When I was browsing through the search pages trying to find plugins that did the functionality i was after and checking the review/rating to see if it works or is the best or at least good..... what a farce!
You find good plugins from searching the million different posts that collate the 'top 30 wordpress plugins', 'top 100 wordpress...". Hours!
The way I found the best plugins was to see them in use at other peoples wordpress blogs, where I found linkwithin, very good, lijit search, or when I received an email from a friend using mailchimp.
I remember I tried to find a google suggest (predict your search) like plugin, I tried loads of plugins, myabe it was my limited knowledge of being able to tweak
php, but non worked, eventually I did find one, ajax... even css customizable, works on a smart phone too!
MAKE YOUR OWN!
Design
I wanted to group them into categories, find a pattern that I could use. But some plugins crossed between categories, overlaps. The all work in conjunction with each other.
I uploaded them to windows live shared space and made some bit.ly/WP15 associated to each plugin so you can download them and it saves on space for the design.
They all stem from the center, around my blog.
Dislikes
I am not entirely satisfied with the bottom list with the referring creator of the plugin and the download address.
Usability
Just download the full image, there is enough quality to see the download link from bit.ly and plugin description.
PLUGINS HYPERLINKS
Add the Print Friendly button to your WordPress blog and
help people save paper and ink when they print. Print friendly cleans and
optimizes your pages. Cool features include get PDF, and the ability to remove
images and elements before printing. It also lets you email.
Instead of: WP-Print 2.50 Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog's post/page. Could never
quite get it to work being the novice that I am coding. http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/
The number of available translations will depend on your blog language and
the translation engine you will chose to use.
The most powerful features which Global Translator provides are:
Four different Translation Engines: it has the ability to
provide the translations by using Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish,
Promt, FreeTranslations.com
Search Engine Optimized: it uses the permalinks by adding
the language code at the beginning of all your URI. For example the english
version on www.domain.com/mycategory/mypost will be automatically
transformed in www.domain.com/en/mycategory/mypost
Fast Caching System: new fast, smart, optimized,
self-cleaning and built-in caching system. Drastically reduction of the risk
of temporarily ban from translation engines.
...and more. It is ridiculously easy to use, its just a widget, not sure
if it is possible to place it the rss but works like a charm as they say in IE 5
I think i'm on browser.
Save bandwidth and speed up your blog with this amazing plugin.
To see a live demo just scroll my homepage staring at the bottom and grey box should
change as the image loads.
Love this plugin. Sexybookmarks is an extremely useful and successful tool in
getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social
bookmarking sites.
I saw this a while ago on a blog before I was familiar with plugins and
wordpress and behold, I saw it again recently over at francesco mugnai's
brilliant (unbelievably regular top quality posts) blog. Linked at bottom
btw.
This is a convenient way for WordPress users to use the Typekit
font service in WordPress web sites. This will enable users to change the fonts
of their sites with least amount of time using the Typekit service. Further this
plugin will give the ability to control where the typekit will be used in their
site (whether in the front page, static pages .etc).
We've worked hard to make Typekit easy to use. Add and use
fonts the way you want to. Try it for free
Even when you update to the latest version all the time, there's still this
slight chance of you getting hacked. WP Security Scan helps you minimize this
chance by pointing you right at all the vulnerabilities in your blog.
Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests
corrective actions.
This plugin adds a separator between the intro text and the
extended (more...) text of the content of a post. It simply replaces the span id
more tag with the separator that is set in the plugins php file.
Some separator samples are given there. Compatible
up to: 2.7
Show shortened posts on your splash page to your blog, with a ‘Read
more of this post…’ link at the bottom. Lets users browse through
your content a little quicker rather than seeing all of one post until they can
see the next. This is the only one I have seen that will include html and
images. Needs a little manual coding of: Open wp-content/themes/<YOUR
THEME NAME>/index.php
WordPress Search by default sucks. Fixing it takes a bit of
work, but the heavy lifting is done by this plugin. If you want to know what
I've done with this blogs search pages, read my post on improving
the WordPress search function. The results are very cool, as you can see in this
search, for instance.
Search Exceprt plugin displays text snippets around found keywords, with
matches highlighted, in a WordPress search.
Extends the standard WordPress search to include data from posts, pages,
comments, and meta-data, as well as the full content of data inserted by plugins.
This last feature makes it unique amongst search plugins. For example, you may
have a plugin that uses shortcodes to insert data:
[product 1]
The standard search will just see the shortcode. Search Unleashed will see
the actual data inserted into your post.
Search phrases are highlighted, as are incoming searches from Google, Yahoo,
and most other search engines. This makes it very easy to see exactly what
phrase matched and why the post is being shown.
Searches can be restricted to specific categories, tags, or meta-data. For
example, you can search for 'persian' in the 'cats' category.
The widget aim is trying to reduce the bounce rate of your
blog and provide the visitor a better navigation experience.
When a visitor lands on your site from a search engine result page, he is in
need of a certain information / service your page might satisfy. It often
happens the visitor go away just after reading that page, for various reasons.
Why not to try suggesting him more posts on the topic he is interested in at
that moment, so that he might visit more pages?
The Search Engine Query in WordPress widget grabs the query
the visitor used on the search engine, executes it in the blog search and
displays results, suggesting the visitor further reading about what he is
actually looking for.
Integrates a google suggest like search to your blog. Kau-Boy's AutoCompleter
uses the Ajax.Autocompleter function of script.aculo.us or the jQuery suggest
function to search for post within the title and the content.
Sphider is a popular open-source web spider and search engine. It includes an
automated crawler, which can follow links found on a site, and an indexer which
builds an index of all the search terms found in the pages. It is written in PHP
and uses MySQL as its back end database (requires version 4 or above for both).
Features
WordPress Integration - Only available from Sphider for WordPress
Automatic Page Reindex: After Adding, Updating, or Deleting a Page / Post,
Sphider will now reindex that page or remove it from the index
Unified administration: Sphider can now be accessed through Tools
>> Sphider
Unified login: Sphider admin interface now requires you to be logged in as
a WordPress administrator
Unified database: Sphider now uses the WordPress database to store the
index and settings instead of a separate database
Organized tables: Sphider uses the WordPress table prefix to keep the
tables cleanly organized and easy to navigate
Installation and Upgrades: Updates have been streamlined to keep your
Sphider installation up to date
Spidering and Indexing
Performs full text indexing.
Can index both static and dynamic pages.
Finds links in href, frame, area and meta tags, and can also follow links
given in javascript as strings via window.location and window.open.
Respects robots.txt protocol, and nofollow and noindex tags.
Follows server side redirections.
Allows spidering to be limited by depth (ie maximum number of clicks from
the starting page), by (sub)domain or by directory.
Allows spidering only the urls matching (or not matching) certain keywords
or regular expressions.
Supports indexing of pdf and doc files (using external binaries for file
conversion).
Allows resuming paused spidering.
Possbility to exclude common words from being indexed.
Searching
Supports AND, OR and phrase searches
Supports excluding words (by putting a '-' in front of a word, any page
including the word will be omitted from the results).
Option to add and group sites into categories
Possibility to limit searching to a given category and its subcategories.
Possibility of searcing in a specified domain only.
"Did you mean" search suggestion on mistyped queries.
Context-sensitive auto-completion on search terms (a la Google Suggest)
Word stemming for english (searching for "run" finds
"running", "runs" etc)
This plugin allows you to give the visitors of your site the option to change
the font size. The plugin acts over jQuery and saves the settings in a cookie.
So the visitor see the same font size if they revisit your site. Which content
is going resized, the resize steps and other options you can set on the admin
page called "font-resizer". Just a sidebar widget, easy. This is
a neat idea to increase the usability and accessibility of your WordPress blog
text. currently it disables the ability to drag widgets across to the sidebar
when activated. please someone help fix this or tell me what i can do, really
want this functionality to be user friendly.
As you know, that some visitors prefer reading in small text
size while others prefer larger, depending on their eye power, screen
resolution, and monitor distance. So for those visitors, you can place
a convenient widget to increase/decrease the font
size easily.
tweak to do the background colour change also. PLEASE help adapt to make it
override the CSS active hyperlinks display still as pink, I want to change their
colour with an onclick like below. was reading up but couldnt make work [
getElementId] to function.
<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="javascript:body.style.backgroundColor='yellow'"><span style="background-color: yellow; font-color: black;">Read This Text Easier?</span>
SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically
updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not
have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according
the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.
ALT attribute is important part of search engine
optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user
searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.
TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for
visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is
over the image.
'Anyone who has been following me for a while knows I'm a huge fan of John
Godley's plugins especially HeadSpace2 and Redirection. HeadSpace2 takes care of
all my meta tags and inserts my Mint code. If you don't need fancy things you
can use it for Google Analytics and other trackers too!' yoast
HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a
wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles
and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run
disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.
Because the configuration of meta-data can be a complicated and tiresome
process HeadSpace provides several shortcuts to reduce your effort:
Meta-data nesting - data is collected not only from the page itself, but
nested parent pages
Dynamic data extracted - why repeat yourself when you can extract data
from the post itself?
Full GUI interface - data is entered alongside post content, and with a
full auto-suggested AJAX interface for tags and keywords
Mass-editing - now you can edit meta-data for all pages and posts at one
go!
By request
of Michael Gray, I coded this plugin to Auto Affiliate Linker, which
automatically adds your Amazon Affiliate ID to the back of all the links to
Amazon you use in your blog!
This plugin uses the Yahoo API to suggest tags based on the
post content. You have the option to automatically tags posts on save or get tag
suggestions with a single click. Auto Tagger will not replace your existing
tags.
This plugin adds the Retaggr functionality to your blog.
** IDENTITY **
The Retaggr Profile Card is about identity - its a virtual,
interactive business card which you can customize as you wish. Widgets can be
added into it to show posts from your blog,music you're currently listening to,
allow communication via IM, or pretty much Consolidate all your identity widgets
on your blog into one, and add custom widgets from anywhere on the web. Built-in
widgets include support for Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, MSN, and Disqus, to
name a just a few.
People use Retaggr Profile Cards to bring traffic to their
blog and express their identity. A demo can be found at retaggr.com.
Installing this plugin means :
Your visitors can leave their retaggr card when they
comment on your posts
When referring to other people in a post, you can insert
their profile card, instead of just linking to their blog.
Your card is attached to your posts
These unintrusive enhancements add context to your posts -
bringing fun and useful functionality to your site, while keeping readers from
unnecessarily navigating away to find out more about the person in question.
retaggr also allows you to add site specific widgets to card
on your site - explore retaggr.com for more details.
** IMAGE TAGGING **
This plugin also gives your blog powerful image tagging
functionality. Your users can tag people in any image on your blog, much like
you would on a social network.
Just drag around the person in the image and select the name from your address
book, which is integrated with your email or Facebook. Mousing over the person
then shows their retaggr Profile Card. There are full moderation and
notification options.
You do not need to modify any of your template files -- just
activate the plugin, and set your options on retaggr.com.
WP-SocialCount is a WordPress plugin that displays the
number of adds/saves from within a social network for any particular URL. Since
this plugin allows you to specify the URL that you want to pull the data for, it
means that you can display any social number for any URL of your choosing. We
also attach no style to the data the plugin returns – so you are free to style
and use the data in any way you see fit.
When someone comments on your blog and writes a comment with his/her URL, is
leaving more information than you think. This wordpress plugin displays web
pages and profiles of those users in the dashboard, so you can add them as
friends if you are in the same social network. You will be able to know the
profiles of your visitors in social networks like flickr, twitter, facebook. If
you want to use it what you do is just download and install the plugin Meet You
Comments.
Zemanta recommends content
while you write your post. It helps you enhance it with images, videos, links,
and SEO optimized tags. It's blogging on steroids!
Widgets: Google Maps,
Last.fm, Slideshare, Wikinvest
Articles: Major news
sources like BBC and CNN and over 10,000 blogs
Social Networks:
Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, MyBlogLog
A simple point and click interface allows you to add only
recommendations that you like. Recommended content is blogger friendly with
clearly marked licenses (Creative Commons or similar).
Not having to search for related content saves you time and
increases the efficiency of your editorial process. You can specify your own
blog(s) and Zemanta will recommend links to your related posts!
Amazon affiliate support allows you to quickly link to
books, music CD's and DVD's and earn money in the process.
As every blogger knows, putting images in your post make them both more
attractive and more likely to be read. The problem is that not ever blogger has
the time, resources or knowledge to take high-quality images for their site.
Fortunately though, there are many of artists and photographers willing to share
their work under a Creative Commons License.
Photo Dropper
makes it easy for bloggers to search for and embed CC-licensed images into their
posts or pages. It works by adding a search box to the edit panel, which pulls
up a list of appropriately-licensed images, and then lets you embed them into
your post in a variety of sizes. Best of all, Photo Dropper adds the attribution
line, making sure your use of the image is compliant with the terms of the
license.
There is no easier way to get high-quality images for your WordPress blog.
The Auto Thickbox plugin for WordPress automatically enables thickbox on
thumbnail images (i.e. opens the images in a fancy pop-up), through the use
of WordPress' built-in thickbox library. Click the image to the right
to see this behaviour.
Benefit: as a website publisher you want your pages to load as quickly as
possible. That means that image files in particular should be as small
as possible, the best option being thumbnail size, rather than having the
user wait for large image files to download before they can see the whole
page.
Thickbox effectively transfers the decision to view or not to view a
large image to the user.
This is a fantastic typographic exploration of type's place within the visual world of the capital.
This map won a design award from Aiga and London Design. The information is taken from AZ street maps where the icons, symbols and hard lines representing churches, streets, rivers and parks have been removed from the map, leaving only letters. It is interesting to see Geography and Creative Graphic Design combine as opposed to the separation they seem to have followed. It is a fantastic and visually inspiring/innovative typographic map of London’s street names.
Although this is not so much about knowledge it is visually inspiring to inform ways of seeing, connecting thoughts spatially, creating a spatial immediacy that demands attention.
