widget – WPVerse

I recently wanted to show my visitors how many posts I’ve written about WordPress on the WPVerse sidebar automatically so I wouldn’t have to manually keep updating it.

So I dug around and found WP-Statistics to give it a whirl. It has a ton of features just beyond showing number of total posts, you can also see how many comments have been published, number of visitors, page views, and much more details that you’d normally find in a true analytics package.

You can now see it in action on the sidebar to your right. I wish it would have a simple notes section below your stats so you could add some disclaimer or extra notes without having to drag text widget below it.

I am not giving up Google Analytics anytime soon so for now I am not turning on the page view stats/analytics tracking for now but if you’re not a fun of sticking a bunch of javascript onto your pages this might be an alternative.

So far so good and as of now, they’e had 11 reviews with an average of 4.5 stars so they’re off to a good start!

Download: WP-Statistics

Here’s an excellent WordPress plugin for sites that have a lot of categories and tags for posts. You can use Taxonomy Drill-Down to either a widget on the sidebar which displays a faceted search box. The widget shows plus and minus signs for categories/tags, allow your visitor to drill down to a filtered set of posts matching their criteria.

It even supports the Simple Taxonomies plugin (similar to post types) so you can do even more fancy things.

You can even use the plugin to insert code snippet directly into your theme template to show it anywhere on your WordPress site.

Based on our experiences, here are some tips: before you install this into a live WordPress site, install this into a test WP site where you have a recent copy of your content imported. Once you actually test out this plugin yourself, it will expose any deficiencies in the way you’ve set up categories and tags. In our case it showed we went a little overboard setting up categories on some of our sites. The plugin also automatically loads new matching posts on the fly so there’s a quick transition that jumps the user to a new page so the widget disappears below the fold making it somewhat jolting, so you may want to have this widget near the top of the page so the user doesn’t wonder what just happened when they use it.

You can use this Taxonomy Drill Down plugin in combination with an improved search plugin like Relevanssi to help your visitors find the content they’re looking for. After all, if you have a ton of useful content you should make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for.

Get it: Taxonomy Drill-Down plugin

Tag: widget

Stats for your WordPress sidebar

Taxonomy Drill-Down plugin – Plugin of the Week