ERA404 NEWSLETTER

SEASON XIII, ISSUE I

Giving Back to WordPress

JANUARY 2014  |  NEWS ARTICLES

The power of the WordPress blogging tool (really, content management system) has arguably been the massive contributive force behind it. The popularity of WordPress has never been doubted since its inception in 2003 until today, where it's the backbone of millions and millions of websites.

ERA404 has been working with WordPress since its beginnings. We recognized this potential not only by tech-savvy contributive network and platform flexibility, but judged purely by prospect inquiry alone.

The awareness of WordPress's ease of use and diverse application has paved the way for it to be the preferred platform for site upgrades and new builds, alike.

Always a supporter of technology that liberates the dependence of site owners on outside service providers, ERA404 takes great pride in encouraging self-administration of their website, via Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress. Even more so, in the legacy of WordPress projects, niche inadequacies have been found and solutions to these are continuously being provided by ERA404 designers and developers back to the WordPress community. A short list of these solutions are listed below:

ERA404 WordPress Plugins

StaffList

Corporate communications can be routed via subject or department in the out-of-the-box contact form feature of a public web presense. On the internal side, where phone extensions, department heads, technical facilities or email addresses may be referenced for daily business interactions, wouldn't it be handy to have a means of maintaining a staff directory without revising and republishing a full table of contact records?

StaffList is described on WordPress Plugins as: a very light-weight plugin, designed to easily create and manage a staff directory on your WordPress theme. Backend management for add/edit/remove staff records, and front end table with sort by Last Name, First Name, or Directory. Table is paginated and searchable. If this plugin will enhance your own intranet or cut way back on the time required to manage this directory, give StaffList a try.

ImageMeta

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), has been a heavily scrutinized task by individuals responsible for marketing, brand awareness, and sales departements. It is one of the answers to the question 'How do my buyers find my product?', and an often challenging task among a world wide web of billions of sites. A large component of SEO success is attributed to Metadata (or 'data about data,' as it's described by Wikipedia). Attributing additional properties to your website imagery (such as titles, captions or descriptions), even if they're unseen by your site visitors, can be an upperhand in your search engine ranking.

Managing your metadata for all of your site's media can be an arduous task, as the core offers a catalog of images, but requires grooming these properties one-by-one. ImageMeta was developed to condense this task into a single repository whereby all values can be articulated, cleaned, and refined. ImageMeta also optimizes this task by giving controls to duplicate these values to other related meta elements for each image, cutting down the repetition, and making the undertaking a little less daunting. Among the newer features of this plugin, was one for house-keeping: ImageMeta also provides visual indicators of images that may be outdated or no longer necessary, easily linking users to pages where they're featured or embedded, or to the WordPress media manager, for images that are no longer in use.

FoundationTables

Succeeding the popularity of Zurb's famous framework, FoundationTables is a WordPress plugin written by ERA404 to harness the responsiveness the framework provides, and extend the WordPress page editor with a new toolset to easily insert, edit, style and delete Foundation-ready tables.

ERA404 encoders and developers wrote the plugin after several clients with WordPress sites requested easily editable tabled data. Previously, no core toolset existed to both build these collections of information and publish them responsively. With the FoundationTables plugin, users can now take advantage of Foundation's responsiveness for different screen sizes and devices, such as stacking data to fit the width of the narrower window of a mobile phone. FoundationTables comes pre-packaged with several design styles, but a separate CSS is also included for unobstructed custom theming. If your website uses a Foundation template, consider FoundationTables to be your solution for quickly and customarily inserting your tabled information.

These plugins are continuously maintained by ERA404, and new versions are being released all the time. If you would like to be notified of changes to these plugins, or learn about new ERA404 plugins as they're added to WordPress, you are invited to subscribe to the ERA404 newsletter for updates. If you're already subscribed, we hope to be able to share more news in the coming months of tools we've written to empower site owners, and show our appreciation for WordPress, a valuable and commendable technology and community.

ERA404 can help you build a plugin for your own needs. Contact ERA404 about making your own WordPress Plugin idea a reality.