Guestbook for WordPress

Guestbook for WordPress
I was looking at some of the “Guest book” plugins for the wordpress. One of the most downloaded is the DMS guestbook. I installed. I tried. But really could not figure out a real need of such a plugin. Why can you enable “comment” feature on a wordpress page and call the page “Guest book”? Someone might argue that with DMS guestbook you can customize your comments in many different ways. Well, I believe in least possible usage of plugins and paying more attention to the core features of wordpress. If you like you can have a Guestbook plugin installed, but it is something really not for me at all. Let me know if you have a different idea.
Note: The old plugin “Guestbook generator” does not work with wordpress anymore (compatible only upto 2.1 version).

WordPress Guest Book

WordPress Guest Book

You can check out the DMS Guestbook here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dmsguestbook/ (Compatible with WordPress 2.7)
So Called “Advertised Features” for the plugin are -
* Simple work on the attitudes over front-end (e.g. text color, guestbook width, border color…)
* Extended attitude possibility over the css file
* Preset DMSGuestbook caption text in different languages (e.g: german, english, swissgerman :-) )
* Make your own language template in few minutes
* Set mandatory fields where user must be filled out
* Set text hidden in the DMSGuestbook (e.g. ip address)
* Captcha antispam (image, mathematically)
* Manage the DMSGuestbook user entries. (e.g. name, message, url, ip adress)
* Sidebar widget
* Administrator can review posts before shown this
* Create your own guestbook template (beta)
* Administrator can search entries in guestbook
* Gravatar function
* Multiple guestbooks

Another Guestbook Plugin for WordPress compatible with WordPress 2.7 is Gwolle-GB http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gwolle-gb/
Advertized Features:

  • Notification by mail when a new entry has been posted.
  • Moderation, so that you have to check an entry before it is visible in your guestbook (can be turned off).
  • Recaptcha integration. (Fighting spam!)
  • Akismet integration (Fighting spam, too!)
  • Localisation (currently english, german and dutch). Own languages can be added very easily, check WP documentation on this. If you translated the plugin I’d be glad to include your language in a future release, so please send them to my via mail, thanks!
  • different-styled admin entries, so that the visitor can tell which entry is written by the ‘real admin’
  • a log for each entry, so that you know which member of the staff released an article to the public and when.
  • IP-address- and host-logging
  • Easy uninstall routine for complete removal of all database changes.

Well I am NOT using any WordPress Guestbook plugin as I really do not think they are necessary. You can try and share your comment about them.