What is premise? Premise is the ultimate landing page optimization WordPress plugin, brought to us by Copyblogger Media Inc.

After spending some time using the plugin, I absolutely love it. There are a few things that could change to make it better, but let me dive into the review.

Premise General Settings

First, the general settings. You have the ability to set landing pages inside a sub-folder, in case you want to disallow all the landing pages in your robots.txt, or you can have them sit in the root, such as wpvibe.com/landing-page/. This is some serious forethought by Copyblogger Media on what people will want to do with their permalinks. Sure there will always be one person that wants to do something different, but this should cover the majority of people.

Premise also has newsletter settings. The plugin comes with support for Aweber, Constant Contact, and MailChimp, three widely used e-mail services for newsletters. It offers the ability to hook in directly and use your landing pages as sign-up lead-gen tools.

Next are the style settings. There are a lot of style settings. Global styles, Global Links, Wrap (content area), Header, Main Headline Area, Blockquotes, Notice Box, and a lot more. Endless style settings, to give you ample control over the style of your landing pages.

Premise Landing Pages

Next, the landing pages. Here is the sweet sauce.

When you go to “Landing Pages” in the left side navigation, you have the ability to view existing landing pages or add a new one.

Upon clicking Add New for Landing Pages, you’ll be given six (6) options. Sales Page, Content Landing Page, Pricing, Opt In, Video, and Tab Scroller. Each will provide you with different write page options, and they’re pretty straight forward given their descriptions.

The ample options that this plugin provides both in the settings and in the write screen for your actual landing pages is quite impressive. It does an amazing job and does exactly what you need it to do.

For a limited time, you can download this plugin for just $85, so hurry up and go download it! Click here for more examples of Premise in action.

I’m going to walk you through two different plugins.

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

This plugin provides a single-opt-in feature that allows comments to easily subscribe to comments. All they need to do is check the box and they will be subscribed. One thing this plugin does really well, is that when you want to manage your subscription, it’s cleanly integrated into your design.

It will even let visitors subscribe to the post even if they haven’t commented, in case they’re just really interested in the feedback on the post.

Here’s a screenshot of the options provided in the admin interface.

plugin download

Subscribe To “Double-Opt-In” Comments

The reason for double-opt-in is because there are some laws internationally, specifically in Germany, that require website publishers to have a double-opt-in for it not to be flagged as spam.

This plugin is a lot more like Mark Jaquith’s original “Subscribe to Comments” plugin which DOI was adopted from. I really like what STC Reloaded did though, it’s a much better interface.

But this plugin is good if you feel you need to comply with the international spam laws.

plugin download

I’ve started using two different child themes, Platinum and Expose. I’ve honestly just been blown away by how easy it is to use the Genesis Framework and child themes.

This was honestly the first time I had even touched child themes at all. It’s been nothing but an easy and good experience.

So just how easy is it to use child themes and framework-specific filters? Extremely easy.

StudioPress’ development sites provides a pluthera of filters, hooks, and code samples for you to easily just plug into your site.

For example, I wanted to add related posts to my single posts. I installed YARPP (wordpress.org), then went into my functions.php file and added this code:

[sourcecode]add_action(‘genesis_after_post_content’,'custom_related_posts’);
function custom_related_posts() {
if ( is_single() ) {
related_posts();
}
}[/sourcecode]

Refresh the page, and there were the related posts after my posts’ content and before the comments. It was really just that easy.

Another example, I wanted to slightly modify how the breadcrumbs looked because I wasn’t 100% happy how it looked out of the box. There’s a simple filter you can apply.

[sourcecode]function custom_breadcrumb_args($args) {
$args['home'] = ‘Home’;
$args['sep'] = ‘»’;
$args['prefix'] = ‘<div class="breadcrumb">’;
$args['suffix'] = ‘</div>’;
$args['display'] = true;
$args['labels']['prefix'] = ”;
$args['labels']['author'] = ‘Archives for ‘;
$args['labels']['tag'] = ‘Archives for ‘;
$args['labels']['date'] = ‘Archives for ‘;
$args['labels']['search'] = ‘Search for ‘;
$args['labels']['tax'] = ‘Archives for ‘;
return $args;
}
add_filter(‘genesis_breadcrumb_args’, ‘custom_breadcrumb_args’);[/sourcecode]

Now I can easily adjust any of the breadcrumbs and how they look, specific to my wants and needs.

The Genesis Framework is an amazing tool that just makes it really easy to build child themes. It has a ton of built-in SEO features that they’ve gone to great lengths to make sure are top of the line SEO features. It’s easy to swap out different layouts, whether you want a 2-column or a 3-column layout, or maybe full-width instead.

Genesis also offers custom widgets, custom header image, awesome primary and secondary navigation options, bulk comment/trackback options, and even auto-updates for the Genesis Framework core.

If you’ve been wondering if you should Genesis or not, now is the time to take your first step.

I’ve fallen in love with the Genesis Framework and I’m excited to build any new sites on the framework.

We currently use Gravity Forms here at WPVibe, but this plugin could give Gravity Forms a run for its money.

Grunion, the WordPress Contact Form, does one thing really well – exactly what it’s meant to do: be a contact form.

This is a big space in the WordPress community that was greatly lacking, so I’m really happy to see what Automattic stepped up and made their own contact form that will make it easier for WordPress site owners to offer customizable contact forms.

click here

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The WordPress SEO Plugin

So what features does this plugin offer?

• Snippet Preview – allows you to see what your post will look like as a Google result
• SEO Title – provides guidance in helping you create a proper title for your post
• Meta Description – helps you create what your snippet will say below the title and above the link. By having two lines worth of description text, it makes your result one line larger, giving is just a little more visibility in the results.
• Focus Keyword – let’s you pick a keyword that you think the post is about, then analyzes your post to see if you’re really targeting the correct keyword.

WordPress SEO Plugin – Advanced

Want to dive deep and get into the advanced section? We do too, so here it is.

• Meta Robots Index – Index/Noindex; Google has an explanation of how this meta tag works, but in the form of rel=”noindex”
• Meta Robots Follow – Follow/Nofollow; Google has an explanation of how this meta tag works, but in the form of rel=”nofollow”
• Meta Robots Advanced – No ODP, No YDIR, No Archive; If your site is listed in one of the trusted directories, DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory, some search engines may use the description you have in either of those directories, instead of what you have on that page. Matt Cutts explains how it works with Google.
• Canonical URL – it is typically a good idea to leave this blank so it defaults to the permalink of the post, unless you really need to change it.
• 301 Redirect – If you need this post to redirect to another page or post, you can setup the redirect directly on the post, rather than setting up a 301 in .htaccess and/or having to delete the post.

Overall, we are really impressed with Joost’s plugin and his commitment to the SEO and WordPress communities. So what are you waiting for? Download it now! (click below)

click

If you have any thoughts or suggestions about other or different SEO plugins, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

It’s easy to integrate Google Analytics code into your site, but using a plugin offer some extended functionality that doesn’t come with just adding the code to your footer.

Today we’re going to look at the WordPress Google Analytics plugin by Joost, which in my opinion, does the best job — and he keeps it up to date.

First step, install the plugin. Either use the web installer or manually download it and install it. But note, there are a number of Google Analytics plugins available, make sure you find the one by Joost De Valk. Then activate it.

Here come the options.

First, make sure you insert your Google Analytics Account ID, it will look like this: UA-######-#, make sure you put the UA in the field, you need the entire string.

You can leave it like that, but if you want to, you can enable advanced options too.

Here’s a small list of things that I like doing.

• I like to un-check the “Track the administrator too” box, so it doesn’t track me while I’m viewing the site. This gives me a better perspective of the site’s actual traffic.
• I leave the prefixes are they are, they are pretty good as is.
• The only thing I really go set is Track extra Search Engines and “Track Google Image Search as a Search Engine”, even though this is only in beta, it’ll eventually work, I hope.
• I don’t tag links in RSS feeds with campaign variables because often people will want to scrap content and repost it to another site, and then they are linking to your campaign links instead of your actual URL. Yes, this does get resolved by using canonical links, but I really don’t feel it adds enough to warrant changing my RSS links.

Any questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comments!

One of the really cool features I really like about this plugin is the “mask login errors.” This option will let you hide the error of either “wrong username” or “wrong password,” which helps because it makes it harder for an attacker to figure out which portion of the login is wrong.

If someone passes the threshold of the max login attempts, they will then be locked out and won’t be able to try to login until the time limit is lifted.

One feature I would love, is an optional email alert on failed login attempts. That way, if someone is trying to hack into your site, you’re quickly alerted and can take action on it. A log history of all past attempts would be cool too, but those just some feature requests.

Here are a few screenshots of what the plugin looks like and does.

Download link: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/login-lockdown.zip

Viper’s Video Quicktags (VVQ) plugin tackles this media sharing hurdle, and is flexible with various customizable options based on your video embed needs.

Quick and Easy

It doesn’t get much better from a usability perspective, check out all of the new buttons you get on your post editor, pick your poison.

When you’re ready to embed, click the appropriate video service button and you get a nice simple popup with an area to add the link to the video.

I’ve added a great video from YouTube on how to install VVQ, this will give you a good idea of what it looks like with my custom dimensions.

[youtube width="640" height="510"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzhZODEquc8[/youtube]

General Settings

VVQ not only supports over 10 of your favorite video sites, you’ll get better control of how the video’s display on your site directly from the plugin settings pages. Now that you have a general idea of what it does, and how easy it is to use, lets go over the various custom options you have at your control.

The general settings are straight forward. Listed are the various supported media types and it allows you to define the video dimensions of your choice with a maintain aspect ratio option. You can also add an edit button which you may find helpful.

Lower in the General Settings tab, you will also see that generic video files are supported but will be greeted by a disclaimer and link to a great help page briefly explaining the difficulties of using generic video files due to cross-browser issues. The easy fix is to convert your files to Flash format which is relatively easy to do and also something I would recommend.

Additional Settings

Here are a few more settings, and some advanced features of the VVQ plugin.

You can align the video’s to your liking as well as add specific text to show in your feeds. There is also the option to use Windows Media Player for regular video file playback for Windows users.

The Advanced settings on the Additional Settings tab provides Dynamic QTObject loading and custom CSS to style the video display.

Video Service Settings

Viper’s Video Quicktag plugins has also included seperate settings pages for some of the video services supported by the plugin.

I think the neatest thing in the settings area of VVQ is the preview option. It enables you to specify a video so you can see what it will look like as you customize.

Depending on the service you are using, the settings page allows you to do so some cool things like styling the default player by changing border and fill color or even setting color presets.

Again dependent on the service, you may also have some miscellaneous options like allowing full screen viewing capability and loop video playback.

All of the options will differ dependent on the settings allowed by the video service integration into the plugin.

Viper’s Video QuickTags FAQ’s

Have a question? VVQ has included a good FAQ’s section to help answer your questions.

If you have more questions or need further support, make sure to visit the VVQ Support Forum.

What’s Our Vibe

VVQ does a great job of making life easier when adding video to your WordPress site. It will definitely save you time and effort, and best of all, it is flexible and customizable.

Make sure to visit viper007bond.com for more information. Drop a comment and let them know how much you enjoy their great resource, I know you will

Download link: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/vipers-video-quicktags.zip

Do you have more to add, did I miss something? Make sure to leave your comments and let us know what you think.

If you’re interested in contributing to WordPress Vibe, make sure to visit out Contributors page and get in touch.