Category Archives: Plugins

New Plugin: Custom Related Products for WooCommerce

I don’t think I’ve ever built a WooCommerce site where the client didn’t ask: “How do I pick which related products to display.” The answer has always been “You don’t; the system randomly picks products from the same category.” No client has ever been happy with that answer.

Now I’m happy to say I’ll never have to give that answer again, and neither will you! My latest plugin, Custom Related Products for WooCommerce, replaces the default related products functionality in WooCommerce. With the plugin activated, edit any product and click the “Linked Products” tab. In addition to Cross-sells and Upsells, you’ll now have a Related Products box. As long as you’re using a default related products implementation, the plugin will work automatically to show the products you selected in the Related Products list at the bottom of the detail view, no theme updates required.

Get it!

You can download Custom Related Products for WooCommerce from WordPress.org or install it from the Add New Plugins page in your admin starting today. If you have suggestions for changes, you can fork the plugin and submit pull requests with GitHub.

custom-related-products

WordPress Plugin: Override Comment Deadline

Today I’m pleased to release a discussion-focused plugin to the directory, called Override Comment Deadline. Now you can have “Automatically Close Comments” enabled in your discussion settings to limit spam activity on old posts while keeping commenting open on specific posts. To use it, make sure you’ve set a deadline on the discussion settings page and then edit any post and check the box to keep comments open indefinitely.

Get it!

You can download Override Comment Deadline from WordPress.org or install it from the Add New Plugins page in your admin starting today. If you have suggestions for changes, you can fork the plugin and submit pull requests with GitHub.

Debug WP-Cron with Trigger Scheduled Events

I’ve added a new plugin to the directory called Trigger Scheduled Events, which does pretty much what it says on the tin. With it, you can view a list of all events scheduled by WP-Cron and run any of them instantly instead of waiting until the next time the event is scheduled to be fired.

WP-Cron is useful because it allows you to schedule events to happen later using the wp_schedule_event() function, but during development this can lead to a lot of waiting around to see if your code works. Trigger Scheduled Events gets around this problem by allowing you to run your events on demand.

Get it!

You can download the plugin through the Add New menu from your WordPress admin or you can download it from the plugin directory. If you’d like to make suggestions for improvements, you can do that over at the plugin’s GitHub page.

Uptime Robot WordPress Plugin

I’ve been using a simple, free uptime monitoring service called Uptime Robot lately to monitor a few of my sites. It will check up to 50 sites every 5 minutes to determine if they are online or offline, log any downtime events, and optionally notify you when your sites are down, all for free.

I wrote a quick WordPress plugin which creates a dashboard widget with your most recent Uptime Robot log entries. You can either monitor your entire account, or a single site. Just add the correct API key to the settings page.

You can download Uptime Robot for WordPress from the official plugin directory or through your WordPress Admin.

WordPress 301 Redirect Plugin Released

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve released my first WordPress plugin. It’s called Simple 301 Redirects and it does just what it says on the tin. It provides an interface for redirecting URL requests. It’s handy for when you’ve migrated a site to WordPress and are unable to maintain the URL structure. With Simple 301 Redirects you can redirect your old urls like “/about.html” to new, clean URLs like “http://www.yoursite.com/pages/about/” or whatever you like. Redirecting your old links to new destinations is important for preserving inbound links and pagerank after migrating a site. And this plugin does it in the easiest possible way I could think of.

You can read a little bit more about the plugin at its official home on this site or go straight to the WordPress plugin directory to download it. I hope you find it helpful!

Simple 301 Redirects Plugin Screenshot