Promote Your Content with the Greet Box WordPress Plugin

By Kyle Eslick on December 24th, 2008 | Filed Under Plugins
Tag(s): Del.icio.us, Digg, Google, Greet Box, StumbleUpon, Twitter, WordPress Plugins, Yahoo

If your WordPress blog gets a lot of referral traffic, there is a WordPress plugin you may want to check out called Greet Box. This plugin actually looks at where referral traffic is coming from and displays an appropriate greeting message to your readers.

A popular example is Digg. If visitors come from Digg.com, they will see a message reminding them to Digg the post! If you have a Twitter account, you can also setup a custom message to show people visiting from Twitter reminding them to “Tweet” your post or to follow you on Twitter. This plugin also works for visitors via Google search, etc.

For everyone else, you have the option of setting a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Greet Box Plugin Features:

Compatible with various WordPress cache plugins so you do not have to sacrifice speed.
Show a different greeting message to your visitor depending on the referrer URL. You can add/edit/delete/disable these greeting messages as you choose.
Detect the visitor’s search keywords and use those keywords to display related posts.
Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not match any of your configured referrer URL.
Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not have JavaScript enabled.
AJAX greeting message in the front-end makes it compatible with caching plugins and WPMU.
AJAX administrative interface that uses nonce verification to discourage hackers.
Ability to set a timeout to forget a visitor so we do not keep nagging them with greeting messages.
Ability to setup regular expression rules to exclude some referrer URLs from seeing greeting messages.
Ultra customizable greeting message box (with CSS) allowing you to prepend/append HTML around the greeting message box.
Currently the following traffic referrers are in Greet Box by default (you can easily create your own if your favorite referrer is not on the list):
1. Delicious
2. Digg
3. Google
4. Yahoo
5. StumbleUpon
6. Technorati
7. Twitter

You can download Greet Box here. If you’d like to check out some of the other WordPress plugins we’ve featured in the past, you can check out our WordPress Plugins page.

Want automatic updates? Subscribe to our RSS feed or
Get Email Updates sent directly to your inbox!

Digg This | Stumble it | Add to Del.icio.us | | Print This

There Are 11 Responses So Far. »

1 Andrew
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 9:30 am

I have to agree with the recommendation. I use it and have visited sites that use it and I really like it.
2 SuperMario290
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 1:47 pm

Interesting. I never really thought of the concept, but I will definitely try it out and see if it works. Thanks for the link!
3 Artem Russakovskii
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 7:23 pm

I’ve been using the Greetbox for a while now and it’s been amazing. The options interface is also the best of any other plugin I’ve seen.
4 rizzy
Thursday, December 25th, 2008 at 8:59 am

OMG this is absolutely great plugin. I will implement it once I can find a darn theme for my new blog.
Regards: rizzy
http://twitter.com/rizzy81
5 Jason
Thursday, December 25th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

How does this compare with the Referrer Detector wordpress plugin. It seems that most of the features are duplicated. Referrer Detector supports a lot more sources, plus it has stats. You can check it out here: http://www.phoenixheart.net/

I’ve been using it for a while and really like it.
6 Thaya Kareeson
Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 5:48 pm

Thank you for reviewing my plugin Kyle! Exposure to this audience really helps my downloads!

@Jason,

WP Greet Box 4.4 supports 24 referrers plus wildcard in domains. Nevertheless, both plugins have pretty much the same functionality. I would say try both to see which one works better for you.
7 Donace
Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 7:39 am

it is indeed a very sweet plugin; the only ‘downside’ I hit was that it was JS based.

I being slightly bored whipped up a pure php based script for it (http://thenexus.tk/hello-visitor-the-quest-to-greet/). However it is not pretty code or even ‘clean’ :p.

Greet box IS great though and very useful.
8 Thaya Kareeson
Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

@Donace
I intentionally coded WP Greet Box to be javascript based from the beginning. Actually, there is both a benefit and a downside for WP Greet Box being javascript based. The downside as you said is that it requires the user to have javascript enabled. The upside is that it works with cache plugins. I’d say that almost everybody nowadays browses with javascript on, so there’s no need to discriminate on javascript :). Also a lot of times my host gets killed from heavy traffic so I need some sort of caching solution for my blog.
9 Donace
Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 7:30 pm

@ Thaya I have no ‘real’ gripes with he plugin

Though I feel it would be possible to use php as an alternative;

The postive being it is smaller in size and faster as well as more versatile (in my opinion).

The negatives of this as highlighted was that the messages would be cached. (vis supercache)

Though as I mentioned in reply to a comment an easy ‘exclusion’ line would prevent it being cached by Supercache plugins etc. and you could further with some trickery cache the ‘result’ of messages via domain names to speed things up (ie digg messages cached etc).

Saying this the beauty of it is many varieties of this type of plugin can exist and probably do.