Essential Wordpress Plugins for Web Fiction Writers
So, Steph Payne of Siren Tides and I have been working on this for quite some time now. Way back in November or December, I came across her post "Design Tips for Webserial Writers ," in which she discussed some themes that work well for web serials. Steph and I got to talking and we decided to work together on a list of plugins for web serials. Some are essential, while others are just handy. Unfortunately, these really only apply to webnovelists who are using Wordpress(.org) and some of them will only work properly with Wordpress 2.7+, but if you use Wordpress or have been considering using Wordpress, I highly recommend it.
I got a bit more verbose in my recommendations than Steph did (I just can’t seem to shut myself up sometimes), and it did take us a ridiculously long time to put this together (though not really that long if you consider that she’s in Australia and I’m in the US—ah the magic of the tubes!), but we’re pretty happy with what we’ve come up with. (Steph’s post can be found here )
My Recommendations:
1. WP Ajax Edit Comments
This plugin is really nice for both site admins and visitors to your site; it provides an easy to use, customizable interface for editing comments in the front end of your blog. When logged in as the site admin, every comment will have several buttons below it, including "Edit" "De-link" "Moderate" "Spam" and "Delete." This makes it way easier to manage comments if you’re like me and read and respond to comments from the front end, rather than in the "Edit Comments" tab in the Wordpress back end. (I do this so I can view the post and comments all together as they appear on the site, rather than out of context in chronological order.) I especially like the "De-link" function, which is great for those odd comments that don’t seem like spam but it’s hard to say. Rather than just mark these as spam (and thus flag the poster), you can "De-link" them so you’re not inadvertently playing into their spammy hands.
The plugin also lets you set every little detail of how users are allowed to edit their own comments, from how long after they post, to whether they can edit their email addresses or URLs. Basically, if you’ve ever misspelled something or realized you made a mistake right after posting a comment, but weren’t able to fix it, you understand how important this plugin is. Plus, it’s pretty Ajax. Mmm… we like Ajax…
2. All in One SEO Pack
I really like this plugin. Sure, you can do everything it does yourself without any help from a plugin, but why would you want to? This plugin has a nice settings page where you can set options for rewriting titles (to emphasize important words and phrases for search engines without affecting anything other than the title bar), home description and keywords, and even choose noindex settings for categories and archives to avoid search engines turning up duplicate content and penalizing your ranking.
Then, in the Post or Page edit screen, the plugin adds an "All in One SEO Pack" box were you can set the title, description, and keywords you want search engines to find for that individual post or page. Again, you can get your hands dirty and do all this SEO work yourself, but the plugin makes it soooo much easier. Try it, you’ll like it.
3. Organize Series
This one is particularly useful for webserials, but can be helpful for any type of blog, really. What it does is, in addition to having your posts organized by category, date, and tags, you have the added option to organize them by series. I use mine to organize all the chapters of Children of the First into one series, bonus content (like maps, pictures, bonus stories) in another series, and guest pieces in a third series, making it easy to navigate within each, regardless of when they were posted. I could post chapter 2 months before chapter 1 and they would still show up in the right order in the series.
The very best feature of this plugin is the in-series post navigation it facilitates; it adds (or doesn’t, if you take it out) a fieldset (box) containing links to the previous and next posts in the series to each post in that series. This way, you still have the regular "next" and "previous" links (depending on your theme and settings) which will take you to the next and previous posts chronologically, but you also have links that only take you to posts within that series. So, say I post a chapter, then a status update, then some bonus content, and then another chapter; I’ll have links to take me to each post in order, and other, good looking links to skip straight to the next chapter in the series. Beautiful.
Another part of the in-series navigation that Organize Series provides is an in-post table of contents for that post’s series, providing convenient, attractive, and unobtrusive links to every post in that series, with the current post highlighted in the list. Out of the box, the table of contents appears as an in-post sidebar with the text wrapping around it, which is great for blogs that want to have the table of contents immediately available, either so people can skip around within a series, or just so they can see all the article at a glance. Some webserials use it this way, but I find that having the text wrap around the ToC can be distracting, so I messed with the fairly straight-forward options page (essentially just moving around template tokens) to get the ToC to appear at the bottom of each post, and then mucked with the CSS until I got it how I liked it. Check out what I did with mine. I’m no code genius, so it should be doable if you have any understanding of CSS at all. Or Google. Google can help you code CSS.
One last thing this plugin does: it provides a "series widget" which displays links to all your different series as though they were category archives, AND, when viewing a post belonging to a series you are able to have it display a list of all the posts in that series in the sidebar, so really, there are two tables of contents, one at the bottom of each post (or wherever you put it) and one that appears in the sidebar. A plethora of navigation means nobody gets lost. (Okay, that is not true at all–if there are too many signs then none of them will help, but I think you get my meaning.)
Oh! One LAST last thing Organize Series does: You can set up a Series Table of Contents page to display all the series’ tables of contents (or only icons and descriptions for each) on a single page. I never really set this up, mostly because I felt it would be supremely redundant for my site, but it could be a great way to organize your story or stories. I’d be interested to see how people put it to use, so if you do end up doing something with it, let me know, willya? (The creator of Organize Series used his fairly well. Go figure.)
4. WP Super Cache
This one is fairly self-explanatory; caching saves copies of your pages that can then be displayed very quickly when a visitor views them. Instead of loading each page element individually, which takes a long time, their browser only has to load the cached page, getting everything where it’s supposed to be much quicker. Bottom line: caching makes your site load faster. WP Super Cache is easy to use and gets the job done.
The only thing you have to remember is that a lot of changes you might make to your site will not show up until you clear the cache via the plugin’s options page. There were a couple times when I thought my CSS wasn’t working properly when it turned out I just wasn’t clearing my cache after making changes.
5. Google XML Sitemaps
This is another plugin that does something you can do by hand, but usually don’t want to. Google XML Sitemaps builds an XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your blog, and will notify several major search engines whenever you make changes. It also allows you to include pages in your sitemap which are not actually part of your wordpress blog, so if you combine wordpress with static pages, you can have it all in one sitemap without getting your hands dirty. Also, OPTIONS, OPTIONS, OPTIONS. Lots of em. I use very few of them, but you never know when you’ll want to exclude a category from your sitemap or prioritize author pages…
The plugin’s settings page also has handy links to some sitemap resources, including Google Webmaster tools (which is very useful for making sure search engines are seeing the right stuff, I go through and prune out dead links or duplicate keywords every few weeks). In conjunction with All in One SEO Pack, this can be a very powerful tool for getting your story ranked higher in search engines.
6. MobilePress
I looked for a plugin like this one when a friend over at the Web Fiction Guide Forums informed me that my story was very hard to read on mobile devices. Mobile device users are a very fast-growing market for internet businesses, and one of the most popular things to do with them is read blogs, and of course, web fiction. It’s HUGE in Japan. Seriously. (Don’t believe me? Ask Novelr, CMSWire (twice ), The Telegraph, or The New York Times, to name but a few.)
Mobile device compatibility is an incredibly easy way to give your story access to a new audience… or keep the one you have: Lets say that Joe Shmoe reads 3 chapters of your story before he leaves for work. He has a 30 or 40 minute ride on the bus or metro, so what does he do? He whips out his Blackberry, or his iPhone, or his Shiny-piece-of-Plastic-with-a-web-browser and pulls up your site to start in on chapter 4. But oh noes! Your site is impossible to read on his Blackberry, and if he zooms in enough on his iPhone to read it, he can only read three words without having to scroll back and forth. Well, if I were Joe Shmoe, I’d head on over to a different blog or webserial, one that I could read on the train. Now what’s to make Joe Shmoe come back to your story when he’s home? He’s already a few chapters into the other story, and he’ll be able to pick it back up on the train tomorrow morning.
Don’t give them any reason not to read it. Web fiction readers can be put off by little things, and they have a gajillion stories to choose from, so make sure they can read yours whenever they want, wherever they want. MobilePress even lets you customize the themes and select which theme displays for which mobile browser. There is nothing wrong with this plugin, and no reason not to use it.
Steph’s Recommendations:
1. Comment Licence
This is one of the more simple plugins available to help you. I happen to be in favour of more simple plugins in general, anyway, but this one aids you in adding either comment rules, a license or whatever else you may want to appear near the comment form. For example you may have a few rules you wish your readers to abide by (No flaming, chatspeak, etc) or tell them that by posting ideas and thoughts they accept that if something they say comes up in the story (by coincidence or otherwise) that they can’t claim that you stole from them, etc.
It’s very simple to install and gives you an admin page in which to add and edit whatever you want to appear near the comments. Unfortunately at this point you can only enter plain text.
2. Guestbook Generator
Another of the more simple ones, but this is especially good for stories that don’t allow commenting on individual chapters. It turns your average wordpress page into a… well. Guestbook. Every time you change your theme you will need to “regenerate” it, but it won’t do any harm to any existing comments on the guestbook. It needs to do this because it makes a custom page template from your theme to make the page look less like a normal page and more like an old style guestbook.
3. Tiny MCE Advanced
Use visual mode to edit your posts? This baby is for you. It adds more options to the wordpress visual editor, including the add on of optional extra buttons and the ability to rearrange/remove buttons as suits you and your work flow. There’s an easy to use drag and drop page added to the administrative section to help you add and rearrange things as you like. It even allows you to “Search and Replace” within the post editor.
4. Search Everything
You may not know this, but the search engine that comes with wordpress is rather limited. This is where search everything comes into play, it allows you to decide what gets searched, allow wordpress to search more than just the basics and like the others I’ve suggested, is very easy to install and use – something to be expected from good wordpress plugins. If your search engine works better, chances are your readers will be able to go back and find stories they liked easier, things they were wondering about but couldn’t quite place or more.
5. Highlight Author Comments
The usefulness of this plugin varies, it’s not any use if the author doesn’t comment, for instance, or doesn’t allow comments at all, obviously. But it requires just a little knowledge of CSS and it will change the comments of the user who posted any given posts automatically using the CSS which can be edited to your liking at any time. This is useful to readers because they can easily spot anything you’ve said and insight to the story, etc.
6. Add To Any
The easiest way to take advantage of the many link sharing sites such as delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and the likes, in my opinion, is this easy plugin that lets anyone add your posts to their favourite site to help share the love. Just install it and edit the options page and you should be good to go! You can even pick/limit the sites you’re comfortable letting people easily share on and edit the colours of the widget (which appears on every post).
That’s it for now folks! If you have any questions, feel free to ask, or check out the individual plugins’ home pages. Rock on.
