Too many plugins from developers and too much writing from me left me with the necessity of doing another post. The first part is not really surprising, the only constant about the plugin directory at WordPress is that it is always growing. As for the second part, what can I say. I want to give a somewhat complete overview of the plugins, and for some of them that requires a lot of words. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

First up is WordPress MyLinks. Yes, I did cover it in my last post. And between the time I finished the post and it was published, the plugin developer did an update. Updates are not unusual, I really will need to go back and check out new versions of some of the earlier plugins I looked at. But the proximity to my post and the increase in features for the plugin, help get this plugin another quick look.

First off, the images on the page are now sorted by category. This makes it much easier to go through them. Next up, you can make a small addition to the shortcode to just display a single category. You can even have several categories on a single page, allowing to you set up specialized link pages. He has also included a new shortcode, allowing you to display a single page thumbnail image, anywhere on a page or post. Finally, if you are comfortable with HTML, he has included templates you can modify to customize the appearance of your link page. The author has taken a very nice plugin, and improved it a great deal.

Multiple Blogroll allows you to split up your blogroll into different parts of your sidebar. Your blogroll is split up by category, you can place more than one category per widget, and name each widget. This allows you to place links near particular places on your page. This is especially handy if you have links that are cyclical, useful part of the year, not really needed other times. Just remove the widget with those categories until it is time to use them again.

The list picks up your theme styling, just as the regular plugin does, so there is no real need of any styling. The limitations of the plugin are not too bad. No sorting of the links, and no control of what is shown beyond the choice of what categories go in each widgets. There is a bug right now, once a widgets is created and saved, you can not change what it contains. Removing the old widget and adding a new with your new choices gets around that until the author gets it fixed. Other than that, not a bad plugin, although not everyone will have a use for it.

Advanced Blogroll actually combines features from some of the others I have looked at. Installation is easy, activate the plugin, then place the widget into your sidebar where you want it. All of the options are taken care of in the plugin itself, and there are quite a few there. And the author even includes some CSS on his website to give a nice hover effect to the images. And there are classes for the images and the list if you want to do any additional formatting. Otherwise, it just goes with your theme’s styling.

First, you can place multiple widgets in your sidebars, which is in fact necessary because of one of the other options available. You can choose from a dropdown list of your link categories to only show one category, or all categories, in that widget. You can choose sorting order of links, what to sort on, the number of links to show, and whether the links will be words, images, or both. You can also control the size of the images and add nofollow to the links on the widget. This can be nice, allowing you to nofollow large sites like CNN or Google, but allowing following for smaller sites.

One of the disadvantages to the plugin is the fact that if you want a certain category set up differently from the rest of the categories, you need to add a widget for every category separately. If you only have a couple of categories, this is not too bad, but too many really makes the widget page get busy. Next, if you want to use the images, either alone or with names, any link without an image will not be shown. This is one way of controling whether a particular link shows in your blogroll, but it also means you need to provide an image for a link to show up. Which brings up the hardest part of the setup, if you want to use images, you need to either get them or make them. Some way to pull in favicons would be nice, although the 16×16 size is not very visible and looks horrible if enlarged too much.

A very nice plugin, with a lot of options for customizing.  Except for getting the images, the set up is very easy. It lives up to its claim of being advanced.

What Others Are Saying is another RSS feed blogroll. The difference with this one is it does not show a post from all of your links. You set the number of posts, and it finds that number, either the most recent or randomly, from the sites on your list and posts them.

Set up is easy, put the widget in your sidebar and set the options. There are only 5 options, how long between feed updates, how many posts to show, use the most recent posts or pick randomly, link to the site as well as the post, and add nofollow to the links. The author has also provided some PHP code so the programmers out there can put the list where they want it.

Depending on your theme, the styling can leave something to be desired with the widget. The author is working on adding some options for this, which will be nice. Other than the styling issue, the hardest part of using the plugin is adding the RSS feeds to your links. I would not use it for my only blogroll, but it makes a nice addition on the sidebar to supplement your main list. A nice plugin that does just what it says it will.

Collapsing blogroll uses a comment code to place your blogroll where you want it in a page or post. This allows for an easily created links page, divided into sections by the link categories. At the moment, there is only one option, what color do you want the category header. This is very well done, but it seems very lonely so far. The author is very open to adding more options, and was very quick to figure out a problem caused by another plugin. A limited plugin right now, but lots of room for growth, with an enthusiastic author.

Final Words

That is 4 1/2 more plugins for working with your blogroll. And there are still more out there, but I will probably move on to something different next time. It is not like I can really keep up with the plugin developers. I hope you were able to find something useful for your site in these two posts.

Blogrolls and links to other sites are an important part of the blogging world. We share our interests and places we think are neat with our reader, and hope others will do the same with our site. The basic Links widget that comes with WordPress only allows you to display the links in your Blogroll separated by the category they are in. You can’t change the name or the order of the display. It is not a bad list by any means, just very limited. There are plenty of plugins out there that go beyond those limits.

Feed reading Blogroll gives your readers more than just the title of the blog to help decide if they want to visit. The plugin uses javascript to pull in the latest post on that blog from its RSS feed.  This certainly can help get them interested enough to go check out the site, or keep them from doing so, depending on their tastes.

There are a lot of options available, including using either 4 ready made looks or setting up custom CSS, and choosing exactly which categories show on the list. You control whether the feed shows up for particular links by choosing which ones to have their RSS feeds on the Links page. This can help keep down the length of your blogroll. Which does lead into one of the downsides. How big is your blogroll? If you already have a large one, adding in snippets from many other blogs, even on the minimalist setting of one line, can mean it really gets out of hand. One way to handle this, if you are comfortable with PHP coding, is putting a PHP snippet on a page and generating the list there. Not easy, but an option.

The setup is somewhat complicated, primarily for two reasons. One, you need a Google API from Google Code, which also means you need a Google account. Second, the plugin uses the RSS feeds that are placed in the Advanced section of each link edit page. How many people bother to get that for their blogroll when they add the link? Neither of these is a huge problem, and they can’t really be avoided because it is information that the plugin needs to perform.

Auto Blogroll allows people to add their sites to either a link exchange page or your blogroll and the page. If you use the included sidebar widget, they will go into your blogroll, otherwise they will appear on the link exchange page. There are plenty of options, including only allowing links with minimum PR ratings on the list and a toggle of whether you want to moderate new links.

The installation starts off easy, taking you to a page for just that in the settings section. It will automatically create a link exchange page, and import your existing blogroll into its list. Or you can use and existing page, and manually add blogroll links. You can put the pages into any order you want on the list, limit the number of links that appear on the list page, place the links into categories and only have certain categories appear in the sidebar widget. The plugin can check each link once daily, and if the link back fails for so many days in a row, will stop showing the link out.

There are some problems with the plugin. The major one is the limited instructions.  The instructions given are only slight more detailed then what I have already written, and the website of the developer, and the website at the link they give to find more information,  is in either Chinese or Japanese. (No, I can’t tell the difference. What can I say, I am ????????????.) Most of the functions can be figured out if you are willing to experiment. But it can be a hassle. While you can order the links however you want, you can’t break them up by category, the way the basic blogroll widget can. And it changes your existing blogroll categories when it is installed so all your links are just in the Blogroll category. This is very irritating, especially if you do not want to use the plugin widget. Not bad plugin, with a nice idea behind it. But not one to add to your site lightly.

mylinks is another plugin that puts your blogroll on a separate page. The difference here is, it uses a shortcode to create a list of your blogroll where ever you want it, with pictures, the link name, the link, and your description of the site. There are no options for the plugin so far, it is completely plug and play. This makes installation a snap, you just need to decide where to place the shortcode.

The downside to this plugin is the fact there are no options. Every link on your blogroll will appear on the page, in alphabetical order. The author has a list of things he is working on adding to the plugin, like sorting, only showing a particular category, and templates to users have more control over the layout. This is very promising news, because right now, it is a nice plugin, but if he can add in the options he is talking about, without too much added complexity for set up, it will be a really great one.

Noio Iconized Bookmarks basically just adds a bit of bling to your blogroll. Set up is easy, install and activate the plugin, go to the options page and click on the update icons button. It may take a few minutes, but eventually it will list the sites where it found a favicon. If you have not placed the included widget, your blogroll will now be nothing but the found images. The widget give you both the icons and the names of the links. There is an option to have a default image for people that either do not use favicons or favicons that the plugin can’t find. I recommend creating one, it makes things look much better and more uniform.

Easy to install, the only real overhead is having to create a default icon. A couple of things to consider, first is the styling. The look of  the icons and links may not fit well with your theme unless you do some styling. The author includes a couple of classes on the list, with the ability to add more in the widget, if you are comfortable working with CSS. The other thing is the fact that if you decide you want to get rid of the plugin and go for a more traditional blogroll, you either need to edit some PHP or go to each link on your blogroll and delete the image URLs in the Advanced options. A case where uninstalling is more of a hassle than the installation.

Final Words

A lot of writing on this one, and only 4 plugins covered. Either I am getting more verbose or there was a lot to talk about on these plugins. I certainly hope it is the latter. I guess this means I will have to write more on this subject fairly soon, because I barely scratched the surface of what is available.

Well, I was planning on talking about some more plugins I have found and installed as a followup to my earlier post. Some from recommendations on other blogs, others just by browsing through the plugin directories on WordPress. There are some really neat things out there to add to blogs, the hard part is keeping it down to a reasonable number. I have actually not been as good about that as I should be. I keep wanting to try out new things that seem really neat.

First off, I learned a bit more about using the child theme that Drew has in the Vigilance theme. If you do a hack in a php file, which I have done with trepidation a few times, you can place that file in the child theme directory. So an upgrade to the theme will not overwrite your hack.  Of course, if he makes a change to the file you have hacked, you may have to redo them, but then again you may not. Version 1.21 added the ability to exclude pages from the header menu in the Vigilance theme options. This is very nice, it helps keep the menu there down to a minimum, helping keep a clean look. And Vigilance has been named by Mashable as one of the 10 Best WordPress 2.7 Themes. It is always nice to see your opinion confirmed by someone who is more knowledgeable about a subject.

I have removed the Amazon Showcase widget, there was a bug if more than one widget was placed in a sidebar. The author has stopped supporting it, but he is working on a re-written version that will have new features. I am keeping an eye there for the new one to be rolled out.

I have also dropped the All in One SEO Pack. Not because I have given up on SEO, but because I saw another plugin recommended over it. The Platinum SEO Pack does everything All in One did, plus some new stuff. If you have an opinion on what should and should not be indexed, followed, nofollowed, and noindexed, this will let you set it the way you want. And it will automatically import your All in One SEO setting.

I like the WordPress Database backup, but that is all it backs up. This is the important part of a blog of course, your words, links, and basic set up. But what about your theme, plugins, and images? Well, there is a plugin for that also. The WordPress Backup backs up your theme, plugin, and upload directories. You can schedule it to backup and mail the zip files to you. The support is very nice, he worked for several days putting out updates getting it to work on my host.

If you don’t want to mess around with uploading an info.php file, or don’t know how to do that, there is a nice plugin that replaces it. WP-ServerInfo places a window on your dashboard that gives your php and MySQL information along with some other useful stuff. But there is a caveat.

With the WordPress Database, WordPress Backup, and WP-ServerInfo plugins all activated, there is an intermittent bug on the dashboard. The QuickPress window disappears. Sometimes. It is very frustrating, and will happen with any 2 of them activated. Sometimes. Not always. Since I do not have a busy blog, I have kept the ServerInfo and one of the backups deactivated unless I need them. When one of them does an update I will turn on all of them and see what happens. Unless I set up a test blog and try to figure out if there is a pattern to the bug first. But the bug is not dangerous, just annoying, and they are worth using, even if you have to activate one of the backups before you can run it.

While looking for a way to manage a Blogroll that could easily get very big, I found the Collapsing Links plugin by Robert Felty. It lets you organize your links by categories and have them in a neat little bundle. I had one problem to start, but one update took care of it. The plugin has worked nicely since.

Rob has done 3 other Collapsing plugins. Collapsing Archives, also working well here, and very useful for people that do a lot of posting. Collapsing Categories, which is not working well on my blog just yet, but does play well on other people’s. But Rob is working on it, which is why it is on my sidebar, I have it set to debug for him to look at,  and it has improved. I am sure it will be working well very soon. I have not tried Collapsing Pages yet, I have not decided how I will handle my page navigation yet. But it is one of my options, so it is good to see that Rob is also very actively supporting it.

Another option for navigation is the Simple Sidebar Navigation Plugin. It works well, and has one bit of functionality that is very nice. You can decide where a particular navigation menu will appear. So some links will only show on your posts, others on your pages, and others on both. This kind of customization is very nice.

For ease of posting, there are a couple of plugins that are must haves. The Amazon Widgets Shortcode means no more working in the html editor instead of the visual editor. It adds a drop down menu on the visual editor that lets you add Amazon.com product links or widgets onto your post or page with ease. If you  are an Amazon.com associate, you don’t have to worry about making a link and copying it, you just need the ASIN. Amazon widgets are slight more complicated to add, but much easier than the regular way.

The Smart Youtube plugin makes embedding Youtube videos completely painless. You just paste the link in your post, add a letter or two, depending on the quality of the video, and it is set. I used it to add the two videos in this post. The frames and other features are options the plugin controls. No messing with the html editor or worrying about messing up coding when embedding a video. From Youtube anyway. You still need to do it the old way for other video sites.

One final plugin to help make things easier on the admin side. Reveal IDs for the WP Admin puts the IDs for your posts, pages, links, and categories on your admin pages. You can decide exactly which kind of IDs you want visible, and you can control what your users (if you have any) can see also. Very simple plugin, that is incredibly useful for setting up other plugins, widgets, and themes. If you are an admin on a WordPress blog, even if you ignore the rest of the plugins on this post, you really want this one.

Time to stop for now. If you look around, you can see some obvious plugins on my site that I have not mentioned yet. And there are more behind the scenes as well. One of the pitfalls of playing with them so much is I add them in faster than I write about them. So I will be doing at least one more of these posts. But at this rate, I will be doing these for a while, since I keep finding more to play with.