajesh Kanuri — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 04:30:36 +0000

Yesterday I have shared the Best WordPress themes for Christmas season, Some of the readers enquired me about the plugins which help to make over the convert WordPress theme and special effects or layers to match the current Christmas niche. I have searched over the web and found these beautiful plugins which helps you to make the things automated and are perfect for the makeover.

WordPress Christmas Plugins:

Christmas Countdown: This plugin allows you to put a nice flash banner with displays the countdown from date to Christmas in hours and days.

Happy Christmas: This plugin will create a perfect skin in your blog. It also adds an image and song in your template. Perfect one for this festival season.

Let It Snow: I think introduction is not necessary to this plugin anyways once after the activation of this plugin, the snowflakes will be falling on the layout of your blog.

Snow Balloons & More: This plugin is similar to “Let It Snow” plugin; In addition to that balloons will also fall on the layout. Using this plugin the snowflakes will move upwards and we can control the direction of the flow in the plugin settings.

WordPress Holidays: This plugin displays candy images on your blog.

WP-Christmas: This plugin creates Christmas snowman and wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and in addition to that falling snowflakes on your blog.

Also check out Must have Plugins to enhance wordpress blog performance.

So Guys choose the best plugin which suits your requirements. Let us know if we miss any one the useful plugin in this festive season. Merry Christmas . . .

Thank Your Commentators with Thank Me Later Plugin

Rajesh Kanuri — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 04:30:37 +0000

Recently we have mentioned about how Commenting will help in driving traffic to my blog and my day of blogging never ends up without commenting on other blogs. The day we started TechCats, We have decided to comment. and maintain good relationship with the fellow bloggers.

If you are regular commentator at TechCats then you would have checked a personalised mail from us with subject “Thank You for Your Comments at TechCats” in your mailbox, we took an opportunity of thanking every commentator for his comments on our blog.

Thank Me Later is plugin specially designed for wordpress blogs and lets you send an automatic messages to the commentators. Thanking the commentator not only makes the commentator feel better and also behaves as a free ad campaign for your blog as you can send some quick updates of your recent posts which may help you in getting a return visit by the commentator.

At the same time some of them may hate your blog for generating auto response mails and they consider your blog as spam blog and they may mark you blog as a spam one and there is also a risk of losing a valuable reader. So what I suggest is to use this plugin occasionally at you blog and I personally do recommend this for new blogs which will help them in gaining some good readership. I got a good response from the commentators and some of them went ahead and enquired about this plugin.

Mashable Style WordPress Plugin to Drag & Drop Images

Rajesh Kanuri — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:19:06 +0000

If you are a regular reader to mashable you will know about the image sharing by just dragging and dropping the image. I just started Google about that and found a beautiful plug-in named Drag to Share by Adrian. It is just a similar plugin version for the script provided by meebo but this particular plug-in is easy to use and we will complete freedom of customization.How It Works?

“Drag to share” is the newest trend in social sharing by just dragging an image and drop it into any social website to share the whole page in real time on Twitter, del.icio.us or Facebook. The plugin offers you a great flexibility so you can let your imagination free and spice up your WordPress based website in a unique way.

How To Stop & Control Spam Comments in WordPress Blogs

Rajesh Kanuri — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:27:57 +0000

Spam comments is one of the biggest problems any webmaster or blogger will face and will be the major task for you to clean up the spam, but you can stop, ban , block spam comments before they become a major problem for you to solve. A simple plug-in can solve the problem of spam and significantly reduce spam comments on your blog.

What is the Plugin?

The name of the plugin is Askimet which is from the Auttomatic company who were the founders of WordPress.

How It Works?

This plugins requires WordPress API key which you get by registering your self at wordpress.com and have to update the plugin and that’s it will solve the problem of you spamming. It will automatically catch up the spam comments where the person posts a comment with repeated URL’s or backlink or abusive language and who does some foul practices which were improper and out the topics. Here is the demo graph of the plugin where it shows the number spam comments it caught and the accuracy it maintained in blocking spam comments

But there are certain limitations for this plugin as it will mark some of the legit comments and marks them as spam this is OK and can work out if you are getting very less spam like 4-5 spam comments per day but it would be hectic if you were getting a hundreds of comments on your blog. In that case you can use WP-Ban plugin in addition to aksimet which will work great.

Let us know if you know about some other plugins which will help us in controlling spam..

Best Social Media Plugins For Your WordPress Blog

Rajesh Kanuri — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:30:00 +0000

Social Media plays and important role to drive instant traffic to your site and also As we always discuss plugins were very important in determining the blog’s performance. I have already told you about the Top 8 Must have plugins after After You Install WordPress Blog, Here are the best social network plugins which you find useful for your blog.

ShareThis: This plugins allows you to share your feeds with more than 50 social media sites & Social networking sites.

Sociable: This is one of the best plugin available for wordpress blog users. It has rich options to choose among the social media sites. It has very good configuration panel.

SexyBookmarks: This is my favourite of all the available social media plugins available. The look and feel this plugins give is ultimate and will suits any blog without much customization. It even has a rich configuration panel to customize it according to our website needs

Tweetmeme: Twitter is becoming more and more popular and here is a beautiful plugin for you blog to allow users to retweet your blog posts.

Digg Digg: Allows you to integrate Digg, Rediit, dZone, Yahoo Buzz, Twitter, facebook and polladium into your wordpress blog. let us know about other social media plugins here

Top 8 Must Have Plug-ins after you Setup WordPress Blog

Rajesh Kanuri — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 07:43:40 +0000

Setting a blog is not complete after you install WordPress and start posting it needs lots of attention and customization and you need not be programming geek to do all this what you have to do is to make sure that you are using the correct set of plug-ins which were available.

All in One SEO Pack

This is the one of top downloaded WordPress plug-in than any other plug-ins. It makes your blog Search Engine friendly and provides lots of features like Canonical URLs, Fine tune Page Navigational Links, Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines, Generates META tags automatically

Google XML Sitemaps

This plug-in will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Every time you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

WP Super Cache

This plug-in generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple mark up. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

SexyBookmarks

Every blogger is aware how important social bookmarking and networking helps a blog to drive traffic, Sexy bookmarks is one the best plug-in where you can get lots of options to choose among social bookmarking sites and it is highly customizable. Check out other available social media plugins available for wordpress

WP-PageNavi

This plug-in adds a more advanced paging navigation for your WordPress blog.

CommentLuv

This plug-in will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit. This makes you able to build a relationship with fellow bloggers.

WP-DB-Backup

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database

Let me know about the other important plug-ins which you feel that I have missed in the list.