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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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?) […]

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 […]