Free Plugins 4 of 4: Functionality

This is the 4th and the last post in the “Free Plugins” series. If you missed it, please check out the previous one here. In this post, I’m showing you the plugins that did not fit otherwise in other categories.

Ads by datafeedr.com

“Ads by datafeedr.com” plugin is very handy if you want to use advertising on your blog.

Do you want to put a banner ad in your sidebar? Okay, if it should be just one banner displayed over and over again on every page load, you can achieve this simply by inserting the necessary HTML code in a text widget. But what about rotating a few banners in the same place to save the space? Or scheduling an ad for a certain period of time?

All these can be achieved with “Ads by datafeeds.com”. It’s not so sophisticated as “Ad Rotator” for example, but it’s free and it does the job quite well.

Auto Affiliate Links

This plugin can help you supercharge your site monetization by automatically adding affiliate links throughout your content. You can simply associate affiliate links with keywords where they should be added into your content. This can be done with the free version.

The premium version of this plugin can automatically extract and display links from Amazon, Clickbank, Shareasale, Ebay, Walmart, Commission Junction, BestBuy and Envato Marketplace.

It is highly configurable, for example, you can specify the link frequency, follow/nofollow, whether you want the links to be cloaked, and many other useful things.

Cookie Law Info

This plugin will display a thin banner either at the bottom or top of your web pages showing your compliance with the EU cookie law. You can also define the cookies that your website is using and display them in your privacy policy page (with a shortcode), just to make sure your readers are aware of them.

Crayon Syntax Highlighter

If you want to show some source code in your posts, Crayon is the best choice. I tested ALL syntax highlighting plugins that I could find, and none of them are so reliable and feature rich as Crayon.

It can be configured to use only <pre></pre> and <span></span> tags to mark the snippets, and you don’t need to include them manually, a button in the post editor handles everything.

Just a small example here:

// add custom CSS to admin backend
add_action('admin_head', 'admin_custom_css');
function admin_custom_css() {
	echo '<style>
	.mce-panel .mce-menubar{display: block;}
	</style>';
}

Drop Shadow Boxes

This handy plugin can highlight important content on your posts, pages and widget areas. Just a small example:

[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”auto” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]Do you see this box here? This is a drop shadow box in action.[/dropshadowbox]

Enable Media Replace

After you upload an image and include it in your post, you may figure out that you have to change something in that image and replace it with a new version. Normally, your only option is to remove the old image from your gallery, upload the new image and then replace it in your post. How about multiple posts?

I really don’t figure out why replacing an image with another one should be so cumbersome.

If you install and activate this plugin, you can replace an existing image with a new one just by using the new button in “Edit Image” screen. You cannot change the file name, nor it’s type. If it’s a JPEG, then the new one must be also a JPEG. The plugin will take care of regenerating all related thumbnails. Pretty cool.

FD Feedburner Plugin

This plugin simply intercepts all accesses to your original feed URL and redirect them to your Feedburner URL. If you had to manually implement it, you had to write a redirect rule in your .htaccess file redirecting everything, except Feedburner itself, which may seem not very easy.

Prioritize Hooks

I wrote about this plugin in the past, and I’m still using it. With it, you can examine all the hooks implemented by all installed plugins and change their default priorities. I’m using it primarily to change the display order of plugin elements included throughout the content.

All you have to do is go to this plugin’s setting page and locate the plugin in question. Then expand it to see the hooks (filters and actions). You can, for example, locate “the_content” filters which are responsible for inserting things along the post content.

Then just change the default priority and save the settings.

Redirection

Redirection does what its name says: manages redirections. You can use it, for example, to add redirected affiliate links.

TinyMCE Advanced

This plugin unleashes the full power of the default TinyMCE content editor by allowing you to display additional toolbars and adding new tool buttons and menus.  It includes 15 plugins for TinyMCE that are automatically enabled or disabled depending on what buttons are chosen.

Widget Visibility

One of the most lacking functionality in the WordPress core is the ability to control widget visibility. With this plugin, you can control it at a very granular level.

You can show or hide a widget on the front page, 404 page, search page, archive page, categories, authors, tags, or any other WordPress page.

Widgets on Pages

This plugin can be used to add additional widgetized areas or sidebars on your WP website. You can add them by messing around with your theme files, or by adding a content filter. Either way, you have to be comfortable with coding a little bit.

WP Hide Post

Did you ever want to hide a page from everywhere? Like search results, XML sitemap, sitemap page, page list widget? Well, “noindex, nofollow” is easily achievable with an SEO plugin, but the rest?

This plugin can hide a page or post from everywhere. Your hidden page is still publicly accessible, but it will not appear anywhere throughout your website.

WP Sitemap Page

With this plugin, you can create a sitemap page easily using shortcodes. Google uses XML sitemaps to retrieve information about your content to be indexed, but it will love you more if you provide such a page for human readers.