Welcome, friends, to WebdesignerDepot’s first monthly WordPress plugin roundup of 2014.

If there’s one word that I would use to describe the WordPress community, it’s this: huge. It should come as no surprise, then, that there are plugins being released and updated every single day. Some of them bring features that we all wish WordPress had by default. Some of them might only be useful to any given website creator once in their lifetime.

Either way, there’s a lot to explore, and every month, I’ll be writing about the freshest plugins making their way out of beta.

Now, without further ado, here’s this month’s batch of eye-catching plugins:

Custom Resources

If you use third-party themes for your WordPress site, this plugin might be for you. Simply put, it allows you to define CSS and JS files to be included in your site, no matter what theme you’re using (it also helps out if your theme is updated frequently).

Additionally, there are fields for including styles and JS code right “in the page” itself, if you want to do that kind of thing.

GuiForm

GuiForm is one of the more interesting form solutions that I’ve found. You can embed the plugin just about anywhere on your site, or on other sites, through a WordPress shortcode, JavaScript, an iframe (the shortcode generates an iframe, by the way), or by copying and pasting the raw HTML. With that last option, you can customize the form to look however you like.

Form submissions can be sent to your e-mail, and you have a fair amount of control over how the information is presented in said e-mail. You can also view form submissions as entries in the admin panel. By the look of things, I imagine that you could also display said entries on your site’s front end, if that’s what you want. That would require some custom queries though.

Zurb Foundation 5 Clearing Gallery

If you’re using a theme that includes Foundation as its base, this plugin will automatically apply Foundation’s “Clearing” plugin to WordPress’ default gallery function. Nifty. Requires Foundation 4/5.

Google Publisher Plugin (beta)

Ah, Google. Can they do anything wrong? I mean, okay, there was Buzz, Wave, and a few others, but this one’s good, I promise. In the beta release of this official plugin by Google, we are given easy access to two tools: Adsense, and Webmaster Tools.

Just install the plugin, verify that the site is yours, and you’re automatically connected to both of these services. From there, you can quite easily insert ads into your site, and access all of the goodies provided by Webmaster Tools.

WP-DraftsForFriends

The concept is right in the name: want to show someone a draft of your latest WordPress post, on your site, without making a user account for them? Wp-DraftsForFriends creates a temporary link (you can define a time period of seconds, minutes, hours, or days) which will allow non-users to see your draft.

PhotoPress – Masonry Gallery

As you can probably tell by now, I’m kind of a fan of extending WordPress’ default functions over replacing them with new code. Hence, another-related plugin.

This one relies on another plugin, PhotoPress – Gallery, which allows you to create galleries based on taxonomies, and can creates galleries out of post types as opposed to attached images. PhotoPress – Masonry Gallery adds to this functionality by implementing a “masonry” layout that is, incidentally, responsive.

Featured Image Zoom

Featured Image Zoom seems like it might be useful for anyone making a simple product catalog, or, well… any other use case where you need zoomable images. You can call it in your template, or with a shortcode.

JSJ Code Highlight

Post a lot of code on your site? Want to give it some line numbers and syntax highlighting? This plugin handles, well… almost everything. To make it work, you have to go into text mode when editing your post and make sure it has the necessary markup for the syntax highlighting to trigger. But then, you’re already posting code, so why not?

WP Post Series

Ever wanted a simple way to organize and present series of posts on your WordPress blog? Here ya go. A separate admin screen is added to the “Posts” section where you can define new series. Then, it’s just matter of selecting said series in the editing screen of each post in question.

WP Backup Lite

A simple solution for backing up your site. The “Lite” (free) version of this plugin only allows for manual backups to whatever computer you’re using, to the server you’re using, and/or a remote server via FTP. The pro version includes options for backing up your site to Dropbox and Amazon’s S3 service.

Eventissimo

Eventissimo is a detailed tool with everything you’d expect from an event-management plugin, with one bonus: you can hook it up to Facebook. Any event created in WordPress will automatically be posted as a facebook event as well. If you do events, and Facebook is a big part of your strategy, look into this one.

GZip Ninja Speed Compression

This plugin only works if you’re on an Apache server. Other than that, though, it’s all install-and-go. The plugin is supported by ads on its (seemingly redundant) admin screen. That aside, it’s a simple tool that saves you bandwidth. Hard to argue with that.

Did I miss any awesome plugins from the past four weeks? Have you tried out any of these? Let us know in the comments.

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It’s that time of year …

The air is painfully cold and the sun is a friend that we certainly haven’t seen much of in a while. 

Life can seem gloomy.

Its likely that you know someone who has struggled with or is still struggling with seasonal depression. Maybe you do yourself. But what happens when this temporary pain morphs into a desire to die? 

In the United States, more people die of suicide than murder every year. Suicide kills more people than AIDS, cancer, heart disease, or liver disease and more men and women between the ages of 15 and 44 than war.

Historically, arguments against suicide have originated from religious ideals that define suicide as a sin–a wrongful act against God.

In opposition to this argument, secular thinkers have treated suicide as a personal right, an act of cultural defiance. This inevitability led many to romanticize and glorify suicide.

Great artists, poets, and writers who died by their own hand are often seen as courageous figures of defiance. The famed Sylvia Plath was one such writer. Plath gassed herself when her son was only a year old. Her son later grew up to kill himself. 

This occurrence is no anomaly. When a parent commits suicide the child is 3 times more likely to commit suicide themselves.  

Which leads to an interesting thought: Does suicide cause suicide? 

Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, certainly thinks so. She goes as far as to claim that “suicidal influence is strong enough that a suicide might also be considered a homicide.”

Hecht claims that if committing suicide can cause others to kill themselves, then the opposite must be true: not committing suicide will keep others alive. 

Hecht believes that remaining alive is one of the most basic acts of moral good that a human can preform. She believes that it is our duty to society to stay alive. She states in her book that:

“We are indebted to one another and the debt is a kind of faith — a beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.”

What do you think? Is this argument against suicide a moving one? 

Courtesy of usatoday.com

An ocean cruise vacation. For many, it embodies the perfect getaway, a little slice of
heaven out at sea. Who wouldn’t love to live in the height of luxury on a massive cruise liner?

Just ask the hundreds who have fallen victim to a stomach bug on two separate luxury liners within the past week.

Then again, at least those poor souls were surrounded by decadence while miserable. This guy had to rough out his trek alone.

Inside a decrepit fiberglass boat.

In the middle of the Pacific.

For 16 months.

Surviving on seaturtle blood.

Not even one lousy complementary chocolate or fresh towel.

Lesson learned: there are worse things than never getting that extravagant Carnival cruise.

Such as, well, having to survive it.

Hello Everyone!

Looking forward to seeing each of you at our first meeting tomorrow, Monday Feb 3rd at NOON in the Commons, room 332! It will be an exciting and interesting one with free pizza and drinks. Please make sure to come on time and be prepared to learn about our upcoming service projects, leadership opportunities and group discussions for this semester!

If looking for something to do this Spring Break, make sure to checkout this myUMBC post on ASB’s Environmental Trip (which spurred the creation of ETF) at http://my.umbc.edu/groups/serve/news/40811

Also, we will be using our website (http://umbceforce.wordpress.com/) as the main method of communication this semester, so make sure to follow us and stay updated!

What words do you affiliate with the Super Bowl? Football? Excitement? Parties? Buffalo wings?

How about Slavery?

 It is a phenomenon perhaps better known by its more sterile, clinical partner “Human Trafficking”. To many of us, Slavery belongs in other countries –in continents like Africa or Asia and not in the Land of the Free.

 Besides, we all say, what has slavery got to do with anything I do anyways? Let alone the Super Bowl.

It’s because many prominent people,  like George Abbott believe the Super bowl to be the “largest known trafficking instance in the United States” 

Others, however, are not so sure about the truth behind the claim (http://deadspin.com/the-truth-about-the-nfl-the-super-bowl-and-sex-slaver-1511917053)

But we at US Democrazy are going to make the case that it’s important this story gets out, true or not. The Super Bowl is capable of bringing American attention to this tragedy that occurs everyday…but receives little attention. Let’s put some things straight for you:

 Human trafficking occurs when others (like pimps) benefit off the exploitation of others.  Sexual slavery, physical slavery, and child soldiers, are all forms of human trafficking. In a period of rapid globalization, physical and sexual slavery are even more accessible…which might explain why there are more slaves in the world today than ever before in history.

 Yikes.

There are at least 17,000 people being trafficking around the US at any given time. It is not isolated to Thai cities or Cambodian countrysides. It’s happening here.(http://www.rescueandrestoreky.org/what-is-human-trafficking/statistics/)The given age for this to start is 12-14 (http://www.rescueandrestoreky.org/what-is-human-trafficking/statistics/)Women and girls are raped 20+ days by clients. Raped, because, this isn’t prostitution. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/13/rani-hong-human-trafficking-victim_n_2460506.html)

Chances are, we are all probably benefitting indirectly from slavery and to illustrate this, there’s a cool game here (http://slaveryfootprint.org/)

 Is this not an issue we should be concerned about?

 In 2012, President Obama gave a speech about his war on Modern slavery. But we can promise you two things: it didn’t get the views of the State Address and nothing has happened (policy wise) to change any of the problems he out lined (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe_ud_5XTBs)

 Until the American public remains blind and apathetic towards human trafficking, policy-makers will also remained unenthused. Are we ready to change this?