Wordpress Plugins

Horizontal scrolling announcement Plugin

I am not a great fan of scrolling announcements and the like but my daughter has been nagging me for one on her site.So after a quick scan of what plugins are available I have decided to test this one out.

The Horizontal scrolling announcement is a simple to configure scroller with numerous options that even the most inexperienced WordPress user can set up.

I would like to see an easier option then having to edit the theme to display but on the whole pretty good.

You can see an example of  the Horizontal scrolling announcement Plugin in action in the footer of  www.ipod2go.co.uk .

Open in New Window Plugin

This is a nice little plugin for those people (like me) that always forget to set the target of external links to Open in New Window.

This plugin uses JavaScript to target external links to a new browser window, leaving your blog page open.

Certain links such as Google are not picked up by this plugin due to issues with Javascript but on the whole a must have plugin.

BuddyPress at iPod2Go

After deactivating BuddyPress on MyWordPress due to the performance issues it created . I have decided to revisit the capabilities of BuddyPress.

I have done a clean install on www.ipod2go.co.uk so I can test it out without messing up this site.

To be fair its pretty good easy to install and not a great deal of performance issues that I can tell.

Hopefully a few people will sign up so it can really be put to the test

Mingle Social Networking Plugin

Given the popularity of social networking I thought it was about time that I investigated what was available for WordPress.

Not to be disappointed I came across this plug-in  Mingle by Blair Williams .

I have set it up on www.wordpressworld.co.uk and it seems to work a treat though to be honest I could do with a few people signing up and drive some activity through it to truely be able to give it the thumbs up.

ByREV Fix Missed Schedule Plugin

Managing scheduled posts have become a real pain recently.Since upgrading to WordPress 2.9.2 no matter what I try scheduled posts just do not publish.

So having trawled Wordpress .org I came across this plugin that will loop through your posts and force publish them if any are found that missed their scheduled publish time.

The plugin will check your posts every 10 minutes but the time interval is easy to change by modifying this line

Its not ideal but until this is fixed this plugin does the job. 

You can get it from http://blog.avirtualhome.com/wordpress-plugins .

Visitor Maps and Who’s Online

Giving the Visitor Maps and Who’s Online  plugin by Mike Challis a test drive.

This plugin will Displays Visitor Maps with location pins, city, and country. Includes a Who’s Online Sidebar to show how many users are online.

You can see the map output here hovering over the map dots will display country and town information.

Due to my server limitation I had to FTP the geo data file as it it would not install on plugin activation ,apart from that its pretty straight forward to set the plugin up.

There is also a page which you can use to focus in on the data in more detail .

Extreme SEO Plugin

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is geting other sites to link to your site that have relevant related content.

So I thought I would give this plugin a try that automates the linking process through their linking network.

This plugin provides inbound links to your site’s post pages from post pages on other unique domains within the Extreme SEO network that have content related to your content

So what happens?

You install and activate the plugin you should then see ‘Related Web Articles’ appear automatically at the bottom of each post.Pretty simple.

I am going to leave it up and running for a few days to monitor the quality of the inbound links and to see if any other problems become apparent.

In theory this plugin should help the ranking of this site .

WP Hide Post

Have been investigating the WordPress Plugin WP Hide Post today.

This plugin gives you the ability to control the visibility of items on your WordPress site.

The following options are available.

Hide on the front page
Hide on category pages
Hide on tag pages
Hide on author pages
Hide in date archives (month, day, year, etc)
Hide in search results
Hide in feeds

This seems a well thought out plugin that makes the task of managing your content that bit easier.

Theme Switch Update to 0.7.3.1

Have just updated the Theme Switch Plugin to the latest version .

Updated nice and easy but I noticed a slight problem which has nothing to do with the plugin but it might give you issues.

I have Buddypress integrated into this site when switching to the standard BudddyPress theme using Theme Switcher the widget disappears so you are unable to switch back.

Now I think this may also occur if the widget is placed in a sidebar area that does not exist in the theme you switch to.

Now the latest version excludes the default WordPress themes which gave me the idea how to solve this.

If you find this piece of code in widget.php

if ( $option['config']['exclude'] == ‘Enable’ ) {
    if ( $theme_name == ‘WordPress Classic’ || $theme_name == ‘WordPress Default’ || $theme_name == ‘Twenty Ten’  ) 

and add in any other theme you want to exclude for instance to exclude the standard BuddyPress Theme do this

if ( $option['config']['exclude'] == ‘Enable’ ) {
    if ( $theme_name == ‘WordPress Classic’ || $theme_name == ‘WordPress Default’ || $theme_name == ‘Twenty Ten’ || $theme_name == ‘BuddyPress Default’ ) 

Problem solved hope this helps .

Theme Switch and Preview Plugin

Have just installed the nifty Theme Switch and Preview Plugin by nkuttler.

You can now view the different Heatmap child themes by selecting from the drop down menu on the right.

Only problem at present seems to be that the widget has no title and no option to set it.

I have dropped a line to the author hopefully he can point me in the right direction.

The author as released an update so you can now set the widget title within the Theme Switcher options