I decided to relax today and spend some time tweaking the blog, loading up a couple of new plugins and the tweaking of options thereof. One which required about a good hour to set due to the instructions being located on a German site (with handy dandy images) and no English translation. Hello Google Translate.

The first of these two plugins is wpSEO (the German one) which hopefully will take the bother out of setting all the relevant meta data into the header.php by hand that isn’t handled by a standard WordPress install. This new plugin supposedly takes care of all that kind of stuff automatically once the few dozen options are set up. The author had kindly provided a screenshot of the optimum set up which of course was in German so using the Translator extension for Firefox in this case wasn’t an option.

The second one was much easier. The newly upgraded for WP 2.2 Samsarin PHP Widget hit the streets recently and I couldn’t wait to grab it. When I upgraded this blog to WP 2.2 I lost my King Text Widgets which allowed me the option of using PHP code in the text widgets it provided. Having 20 or so extra text style widgets besides the standard 9 built into the Sidebar Widgets plugin came in handy also. But with the upgrade I found that I was not only stuck with just those 9 text widgets that were now built into WordPress itself, but no way to use PHP in the sidebar at all unless I hard coded myself into the sidebar.php template of my theme.

Blah! You want to play with the code for the sidebar feel free. Me? Give me widgets any day. So I have an extra 9 text widgets at my disposal that allow me to use PHP calls if I wish. Life is good in WordPress land.

Now I just have to wait a couple weeks to see if wpSEO is doing the job or not. We’ll see. And if anyone happens to be using it and reads this post, please do me a favor and leave a comment as to how it’s working for you. It would be much appreciated.

Technorati tags: plugins, WP plugins, wpSEO, PHP widget, Samsarin PHP widget, WordPress