ColdFusion Throwdown

Pretty straight forward, easy to install and easy to use. Though I could have spent some time styling the translator form I didn't. I felt it actually fit in nicely with the merced theme's left side column without any modification. I didn't feel the plugin was terribly original, I've seen the same functionality on many sites. That said, this plugin's redeeming factors are it's usefulness and usability. Configuration and implementation is remarkably easy.

Pros: Easy to install, limited configuration. Having translation capability available as a Mura plugin is a good idea, though not necessarily new. Cons: Replacing the existing content with the new Google translate frame may not be the best solution as this may be confusing to some users. The Social Bookmarking plugin also had this same solution. Creativity: This type of solution has been done before. See Google's own tool available at http://translate.google.com/translate_tools Usefulness: Useful application for most any content-driven web site. Usability / Easy of Use: See notes in "cons" and compare to competing solutions such as Google's own tool. Overall: Good strictly from the plugin perspective, but too simple in implementation which leads to ease-of-use problems when compared to competing solutions which this tool, ironically, relies on.

For originality I think this plugin falls short. Social bookmarking icons can be found on just about every website. That said, social bookmark icons are still very useful and this plugin makes it very easy to add them to a site. I do have a concern when it comes to the way icon sizes are selected. Since the icon sizes are set globally, there is no way to specify them on a site-by-site basis. Changing them on one site will change their size on all sites.

Pros: Easy installation, excellent documentation. Cons: Clicking icons does not open a new window, instead replaces the existing content. I think this would be confusing to end users. List of social sites is limited compared with competing solutions such as addthis.com which enables features such as emailing. Creativity: Lower score because it is an "expected" app for most sites anymore. The concept of one-click links for social bookmarking is not new. Usefulness: Undoubtedly useful. Usability / Ease of Use: Easy to use from the developer's standpoint. From the user standpoint, a more complex (developer) solution may be simpler for the end-user. Overall, a good idea, having been done a number of times in a number of ways including JS, browser extensions and many more. Full disclosure: I chose addthis.com a few years ago as my solution for an e-commerce site after using other options including various in-house and third-party solutions.

This is a super common request from clients and while it's not hard to add something like this manually, doing it via plugin is nice.