Archives for November 2008

In my opinion, one of the best things WordPress ever did was build widget support into the core. Widgets have been the saving grace for those that don’t like to mess with code but want to enhance their blog. However, there is still a lot that could be done to improve the way widgets work within WordPress. Where there are shortcomings in the core, there are usually plugins which step up and fill the gap. One such plugin is called Slayer’s Custom Widgets.

The following screenshots and descriptions are based on an unreleased version of this plugin.

While WordPress provides a way for users to enable/disable widgets, display which sidebar they appear in, and drag and drop functionality, WordPress does not provide a way for end users to configure where a particular widget is displayed beyond the sidebar. That is where this plugin really comes in handy. After installing and enabling the plugin, a new navigation menu will show up near the header of the WordPress administration area. This will take you to the plugins configuration page.

Once there, you should see a list of widgets that are currently active on your blog.

Clicking on one of the active widgets will take you to a page that gives you all sorts of options with regards to displaying the widget. For instance, you can have a widget be displayed on all posts but not pages. Or, you can have a widget be displayed on author pages but not category pages. Thanks to Slayer’s enhanced version, (1.2) you’ll be able to configure a widget to only display on certain template pages such as the singlepost page or the 404 page.

What does all of this granularity mean? It means that the sidebar in WordPress no longer has to display a static configuration of widgets on every single public page within WordPress. A great example of what you can do with this plugin would be to configure a slew of widgets to display only on the home page but when a visitor views a post on the singlepost page, the sidebar turns into widgets for related posts, tags, recent comments on that specific article, buttons to share the post, etc.

Every so often, a plugin comes along that makes me really excited. This happens to be one of them. The reason being is that for the longest time, I have harped on the fact that Widgets were being under utilized. I often describe how users of Joomla can assign modules to appear on specific pages or content types. Now, with this plugin, you can do the same thing in WordPress. When you have this level of granularity in configuring where specific widgets are displayed, it adds an entirely new level of fun and creativity to using WordPress. Not only that, but if this type of Widget configuration ever makes it into the core, Widgets for WordPress will see a major push in development.

Can you think of an example or two of why having this level of widget configuration would come in handy? Let me know in the comments.

Better late than never but here is a list of plugins that were released during the month of October that caught my eye. It amazes me each time I do a post like this to see the amount of creativity that takes place on a monthly basis to either improve upon WordPress or to add functionality to it that didn’t exist before. Quite a few examples can be found within this list.

WP Blurb – Limit posts, pages, categories or your custom text. Limit the number of characters to what you like. You are calling the plugin function from your theme.

TDW Combobox Links – Display links in a combobox.

bbPress Live – bbPress Live allows you to pull data from a bbPress 1.0 forum using the new XML-RPC publishing API in bbPress.

Xavin’s Review Ratings – Xavin’s Review Ratings is a WordPress plugin that adds a shortcode tag [xrr rating=”4/5″] that displays a rating in one of several formats.

HeadSpace2 – HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks.

CommentLuv – Appends a titled link using AJAX to the authors last blog post on their comment giving back some love to the people that join your discussion.

Lazyest Gallery – Lazyest Gallery is an integrated image gallery with automatic thumb and slide creation

Business Directory for WordPress – Business Directory for WordPress is an easy way to host a free directory page for your readers, affiliates, advertisers, community or club members. Invite them to submit a simple advertisement listing for themselves on your blog

WP Double Opt-In List Management – This WordPress email list management plugin allows the visitors of your blog subscribe to your mailing list using a double opt-in method. The signup form (Email, Name and other fields) is placed on the WordPress blog sidebar. After a user fills in the form and clicks “Subscribe”, WP double opt-in plugin sends an email with the subscription confirmation link to the user.

FV Community News – Allow your visitors to add articles to the sidebar or anywhere else. Complete with moderation panel and a settings page, you can sit back while you have full control about the look and articles that being posted.

Update URLs – When you move WordPress to a new domain or directory, the permalinks are not updated. This plugin updates all permalinks. In addition, it also gives the user the option to update any links within posts and pages.

FTP Plugin for WP Database Backup Plugin – This plugin adds a fourth way to save the database backup files of the WP Database Backup plugin. With the standard WP Database Backup plugin you can save the database tables of your weblog a file. This backup file can stored on the server of your weblog, send to an email account or saved (manually) to your local hard disk.

Wp2BB – Wp2BB integrates your WordPress blog and your phpBB forum. It automatically creates new topics in the forum for every new post in your blog.

ZdMultilang – ZdMultilang is a Multilingual plugin for WordPress allowing you to blog in more than one language. You can define multiple languages and translate posts/tags/categories using the interface that will be added to your blog’s administration panel.

Event Calendar 3 – Manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar.

DasboardZone – Displays statistics about your posts and post frequency on the WordPress Dashboard

Lightbox Plus – Lightbox Plus is a plugin that implements Lightbox JS by Lokesh Dhakar. Lightbox Plus is used to create overlay display images on the webpage and to automatically add the correct overlay links to images. Lightbox Plus captures the image title for display using a fairly robust regex to capture most character that may appear as part of the title.

Stumble! – Stumble! for WordPress extends WordPress to support a “random article” feature, similar to StumbleUpon’s StumbleThru and Wikipedia’s (Mediawiki’s) ran.

FeatPlug – Featplug is a plugin that can mine your WordPress (or any other Blog/CMS/Forum software’s) posts and generates “featured content” section

Results Count – Results-Count is a very simple plugin that does exactly what it says on the tin & will count the number of posts that result from operations in WordPress such as a search, viewing a category, or viewing a monthly archive etc.

Highlight Comments – Highlight Comments allows you to highlight comments, which are worth reading. It can highlight your own comments as well and is fully customizable.

Lifestream – Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.

Backlinks – A simple function to show blog posts linking back to any article, similar to Google Backlinks

WP Hide Dashboard – WP Hide Dashboard is a simple plugin that removes the dashboard link and prevents dashboard access to users assigned to the Subscriber role. This is useful if you want to allow your subscribers to edit their own profiles, but don’t want them wandering around the rest of your WordPress admin section.

J Post Slider – Show your post in fancy jQuery box, rotating images, with show-up text box with post description.

login required – Permit access to your blog only to the logged in users

MobilePress – MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that will render your WordPress blog on mobile handsets, with the ability to use customized themes. The plugin also allows specific themes for specific devices / mobile browsers, such as iPhone, Opera Mini, Windows CE Mobile and other generic handset browsers.

WP-Donators – Wp-Donators provides a smart donation function to autoleave the sponsor information in a container after payment. People can donate and submit name/URL or TextLink ad. The information of the latest donors are displayed in the cloud.

Landing sites – When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, the plugin is showing them related posts to their search on your blog.

Slayer’s Custom Widgets – This plugin will make your widgetized sidebars so flexible that you will almost think that your running a more advanced CMS system and not WordPress.

Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Side Content – It enables you to define a set of widgets which are effectively placeholders. Each one is empty until you assign content to it when editing a page. This enables you to extend the content of the page into the sidebar.

MyADManager – Manages 125×125 ADs. Automatic activation and deactivation of ads. Ads can be bought directly, accepts payments via Paypal.

SocioFluid – SocioFluid is a Social Bookmarking Plugin, displaying small icons, which grows when the mouse is moved over, similar to mac effect.

Moderator – Moderator is a WordPress Plugin and associated desktop application, built using Adobe AIR, that allows you to view and moderate comments from your desktop.

eShop – An accessible Paypal Shopping Cart plugin.

New User Approve – New User Approve is a WordPress plugin that allows a blog administrator to approve a user before they are able to access and login to the blog.

WP Unique Article Header Image – Allows you to add/associate unique header image with each single post/page.So you can spice your blog to have a unique header image per post/page.

WordPress Link Directory – A link directory plugin for WordPress which allows other webmasters to add their link to your site. It can check for reciprocal links and even check the Pagerank of the other site and accept or refuse the link based on criteria you specify

List compiled via the WordPress Plugin Release posts on WeblogToolscollection.com