nrrb
commented
10 years ago Jetpack
Jetpack is a set of WordPress plugins created by Automattic, the company behind WordPress itself.
Below is a list of the plugins, each as a feature along with my thoughts on how useful they would be to us. I include emoji as quick visual indicators of my verdict on the plugin.
:thumbsup: This means that I think it's going to be really useful or worth further study. :question: This means that I'm not thrilled by it, but that depends on some assumptions I have about what our priorities are. :thumbsdown: This means I don't think the plugin helps us or applies to us.
Feature: Beautiful Math :thumbsdown:
I highly doubt we’ll be using LaTeX equation formatting any time soon.
Feature: Carousel :question:
This is a gallery plugin. We could investigate this, see how customizable it is and if it solves any problems we need to solve. It seems like more than we need, though. What is interesting is that it extracts and displays EXIF information, so it would be worth at least diving into the code to see how it works.
Feature: Contact Form :thumbsdown:
This is useful for small sites and personal blogs, but I don't see it being useful for us. In fact, I think this lacks a CAPTCHA so it would be a really bad idea to put on a popular site like ours (SPAM!).
Feature: Custom CSS :thumbsdown:
Custom CSS is like junior theme editing, which is not what we want.
Feature: Enhanced Distribution :thumbsdown:
While the name sounds promising, this is actually just a switch to turn on syndication of our posts to the WordPress firehose which I've never heard of before and I wonder/doubt whether this is relevant.
Feature: Extra Sidebar Widgets :thumbsdown:
Widgets are immaterial if we're not using a sidebar.
Feature: Google+ Profile :question:
Apparently Google+ is not included by default with the social sharing icons? This also allows visitors to sign into the site to leave comments with a Google+ profile. Honestly, who uses Google+?
Feature: Gravatar Hovercards :thumbsdown:
Gravatar Hovercards are an enhancement on commenting, which we don’t even have yet. If a commenter has a Gravatar, then it shows up. No big woop.
Feature: Infinite Scroll :thumbsup:
This is very interesting, either in it working out of the box for us, which I doubt, or just to understand what goes into doing infinite scroll technically. Reading this code and the docs that come with it would help me understand much better how to do it on our site.
Feature: Jetpack Comments :thumbsdown:
We still haven't talked about whether we'll allow commenting or in what form. This is bargain basement multi-login to leave a comment, allowing login via wordpress.com/twitter/facebook accounts rather than as registered users of the WordPress site. This is like Disqus Lite.
Feature: Jetpack Single Sign On :question:
I don't see this as being terribly useful, but we could consider this when we talk about guest bloggers or whether we want to allow for user registration on our site.
Feature: JSON API :thumbsup:
The JSON API is exciting as it opens a lot of possibilities for integration with other applications down the road. This is not immediately applicable to us, but will be good down the road. This will also be standard in WordPress as of version 4.0 (replacing the XML-RPC API).
Feature: Likes :thumbsdown:
This is a site-only count of likes and has nothing to do with the like action of Facebook or other social networks. Also, it's restricted to visitors who are logged in to the site, whether with the Single Sign On plugin or directly registered on the site. I foresee a low adoption rate of this feature if it were enabled, due to that required login. The people who would like it would be an extremely self-selected group of people.
Feature: Markdown :thumbsdown:
This would allow creation of posts using Markdown. Unless you want to train everyone to use Markdown formatting instead of WYSGIWYG, I don't see much use for this. There are also ways to convert existing WordPress content to Markdown.
Feature: Mobile Theme :thumbsdown:
Bargain basement mobile theme, it doesn’t make your theme mobile but instead creates a new theme only shown on mobile that’s super barebones. Better than nothing for some people, not for us.
Feature: Monitor :thumbsdown:
WPEngine should be doing this (notifying us if the site goes down) and should also be handling bring the site back up if this does occur. We don't need this.
Feature: Notifications :thumbsdown:
This is mainly to notify you about comments on a mobile device or if you're currently logged in to a WordPress site where the admin bar is visible. Next to useless.
Feature: Omnisearch :thumbsdown:
This enhances the search function in only the admin bar and the admin area. Seriously, who uses that?
Feature: Photon :thumbsdown:
Photon is baby’s first CDN provided by WordPress.com. If we want to get into using a Content Delivery Network to accelerate delivery of multimedia, the first people we’d talk to is our hosting provider (WPEngine offers CDN with all plans via a MaxCDN Enterprise/NetDNA partnership).
Feature: Post By Email :thumbsdown:
I don't know of any situation that is so urgent to post that doing it by email would be necessary. Maybe very breaking news? This opens another security hole too, no matter how obscure the email address is.
Feature: Publicize :thumbsup:
This will be really useful. We can add Hoy accounts like Facebook and Twitter and publish an update to those accounts when you create a new post. We can add these Hoy accounts at an admin level for everyone to use, and individual authors can also link their own accounts to publish to.
It automatically includes an image, taking something that's at least 200x200 starting with the featured image and then trying any other attached image.
Feature: Related Posts :thumbsdown:
Baby's first related posts. This uses the Wordpress.com infrastructure to index our content and find similar posts there. This also depends on whether we want related posts, and I don't think we're going in that direction.
Feature: Sharing :question:
This adds sharing buttons to blog posts, all the sharing buttons you could ever want. The only question I have about this is whether we like the style of the buttons.
Feature: Shortcode Embeds :thumbsup:
This makes it so much easier and cleaner in the post code to embed all sorts of things, from Google Maps to Facebook posts to PollDaddy polls to Vimeo videos... the list goes on. We want to use this.
Feature: Site Verification Tools :thumbsdown:
This makes it easier for non-developers to add the site verification code required by things like Bing Webmaster Center and Google Webmaster Tools. We can do this inside our theme without needing this.
Feature: Spelling and Grammar :question:
This might be useful, depending on how effective After the Deadline, the spell-checking engine, is with Spanish.
Feature: Subscriptions :question:
This is a quick way to set up email subscriptions to site updates, like a poor man's RSS. This might be useful if we want to offer that.
Feature: Tiled Galleries :thumbsdown:
We don't want tiled galleries, no matter how artfully they're arranged.
Feature: Vaultpress :thumbsdown:
This is a paid service for automatic backups and security scans of the site. WPEngine already provides us with this.
Feature: VideoPress :thumbsdown:
Baby's first video hosting. This is a paid subscription service. We're not there yet.
Feature: Widget Visibility :thumbsdown:
This is a moot point if we're not using widgets and sidebars.
Feature: Wordpress.com Stats :thumbsdown:
Baby's first analytics! Aww, so cute.
Feature: WP.me Shortlinks :thumbsdown:
Shortlinks for any page, similar to bit.ly or something else. Do we really want to shorten our URLs and disguise them? I think this a bad idea.
Break JetPack down into its component parts, make a report for @thefuturewasnow on what's useful and what's not. If any part's function or capabilities are unclear, go into detail on them.