SlideDeck 2.1: Major (and Free!) Update Imminent

---

• SlideDeck 2.1: Major (and Free!) Update Imminent
• Find Out What People Are Searching For on Your WordPress Site
• The New York Times Develops a WordPress Collaboration Plugin for Editors

SlideDeck 2.1: Major (and Free!) Update Imminent Posted: 06 Jun 2012 11:00 AM PDT Back in March of this year, I reviewed SlideDeck. In short, I loved it, and had no hesitation in naming it the ultimate content slider plugin for WordPress. Sure – there are plenty of content sliders out there (I swear a new plugin is released every bloody day), but as far as I am concerned, SlideDeck is the most stable and feature-packed of the lot. Pricing Issues At the time of the review, my only notable reservation was regarding the cost – with licenses starting at $79 f0r a single site. Ouch. Thankfully, the price points have been revised dramatically. A single license will now set you back $49, with a three site license costing $99, and unlimited usage for $199. I think the new price points offer a far more reasonable value proposition for potential SlideDeck users. New Features! And even better, the folks over at SlideDeck are on the brink of releasing version 2.1, with a whole bunch of new features. And best of all, the update will be completely free to existing users. Although the developers have been (inadvertently) tight-lipped about new features in previous updates, they’re holding back nothing this time. For the full reveal, check out these posts: Looking Ahead: Upcoming Features In SlideDeck 2.1 SlideDeck 2.1 progress update: first screenshots and info New 2.1 screenshots, a Content Source and important announcements Here are a few screenshots to whet your appetite: The dynamic SlideDeck editor The lens picker The manage SlideDecks screen You’ve got to hand it to the SlideDeck crew – they know how to put an attractive plugin together. So, there’s lots to look forward to if you are SlideDeck fan. And if you are not, perhaps it is time that you took a closer look… Tom Ewer on Google+

Find Out What People Are Searching For on Your WordPress Site Posted: 06 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT Good site analytics can tell you what terms users enter to find your website but once they have found you, how do you know that you are providing the information, products or services that they are looking for? If you have a search bar on your site that doesn't give visitors the results they're looking for, they will simply look to another site – maybe your competition's website. Keeping track of the terms your users enter in your search bar can help you customize your site's content to more consistently provide the information that your visitor wants. Search Meter is a plugin for WordPress that automatically tracks and records what people on your site are searching for and, more importantly, if they are finding what they are looking for. After you install and activate it, Search Meter will help you find out what people are searching for so you can optimize your content to be found by visitors. To access your statistics, simply log in to your WordPress Admin, go to the Dashboard and click on the Search Meter to see the most popular searches by past day, week and month. Under the Settings tab, you can determine who you would like to be able to see the search stats. You can also filter the search results to exclude specific words or terms from displaying in the Recent Searches or Popular Searches. There is also a feature that enables you to steer your readers by showing the most popular search terms on the front end. The Popular Searches widget shows the most top successfully searched topics, along with hyperlinks to each search result. If you want to get serious about providing your visitors with the information that they are looking for on your WordPress site, then give yourself the benefit of knowing what they are searching. Try out Search Meter and let us know how you like it. Do you already use Search Meter? We'd love to hear from you about how it has improved your online business, service or blog! Sarah Gooding on Google+

The New York Times Develops a WordPress Collaboration Plugin for Editors Posted: 06 Jun 2012 06:00 AM PDT Earlier this year, the New York Times released a WordPress plugin that will help sites that use editors to proofread and edit others' posts or sites where writers collaborate on the same post. The plugin, called Integrated Content Editor (or ICE), allows changes to a post to be tracked and then accepted or rejected, much like the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word. Here's a glimpse of the plugin in action: In an interview with Poynter.org, Chief Technology Officer Marc Frons from the Times explained why the paper first had the tool developed for their own use. When you're working in a collaborative environment as we and a lot of journalistic organizations are, you really need that ability for multiple people to touch a piece of copy, and for those changes that everyone has made to be catalogued and archived and shown, so that there's a record of who's done what to who, when. … No one on the Web had such a thing, because most bloggers, when you think about that, are smaller operations than most newsrooms.   Tracking Changes Built In WordPress, of course, already does allow you to compare different versions of a document by going to the bottom of the Write/Edit screen and choosing different saved documents. However, this method can be somewhat clunky under certain conditions. The inline method that the ICE plugin employs seems much more convenient. (Note: If you don't see this option at the bottom of your screen, make sure the "Revisions" box is checked under your "Screen Options" tab at the top of the page.)   Downloading the Plugin The ICE plugin is can be downloaded at GitHub, but the files at that page contain more than a simple WordPress plugin. If you are a developer, then you should be able to easily decipher what's what. If you are less experienced with different types of code, then to get the functionality that you see in the first screenshot above, follow these steps: Download the file to your computer Unzip it Dig down into the folders in this order: ice_0.4.0 > ice_0.4.0 > wp-plugin > mce-revisions Zip the "mce-revisions" folder Upload the zipped mce-revisions folder to your site by going to Plugins > Add New > Upload Install and Activate the plugin You can see the blog post from the NY Times where they talk about the tool and their reasons behind its development. Joseph Foley on Google+

You are subscribed to email updates from The WordPress Experts - WPMU.org To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610