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 […]

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 […]

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 […]