July 16th, 2006

WordPress Plugins Feature: July

Part of the WordPress Plugins Feature SeriesAs part of the WordPress Plugins Feature series, here are the plugins released in the past 30-odd days that have caught my eye.

In some order of interest to me (not necessarily accurate), they are:

  1. Bls Feeds with Comments
    This plugin basically embeds a comment form into your feeds. This way, your readers can comment on your posts in their RSS readers without entering your blog. Theoretically, this could increase the number of comments you get on each post, especially if most of your readers follow your blog through RSS (e.g. 1000+ feed subscribers). Of course, you’ll only need this plugin if you are publishing full feeds since partial feeds will already force your readers to enter your blog.

    Most might think a plugin like this is nothing more than a novelty, but you’d be surprised how useful something like this can be when you have 3000+ RSS subscribers and barely get 3 comments per post. I’m already testing it out on a blog facing the circumstances I’ve outlined above, and the results look quite positive. However, don’t forget to poll your RSS subscribers. Some have already informed me that they found this feature “annoying” and “irritating”, and that they would visit the blog directly if they wanted to comment.

  2. Wordpress-PayPal membership plugin
    As the plugin title states, this plugin integrates PayPal into your blog - allowing you to make it into a pay-to-subscribe kind of blog. All the confirmation and expiry reminder e-mailing, as well as activation and deactivation of user accounts based on their payment status is automatically handled. This is, I believe, the first plugin to do all this. However, if you’re just looking for a membership-blog plugin, i.e. a plugin that allows you to manage members more efficiently, then I suggest using WP-Members - a more full-featured and established plugin.

    Ironically, this WP-Paypal plugin isn’t free. When David over at Blogging Pro talked about micropayments for WP plugins, this was probably what he was talking about (though he suggested much, much smaller payments than what WP-Paypal costs).

    Anyway, if I were to use this plugin, I’d push it into an established blog which provides value-added content that bloggers might want to charge for. For example, if TechCrunch ends up selling in-house research like Steve Rubel speculates, Michael Arrington might want to use this plugin to charge subscribers for it (though I’d wait until this plugin gets more features filled in).

  3. List Peer Pages Plugin
    This plugin allows you to list the “peer pages” (i.e. pages with the same parent page) of the current page. While there are already plugins that allow you to list the child pages of a parent page (and thus allow you to imitate the function of this plugin), they are not necessarily easy to configure to provide this function.

    I’m already using something like this for a CMS implementation of WordPress. Basically, I’m listing the peer pages of the current page on the sidebar - allowing users a useful form of navigation within a particular group of pages (all with the same parent) - through the In-Series plugin (for example, check out the sidebar of this page on one of my still-developing econs blogs). But In-Series wasn’t meant to do what List Peer Pages does (it has its own good purpose), so I had to hack the plugin a little and waste time in using custom fields. Now that List Peer Pages has appeared, I might replace In-Series with it.

  4. Star Rating for Reviews
    A few plugins are already available for your readers to rate your posts through star ratings (e.g. Votio and Post Star Rating). But to my knowledge, there have been none to allow you to arbitrarily insert star ratings into your own posts (there’s one for movies though, but it’s very specialized) and even generate an overall rating calculated from all the ratings you’ve added into the post. This plugin provides exactly those functions exactly. Moreover, the number of stars used (up to 20) and denominator used can be customised (no more cliche 5 stars only).

    Update: There’s already a rating plugin available called Rate My Stuff. It has less functions compared to this one, but it’ll work for most purposes. Thanks to TDH for pointing it out.

    An excellent plugin for reviews of any sort, especially since you can place a rating for for each review category (e.g. speed, design, performance, etc.) , and let the plugin calculate the overall rating. ‘Nuff said.

  5. Redirection
    This plugin basically provides you the ability to set redirections for any WordPress page, or files in your WP directory - all from the comfort of your WP admin console. Of course, this concept is nothing new, with the Objection Redirection plugin being a notable (earlier) alternative. But this plugin adds quite a few nifty features. For one, you get full regular expression support - meaning that you can easily redirect whole directories. You also get redirection statistics, e.g. how many times redirection has occured, and Google information, e.g. are the old and new URLs in Google? Let’s not forget automatic 301 redirection when you change a post’s URL.

    This plugin is a good example of how rehashes of old ideas can lead to extremely full-featured and robust plugins. If I were to name my most immediate use for this plugin, it would be to redirect all traffic from a blog’s old URL to its new URL. I’m contemplating transferring a blog from a subdomain to a domain of its own, and this plugin could handle the necessary redirections in just one step.

  6. Super Categories Plugin/Hack
    This plugin is fundamentally an attempt to make WordPress into a multi-blog system. It does this by creating “super categories” which you can then use to organize not only posts, but also conventional categories, links and pages. This makes each “super category” into an individual “blog” with its own themes and options. Of course, this is a very early release (a.k.a. quite buggy), but with enough development, this plugin could become truly poweful. There have been, however, prior attempts at developing a multi-blog WordPress (most similar to this plugin is Multiply, which at the moment is more stable).

    The primary way I’d use it is to setup a set of blogs all revolving around a single theme. For example, I might use this to create a personal homepage, blog, portfolio and photolog - all on individual WordPress installs and individual subdomains with individual themes, but with capability to easily cross-reference between them, e.g. list posts from all blogs on the homepage, etc. I’m currently trying to do just that with my personal domain, blog, and in future my portfolio site and photolog. I’m currently testing Multiply and Lyceum, but if this plugin develops further, I might try it instead.

That should be it for this month. I’m sure I’ve missed a few plugins (maybe a lot), but that just goes to show how many useful plugins are released every month.

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Posted by ZMAng

Filed under Plugins, WordPress

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