What is Soliloquy?

Soliloquy makes it easy to put multiple, responsive jQuery sliders in any page, post, custom post type, or widget on your WordPress site. It even has lightbox support (add as a separate plugin) for images, video, iframe, and more.

Completely responsive, efficient in that it only uses resources when it needs them so site speed isn’t diminished, and multiple sliders can be used on the same page without issue.

“Soliloquy is a powerful WordPress slider plugin that makes creating and maintaining responsive, efficient, secure and SEO friendly sliders a breeze.”

It is available with a single support license (good for one site) at only $20 per year (a steal) or with a developer support license (unlimited sites and access to the addons) for $100 per year.

Example

How To Use the Soliloquy Plugin

Once purchased, installed, and activated you’ll want to enter your license key within the Settings tab of the new Soliloquy menu item so you get access to the automatic updates.

From there, start adding new sliders to your hearts content. When you select ‘Add New’, you’ll be greeted with something like this:

Soliloquy - Add New Slider (click to zoom)

Name your slider and then start adding your images. Once added you can drag-and-drop them to rearrange the slide order. You can also click the pencil icon on each image to edit the image metadata (e.g. add a link when clicked).

Then set your slider size, transition, speed, and duration. There are also a plethora of advanced options that allow you to control navigation, loop, pause on hover, and more.

On the right hand side of your screen you’ll notice a box labeled Soliloquy Instructions. This will show you the shortcode you can use to insert your slider in any post, page, CPT, or widget.

To make things easier, the post/page editing screen has a new icon next to the Upload/Insert button that will allow you to choose a slider and have the shortcode automatically added.

Soliloquy Plugin Support

All licences come with access to the documentation and forum access. The developer license also allows for priority ticketing.

First, let me start by offering a disclaimer: These are strictly my opinions on the differences between WordPress .org and .com and more importantly, the differences between who should be using them based on nothing more than what makes the most logical sense. This is not in any way a comprehensive comparison and I do not speak for those in charge of either .org or .com.

With that out of the way let me explain how this post came to be. Since the majority of my time here is spent creating custom WordPress themes for individuals and small businesses, I have a vested interest in the future of the WordPress software (.org) and as such, I keep tabs on upcoming features in new releases. The next major release of WordPress (.org) is version 3.4.

Based on the current feature highlights as of this writing (04/27/2012), it seems there is quite a bit of focus on theme customization and theme selection. With so many complaints from developers and users alike about the current state of the Media Library, it seems strange to me why the focus is on something that appears useless for (.org) users but great for (.com) users.

Like a good social media puppet I immediately asked the hoards on Twitter and received a response from @evansolomon:

@designpx Explain why it should be on .com only.

— Evan Solomon (@evansolomon) April 27, 2012

@designpx You’re wrong about theme market share. I have data.

— Evan Solomon (@evansolomon) April 27, 2012

@designpx There are tens of millions of .org sites. They aren’t all pros. Many are one click installs from hosts with no technical knowledge

— Evan Solomon (@evansolomon) April 27, 2012

My next reply was split between two Tweets, here it is in full:

“Just because tons of people are loading up .org on their domains because they heard it’s what “pros” do or because their host has a one-click option doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing. They SHOULD be on .com, they just don’t know any better.

Our conversation was quickly stifled by the 140 limit so I decided to make my point via post. So, here we are.

First, let me explain how I see the differences between WP.org and WP.com and who “should” be using which.

• WordPress.com – for the most part, Beginners – Those looking to get introduced to the world of blogging. Those that don’t need custom themes and are fine with the pre-made options. A news, updates, or Tumblr-like blog of a business that doesn’t want it hosted on their server and is fine with having a pre-made theme.
• WordPress.org – Pros – Small to large businesses. Those who are familiar with running their own websites. Those with technical knowledge or the ability to hire those with technical knowledge.

I understand that the data might show a ton of people searching and playing with themes who are using WP.org but that doesn’t mean that’s the way it should be. It might just mean a failure at differentiating the two (.org and .com). But, maybe the ones in charge don’t want to differentiate the two…but then why are they different?

It’s true, many people have self-hosted WordPress sites because they either heard it’s the more “professional” thing to do, their host offers a one-click install, or they need more control over the look and functionality of the site. These people either need someone to develop a custom theme so they are actually professional or they should stop wasting money on hosting and use WP.com. In either case, they don’t need better ways of viewing and customizing pre-made themes. Leave that to WP.com.

In my mind, if someone wants (and is satisfied with) a pre-made theme, they should be using WP.com (or, if they bought a premium theme they would be using a self-hosted install but again, they’ll either hire someone to make tweaks to it or leave it as is…either way, they don’t need extra theme options). There is no reason to pay extra and deal with everything that comes along with hosting your site if this is the case.

I do also realize that sometimes there are people who are ecstatic to have a pre-made theme but also want the freedom that comes with self-hosting. But I don’t think the “data” can show these specific people. I’m willing to bet they’re a minority and just grouped in with the ones who were convinced they needed WP.org or eagerly clicked the one-click WordPress install button that their host offers.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen client sites overloaded with the 100-some-odd themes they’ve installed only to finally realize they need something completely custom to get taken seriously as a business. All of that experimenting should have been done with a WP.com site (or not at all), and now that they’re ready to move on, they don’t need uber-awesome theme viewing abilities.

So, I ask again, why the focus on theme options for 3.4? There must be another reason.

Starter Installation

There are two types of websites you’re going to install Starter on and both need to have the most up-to-date versions of Thesis and WordPress (1.8.4 and 3.3.2 as of this review).

The first type is a brand new site; simply upload the child theme zip file from the WordPress admin or upload it to your themes folder via SFTP.

The second type is a Thesis site which has custom code added to it (custom_functions.php and/or custom.css). For this, copy your current custom folder from thesis_184 and replace the custom folder in the thesis_starter child theme. From there, install as normal.

Starter Theme Options

After installing Starter the first thing you’ll notice is a couple new options pages within the main Thesis options tab:

1. Credits & Affiliate – Here you can add a site credit message, replace the default DIYthemes URL with your affiliate URL, and add your affiliate URL for the Starter theme.
2. Social Media Settings – Here you can choose whether or not to display social sharing buttons on single posts/pages and multipost pages (none, before content, after content). You can also change the share button intro message and add your Google Analytics tracking code.

There are other great new options as well:

• 404 Page Support – If you look on your Settings > Reading options page you will see a new option to choose any page you’d like to use as your custom 404 page.
• Team Page Support – Go to Settings > Reading and choose a page you’d like to use as your team page (this lists the members of your site or team). You can even choose which users get added to this page on each users profile.
• Improved Author Archives – This will now also show the author photo, tagline, bio, and links to social media (including Google+ will rel=author in place).
• Extended User Profiles – You can now add author photo URLs, links to social media profiles, a tagline, Tweet via, and choose whether or not a particular user is shown on the Team page.
• Author Post Box – In Settings > Reading you can also enable the author post box which will show author info under each post.
• Shortcodes – shortcodes now work by default in widgets and in the custom code box (multimedia box).
• New Login CSS File – can be used to customize your login screen.

Landing Page Support

On post and page editing screens you will now see a new option box called Landing Page Options. This will allow you to enable/disable your header/footer, add the landing page widgets sidebar, and add a landing_page CSS class for styling.

New Widget Areas

In your widgets section you will notice a plethora of new widget areas: header, feature box, footer, multimedia box, after static front page, after static pages, after blog posts.

More Navigation Menu Areas

Thesis comes with one menu location out of box, but with Starter you will notice two additional menu locations: top and footer. The top menu adds links to the top right of your header and the footer menu adds centered links below your footer widgets.

Overall I think the Starter Thesis child theme is a definite plus to beginners looking to setup their own business website using WordPress and Thesis. It offers just about everything one needs to get up and going in as little time as possible. It may even be great for developers looking for a new default install with more options than Thesis has out-of-box.

Starter Theme Support

For any issues you can contact Serge directly using his contact form. Serge can also be found actively helping and contributing on the DIYthemes forums.

Grab a stack of paper and a few pens, this is going to be a long post and you should take notes.

…okay, so it wasn’t that long.

There is no such thing as too many plugins, there are only poorly coded plugins.

One of the greatest parts of WordPress is the ability to add damn-near any functionality to your website that is needed through the use of plugins.

This is why they exist.

Let’s simplify the breakdown of a WordPress website for the sake of tackling some common concerns like:

But, isn’t too many plugins bad for SEO?
Too many plugins slow my site down, right?
Can’t you just hard-code the changes to my CSS or functions.php file?

Generally, WordPress consists of 3 parts:

1. Core CMS: this is everything included in a default WordPress install. Basically everything you see in the Admin area and all the default functionality and options available to you.
2. Design: this is your particular theme. Sometimes themes come with added options that you have access to in your admin panel but generally, themes should be the look of your site, not the functionality.
3. Further Functionality: these are plugins. Things like adding shortcodes, social media buttons, opt-in forms, new widgets, etc.

Again, this is a very simplified explanation and there are exceptions and things like Frameworks but for our purposes we won’t go down that rabbit hole.

Armed with this bit of knowledge, let’s tackle the common concerns listed above.

Plugins Are Just Fine For SEO

First of all, adding new functionality to a WordPress site entails adding some sort of code to the site. Because we’re adding more to what is already there, depending on the amount of code (and what it does) there is going to be some (generally unnoticeable) decrease in speed.

This is the nature of the game. If we have two different websites hosted on the same servers and one has membership abilities, a forum, and products for sale, and the other is just a simple blog, the simple blog is going to perform faster because there is less code being called. Simple logic.

This is true no mater where we implement the code: functions.php or as a plugin.

However, if we implemented the code in our functions.php file of our particular theme, that functionality will disappear if we change themes. If we implement it as a plugin, the functionality will remain no matter what theme we have installed. And this is why it is considered best practice to designate functionality changes to plugins.

Secondly, this is also why plugins do not affect SEO in terms of slow speed any more than any other code changes do.

Everything you’ve read about multiple plugins causing issues for SEO, speed, etc. are do to the fact that there are many poorly coded plugins available in numerous places around the web and a general rule of thumb for uneducated website owners is to limit the amount of plugins you have to minimize the chance that you’ll download and activate a bad egg.

But now, you’re no longer uneducated. You know the truth and when you approach a good designer/developer to make changes to your site, you will appreciate it when they suggest making you a custom plugin to address your changes rather than adding code directly to your functions.php file (this is still fine for certain things…everything has its place).

Of course, the trouble is finding a good developer…que the contact us linkage.

Here’s a quick tip for adding content to your WordPress posts that only your RSS feed subscribers will see.

Perhaps you want to reward your subscribers by linking to a free gift in your feed, or maybe you have a video or some other embed in your post that may not show correctly in some feed readers so you want your subscribers to click through to the actual post.

Whatever your reasons this shortcode will do the job.

Open up your themes functions.php file and add the following code (without the <?php):

<?php

/*===========================================
SHORTCODE: ADD CONTENT TO RSS FEEDS ONLY
===========================================*/
function dpx_feed_only_sc( $atts, $content = null ) {
	if ( !is_feed() ) return "";
return $content;
}
add_shortcode( 'subscribers', 'dpx_feed_only_sc' );

Now, simply add something like the following to any of your posts:

[subscribers]Thanks for subscribing! Here's a <a href="http://designpx.com/free-wordpress-blog-setup/" title="Free WordPress Blog Setup">free gift</a>.[/subscribers]

What is Premise?

Premise started as just a simple but feature-rich plugin that enabled WordPress users to create optimized landing pages without having any coding knowledge. These landing pages can be used as sales pages for selling software, services, eBooks, other digital downloads and more.

With the recent release of Premise 2.0, WordPress users can now build secure membership sites as well. It really was the next logical step. Now, you can create beautiful, optimized landing pages and offer folks the option of becoming a member to your website in order to access member-only content. It’s all automated and even has a recurring payments option.

The beauty of purchasing Premise is that there is only a one-time fee instead of the monthly/yearly renewals that many premium WordPress plugins employ. The price is currently set at $165 which gets you unlimited use on websites, membership gateways, digital product downloads, landing pages, copywriting advice, use of the graphics library, software updates, and best of all, support.

How To Use the Premise Plugin

Once you’ve purchased premise and installed the plugin on your WordPress site, you’ll notice two new sections in your WordPress admin menu: Premise and Landing Pages.

The Premise tab will give you access to your Main Settings and your landing page Styles Settings.

Premise 2.0 Settings (click to view full size)

Within the Main Settings there are 7 sections:

1. General
   Here you can add your unique API key, customize your landing page URLs, and enable the Membership Module which is off by default.
2. Content
   Here you can set defaults for your landing pages which can also be overridden per landing page.
3. SEO
   This is your default settings for robots meta and feed auto-detect.
4. Email Providers
   This is where you integrate your landing pages with whatever email opt-in provider you use. It currently only integrates with AWeber, MailChimp, and Constant Contact. No Campaign Monitor…bummer.
5. Sharing
   This is great. You can make your visitors share your content on Twitter or Facebook before they get access to the full pages content.
6. Testing
   Premise provides support for Google Website Optimizer or Visual Website Optimizer in order to split-test your landing pages.
7. Scripts
   Here you can insert any code into the header or footer of your landing pages.

The Styles Settings allow you to create a customized look and feel for as many different landing pages as you want. The options are quite extensive as you can see below:

Premise 2.0 Style Settings (click to view full size)

Each of these sections expand to provide a ridiculous amount of styling options.

Moving on to the Landing Pages tab: when you go to create a new landing page you are presented with 8 different options to choose from:

Premise 2.0 Landing Page Options (click to view full size)

These should be pretty self-explanatory.

And last but certainly not least, we have the membership functionality. Once you enable the membership module in the Premise main settings area you will see a new section in your WordPress admin menu called Member Access. The Settings tab offers the following:

Premise 2.0 Membership Settings (click to view full size)

From there you can add products, manage orders, setup the links to your digital downloads, and view reports.

In order to manage your members, simply navigate to the Users tab in your WordPress admin and you’ll see a few new options.

Premise Plugin Support

Your purchase of Premise gets you unlimited support and updates. If you have any trouble, simply log in to your Premise account and click the help link in the top navigation. This will bring you to a page with a long list of frequently asked questions. If your issue isn’t solved here, scroll down to the end of the page and submit a support ticket.

Copyblogger Media made creating landing pages for WordPress a breeze with their landing pages plugin called Premise.

And today Copyblogger has announced Premise 2.0. The plugin is now a complete digital sales and marketing system for WordPress.

Along with the great landing page features you’ve always enjoyed, the plugin will now allow you to:

Who Needs Premise 2.0?

Premise 2.0 is great for folks who like to do things themeselves. People who want to be involved in the mechanics and features of their WordPress-powered sites. And best of all, Premise 2.0 is for non-technical folks who need a way to create landing pages for products they sell online and a way to manage which members get what.

It’s a wonderfully easy DIY solution to WordPress membership sites.

How Much is Premise 2.0?

As stated on the release post at Copyblogger:

“For a limited time, you can get the brand new fully-featured Premise 2.0, with unlimited everything (including updates and support), and save $70 instead of spending more.

That’s right … get Premise 2.0 Ultimate for only $95. There’s full technical documentation for all the new features, and our support team is always standing by.”

However, as soon as the new site for Premise 2.0 goes live, that deal shatters and you’ll be stuck paying $165. Don’t miss the huge discount, pick up Premise 2.0 today.

Here is a quick tip for those looking to use the Amazon short link service (AMZN.COM) with affiliate links. Of course you can always paste the long URL into something like the Google URL Shortener but since we recently had a client who insisted on using Amazon, we thought we’d share.

Long Amazon Affiliate URL

Most Amazon affiliate URLs look something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1616084731/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=dpx-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1616084731

Shorter Amazon Affiliate URL

We can take that long link, get rid of some of the mess at the end, change the /gp/ to /dp/, keep the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) and our affiliate tag and we end up with something much shorter:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1616084731/?tag=dpx-20

Shortest Amazon Affiliate URL

To go even shorter we can replace the long Amazon URL with the short URL and remove the /dp/ entirely:

http://amzn.com/1616084731/?tag=dpx-20

Readable is no longer available. Stay tuned for new Thesis skins launching soon.

Readable is a free skin for the Thesis Theme framework for WordPress designed and custom coded by yours truly.

It stays true to the nature of Thesis by keeping a clean layout, providing simple typography and remaining clutter-free. If you choose to download it, I expect it to stay that way.

Readable Features

• Clean, readable layout.
• 3-column widgetized footer.
• Social sharing buttons built-in (Twitter, Facebook and Google+).
• Uses the WordPress 3.0+ menu system.
• Supports drop-down menus.
• Supports post thumbnails (featured image).
• Full-width page template support (No Sidebars).
• Pre-packaged shortcodes.
• Compatible with all modern browsers including: IE7, IE8, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.
• Optional: Installation and Customization Service.

Readable Support

Since Readable is a free skin, if you notice anything broken or wonky, contact me and I’ll fix it ASAP.

I’m also offering paid extended support options for those that need it.

Making Readable Better

If you have feature suggestions please don’t hesitate to contact me. If there is enough demand, I’ll keep adding and refining.