Turn WordPress Into a Project Management System

collabpress-mainIf you run a multi-authors blog, there will be times when you need to create projects and assign tasks to your authors. Instead of using a third party project management software, you can now use setup a free project management system right within WordPress, with the help of CollabPress.

CollabPress is a plugin for WordPress that transforms your WP setup into a project management platform. It is developed by Brad Williams (@williamsba) and comes with plenty of features at a price of free.
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Turn Your WordPress Into A Private Twitter-like System

inhouse-twitter-mainWordPress is best known as a blogging platform, but it can be a versatile piece of software as well, allowing you to turn it to almost anything you want. Here is how you can turn a WordPress installation into a in-house private Twitter-like microblogging system.

There is little or no coding required. What you need here is a custom theme and some plugins. There are currently two themes that can instantly turn your blog into a status update system: Prologue and P2.
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How to Create And Embed A Contact Form On The Fly

grunion-form-builder-smallCreating and embedding a form into your WordPress blog is not as easy as it seems. Since WordPress doesn’t come with a built-in form builder, you will have to first install and activate a contact form plugin, then go to the plugin setting to create and configure the form. Lastly, go to your new post and copy the form shortcode into the content area. With Grunion contact form, you can now eliminate all the above mentioned process and create/embed a form to your post on the fly.
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How to Make Your Theme Printer-Friendly Without Plugins

printer-iconIf you consistently provide good content on your blog, there is a high chance that some of your readers will print out your articles for future reference. The problem is, while your blog might look nice in the browser, it could be in a mess when you print it out. While there are several plugins that can format your site to printer-friendly layout, they can add extra overhead to your system and mess up your permalink structure (some plugins add a “/print” behind your URL). Here’s a little trick to make your site printer friendly, without using any plugin.
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How to Show Related Posts in WordPress Without Using Plugin

related-posts-wordThere are many plugins that allow you to display related posts on your site, but most of them are either too bloated, too complicated or too simple. A better way is to implement the related posts function directly into your theme and reduce the server overhead. In this way, you can also theme it up the way you want it.

This tutorial will teach you how you can show related posts in your site without using any plugin.
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Easily Migrate Your SEO Settings With A Single Click

seo-logoWhen it comes to the list of “must-have” plugins, SEO plugin will always be in the list. A good SEO plugin can help you to rewrite your site title, description, meta tags and also redirect all your dead permalinks to active one. At its best, It can help you to achieve higher search ranking, without you having to be a SEO expert.

With that said, there are plenty of SEO plugins that you can use. The All in One SEO Pack, Platinum SEO, Headspace2 and WordPress SEO are all great SEO plugins available in the repository. To make things more complicated, premium themes such as Headway themes, Frugal, Thesis, Genesis etc also comes with inbuilt SEO settings that make SEO plugins obsolete.
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How to Embed Tweets In Your Posts

embed-tweet-blackbirdBlog posts,Twitter, Facebook and many other social networks often go hand in hand. When you publish a blog post, you will often tweet the link to your Twitter account. Sometime when you send a tweet, you will also embed it in your blog post. The problem is, embedding a tweet in your post is not as easy as it should be. It often involves taking screenshot of the tweet, crop/edit it before you upload it to your post. With the introduction of Blackbird Pie, the whole process just become much easier.

Blackbird Pie is a method created by Twitter Media to easily embed a tweet on your site. Feed it with the tweet’s URL and it will generate the necessary code for you to copy/paste to your site.
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Limit The jQuery Lazy Load Plugin to Operate Only In The Content Area

lazy-dazyIf you have noticed, one of the way that highly-trafficked site save bandwidths is to use a lazy load plugin. What this lazy load plugin does is to load the images only when they become visible on the screen. Any images below the visible screen will not be displayed. This is also known as on-demand loading.

In WordPress, there are several lazy load plugins that you can use. One of my favorite is the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin, simply because it just works the moment you activate it. No configuration is required.
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