The Daily Plugin for 7-2-2013

The hills are alive with the sounds of plugins. Well, at least on the hill I live on. Welcome to another installment of what we like to call The Daily Plugin, where we plug you into the newest and most interesting plugins found in the WordPress Plugin Repository. Like we always say, make sure to test any plugin on a development or staging site before you go live with anything. Our listings are not official endorsement, rating or rankings, but an occasional virtual fist bump might be thrown down if a plugin is really good. Let’s see what we have today..

Responsiv helps you to develop responsive sites by displaying the current browser width and id of the device at the top of the page. I ordinarily need to use a Firefox Add-In to check the browser width and have another that emulates specific mobile devices. Now I can kill both of those and use a native WordPress plugin instead! I can only imagine how this would help a theme developer create in a much faster and streamlined environment. It worked well for me.

WordPress Landing Pages was recently updated and is something that I will be testing again extensively over the next few weeks. A/B testing I should say! This plugin from David Wells and Hudson Atwell. It allows you to create specific offer or call to action pages that are meant to generate leads or sales with one page of marketing material. This plugin helps to aid in the setup in creating landing pages through WordPress with a step by step start procedure. The beauty of this plugin is that it also gives you the ability to A/B test, in other words test one page vs a second page and monitor the results for the best success rate. Being completely integrated is a true blessing, as are some of the other modules that they have available as a paid add-in. They have many free add-ins as well that provide extra enhancements like Gravity Forms integration and Exit Pop-Ups. For my two cents, this is a plugin worth checking out if you are doing any kind of Pay-Per-Click ads on Google and have a WordPress site. Here’s a video that shows more:

SpinRewriter is a plugin that claims to provide the functionality to use “spintax” to create randomized phrases and sentence replacement. This is done by placing the text to be randomized in brackets with a pipe delimited modifier. For example: Theodore is a {red|blue|yellow} stuffed {dog|cat|bear} would randomize the color and animal type and theoretically be able to output one of many possible sentences. With that being said, this plugin not only does not work as claimed, but it will not work at all WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT. This plugin needs to be pulled from the repository immediately. Bad execution, bad developer tactics.

Customer Area from Marvin Labs is a recently updated plugin that provides some unique concepts when interacting with your clients. This plugin allows you the ability to create a private storage area for your customers that includes private files, invoices, and even a notification/message option that let’s you send a message one-on-one. As someone who uses heavy-duty project management systems that cost upwards of $400 a month, I can tell you that this plugin has some really good options for those with just a few clients or are on a tight company budget. This could also be good as a pseudo-intranet solution within a company or work groups. Worth checking out if you have the need.

Slim picking today in the Repository, but we’ll be shaking the repository trees a bit harder tomorrow. Rumor is that a few of the most popular plugins out there are due for some pretty massive overhauls. Until then, you can contact me on Twitter @marcuscouch or leave your feedback here on WPTavern!