WP Greet Box is Great

A Tech article with View Comments posted 4 July 2009.
Tags: blog, wordpress

I just installed a new WordPress plugin called WP Greet Box. It’s responsible for the nifty little “Welcome, X user!” (for values of X that include Google, Bing, Facebook, etc.) that you see when you visit my website. I had been wanting something like this for a while, and long-time readers might remember that I had a very ugly, homemade version that ran on certain posts for while that I finally got rid of when I upgraded to my current WordPress theme.

I did consider an alternative, Referrer Detector. WP Greet Box appears to be more friendly to my caching plugin, and is Javascript/AJAX based so that it doesn’t slow down page generation times. Referrer Detector also appears to have a few more rough edges just based on the comments and changelog information I was able to find.

Usually, though, I want to choose the plugin that has the biggest community because that plugin will be more likely to be around for the long haul – and on this account, WP Greet Box wins handily with nearly 40,000 downloads. Referrer Detector’s 5,000 was nothing to sneeze at, but the community’s vote seems to be squarely with WP Greet Box. So far, I’ve been very happy with it.