The WordPress Popup Engine Plugin claims to be the pinnacle of WordPress-based pop-up systems, having been heavily tested with many different installation configurations and themes. Here we will take a good look at what it can and it can’t do, and whether it’s a good match for your needs.

Ease of Use and Installation

The plugin installs just like most other WordPress plugins: you upload and then activate it. Every configuration is done on the plugin’s option panel and there’s no complicated theme modification is required.

Support and Documentation

The WordPress Popup Engine Plugin does not specify its support method. Even worse, there’s no mention of any documentation whatsoever. If you’re a beginner to WordPress, you might want to think carefully before purchasing this plugin.

Opt-in e-mail List Support and Compatibility

The plugin supports Aweber integration: you can embed its e-mail marketing code easily on the pop-up.

Custom Pop-up Contents

Custom pop-up contents is where this plugin shines. Here you are given an HTML editor where you can write and style whatever you want to display on your pop-up. This is great if you have informational contents to show. Interestingly, you can also pick any URL you wish and make the pop-up show what’s on that URL, a good thing if you want to use affiliate links to direct visitors to a product.

Multimedia Support

The plugin allows basic embedding of videos from YouTube and/or any other Flash video player. It works well with other multimedia formats, too:

The popup plugin has also been tested with excellent results with videos, images, text content, links and other media content.

Types of Pop-up

You can set your pop-ups to be either a normal pop-up that shows up when a visitor enters a page, a delayed pop-up that shows up after a certain time passes, or the less intrusive pop-unders.

Stylability and Placements

There’s no easy way to style the visual look of the pop-ups made by this plugin. You can probably change it with CSS if you’re an advanced user, but on the option panel you can only you can set its height and width.

Lightbox and Other Effects.

This plugin support the modern Lightbox effect. There are also various neat appearance effects to choose: drop down, fade in, and a few others.

How it Deals with Pop-up Blockers

The pop-ups made with this plugin is coded with DHTML that theoretically can be blocked by most pop-up blockers.

Pricing and Licensing

The plugin costs US$ 19.99, which seems to be quite a reasonable price. There doesn’t seem to be any licensing restriction, so it’s safe to assume that you can buy it once and use it anywhere you want.

Refund Policy

You get a 60 days, no-questions-asked, full refund policy. Two whole months should be enough time to see whether the plugin works for you or not.

Missing Features

• Design templates