Customizing WicketPixie

Ah WicketPixie, what a great wordpress theme! I have received emails and tweets asking how to make wicketpixie get to its full potential. Email me at Mail@BillyMcGovern.com if you would like me to record a video for you!

Of course the first thing we want to do is install WicketPixie, I have made a blog post and video on how to do that. Next we want to enable some plugins, I recommend enabling everything. If you don’t like what a certain plugin does go back and disable it later. After we enabled all our plugins we are going to configure them. I am only going to go through the plugins I use, I don’t use “AskApache Google 404″ “Chitika” and “Kontera”.

All in One SEO - Allows you to add tags to your blog posts, which allows search engines to find them. Also allows you to customize the appearance of Titles and optimizes them for search engines.
All in One SEO pack is easy to customize but, I recommend leaving it the way it is because it is already perfect. (I left it the way it is as well)

Auto-Hyperlink – This plugin will recognize any protocol-specified URI (http|https|ftp|news)://, etc, as well as e-mail addresses. It also adds the new ability to recognize Class B domain references (i.e. “somesite.net”, not just domains prepended with “www.”) as valid links (i.e. “wordpress.org” would now get auto-hyperlinked)
When customizing this plugin make sure you check every box because it makes your life and your reader’s lives easier. In the box where it says “Hyperlink Mode” put in 1. This makes the URL appear as domain name without extensions. ( instead of example[dot]com/this-is-not-a-real-link/ it becomes example[dot]com…I added those “[dot]“s in there so this plugin doesn’t make them hyperlinks). I leave everything else blank.  You can always customize it the way you like though.

FAlbum – Allows you to display your recent Flickr photos via your blog.
On the plugin customization page there are only two things to do; Authorize FAlbum and get a token from Flickr. To display you photos make sure you configure it in the WicketPixie home editor, I recommend you show six photos at a time.

Obfuscate E-mail – Obfuscate e-mail addresses that appear as text in your blog in an effort to deter e-mail harvesting spammers while retaining the appearance and functionality of hyperlinks. (This is basically what you have to do on YouTube to be able to post a link)
These settings are basically your choice; I recommend using [at] for “@” and [dot] for “.”

PageNavi – Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site. (Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » … Last »)
This plugin’s default settings are perfect, no customizing necessary

WordPress Related Posts - WordPress Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts via WordPress tags, and add the related posts to feed.
This is my favorite plugin from WicketPixie; All customizations is this plugin are up to you but, I suggest that you do not click any of the boxes, just makes it nicer.

Moving on to WicketPixie settings!

WicketPixie – These are your main WicketPixie settings that influence your blog in several ways.
For the Feed setting make sure you put in your actual feed address, this way WicketPixie can forward yourblog[dot]com/feed to the feed address. Do not enable AJAX Loader because it will make your blog load slower rather than faster. I always have “Show Author on Post” enabled so people can find a full list of my blog posts; make sure to save your settings after each individual section. The next settings on this page are all personal, your YouTube account Twitter account etc. Make sure you have both “Post Side Box” and “Tweet MeMe” enabled.

Adsense Settings – Places ads in WicketPixie easily without having to mess with php files.
I have never been able to make adsense for search work, it’s nice having the normal search feature anyways. The only thing that you have to do to make this plugin work is sign up for google adsense and place your codes in the text box when prompted to do so.

Custom Code – The name says it all. Allows you to place code in certain spots located in your blog.
This option is all up to you, hence the word custom.

Faves Manager – Allows you to display the RSS feed of your favortie websites on your Fave page.
To enable the Faves page; create a new page with the template of “Faves”, thats it! Of course you have to add your faves too.

Home Editor – Allows you to edit the sidebar and other parts of your “home”.
Flickr Badge will show the most recent Flickr Photos; you should show 6 at a time and have the recent photos heading turned on. Always turn Video embed on because it allows you to embed videos on your home page. The Social Buttons widget is what you see at the top right of my sidebar. You can choose which accounts these point to in the WicketPixie settings. Again, we want to enable the post sidebar.

Notifications Manager – Send out messages to different services like Twitter and Ping.fm to let your followers know of any new blog posts.
Only put in the ping.fm service because if you put in both ping.fm and twitter it will send out multiple messages. There are no other settings.

Social Me Manager – If you’d like to let your visitors know where else they may find you throughout the Web, you can do it easily through your “Social Me” page. This is an exclusive feature of the WicketPixie theme for WordPress. If you have accounts on other blogs, social networks, forums, Web sites, etc, add them here. For example, you might add your Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr accounts here – making sure you use the corresponding RSS (or Atom) feeds for your profile, so that WicketPixie can display your latest content from them on your Social Me page.
These settings are easy, just name your Website and give the RSS feed information.

Theme Options – Allows you to customize the appearence of your blog; your background, colors etc.

Here are my current settings: (Click it for a larger picture)

If you would like to see all of the plugins that I use please watch the videos above. Also if you would like to change who the source is in the Tweetmeme button please watch the end of Part 2.

What do you think of WicketPixie? What are your settings? Comments Welcome!

Tagged as: Better, chris, Customize, Faster, Make, pirillo, Plugins, WicketPixie, Wordpress