In this post, we recap the newest cool and useful (oh, and free!) WordPress plugins added to the WordPress Plugin Directory. This month’s list includes everything from a new way to tidy up your WordPress admin menu to a new way to manage redirects.
1. Paged Post List Shortcode
By Pete Bofs
Plugin Description: The Paged Post List Shortcode plugin adds the shortcode [list_posts_paged] for showing your posts or articles with pagination. It provides options that control which posts to show, what info to show for each post, and how many posts to display per page. You can style the HTML output using CSS.
Nathan’s Notes:
- Incredibly powerful plugin to display posts with lots of query options.
- Full shortcode options list here.
2. WP Server Stats
By Saumya Majumder
Plugin Description: The WP Server Stats plugin will give you the ability to monitor your WordPress site at its core level. With all most important server stats like allocated memory, real-time memory & CPU usage, etc., you can always identify if something wrong is going on with your site.
Nathan’s Notes:
- This one was included in “Best of Plugin Roundup” for December 2016.
- Recent update has a real-time memory usage display which can be very helpful for gauging plugin memory usage.
3. WP Audit
By Xitadel Technologies
Plugin Description: The WP-Audit plugin was initially built to provide a detailed audit report of potential client sites. The initial goal was to get as much information about current environment, database, themes and plugins to ensure compatibility within a managed hosting environment and for capacity planning.
Nathan’s Notes:
- Nice plugin for onboarding support clients.
- Get info about the server environment, database size, media size and domain name on one screen.
- Audit info is a submenu under Dashboard.
4. WP Create Multiple Posts & Pages
By Sajjadur Rahman Sagor
Plugin Description: The WP Create Multiple Posts & Pages plugin adds a feature to create multiple posts/pages at once with empty content.
Nathan’s Notes:
- A handy plugin for your base install to make creating multiple pages and posts simple.
- Simple interface. Type the title and a new page or post is created.
- Only works with pages and posts. Does not support custom post types.
5. Child Pages Tabs
By Rushi Jagani
Plugin Description: With the Child Pages Tabs plugin, now it’s easy to add all the child pages in tabs (Horizontal & Vertical) format using Shortcode. Add shortcode to the parent pages and it will display all the child pages title as tabs title and content as tabs content.
Nathan’s Notes:
- An interesting way to manage tabbed content on a page.
- This approach would make it very easy for a client to add and edit tabbed content by simply adding, removing, or editing child pages.
- Shortcode with several options: [child_pages_tabs tabs="horizontal" border="true" bg-color="true" read-more-link="true"]
6. rw Quick Page and Post Redirects
By Douglas “BearlyDoug” Hazard
Plugin Description: The rw Quick Page and Posts Redirect plugin has two redirect functionalities – “Quick Redirects” and “Individual Redirects”
- This plugin was rescued from abandonment – an excellent example of the WordPress open source community at work.
- Strong plugin for managing redirections on your website.
- Allows standard URL redirections like other similar plugins, but also adds redirection options to individual pages, posts, and custom post types.
- Lots of options on the settings pages including an import/export function.
7. Postem Ipsum
By Fco Palacios
Plugin Description: The Postem Ipsum plugin generates random content for your site.
Nathan’s Notes:
- This plugin has a few flaws but can be really useful for creating dummy content for a development site.
- Allows you to generate posts, custom post types, WooCommerce products and WooCommerce orders.
- I couldn’t make generating orders work, nor could I make the automated delete feature work.
- Still, there’s enough nice functionality here to warrant including in our roundup.
8. Tidy My Menus
By David Artiss
Plugin Description: Are you tired of all those menus that plugins add to your admin screen? Noticed how many just link to a settings page that really should have been under the ‘Settings’ menu? Well, tire no more – the Tidy My Menus plugin will do all of this for you.
Nathan’s Notes:
- Clever little plugin that will once and for all solve the problem of plugins that needlessly create their own menu admin items (and do it automatically!)
9. FIT: Featured Image Toolkit
By Richard-B
Plugin Description: The Featured Image Toolkit (FIT) plugin allows you to set minimum size requirements for featured images. Content editors are shown warnings in both the edit post screen and the featured image popup/modal if they attempt to use an image which is too small.
Nathan’s Notes:
- Nice solution for making sure your clients don’t add featured images that are too small.
- Set global size requirements or specify for pages and posts.
- Adds quite an annoying menu block to the Settings menu. ::rolls eyes::
10. Customizer Refresh This Month’s Simple But Useful Plugin
By Alex Mangini
Plugin Description: Sometimes you need to refresh the customizer preview, and the Customizer Refresh plugin adds a simple refresh button to make it easy. Nothing more, nothing less.
Nathan’s Notes:
- That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.
11. WP Image Recognizer This Month’s Possibly a Little Too Creepy Plugin
By Pete Bofs
Plugin Description: The WP Image Recognizer plugin performs image recognition when uploading images. It uses Google TensorFlow.js for image recognition. Image recognition starts when images are uploaded from WordPress Media Library. Recognition results are automatically registered as captions of images.
Nathan’s Notes:
- While imperfect and maybe not very practical, this plugin is a little creepy.
- The image recognition is surprisingly good.
12. Thanks, GDPR This Month’s “I’ve Had it With GDPR” Plugin
By Eric Nagel
Plugin Description: The Thanks, GDPR plugin redirects site visitors if they’re from the EU.
Nathan’s Notes:
- Redirects users coming from EU countries to thanksgdpr.com.
- Uses a 302 redirect to keep your link juice.
- The plugin is a simple single PHP file. You can edit the redirection location.