WordPress plugins we love – revisiting Wapuu Dashboard Pet

It’s been nearly nine months since we first launched the wonderful Wapuu Dashboard Pet plugin to the world. The plugin has received plenty of rave reviews and mentions across the web – including the leading WordPress news site WP Tavern.

As part of the WPT post, Matt Mullenweg (co-author of WordPress, and current Automattic CEO) hailed the plugin succinctly – “This is amazing.” Honestly, we don’t disagree, which is why we thought it was time to remind everyone about this handy (and free!) plugin.

The plugin is written 100% in house by our WordPress specialist Kayleigh and helps WordPress website owners stay up to date with their software installations, and blogging schedules too. The plugin adds a friendly Wapuu to your WordPress dashboard. Modelled on the popular virtual pet toys of the 1990s, if you don’t keep your site updated, Wapuu will get increasingly sad – giving you a visual prompt to look at the critical updates your website needs.

Since that first 1.0 launch of the plugin, quite a few new features have been added to improve the overall experience:

• Wapuu will now (optionally) nag you when there’s too many pending comments
• Double the fun! Wapuu can now appear in BOTH the admin bar and footer
• Your lazy blogging habits can now be detrimental to Wapuu’s health. An optional function to include post reminders has been added; fail to keep up with your schedule or Wapuu will become sad
• A new health report section allows users to see why Wapuu is sad
• The overall interface has been streamlined
• SVG optimisations for more efficient loading

Just search for Wapuu Dashboard Pet via your WordPress plugins page to add this lightweight tool to your site. You can also find it on the WordPress plugin repo.