The Daily Plugin for 06-28-2013

Today is another high volume day for plugin submissions in the repository. It’s encouraging to see the growth of the submission flow over the course of several years. Not only do we see a big variety of new plugins in both the subject matter and functionality, but there are much many older or abandoned plugins that are being retooled and re-released by newly energized coders and developers. Before we dive in to today’s samplings remember that the following plugins are not endorsements or ratings but rather small samples of what new plugins have been published into the WordPress Plugin Repository. Always test on a staging or development site before going live and make a backup of any live site before activating. OK, let’s get plugged in!

WP Fancy Message Box enables many different message or error boxes in various styles and colors which you can configure. Implemented via shortcode, such as [wpfmb type=’info’ theme=1]your message[/wpfmb]. As you can see, there are many different message box “themes” you can use, like success, error, warning, info, or whatever options you would like to customize. It would be great to have complete control over colors, icons used and other CSS options, though it can easily be hacked through to make the design conform to your choosing.

AwesomePress This offering enables Font Awesome Icons for WordPress. For those of you who are not aware of it, FontAwesome is a font specifically designed for Bootstrap that allows you to use a common font to display frequently used web icons. There are over 350 high resolution scalable vector icons in the single font with full CSS control. This results in a WordPress site with clean, defined icons and category headings.

Vimeo Master is a new plugin presenting you the ability to embed any Vimeo video in HTML 5 code format. What impresses me about this plugin is that it contains no Ajax or JavaScript. This allows for fast load time and is completely responsive. Short codes can be used to embed the video anywhere within your WordPress installation. You have full control over size, color, looping and autoplay options are also available. You also have the option to display links to your Vimeo profile.

Thumbnail Upload is a plugin that permits you to upload your own thumbnail in relation to a specific post. This overrides any featured image resize options that may be in place which would ordinarily serve up a thumbnail. I enjoy having the creative freedom to choose my own thumbnails for my posts. There are often times in which I want to use an animated gif file to highlight a particular story or featured blog posts. By allowing this option I am now able to provide a much more aesthetic look and feel that conforms to the theme that I am using.

Disable Author Pages allows you The opportunity to disable the standard ../author URL designation and instead redirect to a dedicated page. This is something that I’ve always thought WordPress lacked when it came to providing attribution to the author. This plugin allows for a completely new page to be created that contains an author’s bio, social networking channels, and even the most recent feed items from a multitude of sources around the Internet. This plugin is a big improvement over the off the rack options provided by your standard WordPress installation.

WP Ultimate Recipe helps those who want to create an archival of recipes on their WordPress site. It utilizes short codes or simply by clicking on the “insert recipe” button within the editor itself. The features for this plugin are quite robust, tracking ingredients, what type of course the meal is, ethnicity and cuisine type. All of these are tracked as taxonomies which means that you can sort them by any of the fields mentioned. This would result in being able to view all recipes that contain a specific ingredient, or listing all desserts as a type of cuisine selection. Photos can be added to show any stage of the recipe from start to finish. There is also an option to print the recipe with or without images. The plugin is fully responsive on all devices. It is also easily translatable, and I have tested it with Google translate with favorable results. The output looks great and entering recipes into the system is simple to do.

Join us again on Monday for another edition of the Daily Plugin as we unwrap the cellophane on the newest plugins from the WordPress repository. As always you can find me on Twitter @marcuscouch or leave your feedback right here at WP Tavern. Enjoy the weekend everyone!