I’m starting a new series here where I review some of the newest plugins I’ve found in the WordPress directory. Now while these plugins are quite new and might break, I did test them so they should work fine with your site.
Some add really cool features to your site while others fix long time annoyances. Check them out below!
I have to be honest, this plugin is great! You can update your blog by just posting on your Facebook Page, Instagram account or Twitter feed. This plugin grabs everything else you need including the picture, link and content.
Or if you still want to keep blogging, you can use your Facebook posts as extra content for it, for example when you’re posting on the go.
All you’ll need is to create a Facebook app. Don’t worry if that sounds too technical for you, the plugin will point you to an easy-to-follow tutorial. I’ve tried it myself and it works quite smoothly after you’ve set it up, letting you choose which posts to import and how to import them (you can save them as drafts first).
Take a look at it if you post often on social media or just want an easier way to update your blog.
Here’s a simple solution to an age-old headache in WordPress. If your site has been around for any amount of time, you’ll have your fair share of spam registrations.
Why bots keep on registering accounts with dummy emails but not confirming them is beyond me. What I do know is that these spam users make it harder for me to look up true users in my site, and they also clog up my database with useless metadata.
One solution is to just turn off regular registration via the Settings page but this often turns off the ability to register even for legitimate users. This plugin, on the other hand, only disables the built-in registration page of WordPress. You can continue to happily use any other registration method like other plugins or even creating accounts on your own, if you’re just a small site.
If you’re concerned about hackers getting into your site through dummy accounts, just use this simple plugin. All you need to do is to install it and you can go about your other business without worries.
One of the annoyances when uploading images to posts is how WordPress always creates funny thumbnails because it merely relies on centering the image and cropping that to get your thumbnail image. Of course, we’ve long adjusted to this little quirk of WordPress but I think it’s high time we’ve found a solution to this.
Thankfully, popular WordPress dev Viper007Bond, maker of the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin, created an automatic solution for us. Just upload your images as usual and when you need the thumbnail, you’ll get one that’s centered on the most interesting part of the image, whether it’s off the side or not.
It’s a great addition to archive pages which use thumbnails when listing posts, making them a bit more interesting. I haven’t tested it with Woocommerce shops but I think this would be an excellent addition to those types of ecommerce sites as well.
So how this works is you get a button on your Edit Post screen and you can insert a photo while adding a few visual effects to it. While I would have preferred a more visual settings screen, it does the work of adding crazy hover effects to your included photos. I guess it uses CSS3 transformations and animations to achieve the effects?
But it is a really eye-catching way to make your photos interactive, letting visitors change the angle of the photo when hovering over it. It might be something to grab the attention of your visitors though honestly, I’m still trying to figure out how I could use this. It’s a cool effect, nonetheless.
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By the way, if you have a plugin that you think would help other WordPress users and it’s in the public WordPress directory, let me know! I’m always looking for new plugins to try out and share.
PS: Did you know that the plugin cards above were automatically generated by WordPress? All I did was paste the link and you get a nice way to display your plugins. Neat, right?
