Hope you had an enjoyable weekend. It’s time to start your week with another fresh batch of plugins from the WordPress Plugins Repository. As we venture into the details of each plugin, bear in mind that none of this text represents endorsements or official ratings. This is merely a sampling of what new plugins have been released and my immediate reactions and possible usage examples. Remember to always test plugins on a staging or development site before going live. If you enjoy the plugins you learn about, please consider making a donation to the authors of any plugins you use. It helps to keep the community thriving and might just make the difference in a developer deciding to continue upgrading the plugin in the future. With that said, let’s get plugged in!
Attachment Files Importer is a new plugin that helps with an age-old problem when dealing with migrating a WordPress site from a staging area to a live domain. often times all of the posts export and import correctly, however the media doesn’t seem to make its way over to the new site as easily as you would expect. This plug-in helps fill that gap by creating a bridge from your old content to the new content copying over the necessary files and images to your new site. In case of duplicates it does not overwrite any existing files. For any of you web design specialists who use WordPress and frequently migrate over content, this is a plug-in you might want to take a look at.
NT Redirect is an easy “set and forget” plugin that takes every external link and automatically applies a rel=”nofollow” attribute to them. This is great if you want to control the “link leakage” that you just don’t have time to police yourself all the time. There are often other plugins that pull in affiliate feeds, rss feeds, etc. These plugins are often automated and you do not always have control in how the links come over. This plugin solves that by enforcing an across the site solution of nofollow.
HashBuddy allows you the capability to insert #hash tags into BuddyPress similar to the functionality in Twitter and Facebook. This allows your BuddyPress users to filter topics and activities based on topic hashtags. This is a pretty cool way to provide even more functionality with BuddyPress. I run a BP site that could really use this instead of the default search function results.
WP Remember Your Posts is a bit of a blogging history reminder, personalized just for you. Essentially this plugin will email you to remind you of your posts from one year earlier. Though in some cases with some of my early blogs with infrequent posting activity, I’m afraid this plugin would run out of things to do rather quickly. However, if you are a frequent poster and have use to reference something that happened “a year ago on this date”, then this may be a plugin that will drive your inspiration or at least subtle nostalgia.
Reddit Lurker – This Reddit plugin allows access to Reddit’s API in WordPress. Place a shortcode of in your posts or pages and output Reddit links, votes, usernames and comments from individually designated “sub-reddits”. The plugin only works one way, pulling the data from Reddit. It will not go the other way and post any comments or otherwise TO Reddit.
Show Once has my brain spinning today. It’s a plugin that as it’s namesake implies, let’s you use a shortcode that shows content only once to a visitor. For example it shows one-time messages to users that requires a “dismiss” or “agreed” button to be hit. It can be used as a new user welcome message for first time site visitors or even as agreements to terms and conditions. You can also incorporate direct post IDs into the shortcode so that pull from your existing post content, such as [ShowOnce post=420] would output post id#420, or [ShowOnce post=33,212,420] would output the contents of posts ids 33, 212 and 420. When you add something like date qualifiers it can display from only certain start points, display until a certain end point, or display between a range of dates. Acknowledgements are assigned as required through the shortcode as well. [ShowOnce post=420 show=dismiss style=2 from=10/11/13 to=12/11/13] Will display contents of ShowOnce custom post id 420 and will not be removed until the user clicks the “dismiss” link that uses custom css style id 2 (which you would have to have created yourself) from the date specified forward, with no end date. Wow, this one does a ton. I am still wrapping my head around all the possibilities that this could conjure up, especially when considering you use other posts for the content. This would allow you to use other shortcodes and layouts to populate the item being shown once. Very clever idea and well worth checking out.
Join us again tomorrow as we sift through the Repository in search of plugin nuggets worth bragging about. You can follow me on Twitter @marcuscouch or leave your feedback here at WPTavern regarding your thoughts and comments for these plugins.
Hey Marcus have you given Attachment Files Importer a test run to see how well it works? If not, I’ll go ahead and give it a shot because it’s a major pain point in the WordPress importer right now.