I currently use Google Analytics to monitor traffic for the non-profit I work for. I’ve been doings so since January 2009 when we launched a new site. Here’s the problem. I logged this week to check the stats and guess what? One account out of the dozen I have registered to my username has disappeared … and it’s the one account I depend on for my job. A year and a half of data … gone.

I surfed all the help forums and followed the advice to no benefit. There’s clearly something screwy going on, because at the same time that my account is missing, there’s also a strange new account number, with no data associated with it, showing up in my dashboard. I can only assume this account belongs to some other poor soul who has lost his account and now has mine.

The truly frightening part is that Google has almost NO support mechanism for addressing the issue. No ticketing system. No “premium” support option … nothing.

It’s like finding out Atlas (the greek god holding up the world) is really just a 15 year old kid with a bad complexion and too much time on his hands.

Can I trust Google with my email? Can I trust them with my documents? I no longer think I can. Beware Google Analytics, Beware Google.

Hmmm. So what they hell have I been doing with my time lately. Not blogging, clearly. Well first there’s the day job, I’m trying to keep it . Then I’ve been working on a Real Estate plugin built on the PodsCMS framework. (Which incidentally is about to launch version 1.90) Why a plugin based on a plugin? Well Pods creates the power on the database side to build a better real estate listing system than would be possible using custom fields.

Real Estate listings have LOTS of fields, i.e. List Price, Agent, Square Footage, Neighborhood, etc. Sure you could use WP’s native taxonomies for some of these fields, but there are still going to be a lot of Custom Fields like # of beds, # of baths, etc. And try putting together a standard WP Query to filter for 20 custom fields. Damn. I’m just not that much of a pro I guess.

So the plugin will take the power of the pods framework and package it up in a way that you won’t really have to learn anything about pods in order to use it. I’m also adding some custom functions to create listings, display related listings, etc. Hopefully it will prove a valuable plugin to small to mid-size real estate companies looking to showcase their listings.

Full credit, I started the plugin as part of a freelance project for Big Sea Design. Woot! Woot!

Simplr Registration Form Plugin

Installation Instructions:

Download and unzip the package. Upload the simplr_reg_page folder into your wp-content/plugins directory. Go to your plugins dashboard and click “Activate”.

Usage Instructions:

To use this plugin simply employ the shortcode [Register] on any WordPress post or page. The default role is “subscriber”. To apply another role to the registration simply use the the role parameter, for instance: [Register role="editor"]. If you have created custom roles you may use them as well.

You can also use shortcode so specify a custom confirmation message for each form:

[Register role="teacher" message="Thank you for registering for my site. If you would like to encourage your students to register, please direct them to http://www.domain.com/students"]

Finally, you can specify emails to be notified when a new user is registered. By default site admins will receive notice but to notify others simply use the notify parameter:

[Register role="teacher" message="Thank you for registering for my site. If you would like to encourage your students to register, please direct them to http://www.domain.com/students" notify="email1@email.com,email2@email.com"]

Plugin Options:

Please feel free to suggest future options for this plugin in the comments. The current options are:

• Admin Email: Specify the FROM email you would like to use for the registration confirmation message.
• Confirmation Message: Customize the message you would like to appear in the confimation email.
• Style: Overrides the default stylesheet included with the plugin.

WordPress Custom Post Type UI

Developer: WebDevStudios | Download Link

This was likely the first WordPress 3.0-specific plugin posted on WordPress.org. It creates an easy-to-use interface for creating and managing your custom post types. You can also use it to manage taxonomies.

While I always recommend people try to learn as much about the code as possible so as not to be overly reliant on plugins. This is a good one to keep around. It will make your life easier and keep you functions.php file from getting too crowded.

Post Type Switcher

Post Type Switcher

Developer: John James Jacoby | Download Link

I love this simple little plugin. It adds a post type switcher to your “Publish” meta-box that allows you to easily change a page or a post to a custom post type. Though, I wish he’d find a way to work this into the bulk editing functionality so you could switch multiple posts at once.

WP Easy Post Types

Developer: NewSignature | Download Link

This plugin takes the custom post type user interface to another level. Not only can you create and manage new post types but you can create and manage custom fields and meta boxes associated with a particular post type. It comes with a built-in date picker field to help with post types that are date-specific. Another key feature giving this plugin loads of potential is that it allows you manage the admin display of your created post types. For instance, if you wanted a custom field to show up in the posts list screen, you can do that.

Relations Post Types

Download Link

From a developer POV, the Relations Post Type plugin is the most interesting one I’ve seen because it satisfies the need to easily related data between post types. Say you have an Events post type and you want to associate each Event with a speaker. You can do this by creating a custom taxonomy for “speaker”, but you would be limiting the amount of info you could assign to the term “speaker”. So what if you create another post type for “Speaker” then assigned a speaker to the Event using a custom meta box. You can do that but there will be some serious custom programming involved. That’s what this plugin does.

But before you run off thinking the Relations Post Types plugin is going to save your wordpress dev project,  it still has a long way to go. For one thing, the documentation is non-existent. It comes with an easy to deploy sidebar widget, but to do anything more you’ll need to dig into the code.

Also, the plugin sets up an additional table for storing the relationships, which means you’ll have to do a little SQL to retrieve the info, unless the developers decide to create a special query class. Some might question why the relationships couldn’t be stored as a custom field instead of in a new table. The answer, at least in my estimate, is that a relationship table will allow you to perform more complex and more efficient queries on the data.

So, while this plugin looks awesome in theory. There’s some time before it will be mature enough for non-expert devs to use.

Convert Post Types

Developer: Stephanie Leary | Download Link

Ah hah! Here’s the one I’ve been waiting for. Need to convert all those old events-category posts to you new Events post type? This will do it for you in one click saving you the trouble of performing any DB operations via phpmyadmin. Whoo hoo!

Are there any I forgot? If so, let me know and I’m happy to look at them.

At any rate, for anyone who’s running a pods installation and having trouble getting SEO friendly titles on your pod pages, this plugin creates a template tag <?php pods_seo_title(); ?> that you can use to override wordpress default behavior. The plugins check to see if the page is a pod page, and if so calls the title of the respective pod. If not, it checks to see if the page is singular and returns the TITLE | SITENAME format if it is. Otherwise it returns the SITENAME | SITE DESCRIPTION form.

Download: Pods SEO Titles

The Issue: You’re working on a site designed long before Custom Post Types were an itch in Matt’s cerebellum. But now that the functionality is there and you want to incorporate it into your theme. Previously you used conditional code to theme your single.php file.

<?php if(in_category('foo')) { ?>
   Do something.
<?php } elseif(in_category('bar')) { ?>
   Do something else.
<?php } else { ?>
   Do yet another thing.
<?php } ?>

The thought of adding yet another layer of conditionals makes you sick to your stomach. Custom Post Types need to be treated completely different. They have different categories, taxonomies, and even different sidbars. Arg!

Solution: One simple function. Call it whatever you want, but here’s what it looks like. When I say simple … I mean simple.

function get_post_in_context() {
   global $post;
   $type = $post->post_type;
   include(TEMPLATEPATH .'/layouts/single-'.$type .'-content.php');
}

Now just create a directory in your theme called “layouts”. Then copy and paste all the markup in your single.php file between the get_header() tag and the get_sidebar() tag to a file named single-post-content.php and save the file to your layouts folder.

Now place a the get_post_in_context() tag into your single.php  where you want the markup from single-post-content.php to show up.

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php get_post_in_context(); ?>
 <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

The beauty of this is that you can now create a new single-POSTTYPE-content.php (example:single-events-content.php) file for any of your custom post types and it will automagically get called instead of the single-post-content.php without any more changes to the single.php file.

I can’t take total credit for the idea. Some theme frameworks already employ a version of this strategy. But I need to adapt an existing theme rather than start from a framework. This function above will allow you to scale your existing theme to accomodate new post types without having to redesign your whole site.

http://tinyurl.com/3y7ev4c

WordPress founder Ma.tt Mullenweg explains how WordPress is like jazz.