Weblog Tools Collection

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Plugin
Star Rating for Reviews

Description
Star Rating for Reviews is a plugin made for blog authors that post reviews on their blogs. This plugin can help the authors to insert pretty inline rating stars based on the score they assign using intuitive, inline [rating:] tags. This plugin can also calculate and output overall ratings for you based on all previous scores you have assigned, useful for reviews that have multiple categories or an album review where each track is assigned a score.

Features

• uses simple, intuitive tags to generate kawaii inline rating stars for your posts
• supports versatile rating systems
• supports text only output for RSS
• automatically calculates and displays overall ratings, if desired
• supports storing rating scores automatically into database
• supports outputting list of reviews sortable by date or by rating scores
• supports custom star images
• supports custom prefixes and suffixes for your own CSS class
• supports globally forced star count for consistency
• uses as many stars as you want!
• standards compliant i.e. XHTML valid

Future Plans:

• Weighted calculation for overall scores
• Restrict list of reviews returned to specific categories when calling sr_getreviews()
• hReview microformat friendly (not sure if this is doable)

Review

Star Rating for Review allows your visitors to rate, as well as allows you to rate category-wise and it then calculates the overall score.

One good feature is the flexibility of the number of stars that you would like the review to be rated against.

It also supposed the automatic calculation of overall ratings and then store the scores in the database. This has been kept optional by the author for those who aren’t interested.

If you would like to display something other than stars, then the plugin gives you that option as well.

The ability to list reviews by date or rating, allows your site visitors to find the highly rated reviews easily.

One thing I like about this is the optional insertion of the rating stars. Most other plugins force the rating across all posts. If you are running a blog where you optionally review certain items while the rest contain posts you don’t want ratings on, then this plugin fulfils that criteria. You can insert the [rating] tag within your post and insert the stars for rating purposes.

If you are rating an album, users can rate individual songs, and the rating across all songs are taken to calculate the rating of the album.

As usual, is anyone using this plugin? How does it compare to other rating plugins?

Plugin:
Simple Forum

Description
A full-featured forum plugin for WP that does just about most stuff a forum ought to do.

Features
- Integrates into WordPress as a Page
- Most features that a forum should have
- Spam protection
- Recognizes WordPress User Roles and Permissions
- Available in several languages

Review
Let me begin by saying that this plugin is being featured today simply because of its functionality. I haven’t personally tried it out and most probably won’t be using it, only for one reason: I run my forum on a seperate domain and using SMF, with no plans of integrating the same into my blog.

However, I’ve been going through the documentation of the forum as well as seen the demo etc. to get a good feel for the same.

Simple Forum allows you to create a full featured forum which you can embed into your existing WordPress blog. This is perfect for those who want to create some kind of support forum. Or you want to add a forum to your blog, don’t want to import your current users to the new forum.

The plugin allows you to create subforums (both public and role-based), lock and pin posts / topics. It also supports Guests, Normal users and Moderators.

The author has provided very detailed documentation on his site which can be downloaded as a PDF file.

One additional feature I like is the ability to completely uninstall the forum in case you decide to discontinue it for whatever reason.

What I’d like is your feedback. Are you using this plugin? How useful has this been to you?
Why did you choose this instead of a seperate forum software like SMF or phpBB?

Any suggestions for the author?

Plugin Page
Wordpress Stats Plugin

Plugin Mission
Add highly available, highly versatile statistics similar to Wordpress.com to your Wordpress.org hosted blog.

Plugin Vision (Features)
Wordpress.com has had a very nice statistics package for its users for some time. This plugin adds the same statistics to a Wordpress hosted blog. Automattic does require that every user have a Wordpress.com API key for the installation but it is very painless to get and the statistics generated are fantastic. There has been a lot of good press surrounding this plugin and Andy and the Automattic team have done a bang up job on it.

Lots of items are monitored by the statistics plugin and the usual suspects are available. You can access the statistics through your blog admin and the page redirects to a Wordpress.com admin page where the stats are available. The main statistics page displays a flash graph of your daily visits for the past 30 days. Other items displayed in text include two days of statistics of the following:

• Referers
• Top Posts Viewed
• Search Engine Terms used to visit your blog
• Click throughs from your blog to the outside world
• Total Views, Best day Evar and todays’ views
• Incoming links from Google Blogsearch

Each of the items listed can be drilled down further with graphical statictics for each item. Don’t pass up this feature. It is very interesting to see how slowly the posts go out of favor or become obsolete. Some posts of mine are still popular after years or after a Google bomb of some kind. Wordpress Stats FAQ states that statistics are updated every 3 minutes or so and it takes upto 20 minutes for the first stats to show up. Your own hits are not counted and your theme must have the default wp_footer function for things to work right.

My Thoughts
I have been using the plugin for some time and I love the features. The biggest benefit for me has been the load or the lack thereof. The plugin does not add any load to my servers and yet it is available from the backend of this blog without any muss or fuss. In addition, I like the click counting and the per page statistics. One other feature that people might overlook is that once you are logged in with the plugin enabled, your Wordpress.com backend becomes your backend and vice versa. You can get to your own hosted blog’s admin right from any Wordpress.com blog’s navigation bar. I am a sucker for stats and this plugin is just the ticket. The best part of the installing the plugin is the simplicity of installation and forwards compatibility for newer features that might be added.

As for a wishlist, I wish there was an API to tap into the statistics. I can only imagine the possibilities. Top Posts, Top Clickthroughs, Top Referers and so much more could be done if we only had some access to the data.

However, the service if free for most (I pay for Akismet) and is hassle free, comprehensive and will serve most Wordpress bloggers quite well. Are there any features I missed or any benefit/advantage that you experience with this plugin that you would like to share? Are you using Wordpress Stats?

PS: Thanks Andy!

Plugin Page
SRG Clean Archives

Description
It’s a simple plug-in designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion.

Features
It lists the Month / Year (links to that months archives), the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article
(permalink to article), and the number of comments that have been made on each article.

It also hides password protected articles from showing up in your archives list.

Demo

Future Plans

- Adding an admin configuration area to the WP dashboard.
- Turn on/off comments and comment counts showing in the output display
- Implementing a way to have only the posts in certain categories show up.

Review

I’ve chosen to feature this plugin because it shows a lot of promise for the future. The plugin developments changed hands recently and the new author has already planned a roadmap for the plugin.

Clean Archives simply lists all the posts that you have made in a monthly fashion. This works as a great sitemap as also doubles up as a method for a visitor to go through your entire archives without having to browse page by page.

There isn’t much to write about the plugin except that it does what it is supposed to do.

The installation is easy, but after that you need to create an archives page and embed the code to display the archives. You can also display the archives in the sidebar.

Few things that I would like to see is to first display only the months and when the user clicks on it, the posts of that month should be loaded.

Another good feature would be the auto addition of the plugin page, without the need for the user to create the page.

Do you have any suggestions? It would be a great to encourage the development of this plugin.

Plugin
Better Comments Manager

Description
Better Comments Manager is an extension of the default Wordpress comments manager with two features.

Features
- Reply to comment from within Wordpress Admin Panel.
- View All Comments based by posts.

Review
IMO, this plugin should not exist. Infact the two features that this plugin adds need to be within the WordPress core itself.

Anyway, for those who haven’t started using this plugin yet, let me explain.

By default, whenever you want to reply to a comment on your blog post, you need to visit the post page, get to the comments form and reply there.

This means additional bandwidth drawn from your site as well from your internet connection, not to mention the time that you need to wait for the post page to load and then for the page to load with your new comment added.

BCM (can I call it BCM?) adds a new subpage under Comments in WP-Admin, that adds two links: Reply and View All.

Reply allows you to quickly reply to the comment. Currently the plugin loads a new page for this, but the author plans on adding AJAX support to this which would make it even faster to reply.

The second one will list all the comments of that particular post only. This can be done today too, but this makes the process a lot easier.

These are indeed two good feature additions. One additional feature that I would like to see is the ability to move comments from one post to another. I believe there is another plugin that does this, but BCM can easily have this integrated.

Are you like me and immediately added BCM to your blog? Can you think of any other features that you would like to see in this plugin?

Plugin
Genki Announcement

Description
Display an announcement on your blog

Features

• easily switch on and off through Admin Options
• display message without editing theme files (above 1st post or through widget)
• display different message to different roles/users
• timer to switch off announcement (only in WP 2.1)

Review
Genki Announcement does one job and does it well.

Installation is normal and easy. Genki gives you three methods of adding the announcement.

The first is to allow the plugin to add it automatically before the first post. The second method is using the Sidebar widgets if you have the Widget Plugin installed. This will display the announcement in your sidebar. You will need to display it at the very top for your visitors to notice it easily.

The last method is to add the code manually to the template where you want it to be. This is my preferable method, though it involves the editing of the template. I like this because I have complete control of where I want to display the announcement.

The plugin allows you to set a single announcement to be displayed to all users, or you can set individual announcements for different user roles. The ability to customize the announcement from within WP-Admin ensures that you don’t have to keep running to your template file.

The last good feature of the plugin is the ability to auto-expire announcements. It can be used if you are counting down to an event and then then expire once the event time is reached.

One good use of this plugin is to display announcements when you put your blog into maintenance. You may continue wish to display content, but you would like to want visitors and your authors not to post comments or posts.

Are you using Genki Announcement on your blog? What is the reaction of your visitors / authors?

Plugin
MyCSS

Description
MyCSS is a WordPress plugin that allows you to attach your personal CSS stylesheet to your blog, regardless of the theme you might be using.

Features

• imports user-defined stylesheet, independent of blog theme used
• provides convenient stylesheet editor in admin panel for fast editing
• does not write anything to your WordPress database

Review

Without doubt, MyCSS is an extremely useful plugin, because if you are using a ready-made theme, then you’ll always need to add new styles to it to support the many plugins you have.

I design my own themes and create an extra stylesheet that is independent of the theme called userstyles.css which I then include in the main style.css.

This plugin makes it easier for you to manage these styles and keep it independent of the theme you are using (very useful if you let visitors select themes).

Installation is easy, however, you have to make the my.css file that is included in the plugin writable. The plugin warns you if this is not the case. You can then edit the file via the Presentation menu.

Having the seperate CSS file makes it possible for you to edit it yourself by logging into your account via FTP, in case you don’t want to give write permissions and use the plugin only to include the CSS code.

One point that you need to remember is to avoid using this document to color elements. This is because if you’re different themes have contrasting colors, then the elements styled via my.css will not fit into the different themes.
However, one more tip here is that when styling the foreground, always add a background color too.

Again, this is a plugin for intermediate users. Advanced users like me will continue using a CSS file in the main theme. Real beginners (new to CSS) may find a problem with adding their own styles (unless it is given to them).

Do you think you would use this? Are you already using it?

Plugin
Simple Spam Filter

Description
Simple Spam Filter uses three methods to check the incoming comments for spam and rejects those that fit this criteria

Review
Simple Spam Filter is just as its name describes it, simple.

It blocks spam based on three criteria.

• Contains 5 or more links to external sites
• Contains [url=http://www.example.com]example[/url] style links (my blog does not support bbcode style links)
• Contains a word that matches a short list of common spam words

I installed it yesterday because though I am running Akismet for now on my blog, I still get hundreds of comment in the spam bin. And getting legitimate comments out of it can be quite a pain.

I had come across the plugin when it was released itself, but decided to actually check the need for it and so observed Akismet queue for the type of comments and found that most of the comments fit the criteria above.

On installation, in the past 24 hours, I’ve had over 430 comments blocked and just one spam comment in the Akismet bin.

Needless to say the plugin is doing its job well.

Just one doubt is to know what exactly is getting blocked. Again, it is really rare than any legitimate visitor will break one of the three conditions above.

What I would like to see is the ability to customize the number of links beyond which comments are blocked.
Another good feature would be the ability to add words from within wp-admin itself and not by editing the files (I believe the author has this in mind).

Needless to say, this is one plugin that’s going onto most of my blogs.

Plugin Page
Search and Replace

Description
This is a plugin for Wordpress to allow you to search and replace text across all your posts.

Review
Search and Replace is a simple easy to use plugin which is one reason I use it. The only job of the plugin is to find a phrase and replace it by another phrase.

Installation of the plugin is easy, just upload the single file and activate it.

You’ll be able to access the plugin from the Manage tag in WP-Admin.

Once there, you can select through which tables you want to search through and then enter the search and replace phrases.

The plugin uses SQL search. The search phrase is case sensitive, which means you have to be careful with what you are searching and replace.

I’ve been using this plugin to search and replace phrases and is one plugin I use on all the blogs I setup. I enable it whenever I need to make a search and replace and deactivate when done.

There are other advanced plugins with case-sensitive search as well as those which search using regular expressions, however this one is definitely good for its ease of use and getting the job done.

Have you ever felt the need to use a plugin like this?

Plugin Page
Feed Copyrighter

Description
This plugin adds a copyright message to your feed items.

Features
- Ability to customize the message by editing the php file
- Can be used to display anything in the feed, not just copyright

Review
I’ve been using this plugin ever since my post was first scraped by a bot. I was able to find that out and this plugin has been the primary method for me to track the splogs.

The plugin is easy to install and use. Upload to your plugin folder and activate it.
The default installation should be sufficient for most users, however you can edit the plugin to change what you want displayed in the feed.

You can check my blog feed to see how I have customized the message the plugin displays in my feed.

Additionally, since you are editing the php file, you can put your own HTML as well as add images.

Hint: You can even display your own ads.

Are you using this plugin? If not this, what do you use to display copyright messages? Or, do you display a copyright message in your feed?

Plugin Page
WordPress Plugin Download Statistics

Description
Display download stats of your plugin hosted on WordPress.org

Features

• Add plugins to track via administration panel
• Cache download statistics for a amount of time set by the user
• Retrieve plugin statistics from WordPress.org and display in the administration panel

Review
This plugin is not meant for regular users, but is geared towards plugin authors who have hosted their plugins at WordPress.org.

Installation of the plugin is normal and easy. Download the file, upload it to your plugins folder and activate the plugin.

Within WP-Admin itself you can specify the names of the plugins you have hosted at WordPress.org as well as the complete path to them.

The plugin will then get the download stats of your plugins and display them. The stats are cached and you can set the time of expiry of the cache.

Small plugin that does a simple job. Are you a plugin author hosting your plugins out there? Is this plugin any use for you?

Plugin Page
Flickr Photo Album

Description
The WordPress Flickr Photo Album plugin will pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site.

Features

• Display your Flickr photo sets as albums on your site
• Search engine friendly URLs
• Complete control over the look and feel, see below for customization details
• Show or hide your photos that have been marked ‘private’
• Flickr notes (Firefox only) and Flickr comments are supported
• Adds a new Photos tab for you to easily add Flickr photos to any blog post
• The new Photos tab allows you to filter your photos by tags, or to search everyone’s photos by tags
• Supports WordPress Widgets: Pull in your recent photos into your sidebar.

Review
Ever since I signed up for a Flickr Pro account, I’ve been wanting to integrate my Flickr albums into my blog. I tried quite a few Flickr plugins. Some worked but not to my satisfaction, while others gave errors. I was recommended to this plugin by one of my readers, but had kept putting it off until today.
You can see that I am impressed considering I’ve chosen to review it immediately.

To begin the review, the installation process is straight forward but has several steps. Besides activating the plugin, you have to chmod the cache folder and then you need to create a Flickr API key and feed this to the plugin. You then have to authorize your blog at Flickr, so that you can read the images.

Once you finish this, you can choose the url you want the photos to be displayed at. I chose /photos/ which was kinda obvious and the photos started displaying instantly.

You can customize the photos page still further by adding a template page in your themes directory. I haven’t gotten down to this yet.

The photos page displays your latest album and also shows your older album. You can choose to customize the order of the albums as well. You continue to manage your photos at Flickr and the plugin will automatically fetch the new photos and albums. One good feature here is that the photos are cached so as to reduce the continues calls to Flickr.

You can also choose to display the photos in your sidebar if you have the WordPress widgets plugin. I don’t use it, so would be good to know how I can do this manually.

Besides displaying the photos, the plugin adds a new photos tab that lets you insert these photos while composing your posts.

The last good feature is the ability to display / hide private posts.

Things I would like to see implemented is the the new collections feature of Flickr, as well the ability to independently organize the photo albums into collections on the blog.

Are you using this plugin? What would you like to see?

Plugin Page:
http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/clutter-free/

Description:
Clutter Free is a plugin that lets you hide portions of the WordPress posting interface that you rarely (or never) use.

Features:
- Hides various portions from view to save space on the screen
- Can completely remove the Image Uploader and Preview windows saving bandwidth

Review:
Honestly, there isn’t much I can write about Clutter Free other than it works and works well.

The installation is quick and easy. You can then visit your profile page and deselect which elements you want to hide.

I have the inline image uploader and the Preview window hidden on my blogs because I don’t use either of them. You have no clue how much bandwidth I save while I am blogging!

One good feature about Clutter Free is the ability for individual users to select what they want to see seperately. This ensures that on multi-admin blogs, the admin doesn’t enforce his settings on the other writers.

However, what I would like to see is the ability for the admin to have some control over these elements. e.g. I would prefer all my writers to use the same method of inserting images as I do and would like to disable the inline image uploader from all of them.

Are you using Clutter Free? Has it helped saved your bandwidth?

Plugin:
Adsense Manager

Description:
Adsense Manager is a WordPress plugin to help manage Adsense ads on your blog.

Features:
Adsense Manager instead provides all the options within the plugin to change Ad colours, size, layout, etc. which can all be updated on the fly - and checked in situ on the blog.
Default settings can be applied across all Ads allowing for site-wide changes (e.g. colour scheme) with the click of a button.

Implementation:
Once activated all you need to do is enter your Google Adsense ID and create a single Ad block unit. Once done this is gone you can position Ads on your site using either Wordpress Widgets (on enabled blogs), inline code in posts (standard edit box has an automated tool to insert ads) or by adding adsense calls to template code.

Future Plans:
- Extend the types of Google Adsense products supported to include referrals units, etc.
- Support for other Ad systems (e.g. from Yahoo!)

Review:
Before I begin with my review, let me clarify that this isn’t a plugin I have used and possibly may never use. And the reason is because I prefer handcoding everything into my template as much as possible and thus cut down on the number of plugins that I use.

However, for the sake of this series, I decided to give the plugin a test run and will say that I am impressed by what I saw.

To begin with, the installation of the plugin is extremely simple and you can manage your ads from within WP-Admin itself.

The first thing that impressed me while reviewing the plugin is the detailed instruction page the author has. Reading through it is all you need to figure out how to use the plugin.

You first need to setup a default ad unit. This default ad unit is used whenever you don’t specify an adunit by name. It also works as a fallback in case you don’t specify colors for the units you create. My suggestion is to use this default ad unit to define all the colors for your ad units. Only specify the colors of the new ad units when you need it.

You can create multiple adunits after you create the default unit. Each of these new units can be called seperately.

You can embed the adsense ads using several methods. For one, it comes with complete widget support so you can embed these in the sidebar of your theme if it supports sidebar widgets.
It also has support for K2 Modules, if you are running K2 or a theme based on it.

Ads can also be embeded in your post by entering simple comment tags in the body. This is a suggested method if you have a long post and would like to display an ad in the middle of the content.

The last method is via template tags. You can call the various ad units and embed them in your template.

Overall, this is a great plugin to manage all your ads. For now it doesn’t support link units, which means you will have to handcode those. Additionally, support for Google’s Referal Buttons would also be a welcome addition.

Just one note, the author has a system where, with your permission 3% of the adspace on your blog displays his own ads. This works as an indirect donation for his work.

Are you using this plugin? How do you find its performance. Do you have any suggestions?

Removed from distribution. Please remove this plugin from your blog if you are using it.

Having missed out the last few days of the “A Plugin A Day” series due to me being on holidays, we will be continuing the series all through May.

With so many plugins still worth reviewing, the days in April fell shot anyway. This means we are still accepting emails from plugin authors to have their plugins featured.

Read the original post for instructions on how to submit a plugin for review. Remember the more information you provide us the easier it is for us to review and test your plugin.

Note that we are selective about which plugins get featured here, so sending in an email doesn’t mean an assured post.

Also, your plugin doesn’t need to be a new release. You can email us about an old plugin that is still highly relevant. Some of the plugins featured in the last month have been released several months back.

I look forward for the emails. Once again, remember to follow the instructions clearly while sending the email.