A WordPress Plugin a day for 30 days

// November 24th, 2008 // Webdesign, Wordpress

WordPress is one of the greatest blogging if not full fledged CMS tools you can find, it’s greatest strength is the ease of adding new functions via a plugin. Once I hit a list of 30 plugins I’m going to try and release a plugin a day every day for a month. Every day an unreleased plugin that tweaks your site in a variety of different ways. Whether you want to be a better admin, better with social media, or to provide cooler functions for your readers there should be a plugin you’ll want.

My current idea list:

  1. refresh comments admin dashboard
    A simple idea that adds “refresh me” to the recent comments widget on the dashboard, and uses ajax to only refresh that widget.
  2. feedburner widget for dashboard
    Integrated dashboard widget that shows the summary of feed data.
  3. plugin compatibility checker
    The idea is when you try and add a new plugin it will check your plugin list against the plugin compatibility checker to see if it will fail. This one is likely to not be done by me lol.
  4. mint stats dashboard widget
    I love Mint stats so much. I just don’t love always opening an external page to see it. Giving me my stats via the dashboard in widget form is a no brainer.
  5. social media welcome mat with follow me message.
    If people are referred by twitter the header would say “Welcome twitter users, Like what you see? Consider adding <twitter handle> to get updated on new posts” or whatever the user decides to have the message say.
  6. Referrer widget for dashboard
    show your readers where the most recent hits came from.
  7. WPMU plugin installer permissions
    allow users to only install admin approved plugins from wordpress.org/extend/plugins gives users flexibility but protects your WPMU site (Not even sure if this one is possible or worthwhile)

Obviously this is just a very rough list and I’d love more input and more importantly feedback about what functions you want new plugins to serve. So take a moment and suggest something you’d like me to try and build.

Not my picture (again courtesy of the tagaroo plugin and Flickr).

13 Responses to “A WordPress Plugin a day for 30 days”

  1. Daniel Erickson says:
    November 25, 2008 at 2:20 am

    Starting to look like an awesome list, I think I'll subscribe just to see how this turns out!

  2. corourke says:
    November 25, 2008 at 2:28 am

    I don't know if I'll be able to do this endeavor on my own. Interested in helping or suggesting some good plugin ideas?

  3. wpwl says:
    November 25, 2008 at 5:00 am

    Great post :)

    As an avid WordPress user, here are a few of my favorites:
    - Google Analytics plugin
    - Page Link Manager
    - WP-Polls
    - FAQ-Tastic
    - Featured Content Gallery
    - Less
    - CommentActions.com (PAID)
    - FAlbum
    - Gravatar plugin
    - Sociable
    - WishListMember.com (my own – sorry couldn't help myself!)

    Hopefully that list will give you a few extra days :)

    Take care.

    Stu

  4. corourke says:
    November 25, 2008 at 11:48 am

    Did you really think that through with linking to CommentActions? It is hands down one of the dumbest ideas for a plugin I've seen.
    A paid plugin that actually alienates your readers? No one, not a single soul on earth likes automatic optin mail spam. A plugin that does that may as well just shut down your blog and empty your bank account because the lawsuits and CANSPAM violations will do it for you.

    As for your list of plugins, I use some of those. I plan on writing new plugins to add features and functions that aren't yet there.

  5. Mettadore says:
    November 25, 2008 at 12:08 pm

    Man, I agree about CommentActions. I mean, maybe you could script up something useful for comment submission, but that's pretty heavily sales/marketing based.

    Some (many asthetic) that I use on Positively Glorious! include:

    -All in one SEO pack
    -Blog mechanics keyword linker
    -wp-footnotes
    -Dagon Sitemap Generator
    -”Page links to” plugin (link to external pages)
    -Ultimate Category Excluder
    -wp-DBManager
    -Of course, wp-cumulus which you have running.

    I was going to do this same thing for blog.orblogs.org, so maybe I can link the posts over there. It's stuff like this that I thought would be good for the blog site because it's more functional.

  6. corourke says:
    November 25, 2008 at 12:20 pm

    Those are some great plugins. I love the footnotes plugin. Saw it in action on your site the other day and meant to tweet you about it. :D

    So if those are the plugins you like, what function would you like added to your wordpress that there isn't a plugin for?

  7. A.J. aka linuxaid says:
    November 25, 2008 at 12:29 pm

    One I have been looking for is a You Tube sidebar widget that reads the data from a particular RSS feed from YouTube

  8. corourke says:
    November 25, 2008 at 12:37 pm

    I totally dig on that idea. Shouldn't be too hard to do that one at all.

  9. MizD says:
    November 25, 2008 at 12:47 pm

    Here's what I'm hoping to find (or create if I knew how): a plugin that would allow the manager of a restaurant site to update their food menu without dealing with formatting. It would allow for multiple pages — eg Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Happy Hour, etc — and multiple fields for each entry (name, price, description). The plugin settings would allow for customized CSS so the menus would match the site's overall look.

    (Note: this could (or should) be easily adapted to any other formatted, categorized list — resume, artists' gallery listings, etc.)

    I looked at Bibliofly, which is a bibliography plugin, thinking that would be a good starting point. It does something similar with categories (novels, short stories, etc), but sadly it hasn't been updated for a while and doesn't work past WP 2.2.

  10. beerinator says:
    November 25, 2008 at 12:47 pm

    There is already a plugin that is very similar to #5 in your list. wp-greet box plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-greet-box/

    You can see it in action by clicking the link in this tweet:
    http://twitter.com/draftmag/status/1023052493

  11. corourke says:
    November 25, 2008 at 12:51 pm

    Brilliant! That's exactly how I wanted the plugin to work. Adding that one now I think :D

    Are you the same beerinator I think you are? How the heck are you man?

  12. corourke says:
    November 25, 2008 at 12:53 pm

    That's a cool idea. I think most of that could be done with either the ecommerce plugin (minus the buy now button) or with the custom fields when creating the site. Tying that functionality together is a great idea.

  13. Christopher O'Connell says:
    December 3, 2008 at 11:42 am

    I already have a plugin similar to #4

    http://compu.terlicio.us/code/plugins/mint/

    It provides dashboard and sidebar widgets for Mint, as well as and API (And a half).

    ~ Christopher