Lots of great new plugins have come across the wire in the WordPress Plugin Repository. Today we’re going to take a look at TSP Author’s Note for adding after-the-fact post notations from the author, WP No Base Permalink for removing the base /tag/ or /category/ from your permalink structure, Remove Links From Comments, a Username changer, a great way to embed Word files, tools to monitor social sharing on a per post basis, graphic visualization tools and an awesome new RSS embed plugin that I started implementing immediately after I discovered it! Before we begin, remember to test and analyze the performance of these plugins on a staging site. You never know if plugins will play well together, or with themes for that matter. Make sure you make backups of the site and database.
TSP Authors Note allows you to add author’s notes and after-thoughts to your blog posts and pages. This pairs with the plugin’s author box output, but the new “notes” can be added via shortcode. This enables you to go back and add your own “I told you so” passages to older posts, or the opportunity to highlight new findings, specific comments or anything else you need to reflect a new perspective on an old post. I found the plugin to be quite useful for a friend that does a lot of interviews about start-ups. He can use this for making notes on people’s later successes and milestones they faced in business along the way.
RSS This is the crowning jewel for today’s batch of plugins. When building the station site for WordPress Radio, I found the need to insert the most recent shows of each podcast that was featured. Using this plugin was a pleasure! It formatted each item in the site’s feed in a nice content box, including a thumbnail of the post’s featured image. The plugin is shortcode based and allows you to choose how many items are included in the feed. When used in multiple instances on the same page, the plugin’s shortcodes allow you to create a fast news or headline site from many sources on the same page. The “Read More” button goes straight back to the original article source on the home page where the feed item came from, allowing you to give proper link attribution to the feed author. For me, this is a perfect solution to save me the weekly time burden of manually adding news or content items to the site.
WP No Base Permalink optionally removes the base function from your category or tags in your permalinks. The “base” is always a dead ringer for identifying an off-the-rack WordPress site and something that my development project users can’t stand. It is both Multisite and WPML compatible as well. Previously I had used two different plugins to accomplish this task, but now I can remove or rename the tag and category bases with just one plugin. If this benchmarks as a faster solution when compared to the simultaneous load time of the other 2 plugins I use, I can think of at least 50 domains I will use it on.
Remove Links From Comments helps to ease a bit of the spamming going on within your comments. It will remove the option to add a website within the comment form, and in addition removes all the hyperlinks within the comment content itself. Be careful with this one, as more often than not, regular commenting users will drop links in their comments to relevant sites relating to your post. This plugin would discourage that, as well as showing the home page of your comment providers.
Username allows you to change the username of the admin. This has been a need of mine for some time, especially when creating sites for others. Sometimes “admin” just doesn’t click with a new WordPress user and they just need it to be “Tom” instead. This one does the trick nicely. In the instance of multiple admins, each individual administrator has the ability to change their username in the user panel. There is a degree of duplicate protection, as it will not allow you to change to a user name that already exists.
Attachments++ allows you the option to embed popular file formats such as Excel, Word, and other kinds of audio and video media files. If you’d like the ability to publish Word files on your WordPress site, here’s the plugin for you! I tried it on a test site and it worked well with a few CSS width modifications. With the pending Health care changes here in the U.S., there will be a need for a lot of new patient forms and similar items. This plugin lets them read the document on the site with the option to download for offline printing. It would be nice to see more internal on-site print options, but overall worth a look if you need a solution for this common design request issue.
Admin Social Shares is a great plugin that displays how many social shares, likes and gestures of pleasure your posts and pages have received. It displays them neatly in the post list screen so that you can keep tabs on your most popular content in the social scene. This is an admin only plugin that works really well out of the gate. It provides an easy way to report regularly updated social shares to your authors, client and contributors. You can even use it as an internal scorecard among your authors to see who gets the most social approval.
Auto Post After Image Upload is a great plugin for photographers that simply want to post their images without all the “upload images and then post” 2 step process. This plugin condenses the operation into one simple act. Every time you upload an image, it creates a post.
WP-GraphViz gives you the power to insert your own visual charts and relational site structures based on the powerful GraphViz framework. You may have seen the old social influence visibility graphs or site visibility graphs before. Now you can create your own within your WordPress posts. There are a lot of different types of niche applications for the visual representation provided by this plugin.
Feedback Wanted
Thanks for grinding through all these plugins with me today! I’m looking forward to reading the reaction and usage that people get from these plugins. As always you can contact me on Twitter @marcuscouch or right here on WPTavern.com.
I do not quite understand what WP No Base Permalink does?