WP Assist » WP Plugins

WordPress Plugins Spotlight for 01.02.08

Lisa — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:01:37 +0000

Happy New Year – here’s a listing of some of the plugins I added to my blog in recent months and have fast become some of my favorites to recommend to WordPress users:

Different Posts Per Page – Set default value for each different page in WordPress. For example, without this plugin, if you have 1 post set to be viewed on your front page – then only 1 post will show on your archives, search, categories and tags pages. But, you may want more of a listing on those internal pages. With this plugin – you can set values for each of those pages, completely bypassing the setting in Options/Reading in your WordPress administration panel.

Single Click Plugin Updater – A very handy plugin that extends the plugin notification system, introduced in WordPress version 2.3. This plugin also provides an ‘update automatically’ link that, when clicked, will automatically download and install the new version on your blog.

SideBlog – makes it easy and painless for you to add “Asides” to your blog. For an example of “Asides” – you can see an example on my personal blog. On the right side of the site, you’ll see a green area with the title “On the side…snippets of stuff” – - kind of a nice way to have a ’side blog’ on your main blog to post small snippets of info that don’t necessarily require a full-blown blog post. Good for announcements and such.

Post Notification – a plugin that sends out notifications to registered users of your blog whenever you update with a new post.

Smilies Themer – a fun plugin that allows you to use smilies (emoticons) themes (or packs) to replace the wordpress default ones.

Share This

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Plugins.

Displaying Blogrolls by Category

Lisa — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 01:42:10 +0000

One of the more limiting features of the Widgets in WordPress is the inability to disperse your different blogroll link lists to different areas of your template. By using the Links Widget packaged within WordPress, your blogrolls will all appear in the same spot. This is a fine thing, if you only have one blogroll category. But what about those sites that have more than one… or even several, blogroll categories??

Further, what if that particular person doesn’t want all the blogrolls to appear in the same spot, listed one after another? Using the Links Widget, you have no choice really – at least not at this time. You place the Blogroll Widget in your sidebar and all your link lists appear in the same spot.

So, say you run a tech blog and you have a Blogroll category for Windows and another category for Macintosh. And you want to display the Windows blogroll in the left sidebar, and want to display the Macintosh category in the right sidebar. You can’t split the widget (unless you have the coding know-how to edit the actual widgets.php file)!

You can, however, insert a template tag in your sidebar.php template to display the blogroll categories wherever you want them to display:

Where the 1 equals the category ID number (which you can find listed to the left of the bookmark category in your WP administration panel under Blogroll / Categories. Just change the ID number to match the category of links you’d like to display.

Likewise, you can list the blogrolls by category name by using:

Having to insert the code into the template kind of defeats the purpose of using Sidebar Widgets in the first place, but until WordPress updates the Links Widget – there’s no real getting around having to do it this way in order to split up those Blogroll Categories.

Or - to make it MUCH easier – you can use Breukies Links Widget by widget author Arnold Breukhoven – a WordPress links widget, to replace the standard links widget by Automattic. This widget displays links using the wp_list_bookmarks function, utilizes most available parameters for wp_list_bookmarks. You can also set up to 9 intances of this widget in your sidebar(s).

Share This

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Plugins, WordPress.org.

WordPress Plugins Spotlight for 10.29.07

Lisa — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:14:53 +0000

I’m rounding out the month of October by sharing a list of my personal favorites that I use on various other blogs I operate. Do you have any ‘to die for’ plugin favorites? Do share!

Better Feed – Brought to you by Ozh – this plugin puts your RSS Feed on steroids! It allows you to enhance your feeds with several highly customisable features.

Comment Relish – A plugin developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your website who have never commented before. The message dispatched to the user is defined within the plugin’s preferences. Numerous tags have been integrated to allow for information to be included in the message easily (I.E.: timestamp, author name, comment, ETC.). Developed by Justin Shattuck

Feedburner FeedSmith – This plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

Post Teaser – Generates a preview or “teaser” of a post for the main, archive and category pages, with a link underneath to go to the full post page. It includes features to generate a word count, image count, and an estimated reading time. Reasons you may want to use Post Teaser: If you keep using the ‘more’ tag in your posts, You would like to save bandwidth by not serving the entire body of each post on your front page.. or, best of all…. you’re just a tease!

Lightbox 2 – Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers. You need to see it in action to really appreciate it (click on any of the images on that page and you’ll see what I mean!

Can you BELIEVE October is almost over??

Share This

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Plugins.

WordPress Plugins Spotlight for 10.22.07

Lisa — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:59:04 +0000

This weeks WordPress Plugins spotlight brings you some great plugins that will help you enhance your comments on your blog – - making reader interaction more fun and pleasant! Your readers will thank you!

4Avatars – A simple Plugin for WordPress that allows you to add avatars to comments on your blog. Avatars are from MyBlogLog or Gravatar or even from Polish site Avatars. Of curse avatars are NOT saved on your ftp! 4Avatars have very simple options page which allows you to choose site with avatars and choose default avatar which will be shown when author of comment doesn’t have any.
Read About It | Download It

CommentLUV – Everyone enjoys a little love now and then, don’t they? All you need is love. . . . Pass a bit of luv onto your commenters by providing a titled link to their last blog post. This plugin attempts to parse the feed of the comment author by visiting their site and looking in the standard locations for a feed.
Read About It | Download It

Top Commentators Widget – A sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site. Reward your commentators a little by giving additional sidebar link love to those who comment the most on your blog, thereby contributing the most to the discussion.
Read About It | Download It

AJAX Comment Posting – This plugin allows you, and your readers, to comment on a post without refreshing the comments page. VERY VERY handy, especially on a site that gets a fair amount of comments.. or has a very active discussion. Who wants to reload the site everytime — makes nice with server load, as well.
Read About It | Download It

Subscribe to Comments – Absolutely no listing of comments plugins would be complete without Mark Jaquith’s Subscribe to Comments. As a matter of fact, this very plugin is used as *the* ‘real world’ example in the WordPress For Dummies book for the mechanics of finding, downloading, installing and managing plugins on a WordPress blog. Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!
Read About It | Download It

Do you have a favorite comments plugin? Do share!

Share This

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Plugins.

WordPress Plugins Spotlight for 10.15.07

Lisa — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:50:13 +0000

For our plugin spotlight this week, we’re hauling Alex King up front and center with his GREAT (no, really – GREAT) set of plugin offerings he has available at AlexKing.org. Alex is one of the original developers of WordPress from way back in the day. He is still very much involved in the WordPress community, as evidenced by his great set of plugins:

Share This – Used here on this blog, this plugin is THE ONLY PLUGIN YOU NEED FOR SOCIAL BOOKMARKING. Sorry, didn’t mean to yell – but, really – - this is it. It’s all you need. The Share This plugin allows you and your readers to easily add your posts to the various social bookmarking sites out there, like Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, etc. One click is all you need. One click and ONE icon – - so more cluttering up your post footers with a gazillion social bookmarking icons. I love this plugin.
Read About It | Download It

Twitter Tools – How much fun is Twitter? With this plugin, you can add your Twitter updates to your WordPress blogs easily.
Read About It | Download It

Popularity Contest – This plugin will help you see which of your posts are most popular. Views, comments, etc. are tracked and given configurable point values to determine popularity.
Read About It | Download It

WP Mobile – A PDA friendly interface for your blog. It’s (almost) XHTML compliant. You can see it in action by visiting this site in a mobile browser. Very handy for Mo-Browsin’!
Read About It | Download It

You want more? We’ll give you more – - Check out Alex’s collection of WordPress Plugins he has developed and released to the WordPress community. Great work, Alex…and thanks!

Share This

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Plugins.

WordPress Plugins Spotlight for 10.8.07

Lisa — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:34:29 +0000

Plugins make us happy! Plugin developers make us grateful! Plugins for WordPress help us extend our blogs way beyond WordPress ‘out of the box’ – Consider making a donation to your favorite plugin developer today! They work hard, so you don’t have to!

Here’s our spotlighted plugins for this week – Enjoy!

Daiko’s Video Widget – Gives you the ability to add video to your sidebar from YouTube, Google, MySpace, etc.
Read About It | Download It

WP Post Ratings – Another fine plugin from Lester “Gamerz” Chan. This one adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page. Cool!
Read About It | Download It

Advanced Excerpt – This plugin adds several improvements to WordPress’ default way of creating excerpts: It keeps HTML markup in the excerpt, Trims the excerpt to a given, user-defined, length, Customization of the excerpt length and the ellipsis used when trimming and it corrects HTML markup that may have been ‘cut’ during excerpt trimming. Sweet!
Read About It | Download It

Google XML Sitemaps – Brought to you by Arne Brachhold, this plugin creates a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap will be updated and all major search engines which support the sitemap protocol like ASk.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO are notified about the update.
Read About It | Download It

Share This

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Plugins.

WordPress Plugins Spotlight for 10.1.07

Lisa — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 06:10:58 +0000

Finding great WordPress Plugins is not difficult. Plugins developers are talented people and there are some GREAT projects going on out there. Have a look at the plugins we’re putting the spotlight on this week:

Link Harvest – From the incomparable Alex King comes Link Harvest. I use this plugin on this site – you can view the output here on my Links page. Link Harvest will go through all of your posts and pages and compile a list of all external links. Then it will create a live updating linkroll for you, based on your actual linking activity. Nifty!
Read About It | Download It

FAQ Auto Responder – Brought to you from Ozh this plugin gives you the ability to create autoresponders if you run a blog where users frequently ask the same questions over and over again. Brills!
Read About It | Download It

AWSOM News Announcement – allows you to post a news announcement in the area above your posts (or anywhere else you want) and edit it using the Visual Editor or code editor, all from the Wordpress admin area.You can now also run php code from the news area, so audio or video players can now be run from the news area. You can now add the news area to a post or page and also run php code there. Brought to you by Harknell.
Read About It | Download It

On This Day – Outputs a list of posts made on the same calendar day in the past. You can use it as a Sidebar Widget – or use the plugin template tag to call it into your blog, elsewhere. Developed by Yu-Jie Lin
Read About It | Download It

Share This

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Plugins.

WordPress Plugins Spotlight for 9.24.07

Lisa — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 15:55:50 +0000

This weeks plugin spotlight puts plugin developer Lester Chan center stage, up front and personal! Lester has created, and works very, very hard on the plugins he develops. Not only has he developed some amazingly useful plugins – but he keeps them updated and is, generally, happy to work with users on issues.

Here’s a look at some of my favorite Lester “Gamerz” Chan plugins – do you have a Gamerz favorite?

WP-DBManager – Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. Very handy!

WP Download Manager – If you provide files for your visitors to download (WordPress Plugins and/or Themes, perhaps?) this handy plugin will allow you to manage your downloads and gives you an accurate count on how many times each individual file has been downloaded from your site. A really handy way to have a quick glance at how well your downloadable files are doing!

WP Post Views – I use this on this blog and it gives you a nice output of how many times a particular post has been viewed.

WP Print – This plugin gives you a very nice print output for each of your posts and pages. No more worrying about getting your Print.css just right – this plugin does all the dirty work for you!

Find more of Lester “Gamerz” Chan’s Plugins right here. If you have the opportunity – hit his Donate link and drop him a few bucks for all his hard work… he has definitley worked for it.

Thank you, Lester!

Share This

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Plugins.

WordPress Plugins Spotlight for 9.17.07

Lisa — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:52:35 +0000

A quick look at some of the WordPress plugins that caught our eye this week – - there’s some real good ones in here!

Advanced Permalinks – Think WordPress Permalinks can’t get any better? Think again! This plugin allows you to create different permalink structures for each post on your site. This is particularly useful when migrating an old permalink structure to a new one.
Read About It | Download It

Smilies Themer – This is a fun plugin for those of you who like emoticons/smilies on your blog! Smilies Themer allows you to use smilies (emoticons) themes (or packs) to replace the wordpress default ones.
Read About it and Download it

Simple Viewer – This plugin allows you to easily include SimpleViewer Flash galleries into Wordpress posts and pages. The admin interface helps you to manage all the options and will also help you to create the thumbs. The captions for each image can be changed individually if you like to show them in the gallery.
Read About It | Download It

WPphpMyAdmin – WordPress functions as a wrapper for phpMyAdmin, so you have one thing less to log on to.
Read About It | Download It

WP Footnotes – Allows the author of posts on a WordPress blog to easily add footnotes to the bottom of their post. Brought to you by Simon Elvery.
Read About It | Download It

Share This

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Plugins.

WordPress Plugins Spotlight for 9.10.07

Lisa — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 12:41:26 +0000

Having a look at some of the great WordPress plugins we’re spotlighting this week – give ‘em a try and then let me know how you loved (or hated!) them:

PodPress – “A dream plugin for Podcasters using WordPress” – this plugin is feature rich with an automatic feed generator, gives you a preview of what your feed looks like on iTunes, PodCast download stats, support for paid only premium content and more!
Read About It | Download It.

WordPress.Com Stats – excellent stats program brought to you by Andy Skelton! WordPress.com users have enjoyed these stats for a long time now, Andy gives us this plugin so that the users of the WordPress.Org (self-hosted) software can enjoy them, too! (Note: You do need to obtain a WordPress API Key in order to use this plugin).
Read About It | Download It

WP AJAX Edit Comments – Ever wish you could fix a typo or re-word a comment you left on someone elses blog?? Well, if that blog is using this plugin – you can. Give your readers the ablility to do the same by installing this plugin on your blog. Written and developed by Ronald Huereca.
Read About It | Download It.

WP-Polls – Allows you to run polls on your WordPress powered blogs to gather insight, ideas and opinions from your readers.
Read About It | Download It

Share This

Design Portfolio | Design Blog | Request a Custom Design | Lisa's Personal Blog | Lisa's Photoblog

Browse the archive of posts filed under WP Plugins.