WordPress Station

I’ve already covered themes, so now to wrap up any plugins that I saved links for over the last month or so.

First is AdIcons, an interesting little take on selling some link love. Basically it seems you use a sites favicon and have a small grid to fill. A fairly unobtrusive way to monetize your site, or just an interesting way to link to friends/community.

Next up is a simple, but interestingly well conceived plugin. WordPress VCard, which basically allows you to add your info via an admin panel, and then have a downloadable VCard in your sidebar (I imagine you could also have it on an about page as well). Works both as a widget and a standard plugin.

The next plugin I haven’t tested, but need to, as many will know that there’s been a bug in WP for quite some time that if switching from VRE to HTML view, any tables with added styling, the code is stripped, the table is borked, and back to square one. So the Spreadsheet to Table plugin may very well be the answer in the short term. If anyone gets a chance to test this before I, please leave a comment on your experience.

The last plugin I’m going to mention, to me, is more invaluable than ever, considering the fact that “widgets” went into the core of WP 2.2. This plugin allows for the execution of PHP in a widget, so basically you can customize template tags, older plugins, etc from within the admin panel. This will be especially helpful, IMO, to those who help manage blogs for others.

And finally, Devlounge has written a series How to Write a WordPress Plugin. Everything from why to write one, to creating an admin panel has been covered so far (as of today, the latest installment is interaction with the database). Anyone curious about stepping into the realm should definitely take a look.

That about covers the top items I had bookmarked over the past month, so posting should return to the normal one item per post routine I’ve normally followed.

ThinkFree
Ever had the need to include Office documents with a post? Powerpoint presentations, spreadsheets with graphs and charts? Now you can with this plugin from ThinkFree.
Not tested, but the demo and instructions seem to be easy as pie. Activate the plugin, attach the file to the post, and a “view” icon is automatically added to the post. Clicking the view, a lightbox like box opens up with the document overlaying the page. I did notice that one has to have javascript enabled to view the document. A plugin like this can really expand a businesses use of blogging, as they can share all kinds of documents, either internally or publicly.
Well, you can scratch that last part, I just read the TOU,and it appears the plugin is strictly for personal non-commercial use.

This service, however, is limited to non-commercial usage. Users publishing documents for commercial purposes will be terminated. Your subscription and right to use the service are personal to you as an individual and do not extend to use by or on behalf of any association, organization, corporation or other entity comprised of multiple persons

No mention of a for-pay service, which seems short sighted to me.

Dr Dave
It’s little doubt by now my belief this is the single most important plugin for WordPress, so it was nice to see the other day when moderating a site, looking past the 964 spam comments SK had eaten, and the mere 7 that were in moderation (all spam after all), that a new version was out.

And while you are updating, donate.

Napolux.com
I’ve always wished that more people would comment on this site, about their opinions, experiences, general impressions of the plugins/themes/updates that get posted, but alas, I’ve not had much luck. I’m installing Napolux’s MyAvatars plugin, which uses your MyBlogLog avatar in the comments. Not that I expect that to create a mad rush to start commenting, however it’s always nice to have something visual to put with a commenter. I may have to add one of those widgets as well, as it’s kinda funny to click a link to a site, and all of a sudden see yourself as a recent visitor. What are your feelings on those?

ear-fung.us
For those tuned (ha, get it iPod, tuned) into working out with the combo of the Nike+ iPod gear, and want to share/track their progress on their blog, this seem like the ticket. Using the Nike API, it pulls the XML file and allows for customization via the admin interface, including showing a “power song” and linking to iTunes. Also has the ability to graph the run. This plugin is at v 1.4, so it’s seems well developed with a full demo on the author’s site in their sidebar.

WP-AJAX Newsletter
Housed at Google code, apparently this plugin allows for a newsletter to be emailed to all registrants of blog content. Lots of ability to customize the outgoing newsletter, as well as an AJAX powered registration (including email conformation for registration). I couldn’t decipher if you could include content outside of blog posts or not.

Alex King
Beta 2 is out for the Twitter plugin for WP. I keep reading more and more about this Twitter thing, and am finding it hard to resist to “drink the Kool-aid”.

Trev’s Travels
Trevor has released what looks like an excellent learning tool for WP users who want to venture into learning more about plugin development. Basically he’s released everything you need to create your plugin, simply without the specific function.

I haven’t tested it yet, but I did look at the file, and it’s very well commented. Options for widgets, including something like into a post/page and a normal plugin function call are included, as well as an options page for your plugin if you need it.

I’m actually surprised I haven’t seen anything like this before, though there are several tutorials floating around.

while on the topic of plugins particularly, I’d like to take a minute to suggest to users to really think about making donations to authors who provide the ability to do so. Though WP can be downloaded for free, and almost all plugins are freely available, it would hurt to if everyone who downloaded a plugin once donated a dollar, it would make a significant difference to the authors, and I’m sure would spurn quicker development, or user suggested features incorporated at a quicker rate. If not for every download, at least for ones that you’ve consistently relied on. (Especially spam plugins).

And this is not relegate to just plugin authors. Theme authors should be thought about as well. A lot of time and energy is spent on some of the themes, so giving back some of that in the form of a donation would be nice.

This particularly could be said about blogs that create revenue. Andy Beardrecently solicited suggestions for who to make donations to, as he is pledging to donate 50% of all revenue from doing paid reviews. More of this should be happening. Well done Andy.

So the next time you download a killer plugin, consider sending a paypal donation. Any amount will be appreciated, and know that it is one more way to keep the WordPress community strong.

For the record, I have donated to several plugin authors, and as this is will be the first month that WP Station has earned any amount of revenue outside of covering hosting costs, I will explore some of the other plugins I use on this and other sites I maintain.

It was recently announced that a new “official” plugin repository. This is a good thing, however, before all the fan fare, a few things should be pointed out, as I see them.

First, for a plugin to listed there, it MUST be GPL. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a coder, or a lawyer, so I do not even begin to understand all the intricacies of what that means, but not all plugins are GPL. So this will never be a complete list of all the plugins available.

Second, the plugin author MUST upload the plugin to the wp server, and use their subversion directory. This could be a good thing, as it will help in version control, however, again, not all plugin authors are going to want to do this, either because they have their own subversion, method of development, or are just lazy. Also, a lot of plugin authors want the traffic for creating the plugin. Hosting the plugin off wp.org will take some of that away. WordPress.org is offering noticeable links back to their site, as well as paypal button for donations, however, that may not prove enough of a trade off for the authors.

Next, unless a decision is made to drop the bundled plugins from the “most popular” (akismet, default widgets if that becomes part of the download package, I see the delicious widget is included in that list), the data will be skewed. Speaking of “skewed”, the most popular tags listed on the left of the page there are numbers in parenthesis. Skype is listed first, with the # 36. Click on that tag, you see 1 plugin. Confusing? Yes. Granted these bugs could be worked out, however I would have thought some of the UI would have been better thought out before launching.

Another issue there is not currently a RSS feed for this, only feeds for individual tags. I’m quite surprised by this, but assume that will be another bug worked out.

Finally, as people have experienced with the “official theme viewer”, it is volunteer supported (or so I understand). And just as the other major source of plugin info, lapses in volunteers can lead to a bad experience for users.

All of that said, it is still a positive move, as more and more people rely on plugins for extending WP beyond basic blogging. An advantage I already see is it would provide developers with a localized source of plugins to develop new versions against. If you know certain plugins are highly rated and downloaded, you can test development against the plugins to avoid major “breakage” of a lot of blogs with an update. However, this will rely on authors keeping the plugin subversion up-to-date, and participating in general.

Another feature I see that can be beneficial to the community is the commenting on the plugin page. This very well can be used as a source of support, potentially moving that from the general support forums, to where the author can better track their plugin and offer support (or other users of the plugin if the author doesn’t participate).

Finally, the plugin page is beautiful, with lots of useful info, including the ability to have screenshots and FAQs.

So while a move in the right direction, I’m not sold this will be the de-facto solution, however only time will tell.