I’ve been working with these guys who are really into wordpress plugin programming. Not the cheesy simple little plugins on your mama’s blog. These plugins are incredibly serious apps that show what plugin creation and design should be.
The one I am reviewing now is fantastic. It replaces the need for at least 2 plugins I am using now to do the same thing and it adds awesome features no one has ever thought of before.
General
HeadSpace allows you to configure settings for specific posts, pages, and category pages. In addition to this you can configure settings globally, as well as for search results, 404 errors, author pages, the home page, and archive pages.
Here is the feature list for Headspace 2:
- Hot words – automatic generation of keywords based upon a dictionary of ‘hot’ words (any word that matches the hot words list in a post will generate a keyword)
- Automatic generation of descriptions
- Add Technorati links to your posts
- Dynamic data generation based upon various post information (insert author, time, excerpt, category etc)
- Fully localized
- WordPress 2 only (2.0 and 2.1 compatible)
- Custom stylesheets and javascript – add on a per-page basis without editing your theme
- Insert any ‘raw’ data into the
headsection - Control the title of each post along with meta description and keywords – get rid of your old WordPress meta plugin, this blows them all away.
New features make this thing so much more than a title and meta manipulator:
New for version 3.0!
- Full GUI editing. Everything is now managed directly from the post editing page – no more cryptic tags
- Support for Ecto and Marsedit (and possibly other tools). You can now edit HeadSpace2 information directly from Ecto and Marsedit without affecting your content. This includes adding the ability to directly use Ecto & Marsedit tags.
- Custom meta-data for all WordPress pages, including posts, pages, search results, archives, 404, and category pages.
- Per-page themes! Now you can choose a theme for every page of your blog
- Per-page plugins. Now you can enable a plugin on a specific post/page
- Custom page titles, site names, and site tag-lines – change for every page
- Custom separator – change the symbol that separates your site name from page title
- RSS titles & description – change the title and description of your RSS feeds
To call something like this a mere “plugin” is demeaning to the programmer. It does far more than most plugins in functionality and does something very important that WordPress users need to be very aware of: replaces the need for several separate plugins.
The Importance Of Multi-Tool Plugins
When you have 8000 plugins working behind your blog every time someone hits your site, it takes years to load. It also causes tons of conflicts because plugin creators don’t talk to each other and many don’t care to test if their plugins work with other popular plugins.
Raise your hand if you’ve broken your blog at least once by loading a plugin that was poorly written and inconsiderate of what it does to other popular plugins that you run on your site!
I will be talking more about [tag-tec]plugin development[/tag-tec] and usage issues because there needs to be a standard set for how they are written and tested. It’s getting very crazy out there in plugin land with new ones coming online every single day and there needs to be some basic standard set for them so we ‘pressers can be assured that things we plug in won’t kill our sites.