WordPress CMS: Plugin Must Haves

I’m a stay-at-home’r. After being offered to build my work’s site, I gave it a go despite being a complete novice.

Once I decided to go down the CMS route and ultimately decided on WordPress as the back-end of choice, I entered unknowingly into the vast world of plugins. I’ve tried so many, I’ve lost count of the numbers installed and immediately uninstalled.

A quick background of the organisation the site is for: it comprises of members and other companies and organisations who deal with potentially sensitive issues and documents relating to these issues. Since it’s a member-based organisation, it presented some interesting — but not unusual — challenges for the site build. There are large areas of the site which need to remain private. Within these private areas, are subsections which are also restricted to certain members only. Layers upon layers of privacy and user permissions and registration requirements. Quite a bit of fiddling around was involved.

Anyhow, on to the praise of some very worthy WordPress CMS plugins:

One of the best I’ve found which allows for some very fine customisation of user roles and permissions is Role Scoper. You’ll find it very hard to come across any other plugin that offers the level of support its creator, Kevin does. He’s a plugin genius. This powerful plugin takes basic WordPress user permission functionality and makes it usable for real sites. Role Scoper enables you to create user groups, pages, posts and categories with different permissions; my site could not exist without this plugin … seriously. It goes far beyond what I require for my own site, but it’s nice to know it’s there in case I need to utilise more of its advanced features. I can’t say enough nice things about Role Scoper.

Another that slots very nicely with Role Scoper is a user registration plugin called Register Plus by Skullbit. It takes the user registration page and makes it completely customisable. Allowing you to add fields, ReCaptcha and all sorts of other goodies that make your site more your own and less like a WordPress blog. Another great plugin for websites allowing you to lock down your site can also be found courtesy of Skullbit.

Need a forum for your site? Simple: Press Forum is the answer. Works flawlessly, offers a vast amount of features similar to phpBB forum. Exactly what I needed for my site.

More to come…

Mad Men Returns

Tonight on BBC 2 BBC 4, the second season of Mad Men will begin.

Haven’t seen a more stylish show in quite some time. Can’t wait!

From one obsession to the next…

So, I’ve been away … forever.

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Happy New Years and Happy Valentines (to come). It has been a long, long time.

Been back to the US over Christmas. Ugh. Not that it was “ugh” going to the US. It was “ugh” having to see the parents… and their new and horribly untrained puppy. The one saving grace: they are crate training him so he got to sleep inside the crate and give EBO free run of the house. What a nightmare of a dog.

Anywho. Obsessions. I move from one to next. My new (old) obsession is World of Warcraft. We completely nerded out, bought new PCs and 2 copies of each expansion right around Thanksgiving. Hence my absense from blogging the boredom away right around the end of November. I now relieve the boredom with full-on WoW geekery. Wonder how long this one’ll last…

Another (UK) Food Post

As much as I like to complain about the lack of choice here where we live, we can drive into Glasgow and buy peanut or coconut mochi and pancit noodles. It’s not that bad, really. It’s mostly the convenience factor that’s lacking. If we lived in London, I wouldn’t have near as much to bitch about food-wise just a whole other realm of things to moan about.

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But being stuck out in the ‘burbs, leaves us with little to choose from in terms of anything slightly exotic other than Pot Noodle and Irn Bru. Kidding, of course, we do have some wonderful farmer’s markets and even a great fishmonger up the road from us: Fence Bay. But for everyday shopping, we’re stuck with the bog standard Tesco, Morrisons and Asda. Not exactly glowing with inspiration.

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Much to my delight, I have found that Morrisons’ bakery is far superior than those of the other two. (I was reminded of this by a post on Not From Around Here’s expat blog about the UK lacking bagels.) We’ve had some excellent artisanal bread from Morrisons and I say this with an appreciation that comes from having lived in France. Spelt and rye. Date and walnut. And most recently, a fruited buckwheat batch loaf. Now this is the type of bread the general population of America has never had the pleasure of tasting, being brought up on Wonderbread as the norm. Maybe France and the UK can ship some bakers over and in return, the US can send over our bagel makers and some stuffing recipes.

Chivalry Not Dead … but should be?

We had a dead car sitting in the driveway for over a week. Initial hunches pointed to the battery. Called my father for some advice, as I do in these situations.

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Having replaced a battery before, I took it upon myself to go ahead and get under the hood (bonnet) and do the same with this car. One little thing though, the whole “might explode in your face” and battery acid thing always gets me a little on edge. So, I don the very silly and thick fireplace gloves and take to loosening the cables on the battery terminals.

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That’s when I hear something. I ignored it the first time since the neighbours were having some massive tear-up of their back garden and had some guys working there with loud machinery for a couple weeks now. And I hear it again. The very distinct but also seriously unintelligible Ayrshire accent. (I can understand Glaswegian in a heartbeat; Ayrshire truly baffles me.) It was one of the workers from next door asking me — or at least that’s what I assumed — if my car wouldn’t start. I guess I had the look of helpless woman about me with my overly large leather gloves on to keep any potential battery acid from eating through my skin.

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Next thing I know, in the blink of an eye, he and his workmate have jumped our car and topped up the battery with water — all in his bare hands. After this sincerely noble gesture, and returning with a new battery, he even put the new battery in the car and offered to take our old one to the recycling centre. We had a nice conversation about how crap French cars are and various other things in which I had to have the poor guy repeat himself numerous times. I need an Ayrshire translation guide.

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I’m pretty positive, if this was anywhere down say, near where MotH is from (Bucks), I’d have changed that battery all on my own. I’ve always maintained the further north you go, the nicer folks are — like the US in reverse. Of course, with some anomalies here and there.

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Anyhow. What decade is this again? The 1950’s? Sadly, I couldn’t even offer beer as repayment as he didn’t drink, so made a pot of joe instead. Now, I’m not usually the ungrateful and/or raging feminist type but I was slightly disappointed at not having done the battery swap myself. Ah well. At least my nails were saved. Every once in a blue moon, my usually waivering faith in humanity is ever-so-slightly reaffirmed.

Facebook. Oh god.

I’m not sure why I did it. Well, I do, really.

I’m a thoroughly, 100% bonafide nosy person. But my alternate, legitimate excuse is: you can share pictures with people easily.

Finally, I succumbed to Facebook. Well, for at least half a year now.

Internetsing™ has been my thing since oh, 1994 maybe? 9600 baud modems, no wait… make that 14.4. And bitnet, usenet, Mosaic. Bulletin boards and muds. I am so sad. Although with this dorkitude comes a bit of snobbishness and social networking sites were oft on the receiving end of my uppity nature. But, like an old chick whipping out the peroxide and throwing on hot pants for a night out, I threw caution to the wind and signed up.

Not sure if I suffer from ADD but I certainly get carried away with “new” things. And, then promptly get bored. Hasn’t happened yet with Facebook and I firmly blame all those godawful apps that you can use to shit up your profile. I can easily spend a couple of hours doing inane Facebook app garbage. Facebook does get kudos for being an amazing timesink.

Let me now reiterate that sad statement from above.

British Culinary Quirks

I’ve been meaning to update my POS list but being a lazy arse, I’ll just make a more general post regarding my findings in the realm of British cuisine.

My husband is a Brit; we live in Scotland. I’m, by no means, an expert but I’ve ran across some little nuances from my experiences that set Brits apart in the culinary world — at least in regard of their American counterparts. Let’s start with something that I still don’t quite get, maybe someone could explain it to me…

Margarine

On sandwiches. Regardless of the contents. Even if it’s just a slice of toast with peanut butter, margarine must be added. This is not normal. It is also unnecessary. Do not tell me it’s to stop the bread going soggy. Please stop this insanity. I will soon start a campaign to ban margarine as an illegal substance.

Bacon Sandwiches

Now I love me some bacon. And, British bacon is particularly nice. However, the standard method of consumption includes cold white bread and aforementioned blight on sandwiches: margarine. Cold white bread, cold margarine and nice warm bacon. Just throw it in the bin while you’re at it.

Beet Root

You can just leave it at “beet”. The “root” bit is slightly redundant.

Ice

Use it. Embrace it. Love it. Despite what you might be led to believe in the UK, it’s not expensive; so you can, indeed, use more than one cube in a glass.

Custard

Now here’s a British culinary delight the rest of the world could benefit from. Custard on fruit pie is good. Custard on warm brownie is godly. Go forth and custardize your desserts!

More to come as I happen to remember them! And there are many more… unfortunately brain only works in short intervals and my memory is proverbial shite.

Back to Work

I’m pretty damned lucky.

Having told my previous employer that I wouldn’t be returning to the office after my maternity leave was up, I was fully prepared to be a stay-at-home mom. Fate had other plans for me… dorkier plans, that is. My previous job was split between two organisations. As it turns out, the other organisation was looking for someone to build and administer their new website — me. Best of all, my work would take place entirely in the comfort of my own living room floor in front of this very laptop /does a woot-happy-dance.

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After the two of us came to an agreement about what was expected, off I went in search of a CMS suitable for the site. I tried out demos of Joomla, Drupal and a few other less-than-impressive options. Got our hosting sorted and decided on trying a Joomla install for the build of the new site.

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/makes a loud “ERRRR” buzzer noise.

Turns out Joomla and our host don’t play well together. Couple that with various other bugs and awkwardness and I gave Joomla the boot. I’m sure Joomla is great for folks with decent hosting and those who have the technical mojo to see through the various faults and issues but my desire to get the site up and functional was more pressing than my desire to become one with the Zen of Joomla. Back to square one it seemed. But not for long.

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I smacked my forehead in one of those revelatory, cartoon-like ways and the very dim lightbulb lit: WordPress! After doing a bit of research, it turned out it was staring me in the face the entire time. Lots of real, non-blog sites are utilising WordPress as a CMS and in a very convincing way. Uploaded WordPress and away I went. With some tinkering and modifications, the basics of the site are up and running with some very nice additions (hope to get around to mentioning them soon).

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Just sitting around and waiting for the content to be forwarded my way and the site will be almost ready to go live. Exciting stuff… for nerds I s’pose. ; )

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Weekend in York

Spent the weekend in York.

We wondered whether or not we’d survive. The brakes on the car went to shit on the drive down (thanks auto mechanic who supposedly replaced them on the previous Monday — don’t get me started on mechanics again). Detour into Newcastle to the garage so they could tell us they couldn’t do anything until the following week, yay! Add an EBO fever to the mix and it wasn’t off to a great start to our long weekend.

All in all, we made the best of it. Had gorgeous weather in York. Poor folks were dealing with the aftermath of the River Ouse flooding:

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Took a gander around the Minster on Saturday and Sunday — EBO picked this location to flake out in each day. A heathen after my own heart.

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Had a fab cup of coffee at a little cafe on Swinegate at the aptly named Piglets — really great locale, feels out of the way. Shopped at the market. I’m always up for a little caffeine and retail therapy.

Back to writing … hopefully?

After another long absense, I hope to get back to updating my blog a bit more frequently.

Gardening season is coming to an end. Or, did it ever actually start? Another craptastic “summer” here in Scotland. Rain, rain and more rain. Suicide rates must be sky-high in the west of Scotland.

No dog to speak of after a failed attempt at a puppy — was aggressive toward EBO and they didn’t ever warm up to each other. Ah well. Despite it all, EBO still absolutely adores dogs. Will probably try again in a few years time, and it will be an adoption from an animal shelter and an older dog at that. We won’t be considering any dog under the age of 4. Funny how becoming a parent changes your outlook on… well, just about everything. o.O