#1 October 2026

As always, I tested again 8 featured plugins from WordPress.org. October batch #1. Here is what I think;

A flexible quiz and poll builder with lots of question types and a handy question bank you can reuse across quizzes. I liked that you can embed it via shortcode, iframe or a slide-in popup. But the UX is rough: the menu shows up twice, the results are hard to find under settings, lead capture never worked for me, and some smaller bugs. Right now it still feels quite unfinished.

A lean event management plugin with ticketing, RSVP, recurring events and Stripe payments that worked fine. It mostly sticks to the native WordPress UX, supports multiple ticket types and even custom RRULE recurrence with dates you can skip. Venue and organizer pages can’t really be customized and there are only two blocks so far, but overall it works well and it might have some potential.

A really nice looking roadmap with (Kanban)-board, list and timeline views, voting, dark mode and a suggest-an-idea button that allows users to submit ideas for approval. There’s basic spam protection on votes and comments, and lots of settings to switch features on and off. It loads its scripts and styles on every page though, and the block can’t filter by product, which is a pity because the rest feels quite good.

It gives you a huge amount of customization, with tons of templates and live previews, albums and statistics. You can tag and mark people on individual images and it has a great permissions manager. It’s very flexible and the onboarding is grate to get you started fast. The downside is that it is quite heavy in size. Autosave is a bit inconsistent, and it can be overwhelming if you are less tech-savy.

A fun and original idea for building narrated chats with avatars, typing indicators and attachments. It feels lightweight and WordPress native. It’s easy to set up and comes with example conversations to get you started. The style settings are separated from the conversations, there’s no contrast check for colors and you can’t change the font, but it’s a nice niche plugin.

A well-designed recipe plugin that encourages you to get to the point instead of writing a long story before the recipe. Paste and parse is the main feature, and with an AI connector it cleans up and structures recipes even better. You also get servings scaling, metric and US units, cook mode and imports from other recipe plugins. There are a few things, like the gallery not showing by default, Youtube video can be added, but does not display anywhere. Jump to recipe is not jumping, because it was nowhere to be found in the frontend.

A very simple gallery plugin with albums, ZIP upload and a basic lightbox. It’s easy to use, but it asks for an event date on every album for some reason, autoplay in the lightbox can’t be stopped properly, and there are no styling options. I think the default gallery block does the same job, which makes this a uninteresting choice for most users.

A complete donation package with campaigns, multiple forms per campaign, funds and subscriptions. Payments are possible with Stripe, PayPal and can be collected via bank / offline payments in the free version. It has a great dashboard, a setup check in the settings, and an helpful onboarding (that doesn’t start on its own, nice!). But editing a single campaign means jumping between several screens, and there are a few confusing design decisions. It’s feature rich, but it takes a bit of getting used to.

What do you think about this selection? Will you install any of those?