Tag: Plugins

New WordPress Plugin: Google Analytics Popular Posts

Posted on by Ryan Nagle

Another day, another plugin. Get excited! We're announcing the release of our Google Analytics Popular Posts plugin.

The plugin (previously called Analytic Bridge) queries Google Analytics for pageview data for your site and uses an algorithm – based on publish date and total number of pageviews – to determine a weighted popularity score for a post.

Using this scoring mechanism, the plugin generates a list of the most popular posts for a given site.

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The list of popular posts can be displayed on the front end of your site using the included "Google Analytics Popular Posts" widget.

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We hope to make this the start of a suite of tools to improve the connection between your site and Google Analytics. Stay tuned!

The plugin is available now in the WordPress plugin directory and you can check out the code on Github and create a fork to contribute!

New WordPress Plugin: Term Debt Consolidator

Posted on by Ryan Nagle

We're pleased to announce the release of a new WordPress plugin: Term Debt Consolidator.

We've all been there. You have an older WordPress site with thousands of tags. Mixed up in there you have misspellings, singular and plural version of the same term, similar terms applied to only a single post and more.

Our new Term Debt Consolidator plugin examines your site's tags and categories and groups them by similarity, allowing you to consolidate groups of similar terms down to a single term of your choosing:

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This is useful for sites that have tons of messy tags, some of which are technically unique due to differences in capitalization or minor typos in the term title.

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Using Term Debt Consolidator, you can identify and fix these issues quickly.

You can also use the `tdc_enabled_taxonomies` filter to enable the TDC to work with your site's custom taxonomies (it supports the built-in WordPress categories and tags taxonomies by default).

If you feel so inclined, you can contribute to the plugin by forking the code on Github.

Nerd Alert 38: Bert’s Pancake ‘n’ Pizza World

Posted on by David Ryan

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Our thoughts are with everyone who loved Alison Parker and Adam Ward. #WeStandWithWDBJ7

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: News sites have gotten a bad reputation for being pretty miserable to use by overloading their pages with ads, popups, social buttons and other gadgets. Designer Brad Frost has documented a number of anti-patterns to avoid (make sure to turn on the bullshit).

  Ben: Don’t use .dev for development domains - it’s a real top-level domain now: http://nic.dev.

  David: This post explores the WordPress Transients API and use cases for leveraging it. Here's a great tutorial using them to push plugin updates from GitHub via the GitHub API.

  Kaeti: Why it’s important that we design tools with emotional intelligence.

  Bert: Would you patronize Bert's Pancake 'n' Pizza World?

This week we bid farewell to our summer apprentice Dani Litovsky Alcala who did great work with INN members on data projects! All the best, Dani!

You could be our next apprentice this fall or spring. Our apprentices are paid, trained, appreciated and awesome!

 

WE MADE A THING

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Many sites we work with collect links from around the web and then either present this feed of links on their sites in a widget or turn them into roundup posts and email newsletters.

To improve the workflow for curating and publishing these roundups, we've created a new WordPress plugin called Link Roundups. Now available on WordPress.org.

SOME OTHER STUFF

LISTEN: Stand by each other. Be excellent to one another.

COOK: Go crave these Quinoa lunch bowls. Not a joke.

WATCH: We always *knew* Android versions are delicious but...

GIF: Explore the world, bring a friend!

CatsRedCarFun

 

New WordPress Plugin: Link Roundups

Posted on by Adam Schweigert

Many sites we work with collect links from around the web and then either present this feed of links on their sites in a widget or turn them into daily (or weekly) roundup posts and email newsletters.

To improve the workflow for curating and publishing these roundups, we've created a new WordPress plugin called Link Roundups.

The plugin borrows some patterns and a bit of the original code from a plugin called Argo Links, but has been almost completely rewritten with a number of new features added (if you are a current Argo Links user, we've included an update script to help you migrate).

Features

Some of the key features of the plugin include:

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A browser bookmarklet to collect links as you browse, add your own description, tags and then save the link directly to your WordPress site, all without having to leave the site you're on. This bookmarklet will also attempt to automatically pull in the title, source and a featured image for the links so you don't have to populate these fields manually.

Widgets for saved links and link roundups to display the links you've saved or your recently published roundups in any WordPress widget area.

published-roundupA WordPress custom post type called Link Roundups with a way to browse your saved links and compile roundup posts to be published on your site.

Integration with MailChimp to simplify the process of sending the roundup posts to your newsletter subscribers.

Plugin options to control the display of saved links in roundups, manually specify the anchor text to be used and a number of other nice enhancements to give you the flexibility to format link roundups the way you want.

Installation

You can find documentation and installation instructions on GitHub and the plugin is also now available from the WordPress.org plugin directory.

What's Next?

In our next release we plan to add the ability to share links you save directly to Facebook/Twitter at the same time as they are saved to your site, improve documentation and add a number of other features.

You can submit feature requests and see our plans for future releases on the project's GitHub repository. Feedback, bug reports and questions are most welcome!

Thanks!

Finally, we want to thank INN member Fresh Energy who funded some of the development of this plugin as part of our recent redesign of their Midwest Energy News site. Thanks also to Aspen Journalism for offering some helpful feedback.

Quiz Your Readers: Our New WordPress Plugin To Create Simple Quizzes

Posted on by Will Haynes

Today we're excited to announce a new embeddable interactive quiz tool built using Mother Jones' handy quiz tool but adapted specifically for the Largo platform and available now for any WordPress site.

[quiz key="0AvfAWkLLRik_dGtjRVNUamJwbE1wRWxtVVRURG1UU0E" layout="sidebar" answerstyle="alpha" align="alignright" title="Take the Quiz!" description="Think you've got what it takes?" source="Wikipedia" byline="Will Haynes/INN"]

Built on top of Mother Jones’ NewsQuiz.js library, this WordPress plugin allows you to build a quiz in Google Drive and embed it with a shortcode into a WordPress post. This could be used to test readers’ understanding of material, or just to expose them to the questions in an interactive way.

Grading of questions happens inline, at the bottom of the widget. Settings exist to control both the size and flow of the plugin, as documented in the project readme.

Try out the example quiz embedded in this post, or check out how INN member Youth Today is using it to support a piece exploring how the income gap affects scoring on college entrance exams.

To see how to build a quiz of your own using this plugin, how to format your Google spreadsheet, etc. please see Mother Jones’ documentation for the original quiz library.

We’re hoping to build more interactive features for Largo in the future.

So if you have an idea for what we should build next or suggestions for how to improve this tool, let us know in the comments or email us anytime at nerds@inn.org.