Some WordPress plugins do the thing you need but not quite in the exact way you want. I have found that adapting plugins is a viable way — and legal, too, since all plugins are GPL licensed. Here are some customisations I did.

Upcoming events vanilla and with adaption

Plugin Calendar provides both list and calendar views on events. Default list view is kind of funky and does not integrate well with my theme. In particular, it heavily uses user specified category colors which have nothing in common with the theme used. I wanted it to look like all other sidebar widgets, that is to use a simple list. Calendar lets you change the used CSS classes, but nothing is documented there. I therefore decided to just change the responsible part of PHP code. After sifting through quite some code that is intimidating, if not ugly, I found the places to adapt (line number for version 1.2.3): function upcoming_events (lines 1766ff) contains code for lists, while function draw_event (lines 1942ff) prints a single event. I removed lots of code and replaced the essential parts by simple HTML. The output now fits much nicer into any theme but contains less information; in particular, event descriptions can no longer contain HTML. Download the modified file which is obviously as free as the original one.

The second plugin I adapted is Most Popular Tags which provides a widget printing what its name says. It provides a frontend for some options the corresponding WordPress API function supports. I was not satisfied with lots of tags being hidden if so configured and therefore wanted to implement means to show more. Since the plugin uses WordPress API directly, a nice solution with AJAX that just elongates the list appeared not viable with little effort. I therefore included an option where you can put the (relative) path to a page that contains a more complete tag list. You can just replace the original file (version 2.8.5) with my version. Maybe the original author even includes this in future releases. A tag cloud page can, for instance, look like this:

  [tagcloud]

Here, [tagcloud] is a shortcode representing the following PHP code:

$args = array("number" => 0, "separator" => "   ", "echo" => false);
return wp_tag_cloud($args);

Another plugin I tried to adapt is ZenphotoPress which allows you to use Zenphoto albums in blog posts. It failed to work, claiming it had no access to Zenphoto‘s config file even after I made several adaptions to make it look for config files right in its own plugin folder. So I decided to write my own solution Zenphoto Gallery. It basically uses Zenphoto‘s RSS frontend to get images, not database access like ZenphotoPress. It is an offical plugin so you can install it via your plugin administration.

Looking around for useful WordPress plugins you can easily find such of the kind that do visually impacting, statistical or SEO stuff. Therefore,  this post is dedicated to plugins that do not immediately meet the visitor’s eye but are nonetheless very useful.

The first plugin I want to mention is Align RSS Images. It does one simple thing for RSS feeds: it scans posts for images that have been aligned using standard WordPress classes and explicitly aligns them with inline CSS. This is pretty useful because most feedreaders do not download the source’s CSS files but use some own or none to render posts. In this case, you have images everywhere but not where you want them to be. So, this is a nice plugin that needs absolutely no configuration and solves an annoying problem.

The next one is Exclude Pages. It enables you to circumvent WordPress’ obsession to list each and every page in the menu bar; were there pages you did not want to be there, you would have to edit your theme. This plugin now adds a simple checkbox to the page editor that allows you to hide the edited page. Clean and simple, good plugin. I use this in my blog to hide the tag cloud page you can access via sidebar. I wonder why WordPress itself has not had this functionality for years.

Last but certainly not least is Shortcode Exec PHP. It allows you to specify any number of shortcodes that are replaced by the result of PHP code you (statically) define. Shortcode parameters and content are handled nicely. I use this to generate those book rating boxes without having to code them by hand every time. Also, there is as far as I know no way to have dynamic elements in posts without a plugin like this.

Are there any day-saving plugins you use?