I’ve added the main plugins I intend to use, and everything appears to be behaving at this stage. If anyone finds a page that is rejected by the W3C Validator, it is considered a bug. Please let me know, and I’ll do my best to fix it. Likewise with any other poorly written code you find, though it may be more difficult to correct.
So what are the themes I’ve installed? Well, the most important one is probably WPML, which allows me to translate this site – including all blog posts, pages, categories, tags and theme-related strings – into other languages. This plugin was one of the deciding factors for me when I was looking at WordPress. I’ve started translating parts of the site into Korean, but it will take a while before everything has been localized.
A second important plugin is Greg’s High Performance SEO Plugin. “SEO” is a term which may conjure up thoughts of commercial sites using every underhand trick at their disposal to make search engines give preference to their products, and is likely to induce nausea in any readers who have been involved in web development or design within the last year or two. However, this plugin is a ‘white hat’ SEO plugin, designed to help search engines index real content – the original purpose of SEO. It is highly customizable, light, and recommended for anyone who uses WordPress.
Another plugin I like is WP-prettyPhoto, which is a lightbox clone for displaying images. There are several similar plugins, but they don’t all work well with other plugins or themes.
Do you like my new theme? Not all that original, yet, I know. Now that plugins have been taken care of, I can turn my attention to customizing, localizing and styling it. I spent long hours over the weekend looking through and testing different themes, but I only found one or two that were at all suitable for this site, and in the end I’ve decided to develop my own based on the default WordPress theme. So, I should probably get to work!
