A cursory search on Google (or your favorite search engine) for WordPress Plugin Reviews is going to yield a massive number of results. I entered “wordpress plugin review” in Google and got over 17,000,000 results. Narrow that down with a specific type of plugin and you might tighten things up a bit. Changing to “wordpress membership plugin review” still yielded more than 1.2 million results. You might get similar results looking for a security plugin, backup plugin, and the list goes on. That’s a good sized mountain of search results. [Read more…]
Plugin Review: Editorial Calendar
After blogging for some time, it became evident to me that I needed an editorial calendar. I used to use a spreadsheet for this, and I have seen many other people handle their posting schedule in a similar way.
But I really was looking for something that was more effective, and something that would work well within WordPress. Up until now, I just had not found the right solution.
Enter Editorial Calendar from Stresslimit
Here is what Stresslimit says about their Editorial Calendar plugin:
After years of hacking together editorial calendars for our clients using Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs, we decided that the blogosphere needed a better editorial calendar management tool. WordPress lets you create and edit your posts, but does not have the simple and powerful “bird’s eye view” of your content that allows you to control your long-term strategy.
That description sounded exactly like what I was searching for.
My Thoughts
Finding this plugin got me somewhat excited because it looked to be what I was searching for. But after trying out other plugins, I will say I was a little skeptical as to whether it would really perform as described.
However, immediately after installing it, I found the plugin work quite well. I was impressed. It has an intuitive interface and had stable performance. It also worked well on my mobile devices.
I particularly like the drag-and-drop interface they have provided. You can easily schedule posts directly from the calendar page. Changing the schedule is as easy as dragging a post to a new day (or changing the time).
All things considered, this is a very well executed plugin and I expect I will be using it consistently. Honestly, after only a couple of weeks using the plugin, I’m not sure how I was able to function without it.
What Others Are Saying
Here is what Chris Brogan had to say about Editorial Calendar:
It works exceptionally well at a very simple, but useful task. It helps you plan out your content with a very useful drag and drop interface. I checked it out a day or two ago and am already using the heck out of it.
No plugin alone can make you a brilliant strategist. But the WordPress Editorial Calendar is a tool that will encourage more strategic habits, thinking, and behavior.
Where To Get It
The plugin is available free in the WordPress Plugin Repository.
Plugin Review: User Switching
If you are a WordPress developer of either themes or plugins, or you are running/building a membership site with something like WP-Members, then you may find yourself logging in and out of your test site a lot. In building WP-Members, I find myself doing this constantly to test the plugin with different user accounts.
The User Switching plugin has made my life easier in this area, and if you are a developer, I think you’ll find it incredibly useful as well. It is also handy for site admins that might be testing features of their site and might need to be logging in and out of various test accounts.
About The Plugin
As I mentioned, the plugin allows you to switch user accounts, and you can do this all from the WP Users screen. The plugin was developed and is maintained by John Blackbourn, WordPress specialist at Code For The People.
This is a free plugin maintained in the wordpress.org repository.
Analysis
The first concern with any plugin that deals with user accounts is of course going to be security. I was impressed with John’s attention to detail in this area, including use of WP nonces. This is from the plugin description:
- Only users with the ability to edit other users can switch user accounts (by default this is only Administrators on single site installs, and Super Admins on Multisite installs). Lower level users cannot switch accounts.
- User switching is protected with WordPress’ nonce security system, meaning only those who intend to switch users can switch.
- Full support for administration over SSL (if applicable).
- Passwords are not (and cialis online cannot be) revealed
The plugin is essentially one single file. There is not a lot to it in terms of code. This does have the downside of needing to load with all WordPress plugins. Personally, I would like to see a two file system, the first testing to see if the user has user editing capability (required for the plugin’s security) and if so, go ahead and load the class file for user switching.
Even without that, it is a very lightweight plugin and uses proper security controls, so it could be used on a production site, but I would recommend limiting its use to staging sites and if used on a production site, definitely limit its use to only active when needed.
The plugin supports WP standard installs, but also Multisite and BuddyPress (and WP-Members!).
Critical when considering a plugin is support. John is active on the wordpress.org forum, so support issues are addressed in a timely manner. This also tells you that the plugin is continuing to be maintained. The plugin’s most recent update just last month and it has ongoing downloads, 81,397 as I write this. The ratings are impressively high with 79 5 star ratings and only 1 each 4 and 3 star. The non-5 star ratings were before the new wordpress.org review system, so we don’t know the reason for that, but clearly those individuals were out of touch. This is a 5 star plugin.
Status
Definitely Recommended!
Where To Find It
Get it in the WordPress Plugin Respository: