Best WordPress Modifications: Article2pdf

Posted by on July 29, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

PDFSay you want to offer your website content as a downloadable PDFs.  A typical process for this might include:

  1. Copy and paste all of your content into a Word document
  2. Export as PDF
  3. Upload to your website
  4. Modify page to include link to PDF

It seems simple enough, but one can quickly see the drawbacks of using this manual method (ex. possible errors at all stages, can’t upgrade look of documents without recreating each individually, far too many steps to be doing on a regular basis…).

FPDF

However, if you’re using a content management system you can very easily automate the entire process.  The key is to use a PDF creation library such as FPDF.  This free library (the F in FPDF stands for “free”) is easy to use and allows you to create standard PDF documents using nothing more than a few lines of PHP.

Article2pdf

If you’re using WordPress the process is even simpler.  Article2pdf is a free plugin from Marc Schieferdecker that utilizes the FPDF library.  The installation process is like all other WordPress plugins, and it comes with several configuration options and good documentation.

To use Article2pdf, you simply create a template PDF that serves as the basis for all of your PDFs to be generated.  The plugin does the rest of the work in adding the content to your template design.  With the ability to create template files, I’ve found that I can control nearly everything about the look of the PDFs that I need to.  Of the few things I’ve changed within the plugin code itselft, all were cosmetic details that bugged me as a designer–I could have lived without making any changes if I was willing to accept a slightly less refined look in the end.

So quit manually generating PDFs for everything on your website–with FPDF and Article2pdf you can completely automate the process and use the hours saved to generate more great content for your users!

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Best WordPress Modifications: Feedburner

Posted by on July 12, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

Feedburner is a great tool for making the most of your RSS feeds. A free service now owned by Google, Feedburner extends the functionality of your standard RSS feeds in multiple ways:

Metrics – The basic WordPress RSS feed doesn’t give you much of an idea about your readers.  Burning your feeds allows you access to important metrics such as how many people are subscribed to your feed, where they are located, how many unsubscribed readers are accessing your content, etc.

Social Media -Under the optimize tab in your Feedburner account exists an option for FeedFlare–a super easy way to add interactivity to your RSS and email subscriptions.  While the options are somewhat limited, the big names such as Digg, Facebook, del.icio.us and a few others are there and easy to use.

Email – Feedburner makes it easy to deliver your content through email.  Under the publicize tab in your account settings, simply enable email subscriptions and copy and paste the snippet of code into your template.  Your emails will be delivered at a specified time every day that you post something on your blog.  While you don’t have the same degree of control as might be provided by an HTML email service such as MailChimp, your content gets distributed without any work on your part.

Future Modifications – Feedburner routes your feeds through their own servers to provide the benefits described above.  While this may be a drawback to some because your feed address is now of the form feeds.feedburner.com/FlintHillsDesignSnippets instead of something associated with your domain like flinthillsdesign.com/blog/feed, the upshot is that now if your blog moves or your feed address changes, your subscribed readers will not be lost!

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Best WordPress Modifications: WP-Database-Backup

Posted by on July 11, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

WP-Database-Backup (plugin) – This amazing little plugin takes care of backing up your mysql database, allowing instant or scheduled backups to automate the process and ensure that this important task actually gets completed with regularity. WP-Database-Backup only takes care of the database content (the backup is in the format of an sql dump) so you’ll have to take care of images, themes, plugins, etc. with a different method, but it allows you to sleep peacefully knowing that your clients’ content is safe!

You can find WP-Database-Backup here. Thanks to Austin Matzko for such a great modification to WordPress!

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