Mozak Design Blog

Plugins In Review: Redirection

Picture this, a potential client is searching on Google and finds a link to your site. They click on it and … yikes … a 404 page not found error! How embarassing …

One of the more useful Wordpress Plugins that I have been using on my Wordpress Website is something called Redirection. This handy little plugin helps to keep my site navigation clean and useful. Being highly configurable, Redirection provides many different options to help you keep your website navigation in check.

There are two specific cases when I turn to this plugin.

• First, in the event of a page url change or removal.
• Second, if I want to add an external website as a link in my navigation bar.

In the case of the first application, Redirection prevents visitor loss due to “page not found” errors (404s).  Instead, this plug in will redirect visitors to a specific page you select when the invalid URL is requested.

Additionally, Redirection tracks all “page not found” errors that occur on your site. This is important as it tells you exactly which URLs bring people to your site resulted in a 404.

The second application where I find Redirection comes in handy is the addition of and external site to my navigation. This comes in handy if something like a “calendar”, “event registration” or “homepage” exist on another site. To add these items to my navigation I simply create a page with the name I want to show up in my navigation. I then use Redirection to send visitors to the external URL I want when they click on the page name I created. It really is that easy.

Redirection is one of those gems of a Wordpress plugin that helps you gain more control over where your traffic goes because of errors. Installation is quite easy, and works with Wordpress 2.6 and higher.

Check out my video below to see how to install and use the plugin Redirection. (coming soon)

Wordpress Plugin’s In Review: TinyMCE Advanced

Finally you can format your text the way you want!

I remember the first time I sat down to create a post on my new Wordpress blog. It was an exciting moment that quickly changed to frustration. All I wanted to do was change the font size!

Seemed to me like a reasonable enough request. But, I’d be darned if I could figure out how to do that with the default tool bar. Sure I could change from “paragraph” to “Heading 1″ or “Heading 2″ but none of these gave me the results I wanted.

This sent me on a quest for a good wordress wysiwyg editor. After hunting around for a while I discovered two that I liked. One is called “WP Super Edit” and the other is “TinyMCE Advanced”.  Since of the two I prefer TinyMCE Advanced, that is the plugin I will discuss today.

So with out further ado here are some of the features this plugin provides:

1. Change font size and font family !!!
2. Create and editing tables
3. Text justificati0n
4. Text hi-lighting
5. Subscript & superscript
6. Anchor links
7. Search and replace
8. Time & Date insertion
9. Emotions (Smilies)
10. ieSpell checked

40 new formatting buttons in all.

Needless to say this plugin has become a staple in each and every wordpress website & blog I design. To see the plugin installation in action I invite you to watch the video below: