As an avid Wordpress user, I have come to rely heavily on some of my plugins. Occasionally I’ll browse the Wordpress.org plugins section looking for cool ones to try, but usually I stumble across them trying to solve a problem or make my life easier. I’ve come up with a list of the ones that I find the most useful, or that are cool and worth having anyway.
I take a lot of pictures, and I like to upload them to my blog. My camera takes large resolution photos though, so preparing the pictures for upload can be annoying. I used to open up each photo I wanted to upload individually in GIMP, resize it, and once all the pictures were resized I’d upload them one by one. I then decided I would go looking for a batch resizer, and found a very basic one that got the job done. It still wasn’t ideal since I was resizing and then uploading, adding (I felt) unnecessary steps to the process. Finally, today I decided I’d see if somebody had been smart enough to write a Wordpress plugin to resize images when you upload them. Lo and behold, somebody was, and the results more than fit the bill.
A couple days ago I decided to get a Twitter account. It seemed like a cool idea, especially when I saw how Paul Stamatiou had integrated it into his Wordpress blog. Being able to have a real-time status update on my site sounded like a cool, more personal touch to stay connected with readers. I wanted to do it in a way similar to Paul’s site - one line that simply displayed the most recent tweet. A number of plugins exist to do this; I tried a few of them and overall my results weren’t great.
Wednesday, October 17th 2007 12:02 AM in Wordpress Plugins (2)
I’m developing a new plugin for Wordpress to allow you to provide web proxy service to your visitors, directly integrated into your site. It is based off of the PHProxy codebase. It does not yet have a first release; please continue to check back for the first release, expected within the next few weeks.
One of the nicest aspects of Wordpress is its ability to be used as a complete web site management tool, rather than just a blog. Its ease of use makes it a great solution for people unfamiliar with web site management, and daunted by the complexity of larger content management systems. However, there is something missing from the default Wordpress installation: the ability to easily manage page menus. There are a number of plugins that let you do this, but I’ve found two that I think are the most valuable to have.