The Bivings Report - powered by the Bivings Group

The Bivings Group is proud to announce the release of our first Wordpress plugin, Comments Vote, which is available for download on Wordpress.org.

This plug-in enables users of the website to vote comments up or down, in a style similar to Digg.com. The running vote tally can be displayed next to the comment, as a positive or negative number.  The screenshot to the right shows what this looks like. 

In addition, administrators have the ability to set a threshold at which comments are automatically collapsed, meaning users won’t see them unless they specifically opt to.  This feature will make Comment Vote useful plugin for webmasters looking to have their community help them police their comment section for spam, trolls and general unpleasantness.

This release is most definitely a first iteration.  We have plans to make improvements to the user interface of the plugin, with the goal of giving administrators more control of how the buttons/votes are displayed.  We also want the collapsing of comments to work most smoothly.

Comments Vote was original written as a custom plugin for a client project we were working on. It has been cleaned up and made release-worthy by John Bafford, our Director of Programming Services.

This plugin is installed on this blog, so please test out in the comments.  Please leave comments if you have suggestions or find bugs.

• Download Comments Vote (zip file)
• Comments Vote page on Wordpress.org

Almost all the sites we build at The Bivings Group these days use Content Management Systems (we usually use Drupal or Wordpress).  However, we do occasionally build old fashioned static sites when we know a site isn’t going to be updated that often and/or it is design heavy and we’ll be charged with managing it.  SEOMoz has a great chart up showing the decision tree people should use in deciding whether they need a CMS or not.  The chart is embedded below and I think it pretty much nails the questions people should be asking.

Many of our readers are well aware that we use WordPress as the CMS platform for a number of our clientele. We thus thought it would be fun to compile a list of our favorite WordPress plugins. (more…)

We just recently finished updating most of the Wordpress sites we maintain to Wordpress 2.5, so our normal process would be to monitor for security issues and wait a bit before upgrading again.  However, in reviewing the features of Wordpress 2.6 we may have to make an exception and upgrade sooner rather than later.  Seriously, it is like they read my mind and added the new features I wanted most.  Specifically:

(1) Wordpress now tracks your revision history, so you can now revert to old versions of your posts should you desire.  This will come in handy.

(2) You can now add captions easily to your images in Wordpress.  This feature is already present on the Wordpress-driven CNN Political Ticker (see image on right for sample).  (more…)

The Bivings Group is a busy web development firm, and as such we don’t always spend the time we should on our own websites. As a consultant, you focus so much on helping clients that sometimes you don’t spend the time to help yourself.

In an effort to improve the performance of our own online program, we are going to take some time this summer to update the content, graphics, etc. on our main site, our blog and the website of our principle product, ImpactWatch. One of the first things we are doing is looking at ways to improve our performance in search engines. Our sites do pretty well in Google, but, like anyone else, we want to do better. We know that search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process, and that if we don’t consistently put in work our ratings will drop. (more…)