Brag About Favorite Plugins

It’s sort of unfair to ask an author, who has spent x amount of hours, days, weeks to do anything more than describe the functionality of the plugin.

Unfair, maybe, but awfully important, especially to newcomers like me. So many times I visit a plugin’s site but can’t figure out what the plugin does, or how I can use it.

For example, I went right to ScriptyGoddess’ site to check out the Paginate Plugin, but couldn’t figure out what it did, or why it would be such a great plugin.

So then I went to Kafkaesqui’s site to see if I could find anything he was doing that related to the word “paginate.” I discovered how when the posts in an individual category exceed one page, the links to the next pages are displayed as “Page 1, 2, 3, etc.” rather than “next page – previous page.”

That’s cool! Now I know I want that plugin.

Sorry, Jinsan. I disagree. That is, assuming a developer cares about end-users being interested in his/her work. Otherwise, you’re right, the developer is under no obligation to say much of anything other than putting up the code. But I come from the school of coding (yes, I do a bit of coding) where 1) commenting code too much is better than too little, and 2) too much documentation is better than too little–which includes putting oneself in the position of the enduser and imagining what this code is useful for.

“It’s up to the end user to say, “You MUSt try this plugin because…”—> This overstates what I said. I said ‘should’, not ‘must’.

“I don’t believe the authors really have time to slap themselves on the back for a job well done.”–>And this equates documentation with congratulations.

I’m talking about giving endusers reasons for checking out their work. That can’t be bad, and certainly shouldn’t be onerous to the developer. Heck, it sure beats debugging!

RosieMBanks–nice layout! Not my style really, but I still recognize nice work when I see it.

cheers!

Thanks, xmiinc, I recognize nice work when I see it, too. That’s why I’m using geeksmakemehot‘s “Dixie Belle” theme!

Some of us are born to create nice work, and some of us have to wait for them to release themes.

(And plugins.)

vkaryl: great list, but how about a few whys as to why you like using these and how you use them. I’m intrigued with Adhesive and Countdown. Is that one plugin or two? How do you use those?

What’s Shire Reckoning and Referrer Bouncer? Those sound like comment spam or something plugins.

Lists are everywhere, we’re looking for the brags, the why these things work great for you and are on your favorite list. It helps us all decide which ones to use a little better. Great list, though.

For Aministration – I can’t live without Paged Comment Editing and Enhanced Manage Screen View by Coldforged. With the first one, I can quickly check for spam (they show up in pink with one click) and delete them from my database, which saves some database size space. With the second one, I’ve mentioned it before, but I use it every day to figure out what is where, where I put it, and what the heck is it doing there.

Batch Categories (does anyone have a link to a working version of that for download??) is a total life saver. It isn’t a plugin (though they are working on it) but a separate file you can link to from within your Admin screen. It allows for massive shifting around of posts from one category to another. This thing saved me totally when I screwed up my categories and had the wrong post in the totally wrong category – more than 500 of them. With a few quick clicks, I could move around 50 or more posts between categories. Amazing.

I’m also eternally grateful to Coffee2Code for the Never Moderate Admin or Author plugin – so I don’t have to moderate my own comments any more. YEAH! Time saver.

For my posts and layout, I’m totally lost without Coffee2Code’s plugin for customizable posts and WASABI’s Related Entries Plugin which I use in my sidebar to help people navigate around my site and find related and recent articles on similar topics.

My site’s look, when it comes to the actual posts, is totally and completely saved by TextControl plugin which allows me to control the generated code results per post. So if I have a totally XHTML marked up post with boxes, graphics, and bells and whistles, I can turn off all the autoformatting and have that post look how “I want it”. If I am not using any XHMTL in my post, for quick entries, I turn on the autoformatting and I don’t have to worry. I love it. The only thing that is a pain is that I have to SAVE AND CONTINUE EDITING before I can see the plugin’s options, a minor detail.

There are so many that save me daily, but these are the top ones.

I guess the last one I’d like to mention is one that does something that is rarely directly talked about here. We fuss over comment spam and other details, but I still don’t want harvesters coming through and grabbing my email or anyone elses from my site, something that really was the rage a few years ago. Coffee2Code, who I swear works overtime from time to time on producing amazing plugins for WordPress users, has a neat thing called “Obfuscate E-mail” which changes all email addresses into character codes which can be read on the screen but are garbled looking when the source code is viewed. Just as we use “<” to make the left arrow for beginning a tag < as a character representative, this plugin takes every letter or number in your email address and makes it into an ascii character code. Viewable but unrecognizable to harvesters. Very cool.

I have to say, from the number of plugin-pages I’ve visited, authors should spend more time answering the question “Why would I want to use this (plugin)?” instead of just describing what it does. Not the same thing.

Speaking as a person who’s only written 2 plugins, here’s why I don’t try to “sell” anyone on them: I wrote them for ME, I wrote them because I needed them…but, I also felt kind enough to share with anyone else who may be looking for the same functionality.

So I thought I’d ask if anyone had any favorite plugins that they would like to brag about that they use on their site.

Definitely Scriptygoddess’s show/hide “more”, and subscribe to comments plugins. I think more people should have subscribe to comments. ?? so much easier to follow discussions. And, well, the show/hide thing…just cool.

Scott Reilly’s wp-untexturize and Alex Kings WP Unformatted. Because I hate curly quotes. HATE THEM, I tell you! That, and sometimes, I just don’t want WP’s formatting. Period. ??

And, of course (since I got rid of Authimage), Dr. Dave’s Spam Karma.

Lorelle, I was trying not to take up a lot of space…. stuff like that is so subjective….

Adhesive is one plugin – sticky post, I like it and have had zero problems with it though YMMV, others have had a lot of trouble with it in 1.5.

Countdown is a separate plugin: it allows you to input data to a text file to count the days remaining to whatever events you choose to list.

Referrer Bouncer bounces referrer spam back to the originating site. It’s one of my “action against spam and dreck” crew: the others are Spam Karma and WP Spam Assassin, which works directly with the Spam Assassin installation on your host server (assuming your host has that installed). I don’t have any spam….

Shire Reckoning2 lists “today” as if it were happening in Tolkien’s world of LOTR, complete with events from the books on the relevant days if one chooses to display them. Since I’m an unregenerate Tolkien fan (read the whole bunch of them a couple of times a year, every year since about 1965 – still finding stuff I’ve missed before), I had to have this one.

The bunch of them fits the way I handle blogs, which is pretty unlikely to be the way others do, I think, just from my reading around here!

Wow! This is amazing. I thought Shire Reckoning2 would surely have something to do with comment spam. This is why I started the thread. One, to generate interest in plugins and what’s available, but also to find out what is available and how people use them. The way I use things is different from how you would use the same things.

I said a lot, but part of this topic is the different way we use things and I use Coffee2code’s customizable post listings in several different ways. One in my sidebar to show the most recent posts, and another in a good number of my major categories. I created custom category-X.php template files for these and added the random function of the customizable post to create a list of random selections (“highlights”) of the different posts within that category.

One plugin that does a dozen different things. It all depends upon the use, and learning how people use different plugins for different reasons helps us all to learn more.

Thanks!

PS: vkaryl – I was so inspired by your Shire Reckoning2 mention, that I decided to see what was out there and I found ca-Stardate plugin which gives the date in Star Trek time. LOVE IT! Don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but as a major Trekie (closet – opps, guess not anymore ?? ) fan, it has me thinking…..

Wow, Lorelle – I totally missed that one! Okay, gotta go get it now. My “trekkie-ism” is limited to the original series (in B&W, btw – we were the last family in Vegas to get a color tv!), but that’s okay….

Hmm. Hey, any of you fab plugin coders want to whip up a plugin to consolidate the stardate trekkie one with the stardate info from the University of Texas (I think) that one hears on pub radio? Now THAT would be cool!

Oh, wow….totally cool. Ain’t it amazing what people come up with for plugin ideas!

It got me thinking about other calendar/date/time things and I found these little novelties, and you can find more at Codex Plugins Calendar/Event List and https://www.wp-plugins.net :

* Time Zone Plugin
* Month Chunks
* CA-weton’s Javanesse Weton day and date
* Jalali(shams) date convertion for WordPress Iranian users

I’m sure there are other cultural/religous time and calendars out there…anyone know?

wp-hashcash, which is recently updated has been my favourite spam plugin, well probably of any plugin, so far. I tried SpamKarma and Spaminator, and I saw all the for and against for each plugin. Hashcash (previously stopgap) is such a simple and devious little plugin.

Upload the js file, upload the php file, run the plugin and that’s it. no configuration, no messing around – it has never moderated any author comments, it has never moderated legtimiate comments and it has stop ANY spam from appearing. Of course I don’t use robots.txt and my meta info in my header is not up to date, but before this plugin and with either of the other two plugins I still recevied and managed spam comments on a regular basis.

Iimage Gallery based on the Image Gallery (?) plugin by a French WP users I believe, this has done a lot with regards to improving on the base. It allows creation of thumbnails, resampling as well as resizing, includes a mutltiude of options on how to link an image, either as a thumbnail, as a full image and so on.

It allows a lot of control within the pop up window, including uploading and deleting from within the pop up. It’s improving with each build although since the quicktag button was introduced there have been issues with it not working as it should, it seems like a bug where the some have it working and others don’t. still I’ve very happy with the 1.41 version of the plugin.

simple php gallery – even after I dumped it once, and althougt not strictly a plugin it is a brilliant WP addition. It may not have a lot of options, but if you just want images uploaded to a folder, want auto-thumbnails and a gallery that is frankly astongishingly easy to integrate not only into WP but also to make it look like the rest of your site then no other gallery “plugin” comes close to simple php gallery IMHO. If this had a few more features, and an administrative backend, it would be pretty perfect.

comment quicktags – if there is one way to include and style the quicktag buttons for use in the comments page, then this is it. upload, activate and style. simple, but oh so useful.

custom posts per page/custom query string a clever little plugin that allows you to manage posts depending on the page so you can set it to display 6 posts archives, 10 posts in a category, 2 posts if it’s home, and so on. Simple and easy to manage with it’s own interface within the admin panel.

category images – another c2c plugin and one that offers a multitude of options over the existing tag within wp I feel. It’s a brilliant plugin and piece of cake to use, I use for both sites I’m working on and the options available just add to the fun of this plugin. Both plugins do essentially the same thing, with some minor difference, it’s down to preference and need I suppose.

customisable post plugin again from c2c the flexible nature of this plugin and the updates it has gone through, as well as the upcoming and tasty prosecpt of upgrades in the waiting, have made this plugin invaluable for my needs. it’s options, and it’s ease of use as well as the huge number of variables allow the mix and matching of different ways to display posts in different containers. it’s just brilliant.

Wow, I got a mention and didn’t even know it! vkaryl, I’m glad you like wp-spamassassin. But see below, because there’s more…

OK, the plugins I run and wouldn’t do without are as follows:

• Bad Behavior. Kills spambots dead by denying access entirely; this saves your bandwidth from being wasted and your email addresses from being harvested.
• Spam Karma 2. Because not all spam is automated.
• WP-ContactForm. Lets people get hold of you without giving out your email address; you can drop a contact form in any post or page.
• Live Preview from Chris J. Davis. Shows an immediate preview of comments as your reader types it in.
• Moose Candy. This is a special plugin just for NuclearMoose. But it’s oh so amazing. Lets you insert content between posts. This only works with some themes! Classic and default are fine. For others it might not work.

As a newbie, I would like to see more plugin authors explain some basics about your plugin. It may seem obvious to you, because you know the terminology, but newbies can learn quickly if you give an example.

Basic info to tell us:
–What part of my WP would the plugin enhance? BASICS. Does it change the way posts look, the category listing, the layout, or the admin interface?

–A visual example if possible, either a screenshot of it in-action (such as an admin interface change), or an actual blog using the plug-in. Preferably a screenshot of the plug-in being used, with a simple circle or arrow drawn around the part of the page that is affected. Like, “Look here dummy, it does this >>”

Again as a newbie, my 2 cents. Thanks to the plugin authors and all helpers here.

My favorite plugins:

Bad Behavior, to keep bandwidth wasting, email harvesting, and spam posting bots out of this site.
Permalink Redirect, to ensure that redirected permalinks (those entered without a trailing slash) return a 301 permanent redirect message.
Screw Nofollow, to disable the rel=nofollow attribute in the comments area.
Search Hilite, to highlight search terms when visiting from any popular search engine.
Search Pages, to allow pages to be searched as well as posts.
Spam Nuker, to manage spam deleted by WordPress’ default anti-spam tools.
Translator, to present MacManX.com in 9 different languages (including English).
WP-ContactForm, to provide a contact form and hide my email address from spam bots.