What WordPress plugin would you like to see most?
What plugin would you most like to see for WordPress (something that doesn't already exist)?
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M$4 Answers
Complex Rating Plugin
There are various rating plugins that allow users and sometimes visitors to rate a blog post, usually with a 1-5 star rating system. However, I would like to see a rating system that is somewhat more dynamic, similar to what Netflix uses for their movies. Before you rate a movie, you can see what Netflix thinks your rating will be, based on your previous ratings on similar films. Therefore, the plugin would need the capability to identify similar content, possibly through tags, and then dynamically relate your rating history of past content and apply it to new blog posts. Then, when a user signs in, you can put the recommended blog posts up front, starting with the newest content.
Audio Playlists
I subscribe to several blogs that have audio content associated with each blog post. It would be nice to have a dynamic playlist that is generated from blog posts that I select. Perhaps a dynamic podcast?
I could go on, but those are the two that come to my mind most easily. I too have a desire for a FREE and less buggy membership plugin. There are some good membership plugins, but they all cost around $100 USD, which in my mind goes against the open-source principles of Wordpress.
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M$In Wordpress themes there is often a need to show an image of certain fixed dimensions. Let's say in my particular layout I need a 220x160 image to show along with a featured post, and a 120x120 image for showing along with regular posts.
There is utility called Tim Thumb that dynamically resizes images, and which is used by quite a lot of themes and sites I think.
From my perspective, this has a number of issues...
- It only works on files stored on your own site, not hot linked images
- Dynamically resizing apparently slows down page loading
- There is not much end-user control over it... the calls to timthumb are buried in PHP in the theme
So a useful (but maybe quite hard to write!) plugin for me would be one that supported as many of the following features as possible...
- Define a standard set of a few image sizes that I would like to generate
- On any given image (either from media library or offsite) be able to specify which of these sizes I want prepared (By default... create *all* of the standard sizes I specified)
- If the resized image has a different aspect ratio to original, allow me to easily pick which part of the image I want to use. Visually choosing an area would be nice, but even just being able to say"pick between top/middle/bottom would be useful.
- Create image files of the required dimensions. (For hot linked images, that might be optional.)
- Have the ability to associate the different sized images with posts, maybe as custom fields
- Have the ability to easily use the images in theme code. Maybe just having some functions called large_post_image and small_post_image that return the html for the image.
Overall the idea is...
- Have a quick and user-friendly way of making images of the right sizes to include in your layout from arbitrary sized images
- Provide an easy way to access those images in posts and templates without lots of cutting and pasting image URLs into specific places.
I don't know how hard or easy it would be to make such a thing, but I think it would be a good utility.
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M$
I wouldn't want all those features. That's not a job for a plug-in.
Easily choosing a fixed-sized area (that fits into theme layout) to crop, yes.
Rebuilding Photoshop in a plug-in... no. :)
Ok... a fairly simple plug-in (it may already exist) might be one like this...
Aim: Help people share their writing via Twitter and bit.ly
- Allow user to enter such info as needed to use their bit.ly & Twitter accounts
- For each post, create a short url belonging to users bit.ly account
- Provide a "Tweet" function that allows user to add short msgs to the url and tweet it
Nice to have...
Automatically add Wordpress tags and/or categories as Twitter hashtags to the tweet. (Allow user to edit before finally tweeting though.)
You raise some good points here @philipy - I have 1 extra one to add:
A WYSIWYG editor for your pics within a wordpress tab in the gallery section.
This addition should let you take any pic file you have uploaded and edit it the way you would in Gimp/Photshop/Paint...
I could specify the size of a crop box and position it where I wanted by dragging it around until I was happy and then crop...
I could magic-wand select things and give them mirror effects or vary the angle perspective (as made popular by Apple)
Maybe even allow for High Dynamic Range to add wow to otherwise standard/drab looking pics.
I realise all these things can be accomplished on client software but to continually download / upload is frustrating.
Great Q btw
Also, probably beyond my skill level (for now) but the whole image part of WordPress definitely needs some work. Hopefully we'll see some updates and new features around that for 3.1 or 3.2
Another nice to have feature...
Allow visitors that are signed in to Twitter to tweet from their accounts with the already available bit.ly url and hashtags. (i.e. Let visitors do what the author can do too.)
After much digging around, I found that timthumb does cache images it has previously processed. It was hard to find where it puts the darn things! :)
So that is one part of my requirement that is met already.
I am sure this already exists in one form or another. The problem is I need dumbed down versions. This is probably not the ideal plugin for you but I feel if you could do it right, this would be highly successful.
This plug-in should be EXTREMELY customizable, which is something I cannot seem to find. I am not the most tech savvy person in the world and it seems that most the plug ins for this type of thing are WAY over my head. Either that or they don't want to do exactly what I want them too, just vaguely.
I would like to see easy features to make certain areas of a site only accessible to members, also i would like the act of signing up to be a member really easy for the user. It would be nice if it was like facebook, where you could view very small amounts of content without being a member, and the first page you go to is an easy sign up sheet with text fields.
I have no idea how possible this next request is, but here it goes. I would also like the plug in to be able to verify and confirm a member without me doing it manually, I have noticed some sites can verify if you E mail is real or not so this would help out greatly.
If you want anymore details or have a existing plug in already in mind, let me know.
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M$
Thanks - I know that paid membership is a big request for WordPress plugins/addons. I think that right now it's beyond my level of skill though. As Phillipy mentioned, there's buddypress. I have also heard good things about Amember, which is paid software that you can integrate into WordPress.
I haven't, thanks for the tip, I will look into it. Right now I am real frustrated with finding them and have given up.
Yeah, we had this conversation before except I needed the plugin remember?
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/i-need-to-add-membership-capabilities-to-a-wordpress-blog-what-are-my-options
Have you looked into Buddypress?
I don't know much about it, but apparently it is a set of plug-ins to add social networking features to a Wordpress site.
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M$
Hm. I really like your Audio Playlists idea. It sounds like you'd like to make a mash-up of several RSS feeds, and either generate a new RSS feed, or play the audio right on your blog?
My first concern would be that I wouldn't want to make it a way to re-brand (or 'steal) other people's content, but I can already think of some ways to make it clear where the content is coming from...
Yeah, I was thinking of a plugin to funnel content from a single site. It would be nice if listeners could check/mark audio content they would like to add to the playlist. Once they go through the site and mark various audio files, they could hit play and the player would play through all the files they selected.