This weekend I attended WordCamp Boston at The Nerd Center aka Microsoft’s building at 1 Cambridge Center. It was an excellent conference and extremely well organized, run and managed WordCamp.
I was introduced to the After the Deadline plugin while helping people at the Genius Bar. After the Deadline is a great plugin that does grammar checking and spell checking of wordpress posts and pages. This is no simple tool, it performs contextual checking of grammar and spelling at a very high and accurate level.
WordPress comes with a built in spell checker these days, but its not to powerful. After the Deadline is a plugin that has been picked up by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.
I was also re-introduced to the Shopp ecommerce plugin for WordPress. These days there are several WordPress plugins that provide ecommerce capabilities either as a bolt on plugin or as a conduit to another ecommerce plugin like OScommerce. Shopp provides a number of great features as an ecommerce tool which include but are not limited to
- Easy to install WordPress plug-in
- Bolt-on e-commerce functionality, just install and activate
- Works out-of-the-box with any theme (quality may vary)
- 2Checkout.com (included)
- PayPal Website Payments Standard (included)
- PayPal Express Checkout (included)
- Google Checkout (Lvl 2 Integration) (included)†
- PayPal Website Payments Pro (available add-on, US & UK only)†
- Handles multiple product images with easy drag-and-drop sorting
- Support for selling digital & physical products and donations
- Export orders and customers into Tab, CSV and Excel formats
- Export orders for import into Intuit QuickBooks
- Search engine optimized shopping pages (product name and category in the title, semantic markup, alt/title attributes set, <meta> keywords/description)
- Built-in smart categories provide easy ways to highlight: new product additions, featured products, bestselling products, on sale products, random products, even related products for cross-selling
- Standards-compliant mark-up output (targeting XHTML 1.0 strict)
- Setup free shipping discounts
- Promote overstocked items with buy X get Y free promotions
- Apply any of your discount options using promo/coupon codes
Shopp is not a free plugin, it costs about $55. As compared to the WP-Ecommerce plugin, which is free at a basic level and has multiple add on components to make it shine. That said, the total price adds up to about the same amount.