The Daily Plugin for 07-10-2013

Welcome once again to The Daily Plugin, where we take a look at the newest and most frequently updated plugins from the WordPress Plugin Repository. Remember to install new plugins on a staging site first as to not expose your valuable sites to any risk of plugin conflict or crashes of your site. Also please consider that these plugins are not rated or suggested in any official capacity. This is merely my reaction to the latest plugins to be released. With that being said, let’s get plugged in!

Easy Responsive Tabs to Accordion is a visually appealing way to add a tab/content component to your responsive WordPress site. This is a lightweight jQuery plugin which optimizes normal horizontal or vertical tabs to accordion on multiple devices for Desktop browsers, tablets and Mobile viewing. This plugin adapts the screen size and changes its action accordingly. I found the display options to be very configurable and highly attractive. There have been a lot of tab plugins released in the last several months, but this is the first one that I’ve seen that is actually completely responsive. It has a high degree of added ability when it comes to editing CSS. I had a complete set of tabs up and running to conform with the look of my site within 10 minutes. Not too shabby. So if you or your clients have been clamoring for a refresh on their website design, this element might help spruce things up a bit and give you added functionality to boot.

Featured Image from Google Images has some pretty intriguing elements to it. Rather than having you upload a featured image into the media gallery, you instead can simply search based on keyword and find results in the Google images pool. With just a few clicks you can add that image straight into your blog without having to download it and upload it ahead of time. While I think this is a pretty fantastic way to add images, I do worry about copyright infringement and the implications that it might bring about. Using Google images is often a shortcut that we’re all guilty of. We need to also remember that there are photographers behind those images that should also be compensated for their creativity and hard work. If you’re going to use a plugin like this I would encourage you to stick with what is generally accepted as public domain or Creative Commons licensed material. Otherwise you run the risk of getting into trouble (or getting your client in trouble) because someone down the line forgot to purchase a license agreement for the images used. I’ve seen it happen several times, so if you are going to use this add-on, make sure to use common sense in doing so. Here’s a video that summarizes the functionality and setup of this plugin.

Meetup Winner! is a plugin that taps into the Meetup.com API. I’ve not run across anything that has Meetup API functionality in the past, so I decided to check this one out. The basis of this plugin is basically one that allows you to reward those who RSVP to one of your meetups. How it works is that you set up an event ID shortcode corresponding to your individual event. Once at the event, you can call up the page where the shortcut resides and the plugin will randomly pick from those who have RSVP to the meeting. It will display the person’s name and the picture associated with them at meetup.com. I find this quite encouraging that different plugins are being developed around meetup.com. Regarding Meetup.com: Though there are some questionable groups that can be found on the site, I have found invaluable resources and relationships garnered at my local Southern California WordPress meet up group, which happens to be the OC WordPress meetup headed by Steve Zehngut. With other power WP users like Jason Tucker and Suzette Franck, co-hosts on the weekly WP WaterCooler Hangout. It’s one of the more active among WP Meetups. I applaud the concept and integration of this plugin and look forward to even more Meetup.com WordPress integration in the future. Hopefully this also means I might win something at a future meetup!

LateralPress is an interesting java based design plugin that allows you to display an animated scrolling timeline of content relative to the post date and a custom post type modifier. I found this plugin to be quite visually appealing. However the JavaScript time did take a while to load in the test application that I tried on a staging site. While posts set up for previous posts to be included in this plugin’s display is a tedious process, the results are rather difficult to compete with when it comes to final output. I think this would be an excellent plugin for people who would like to tell a story with their content over an evolutionary period of time. It adds a lot of visual appeal to what would otherwise be a boring about us or bio page on your WordPress installation.

Thank you for joining me in another installation of the Daily Plugin. Remember that you can follow me on Twitter @marcuscouch or simply leave your feedback right here on WPTavern. Join us again tomorrow as we dive headfirst into the WordPress plugin repository in search of the best and brightest new plugins as they are released.