Live Demo | Download [ 39 ]

Live Demo | Download [ 44 ]

Live Demo | Download [ 44 ]

Ever since WPCandy was brought back to life around four months ago it has been, easily, one of the best places to find constantly updated WordPress news.

For a while I used it almost solely to keep track of all the happenings in the community, not having time to dig through all the noise on Twitter on a daily basis.

Being an iPhone owner, I was especially excited to hear that they released an app for it. I recently had the chance to try it out and my findings are below.

Buying the App

The app currently costs $0.99 in the App Store. Just search for “wpcandy” and it’ll pop up.

The Home Screen

By default, the WPCandy app shows the latest posts on the home screen.

It utilizes scrolling to navigate through all of the latest posts, which are separated by day.

At the top right, there is a refresh button which checks if there are any new posts available (which is also visible on every other tabbed page except “More”).

On the bottom are tabs to navigate between other categories from the WPCandy website. By default, they are:

• Popular
• Interviews
• Reviews
• More

If you aren’t happy with these, not to worry, they can be customized later (which I’ll get to later in the review).

Normal Single Post

The single post is about what you would expect. The top menu changes around a bit with:

• A button to return to the previous category screen
• A button to open in Safari or share via email
• Buttons for previous/next post navigation

…in that order.

The bottom menu is also removed in favor of more space for content.

There are no comments displayed, although if you really want to see the comments on a specific post, you can always use the “Open in Safari” feature to read them.

Interview Posts

As of now, all of the posts included on the “Interviews” tab are videos.

When selecting an interview, you will be taken to an alternate version of a single post view which is basically a link to the corresponding YouTube video.

After tapping the video thumbnail, you’ll automatically be taken to the YouTube app which then plays the video.

After you’re done with the video, you can leave the YouTube app and end up right back where you started in the WPCandy app.

Configuring the Tabs

As I mentioned above, you can also configure the featured tabs that are displayed at the bottom of category pages. Besides the default ones, you also have the following available on the “More” tab:

• News
• Tutorials
• Editorials
• Features

To configure them, select the “Edit” button on the top right of the “More” page.

Simply drag the corresponding icon to the tab area below you want replaced. In the picture I’m dragging the “Tutorials” icon.

Some Limitations

The biggest limitation seems to be not being able to dig past 25 posts in any given category. There is also not a search feature as far as I can tell, so if you’re looking up an older post or want to search for specific keywords and such, that option is not available at the moment.

According to the most recent post about the WPCandy app, Ryan says that, “We have a few enhancements coming to the iPhone app very soon.” So maybe these search features are already in the pipeline.

Conclusion

Currently priced at $0.99, this app is definitely a great deal to stay up-to-date with all the news in the WordPress community. Yes, I know you can get all the same information just by visiting their website in Safari, but the app does make it a lot easier and more convenient to browse.

Also if you don’t have an iPhone, you can also build a WPCandy news feed directly into your WordPress dashboard with this plugin.

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Yoast, who you might know from the SEO community or from the various WordPress plugins he’s developed, has now created a WordPress SEO plugin.

I recently had the chance to try it out. You can follow along in my video screencast below, as well as further thoughts later in the post.

A true “all-in-one” solution?

Currently on Theme Lab, I use a few different SEO plugins including All-In-One SEO Pack, XML Sitemaps, RSS Footers (also by Yoast). I’ve also used plugins like Yoast Breadcrumbs on other sites.

Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin combines all of these features into a single plugin making it much more of an all-in-one solution than other SEO plugins available on the market today.

It even has features like cleaning up the <head> portion of a document (which I went over in the video). I went over how to remove this code manually in a previous tutorial: Remove Unnecessary Code from wp_head

Best of all, you can import and export all of your settings which can be transferred to other sites easily. With plugins like SEO Data Transporter from StudioPress, you can import SEO settings from pretty much every popular SEO plugin or theme framework to be compatible with Yoast’s WordPress SEO.

Conclusion

I’d recommend WordPress SEO by Yoast as a must have plugin. On more recent site developments, I’ve tried to stop using as many plugins which included cutting out plugins like All-In-One SEO Pack in favor of storing meta tags and custom titles hard coded into custom fields.

With all of the WordPress SEO plugin’s useful features covering many aspects of SEO, you really can’t afford not to use it. I plan on switching to the WordPress SEO plugin on Theme Lab in the future.

What do you think of the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast? If you currently use another SEO plugin or theme framework, would you consider switching?

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