You may have noticed things have gotten dressed up a little.

We still have tons of content to add and may keep tweaking some things but it’s looking better, right?

Our demo site has been functioning for a while but was only known to people we shared the link with. It is now fully visible and ready to go , so take a look.

Our support forum has been getting some great feedback from the early beta testers, so if you are curious about seeing what is happening behind the scenes, feel free to check that out as well.

What do you think?

photographyblogsites.com is built using WordPress. But not the traditional version, the less supported WordPress MU. The MU stands for ‘Multi-User’ and allows you to set-up a network of blogs. You could use this for yourself to run all your sites from the same backend, or you do what we did and set-up a system to allow anyone else to come along and easily sign-up for a new site.

With the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0, these two branches will be merged and with it, the support and documentation for a site like PhotographyBlogSites will hopefully improve. But up until that happens, the only real support has been through the folks at WPMU DEV.

I recently posted about some of the more technical, developer heavy plugins used on PhotographyBlogSites on my own site. You can read that here. But I wanted to post here about a few of the plugins we have used to help make the user experience better.

The Sign-up Process

The usual process for signing up for a new WordPress blog requires you to wait for a confirmation email. It also automatically generates a password, which you will most likely want to change once you finally login. Why? For security reasons and to help preveny spam blogs.

Well, what if we could eliminate (or improve) the spam part… Could we maybe skip the confirmation email and let you choose the password you want as you sign up? Yes we can.

Anti-Splog

What is a ‘splog’, you might ask? A spam blog. Think spam comments are a pain? Try running a site that allows sign-ups for entire sites.

The Anti-Splog plugin does a number of things:

• Limits sign-ups per IP address in 24 hours. (this even stopped me as I was setting up test sites!)
• It can randomly change the sign-up page every 24 hours.
• Adds human verification to the sign-up process – simple question and answers that couldn’t be answered by bots.
• It also test all sign-ups against a community test system, which tests the likelyhood of a spam blog and can send the blog to moderation until the administrator approves it.

Get it here: Anti-Splog

Removing Email Verification

Don’t you hate signing up for sites where you need to wait for the confirmation email? Me too.

This plugin does exactly what it sounds like… As soon as you enter your info, you get a site. Pretty nice.

Get it here: Remove Verification Email From Signup

Choose Password on Signup

The security of a randomly generated password is nice and all, but most people will redo the password as soon as they get the chance to be something more memorable.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you skip that arbitrary process and just choose the password you wanted to start with?

BTW – Feel free to choose a highly secure one, with symbols, numbers, capital letters, etc. There is a reason why those random ones look so crazy – it’s more secure.

Get it here: Set password on WordPress MU blog creation

SiteMaps and SEO

One of the main goals behind PhotogrphyBlogSites was to make the process of creating, customizing and running a website easier. The previous plugins took care of making the creation easier – just sign-up and go. Our customized backend (a topic for another post) makes the customization easier. But one of the most important parts of running the site is making sure that it is optimized for search engines.

While SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be a painstaking process that requires some significant technical knowledge, the basics can actually be covered pretty easily.

The meaning behind all these steps are for another time, but the following should be thought of and included in any site:

• The ‘Title’ meta tag should be meaningful and specific to each page on a site.
• The ‘Description’ meta tag – the same.
• There should be a ‘sitemap’ that is crawlable and easily findable by Google and other search engines.
• Search engines should be notified of changes to the site as they happen.

If you know how to do all the above, you know how long it can take to do it right. If you have no idea what the above meant (or no idea how to accomplish it) then just take my word – it takes a while.

In either case, this plugin does it all without you lifting a finger. Just one of the ways we are striving to make our sites the most optimized for search engines that they can be.

Get it here: Sitemaps and SEO

Conclusion

The best part about all these plugins is that you have no idea they are there until they are described. All you get from a user standpoint is an easy to use site that still provides security, customization and SEO.

Disclaimer: While I stand behind every word of this article and would write it anyway, this post was done as part of a contest run by WPMU (of which we are already paying members). The idea is to highlight the plugins they provide and link back to them. Three winners will be chosen to win a year subscription ($419 value). This would be a cool thing, but we will continue to support WPMU DEV regardless. They really are the only option out there. (Maybe I shouldn’t say that if I want to win, right? I take it back… I won’t pay anymore if I don’t win… Ah, too late).

We have just released a new plugin that solves one of those annoying little blog issues for photographers. When uploaded images are slightly too big for the content area of your blog they can either pop out the side of your blog posts or squish in an attempt to match the width of your blog.

After all the work you put into your images, it is a shame to see them destroy the layout of your site, or end up distorted by squeezing the width.

The fix is here – PhotoBlog Image Fixer.

You can search for it through your WordPress plugin browser and install it automatically.

You can also download it from WordPress.

Once it installs, and is activated, it takes care of itself. No settings to worry about. Nothing else to do.

In an effort to consolidate our support system, the temporary foums setup at the main site have been moved to:

http://support.photographyblogsites.com/forum/

Redirects are in place for anyone trying to access the old forums.