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Written by
Jean Galea
A few months ago I asked you about your thoughts on what niches were not exploited within the WordPress theme market.
This time, I’d like to focus on plugins. The question is the same. I’d like to know if you think there are niches which should be served by WordPress plugins but currently aren’t. What functionality did you need and did not find within the WordPress ecosystem?
Over to you!
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Jean Galea
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22 Responses
Hello, the answers are very simple to your question:
1 – a free advanced database plugin as Fabrik for Joomla;
2 – a plugin to feature all of the functionalities of a great crisis map application as Ushahidi.
Regards,
Giuseppe.
Hello Jean, I would love to have a plugin for my mini Etsy shop that works, and a plugin/widget for Pinterest. As my site grows I also would like to find the smaller twitter and facebook icons like you have at the top of your page. Where would I find those? Is it associated with a particular theme page?
It can’t much more simple than a simple “contacts” plugin that allows name, email, phone number, city, state, and notes. There are some commercial plugins, but they have more features than I need.
You don’t need a plugin for that Ed 🙂 Just create a custom post type and some custom fields using the Types plugin
I recently needed an advertising solution for a WordPress site I was building for a big corporate client. OIOPublisher is good enough for bloggers, but for serious advertisers (online magazine in this case), it just doesn’t cut it, and OIOpublisher is the best WordPress option there is. I had to go outside of WordPress, with OpenX to get what I needed.
I feel like it’s a good time for plugins to start dialing into really specific niche areas. There are tons of broad one-size-fits-all solutions for WordPress and more are being created all the time. There are much fewer plugins geared towards very specific use cases.
I assume this is because people think they’ll be targeting a smaller audience and therefore they’ll make less money or get fewer downloads from the repo. I can understand that viewpoint, but I think that if you laser focus on accomplishing one thing with a plugin, you could do very well if you choose the right niche.
Here are some examples (some of these have been attempted already)
Hotel booking systems
Home and apartment rental management (availability, pricing, photos, floor plans etc)
Car dealership inventory management
Industry-specific appointment systems (doctors, lawyers, hair dressers, etc)
Restaurant menu systems
Small, local business inventory management/e-commerce
I’m sure there are more that I’m missing, but I think you get the idea. 🙂
Oops… Last message got posted before I finished… Its not hard to create a CPT for a bio page every time but I would prefer a 5 minute bio page setup rather than spending an hour or two coding the functionality out.
Can you share some of the best you’ve found, so others can take a look and possibly improve upon them?
Here is a link to a review of “Best 7 Auction WordPress Themes And Plugins”
I haven’t been able to find a well coded teamember/bio plugin. There are a few but they don’t play well with themes and require CSS tweeks to look OK. I know its simple r create a CPT but
I’ve seen a few auction themes but not a plugin that is easy to set up and looks good. A lot of them look like Windows 95 forms with small pictures. I’m looking for functionality but I need more styling choices, custom fields and custom forms. It should look like a modern blog or portfolio.
I would like to see more auction type plugins.
Are there any good examples to act as inspiration Mike?
I spent a good few hours recently trying to find a good logo carousel plugin that moves images/logos in a continuous marquee effect for a bespoke theme. I needed one that you could add multiple instances to the same page but couldn’t find one on wordpress.org, Code Canon or Google. In the end I used ‘Image horizontal reel scroll slideshow’ on wordpress.org but I could only add one instance without taking the code apart which I didn’t have time to do. So a nice and easy to use logo carousel plugin with various features like speed control etc. would be great.
I think you could use Soliloquy for that.
We run our RSVP for the monthly WordPress meetings via Camptix, but it doesn’t let you do more than one event.
@Matt,
I have used Events Made Easy in the past. Have you ever tried that one?
No I haven’t. I’ll check it out sometime for sure.
There are decent event registration plugins, but sometimes you just need a simple RSVP function, not the full paid registration stuff. Lots of small businesses and non-profits hold free events and need to know who wants to come. That’s just the first one I can think of. Interested in what others here will say.
That’s an interesting one Matt, how would you see that working? Couldn’t they just use form building tool such as Gravity forms?
I might not be familiar enough with ALL that Gavity Forms does, but the ability to turn RSVPs into a simple report and intake form, as well as list subscription (which I know GF does) would be ideal. Plus, worked at a synagogue that put on tons of small events every year and some in their congregation wanted to RSVP for multiple events at the same time. So there’s event sorting, multi-event registration, linking from the event page to a pre-populated form, having the RSVP all on one page for easy reference (e.g. synagogue.org/rsvp). Those kinds of things that I think feel really intuitive but somehow are not made readily available plugin-wise. At least not as far as I’ve seen so far.
Right, sounds like an interesting plugin indeed if there is enough demand to support it. You could probably build something like that with Gravity Forms or Toolset, but I don’t know of any plugin that does it out of the box.