Contact forms are an essential tool for any site owner that wants to keep in touch with their readers. There are a lot of plugins available on WordPress to help you create forms, but they tend to be a little hard to use, especially when you need to create a form to get started. WPForms is here to solve this problem.

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WordPress’ visual editor is simple and easy to use but is far from a complete text editor. Many tools that are very useful to editors are missing, for example copy/paste buttons, adding tables, subscript and superscript buttons and more. Today’s plugin is here to help.

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Are you in the habit of scheduling posts to be published in future dates on your WordPress site to create a steady flow of content for your viewers? Then today’s plugin is one you surely need to check out.

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One of the most important things you need to take care on your site is its security. If you frequent WordPress related forums or groups you will often run into posts that ask for help after a malware infection or hear about security vulnerabilities discovered in WordPress plugins or, more rarer cases in the WordPress core itself. Many of these issues could be avoided by using a security related plugin on your installation. This is what our plugin of the day is about today.

Sucuri Security – Auditing, Malware Scanner and Security Hardening

If you haven’t heard of Sucuri, you will be relieved to hear they are a leading online security brand. WordPress security is among their fields of interest. This free plugin includes an array of tools to help you tighten security on your site and monitor it efficiently. Its activity auditing feature tracks any changes made on your site that might be security related, for example user logins and modifications. Another important thing the plugin does is monitor file integrity. Once its activated it creates a “good” state of all important files on your site and if at some point in the future it notices a modification of these files it will let you know.

Modifications often occur from malicious attacks and knowing about them will help you respond to the issue effectively. A malware scanner is also built in to the plugin making malware detection very easy. The plugin provides effective security hardening options like preventing PHP execution in the uploads folder or restricting access to PHP files in the wp-content and wp-includes directory and many more. Some helpful post-hack tools are also available to you such as creating new security keys, changing user passwords and resetting plugins. All of the above are included in the plugin for free.

There is also an add-on service which is a website firewall (Cloud WAF), this is a subscription based service and provides you with DDOS attack protection, brute force attacks, software vulnerability exploitation and more.

Price: FREE
Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/sucuri-scanner/

Sometimes you need to display a message that you want all your visitors to see. Whether it is a sale you are running on your e-shop or an important post you have recently published, you need a way to make your visitors aware. This is where the WordPress Notification Bar plugin comes into play.

Install the plugin and navigate to Settings > Notification Bar to set it up. You can add some text and create a button that links to a different page if you wish so. The bar can be made to stick at the top of the page when scrolling and its background can be customized to match your site’s color scheme. That’s it, save and enjoy your new bar.

Price: Free
Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-notification-bar/

Today’s plugin of the day utilizes the popular bitly service to help you generate short-links for your content. To start you will need a free bitly account.

Setup is pretty straightforward. Install, activate the plugin and go to Settings > Writing to configure it.

Fill in the OAuth Token, select the desired post types and save. That’s it. Now go to any post, page or custom post type and click the Get Shortlink button and get your bitly short-link from the pop-up window. You are now ready to share on any social network and take advantage of the analytics the service offers.

Price: Free
Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-bitly/

In order to keep your followers on social media engaged you will need to have a rather regular stream of posts. Of course new content is the ideal option for these posts but in some cases you might not have the time or inspiration to generate something new. A good way to fill in this gap is to share one or some of your older posts. This is where today’s plugin comes into play.

Revive Old Post can automate the process of sharing older posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing and Tumblr. You can set a minimum a maximum age for the posts eligible for sharing, set how many posts you want to share on each run and the interval between runs. You can also include/exclude certain categories if you wish so. The content of the share is also customizable, you can share just the title, content, both or the content of a custom field instead. Hashtags are also available and so is feature image sharing. Finally campaign tracking on Google Analytics is built in to the plugin so you can see if it indeed works on your site.

Price: Free
Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tweet-old-post/

Today’s plugin is Magic Action Box. A lead generation plugin that allows you to create highly customizable action boxes for your content very easily and very quickly.

Along with the ability to create your own custom action box using a form of your choice, the plugin offers integration with Contact Form 7 and Gravity Forms. This integration allows you to create complex forms within minutes and display them in your action boxes. The plugin comes with some predefined styles for forms and action boxes but it also provides you with the ability to use your own styles to match your site’s design. Once generated, action boxes can be placed either at the top or bottom of the post’s content using easy selections within the post edit screen. Shortcodes are also available which allow you to place the action box anywhere in the content or in widgets. Grab it, create your boxes and increase visitor engagement today!

Price: Free
Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/magic-action-box/

Did you ever want to create a post grid or list but your theme does not offer the layout out of the box? With Content Views you can do that very easily and without having to write a single line of code.

The plugin supports both posts and pages. You have the option to create grids, collapsible and scrollable lists. The items per content view can be filtered by id, category, tag, author and restricted by number with pagination also being available. You can toggle the appearance of the featured image, title and excerpt/content to get the layout you need. The grid can be made responsive so less items are displayed in a single row on mobile devices to make reading easier. There is a live preview to see how your content view looks like before finalizing it. Once done just paste the shortcode in an empty page and save, that’s it.

Price: Free
Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/content-views-query-and-display-post-page/

Today’s plugin of the day is Frizzly. This plugin will allow you to add social sharing buttons wherever you need them. Over images, inside the content and in widgets.

Frizzly allows you to share your images in three social networks; Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. The sharing buttons can appear on-hover, they can be shown on all or just selected images and finally they can be placed in any content or widgetized area via the use of shortcodes. The social media icons can be customized so if you have your own custom images you can easily use them instead of the default ones. You can also disable sharing buttons you don’t need, if for example you are only interest in Pinterest sharing, you can disable the other two. Finally the sharing buttons can be hidden in specific pages, for example if you don’t want them to show up on your homepage etc.

Price: Free
Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/frizzly/