oQey Gallery by oQeySites.com

oQey Gallery is a Plugin for WordPress that let users create and manage flash slideshows with a non-flash version of gallery built-in for all non-flash browsers and mobile devices like iPhone / iPad / iPod etc. The flash version supports music and skins, so users can change the way it looks with a few simple clicks. Customizable, commercial skins are also available as well as custom galleries for professionals. This plugin uses built-in WP functions and a simple batch upload system. Multiple galleries are supported.

Fullscreen HTML Editor by jbleuzen

This plugin adds a button to the default WordPress editor entitled “Fullscreen.” Like the name suggests, clicking on this button maximizes the editing screen so you can completely focus on your writing.

Specific CSS/JS for Posts and Pages by techtastico

Specific CSS/JS for Posts and Pages is a plugin that allows you to add custom CSS or Javascript files or embeded code in header to individual posts or pages. This is great for blogs that want to have a custom look/feel for each post, like that of Jason Santa Maria or Dustin Curtis.

Comment Location Tracker by jason.grim

This plugin can be useful but is also somewhat creepy – it lets you track which city and state your commentors are from by tracing their IP address.

WordPress Donation Plugin with Goals and Paypal IPN by NonprofitCMS.org

The NonprofitCMS.org WordPress Donate Plugin allows you to create unlimited donation campaigns with goals, capture donor information and gives a donation progress for each campaign! The plugin integrates with PayPal IPN and updates a progress meter in real time. Donors that choose not to be anonymous can be seen in a table.

Simple Local Avatars by jakemgold

Adds an avatar upload field to user profiles if the current user has media permissions. Generates requested sizes on demand just like Gravatar! Simple and lightweight.

Comments Capcha Box by digitalzoomstudio

This plugin creates a capcha box before your submit button in the comments section to prevent all that unwanted spam. It comes with a mini-admin panel and love.

Search Engines by Luis Alberto Ochoa

This is YASEOP – Yet Another Search Engine Optimization Plugin! Search Engines is a smart plugin that helps you to optimize the blog for SEO purposes by eliminating issues with duplicate content and specifying meta tags and page titles for different posts types and taxonomies.

Facebook Fanbox (with CSS Support) by ppfeufer

Adds a likebox for your Facebook fanpage to your wordpress-sidebar. Use your own CSS to style the box to your needs (fully customisable via css). Just add the ID of your Facebook fanpage and you are ready to go.

Timeline Calendar by omidkorat

A plugin for make your own timeline calendar. With this plugin, you can add your own events and show them via widget or special php code in your template. This plugin displays your events in specified dates (that you already set). For instant if your birthday is February 3, in Feb 3 your birthday message will be display. In addition you can display yesterday and tomorrow events too.

Related Posts Slider by Compact News Previewer

Related posts slider creates a very attractive slider of the related posts or/and pages for a WordPress post or page. The slider is a lightweight jQuery implementation of the related post functionality. It has a ready shortcode and widget as well to insert the slider.

Max Foundry Landing Pages by maxfoundry

Quickly create great-looking landing pages using a built-in template that is highly customizable. The template gives you complete control over a number of configurable options, and is a big timesaver for creating different versions of landing pages to use for A/B testing.

Facebook Fan Box Cache by dilbert4life, electriceasel

A plugin to cache the Facebook Fan Box. As the author says, “this plugin was written to take care of a serious issue. We were getting horrible load times on any page that contained the Facebook Fan Box iframe code. Especially during the evenings when everyone else in the world AND their mother was on Facebook playing Farmville and asking ME to join them. I wanted nothing of it, and I didn’t want my website to suffer the consequences. So after some research, I wrote up this plugin.”

WordPress Plus Points by andrew.alba

This is an interesting plug-in that allows you to log your meals and let you know how many Plus Points you use in relationship to your targeted daily plus points. It’s useful for personal (more private) blogs that are mainly for self-help purposes.

Graceless Degradation by drench

Graceless Degradation checks to see if the current browser is MSIE 6. If it’s not, it does nothing. If it is, it injects CSS and JavaScript into the page that:

• Puts Comic Sans fonts everywhere!
• Makes emphasis tags (bold, italic, strong, and underline) blink! Even though IE doesn’t support the tag!
• Turns tags into animated rainbows!
• Finds “mailto:” links and tacks on animated mailbox graphics!

Conclusion

The last plugin is probably my favorite of the bunch, as it makes corny any blog when viewed in Internet Explorer 6. What better deterrent to using an outdated browser than every blog you view looking like a Geocities site?

As always, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed and follow @ThinkDevGrow on Twitter!

Download

You can view the plugin details at WordPress.org or view a simple demo.

1.2 Change Log:

• Added ability to change color of vertical widget from admin panel
• Added ShareThis buttons
• Changed Facebook Share to Facebook Likes

To-do List:

• AJAX loading of buttons
• Better browser compatibility (specifically Internet Explorer)
• More default buttons

So it turns out AJAX loading isn’t as easy as I thought. While several buttons work, many do not function properly when called from another page via jQuery’s GET function. I ended up switching to the Facebook ‘Like’ button as the default over the Facebook ‘Share’ widget, as I think it will be more consistent with displaying the actual share/like numbers (a common complaint of the previous Share button). Also, the default buttons now include ShareThis, which include a couple of great E-mail and Share buttons. I left the ShareThis Facebook button code as well, in case anyone preferred using that over the new Facebook Like one.

If you have ideas to improve Sharebar or would like to contribute to the code, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail. I could definitely use some help in debugging the random IE/Thesis theme errors!

The Top 10

I’m always looking for ways to increase productivity and improve my overall experience in the application I spend the most amount of time in: my web browser. The following are 10 Chrome extensions, when used in conjunction with the Chrome element inspector, that have helped make web developing on Chrome a lot less painful:

1. StayFocusd

This extension is highly recommended. StayFocusd is a productivity extension for Google Chrome that helps you stay focused on work by restricting the amount of time you can spend browsing time-wasting websites. Once your allotted time for the day has been used up, the sites you have blocked will be inaccessible for the rest of the day.

2. Eye Dropper

Eye Dropper is extension for Google Chrome and Chromium that allows you to pick color from any webpage or from an advanced color picker.

3. SEO Site Tools

SEO Site Tools provides extensive information on the SEO and ranking of the site. It includes on-page/external metrics, social media info, Google PageRank and various other rankings for Yahoo, Bing and Alexa. The tool also checks the page content for validation, proper title tags (for better SEO rankings) and even provides suggestions for improving the overall site ranking. After trying this extension out for the past couple of days, I have to say I highly recommend it for any site! (thanks to Ileane for suggesting it)

Note: SEO Site Tools has replaced ChromeSEO here, as I feel it is a more comprehensive extension for all things SEO.

4. CSS Reloader

CSS Reloader is an extension that allows you to reload all the CSS of any site without you have to reload the page itself. To use this extension just press F9, and the loaded stylesheets will reload. The only drawback to this extension is that it does not support files on your local machine using the file:// protocol (however localhost should work).

5. Pendule

Pendule is an advanced set of web developer tools that allows you to easily view the (css|javascript|html) sources, adds links to popular accessibility and validation checks, and it includes a color picker and display ruler as well.

6. Awesome Screenshot

Awesome Screenshot lets you capture the whole webpage or any portion of it, annotate it with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines and text, and blur sensitive info. It supports PNG format and even has 1-click uploading (of course you can save it locally instead).

Note: Awesome Screenshot has replaced Screen Capture here, as it provides a great annotation system while providing the same screen capture ability of it’s competitors.

7. Stylebot

Stylebot is a Chrome extension that aims to simplify customizing the web, making it more accessible and adaptable. It puts you in control of the web’s presentation, allowing you to quickly change the appearance of any page. You simply launch Stylebot on a page, pick an element and apply styles to it.

8. MeasureIt!

As the name of the extension suggests, MeasureIt! provides a display ruler that lets you easily determine the dimensions of anything in your browser window.

9. Ultimate Chrome Flag

This extension shows a country or region flag indicating the location of the website you’re visiting (where server is hosted). Clicking on the flag produces a drop-down with a lot of great information, including the IP address, Pagerank, Alexa Ranking and WOT ratings.

10. Speed Tracer

Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs.

Also Noteworthy:

11. Web Developer

Similar to Pendule, the Web Developer extension adds a toolbar button to the browser with various web developer tools, including CSS and form manipulation, multiple validation links and even has a built-in color picker and ruler. Thanks to cmsguy for the suggestion.

12. Firebug Lite

Firebug Lite is not a substitute for Firebug, or Chrome Developer Tools. It is a tool to be used in conjunction with these tools. Firebug Lite provides the rich visual representation we are used to see in Firebug when it comes to HTML elements, DOM elements, and Box Model shading. It provides also some cool features like inspecting HTML elemements with your mouse, and live editing CSS properties. Thanks to Jeff for the suggestion.

Conclusion

There are so many great extensions available for Chrome that I know I’ve missed a few other good ones – if you have any suggestions for this list, leave them in the comments so we can check them out!

As always, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed, join our Facebook group and follow us on Twitter!

Nearing 10k Downloads

Sharebar is my first ever WordPress plugin and it’s amazing to see that it has been installed almost 10,000 times! I’m very curious as to which sites are using the plugin, especially any big ones. If you know of a big blog that uses Sharebar, please let me know in the comments so I can check it out!

Download

You can view the plugin details at WordPress.org or view a simple demo.

New Plugins Coming

I have some ideas for a few new WordPress plugins that I hope to start coding soon. If you have suggestions for a plugin, feel free to post them in the comments or e-mail me directly.

Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed and follow me on Twitter for the latest on the Sharebar and all other plugins I release.

Publish Confirmation by BloggingBookShelf

Have you ever accidentally published a post before it was ready? Yeah. It sucks. This plugin takes care of that. When you hit the “Publish” button after writing a post, a small dialog box appears asking you if you’re sure you want to publish the post. You can either click OK or CANCEL. And that’s it! Super simple and no more acidentally published posts.

Gravatar Hovercards by Otto

So this is one isn’t an official plugin and thus isn’t in the WordPress plugin directory but I thought it was worth mentioning. WordPress.com has implemented a new feature which lets you hover over a user’s Gravatar to get additional information about them and Otto has created a jQuery/WP plugin that lets you do this on any WordPress blog. You can see it in action on his personal blog.

NND Facebook Gravatar Grabber by NerdNextDoor

If a user or commenter has a link to their Facebook Profile Page as their URL link, this plugin extract their Facebook profile picture and use it as their Gravatar across the site. This will work in comments as well as in the user admin area, and anywhere that Gravatars may be used.

Visitor Analytics by Suny Tse

This plugin provides pretty detailed information on your latest visitors, including their IP address, number and frequency of visits, time spent on the site and which pages they visited. All of this information is available in Google Analytics or any log analyzer (ie Awstats), however it can be nice to have this quick summary easily accessible in your WordPress admin section.

Diagnosis by GamajoTech

Diagnosis adds a subpage to the dashboard where the main administrator of the WordPress installation can view technical data about the server in an easy manner along with a suitable explanation. Most fields also have a link to an appropriate Wikipedia article.

Pronamic Page Widget by pronamic, remcotolsma

This plugin makes it easy to add pages as widgets to your sidebars. Developers can also easily create templates for the different page widgets on different sidebars.

WordPress Firewall 2 by Matthew Pavkov

This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple, WordPress-specific heuristics, to identify and stop the most obvious attacks. It intelligently whitelists and blacklists pathological-looking phrases, based on which field they appear within, in a page request (unknown/numeric parameters vs. known post bodies, comment bodies, etc.). Its purpose is not to replace prompt and responsible upgrading, but rather to mitigate 0-day attacks and let bloggers sleep better at night.

Mystique Extra Nav Icons by frasten

Adds a number of social icons (customizable) above your navigation bar that slide up when you hover on them. Check out the screenshots and the demo for a better idea of how they function.

Anyfeed Slideshow by Soleil Golden

Anyfeed Slideshow is a plugin that adds a slideshow widget to your library. This widget is fully customizable and will display a feed of images from any RSS or Atom feed provided to it.

Allow PHP in Posts and Pages by Hit Reach

Allow PHP in posts and pages adds the functionality to include PHP in wordpress posts and pages by adding a simple shortcode [php].code.[/php]

Asteroids Widget by Electric Tree House

Turn your site into the game of Asteroids. Click to start and you can destroy the contents of your webpage by flying around and shooting them. Check out the demo on the author’s blog (see right sidebar) to try it out yourself. The plugin is also highly customizable allowing you to add a description and/or image as well as controlling which pages the Asteroids widget appears on. Based on JS from Erik Rothoff Andersson.

Contact Form by ContactMe.com

Add the free, eye-catching ContactMe button and contact form to your blog to turn your site visitors into sales leads and customers.

Post video players slideshow and photo galleries by Cincopa

Yes, that’s really the name of the plugin. Despite the ridiculously long name, the plugin is actually pretty cool – it lets you post your media in multiple ways, including a variety of galleries, slideshows and players.

Option Tree by Valen Designs

With OptionTree you can create as many Theme Options as your project requires and use them how you see fit. When you add a option to the Settings page, it will be available on the Theme Options page for use in your theme.

Post Via Email by jonefox

The easiest way to post to your WordPress blog using email. Just activate the plugin and you’ll get an email address to send to which will post the contents directly to your blog. The subject of the email is the title of the post and the body of the email will be the contents of the post. Posts will be published immediately after sending the email. Post by email!

Conclusion

I’ll try to continue this series every few months to stay on top of the best new WordPress plugins being released. If I missed one (undoubtedly so), please post it in the comments so we can check it out!

I wasn’t able to find a few author homepage URLs so I used the WordPress profile pages – if you would like me to use your homepage URL instead, post that in the comments as well and I’ll update the post.

As always, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed and follow @ThinkDevGrow on Twitter!

1. W3 Total Cache

This is perhaps the most critical plugin for any blog that gets a decent amount of traffic. W3 Total Cache (W3TC) allows you to:

• Cache your pages so they load much faster (not dynamically generated)
• Minify and compress your HTML, JavaScript and CSS files
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to quickly serve static media files from multiple subdomains

All of these features serve one purpose: to reduce page load times. Check any popular blog running WordPress and there’s a pretty good chance they are using W3TC (or their own custom caching solution).

2. All-in-One SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are a set of practices and techniques that help your website rank better in search engines, which in turn generates more traffic. The All-in-One SEO plugin makes your blog a little more SEO-friendly by allowing you to customize titles, keywords and descriptions (META data) for the overall blog and for each post.

Honorable Mention: Platinum SEO Pack – I’ve been told this is just as good (if not better) than All-in-One SEO Pack, however I have not tested it yet personally.

3. Contact Form 7

Ever wanted an elegant, AJAX-powered contact form for your blog? Contact Form 7 makes it super simple to get one up and running within minutes, just customize the form in the administration panel and paste the code in any page or post.

My favorite part about this plugin is that you can create multiple custom forms and do so very quickly using their intuitive backend interface, it’s simple but very effective.

4. WP Greet Box

I’ve just recently installed this plugin (I know, I’m late!) but it’s easily part of the essential plugins list. WP Greet Box displays a custom greeting for users that arrive to your blog posts from a recognized referrer, such as Google, Digg or Reddit. The default install includes greetings for over 30 popular services however you can also add a custom greeting for any referring URL manually.

If you’d like to test this out, search for ‘SliderNav’ on Google and the first result should be a jQuery plugin I wrote a while back. Clicking on it will take you to the post but soon after you should see a box appear under the title that has a Google logo, a link to my RSS feed and the option to display a few other related posts. Very useful for keeping users engaged!

5. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

At the bottom of every post I write, you’ll find a list of related posts. This is courtesy of YARPP, a related posts plugin with a high level of customization and display options. In my opinion, you should always try to have a list of related posts immediately after your post, as it will help increase user engagement and strengthen your readership, and this plugin makes it easy to do exactly that.

6. Subscribe to Comments

In my opinion, WordPress should integrate this feature into the core – it’s a simple addition that can have a meaningful impact on reader discussions. Subscribe to Comments adds a checkbox beneath your comment form that if checked will send an e-mail notification each time someone comments on the post. It’s especially useful for posts in which the reader expects the author to respond or wants to follow an active/heated discussion.

7. Google Analytics for WordPress

As the name suggests, this plugin by Yoast allows you to add Google Analytics code to your blog. You may be thinking ‘well, I can easily do that by editing my theme templates!’ and you would be correct. However, you’d have to edit every theme you use with your personalized analytics code and that can be pretty annoying. It makes much more sense to use a plugin that allows you to embed any analytics code on any theme without having to manually change files – this keeps things organized, systematic and efficient.

8. Popularity Contest

Alex King’s Popularity Contest is by far the best plugin to determine which posts and pages are popular based on a number of customizable criteria, including views (from multiple sources), comments, pings and trackbacks. It also provides a customizable function to display your popular posts in whatever format you’d like.

You can see the plugin in action in the sidebar to the right, under Popular Articles.

9. Google XML Sitemaps

As I mentioned in a previous post, submitting your XML Sitemap to Google can be crucial in improving the number of pages indexed by the search engine. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t generate an XML sitemap by default. Thankfully, there are multiple plugins available that take care of this (of which I prefer this one).

10. Akismet

This isn’t higher up on the list because this plugin is included by default in every WordPress install. If you haven’t used or activated it yet, stop whatever you’re doing and make it your first priority to do so. Even on a fairly small blog like this one, Akismet has prevented more than 2000 spammy comments from being posted. It is by far the most useful WordPress plugin, hence it’s inclusion with the core package.

Parting Thoughts

Since I use these plugins in just about every WordPress install I do, it would be nice to have a plugin that downloads and installs them in one shot. Does anyone know of a plugin that does this? If not, it seems like it could be very popular, at least in the web design/development circle.

Are there any other plugins you consider essential? Share them in the comments!

After The Deadline For Comments by Otto

If you’re not using it, I highly recommend the After the Deadline plugin, which provides contextual spell checking and grammar checking to your blog posts. This plugin extends that functionality to comments (demo).

DukaPress by DukaPress.org

DukaPress is open source software that can be used to build online shops quickly and easily. DukaPress is built on top of WordPress, a world class content management system. DukaPress is built to be both simple and elegant yet powerful and scalable.

Page Template Thumbnails by C. Tullos

This plugin creates a thumbnail list of the available page templates. Clicking a thumbnail updates the Page Attributes -> Templates drop down to the corresponding page template.

Basic Authentication by Klaas Cuvelier

With this plugin, you can ask users to authenticate before they can see your WordPress site. You can either use the WordPress logins to authenticate, or a given password. This plugin can be useful when your website is still under construction or in beta.

Top Contributors by Robin Dalton

Give your loyal visitors and contributors some recognition by adding a list of your top commenters to your blog.

Auto Twitter by Unreal Media

Auto Twitter is a wordpress plugin that automatically tweets each new blog post to the twitter account you specify. There really isn’t anything more to it than that.

WP-IssueTracker by Mahmoud Sakr

WP-IssueTracker is a full (yet basic) issue tracking system powered by WordPress. Currently WP-IT can operate one tracker per blog, however the back-end was designed to allow as many trackers as you might want. This will be targeted in a later release.

WordPress 3 Invoices by Elliot Condon

This plugin lets you generate great looking invoices directly from your WordPress admin panel. Great for freelancers and web designers, definitely worth checking out!

WP ImageHost by Hauke Leweling

The WordPress Plugin WP ImageHost is a simple and easy to configurable plugin to host your images inside your blogposts on a separate subdomain to reduce the number of requests.

Registration-Login by Md. Jamal Hossain Khan

Add a JavaScript loaded widget to your WordPress theme so user can login, registers without leaving the current page.

Remove WordPress to WordPress by Tom Lany

WordPress introduced a new filter called capital_P_dangit that changes all instances of WordPress to WordPress, stirring controversy in the WP community. This plugin removes that filter.

Tabs in Post Editor by Aaron Harun

This simple plugin allows you to use the tab-key inside the post editor to indent code or paragraphs.

Index Press by GrandSlambert

Provides a standard index of content in your site using a short code. Sorts results into alphabetical listings.

WP Chat by Abhinav Singh

WP Chat plugin embeds Jaxl IM (Instant Messenger for the web) for wordpress blogs. Jaxl IM is a hosted solution provided by Jaxl Inc. and requires no additional plugins from your site servers.

BM Shots by BinaryMoon

So this one isn’t that new but very worthy of being in the list. BM Shots is a plugin that makes use of WordPress.com mShots API for automatically creating screenshots of any website.

Conclusion

I try to visit the new plugins section at least once a week to get an idea of what people are working on, the kinds of problems people are trying to solve and to see if there’s anything I can use on my own sites. I’m always amazed at the sheer amount of creativity that people have when it comes to plugins, it’s often very entertaining to browse through.

Have you started using a new plugin that you’ve fallen in love with? Share it in the comments!

And as always, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed and follow @ThinkDevGrow on Twitter!