Tag Archives: WordPress Plugins

How to find a good WordPress plugin

Last thursday was the first WordPress Meetup in Apeldoorn organized by Karim Osman and Max.nl. I held a short presentation about how you choose good plugins and/or themes. Regularly I get questions about good or bad plugins and how you find them. So in the talk I talked about the things you should look for, when choosing a plugin or theme.

Here are 9 points you could look at when you’re searching for a good plugin or theme in the WordPress.org respository.

  1. Author
  2. Description / Changelog
  3. Latest Update
  4. Rating
  5. Compatibility
  6. Number of downloads
  7. Reviews on forums, blogs or other websites
  8. The authors reactions on the WordPress.org support forums
  9. Ask the community!

I would like to thank everybody who attended the WordPress meetup and a specially Karim and Max.nl! On Apeldoorn Direct is a great recap of the meetup.

5 useless but awesome WordPress plugins

I would like to share with you five truly amazing WordPress plugins. These plugins will blow your mind and make your WordPress installation awesome. Even on a monday morning. So forget all those other WordPress plugins and use these! ;)

Comic Sans FTW

The name is self-explanatory. It’s the best plugin to change the font of your theme and admin dashboard to the #1 winning font. Comic Sans.

Rainbowify

Adds a nice little rainbows to your admin bar.

Unicornify

This plugin changes all the Gravatar pictures in to unicorns. Pretty sweet, right?

Unicornify and Rainbowify are made by mister Otto42.

Nyan Press

This is not just a plugin, it symbolizes the hope and enthusiasm of an entire generation summed up in two words sung most famously by Internet Users: Nyan Cat.

When activated your WordPress installation will join the ranks of the initiated. Your dashboard will be overcome with the spirit of great successful sites such as Reddit.

Everybody loves cats!

Hello Dolly

Yes, Hello Dolly is useless but awesome. A WordPress install without Hello Dolly is not a real WordPress install.

This is not just a plugin, it symbolizes the hope and enthusiasm of an entire generation summed up in two words sung most famously by Louis Armstrong: Hello, Dolly. When activated you will randomly see a lyric from Hello, Dolly in the upper right of your admin screen on every page.

The end result is AWESOME!

Do you know any useless but awesome WordPress plugins? Share them in the comments!

4 Reasons You Should Never Use WordPress.com (And 4 Reasons You Should)

4 Reasons You Should Never Use WordPress.com (And 4 Reasons You Should)

4 reasons you should never use WordPress.com

  1. You can’t alter page structure
  2. Limited themes & plugins
  3. It costs to add style
  4. The content & copyright issue

4 reasons you should use WordPress.com

  1. Back-ups
  2. Availability
  3. Security
  4. The value bundle

PS. did you read why I switched from a self-hosted WordPress.org blog to WordPress.com?

Comic Sans FTW

A good friend of mine, Coen Jacobs, just released a new plugin called Comic Sans FTW. YES! Comic Sans FTW. When I first saw his tweet I thought I would get Rick Roll’d. But sadly he actually build the damn plugin and released it.

What it does is it simply turns your WP admin in to “Instant Comic Sans awesomeness”. It changes all the fonts in the back-end to Comic Sans. Of course I installed it on my WordPress installation and I love the Hello Dolly lyrics in Comic Sans. I was just kidding.

According to Coen, Comic Sans is going to take over the world, one WordPress installation at a time and the next big feature will be Comic Sans on the front-end. Total Comic Sans Awesomeness!

A great spellchecker for WordPress

I would like to share with you a plugin I just started to use this weekend. It’s called After the Deadline and it is built by the guys of Automattic. You know, the company founded by Matt Mullenweg, who is behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org and many more great things.

After the Deadline is a plugin that really nifty checks your spelling, style and grammar. It’s only for English so not really useful for my Dutch blogs but for this blog it’s really handy. My English writing is not yet on a level that I would like to be. That’s one of the reasons I started this blog in English. This plugin really helps me find mistakes and corrects them. So if you have an English WordPress blog, you should really try this plugin and let it check your writings.

Installation

Go to Plugins -> Add New and search for ‘After the Deadline’. Click on Install Now and wait a few seconds. Then you can activate the plugin and you’re ready to go!

Update – 26 may

I just read on WPMU.org that there is now also a After the Deadline for BuddyPress. It will add all the functions of the WordPress version to the BuddyPress Groups, Forums, Activity Stream, Profiles, Messages and Blog Comments.