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.

Going back to the reader’s side this time, I will look at some plugins that help you keep posts in front of their eyes.  The most important thing about the post is that the writing and content are good. But if it is from very far back in time how to get it somewhere your readers can see it. Well, the trusty plugin developers of the WordPress world are up to the task.

First up is Recently Updated Posts, an easy to install, easy to use plugin. It gives you a widget for your sidebar that will display a number of your posts that you have recently updates. You can change the title, the number of posts shown, and you can exclude certain categories from showing. All of this is on the widget, there is no option page for the plugin.

If you are comfortable dealing with php, the author of the plugin has included some of the parameters he uses so you can edit the plugin your self to customize it a bit more. You can include pages, or switch it to show new posts that haven’t been modified. Still not a huge amount of control, but some. And not at all easy to make use of if you do not do code.

TDD Recent Posts is almost identical to the Recent Posts widget included with WordPress. It places a list of your posts, from most recent to older, with a link to them. But it also includes the date of the post and a short excerpt from the beginning of the post. You can change the length of the excerpt shown, and the number of posts shown, but that is about it for easily controlled options.

Again, if you are comfortable with coding, the author gives instructions for including pages in the listing and how to increase the maximum character limit for the excerpts. There is no styling, although if your theme styling does things with unordered lists, the widget output may be included. If not, you will have to do your own CSS to make it fit in. The author has included one class name so far for styling purposes, although he says he may include more later. Nice change to the basic recent posts widget.

WordPress.com Popular Posts uses the stats from the Wordpress. com Stats plugin to give you a sidebar widget that shows your most popular posts. All of the controls on on the widget, making for easy installation. You can show popular posts, pages, or both, and can choose to limit it to only posts within a certain number of days. You can also choose to have an excerpt, length up to you, posted. And it can show the number of view each post has received.

This is a nice plugin, easy to install and use. Having to install the Stats plugin also is somewhat irritating, but not too much since having some kind of stats tracking is always a good idea. If you are relying on Google Analytics already, then it would be more annoying to add the second. The documentation on the available options could be a bit better, it is not real easy to figure out how to add the excerpts, but they are just additions to a plugin that is good from the start.

Must Read Posts allows you to put a list of posts on your sidebar that you think your readers will like. You can set the number of posts that will be in the sidebar, and the author includes a class for styling the list. Aside from putting the widget in your sidebar, the only other thing you need to do is add a custom field in your post. Posts with the field can show up in the list, making it easy to control what will be there. It does not do much, but what it does do, works well.

Old Post Promoter also allows you to keep older posts up for your newer readers to find. But it does not use your sidebar to do it. Instead, it updates the timestamp on older posts and puts them back on your front page and back into your RSS feed.

You set how often old posts are promoted, how old they have to be before they can be promoted (minimum 30 days), and whether they are put in front of your most recent post. The only other control you have over what posts are promoted is by excluding categories. The lack of fine control over what is promoted is not the best, and something about changing the dates on the posts to bring them back to the front doesn’t really appeal to me. But for blogs that are offering advice or how-tos that are not time sensitive, this can be an effective method of keeping good ideas in front of your readers. Of course, you also need to keep writing new posts, or you will end up doing nothing but recycling the same posts over and over.

Serial Posts Plugin is a way to send people to other posts in a series. It is much more powerful than the typical related posts plugins, with exact control over what posts appear, where the list appears on each post, and what information about the series is given to your readers. The documentation is much better than average, including a nice tutorial, although that lacks the shortcode information.

Set up is remarkably easy. You need to add a custom field to the posts you want included in a series (Note: Make sure you put Serial in just like that. Lowercase will not work.) with the name of the series as the value of the field. Then place the shortcode in the posts where you want the list to appear. You can have multiple series going at the same time, just use different values for the custom field. And there are several ways to control the styling of the list if you do CSS, so you can make it stand out from the rest of the post. There are improvements that can be made, like specifying the order of the list or making the styling easier for non-coders. But really, it is a very nice plugin as is, well worth using if you do series of posts.

Hackadelic Series does almost exactly the same thing as Serial Posts, but slightly differently. The plugin generates a menu of related posts, defined by a custom field added to the post (Sound familiar? Great minds think alike.) the places the list in a collapsing menu at the top of the post. It has many of the virtues of Serial Posts, as well as adding a very nice back end for controlling your series and the meta fields. And the collapsing menu means even larger series, like these are starting to be, can be added to your posts without taking up too much room.

When the developer found out that the Serial Posts plugin was out, he even created his so that you can use his back end for admin of that plugin, without using his frontend and placing his menu at the top of the post. This is very nice, and it means that if you have already started using Serial Posts you do not need to stop.

The downside of the plugin are not major, but they are real. In order to use this plugin, you have to install the authors other plugin, Sliding Notes. This is a nice plugin by itself, and does not take any set up if used for the Series plugin, but it is one more thing to install. And there is no control over the location of the menu, it automatically shows up at the top of the post. The styling is very vanilla, but can be made to blend to your site if you are comfortable with CSS. All in all, a nice plugin that you will definitely want to consider.

Upcoming Posts goes in the opposite direction from most on this list. Rather than trying to interest your readers in older posts, it gives them a glimpse of what you have coming up. Again all of the controls are in the widget you place in your sidebar, but there are quite a few options available there.

You can set the number of posts, whether to have a timestamp, the category of the post, and whether an excerpt will show. You can have either scheduled posts or drafts on the list, and can put a message up if you have nothing planned. And you can specify specific categories to be shown. Nice options, easy to install and use. One problem, the styling out of the box is not very good, and you need to do it in the css in the plugin folder. But that is pretty much the only downside to the plugin.

Final Words

So there are some ways to keep people reading your old posts or get them interested in what is coming soon. If you think something is really good, you should be able to find something here that will let you share it with your readers and keep them coming back.

Edited to remove error about Hackadelic Series plugin.

I have been looking at a lot of plugins lately, as you can see from my posts. I have noticed something about most of the plugins I look at that is very annoying. I was thinking about posting this today, when I checked my RSS reader and found the post from Ma.tt about there being 4000 plugins in the directory as of today. He then posts on the Wordpress Blog that today is Thank a Plugin Developer Day. Well, I do thank them. But I also have a bone to pick.

Wordpress requires MySQL v. 4.0 or better and PHP v. 4.3 or better to run. They deliberately did not use version 5 of either in order to allow more people use the software. This is a good thing, it has helped spread the use of Wordpress over all corners of the web, as blogs and as CMS.

Then there are the plugins, and some themes for that matter. Programmers, especially hobbyiests, like using the latest thing. Updated langauges and software call to programmers seductively, tempting them with more gadgets and easier ways to do things. I have no problem with this, I like things being easier and faster when possible myself.

What this results in is plugins that are developed and tested one MySQL 5 and/or PHP 5. Which means they may, or may not (bet on not), work well on version 4 of either. This is also all right. Sometimes you just can’t do what you want with the older version, or it takes much more overhead that makes it impractical. It will mean less people can use your plugin, but there are still thousands that can. And eventually most places will upgrade.

What I do not like, and think is incredibly stupid, is the huge number of plugin developers that do not say what versions of PHP and MySQL are required to run their plugin. So someone will install it on their site, try to run it, and have errors. So they go to the developer and ask for help. The developer will spend time and effort trying to figure out the problem, until he asks, or it is mentioned, what version of PHP is on the server. Then it is “Oh, it won’t run on version 4.”

Developers, please. You have the front page of the directory page for your plugin, you have a FAQ section on the page, most of you have websites that are linked from the page. Someplace on these pages, or on all, you could easily mention what versions of PHP and MySQL are required. It will save you, and your users, so much time and trouble.

That won’t make any difference, but it felt good to say. And thank you developers, I do appreciate your efforts. I like playing with your producopts.