The plugin lists the products purchased, together with simply sharing links for the social networks you’ve configured. Everything happens post purchase – so you’re not making your purchase process more complicated, or making barriers to checkout.

The plugin already supports Facebook sharing of purchased items, Twitter posting, and pinning to Pinterest.

Check out the screenshots below of the setup options.

The plugin’s under active development, so any other features you think should go in there, or networks should be added – let me know in the comments!

The post Social Checkout for WooCommerce appeared first on Lee Willis.

I submitted the patch upstream, and Alex kindly pointed out that rather than bodging around in his code – you could achieve the same effect with a filter.

So, here it is. Simply download this file and save it in your wp-content/plugins directory. Activate the plugin in your WordPress backend (It will be listed as “Twitter Tools Tagger”) and away you go. Whenever the twitter-tools plugin tweets about one of your blog posts, the URL will be tagged with analytics tracking.

As an added bonus, version 2.0 of Alex’s plugin can also pump your URLs through the http://bit.ly/ URL shortening service so your URLs will be tagged, and shortened.

So, that’s nice.

The post Tracking Twitter Traffic Redux appeared first on Lee Willis.

This list is my ten “essential” plugins, that I think every wordpress site needs, and they all get installed straight away on any new site I build, so here they are in no particular order…

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against an online web service to see if they look like spam or not – and if you ask me it does a great job. If your site gets in any way popular then you will need this plugin. It comes bundled with WordPress so there’s really no excuse for not enabling it.

Google Analytics for WordPress

A great plugin from the WordPress expert Joost de Valk – this allows you to easily add Google Analytics tracking code to your blog. You can download it here.

Google XML Sitemaps

This tool allows you to automatically create an XML sitemap suitable for submission to Google Webmaster Tools. An excellent opportunity to see how your site is being indexed and found by users.

HeadSpace2

Probably the most difficult to set up properly of the lot, Headspace2 describes itself as a “meta-data manager on steriods”. By default WordPress generates meta descriptions and keywords itself, but it often can’t do a great job (After all – you can probably summarise your article better than a computer – right?). Headspace2 lets you set sensible defaults for page titles, and meta-tags, and then offers you to override them for each post allowing you to put in meaningful descriptions, and keywords, and set SEO-friendly titles.

Robots Meta

This plugin offers an easy way for you to control your robot meta tags. For the uninitiated this means you can choose which of your archives (Date, Author, Category, Tags etc.) can be indexed by Google – allowing you to choose the scheme that makes most sense or your site navigation.

Secure WordPress

This is a fairly simple little plugin that takes care of hiding bits of information in the background of your site that might otherwise make your site easier to attack – and no one wants to deal with a hacked site do they! Get it here.

Sociable

Another simple plugin – it adds social bookmarking buttons to your post so that your readers can share your musings with their friends, colleagues, and the rest of the Internet too. It offers a great selection of social sites, so you’ll be sure to find a set that match your business.

Subscribe2

This plugin allows your readers to subcribe to updates via email – receiving an email every time there is a new post or page. This is an essential plugin if your audience is non-technical and wouldn’t know their RSS from their elbow …

Subscribe To Comments

If people comment on your posts, then they’re starting a dialogue – one that you’ll want to continue. This plugin lets people receive notifications when other comments are made against a post they’ve commented on. There are other options for this sort of functionality (Disqus, Intense Debate etc.) – but this is a good option that works well.

Twitter Tools

An excellent tool that lets you join up your twitter following with your blog, turning blog posts into automatic tweets, and letting you feature your tweets in the sidebar of your blog. You can get the plugin from here – although I’d also recommend checking out my previous post about how to track your twitter traffic so you can tag the tweets it produces with Google Analytics and you can see how effective it’s being.

Roundup

If you get all of these installed and set up you’ll have the basic of an SEO friendly blog which will allow your readers to interact with you how they want – now you just have to write engaging content!

The post 10 Essential WordPress Plugins appeared first on Lee Willis.

So, Twitter is a revolution (Apparently). The important thing about Twitter isn’t that you can find out what Stephen Fry had for lunch, or when Oprah is having her makeup done. No, the important thing, for people trying to use Twitter as a a weapon in their digital marketing arsenal, is that Twitter traffic is 10x higher through their API, than through their website.

What is Twitter doing for you?

So what does that mean for Average Joe Ltd. trying to engage with his customers in a brave new digital world?

Simple – links that you post are likely to get read on a mobile phone, or in any one of hundreds of different desktop clients . There’s every chance that if someone clicks through to your site you will have no idea that they came from a Twitter link (Desktop clients particularly tend not to send the all-important HTTP-Referrer information).

So – what’s to be done?

For SnugBaby, as well as twittering as a normal user, we use the excellent WordPress “Twitter Tools” plugin to tweet when we update our blog. So – how to track how much traffic we were generating from these links? Fortunately there’s a fairly straightforward solution to the problem. We analyse our traffic using Google Analytics, which provides the ability to “tag” links with extra information. This is commonly used to track inbound links relating to specific marketing, or email campaigns – but we use it to track Twitter as a campaign all of it’s own. This is nothing new.

However – our blog-related links are tweeted automatically – so we needed to make some changes to the Twitter Tools plugin to add on the tracking codes.

The Solution

For those that are interested I’ll step through the changes below – but if you want a quick twitter tracking fix, then you can download a patch (Against version 1.6 of twitter tools), or a complete copy of the twitter-tools.php file.

Step 1. Flexibility is king

We want to make our solution a little bit flexible, so we set up the tagging as a setting which can be controlled through the WordPress admin pages. We called it extra_query_args:

	$this->options = array(
			'twitter_username'
			, 'twitter_password'
			, 'create_blog_posts'
			, 'create_digest'
			, 'create_digest_weekly'
			, 'digest_daily_time'
			, 'digest_weekly_time'
			, 'digest_weekly_day'
			, 'digest_title'
			, 'digest_title_weekly'
			, 'blog_post_author'
			, 'blog_post_category'
			, 'blog_post_tags'
			, 'notify_twitter'
			, 'sidebar_tweet_count'
			, 'tweet_from_sidebar'
			, 'give_tt_credit'
			, 'exclude_reply_tweets'
			, 'last_tweet_download'
			, 'doing_tweet_download'
			, 'doing_digest_post'
			, 'install_date'
			, 'js_lib'
			, 'digest_tweet_order'
			, 'notify_twitter_default'
			, 'extra_query_args'
		);

We also provide a sensible default for people installing the first time:

$this->extra_query_args = '?utm_source=twitter&
utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter';

The final step is to build the form that will let users change the value of the new parameter:

<div class="option">
  <label for="aktt_extra_query_args">'.__('Text to tag on
the end of URLs in generated tweets', 'twitter-tools').
'</label>
  <input type="text" size="30" name="aktt_extra_query_args"
id="aktt_extra_query_args" value="'.$aktt->extra_query_args
.'" />
  <span>'.__('Include the leading ? before query args',
'twitter-tools').'</span>
</div>

Step 2. The magic bit

The final change simply adds the contents of your parameter onto the end of the post URL before passing it off to the URL shortener.

$url = $url . $this->extra_query_args;

Job Done

And that’s that. Twitter tools will now post URLs that include tracking information – all you have to do know is keep an eye out for them in Google Analytics!

The post Tracking Twitter Traffic appeared first on Lee Willis.