Welcome to the WordPress Champs Site!

What This Site Is About

This site is here to help you learn how to look like a WordPress Champion when it comes to making WordPress do things that make you look good.

Most people install WordPress, fiddle with the theme a little, then start posting blog entries.

If you buy a WordPress book, it probably shows you how to go to the WordPress.org site and look for additional Themes and Plugins.  Most also discuss some popular plugins and themes.

The trouble is, as I’m writing this, there are 1,306 Themes and 12,637 Plugins listed on WordPress.org.  Finding nice themes isn’t so difficult, but finding plugins can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Why Should You Care?

Believe it or not, there are TONS of really cool plugins available that can make your WordPress site really sizzle.  Most are free, and some are not.  Some of them help make things a lot nicer for your readers, and many are only useful for you to use inside of the Admin panel.

One thing lots of WordPress users don’t realize is that it can be used to build sites very similar to what you’d do with a typical web page development tool like FrontPage or Dreamweaver.  That is, you can create a site that’s a big tree of pages and subpages.  THIS SITE is such an example.

The only Page that most people create is their About page. Everything else is published as Posts.  That’s nice, but it’s very limited.

In fact, Pages are really easy to create in WordPress!  The problem is, WordPress is designed to work mainly with Posts, not Pages.  So you need to grab a bunch of (free) plugins to make it more useful with lots of Pages.  None of them are complicated.  The trouble is finding useful plugins!

What’s The Problem Finding Useful Plugins?

The challenge in finding useful Plugins is that it can be a bit of a “name game”. You’re stuck searching for terms that may or may not be the same words the plugin authors used to classify their plugins.  And if you don’t know what terms THEY used, then it can be next to impossible finding their stuff.

To make matters worse, many plugin authors read and write English as a second (or third or forth) language.  They’ll often pick words that native English speakers would not choose to describe a plugin, or its features and benefits.  Which, curiously enough, makes them easier to find by non-English speakers!

How About An Example

For example, I was recently looking around for a plugin to help me deal with Page categories.  Now, most people may know what “categories” are in terms of how WordPress uses them.  But since most people only deal with Posts, they don’t realize that there’s no way to assign category tags to Pages.  I bet you didn’t know either!

Many of the plugins on WordPress.org are somewhat obsolete and don’t work with the newest plumbing inside of WordPress.  Many of the plugins that deal with Page Categories are like this; they haven’t been updated in a while.  I didn’t realize that there’s a good reason for this, although it’s not very obvious.

I searched high and low on the WordPress.org site, and just couldn’t find what I wanted.  I did some searching in Google and eventually stumbled into an article someone wrote who happened to be talking about using “taxonomies” in WordPress.  Well, it just so happens that the word “taxonomy” is a synonym for “category” in this context.  Only … who the heck would think of THAT?

Upon discovering this, I searched for plugins on WordPress.org related to the term “taxonomy” and sure enough, there are a BUNCH of them.  And virtually all of them deal with Pages, rather than Posts.  Go figure.

So it turns out that the reason that the older Page category plugins haven’t been updated is because, at some point in time, all of the plugin authors started to rename their plugins as “Taxonomy” plugins rather than “Category” plugins.  They’ve been updated, but they got renamed in the process.  And a bunch of new ones were created as well.

How Much Time Do You Have To Search For Needles In Haystacks?

I don’t know how much time you’ve got to spend digging around playing name games like this trying to find useful plugins, but I can tell you from experience that it can take quite a while.  As in several hours.

A couple of friends were complaining to me about this one day and I said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place where you could post questions about plugins you’re looking for and they’d actually help find them for you?”

Both friends said the same thing: “Why don’t you do that?”

They suggested I set up a membership site and charge a very modest monthly fee to access it.  As I dig up interesting plugins, I’d document them and send out an email to everybody letting them know I just found something useful.

What’s Your Time Worth?

I don’t know how much you figure your time is worth, but I can pretty much guarantee you that, even if it’s just $10/hour, you’ll save HOURS of time every month just in what you’ll find here!  My goal is to help you leverage your time.  Let me put in the legwork finding useful plugins, Tips, and Tricks, and you can put them to work and look like a champ!

And over time, I’ll be building up quite a library of useful information here related to both WordPress plugins, as well as various Tips and Tricks that will be helpful.