Casey Bisson

<p>bSuite is a set of tools that help surface interesting and popular stories as well as improve WordPress’ CMS capabilities and usefulness as an application platform. <a href="http://maisonbisson.com/bsuite/widgets/" rel="nofollow ugc">Available widgets</a> can show most popular posts, recently commented posts, or related posts (can also add a listof related posts to the bottom of the post content). <a href="http://maisonbisson.com/bsuite/shortcodes/" rel="nofollow ugc">Added shortcodes</a> help organize content, allowing you to list all sub-pages of the current page or list all headings within the page. Another shortcode will render RSS feeds into a page or post. See <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bsuite/screenshots/" rel="ugc">the screenshots</a> for more.</p>
<h4>Stats</h4>
<ol>
<li>Tracks page loads across your WordPress site</li>
<li>Works with caching plugins</li>
<li>Shows you what’s popular, what’s growing in popularity, and what’s declining</li>
<li>Shows you what categories and tags are most popular</li>
<li>Tracks the search terms readers use to find your site (and highlights those terms on the page)</li>
</ol>
<h4>Widgets</h4>
<p><a href="http://maisonbisson.com/bsuite/widgets/" rel="nofollow ugc">bSuite widgets</a> include:</p>
<ol>
<li>Post Loop allows you to build your own, um, post loop, and put it anywhere a widget will fit.</li>
<li>Pages replaces WP’s built in Pages widget and adds the option to expand the page list to include the parents and immediate children of the page your currently viewing.</li>
<li>bSuite Popular Posts</li>
<li>bSuite Related Posts</li>
<li>bSuite Recently Commented Posts</li>
</ol>
<h4>Shortcodes</h4>
<p><a href="http://maisonbisson.com/bsuite/shortcodes/" rel="nofollow ugc">Built-in shortcodes</a> allow you to:</p>
<ol>
<li>Embed an RSS or Atom feed into a post or page</li>
<li>Include the content or excerpt from one post or page in another.</li>
<li>Automatically build an index of headings on a page and create a table of contents to it (with links to anchors on the page)</li>
<li>Embed a list of pages or sub-pages on a page or post</li>
<li>Embed Slideshare items</li>
<li>Embed Wufoo forms</li>
</ol>


bSuite

A suite of tools used to help surface interesting and popular stories as well as improve WordPress' CMS capabilities as an application platform.

interconnectit

Spectacula

cm2creative

<p>Here at interconnect/it we have a policy of developing client sites with the premise of “content manage everything!”  That means the little notices on sites, minor widgets and so on should not only be content managed, but they should be easy for both an end-user and a developer to work with.</p>
<p>To that end, we developed Spots.  This creates a custom post type that allows you to create widgets using a visual editor, whilst also giving developers an easy hook for the creation of content managable elements within a theme.</p>
<p>The plugin now uses caching in order to help ensure that the load on a typical site is kept to a minimum.  Performance is important!</p>
<p>The plugin is prepared for translation, if you’d like to drop us a line about your translation you can contact us through our <a href="http://interconnectit.com/about/contact/" rel="nofollow ugc">website</a>.</p>
<h3>Developer Notes</h3>
<p>Spots provides 2 template tags for developers to use shown below with their supported arguments.</p>
<pre><code>icit_spot( $id_or_name, $template );
</code></pre>
<ul>
<li><code>$id_or_name</code>: Required. A numeric ID or the name of a spot as a string.</li>
<li><code>$template</code>: Optional. A string used in a call to <code>get_template_part()</code></li>
</ul>
<p>This template tag always echos out the spot.</p>
<pre><code>icit_get_spot( $id_or_name, $template, $echo );
</code></pre>
<p>Same as the above with an extra argument:</p>
<ul>
<li><code>$echo</code>: Optional. Defaults to false. A boolean to indicate whether to echo the spot content or just return it.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Basic Usage</h4>
<p>You can use spots to replace boilerplate text in your themes. If you have areas in your themes where typically you would hard code the text you could use the following code:</p>
<pre><code><?php
if ( function_exists( 'icit_spot' ) )
    icit_spot( 'Copyright' );
?>
</code></pre>
<p>The above code would output the contents of a spot titled ‘Copyright’. If the spot does not exist it will be created as a draft. Spots in draft mode are only visible to logged in users with editing capabilities.</p>
<h4>Templates</h4>
<p>The plugin will initially look for a file in your theme using the <code>get_template_part()</code> function. If you have a file called <code>spot.php</code> in your theme that will be the default template for all spots. The <code>icit_spot()</code> function can take a second parameter for the template part to use for example:</p>
<pre><code><?php
if ( function_exists( 'icit_spot' ) )
    icit_spot( 'Copyright', 'copyright' );
?>
</code></pre>
<p>The above code will make the plugin look in your theme folder for a file called <code>spot-copyright.php</code> to use for the output. If not available it will fall back to <code>spot.php</code> and if that is not available it will simply output the spot contents.</p>
<p>Use templates when you want to display a featured image from a spot or if you require some additional/alternative markup for the spot. Spots are just like posts, so in the templates you retrieve the contents of the spot using <code>the_content()</code> just as would in the loop.</p>
<p><strong>Basic spot template example:</strong></p>
<pre><code><div class="spot">
    <?php the_content(); ?>
</div>
</code></pre>
<p><strong>Spot template with featured image:</strong></p>
<pre><code><div class="spot-with-image">
    <?php
        if ( has_post_thumbnail() )
            the_post_thumbnail( 'medium' );
        the_content(); ?>
</div>
</code></pre>
<h4>Additional</h4>
<p>There are many filters and hooks available to get even more out of spots so drop by the plugin homepage or use the forums if there is something you need to do with spots but aren’t sure how.</p>


Spots

Default install on every site

Content manage those little snippets of text that you need across your WordPress site and in widgets properly. Forget the text widget.

bSuite vs Spots