Google and WordPress are a few of my favorite things - something which you may have picked up on if you read the commentary in our recent issue (A Day in the Life of a Google Junkie).

Let's look at a few recently released WordPress plugins which rely on Google API's for their functionality:

The Google Checkout Shopping Cart Plugin lets WP users quickly add Google Checkout buttons to any post and use the automatic javascript shopping cart. Simply drop a one line tag/include into a post and the plugin will place the "add to cart" button and the price directly into the post. The plugin does not currently support "buy it now" buttons and you won't be able to provide options, but those features are apparently in development.

The GoogleMapStats Plugin geolocates vistiors of your site using hostip.info and shows the latest 200 in real-time using the Google Maps API. Maps can be inserted at any place using the "shortcodes" system in WP 2.5 and up. If the IP address is already logged once it will not lookup the geo data again to speed up things. The main search engines are mapped under one IP address to avoid a lot of loggings for the same bot. While probably not the most useful of plugins, it could be fun to get a quick idea of where visitors are coming from and the last time they visited.

Screenshots of the Google Checkout Shopping Cart Plugin and the GoogleMapStats Plugin below:

Google Checkout Shopping Cart Plugin

GoogleMapStats Plugin