Here’s the second installment of the WordPress (WP) Plugins Feature series – exactly 30 days after the first one (which got attention from some pretty cool places BTW).

For those of you who are new to this series, each monthly installment features WP plugins released that month which to quote myself, “…provide enough new functionality to be described as worthy additions to our plugin libraries.” It’s definitely a subjective list, but I’ll try to justify my choices and provide examples of their (practical) use.

1. Post Tools
   This plugin checks your posts for specific tags which you can insert to enable some interesting functions. There are a total of 14 tags you can use, though only some are truly unique to the plugin. Some of the tags that really got me interested are pt:password (to password selected portions of a post), pt:sql (to query your WP database in-post) and pt:form (to embed a form in-post). But I’d be lying if I said that was all.

   I can see this being a good toolset for geekier bloggers like myself, with tags for mp3, quicktime, wmv, flash players, as well as tags to display information about the post, your visitors, etc. Not only do you get some unique functions with Post Tools, but you can probably skip installing and activating a whole host of other plugins too. I’m also very impressed with the documentation provided. But the plugin isn’t exactly small file size-wise since it comes with flv and mp3 web-players (around 1.5mb uncompressed).

2. Mass Edit Pages
   Simple, but truly effective. This plugin allows you to the page parents and menu orders of multiple pages all in one interface. I’m sure this will come in handy for those using WP’s pages system extensively (i.e. those using WP more as a CMS), and is a great fit for the CMS-friendly concept or rather, permalink structure, I outlined yesterday.

3. Post Filter
   First up, let me say that I wasn’t very impressed with what this plugin is supposed to be used for: “If you see interesting content on other site just copy paste it in to your post… I hope you understand this and now reblogging will be even more easy with this plugin!”

   But upon second thought, I saw that it had excellent legitimate uses as well. What the plugin mainly does is to filter any content that you copy and paste into your post from other sites, and automatically resize, download and cache any external images in the post to your own server. This is extremely useful for product bloggers that use pictures from other sources in (almost) every post.

   More importantly, I think that the plugin’s last feature, i.e. stripping id, style and class attributes, has the potential to solve an irritating problem I’m facing with a couple of blogs I manage. If expanded to filter stuff like rogue font and span tags or unclosed strong and em tags, it could be used to filter posts first prepared on wordprocessors like MS Word – which often introduce such crap tags for no reason.

4. CafePress WordPress Plugin
   This is the first WP plugin I know of to provide CafePress integration. It allows you to setup a virtual shop using WordPress (ala Chitika ShopLinc and the Pilkster.com Amazon Plugin) to sell other people’s goods on CafePress (affiliate-style) and/or sell goods from your own CafePress store.

   But for those looking for WP-Amazon. style functionality (i.e. insert items inline through the Write Post interface), I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere. Also note that “…we recoup our development costs on the back end using a random (20%) affiliate link rotation system.” It’s at the end of their FAQ and can almost certainly be missed.

5. Create N Place
   Editing posts inline, i.e. without entering WP’s admin panel isn’t new. We’ve had two plugins for that – WP-Touched (of which development seems to have stopped) and Edit N Place (by the author of this plugin). What hasn’t been done, at least to my knowledge, is a plugin that allows you to create new posts inline.

   I won’t deny it’s little more than a novelty for most, but it’s nifty nevertheless. The first real use I thought up was to use it in combination with Edit N Place to simulate a MediaWiki-style environment, where articles can be edited and created inline.

6. Simple Graph Plugin
   If you need to put a regularly updated graph on your blog, this plugin will help you do it. Whether it is to represent your weight loss progress or child’s height, you can just add data points to your graph through WP’s admin interface. The current version only supports simple charts, but the upcoming version will support some pretty complex ones. My only gripe is that you can’t use it to simply generate a chart and save it as an image for individual posts… yet, I hope.

7. Survey Fly
   A WP survey creation plugin, which isn’t original considering that WP Survey Creator has existed since late 2005. But its functionality is a whole level higher, with multiple types of questions available for use. See the demo yourself. To me, it pretty much rounds up all the user-input plugins WP users need. After all, we already have first-class plugins for quizzes and polls.

8. My Comic Browser
   From the plugin’s name alone, I’m sure you’d have noticed that it’s an extremely niche plugin. What it does is to create a navigation system that you’d normally see on a webcomic (e.g. first, previous, next, last comic). My first thought was that it is an easy way to augment WP to act as a webcomic-centric CMS. After all, it’s really only up to your imagination how to use WP as a CMS.

   An idea like this may not seem to be the most original ever, but being able to jump straight to “first” and “last” is a concept that I feel would be interesting to carry over to a normal post/series navigation plugin, like the great In-Series (hint, hint ).

9. Slug Trimmer
   This is another simple, yet effective plugin if you’re the type either really concerned about the SEO aspect of URLs/permalinks or just hate the uber-long post slugs you can get in WP. Unlike Movable Type’s automatic post slug truncation though, Slug Trimmer cuts down on slug length “intelligently” by first removing short and commonly used words like “a” and “the” before truncating it. You can even choose the minimum and maximum length of the final post slug, and whether or not you even want automatic truncation to occur (this mode is ideal for blogger who just want to kill non-keyword words in their post slugs).

10. WP-phpMyAdmin
    This is a time-saver, but one for only a selected group of people who constantly have to access their WordPress database (e.g. plugin designers). From the number of downloads this plugin has had though, this select group is probably larger than I thought.

11. newZ.at Show Drafts
    Here’s another new and simple plugin which I feel is targeted at a rather niche audience. It allows you to show your WP drafts anywhere on your blog, e.g. the sidebar, and could be useful for bloggers who keep many concurrent drafts and wish to let their readers know what they’re writing about.

12. diggPress
    Truthfully, this plugin got my interest simply because it is the second plugin I’ve seen this couple of months that requires you to pay for a copy (a micropayments concept BloggingPro addressed earlier). It, however, is currently more expensive (US$19 vs. US$15) and provides less important functionality compared to the WP-Paypal plugin we saw in the last Feature installment.

    I’m not convinced of the plugin’s aim either. It’s supposed to be the first WP plugin that uses direct API calls to get posts on digg’s front page (allowing you access to more data, e.g. URL of the original dugg page). But based on the demo page provided, it looks to me more like a digg scraper, with key functions other plugins already have (in part). I’d love to be corrected on this one though.

13. Recent Child Pages
    Yep, this is some shameless self-promotion here. Basically, the plugin is just like a Recent Comments or Recent Posts plugin – but for child pages (a.k.a. subpages) instead – and could be useful if you want to use WordPress as a CMS via the pages system. You can check out my somewhat production-level demo (it’s the Recent Articles list on the right sidebar) for more details.

As usual, feel free to point out any mistakes or cool plugins released this month which I missed.

Edit: Oops, almost forgot to pimp my own plugin.

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