Designs by Seth Alling

Over the past year, I have developed quite a few sites in WordPress. One of the common requests that I have been asked to do is to create a testimonial page, where people can leave their testimonials as a comment and then style the feed so those comments will display nicely as client testimonials.

While this has been easy to do, I have found it rather annoying at times because I then have to allow comments on that particular page, but on no others. One would think that WordPress by default would allow for this be be fairly simple out of the box, and it is, but only if you do it their way.

On the WordPress settings, you can choose to disable posts and trackbacks by default, but throughout the entire site. You can still enable comments on a page by page or post by post basis, but you can’t have it be enabled by default on posts, and then disabled by default on pages. This is the probable that I always seemed to be running into. Normally, I would just remove the comments template from pages, but once I wanted comments on just one page, I would have to add the code back into the template.

Now, I know I could just grin and bear it and remember to disable comments on each new page, or enable comments on each new post, depending on my main comment settings, but I want things done my way. I don’t want to have to remember and leave the possibility of human error taking effect, so last month I determined that I have had enough.

I finally put my mind to it and wrote a plugin to allow me to set the default comment settings individually on a page. This way I could enable the comments so they would appear on posts, but disable them by default on pages. I did this using javascript so I could then change my comment settings on an individual post or page basis. After developing it, I released it to the WordPress community. The plugin is No Page Comment.

Well, now that a little more than a month has passed since developing it and releasing it to the WordPress community, I have made some more modifications to it. It is now possible to set the default for posts, pages, and any custom post types that may be installed on your site. I found out that some people wanted comments disabled on posts only, but wanted them open by default on pages. Others saw a need to block comments on custom post types that came from third-party plugins. Because of this, I have made the modifications, and am happy to release the next version of No Page Comment. Feel free to check it out. It just may make working with WordPress a little easier for you, as it did for me.

Last month, my first premium WordPress plugin was released to the public: WP FAQs Pro. I have been working with WordPress for more than a year and have developed plugins before, but this is the first one that I am selling to the public.

The plugin is meant to be a simple way to manage FAQs for a website using WordPress, giving the user complete control over the way FAQs are displayed without needing any coding knowledge.

Features of WP FAQs Pro

• jQuery usage and non-JS support
• An optional questions index
• Easy drag-and-drop question reordering
• Multiple style choices
• Custom CSS ability
• WordPress shortcode incorporation
• FAQ categories
• Ability to post multiple FAQ lists on a page

A live demo of WP FAQs Pro can be viewed and the plugin can be purchased at WP Plugins for $15.

As a special in honor of my first premium WordPress plugin, the first 10 who use the code “1STPLUGIN” will receive $12 off their order, bringing the total to only $3.