Amazing WordPress Plugins

I am a big fan of WordPress. Most of my clients have chosen to move their Web presence to that platform for the following reasons:

• Low cost
• Easy to use
• Easy to maintain and update content
• Easy to add a blog when ready
• Many cool plugins to make our lives easy
• Add your favorite reason here!

So when I suggested we move the Beach Dreams Community Web site to WordPress, I really didn’t think twice about it. However, I had forgotten that we had a Flash header with a variety of catch phrases that were randomly assigned to pages. I really wanted to find a way to create the site so that the phrase changed everytime a page is refreshed or a new page is loaded. But after looking for a plugin to provide that feature, I came up empty-handed. But with my creative juices flowing, I managed to implement the headers using two plugins – Kimili Flash Embed and WP-Ads.

WP-Ads lets you set up rotating ads pretty much anywhere you want them on your page or post. In the administrative interface in WordPress, you set up as many banner ads as you want, indicating the location and the html code that will show the ad. Unfortunately it did not take the Flash code directly but by using the Kimili Flash Embed plugin, I was able to put the following code in place of the html the plugin was expecting:

[kml_flashembed movie="/flashfiles/catchphrase1.swf" height="171" width="639" /]

Kudos to these developers who built these plugins. I’m sure neither thought this was how their plugin was going to be used, but the flexibility of WordPress and the creativity of the development community enabled me to accomplish what I had set out to do. To view the site with the rotating flash header, go to Beach Dreams Properties web site and go to any of the back pages and refresh a few times.