My first blog was on Xanga.com. For a long time it was great, but eventually I wanted something a little bit more mature and migrated over to Blogger. Blogger lasted me for awhile as well but again, I wanted something with more “oomph.” After trying out a handful of different blogging services, I settled on WordPress and started craftycathy.wordpress.com. It gave me exactly what I needed: pages, various themes, easy posting and editing– essentially a website without needing to code!

When Mary and I started talking about building a website for embe, I knew WordPress was the way to go. Although I hadn’t used WordPress.org before, I was ready to leap right in. It had a higher learning curve then I expected but once I found the right theme for embe, everything began to fall into place.

What I really love about WordPress.org is the sheer amount of plug-ins that are available. There are so many talented people sharing their work, and I wanted to give them a little shout-out. embeshop.com wouldn’t look the way it does without their plug-in.

embe's homepage slideshow

Our homepage slideshow uses a few plug-ins but the main one is Featurific. Featurific creates a slideshow using blog posts to highlight stories or in our case our products. It’s easy to use and allows you to select which stories by category or by post ID. There are a dozen or so themes to choose from. embe uses the “Time.com (transparent)” theme but I did make a few tweaks to the theme code to make it fit with embe’s site.

There are two additional plug-ins I used in order to make Featurific play nice with where and how I wanted it to be displayed.

The first is Exec-PHP. This plug-in executes <?php?> code in  your posts, pages and text widgets. The Featurific code is in php and WordPress edits the code to remove php tags when the page is saved.

The second is Deactivate visual editor. This plug-in deactivates the visual editor for specific pages or posts. While you have the option to disable the visual editor for all pages/posts in WordPress, it’s not very convenient to have to change that setting to make edits to the homepage and then switch it back to edit the other pages.

Stay tuned for the next installment of plug-in shout-outs!