Performance Plugins Reviewed on WordPress Plugins from A to Z Episode 58
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Plugins covered this episode:
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) , Lazy Widget Loader, (WP Gift Cert), WP Editor, WP Lead Management, Hide Login, Foursquare Venue
Can now bw found at WPPluginsAtoZ.com
John’s & Marcus Rant: What to rant about?
Well the world is a crazy place.. and I am spending to much time watching Netflix.
Shout Outs:
Couple one to Kento for his plugin I reviewed below, and since the website is new one to our first couple comentaters Thomas at level One Web Design & Chad at Butlerblog.com
List of interesting sites that run on WordPress:
World of WordPress News and other interesting WordPress related posts:
WordPress Plugin Unblocks Censored Sites, Including The Pirate Bay
Security Flaws Found in WordPress Setup
Increase Your Audience with a WordPress Translation Plugin
List of Plugins:
—–Johns Plugins——-
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) 1.1.1
- Version: 1.1.1
- Author: GoDaddy.com
- Last Updated: 19 days ago
- Requires WordPress Version: 3.3 or higher
- Compatible up to: 3.3.1
- Downloaded: 4,628 times
- WordPress.org Plugin Page »
- Plugin Homepage »
What they Say:
This plugin creates a profile of your WordPress site's plugins' performance by measuring their impact on your site's load time. Often times, WordPress sites load slowly because of poorly configured plugins or because there are so many of them. By using the P3 plugin, you can narrow down anything causing slowness on your site.
What we say:
It can take a few for the scan to run so just go get another beer and you’ll be fine. This give some ver nice information on what is or may be causing an issue on your site. I ran it on mine and discovered a plugin that was running slow and slowing down the site turned it off since it was not essential to improve loading time.
Rating: 3 Dragons
Lazy Widget Loader
- Version: 1.2.3
- Author: itthinx (Karim Rahimpur)
- Last Updated: 132 days ago
- Requires WordPress Version: 3.0 or higher
- Compatible up to: 3.3.1
- Downloaded: 2,114 times
- WordPress.org Plugin Page »
- Plugin Homepage »
What they say:
The Lazy Widget Loader plugin provides lazy loading for widgets to improve page loading. Use it on slow widgets, especially those where external data is loaded, like widgets from Facebook, Twitter, AdSense, …
What this plugin basically does is to postpone loading the content of those widgets you choose, so that their content is loaded after the main content of the page that is displayed.
You can choose which widgets should be loaded like that, by default the plugin does not “impose” itself on any widget. You may also choose to display a throbber while the content of a widget is loaded.
What we say:
Simple install no setting except a box to remove data if you deactivate it.
Then simply go to the widgets in question and apply the plugin.
I tried this plugin on my own site in the hopes I could improve an issue I have been having with extended virtual memory use and excessive resource use. Seems to have improved it a bit..
Rating 5 dragons
(WP Gift Cert) 1.1.1
- Version: 1.1.1
- Author: Kyle Cox
- Last Updated: 376 days ago
- Requires WordPress Version: 2.8 or higher
- Compatible up to: 3.1.4
- Downloaded: 3,155 times
- WordPress.org Plugin Page »
- Plugin Homepage »
What they say:
A plugin that allows you to sell printable gift certificates for your service based business through your WordPress Blog or website. Fully integrated with the PayPal IPN framework printable gift certificates are e-mailed to your customers upon successful payment. Each certificate includes a QR code allowing you to validate the certificates in the field.
What we say:
This was pretty easy to install as are most plugins but setup did not go completely smoothly. While it was pretty easy to configure it seemed to have issues with paypal sandbox so it was not posting any gift certs to the database and therefore not emailing the cert for printing.
Rating 3 dragon
—— Marcus Plugins ——–
WP Editor
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-editor/
WP Editor is a plugin for WordPress that replaces the default plugin and theme editors. Using integrations with CodeMirror and FancyBox to create a feature rich environment, WP Editor completely reworks the default WordPress file editing capabilities. Using Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) to retrieve files and folders, WP Editor sets a new standard for speed and reliability in a web-based editing atmosphere.
Features:
- CodeMirror
- Active Line Highlighting
- Line Numbers
- Line Wrapping
- Eight Editor Themes with Syntax Highlighting
- Fullscreen Editing (ESC, F11)
- Text Search (CMD + F, CTRL + F)
- Individual Settings for Each Editor
- FancyBox for image viewing
- AJAX File Browser
- Allowed Extensions List
- Easy to use Settings Section
Marcus’ Take: Finally! A line counter and full screen editing for theme and plugin editing! This is a great addition to any WP install that you want to hack around with.
Rating: 4 out of 5
—
WP Lead Management
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-effective-lead-management/
WP Lead Management turns your WordPress into a fully operational Lead Management CRM and requires no setup.
WP Effective Lead Management system is a lead Management solution for WordPress websites to manage the leads or contact us Emails. This is kind of very tiny CRM for a sales person who follows up with leads. This best fits of someone who is looking for simple and effective solution. If you are small company with few sales guys, this works better, Doing a complete integration of other complex software to handle the leads is a overkill sometime.
Features of WP Effective Lead Management system:
- Displays a lead form in the site and administrator.
- All the administrators of the website can view the new leads. and they can pick and unpick the leads.
- The administrator who picks the lead can view the requirements of that lead but others can't view it and also he is having an option to delete that particular lead but others cannot.
- When the client submits a lead a mail is sent to all administrators of the site.
- When the administrator picks the lead a status mail is sent to the client.
- The administrator who is already picked the lead then is having an option to unpick the lead if once he unpicks that lead is reset back so that others can pick it.
- Display leads information in the administrator based on the time and date.
- This plug-in provides an easiest way to handle the leads.
- Unlimited number of administrators can be added. 10.The form includes an simple javascript validation.
Marcus’ Take: This is a lead management system with too much back end involvement into wordpress. Most sales guys won’t figure out the WordPress interface to the point of getting their lead information. This is good concept but poor execution.
Rating 2 out of 5
—
Hide Login
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hide-login/
Have a Secure Login Page! Allows you to create custom URLs for user's login, logout and admin's login page.
Must Have Plugin For Your Personal WordPress Blog
This plugin allows you to create custom URLs for logging in, logging out, administration and registering for your WordPress blog. Instead of advertising your login url on your homepage, you can create a url of your choice that can be easier to remember than wp-login.php, for example you could set your login url to http://www.myblog.com/login for an easy way to login to your website. You could also enable “Hide Mode” which will prevent users from being able to access ‘wp-login.php' directly. You can then set your login url to something more cryptic. This won't secure your website perfectly, but if someone does manage to crack your password, it can make it difficult for them to find where to actually login. This also prevents any bots that are used for malicious intents from accessing your wp-login.php file and attempting to break in.
Marcus’ Take: This is a pretty important function that closes one of the biggest holes in WordPress. WordPress is pretty easy to spot and “money with” on the back end to outsiders. This is just one more way to keep one step ahead. I also like the functionality that allows a custom login page for any secondary users.
Rating: 4 out of 5
—
Foursquare Venue
Foursquare Venue gives you the ability to display any venue's latest stats on your WordPress site. Using either the widget or shortcode, you will be able to display:
- People here now
- Total check-ins
- Current mayor (along with their picture and number of check-ins)
Marcus’ Take: This is a really cool plugin for business sites that encourage check-ins. I am working on a restaurant site currently. The site boasts two locations and encourages Foursquare at both. This plugin lets me add both location’s Foursquare info into the site for a live, real-time tally of checkins (both current and total), and the current mayor. This is easy to use and set up, but the layout that is output needs a lot of work. It spreads out and doesn’t always align properly.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Some Terms here for plugins: Nothing special this week..
In closing here is what is coming in future podcasts:
scroll plugins or banner tickers
404 redirect plugins
Ad banners plugins
More Lazy Plugins
How to Contact Us:
John can be contacted at:
on my website @ http://www.johnoverall.com/ or you can follow me on Twitter @Ahkonsu or even like me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/JohnOverallcom
email: dragon@wppluginsatoz.com
Marcus can be contacted at:
Marcus Couch can be contacted at his website at marcuscouch.com on twitter @marcuscouch and on facebook at facebook.com/marcuscouch
email: marcus@wppluginsatoz.com
Some of the music provided tonight is from Mevio's Music Alley. Check it out at ‘music.mevio.com http://music.mevio.com
Thanks John, keep going with these, they are really helpful.