WordPress Plugins

This is a list of plugins used by students in their WordPress projects. The plugin name should link to the plugin site and the descriptions should follow this syntax and be in alphabetical order by plugin. If more than one student has used the plugin, append name and edit description if desired.

Plugin – Description/rationale – Student Name(s)

2011 Plugins

• Akismet was installed to protect the site from spam. (Rachel C)  It will greatly reduce or even completely eliminate the comment and trackback spam you get on your site (Ruba H) (Cheryl L.) (Dacia S.) (Ting K.)   I found it refreshing a person could choose to pay nothing, yet have as only consequence not getting any ‘Help’ priority over those who pay. Also enjoyed national debt-like clock that counts deep into the billions how many articles of spam are being blocked. (Thor T.)
• AJAX Contact allows easy ability to add contact forms to pages, posts and widget areas. (Thor T.)
• All In One SEO Pack was installed to “optimize WordPress search engine” capability.  It also populated the description for the “tab” attached to my blog. (Rachel C) (Ruba H) (Cheryl L.) (Ting K.)
• bbPress This is a forum/bulletin board tool, from the makers of WordPress. It’s an alternative to BuddyPress (which is great, but my theme didn’t support them). Right now, the tool isn’t active, but it’s really handy. (Kat S.)
• Image horizontal reel scroll slideshow allows images to move horizontally. Speed of plug-in gallery is customizable, but scroll stops for as long as a mouse is hovering over it. (Thor T.)
• JetPack by WordPress allows linking of blog to WP account.
• Photo Galleria This plug-in is used to display photos and thumbnails in gorgeous and elegant way. I love the design of the large image with the ability to scroll through thumbnails beneath. Currently not using until I uninstall graph paper press theme that I am not using because WP will not redeclare plug in within my server files. (Dacia S.)
• Simple Contact Form Revisited Widget My theme came with its own Contact Form widget, but you can only put it in a sidebar, not in the content of the page. The plugin I used looks identical to the theme’s widget but it allowed for short code right in the page, allowing me to have a form in the main content area of the contact page. (Derek W.)
• Slideshare This plugin allows you to import documents, slideshows, or other media from Slideshare.  I used it to embed my resume in a page on my site. (Elizabeth W.) (Ting K.)
• WordPress Mobile Pack This plug in is awesome! It allows you to choose and apply a mobile theme for your blog, and uses detection technology to know whether to serve up your standard template or the mobile template depending on the device used. (Cheryl L.) (Elizabeth W.)
• WP Super Cache This is a fast caching plugin that allows your site to load faster by storing the information for static pages and other elements that aren’t constantly changing on your site. (Elizabeth W.)
• wp-Typography  Improve your web typography with: (1) hyphenation — over 40 languages supported, (2) Space control, includes: widow protection, gluing values to units, and forced internal wrapping of long URLs & email addresses, (3) Intelligent character replacement, including smart handling of: quote marks, dashes, ellipses, trademarks, math symbols, fractions, and ordinal suffixes, and (4) CSS hooks for styling: ampersands, uppercase words, numbers, initial quotes & guillemets. (Cherilyn W.)
• Online Booking Calendar. I’m using this plugin to give customers the option to make a reservation through the website. The free version is great and lets you embed a calendar (you can black out unavailable times) and a submission sheet. It will counter act that submission with a confirmation email from your desired adress. I would recommend the pro version if you would like to include specific time bookings. I am setting times up through my email confirmation afterwards. (Samantha J.)

2010 Plugins

• About Me – Displays icon links to profile pages on various social networking sites. – Nicole S.
• Akismet – Takes comments from your posts and measures them against a web service that recognizes spam. If it looks like spam, it wont display the comment. I use this to protect my site from being spammed and to help validate the content on the blog. – Elise, Scott Loughran
• All in One SEO Pack – The SEO Pack plugin optimizes a site for search engines. – Nicole S.
• Category Cloud Widget – Adds a sidebar widget to display a site’s blog categories as a tag cloud. – Nicole S.
• Clean Contact – A contact form with SPAM protection – Stephen
• Disqus Comment System – Replaces WP comment system, allowing several login systems for users to self-identify more easily. I hope that the content on our blog sparks conversation and encourages people to ask questions. Lengthy validation processes for comments stops people from making them and hopefully the quick connect options will help with the encouragement. – Scott Loughran
• Favicon Manager – Places a little image next to your domain name in the URL box. I feel this helps add individuality and establishes brand better than the generic WP default favicon. The favicon was generated by uploading a PNG file to http://www.favicon.cc/. – Scott Loughran
• FD Feedburner Plugin – Redirects all of your sites feeds back to a Feedburner feed. I like this idea as Feedburner is now a Google entity and allows me to integrate AdWord campaigns and measure feed performance much like Analytics. – Scott Loughran
• Gcal Sidebar – A widget that puts a feed from a Google calendar. – Stephen
• Google Analyticator – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics. – Nicole S.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – Easy way to copy/paste your Analytics UA# for automatic metrics. Analytics is important in understand the behavior of your audience. This plugin took out the need to copy/paste code, on your UA#. – Scott Loughran
• JR Digg – This Digg plugin allows your users to share your posts through Digg. – Holly
• JR Ratings – This plugin allows you to enable a rating form where users can rate a particular post. – Holly
• JR YouTube – This YouTube plugin allows you to show your recently listened uploaded YouTube videos, and display them in a list as a widget on your blog. – Holly
• Keyword Statistics – Takes all the content from your post and creates a suggested keyword list based on the 10 words that appear most often in your post. I have a hard time generating tags, so this plugin helps me come up with relevant tags. – Elise, Scott Loughran
• MM Forms – A fully customizable online form creation tool. It also stores information gathered from forms in a database and has the option to email to a user. – Stephen
• My Page Order – A tool that allows a use to organize pages and subpages by dragging and dropping. – Stephen
• NextGEN Gallery – A gallery plug-in that displays a slide show of pictures with multiple features such as transitions, arrows, thumbnail navigation. – Stephen
• NextGEN Smooth Gallery – An add-on for NextGEN Gallery that adds functions to the gallery plug-in. – Stephen
• Picasa Widget – Shows Picasa pictures in sidebar (with the option to choose albums or individual pictures). – Nicole S.
• Share and Follow – A split plugin. “Share” lets you select from the most popular sharing options in icon format at the bottom of each post. “Follow” uses the same icon format in the sidebar to allow users to subscribe to your feeds via the channel of their choice. I am a firm believer that your inability to provide options to your audience will give your audience the ability to leave. To add other sharing channels no accounts are needed and the follow links in the side bar operate of off links, not feeds so it doesn’t interfere with my RSS. – Holly, Scott Loughran
• SlideShare – makes it possible to insert slideshare.net presentations with shortcode – Elise
• Sociable – adds links to your favorite social bookmarking websites – Elise
• Table of Contents Creator – Table of Contents Creator automatically generates a highly customizable dynamic site wide table of contents that is always up-to-date. – Holly
• Tweet Blender – Twitter integration for the sidebar, allowing tweets, tweets relevant to post’s tags, Twitter list, hashtags and keyword searches. I wanted people to be able to see the conversation Twitter so they can be encourage to follow us there as well. – Scott Loughran
• Twitter Tools – Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. – Holly
• YouTube Brackets – inserts YouTube videos into posts using shortcode brackets – Elise
• wp-Typography – Helps make your text look pretty and uniform amongst various formatting differences between languages and OSs. I haven’t found a situation where this plugin helps, so either it’s doing its’ job really well or its’ not that necessary. – Scott Loughran
• WPtouch iPhone Theme– Provides mobile themes for your site to display more friendly on touch-based smartphones. It takes the customization of my theme away from the content, but makes the content much more friendly to browse. It does give users the option to divert back to the original theme. – Scott Loughran