WordPress Text Message is a WordPress plugin that allows a visitor to sign up to receive text messages when your website is updated.
The plugin sends an email to an SMS Gateway that triggers an SMS. Currently it only support US carriers out of the box.
Relevanssi is a plugin for WordPress that replaces the existing search engine with one that does a better job of finding relevant results and is far more configurable than the default search. I especially like the fact that it will not only let you decide whether or not to index comments or user profiles, but also let you assign weights to content types for determining relevancy.
Relevanssi is available in both a free version from WordPress.org and a premium version available from Relevanssi.com The premium version comes in several different licensing flavors — for $9.95, you can install it on an unlimited number of personal blogs, though with no support. There are also standard and developer licenses at $39.95 and $69.95 per year that add additional support and installation options.
Humans TXT is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to add and update a humans.txt file.
WordTwit Pro is one of the few commercial WordPress plugins I’ve paid for, and am extremely happy with. This is another plugin designed to let users automatically tweet blog posts. I’ve played around with quite a few of these, but this is the only one that had all the features I needed.
What I especially liked was the ability, seen in the screenshot below, to schedule tweets to occur a certain amount of time after a post gets published. WordTwit Pro also supports a variety of URL shorteners, including self-hosted YOURLS installs, and has a very simple but thorough interface for editing what finally gets tweeted.
Finally, I didn’t have any problem at all actually getting it to tweet without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. Most of the other post-to-Twitter plugins I tried were a pain in the ass to configure to actually work properly with Twitter.
Expensive ($39 to $99 depending on the number of sites you want to install it on) but worth it.
For awhile I’ve been looking for the best way to import CSV data into WordPress. So far, CSV Importer does pretty much everything I need.
After installing CSV Importer, you simply take your CSV file and add column titles such as,
csv_post_title- title of the postcsv_post_post- body of the postcsv_post_type-post,pageor a custom post type.csv_post_excerpt- post excerpt
It doesn’t matter what order you have the columns in as long as the column titles are correct. Moreover, CSV Importer assumes any column title that doesn’t begin with csv_ is a custom field, so you can import custom field data, and there’s a setting to import custom post data as well. Most fields are optional as well, so you could just import a single column of data just using the csv_post_title if you wanted to.
CSV Importer will let you mark the posts created as a result of the import as Drafts, so I took a Google Spreadsheet that I’ve wanted to import into my lifestream, added the column titles and massaged the data a bit, then hit import. It worked like a charm.
The only downside is CSV Importer requires PHP 5 and some folks might still be stuck on virtual servers still using PHP 4. Other than that, this is an awesome plugin that again reflects the strengths of WordPress and its developer community.
Developers are promising some sort of distraction-free post writing/editing in the next version of WordPress, but the Zen plugin implements that today. It also includes several different themes to choose from. And while I like the idea of a distraction-free option, I’ll never understand why a feature like that gets chosen to be added to the WordPress core while something like a decent caching feature is left entirely to plugins.
Login Logo is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to customize the logo that appears on the login page for your site. The WordPress logo itself shows up by default, but the plugin looks for a login-log.png file in the WordPress content area and will use that instead.
Akismet does a pretty good job of catching most comment spam on WordPress blogs, but you still tend to end up with hundreds (in my case thousands) of user accounts registered by spam bots that just sit there cluttering up the user list.
User Spam Remover is a plugin for WordPress that fixes this problem by automatically removing any accounts that have not made a non-spam comment in > x days since it was created. It can also be set to block that stupid email notification that WordPress sends every time a new user signs up.
Dynamic Widgets is another plugin for WordPress that lets the user customize which widgets appear on the sidebar based on the specific context of the page, post type, user type, etc. This one seems to be more actively developed than some of the other plugins that perform this function, and seems to have support for a lot more contexts:
- Default widget display setting is supported for:
- User roles
- Dates
- Language (WPML)
- Front page
- Single post pages
- Pages
- Author pages
- Category pages
- Archive pages
- Error Page
- Search Page
- Custom Post Types
- WP Shopping Cart / WP E-Commerce Categories
- Exceptions can be created for:
- User roles on role, including not logged in (anonymous) users
- Dates on from, to or range
- Language (WPML) on language
- Single post pages on Author, Categories, Tags and/or Individual posts
- Pages on Page Title, including inheritance from hierarchical parents
- Author pages on Author
- Category pages on Category name
- Custom Posts Type on Custom post name, including inheritance from hierarchical parents
- WP Shopping Cart / WP E-Commerce Categories on Category name
