To whip WordPress into shape more often than not a custom plugin is necessary. I have developed many custom WP plugins, as well as a couple of free plugins that are available through the WordPress plugin repository.
Free WordPress plugins
To showcase my work and ‘prove’ that I know my way around WordPress I have a couple of free plugins in the official WordPress plugin repository.
Plugin to show a landing page
This landing page about custom WordPress plugins you’re reading right now appears thanks to a free plugin of mine: each domain a page. I have simply pointed the domain customwordpressplugin.com at my standard WordPress install and created a page with the slug customwordpressplugin-com. Voilá, here is your landing page. No custom plugin necessary.
Note: for multisites I developed Multisite Landingpages.
WordPress reading progress bar
The reading bar above that follows your (reading) progress is a free plugin as well: WP Reading Progress. On longer pages (also: longreads) it provides a great experience for your website visitors and improves engagement as well as time spent. Sometimes by nearly 20% (actual reported figures by users of this free plugin).
Free FAQ plugin
For a client of mine I developed this custom FAQ plugin to integrate perfectly with his custom website and output FAQ schema data as well. No existing solution was found that could easily be managed and perfectly integrated and output ld+json schema data as well. This custom FAQ plugin was also later released as free WordPress FAQ plugin. It is not very popular, I think because it uses short-codes and existing categories, that make it a bit not-so-obvious to setup. However, these are also strengths. Please do not hesitate to shoot me a support question if you need help with the FAQ plugin.
Bloembraaden (talk about custom)
This page exists because I can help you with your WordPress website, make it more suited to your business goals, by developing a custom plugin for it. But the fact that you need a custom plugin may point to an underlying problem, that maybe WordPress is not ideally suited for your purpose. You may want to consider a custom developed website on my platform Bloembraaden. A Bloembraaden website is developed from the ground up and as such unique and original. Bloembraaden as a platform provides the backend and admin interface as well as a stable frontend environment for your custom website.
The only code and design elements used are the ones necessary to get your message accross and have your (potential) clients accomplish their goals through your website. Because there are no templates to choose from, the working and appearance of your website is precisely as needed.
Bloembraaden is open source and available to (small) digital agencies or larger companies that need several (temporary) websites, either as managed hosting solution or source code.
Custom WordPress plugins
I have developed custom WordPress plugins for several clients. The plugins are a result of special requirements regarding the working of a custom website or sometimes because obvious functionality is lacking in standard WordPress themes. Mainly I translate these requirements into a technical solution that makes not only the custom website behave as intended but is also easy to manage.
For Graffitinetwerk I have developed an elaborate plugin that links the portfolio items (projects / events) to several properties such as client, year and location. Also the FAQ plugin is custom (now freely available) and the search functionality is customized to present the results in a more logical fashion.
For Goodcook (a cookbook publishing company) a collegue and I developed a plugin linking books, authors and publishing dates in a way that is easy to manage for the publisher. Showing related items as well, thereby improving engagement on their site.
Plugins as a solution
Simple (free) plugins that I made custom for clients as a solution to solve a problem they had:
When you use WP Bakery as a pagebuilder and SearchWP to improve the search within your WordPress install, you may notice that posts with raw html blocks are not found when searching for terms that are only in these html blocks. This is because the blocks are saved encoded. I figured it out and wrote a small custom plugin to have SearchWP (4.0+) index raw html blocks from WB Bakery. It does not slow down your website, it only slows down the indexing ever so slightly, but that is asynchronous so your visitors won’t notice.
Have you, as a developer, ever wanted to trigger a specific WordPress hook during development of your own plugin or theme, to test your own code? Use WP-Trigger. Simply trigger the hook by navigating to your development install. (This plugin takes you probably all of 30 minutes to build yourself, but downloading is still faster :-D).
Get your own custom plugin
Get in touch if you want to know more about what I can do for your website with custom WordPress plugins.