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It’s episode #72 and today we’re reviewing plugins that track changes, a shortcoders delight, a content pop-up plugin, a mortgage calculator, customizable site trees plus a re-review of a poll plugin after the author contacted us about more features! All that and more coming right up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

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John’s & Marcus Rant: What to rant about?

It was a great weekend my oldest turned 5 got out into the sun and had some fun. Plus even managed some Diablo 3 playtime. Don’t forget have your say leave us a voice message via Speakpipe.

World of WordPress News and other interesting WordPress related posts:

WordPress 3.4 Release Candidate

Mullenweg: Future of WordPress is ‘shorter, simpler, faster’

Internet Protection Act’s Anonymous Comment Ban Proposal ‘Mischaracterized’, Says Assemblyman

The Pros and Cons of Designing a Custom WordPress Theme

WordPress @9: Matt Mullenweg on ‘Radical Simplification’ for Mobile and Social

WordPress Is Not Just A Blogging Platform [INFOGRAPHIC]

Automattic just released version 3.0 of their iPhone/iPad app. It includes push notifications for newly received comments, improved interface (especially for iPad), and a new swipe to moderate feature for comment list moderation.

Plugins Reviewed by John

Re-Review
Cardoza WordPress Poll 1.0

Version: 1.0
Author: Vinoj Cardoza
Last Updated: 8 days ago
Requires WordPress Version: 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.3.2
Downloaded: 6,771 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:
Ok this one is a re-review mainly because I am a fair person and if called on the carpet I will answer for my actions. Seems I may have missed a thing or two here and the author Vinoj Cardoza called me out on it and also updated the plugin a few days ago and notified my about changes so here is the retake.

First the new icon is great it makes a bit more sense in the context of the menu than the previous one (see last review for info on that.) Installation still easy, creating poll also easy I do like the poll start and end date creation, would be nice if it had an auto chooser for date. Displaying it is pretty easy seems I missed the short codes in my previous review you can display a single post on a page or the archive of all posts aside from just a widget in sidebar.
Id does still seem to be limiting to what I was looking for and that was a way to control who can vote and how often. This one allow you to let anyone vote or logged in users vote aside from that I could not find any other controls.
So in final rating I give this a 3 but move it to a 4 because of the icon change

Rating 4 Dragon:

You know sometimes it pays to simply check out the latest new plugins instead of going with the old standards. Seems innovation is not lacking in the WordPress Community where even an old idea is getting great new makeovers.

Worpit WordPress Admin Dashboard Plugin trunk

Version: trunk
Author: Worpit
Last Updated: 15 hours ago
Requires WordPress Version: 3.2.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.4
Downloaded: 5 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:
According to author it is still underdevelopment and has nothing to install yet they allow a download so i thought i would check it out seems all you can do is download the pre-plugin. But I like the premise and will keep the mention here. It is to be a centralized area for managing your WordPress websites all in one spot. I am interested to see how it does this task. Will respond on it after they go live.
No Rating yet….

WP Changes Tracker 1.0.0

Version: 1.0.0
Author: pixeline
Last Updated: 15 hours ago
Requires WordPress Version: 2.9.2 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.4
Downloaded: 13 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:
I like what this plugin is offering that is a way to track changes you make to your plugins. You just install activate and it track what you do. Once activated it make note of your system and where it is at. Very simple and lazy just they way we like it. I activated and deactivated and updated a couple plugins on my test site and it was able to tell me everything I had done this is pretty nice.

Rating 4 Dragons:

Anything Popup 1.0

Version: 1.0
Author: Gopi.R
Last Updated: 3 days ago
Requires WordPress Version: 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.4
Downloaded: 262 times
WordPress.org Plugin Page »
Plugin Homepage »

The Lowdown:
I know many folk from time to time need an unblockable popup window, a way to present important info on your site or to simply be annoying and make sure your ad gets showed. I know I have been looking for a decent one for a while and have checked out many in the past. Installation is like most every plugin out there.

It uses a WSYWYG editor for popup creation you can also set the popup colour options at this point. and has a list of popups created that you can manage later for edit changes ect.. You can then drop a short code into a posts for an individual popup that produces a link that when clicked it popups for folks to view this is a very nice feature. Then there is the widget where you place the short code and it does the same thing. I am truly liking this plugin with one major exception, I am looking for one that auto loads when folks visit the site this one does not do that out of the box but may be modifiable to that end. Otherwise this is a pretty nice plugin.

Rating 3 Dragons:

Plugins Reviewed by Marcus

DOB Easy Shortcode
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dob-easy-shortcoder/

Requires: 2.7 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.3.2
Last Updated: 2012-5-31
Downloads: 12
Author: evgen dob

DOB Shortcoder allows you to create any shortcode and easily modify it’s content. No coding skills needed.

This plugin allow you to create any number of shortcodes, easily edit content and use it in posts and pages. You can even use one shortcode inside another shortcode that allows you to build complex content systems. For advanced users: In single editor you can also put shortcode content in div element and add class and additional styling to this element. That will help you to make code look better within your design.

Marcus’ Take: I’ve been waiting for a plugin like this for a long long time. Something that lets me nest my own content within a shortcode, while also letting me embed a shortcode within a shortcode! I am continuing to test this plugin on a live client site and trying the shortcodes of other plugins in combo with what I can create with this DOB plugin. So far so good!

Rating: 4 Dragons

—

SiteTree

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sitetree/

Requires: 3.2 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.3.2
Last Updated: 2012-5-31
Downloads: 27
Author: _luigi

This plugin lets you easily add a dynamically generated sitemap page to your WordPress blog or website.
SiteTree lets you add a customizable sitemap page directly from your administration area. No shortcode or coding knowledge needed.

Features

Selectively choose what to show.
Exclude specific pages or whole subpages levels.
Show meta informations.
Sort posts by title, most recent or most popular.
Group posts by category or date.

… and a few more: title tag control, trailing html, custom css code.

Marcus’ Take: I used this for a client site that we wanted to selectively prune what was shown in the default sitemap pages (like ones seen in a 404 error page). The issue was that we did not want certain things like tags, authors and categories to appear to potential clients, rather keeping it to only the main “sell” pages. This plugin did the trick with a bit of setup.

Rating: 4 Dragons

—

Advanced Real Estate Mortgage Calculator

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-real-estate-mortgage-calculator/

Requires: 2.0.2 or higher
Last Updated: 2012-5-30
Downloads: 38
Author: maxxsnake

Advanced Real Estate Mortgage Calculator is an easy-to-use financial calculator and a great tool for real estate websites. Quickly calculates monthly payment from sales price, down payment, and interest rate & length of loan – or, enter the desired monthly payment to calculate sales price, all on the same form. Calculations occur instantaneously upon each updated entry – so checking a few dozen different potential scenarios is a snap.

Marcus’ Take: This is an outstanding plugin for anyone that has or designs real estate sites in wordpress. It’s important that you have tools like this on site to keep your site viewers from leaving to find this type of tool somewhere else. Great functionality in a few different themes that I’ve tried and the calculations are instant.

Rating: 4 Dragons