There are not very many good plugin options for WordPress right now if you want an event calendar. The Calendar plugin is the only one I’ve found that functions well as a full featured calendar and it has some great features, like color-coded categories for events and a widget. However, you can also just integrate a Google calendar into a WordPress site. The linked article is a nice, quick tutorial explaining how to make this work.
WordPress is already set up to be well optimized for SEO, but there are some additional techniques to employ and plugins available that can greatly improve search engine rankings. First, install either the Platinum SEO Pack or the All In One SEO Pack plugin. Then check out this comprehensive guide to WordPress SEO.
If you get into managing a large amount of content or have a very custom site, and you’re using widgets, odds are that you’ll have a need to be able to selectively display certain widgets on certain pages. There is an awesome plugin called Widget Logic that addresses this need perfectly. It adds a field at the bottom of each widget box where you can drop in a WordPress Conditional Tag (or other PHP) such as is_home() to show a widget only on the main page for example.
I don’t know much about JQuery and scripts in general, but I’m learning that the order they’re loaded in the header can make all the difference. If you have a plugin that uses the JQuery library and doesn’t come with it, then the hook for wp_head needs to be below the load of the JQuery library in the header. This is because often plugins use the wp_head function to insert script code into the header.
So, move this bit:
<?php wp_head(); ?>lower in the header file just above the
</head>tag.
