Welcome to the latest edition of the ManageWP Plugins of the Month series! While the pool of available plugins wasn’t as deep as it has been in previous months, that made no difference to the quality — they are all still excellent.
This month we have plugins that will allow you to make dramatic changes to the look and feel of your website. These range from simple pagination and code additions to remarkably flexible page design options. You will also find a selection of plugins that are designed to give you greater user engagement and social interaction.
There is something for everyone in this month’s plugin selection. As always I leave to hear your thoughts about the plugins we showcase here, so let me know what you think about them in the comments. Enjoy!
10. Page Navi Slider
Page Navi Slider is a fully customizable and responsive plugin that allows you to build better pagination links.
Instead of having the simple page numbers available for you to click on, this plugin creates a slider with jQuery that allows you easily navigate back and forwards through the pages.
The slider works on your desktop and is also fully touch screen compliant, enabling its usage on tablets and smart phones.
9. ezPHP Plugin for WordPress
The ezPHP plugin for WordPress allows you to add PHP code snippets into your post, pages, and text widgets.
This plugin is more useful for developers and those who like to add additional functionality to specific areas of your site. Using this plugin allows you to add this additional functionality to posts and pages without having to alter the theme templates.
8. Awesome Weather Widget
The title of this plugin says it all really.
Awesome Weather Widget allows you to add extremely clean and easily customizable widgets to you your site to show weather forecasts and information about any city in the world. The widgets change color based on the temperature of the city being displayed.
It can be added to your site with the built in widget or by using a shortcode that allows you to display specific information. It updates its data from http://openweathermap.org/ on an hourly basis.
7. Compact WP Audio Player
The Compact WP Audio Player plugin is a hybrid between HTML5 and Flash and allows you to embed an MP3 file on your site using a simple shortcode.
The player is very small and compact so it won’t take over the post or page you embed it on. It has been built to work well with major browsers including IE7 and upwards.
It is a great little plugin for people who like to podcast or want to share their music with their community or fans.
6. Convertable Contact Form Builder Analytics and Lead Management Dashboard
Convertable is a marketing platform that automatically tracks the source of conversions from the moment a lead uses your contact form, all the way through your sales funnel.
This plugin won’t be for everyone, but it is a great way to track potential customers as they interact with your site. This is especially useful if you are selling a product or service from your website.
This is a web-based system that will require you to create a free Convertable account so that you can use it.
5. Smart Layers by AddThis
Smart Layers allows you to add easy-to-use buttons to your content that can increase your visitor engagement. You can add social share buttons, follow buttons, or recommend additional content to your visitors with this plugin.
These social buttons work as layers that overlay your site design and can be turned off for specific content. They also come in three distinct styles: light, dark or transparent.
4. Advanced Comments Moderation
This is one of my own plugins that I’ve developed with the always awesome Tito Pandu Brahmanto. I use this plugin religiously on Leaving Work Behind to moderate and respond to comments — it makes my life a lot easier.
The plugin adds additional features to your comments moderation window that allow you to hide author comments, pingbacks and comments that have already been replied to. You can also dismiss comments that you don’t want to see again.
In a nutshell, Advanced Comments Moderation allows you to get to “Inbox zero” on your WordPress comments screen. It’s a huge time saver and perfect for people who receive a large number of comments on their site.
3. OSE Firewall Security
WordPress security is very important and should never be taken for granted. There are a lot of security plugins out there and we’ve featured a few of them before.
OSE Firewall Security is part of the Better WordPress Security Project and is designed to protect your website from attacks and hacks. It has a built in Malware and Security Scanner that helps you identify risks and vulnerabilities on your site.
I highly recommend you take a look at this plugin.
2. Zedity
Zedity is a powerful and extremely easy to use HTML5 design editor.
The plugin is remarkably flexible and allows you to create page designs any way you want. It gives you complete design freedom with drag and drop functionality. This is a truly excellent design tool that will allow you to make each page on your blog completely unique.
1. Evergreen Post Tweeter
Yes, I have included a second plugin of my own this month and given it the number one spot. Call me biased but I think it deserves its spot 🙂
I’ve featured the Evergreen Post Tweeter on the monthly plugin lists before, but it’s recently been updated with an awesome new feature that has made it a real game changer for a lot of people.
Evergreen Post Tweeter allows you to schedule and automatically tweet out links to old posts on your blog. This lets you expose your twitter followers to old content they may not have seen before and boosts twitter referrals and blog engagement at the same time.
The plugin now has the feature to schedule your tweets with a Buffer-style day and time selector. This makes scheduling even more functional than it was before: want to promote old posts every day at 5pm, or every Wednesday at 1pm? No problem!
If you haven’t taken a look at this plugin before, now is the perfect time to check it out.
David
Hi Tom. Thanks for sharing these useful plugins. Zedity looks great, I will definitely try it out.
John Larson
I recommend this plugin http://wordpress.org/plugins/audio-comments/
Lewis Iyaogeh
Thanks for the great list there.
I have seen most and definitely recommend them, although there are a few that are new to me, especially the Zedity plugin and Smart Layers.
Lewis
Tom Ewer
Thanks Lewis! Glad you liked it 🙂
Nitin Srivastava
Hi Tom,
Thank you the updating the latest Plugins,
I was aware of some but many are new.
Tom Ewer
My pleasure Nitin!
Grand National 2014
I have been looking for a plugin like Zedity for ages! You’ve saved me a shed load of work with that pick.
Tom Ewer
Good to hear!
Liz
Hi Tom! Thanks so much for these best-of lists, just came across this feature.
Wondering – is it possible to submit a plugin for review? I’d love to share a new plugin we’ve been working on, we’re looking for WordPress user feedback as we improve it.
Thanks!
Tom Ewer
Yep! Just drop it in the comments box or email us 🙂 Please note that we only feature plugins with <100,000 downloads and that are hosted on WP.org.
Adithya Shetty
Hi Tom,
Great list of plugins you shared! I never heard some of them!
thanks for sharing! 🙂
Tom Ewer
Glad you enjoyed Adithya!
Wordpress Form Builder
Advanced Comments Moderation is exactly what we need. We have huge number of comments that we should moderate and this seems pretty simple and yet effective.
Thanks for the list!
Tom Ewer
Great Ben! Glad you found the plugin useful 🙂
Wordpress Form Builder
Yeah, thanks again Tom!
Tom Jamieson
Very cool list here. I have been using tweetily for a while now, so I will definitely check out your new tweeting plugin. Thanks for sharing!
Tom Ewer
No problem Tom!
Abhay
Cool comment moderation plugin.
Thanks
Tom Ewer
My pleasure Abhay!
gkocis
Evergreen Post Tweeter. Is this the new Tweetily ?
Tom Ewer
It’s a fork of Tweetily — I was having issues with certain bugs and I also wanted to tweet by tag and have some other features, so I created this 🙂
Baris Sarac
I am not sure what the 1st plugin does “tweet out links to old posts”..
if you mean scheduled tweeting, I would rather use hootsuite than anything else. If you mean schedule an article there is already wordpress functionality like that.
In my opinion, more than one people should put this list together and should not do advertisement here. I am not going to follow managewp notifications anymore due to biased product based recommendations.
Tom Ewer
Hi Baris,
I’m not sure how else to explain it other than the plugin tweets out links to old posts. It…tweets out links to old posts. Sorry I can’t be any more specific — that’s about as specific as it gets!
There is no advertising on this page (other than the mentions of ManageWP, which one would expect). I happen to have helped develop a couple of free plugins that are featured here, along with eight others, in just one edition of this long-standing series.
Cheers,
Tom
Tony Jones
Tom,
I always check your list and I think you were upfront in pointing out your own plugin. Maybe another approach would be to do the top then and then add your own as an extra piece of information.
You might get less stick!
Tony
Tom Ewer
Hey Tony,
To be honest, I think you’ll always get stick from certain people when mentioning something you’ve done. I like what you’ve suggested though and might do it next time. There’s still a good chance that the Baris’ of this world will comment though!
Cheers,
Tom
Keith Davis
All these are new to me Tom.
I think most of us stick with the plugins we use and use the same ones when we start a new site.
Having said that I have recently added a few new plugins so it’s good to know what’s out there.
Tom Ewer
Glad to help expand your horizons a little Keith 😉
Glenn Tate
The video on Zedity is for the premium version so I thinks it’s misleading to have it in a post about the top FREE plugins …just sayin.
Baris Sarac
agree
Tom Ewer
You’re both absolutely right. I was fooled by the video’s inclusion on the plugin page. I’ve removed the video now. Thanks for the heads up!
support
You might want to delete this line as well 🙂
I’ve embedded a brief video of Zedity in action above.
Tom Ewer
Now you’re just being picky 😉