This is really handy: the Drop Down Menu WordPress plugin creates a drop-down navigation scheme where sub-pages appear under their parent pages in the menu. All you have to do is upload, activate, and add one snippet of code to your template files. The menu can be styled in the styles.css file in the plugin’s folder.
See the demo here.
Wordpress plugin for creating a drop down navigation menu using JQuery»
I’ve never come across a situation where I would need this feature, but I’d like to have this on record in case it ever comes up. Mike has developed a WordPress plugin, Themed Categories that allows the user to select different uploaded themes for different categories. According to the comments, his version doesn’t work with WordPress version 2.3, so someone named Kalle made the necessary changes and the modified plugin can be downloaded here (direct link to zip download).
Wordpress Themed Categories Plugin
WordPress Themed Categories Plugin for 2.3 (direct link to zip download)
Recently I wrote about a WordPress plugin that allows you to exclude certain pages from appearing in your list of Pages without coding your template files. The My Page Order WordPress plugin gives you additional Page flexibility by allowing you to manually order your Pages without coding.
Update Feb. 17, 2008:
I just used this plugin for the first time, and it’s fantastic! All you have to do is upload it and activate it, and then go to Manage > My Page Order. There, you have an Ajaxy menu that shows you all your pages. You just drag and drop them until they’re in the order you want, and then click the “Click to Order Pages” button. You can also order subpages in the same way.
This is a plugin that can save you tons of time when you have five or more pages that you need to reorder.
My Page Order WordPress plugin
Perishable Press has released a new contact form WordPress plugin called Contact Coldform. The main selling point behind this plugin seems to be its “sqeaky clean” PHP, and the fact that it’s standards compliant. Here are the features that I think are the most significant and unique:
<head>.Contact Coldform from Perishable Press
There are many situations where you want to make sure that certain categories only appear on some pages, and not on others. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help you do this without having to hack your template files:
Front Page Excluded Categories WordPress plugin - this plugin enables you to exclude posts from certain categories from your front page. This is possible by hard coding your template files as well, but for those who want to give others the ability to do this easily, or who just don’t want to mess with their template files, this is a good solution.
Advanced Category Excluder WordPress plugin - this plugin gives you more flexibility over where categories appear. Here, you have access to modifying categories for five different pages on your blog: archive, home, rss posts, rss comments and search. It currently does not work for tag pages.
It seems like this WordPress plugin is not a joke, although it took me a while to figure that out. CO2Stats claims it will detect how much electricity is being used to power your site, and “offset” the emissions by investing in renewable energy projects. Who pays for these investments?
Our offsets are funded by advertising sponsors who are selected because they are committed to making the Internet more environmentally friendly.
Is “green” blogging the next trend? It’s so hard to keep up.
The Page Link Manager WordPress plugin creates a place in your admin where you can select which Pages will appear in your list of pages, and which will be excluded. This means that your clients can easily do this themselves, and it saves you a bit of trouble too.
Garrett Murphey » Wordpress Plugin: Page Link Manager
Urban Giraffe has a list of amazing plugins that the guy behind the site, John Godley, developed. Many of these plugins are really unique, and I haven’t seen anything like them anywhere else.
Here are the ones that I find most interesting, and I hope to try out soon:
- Full text search with wildcards and logical operations
- Search posts, pages, comments, titles, URLs, tags, and meta-data (all configurable)
- Search data after it has been processed by plugins, not before
- Search highlighting of all searches, including titles and comments
- Search highlighting of incoming searches from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Baidu, and Sogou
- Search results show contextual search information, not just a post excerpt
- Record search phrases and display in a log
- Exclude specific posts and pages from results
- Compatible with WP-Cache
- Supports WordPress 2.0.5 through to 2.3
- No changes required to your theme
See ‘em all at: Plugins - Goodies for WordPress | Urban Giraffe»
WordPress comment boxes tend to be dry, text editors. That’s kind of ok for people who know HTML, but even I get frustrated when I want to add a link in someone else’s comment box.
Here’s a really easy and pretty solution: Advanced TinyMCE Editor. This editor add a simple yet useful toolbar to the top of the comment box with the following buttons: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, undo, redo, add link, remove link, and view HTML. To see it in action, go to the comments section at the end of this post - I’ve implemented it here on WordPressGarage.
Update March 10, 2008: I have disabled this plugin because a user notified me that it was causing Safari to crash. Oh well.
Not to be outdone by WordPress.com’s announcement that users can add falling snow to their blogs until January 2 in honor of the holidays, widgeo.us has “whipped up” a falling snow plugin (who whips up a plugin?) for self-hosted users of WordPress.org. This plugin can be used as long as you like - one of the benefits of the control you get having a self-hosted WordPress blog!
So if you’re yearning for some gently falling virtual snow on your blog on this Christmas day, Santa has fulfilled your dream!
(we don’t get much snow here in Israel…)
