Blog sites are popular, and wordpress and all its plugins are getting out of control! Yes, I’ve done a lot of work recently with wordpress templates, finding the right plugin and getting them all to work together nicely. It is for most users a really nice way to quickly and easily get up and running with a website.

I love wordpress. Don’t get me wrong, it totally has revolutionized blog sites. But, it does have a couple draw backs that are becoming pet peeves for me.

Pet Peeve #1. What is up with all the Meta Content? You really have to be careful with the plugins you want to use. Most of them (especially the ones you get for free) use the custom fields or place everything in strange meta tags that get entered into the wordpress tables. So, if you want to know how many orders of a certain product there was from your ‘shopping cart’ plugin or who those new customers are, good luck querying that from your database.

Pet Peeve #2. Plugin mash up. Wouldn’t it be nice if the photos for your products actually looked and operated the same way as the main photo gallery on your website? Too many websites are jamming in the plugins they need with little regard for the user, the continuity of their site, and what the actual usefulness of that plugin is. If you are taking the time to create a website for your business (especially if it will make you money) spend as much time and money on the website and making it work as you did on the lawyers and accountants you needed to set up your business.

Work Arounds? Yes there are a few. You can actually create a custom admin interface for your shopping cart and/or photogallery and have that content displayed in your wordpress site. Using the exec-php plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exec-php/) you can include actual PHP code, but don’t go crazy cause your executed PHP code will be slow if you put to much right in your page content. Instead put in one simple line – to include your custom php code. Does that actually work? Heck ya!

http://dansloanconcert.com with a custom ticket order form and admin backend for printing a PDF of the ticket purchases.

http://svcautodealer.com with a custom admin backend to add cars for sale (searchable without meta tags) and manage the photo gallery. Notice that the Cars for Sale images and Photo Gallery images work the same.

Happy blogging!