Plugins 030 – Sociable WordPress Plugin

Today we’re covering the Sociable WordPress Plugin. Similar in function to the Share This WordPress Plugin, Sociable adds link and share icons to the bottom of your blog posts and pages to make it easy for your web visitors to share your content through their favorite social network. List of social sites is extensive and include Digg, Facebook, Delicious, Twitter and MySpace and also provides an share via email option.

Features Include:

  • Ability to order the icons with an intuitive drag and drop interface
  • Disable/Enable the roll over functionality
  • Select which types of pages icons should appear on, such as posts, pages, homepage, etc..
  • Switch between icons and text links
  • Option to use a pop up (thickbox) to display icons
  • Open links in new window option
  • Use your own custom icon images

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about the Sociable WordPress Plugin, please visit the WordPress plugins sociable page, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/.

Plugins 018 – WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin

Today we’re covering the WP Greet Box WordPress plugin.

The WP Greet Box plugin adds a welcome box to the top of your blog post and/or pages based on where the visitor came from. The box can be extensively customized and special greetings can be added. The plugin is useful if you wish to help new users find additional content on your blog as well as encourage visitors to subscribe to your feed or tweet the blog post they are currently viewing.

Features include:

  • Extensive list of greetings for sites such as Google, Yahoo search, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc…
  • Ability to add custom greetings and greeting icons
  • Open links in greeting box in new browser windows option
  • Display related posts within your welcome boxes to help visitor find additional relevant content
  • Import/Export options
  • Extensive documentation to add greetings to your WordPress theme

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about the WP Greet Box plugin, please go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-greet-box/.

Plugins 015 – Subscribe to Comments Plugin

Today we’re covering the  Subscribe to Comments WordPress plugin.

The Subscribe to Comments WP plugin allows comment contributors to receive email notifications when additional comments are left for the specified blog post. This is a great way to encourage both comment contribution and increase your returning visits to your web site.

Features include:

  • Customize From email address and name
  • Users who do not leave comments can subscribe to comments
  • Customize the messages shown to comment author, subscribers and unsubscribed users
  • Customize styling for subscription manager pages
  • Add your own custom header, footer and sidebar (for advanced users)

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any (Creating customized header, footer and sidebar Plugins Skill Level: Advanced)

To learn more about the Subscribe to Comments plugin, please go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/.

Plugins 012a – MailPress Plugin

MailPressToday we’re covering the MailPress plugin to quickly add a newsletter mailing list to your blog.

Features include:

  • Newsletters for (users can subscribe to)
    • Each post
    • Daily (digest of posts each day)
    • Weekly digest
    • Monthly digest
    • Comments
  • Manually send newsletters
  • Detailed logging of sent messages
  • Themes for Email newsletters
  • Add-ons (Sort of like plugins for this plugin)
    • Bulk import tool (comma separated list of addresses)
    • Import data (csv, XML sample, other WordPress plugins from database)
    • Mailing lists manager
    • Newsletter categories
    • Synchronize WordPress accounts with MailPress Users
    • Add roles and capabilities (Special User Roles to apply to WordPress accounts)
    • Custom Fields

The plugin is very powerful which makes it very complicated to setup and configure. It definitely helps to read all of the documentation and have previous knowledge of how to edit source code before attempting to use this plugin.

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Advanced

To learn more about MailPress, please go to www.mailpress.org.