Opt-in Front Page Plugin For WordPress
One of the goals of SanAntonioNews.com, an experimental news site I’m working on, is to evaluate how open source tools and publishing platforms can be used in new ways to merge content from traditional main stream media and citizen media. Alpha version .04 of SanAntonioNews.com was released earlier this month on the WordPress blogging platform.
A limitation of many blogging platforms is that they are based on a chronological publishing system. This is also one of the things that make them great. The newest stuff goes up front all the time. That works pretty well for traditional blogs like ContentDeveloper.com (which is built using Movable Type), but if you want to create a more robust news and information site you may not always want the most recent items you publish to occupy the most prominent position on your home page.
A quick example. Suppose your blog has several contributors and one of them has just completed a high profile video short that took a couple weeks to finish. Once its published, that high value content occupies the high value real estate that the most recent post traditionally gets in a blog. That is just where you want it, but now imagine that an hour later another contributor to your blog has completed another time sensitive post that needs to be published now but doesn’t carry the weight to knock the other video piece out of the high value position. What can you do without resorting to manually maintaining your front page?
Higher end Content Management Systems used by newspapers and large media companies are built with these situations in mind and offer professional solutions for this kind of control, but many of the blog based platforms currently do not. That is where a plug in like the Opt-in Front Page Plugin for WordPress really comes in handy.
This valuable little plugin gives you the ability to control which of your blog posts occupy your front page positions. This allows you to keep your higher value content out front longer and not get pushed to a lower position automatically just because something more recent gets published.
The way it works is pretty simple. The plugin designates a special category to represent the home page. You can name this category anything you like. Anything not selected for that category gets published only in the other category(s) it is filed in and not on the front page. Any post filed in that special category goes on the front page. Clean.
Have been trying out the Opt-in Front Page Plug-In for a couple weeks now and I’m impressed. Super easy to implement, and the kind of control it delivers helps take WordPress closer to being a more flexible and powerful CMS.
The author of the Opt-In Front Page Plugin also offers the Static Front Page Plugin for WordPress which takes a slightly different approach to maintaining the high value screen real estate your front page represents. Have not worked with the Static Plugin, but both might be worth evaluating if you are looking for ways to expand the power of your WordPress based site.
Both plugins are currently free.
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