WP-Blog Proves that Dreams Can Come True

By Michael Robinson on February 3, 2009, Filed in: Wordpress

This post was originally published in 2009
It may contain stale & outdated information. Or it may have grown more awesome with age, like the author.

The days of staring jealously at the WordPress crowd have ended. No more shall we scroll longingly down the lists of available WordPress plugins, wishing they were ported to RapidWeaver.

WP-Blog has arrived.

Simple and effective integration with your Rapidweaver site and sparkling new WordPress blog is swift and painless. In fact, there are so few steps, and those steps are so easy that I found myself convinced that wasn’t all, I had missed some vital option that would break my site as soon as my back was turned.

The only irritation has been the slow manual process of transferring past blog posts, and setting up Redirect 301s âœ£ for each post. I think it’s worth it though!

I’ve been using it for about a week now though, and nothing’s broken. Quite the opposite, I’m delighted at my blog’s new ability to utilize some of the best blogging plugins available! Plugins that have made me seriously consider switching to WordPress and loading it in an iFrame within my site.* So far none of the plugins I’ve tried have broken anything, and all of them have added something worthwhile to my site.

And it’s all thanks to Roger at Nilrog’s Place.

Thanks Roger!

Plugins I’m using:

All in One SEO Pack 1.4.7 – offers various SEO related options.
Exec-PHP 4.9 – allows one to insert php code within posts!
Fancy Footer 1.0 – I’m working on porting this to WordPress (I think it’s done, waiting for my wife to make some posts – she doesn’t know it but she’s the beta tester…)
Feed Subscriber Stats 1.1.9 – displays RSS subscriber stats in one’s WordPress dashboard.
Global Translator 1.2 – gives visitors the option of reading your site in their native language.
Google XML Sitemaps 3.1.2 – generates a Google-friendly XML sitemap for your blog.
SRG Clean Archives 4.3 – creates an attractive and functional archives section in the sidebar.
Twitter Tools 1.5.1a – allows placement of a “latest twitters” box in the sidebar.
WordPress Database Backup 2.2.2 – VERY IMPORTANT!
WP-Cumulus 1.18 – slightly modified to allow two tags. I’ll post on how to do this later.
WP-Syntax 0.9.2 – allows rally attractive and functional syntax-highlighting for source code in posts.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin 2.1.6 – places a list of related posts at the bottom of a post’s page. Really quite accurate.

I have tried more, but these are the ones I really couldn’t do without. I’m sure I’ll come across more in the future.

*Actually, that’s a lie. I hate iFrames. The plugins really are good though.
âœ£ Very helpful and important when changing the address of a page.
Redirect 301 /mikes/blog_of_interest_files/a_post.php http://pagesofinterest.net/blog/2008/08/a-post.php informs visitors that the page previously at the first address has permanently moved, and can now be found at the second address. Search engines use this information to stay up to date.