Here are 2 useful plugins I thought I’d share. We’re incorporating them on a few sites and I thought I’d share.
Solving multiple image uploads
First up - image upload. — one by one is a pain and re-ordering / etc. is not always easy. This control allows you to upload images and re-order, etc. We found it to be pretty easy to use and implement. Facebook uses this as their default image uploader. Only problem is you have to allow it to have access to your file system which might deter some users. Overall worth it though. Has support for ASP.Net (C#, VB), JSP, PHP, Perl, Python, ColdFusion, Ruby
http://www.aurigma.com/Products/ImageUploader/OnlineDemo.aspx
Leveraging existing contacts in webmail/outlook/social networks
This nifty app lets you invite your friends from most of the common social networks (MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, Xing. It has support on the server side for PHP, .Net, and Java so can be used on most platforms. So you can invite your friends in these networks through their built in engines.. You can’t import these people as their email address is typically not exposed.
Next is their importer that will allow the user to put in their webmail account information and passwords and retrieve all of their contacts (typically for importing into the users contacts folder in the app you’re writing). You get emails, etc. of all the people they have stored there.
Finally, they have an Outlook / Thunderbird importer but it makes you walk through an export process that’s not ideal. I am still looking for an out of the box Active X outlook importer that skips this step.
The drawbacks are the interface (can use lots of work) and the roughness of the Outlook / Thunderbird integration.
