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 014 – NextGEN Gallery Plugin

Today we’re covering the  NextGEN Gallery WordPress plugin.

The NextGEN Gallery plugin adds image gallery functionality to your WordPress blog. Click here for a demonstration.

Features include:

  • Flash Slideshow
  • Flash Viewer (as an additional addon)
  • Templates
  • CSS styling
  • Watermarks
  • JavaScript Effect (Web 2.0 feel)
  • Custom Media Gallery RSS feed
  • Sidebar Widget
  • Tag images
  • Detailed descriptions
  • Multi-language support
  • Administration
    • Copy/Move images
    • Upload zip file of multiple pictures
    • Integrates to Post/Page editor (TinyMCE)

The NextGEN Gallery plugin makes it easy to add a modern gallery to your blog. Users knowledgeable in CSS and HTML can take further advantage of this plugin, though knowledge of CSS and HTML is not necessary to use this plugin.

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about the NextGEN Gallery plugin, please go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/.

Plugins 013 – Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin

Today we’re covering the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.

Google Analytics is a free web site statistics service provided by Google. This plugin allows you to easily add the Google Analytics tracking code to your WordPress blog.

Features include:

  • Easily set your Analytic Account ID
  • Disable tracking of outbound clicks and downloads
  • Set the extensions of files to track as downloads
  • Sub-domain tracking
  • Track AdSense

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin makes it easy to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog and to configure custom features in Google Analytics. If you do not need any of these custom features and you’re comfortable with editing your theme, you can simply add your Google Analytics to the footer of your theme rather than use this plugin.

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, please go to yoast.com/wordpress/google-analytics/.

Resize Image in Blog Posts To Fit Column Width Using CSS

Have you ever added an image to your blog post to find that the width of the image exceeds the width of the column of the page? Here’s a simple fix you can add to your theme’s style sheet to solve this problem. The fix below assumes that you have a class for your blog post entries called “.entry”. This class may be called something different depending on the preference of the theme developer.

.entry img {
max-width: 500px;
height: auto;
}

The max-width: is the maximum width the image can be within the .entry class. In this example the maximum width for an image is 500 pixels. We set the height: auto so the height of the image is auto adjusted to maintain the aspect ratio. Images that are smaller than the max-width will not be resized.

Note that this will not work for Internet Explorer 6 or older.