July 4, 2012

Scripting, Fonts, Compression, Twitter, and more on Episode 76 WP Plugins A to Z

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It’s episode 76, and we’ve got plugins for Scripting, Fonts, Compression, Twitter, and a few plugins that operate in Real-Time. Its all coming up next on WordPress plugins A-Z!

This Podcast Can now be found at WPPluginsAtoZ.com

You can now also find the show by using the new Podcasts app on your Apple device, with the ability to speed up the show to hear John and Marcus knock out 6 plugins in 10 minutes! (Though we do sound rather chipmunk-like) Great app with a really great new way to hear the show streaming to your phone wherever you are without having to download to your device or use iTunes.

>>>>>>>>>>Self Promotion<<<<<<<<<<<<

Do you need WordPress Emergency WordPress support for issues you know when you see the ever favorite White Screen of Death. Or just some questions on how to do something please visit www.johnoverall.com/wordpress-emergency-support/ for some quick tips or request some help.

John’s Rant:

Turned into a beautiful Canada Day here this past week and a happy July 4 to all our American listeners.

Listener Feedback / Audio Clips

Jamie Hayes from down under in Aussie land

World of WordPress News and other interesting

WordPress 3.4 update closes important security hole seems there is some cross-site script holes in 3.4 among other things so update…

Plugins Reviewed by John

Scripts n Styles 3.2

Version: 3.2
Author: unFocus Projects
Last Updated: 11 days ago
Requires WordPress Version: 3.4 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.4.1
Downloaded: 4,875 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:
While polishing off a major project I ran into an issue that I hoped would have a plugin solution instead of having to go into the css one more time. The problem was needing to make a custom on a couple of posts but only for the text sure easy enough to do in css but hey I am the plugin guy after all. So I went looking and this is what I found.
Now I had high hopes but it turns out I was not able to focus this on a per post basis so I had to go back to the css to write what I wanted but it does have some great potential for site-wide css and scripts and it has something interesting called hoops that may come in handy. It allows an admin to allow certain html usage that is often stripped out by WordPress to prevent less leveled users from messing thins up. Plus a few other tools that may be fun.

Well scratch all that just as I was about to toss i discovered how to make it work and it is pretty sweet how it applied something to a specific page. Seems that I almost the box on the post/page that allows you to enter something for that specific post experiment with some other scripts and wow they hit it out of the park here I think what a time save when you only need to customize a single page or two.

Rating 5 Dragons.

WP-Cufon 1.6.10

Version: 1.6.10
Author: Tobias Battenberg
Last Updated: 274 days ago
Requires WordPress Version: 2.5 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.2.1
Downloaded: 99,726 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:
So you need some custom fonts and you cant find what you want at Google fonts or fonts.com or any other place this may be your solution. Well you need to go here and convert your font https://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/ then install this plugin and upload a couple files to your site. In particular you need to upload the font you just turned into a .js script. Setting and assigning it is pretty much the same as any font you can either assign by main body types ie H1 or p tags or assign to specific spots via custom css using the plugin before. I did find this one a bit more work to use that other ways I have talked about in the past for webfonts.
Rating 3 Dragons

Gzip Compression 1.0

Version: 1.0
Author: James Socol
Last Updated: 576 days ago
Requires WordPress Version: 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.0.5
Downloaded: 22,757 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:
Well what can I say this is a lazy plugin drop it in turn it on and it speeds up load times for your site. Does it work well it does seem to I tested it on a graphic heavy site and it did load faster so I have to say yes.

Rating 4 Dragons.

Plugins Reviewed by Marcus

Search in Place

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-in-place/

Search in Place improves blog search by displaying query results in real time. It displays the results dynamically as you enter the search criteria.

Requires: 3.0.5 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.4.1
Last Updated: 2012-7-2
Downloads: 204

Search in Place groups search results by their type, labeling them as post, page, or attachment, and highlights the searched terms.
Features:

Performs real time search as you enter search criteria;
Groups search results by post type (post, page, attachment);
Allows to highlight the keywords used to run the search, in search results (Advanced version only);
Allows to limit the number of elements in the dynamic search results.

Marcus’ Take: Search has always been the Achilles heel of WordPress. This plugin helps to bridge that gap and display your results in Real-Time. This plugin worked great for a client site that required a more robust search functionality.

Rating: 4 Dragons

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Real Time Twitter

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/real-time-twitter/

Real Time Twitter display your tweets on your sidebar in REAL TIME. It will retrieve tweets based on time specified without page reload.

Requires: 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.3.2
Last Updated: 2012-6-29
Downloads: 591

Real Time Twitter provides you the latest tweets in real time.
Features:

Custom Refresh mode.
User defined tweets to be displayed.
User defined Refresh Interval.
Hover Cards.
Pagination option.

Marcus’ Take: Another great Real-Time plugin that allows you to use Twitter in the sidebar to display lists and multiple Tweet authors.

Rating: 3 Dragons

Email Commenters

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/email-to-commenters/

Send email to post commenters

Requires: 3.3 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.4.1
Last Updated: 2012-6-26
Downloads: 119

Send email to your post commenters with 2 clicks. If you want to send email to users who commented on a certain post, you can do that easily. Also you can select all the commenters from your site to send email.

Marcus’ Take: Great way to get in touch with your closest and most active members of your site’s community. Simply designate who you want to contact (or all) and then click send. It’s a great tool that I used for some client work. I would love to see some automated functionality added to this, but it’s a great start.

Rating: 4 Dragons