Available Plugins For Sites We Build

WordPress plugins are modules that extend the functionality of WordPress. Anyone can write them and WordPress maintains a directory of available plugins. Since anyone can write them, this means that plugins vary widely in quality so we’ve curated a list of plugins that add functionality commonly needed by news organizations and that we have tested to ensure they work well together and do not cause compatibility issues that sometimes crop up when using less-trusted plugins.

Many Largo sites are hosted on our WordPress multisite environment. For these, individual site admins are not able to install and activate plugins; This needs to be done at the network level.

NOTE: If you would like to have a plugin installed and activated for your site we prefer that you contact us through the Largo help desk and describe the functionality you are trying to add rather than asking if we’ll install Plugin X for you. In some cases what you are after might already be possible in Largo and/or we might know of a better plugin to accomplish the desired result.

We strive to maintain a secure environment for all of our hosted Largo sites and to avoid potential compatibility issues, so in some cases, we may refuse to install a particular plugin if we believe it might cause problems for you or for us. We will, however, always try to work with you and recommend an alternative.

For hosted INN member sites using Largo, this is a complete list of the plugins that are currently installed and available in our production environment.

Plugins we’ve built and maintain

We provide direct support for the plugins we build. We’ll iterate improvements as much as possible, and invite collaborations on these as open source projects on INN’s Github directory:

  • DoubleClick for WordPress – Integration with Google’s DoubleClick for Publisher ad serving platform.
  • Google Analytics Popular Posts – Surface your site’s most popular posts based on Google Analytics pageview data.
  • Disclaimers – Set sitewide or per-post disclaimers, and display them using a widget.
  • Link Roundups – Curate links from around the web, turn them into roundup posts (or display in a saved links widget) and then send them out as MailChimp campaigns.
  • News Quizzes – A WordPress wrapper for Mother Jones’ news quiz tool.
  • No-Nonsense Google Analytics – A simple way to embed multiple Universal Analytics codes on your site. No dashboard, no reports.
  • Pym Shortcode – Responsively embed iframes within post content – perfect for interactive graphics.
  • Super Cool Ad Inserter – Easily insert ads, signup forms, donation messages, etc. within the body of a post or page.
  • Term Debt Consolidator – Algorithmically suggests likely duplicate tags and categories for consolidation.

Third-party plugins

We cannot provide direct support for third-party plugins, which is only available from the plugin makers themselves.

  • Akismet – Spam prevention
  • Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps – Create and manage sitemaps for submission to Google and Google News
  • Chartbeat – Adds Chartbeat pinging to WordPress.
  • Co-Authors Plus – Allows multiple authors to be assigned to a post.
  • Disqus Comment System – The Disqus comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus.
  • DocumentCloud – Embed DocumentCloud documents that won’t be eaten by the visual editor
  • Edit Flow – Adds better editorial workflow options to the WordPress admin
  • Liveblog – A simple way to add live blogs to your site.
  • Redirection – Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors
  • Slack – Adds Slack notifications when you publish posts, receive new comments, etc.
  • TablePress – TablePress enables you to create and manage tables in your posts and pages, without having to write HTML code. Also installed are the DataTables Counter Column, DataTables Sorting plugins, and Pagination Length Change “All” entry extensions.
  • Tweetable Text – Make your posts more shareable. Add a Tweet and Buffer button to key sentences right inside each blog post with a simple [tweetable] tag.
  • WP Job Manager – A lightweight job listing plugin for adding job-board like functionality to your WordPress site. Being shortcode based, it can work with any theme (given a bit of CSS styling) and is really simple to setup.

Premium plugins we’ve bought a site license for INN member sites:

  • Business Directory Plugin – Provides the ability to maintain a free or paid business directory on your WordPress powered site. We also have a license for the Paypal Gateway Module.
  • Gravity Forms – Easily create web forms and manage form entries within the WordPress admin. We also have a license for the Gravity Forms PayPal Add-On.
  • The Events Calendar Pro – The Events Calendar PRO, a premium add-on to the open source The Events Calendar plugin (required), enables recurring events, custom attributes, venue pages, new widgets and a host of other premium features.
  • Restrict Content Pro + RCP Pro Add-Ons – A full-featured, powerful membership solution for WordPress that allows you to lock away your exclusive content and give access to valued members.

Utilities:

  • Categories to Tags Converter – Convert existing categories to tags or tags to categories, selectively.
  • CodeStyling Localization – a utility for generating translation files from within the WordPress dashboard.
  • Core Control – Core Control is a set of plugin modules which can be used to control certain aspects of the WordPress control.
  • Empty Tags Remover – Removes the empty tags, tags with no posts attached.
  • Regenerate Thumbnails – Allows you to regenerate all thumbnails after changing the thumbnail sizes.
  • Taxonomy Converter – Copy or convert terms between taxonomies.
  • Term Management Tools – Allows you to merge terms and set term parents in bulk
  • Vice Versa – Convert Pages to Posts and Vice Versa
  • Theme Check – A simple and easy way to test your theme for all the latest WordPress standards and practices.
  • WordPress Importer – Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and more from a WordPress export file.
  • WP Maintenance Mode – Adds a splash page to your site that lets visitors know your site is down for maintenance.