Fabulous Featurific

I’ve just installed an innovative new WordPress plugin – Featurific.  You should be able to see it above the right hand columns.

The way Featurific works is wonderful, and it is highly configurable, and free, free, free!  The guy who put this tasty technology together is one Rich Christiansen.

Rich  also does a full blown commercial version, which is possibly a little pricey at $499, but his site does explain that generous discounts are offered to bloggers and non-profits, so if you make a good enough case, the pro version could turn out to be a steal.

All I hope is that this beauty does not cause my server to fall over.  Hope not, because I really do love this thing.

Installation is not too difficult, but to really benefit from it, you will need to know how to cut and paste a code snippet, and for the more ambitious, an xml code editor, such as VIM, may well prove useful.  For more information, there are pretty comprehensive FAQs and instructions here

When you first activate Featurific, it will pop the presentation type system above the main posts on your home page.  If you like it there, leave it where it is, and go play with the templates, and the comprehensive settings.

Otherwise, you will have to tinker with your template code.  Still, it’s probably worth a go to get the best out of this system.

Featurific appears to be Flash based, which means search engines should not be able to index the displayed content snippets and become all uppity about duplicate content.

Well worth a look, and I am an early adopter!  Woo Hoo!

UPDATE: January, ’09.  I’ve removed the Featurific plugin – but not because it did not work, more because I was unable to set the dimensions of it properly.  This caused issues with IE6.  Not the plugin’s fault – just a lack of knowledge of xml editing!

I still think it is an excellent plugin, even if it is a big download, and I am looking in to reimplementing it.