I’ve been up to a lot of Wordpress QA lately. By QA, I mean Quality Assurance. I’ve been testing a lot of changes that have been on my to-do list for quite some time now. Testing template changes, plug-ins, ad placement, etc. have been keeping me busy the last week. I’ve also conducted some more testing on Joomla for one of my clients, but that’s whole different topic.

I conduct most of my testing using XAMPP. It’s a lot faster and I can take my test sites from my desktop to my laptop because I can run XAMPP on my USB key. How sweet is that? Anyway, my testing mainly consisted of similar plugins and deciding based on the benefits it can provide my niche sites.

One of plugins I ran into was the Wordpress PayPal plugin. This one isn’t free though. It costs $42. I was willing to pay for the plugin, but one thing stood out that stopped me from buying it.

After buying the software once, it is only 10 USD per upgrade as newer versions are released

You’d think that $42 would get you some upgrades. Even a years worth probably. Not in this case. Oh well, another lost sale for the creator. I’m sure that he would’ve sold more if he provided some sort of free update.

Getting back to my testing, I found some really useful ones that I will be rolling out to my wordpress sites. By the way, if you aren’t using widgets yet, you’re missing a lot. One of the useful plugins I found useful is called striptease. If you’re using the ‘more’ tag to keep your blog’s front page cleaner, then you know that visitors who click on the ‘more’ link are taken to the post’s individual page. It also automatically scrolls them down to where the article left off.

I personally found that visitors like it better when they’re presented with the article from the top. From an adsense perspective, I’m testing to see if this increases or decreases CTR on ads displayed before the article. If you have any substantial information on this, I’d really like to know.

For those who are experiencing dashboard problems, I tested 3 different dashboard plugins that effectively replace your dashboard. I found x-dashboard to be lightweight, simple and effective for my needs.

My “fancy” plugin testing led to the new version of Lightbox, which integrates beautifully well with the Hemingway-Flickr plugin. I like the way it allows you to group photos. The presentation really makes the photo jump out at you. It’s the same principle when staff at a jewelry shop present you with the item you’d like to see.

Well, that’s all I have to report on plugins for now. I did quite a bit more testing on a ton of other plugins, but I haven’t decided on any yet. I did find a plugin that was the perfect solution to one of my ideas. It’s not something that everyone needs or uses, but I had a particular application in mind.

If you have any plugin test results that you’d like to share, feel free to contact me. I would love to hear about it. Thanks for reading!

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