chad butler's weblog
WP-Members is arguably the first membership plugin that was available for WordPress. It started as a simple project so I could publish my own membership sites on the WordPress platform. 15 years later, it has grown into a much larger plugin than originally conceived and provides a framework for building membership sites and generating revenue.
Here are 5 reasons that I use it for building membership sites. [Read more…]
A cursory search on Google (or your favorite search engine) for WordPress Plugin Reviews is going to yield a massive number of results. I entered “wordpress plugin review” in Google and got over 17,000,000 results. Narrow that down with a specific type of plugin and you might tighten things up a bit. Changing to “wordpress membership plugin review” still yielded more than 1.2 million results. You might get similar results looking for a security plugin, backup plugin, and the list goes on. That’s a good sized mountain of search results. [Read more…]
After blogging for some time, it became evident to me that I needed an editorial calendar. I used to use a spreadsheet for this, and I have seen many other people handle their posting schedule in a similar way.
But I really was looking for something that was more effective, and something that would work well within WordPress. Up until now, I just had not found the right solution.
Here is what Stresslimit says about their Editorial Calendar plugin:
After years of hacking together editorial calendars for our clients using Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs, we decided that the blogosphere needed a better editorial calendar management tool. WordPress lets you create and edit your posts, but does not have the simple and powerful “bird’s eye view” of your content that allows you to control your long-term strategy.
That description sounded exactly like what I was searching for.
Finding this plugin got me somewhat excited because it looked to be what I was searching for. But after trying out other plugins, I will say I was a little skeptical as to whether it would really perform as described.
However, immediately after installing it, I found the plugin work quite well. I was impressed. It has an intuitive interface and had stable performance. It also worked well on my mobile devices.
I particularly like the drag-and-drop interface they have provided. You can easily schedule posts directly from the calendar page. Changing the schedule is as easy as dragging a post to a new day (or changing the time).
All things considered, this is a very well executed plugin and I expect I will be using it consistently. Honestly, after only a couple of weeks using the plugin, I’m not sure how I was able to function without it.
Here is what Chris Brogan had to say about Editorial Calendar:
It works exceptionally well at a very simple, but useful task. It helps you plan out your content with a very useful drag and drop interface. I checked it out a day or two ago and am already using the heck out of it.
No plugin alone can make you a brilliant strategist. But the WordPress Editorial Calendar is a tool that will encourage more strategic habits, thinking, and behavior.
The plugin is available free in the WordPress Plugin Repository.