Posts Tagged ‘Plugin’

I discovered a plugin about 2 years ago that greeted people when they visited my site. It knew (by magic ) who had sent the person, google or a certain forum and welcomed them.

A little banner greets the person and invites them, after welcoming them to stay in touch via RSS or email and you can customise it to say what you want. For a small fee you can remove the creator of the plugins name

This marvelous tool is WP Greet Box. I love it, I love it to bits. If someone visits from a social bookmarking site they are welcomed, fellow Googler, Stumbler etc. I am a member of a forum and when people pop over to view a post from that forum, I personalise that greeting to them, and demand they leave me a comment, they know who they are and are bemused by it. On one social network, Nikki Pilkington, Ida Horner and Steven Healey regularly post links to their works on Birds/ Blokes on the Blog and the Greet Box welcomes them appropriately too. Often  it simply says ” Thank you for clicking Nikki, Ida or Steven’s link”.

Yesterday on twitter I was chatting to Graham Hunt of Entrepreneur Solo fame, and author of the Bootstrapping guide and he had seen the Greet Box and loved the idea of it. Sadly it conflicts with another plug in or the theme of his site, whilst he is working it out, there is another option.

Referrer Detector You can read all about the similarities and differences between the two plugins on the download page. Given the choice, I’d use the WP Greet Box, when there is no choice for reasons of conflict then I use Referrer Detector. No point in missing out on greeting our readers is there?

Ian McAllister pointed out that sometimes the conflict is another plugin called YARPP. YARPP shows related posts in your side bar or elsewhere on your blog. If you get the time, check out the link – the floating tabs are sublime, just run your mouse across them.

Now if only someone would invent a wave goodbye box for when someone leaves my site, I’ll be truly happy

Sarah

Not content with cracking her whip via email, skype and twitter the blogmistress installed Dashboard Notepad too! It’s really handy actually, just a place to jot down to-do lists, ideas on future posts and to be able to leave a message for sarah and I to respond to.

Blogmistress asked me to check it out and if I could see it, and as expected there it was but the problem being I could only view it, assuming she didn’t like me answering back I let her know I could see it and that was it. Well, it turns out the clever little plugin also has more options but not that obvious when you start using it. Just to the top right of the notepad itself click on configure and you get the options on who can edit and who can read the notes – nice and simple and everything you’d need.

There are other notepad plugins, this one allows you to have three pads in your dashboard (I wasn’t going to mention this, don’t want to give her ideas! ) but they all do more or less the same thing.

Very handy to make notes for yourself and also if you have multiple users, I think this is going to be very useful for us.

This post is to all those out there in the big wide world of WordPress that code plugins…

How do you name them?

The other day I was reading and loving Joe’s post about the Hottie McFoxy dashboard plugin, but it turns out if you read the post that it isn’t actually called a hottie mcfoxy dashboard plugin at all, it has a rather dull name that I can’t recall for love nor money. Which got me thinking about how I search for plugins and what I actually find for my efforts.

Looking for – a diary of blog posts scheduled and what I get is this…. pre-date-future-post not what I was looking for at all, but I am sure it does whatever it does very nicely, it’s just doesn’t help me… what I was really looking for was Calendar by Kieran O Shea . It did not cross my mind it would be called a calendar. A Calendar goes on the wall doesn’t it? What about a schedule? Err, nope. Not that either. In fact the list of plugins under schedule blogs seems to have  nothing at all to do with scheduling blogs!

I like to do my follow Fridays for twitter in a blog, so I was looking for the holy grail of plugins – I was looking for a fabled plugin that does something that really will make my life easier, the plugin that hyperlinks twitter names. Could I find it? I could find that Grail quicker! I stumbled across the actual plugin by accident after searching through a pile of plugins that pulled my tweets into the blogs, sent my blogs to twitter and all sorts of things, it was more luck than judgment that I found the easy twitter link plugin!

So back to my original question… how do you name a plugin? Do you give thought to non technical minded people looking for your excellently coded piece of WordPress perfection? or is it something else?

Sarah

March the 1st has been designated ‘make a donation for your plugin’ day, or buy a coffee for your coder day

The idea came from V S Ellis who mentioned it on his blog and in some forums.

Many of us use plugins and often the developers or coders provide extra help to get it just perfect for your needs, this is a way of saying thank you. Without them our WordPress blogs would look a lot different!

I shall be buying a few coffees for the people who have taken the time to create the plugins that I love.

If you take a look at V S Ellis’s blog, you’ll see he suggests the following hashtags/tweets

“I just donated to insert plugin name” #wppdd

Alternate ($ amount optional of course):

“I just donated to Plugin Developer to say thanks for the PluginName [insert short URL to plugin page or author]” – #wppd

“I just donated $x to Plugin Developer to say thanks for the PluginName [insert short URL to plugin page or author]” – #wppd

If you don’t know who your plugin creators are, just leave us a comment with the name of your plugin and we’ll tell you who coded it.

Sarah