What did I learn today ?

There is some confusion as to what a widget and a plugin is and the difference of both of them. WordPress has many 3rd party developers who create widgets and plugins for download. Most, if not all, are free of use for anyone using the WordPress platform. Most of the widgets and plugins are compatible with the newest version of WordPress. You can flawlessly upgrade the plugins inside the WordPress Admin panel. There are thousands of plugins and widgets available but what is the difference and what should you be looking for?

A WordPress plugin allows you to add a function to WordPress by downloading a software script. Some of the popular plugins allow for better SEO, Adsense placement, sharing of posts, contact form generator and much more. There are literally thousands of plugins you can download for free that will make your WordPress installation more powerful. Some plugins are visible to the viewer of your WordPress while others are for the back-end where only you can see they are present.

A WordPress widget is an object you can add to your sidebar usually derived from a plugin. Under “Appearance” is the “Widgets” section, you can simply drag and drop objects into your sidebar. When you upload WordPress onto your server you will have some widgets that are already available such as a search box and category section. A widget is very important for your WordPress installation because the sidebar is where the action is other than your content. A well-organized sidebar is essential for reader interaction, advertising placement and an area for your readers to explore other content on your WordPress.

The short answer: A widget is a plugin that you can drag and drop in your sidebar. A plugin is a script that you download that improves the function of your blog in your front-end or back-end. Widgets are always plugins but plugins are not always widgets J

Planning process for a WordPress site

Once you have done your required analyse to identify the functions and features of the proposed WordPress based site you need to identify the plugins/widgets you will required and the theme that you could base the design on.

You may already have identified the required layout but unless you are going to create a theme from scratch you need to identify one that is suitable to begin from.

Think about your proposed sites- what widgets/plugins would they require?

Posted in wordpress | 1 Comment »

Week 7 SLA

March 23rd, 2011

What is a SLA- Service Level Agreement

What is a service level agreement week7

View more presentations from hapy

Posted in relate to clients, Web Diploma | 1 Comment »

Week 6 diagrams

March 16th, 2011

Dynamic web pages and server interaction

Dynamic webpage server and database request

WordPress database schema diagram

WordPress table definitions and schema

Posted in Web Diploma | 1 Comment »

Using robots.txt to stop your website appearing in search engines

March 14th, 2011

While most of the time we want our online content to appear in Goggle and other search engines there are other times that you may want to make sure that either certain pages and folders or the whole site do not. For example if you have sensitive content that you do not want appearing in search engines or if the site is just test one then you probably wouldn’t want google to be promoting it all over the internet.

Therefore if this is the case you can use a robots.txt to tell the robots which pages or folders that they should not index your site.

So what is a robots.txt file

A robots.txt file is as the name suggest a plain text file which simply tells any robots (any piece of software which crawls the net retrieving content and information) what they can and can’t index. You should be aware though that any malware bots will simply ignore robots.txt files so if you trying to protect sensitve content from anything other than search engines then a robots.txt will probably not be enough.

But for our simply requirement of keeping our webpages out of the search engines they should be fine.

Another important aspect to be aware of is that the robots.txt file must go into the root of the main directory eg in the root of the domain because this is where the robots will look for it. They won’t bother looking any where else and will simply index the full site if they can not find a robots.txt to tell them other wise.

How to create a robots.txt

You can either open notepad and type in the directives or use a robots.txt creator such as this one at seobook.com. Either way the resulting file is incredibly simple. For example if want to stop all search engines to not index any of our files then the robots.txt would just contain the following

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

For further information just do a quick search on google.

Posted in Web Diploma | 1 Comment »