About two years ago (yeah, really!) I reviewed the WP-Table Reloaded WordPress plugin on our show The Sweet Plugin. After a rebranding and reworking of the code, WP-Table Reloaded is now TablePress. The developer Tobias relaunched the plugin, renamed it with a much better name, and revamped a number of the plugin’s features.

One of the biggest improvements has to be the all tables view, which feels almost exactly the same as the edit posts and pages WordPress screens do. Honestly, the closer any plugin or theme can get to WordPress core UI, or feeling like a real part of WordPress, the better it is.

Adding and editing tables feels better too. A lot of what was there before is still in place, but nicer. Manipulating table content feels much better; you can drag and drop rows and columns around and change the display order of table cells with one click. This sort of table manipulation would have been much more time consuming under the old WP-Table Reloaded plugin.

TablePress makes the table shortcodes much more obvious too. Each table management screen includes the table’s shortcode at the top of the screen, and they’re quickly available from the all tables screen too.

TablePress also implements something I don’t remember seeing in WP-Table Reloaded, and that’s the ability to choose where in the WordPress dashboard the TablePress menu is located. This is one of those options which I could see popping up in any of the more complex WordPress plugins out there. Let users choose whether the menu item displays right below comments, at the bottom below settings, within the tools menu, and so on. I think this is an approach I can get behind — again, only in plugins that potentially warrant prominent menu placement in the first place.

Where to grab TablePress

You can download TablePress from the WordPress.org plugin directory, and based on everything I’ve seen there’s really no reason to hold back. Your tables will need to be exported from the old plugin and imported into the new plugin, but really that seems like a pretty seamless process.

Tobias also runs TablePress.org, a nice resource for using the plugin.

Have you switched over to TablePress yet? What do you think of the new, rebranded, and updated WordPress plugin?

The post Sweet Plugin: TablePress, the successor to WP-Table Reloaded appeared first on WPCandy.

Fullscreen Preview Button is a simple little WordPress plugin that solves a problem I’ve been annoyed by for a while. It adds a preview button to the distraction free writing editor so you don’t have to exit out of the view in order to see what you’ve written on your site.

Alex King released this plugin on the WordPress.org plugin directory, which is where you should grab it if you’ve ever had this problem with the distraction free writing editor.

Do you have any favorite plugins designed to tweak and improve the distraction free writing editor in WordPress? Do you use the fullscreen editor as often as I do?

The post Sweet Plugin: Improve the DFW editor with Fullscreen Preview Button appeared first on WPCandy.

The WordPress theme customizer is without a doubt one of the most important new features to be added to WordPress in a long time — possibly ever. If you haven’t used it since WordPress 3.4 came out, you really should.

Daryl Koopersmith was one of the developers who worked on the theme customizer, and he recently released a plugin simply called “CSS”. The plugin adds a box for CSS to the theme customizer panel. So if you want to, while customizing or previewing a theme, you can drop in CSS and watch it update live on your site.

It’s pretty cool, isn’t it? As far as testing out CSS tweaks for a WordPress theme, it’s a pretty slick way to do it, and it doesn’t require anything but a browser.

Now keep in mind that the CSS will, when you save your options, be added to the theme as CSS directly into the header. While you can technically customize your theme this way, it’s not the best way to manage your CSS. What I would recommend, if you use it, would be to test the changes out within the customizer and then copy and paste the CSS that works for you into your theme’s stylesheet.

Aside from the plugin itself, which is cool and you should use it, I would also recommend taking a look at Daryl’s other plugins. He makes neat stuff.

Episode links

• Download CSS from WordPress.org
• MOV file (61.4 MB)
• Subscribe on iTunes (coming soon!)
• Video RSS Feed

Is your plugin worthy?

If you would like to see your plugin featured on an episode of The Sweet Plugin, get in touch via the contact form and select The Sweet Plugin in the “reason for contacting” drop down.

Video recorded with version 0.1 of CSS, running WordPress 3.4.

The post The Sweet Plugin: CSS by Daryl Koopersmith appeared first on WPCandy.

Today’s Sweet Plugin is Add Admin CSS, which I’ve found to be pretty helpful in a few key situations. Mine might be a small use case, since I’ve mostly used it to hide certain things from Dashboards when recording screencasts. If you’ve ever been in a similar situation, though, this plugin might be worth checking out.

The video is embedded at the top of this post’s page, with more about the plugin below.

Add Admin CSS Plugin

Add Admin CSS is a plugin from the mind of Scott Reilly (or coffee2code, if you prefer screen names) and is very similar to the WordPress.com Custom CSS plugin, except that the CSS you add will affect your Dashboard.

Video recorded with version 1.1.0 of Add Admin CSS, running WordPress 3.2.1.

Is your plugin worthy?

If you would like to see your plugin featured on an episode of The Sweet Plugin, send your plugin information over to sweetplugin@wpcandy.com. We’ll see you tomorrow for another Sweet Plugin!

The post The Sweet Plugin: Add Admin CSS appeared first on WPCandy.

Today’s Sweet Plugin is User Switching, which has quickly become one of my all-time favorite plugins. It allows admins to easily switch to another user, skipping the log-in-log-out process which can become quite lengthy when you’re testing a site for different users. This is one plugin that is seriously worth checking out.

The video is embedded at the top of this post’s page, with more about the plugin below.

User Switching Plugin

User Switching is a plugin from John Blackbourn, and has seen a healthy number of updates since version 0.1.

Video recorded with version 0.5.1.1 of User Switching, running WordPress 3.2.1.

Is your plugin worthy?

If you would like to see your plugin featured on an episode of The Sweet Plugin, send your plugin information over to sweetplugin@wpcandy.com. We’ll see you tomorrow for another Sweet Plugin!

The post The Sweet Plugin: User Switching appeared first on WPCandy.

Today’s Sweet Plugin is Let it Snow, which is an entirely fun plugin that everyone should try around this time of year. It doesn’t add functionality to your site, unless you view falling snow on your blog as functionality. But if that’s the case your standard for functionality is probably set a bit too low.

The video is embedded at the top of this post’s page, with more about the plugin below.

Let it Snow Plugin

Let it Snow has been around for nearly five years now, which is pretty impressive. It’s maintained by Aen, although it doesn’t take many updates to keep this sort of plugin working.

Video recorded with version 3.0 of Let it Snow, running WordPress 3.3.

Is your plugin worthy?

If you would like to see your plugin featured on an episode of The Sweet Plugin, send your plugin information over to sweetplugin@wpcandy.com. We’ll see you tomorrow for another Sweet Plugin!

The post The Sweet Plugin: Let it Snow appeared first on WPCandy.

Today’s Sweet Plugin is Matty Theme Quickswitch, a toolbar plugin that allows you to quickly search for and change your theme right form the WordPress toolbar. I would consider this the kind of plugin you don’t use all the time, but in the right situation it can be just what you’re looking for.

The video is embedded at the top of this post’s page, with more about the plugin below.

Matty Theme Quickswitch Plugin

Matty Theme Quickswitch is  a plugin straight from the mind of Matty Cohen, a developer at WooThemes who has also authored a post or two on WPCandy in the past.

Video recorded with version 1.1.0 of Matty Theme Quickswith, running WordPress 3.3.

Is your plugin worthy?

If you would like to see your plugin featured on an episode of The Sweet Plugin, send your plugin information over to sweetplugin@wpcandy.com. We’ll see you tomorrow for another Sweet Plugin!

The post Sweet Plugin: Matty Theme Quickswitch appeared first on WPCandy.

Today’s Sweet Plugin is Drafts Dropdown, a fun little plugin that adds a drafts button to your toolbar that links to your post drafts. What’s great about it, though, is that it does something a little bit special when clicked from the front end of your site.

The video is embedded at the top of this post’s page, with more about the plugin below.

Drafts Dropdown Plugin

Drafts Dropdown is a plugin creation of Alex King, who has a veritable slew of plugins. In fact, most of them should probably end up as a Sweet Plugin in the future.

I guess I should go record more of these then, huh?

Video recorded with version 2.0 of Drafts Dropdown, running WordPress 3.2.1.

Is your plugin worthy?

If you would like to see your plugin featured on an episode of The Sweet Plugin, send your plugin information over to sweetplugin@wpcandy.com. We’ll see you tomorrow for another Sweet Plugin!

The post Sweet Plugin: Drafts Dropdown appeared first on WPCandy.

Today’s Sweet Plugin is the WP Core Contributions Widget plugin, which is easily one of my favorites because it’s both specific to the WordPress community and so simple that it just adds a widget to your WordPress installation. If you know me at all, you know I love plugins with a tiny footprint.

The video is embedded at the top of this post’s page, with more about the plugin below.

WP Core Contributions Widget

WP Core Contributions Widget is a fun widget-only plugin that allows you to display your props on WordPress Trac tickets in your blog’s sidebar. It’s a fun way to show your code contributions to WordPress and, if you haven’t contributed much (like me) it will act as positive encouragement to do more.

Video recorded with version 1.0 of WP Contributions Widget, running WordPress 3.3.

Is your plugin worthy?

If you would like to see your plugin featured on an episode of The Sweet Plugin, send your plugin information over to sweetplugin@wpcandy.com. We’ll see you tomorrow for another Sweet Plugin!

The post Sweet Plugin: WP Core Contributions Widget appeared first on WPCandy.

Today’s Sweet Plugin is Menu Humility, which I’m honestly surprised I haven’t featured on this show yet. It’s a solid plugin that will solve a problem you might not even know you have.

The video is embedded at the top of this post’s page, with more about the plugin below.

Menu Humility

Menu Humility is the cleverly-titled plugin from WordPress Lead Developer Mark Jaquith. It is created for the specific purpose of pushing any attention-hogging menu items added by themes and plugins down to the bottom of the Dashboard menu list.

The plugin’s so specific in its purpose that there are no settings and no user interface at all. You simply turn it on and you’re good to go. Who doesn’t love that?

Video recorded with version 0.2 of Menu Humility, running WordPress 3.2.1.

Is your plugin worthy?

If you would like to see your plugin featured on an episode of The Sweet Plugin, send your plugin information over to sweetplugin@wpcandy.com. We’ll see you tomorrow for another Sweet Plugin!

The post The Sweet Plugin: Menu Humility appeared first on WPCandy.