September 15th, 2006

WordPress Plugins Feature for September

Part of the WordPress Plugins Feature SeriesIt’s hard to believe this is the third installment of the series already. The first was in mid-July, while the second was in mid-August - featuring 19 new WordPress (WP) plugins in total.

For those out of the loop, each monthly installment of the WordPress Plugins Feature series highlights WP plugins released that month (or more accurately, the 30/31 days from the last installment) which either provide sufficiently unique functionality or substantial improvement over existing alternatives.

Of course, the standard disclaimer applies: This list is inevitably subjective despite significant effort to ensure objectivity. What exactly constitutes “unique” and “substantial improvement” does vary between people, though I do try my best to explain my selections and provide examples of their use.

  1. Whisper
    Private comments are here. Via this plugin, your blog’s registered users can leave “whisper”-type comments to Admins or other registered users. If you want to, you can even allow non-registered users to “whisper”, but only to Admins.

    IMO, while blogging purists will tell you that comments should be public, this plugin is useful for a community blog, and somewhat replicates the Private Message (PM) functionality normally seen in forums - which allows registered users to talk to each other without e-mail addresses.

  2. Themed Login
    Tired of WP’s default login/registration page? Want to integrate it with your blog’s theme? This is the plugin to do it. It allows you to customise the form titles, wrapper CSS elements, as well as the header and footer template files used. You can even change where you get redirected to when you login (which is normally your WP Dashboard at /wp-admin/). There is one key drawback though: It replaces your default wp-login.php and wp-register.php files (i.e. modifies core code) - meaning that WP upgrades could break the plugin. Edit: I misunderstood. No core code edited. However, core code is duplicated within the plugin, and then modified.

  3. My Page Order
    Mass changing page order in WP requires you to edit the Page Order of your pages one by one. That is, until now. This plugin provides an intuitive interface to order all your pages via up/down arrows - all in the comfort of a single admin page. Simple and effective. Now, all we need is Drag and Drop functionality. :)

  4. WordPress Image Tracker
    This plugin allows you track the view and clickthrough stats of images/buttons/banners that you provide to others to place on their own blogs/MySpace profiles, etc. Seems useful for those “Proud YourBlogName Reader” chicklets that appear now and then, or even stuff like the Performancing Banner.

  5. WP Article Import
    This plugin allows you to mass import articles from (TXT? CSV?) files which have been compressed into .zip archives. These .zip archives can either be uploaded manually via the plugin’s admin panel, or uploaded to a folder on your server. You’ll have to purchase a license (US$25) before being able to download it though.

    Truthfully, while the functionality offered is unique, I really can’t think of any situation where I’ll have to use it (can anyone point me to some?). The only time I’ll need to mass import articles is when I’m migrating from another blog platform, and there are already importing scripts available for most platforms. And considering the number of free desktop blogging editors available and WP’s built-in post-to-email functionality, I can already compose articles offline to publish later easily.

    But then I have seen a number of theads in the WP Support forum requesting something like this, so there are surely potential users available. One last thing: It would be nice to see integration with WP-Cron such that the plugin automatically searches a particular folder every XX hours and publishes the .zip files that are in there.

  6. EasyPayPal
    I know there’s already a plugin that provides pay-to-register functionality via PayPal (featured in July, see No. 2), but that one requires you to pay US$15 to download. EasyPayPal is completely free, and while it doesn’t seem to be as robust as the paid version (e.g. reminder emails), all key functionality is available.

  7. Incoming Hits Count
    I have a vague recollection of something like this already existing, but I can’t seem to find it via Google, so here it is. What this plugin does is to rank the links on your blogroll by the number of incoming hits they provide (determined via referral URLs). A partner script - so to speak.

  8. mPicasaIntegration
    There are already plugins that show your most recent/random Picasa Web Album pictures in your sidebar, but to my knowledge, this one is the first to display them in gallery format, or inline with posts.

    Basically, it’s similar to the Flickr Photo Album plugin, but for Google’s Picasa Web offering instead.

  9. phpGedView Integration
    Here’s a plugin with a very specific target audience: Genealogy (family tree) blogs, or blogs with genealogy component. It integrates the popularphpGedView software with WordPress.

  10. JPF Link Pages Plugin
    As a simple extension to the link_pages or wp_link_pages function, this plugin allows you to place both next/previous links and page numbers together - something WP’s default functions don’t allow… yet (I hope).

  11. Spamgarden
    Here’s some fun for this month. Ths plugin creates (via Flash) a tree with branches made out of your comment spam. You can even “trim” the tree by removing old comment spam. ‘Nuff said.

  12. Most Popular Categories by Posts
    Now for some shameless plugging of my own plugin (pun not intended). What it does is to “…list your blog’s most popular categories based on the number of posts assigned to those categories within a user-configurable time period.” It could be useful, for example, on commmunity/multi-author blogs to indicate categories that your bloggers liked writing about this month.

That’s it for this month. Anything else that should be in this list?

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Posted by ZMAng

Filed under Plugins, WordPress

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