I’ve been doing a lot of work for a client using WordPress this week. Briefly, WordPress is an open source platform for blogging. It also offers many more features than just a simple blog. Here, I review a couple of optional plugins that you can use on WordPress. These plugins offer your WordPress site visitors a photo gallery (Webpsilon Morfeo Gallery) or an email subscription option (Subscribe2).

A WordPress Plugin Review: Webpsilon Morfeo Gallery

Here at LDW, Morfeo Show has been one of our favorite plugins for our clients’ Joomla! sites. Thanks to Webpsilson Morfeo Gallery is also available for WordPress.  I find the WordPress version every bit as user-friendly as the Joomla! version. It provides for basic image needs very well.

While the Joomla! version is more advanced and offers a wider range of gallery themes, I do not believe the WordPress version is limiting. It’s meant to display within blogs, whereas the Joomla! version has been developed to be very versatile for websites’ many needs.

There’s one limiting factor with Morfeo on WordPress: you have to get your photos to the site using ftp, and many bloggers are not familiar or comfortable with the ftp side of a website. There is a workarround for this by changing your default upload location to the Morfeo image folder, but you have to remember to switch it back to the default once you are done.  Even with this limitation I feel that this is a plugin worth mentioning.

Thanks to the developers of Webpsilon Morfeo Gallery—it was just what I was looking for.

A WordPress Plugin Review: Subscribe2

The Subscribe2 plugin is a way for your WordPress visitors to sign up to receive an email subscription to your blog. You can configure the frequency with which subscribers receive emails: every time you post something new, weekly, daily or even hourly if you prefer. I set mine to only send out an email when there is something new to read.

My goal was to create a separate page on a WordPress site which would give the visitor a place to sign up for the subscription. I was provided with two options: I could manually insert the Subscribe2 token into a newly created page, or I could simply press the Subscribe2 button in the WYSIWYG and it would be inserted on the new page. I picked the latter, and there it was. Subscribe2 also has a widget option, in case you would prefer a widget on your blog’s sidebar rather than having a separate page for email subscriptions.

I really enjoyed working with this software. Plugins can sometimes be a struggle to get to work, but with Subscribe2 this was not the case. I am happy with this plugin’s performance and would recommend it as a simple and effective way to handle email subscriptions on a WordPress site.