I’ve been updating all of Local Nights Out’s WordPress sites to latest version (2.6.5) which is a straight forward process through the use of the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin that I use on all of the WordPress sites. Booktheatretickets.co.uk [I have changed this site since posting] has received some extra upgrades though which i’ll detail below.
First of all the homepage was showing a summary of some popular shows which had to be updated manually. This was not really an issue but it would obviously be better to have a dynamic page to reduce maintenance. I installed the excellent Random Posts Plugin and set this up to show 10 shows as “Featured Shows” on the homepage by using the special place-holder of <!--RandomPosts limit=10-->. The homepage will now not need to be updated manually if any new shows are added or old ones deleted.
In a similar vein the “Musicals” page and “Plays” page also needed updating manually if any shows were added or removed. I used the Random Posts plugin again on each page with a place-holder like <!--RandomPosts limit=999&prefix=&included_posts=1,2,3,4,5,etc&sort-by1={title}--> to overide the title of “Featured Shows” that is set in the options for use on the homepage and to determine which shows are shown. The only maintenance now is to add or remove the page id to/from the place-holder if any shows are added or removed.
Can anyone recommend any other must have WordPress plugins?
