The Daily Plugin for 07-08-2013

I hope that everyone in the U.S. enjoyed the long Independence Day weekend. Here in Southern California we like to have fun and this past weekend was no exception. Fun for me though, is taking some quality time to hit the WordPress Plugin Repository and check out the newest plugins to hit the street. I’m happy to bring you another edition of The Daily Plugin where we highlight some of the newest and most recently updated plugins available for WordPress. Remember to always test these plugins on a duplicate development or staging site to mitigate your risk of anything going wrong with a fully live site. With that being said, let’s all get plugged in!

Settings Revisions is a handy tool developed to provide the ability to roll back the changes to your theme that are done by the default “Edit Theme” editor. As we have talked about previously with other revision archive tools, it’s fantastic to be able to reference older changes to WordPress, especially for clients who frequently change opinions about site colors, layouts, etc during the design phase. It’s always great to have a degree of rollback control with anything, especially as something as critical as theme design options.

FP RSS Category Excluder helps to add some control of your RSS output by allowing you the ability to remove certain category id’s from appearing in your RSS feed. As one who originally began my WordPress journey over 8 years ago BECAUSE of the RSS/Podcasting capabilities, I welcome all plugins that allow crafting of how the RSS feed is shaped. This plugin works easily by adding the ID numbers of one or more categories to exclude from publishing in the main RSS feed. Another great plugin by Flourish Pixel.

Custom Comment Form Title helps to encourage discussion by getting beyond the stock “Leave a reply” that follows a typical post. Instead, this plugin enables a new text input box in each individual post’s content editor.  This would let you customize the call to action for prompting your viewers to make a post. Anything from “Do you think this person is GUILTY? Why or Why Not?” to “Are you experiencing problems with your Gadget 2001 as well? Let us Know!”. Anything you want. It’s all customized per post to say whatever you want.

YouTube Analytics Dashboard allows you to view your YouTube video analytic views and statistics right in your WordPress dashboard. This helps to prevent going back and forth to your YouTube account and would also allow you the means to use this for clients. Permitting more data in the dashboard gives your client the reinforcement that their WordPress based domain is a web property and WordPress can be the “transparency conduit” for all other social arms out there, including YouTube. It also allows you to have access restrictions based on user role, so if you only want admins to see the data, it’s completely configurable with just a simple drop down. I love the direction that this plugin is going in and welcome more statistical and analytical based plugins from other developers to follow in the same manner. The more we can use the user dashboard to display external information, the better.

Map My Posts shows off a grouping of your posts according to where you Geo-Tag them. In other words, people can scroll through a Google map that is tagged with pins. Each pin is defined by placing a location tag in each post. The editor allows you to enter in a location relevant to a category, such as identifying a news item about a particular country or city. The viewer would then be able to navigate around a map and see how many stories are listed in each area. This could also be listed in this manner for business purposes to show pages from different locations or franchise info for each store. You would create a new post or page the location would populate based on the category. The map would then highlight exactly where each post is associated and grouped. Very nice technical capabilities with very little user input required. It would be nicer to be able to individually tag the posts and pages themselves rather than having to associate with a category all the time. Then you could associate individual addresses with individual posts.

We’ll be back on tomorrow with another edition of The Daily Plugin, scouting out the newest rookies in the game to see if they are good enough to make the cut for YOUR team of preferred plugins. Be sure to say hello on Twitter @marcuscouch and leave your comments, suggestions and admiration notes about any of the plugins mentioned right on WPTavern.