Weblog Tools Collection

While reading Lorelle’s awesome post over at the blog herald entitled WordPress Wednesday I noticed a blip she mentioned about Mark Jaquith’s Subscribe To Comments plugin. Apparently, Mark has changed the way in which subscriptions are dealt with by default. In earlier versions, Subscribe To Comments would leave the Subscribe Box check marked by default, causing anyone who commented to automatically be subscribed to that blog post. This in turn created an opt-out way of thinking which has been and continues to be a bad practice.

Mark has changed this around and now leaves the subscribe box blank by default, leaving it up to the end users to decide on whether they would like to subscribe to the post or not. A much needed and welcomed change. Mark even set the plugin up so that even those who want to be subscribed to every post they comment on can do so via cookies:

I appear to have misread into Marks’ post as has been pointed out by both Mark and Lloyd Budd in the comments. What really changed with the plugin is the fact that the site admin now no longer has the configurable option of making the plugin opt-in or opt-out by default. According to Mark,

Before: option of opt-in or opt-out with default of opt-in for new installs. After: opt-in only, but with per-user checkbox stickiness. And yes, the change is old — I just have been getting a lot of e-mail about it and realized I never explained the change publicly.

I realize the change is old and the post I linked to was written in April, but because of the way I read into the post, I thought this was something that needed to be brought up due to the ethical nature of the changes that were made.

Google Maps

The Google Maps plugin allows you to easily insert Google maps into your blog, making use of the new shortCode system in WordPress 2.5. The maps can be configured to offer directions to or from the location, show or hide the zoom/pan controls, show/hide map type, activate zoom using mouse wheel. This plugin requires a API key from Google Maps.

TW-Asides

Tw-asides is an asides widget for WordPress. It lets you publish short posts that appear in your sidebar rather than in the main content column. Asides posts won’t appear in your main content stream, whether it’s on the front page of your blog or when navigating via the next/previous post links.

WP-Crontrol

WP-Crontrol is a plugin that lets you manage the WP-Cron system and see what’s going on there. This includes adding/editing/deleting cron entries, as well as cron schedules.

Random Featured Post

The Random Featured Post plugin allows you to display a random post from one or more designated categories. The featured post will display the title “Featured Post” which is customizable along with the post’s title and content or an excerpt with link to full post.

WP-Offload

WP-Offload will boost the performance of your blog by seamlessly offloading static content like images, documents and movies. This will greatly reduce bandwidth consumption and the number of HTTP requests issued to your web server. Additional features such as remote image manipulation and thumbnail generation are provided.

Google XML Sitemaps with Multiple Domains

This plugin is a solution for those running both the Domain Mirror and the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator plugins together in WordPress.  The plugin extends Google (XML) Sitemaps so that it creates one sitemap for each mirror set up in Domain Mirror.  Sitemaps are created with the mirror URL prepended to the custom filename.

BT Active Discussions

This is a recent comments plugin that displays customizable number of blog posts with recently updated comment. The output is very similar to phpBB’s View Active Topics and vBulletin’s Today’s Posts functions.

While Matt Mullenweg attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco just a few weeks ago, he previewed a new theme which looks like might be the perfect WordPress theme for photographers called Monotone. Monotone was developed by Noel Jackson and is a very unique theme in that, the color scheme changes based on the photograph being displayed. Here are two screenshots showcasing the theme in action with two different photographs.

Monotone takes the first image attached to a post and samples colors from it for use in the surrounding layout. Each post needs to contain one image, and optionally, any text you want. The theme does the rest, pulling colors out of and resizing the images for use in the design. You can use the visual or the HTML editor in wordpress to input your image and supporting text.

One of the only problems I’ve seen with the Monotone theme is that, sometimes the link colors blend in with the background making them difficult to see. Other than that, some of the photos really pop out at you thanks to the surrounding colors.

Monotone is generally only available for WordPress.com bloggers because the images must be uploaded to WordPress so they can resize them and extract the colors properly. For more information regarding the Monotone theme, check out the WordPress.com April Wrap Up.

As a side note, if you would like to use this theme on a self hosted WordPress blog, you will need to visit the Automattic SVN and then download and package the following files.

Also, if you happen to be using the Monotone theme on your WordPress.com blog, provide us a link so we can take a look at it!

One Column Themes

Simple Gray

Simple Gray is a one column theme which features dark tones of gray and mauve. The theme does not have any sidebars but does sport a extended footer.

Two Column Themes

Just Lucid

Just Lucid is a simplistic two column theme. The menu for the theme is shown to the left hand side of the page instead of the top. The sidebar and footer area are both widget ready. The theme contains stylesheets for 800px and 1024px width.

Three Column Themes

Written

Written is a 3 column widget-ready theme featuring a personal photo, full-width footer in black, white and blue/green.

Zoxengen

Zoxengen is a 3 column widget-ready theme with theme options.  The theme uses a bright color and has a section for feature articles and 6 spots for adding 125*125 banners.

Four Column Themes

LivingOS TAU

LivingOS TAU is a four column widget-ready theme. The posts are displayed in newspaper of magazine style grid format.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a WordPress plugin. One of my goals was to have fancy and relevant error messages.

I contemplated writing my own error manager, and even began a very basic one. I experienced hurdle after hurdle, and finally I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t WordPress have its own error manager also?”

So I did a quick source-code search and came across the WP_Error class.

One of the hurdles I ran into in creating my own error manager was error localization. The WP_Error class makes localizing error messages extremely simple.

Adding Error Messages

To add an error message, the first thing you’ll want to do is instantiate your own instance of WP_Error.

$myErrors = new WP_Error();

The next step is to add in your error messages.

$myErrors->add('access_denied', __('You do not have permission to do that.',$myLocalizationName));

There are a few things to notice here. There is something called an error code, which you will use to look up the full error message. You also have the full error message, which uses the __ function for localization.

Retrieving Error Messages

After you have added in your error messages, you’ll want to retrieve them at some point.

Retrieving an error message is as simple as calling the get_error_message method and passing it your error code.

$errorMessage = $myErrors->get_error_message($code);

From there you can echo out your message in whatever manner suits you.

Applications

Using the WP_Error class is ideal for those with themes and plugins.

For plugins, it’s best to have your errors as a member of a class. Using the class approach assures that you can access the errors throughout your methods, and also avoid naming conflicts.

For themes, you can also create your own class, or have a prefixed variable so you don’t have possible conflicts with other variables.

Downloadable and Example Code

Here is some downloadable code with an example of how the class might be used in a theme. As stated earlier, plugin authors may want to use a class for this.

The code is assumed to be placed in a theme’s “functions.php” file.

class my_class {
	function my_class() {
		$this->localizionName = '';
		$this->errors = new WP_Error();
		$this->initialize_errors();
	}
	/* get_error - Returns an error message based on the passed code
	Parameters - $code (the error code as a string)
	Returns an error message */
	function get_error($code = '') {
		$errorMessage = $this->errors->get_error_message($code);
		if ($errorMessage == null) {
			return __("Unknown error.", $this->localizionName);
		}
		return $errorMessage;
	}
	/* Initializes all the error messages */
	function initialize_errors() {
		$this->errors->add('my_weird_error', __('Some weird error has occurred', $myLocalizationName));
		$this->errors->add('access_denied', __('You do not have permission to do that.',$myLocalizationName));
	} //end function initialize_errors
}
$myErrors = new my_class();
echo $myErrors->get_error('my_weird_error');

The above code has two helper methods, one which retrieves the errors, and one which initializes the errors. The example is very basic, but should give you a good idea on how to use the WP_Error class.

Conclusion

There are many features of the WP_Error class not mentioned here, but you can dissect the code yourself if you like. The class is found in the wp-includes folder under classes.php.

The WP_Error class is a simple and powerful way to store errors, and output them rather easily. And the best thing, the messages can be localized.

Two Column Themes

Statement

Statement is a clean and professional looking WordPress theme meant for intellectual blogs like education, science, culture, books etc. The theme is WordPress 2.5 ready with gallery functions enabled.

GreyBox

GreyBox is a two column widget ready theme with space for advertising 125×125 banners right at the top of the page. The theme is simple and has a thick black border surrounding the main content.

Three Column Themes

Revolution

Revolution Blog is a 3-column Widget-ready theme created with clean and elegant look. The theme is largely made up of blue colors and has 2 sidebars to the right of the content.

Peacemaker

Peacemaker is a three column, widget-ready WordPress theme. The theme sports a header from B-36 Peacemaker which was a strategic bomber. The theme makes use of sober colors which includes gray and white.

WhiteDust

WhiteDust is a fluid three column outfit, plain white background with a splash. The frontpage shows the latest post in full followed by titles of the latest eight aligned on the frontpage, while the sidebars are enabled with recent comments, flickr feed, enabled with flickr support, pagenavi support, related posts and recent comments.

Here at WeblogToolsCollection.com, we have already discussed how you can change the color scheme in the WordPress 2.5 administration panel from Classic to Fresh. We have also highlighted an awesome plugin that was written by Kaspars which gives users up to 8 different color schemes to choose from. However, what if you want to create your own color scheme? Thanks to a plugin written by James Dimick called Easy Admin Color Schemes, users can now create their own flavor of the WordPress 2.5 back end.

After downloading and installing the plugin, you can access it by browsing to SETTINGS-COLOR SCHEMES. There are three color schemes to start you off, Classic, Fresh and Washedout. The plugin does not allow you to delete nor edit the Classic and Fresh color schemes. This makes sense as you wouldn’t want to screw up a default skin only to have to reinstall WordPress to fix the issue. However, you can edit the Washedout color scheme which introduces you to the plugins functionality.

The plugin starts off by giving you the chance to name your color scheme. Next, give your color scheme four primary colors. If you don’t know of a six digit color code, there is a small arrow to the right of the text field that will open up a color picker. Opening the color picker and then selecting a color will automatically place the corresponding color code into the text field.

Once you have your four primary colors in order, the next step which is the longest of them all is to go through all of the CSS specific code and change the color code values to something else you prefer. There at least 10 different CSS files which make up the styling of the administration panel. There are more if you want to include support for RIGHT TO LEFT text. This plugin takes all of those CSS files and puts them in one place for you to edit, which makes things so much easier. Also, for those who have javascript enabled in their browser, you can view a live preview of what the changes will look like on an active WordPress administration page. Very handy as it cuts down on the browser refreshes.

One thing that I think this plugin is missing is an easy way for users to share their creations. If a download or save link could be added to the color schemes which would automatically package the necessary files together which could then be saved to my desktop for distribution, this would make the plugin a home run.

If you are looking at adding some spice to your WordPress back end, give this plugin a try. I don’t think it could be any easier than this plugin. The only problem with creating a color scheme is figuring out where each CSS class or DIV is defined. That’s where FireBug comes in.

Good luck and if you happen to create a color scheme using this plugin, be sure to say so in the comments.

One Column Themes

TJ-Clean

TJ Clean is a simple, clean cut yet feature-full WordPress theme which is great for sites where content is king. Ideal for personal blogs as it includes integration with Flickr (photo sharing), Last.FM (music sharing) and status updates from Facebook/Twitter (and others). This theme is also XHTML Strict 1.0 and Valid CSS 2.1.

Two Column Themes

30April

30April was created by the theme author to celebrate his birthday. This theme contains widget support, is fixed width, contains an extra footer, theme options to make changing and editing the theme easy and built in gravatar support.

Milky Conversations

Milky Conversations is a two column, widget ready theme that is based off of the White As Milk theme, written by Azeem Azeez. The theme has been released under GPL and is fully compliant with the license. As the name implies, this theme is pretty white with black text and a little bit of orange thrown in via the RSS icons.

Three Column Themes

Khaki Traveler

Khaki Traveler was developed by Jeremy Clarke. It has a tan color scheme and a travel themed header. It is also a three column widget ready theme. It has gravatar support as well as tagging support. It has a top navigation menu with an easy to access log-in form.

Hybrid Themes - Themes Where The Number Of Columns Can Be Configured

Choice

Choice is a highly configurable theme that supports either 2 or 3 columns, is widgetized, theme options to control the themes background color, theme text weight, theme heading color, number of sidebars and whether or not your slogan appears. The theme also has native tag support.

Not too long ago, a new plugin was released called WP-Crontrol. WP-Crontrol allows you to take control over what is happening in the WP-Cron system.

WP-Cron is a tangle of black magic that allows a plugin developer or a user to schedule commands to be executed. WP-Crontrol is a plugin that lets a blog owner see through that magic and figure out what’s actually going on

If you want a detailed introduction to this plugin as well as an explanation as to how to use this plugin in conjunction with WP Database Backup to create backups when you want them, be sure to check out this article: Add a new WordPress backup schedule with WP-Crontrol

Also on the radar today is a quick fix for the WordPress 2.5.x image uploader. Awsom.org is reporting that there is a no-flash plugin that is available which returns the previous image upload function from earlier versions of WordPress.

It is time for another WordPress Plugin Competition. Plugin competitions of the past have seen fantastic code, extremely useful and fun plugins and have generated a lot of interest in WordPress and plugin development. Prizes have been very generously donated by readers and well wishers and we already have some donations towards this year’s competition and are looking for more. The final list of prizes will be determined very soon. If you would like to sponsor a prize or donate some money to the competition, please contact me. Lots of eyes see these competitions and your encouragement goes a long way in helping provide incentives. The plugin competition will begin on the 10th of May and will last till the 10th of July.

There will be prizes for first, second and third places and a consolation prize. The plugins should be officially submitted through email and the Plugin Competition Blog (which will be cleaned for the new competition) should be used as a launching ground for plugin ideas, updates, development news etc. The plugins will be judged by a panel of at least three judges and reader feedback will be an essential part of the judging process. At the end of the contest, we will put up posts for each submission and will open them up to our readers for two weeks. The contest results should be declared by the beginning of August.

All code must be GPL (or compatible) and should be available for download through the Competition Blog and preferably through WordPress Extend. The plugins can be modified and tweaked till the last day of the competition or until the author sends us an email with the final version of the code. In essence, the Plugin Competition Blog is the preferred vehicle of communication for all contestants.

Some relevant details:

• Running time for competition = 2 months starting the 10th of May till the 10th of July.
• True Wordpress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users.
• You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. New code only please.
• Plugins can only be submitted via email. We will make that email address public later on in the competition.
• Plugins cannot have opt-out links back to the authors’ pages (from the main blog pages, admin pages are fine). If you have links or donation forms, please make them opt-in.
• All plugins require documentation as in the Wordpress Extend pages. Documentation will be one of the judging criteria.
• Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
• We are looking for innovation, documentation and elegant code.
• Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at our sole discretion.

More details to be added with time.

Stay tuned and please help spread the word.

Clean WordPress Gallery Plugin

This plugin replaces the default gallery feature in WordPress 2.5 with a valid XHTML solution and offers Lightbox, Slimbox, and Thickbox support.

Theme Tester

The Theme Tester plugin allows you to change themes and view the results without the visitors to your blog seeing any changes. The visitors may notice some changes if your current theme uses blog options that a new theme overwrites.

Fresh Plus Visited

Fresh Plus Visited is a very simple plugin for WordPress 2.5 that adds a user color scheme to the admin interface.

Lameda

Lameda stands for List Attachment MEtaDAta. The plugin enables you to display any information from your attachments like photos, music files, pdf, etc within your posts or pages.

Movie2Blog

The plugin inserts short movie info in your posts (poster, title, directors, actors, runtime, short review, trailer). Uses Cinema Rx for serving data.

Fun with Random Comment Forms

The plugin replaces the form field names in the comment form with random names then uses sessions to name them correctly after submission before passing the values back for comment processing.

Easy Admin Color Schemes

The plugin allows you to manage the color schemes in your WordPress admin area. You can add new colors as well as edit current ones.

Facebook Dashboard Widget

Using the dashboard widgets available in WordPress 2.5, this plugin will process your Friends status updates RSS feed and/or your Facebook notifications feed, and add a widget for each to your WordPress admin dashboard.

When it comes to exporting, WordPress already does a wonderful job with it’s support to export posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. However, there is a problem. The WordPress exporter lacks granularity. What I mean by this is that, the exporter covers the entire blog instead of being able to select certain categories to export. I’ve searched the WordPress Plugin database high and low to look for a plugin that would specifically export categories and I could not find one. I did manage to come across two techniques though that get the job done.

There are two ways to export specific categories. The first is to read this forum post where HandySolo explains how to use the category RSS feed to export specific categories from a self hosted blog to a WordPress.com blog. The problem with this method is that, none of the meta data attached to the posts are carried over with the posts.

The second method is not pretty but it gets the job done. What I ended up doing was creating a new user account on my blog. I then used the post manager and filtered the posts by the category for which I wanted to export. I went through each individual post and quickly changed the post author from the original account, to the newly created user account. In my case, I had to do this to 25 individual posts. What is annoying about this method is that, when you save a post under a new author name, any blogs or posts that you have linked to within those posts will end up resending PINGs. However, I believe if you turn off this setting under the SETTINGS-DISCUSSION link in your administration panel this will prevent that from happening. Just remember to turn that back on after you’re finished.

After all of the posts within the category have been reassigned to a new author, you are ready to export. In your WordPress administration panel browse to MANAGE - EXPORT. Now here is the important step. Underneath where it says OPTIONS, you have a drop down box where you can restrict the export to a certain author.

In the drop down box, select the newly created author and click on the DOWNLOAD EXPORT FILE and a WordPress WXR file will be downloaded to your desktop. This file will contain all of the posts from the category you wanted to export because the new user you created was assigned to only those posts within that category. This method actually allows you to export specific categories while maintaining the meta data associated with those posts such as comments and tags.

This is probably not the best way to obtain these results but it’s the only method that I’ve found that allows me to export specific posts/categories while still having all of the other data attached to those posts. If you have a better solution or know of a plugin that can obtain the same results, I’d be very interested to know about it.

Woopra was opened up to the world at the Dallas WordCamp where I met John for the first time. His talk was not on Woopra but he introduced it to the event in a very short, three minute spiel. Since then Woopra has generated a tremendous amount of buzz in blogging circles. In short, Woopra is a stats tool for websites that lives as an application on your desktop (among other places) and can provide live webstats on your visitors. I like it since it is fast and since the developers gave me an opportunity to look at the insides early on, I have developed quite a fondness for it. They are in growth mode and with the recent upgrade to their desktop client, they can support more locations and are in the process of approving a large number of new users for their service.

All of that being said, with my previous knowledge of Woopra and its capabilities, I was literally floored this afternoon by a flood of new “stuff” that I had either completely missed or capabilities that were added in this new release. So if you are a Woopra user (or if you are not, just sign up), pull up a chair, grab a cup of your favorite beverage and read on. This is pretty cool.

All of the following assumes that you have an active Woopra account, are using WordPress, have the WordPress plugin installed and have the Woopra application (1.1.1.0) installed on your machine.

• With Woopra, and the Woopra WordPress Plugin, you can monitor all your registered users and all your commenters. This sounds obvious/relatively mundane until you install the plugin on your WordPress blog and create an event notification on the application. Follow the bouncing ball.
  • Open up your Woorpa application, click on the manage tab on the left and then click on Create a new Event Notification.
  • Then type in “Known Visitors” into the label box, click Next.
  • On the next window, click and activate the checkbox next to “Visitor is tagged or is a member” and click next until you come to the “Edit Notification’s look and feel” screen.
  • Here click on the “Notification’s Icon” dropdown to click on “visitor’s Avatar” and then paste the following in the “Custom notification message” box: Visitor %NAME% is viewing %PAGETITLE% Then click on Apply Notification button

  Now you will receive a notification on your desktop whenever a registered user or a user who has left a comment, visits your blog. This gets even cooler when you notice their gravatar shows up on the notification and you are now able to track these known visitors are they traverse through your blog. You can even choose to initiate a web chat with these visitors through the Woopra application. The chat shows up on their browser. This is cool and scary at the same time.

• Another cool new tool I discovered today was the little map of the world on the top left corner of the “live” tab. Now I had noticed the map there but had not looked into it much. Look for a small arrow on the top right corner of that map. Once you click on that arrow, the map opens up to a full screen view and now you are able to use your mouses’ scroll wheel to zoom in on any part of the map and use your cursor to identify users. I could spend hours doing this on a busy day.
• I had noticed the small column of labels at the top right hand corner of the Woopra desktop application but had not paid much attention to it. The lowest item on that list is called “live” and once clicked it shows the number of  users on your blog on a moving bar graph, much like whos.amung.us
• The analytics tab has a bunch of hidden gems. Some newer features were also added to the items on this tab. Click on the Analytics tab on the Woopra application and look for the following:
  • The “referrers” tab now has a few new subtabs. They include regular stats stuff like webpages, domains and search engines. But now this tab also include Feed Readers, Emails, Social Bookmarks, Social Networks, Media, News and Communities. Each one of these intrigued me and the I was taken aback by the breakdowns of referrals from various applications. The Email tab gave me the most food for thought. If your blog has email readers or you publish regular newletters via email, this tab could help you identify reader populations from various email services. Clicking on the graph part of the display brings up a historical view.
  • The “pages” tab breaks up visitors by subdirectories. With WordPress’ permalinks, you can now determine how hard your yearly archives are working for you. Apparently, over a thousand people looked at my archives from 2003 this week. As your data grows, this tab could contain breakdowns by tag, by author and any other permalink features that you have enabled through your blog. I wonder why our WordPress tag is so popular?
  • The last tab to point out is “systems”. Now this data can be mundane and almost all stats programs offer some sort of systems breakdown. Woopra adds to this functionality by letting you find permutations of systems options. This blog receives more Chinese speaking, Internet Explorer 6 users on Windows XP than any other language. I will be using that information to my advantage, I am sure you can find your particular niche to help or enhance.

Woopra is a great tool. It is even better with these little tidbits. There are literally thousands of different ways to enhance your stats and understand your reader population better. I have just outlined a few that I had completely missed till today.

Have you found any cool new tricks for Woopra that you would like to share?

For those of you who have recently browsed to the website that the popular PodPress plugin calls home, you’ll notice that the site is gone and has been replaced by a parked GoDaddy domain page. This GoDaddy parked page has already sent many people into a frenzy. As I’ve monitored my Twitter stream, many folks were already started to think that PodPress may have up and folded for greener pastures. There have also been a forum post or two discussing the possible demise of the PodPress project.

I’ve recently got in contact with the author of PodPress and I have excellent news. The GoDaddy page is the result of a domain registration snafu. The site should be back online either as you read this, or within the next few hours.

While talking with Mightyseek, I learned that the new version of PodPress is almost ready for release. The next version of PodPress promises to be more customizable as in the way it looks on your blog. Mightyseek has also informed me that he plans on creating PodPress ports for Joomla and Drupal which should quickly follow the release.

One Column Themes

Integrati

Integrati is a single-column theme with the sidebar below the post. This theme has a built-in recent comments and previous posts section in the sidebar.

Fun with Minimalism

Fun with Minimalism is a one column theme without widget support . The theme provides an admin screen to make choices over the default colours, the colours used for each category, or post in that category, the feed link and the position of the feed icon.

Simple

Simple is a really simple theme with one column and good use of colors and fonts. The theme loads fast and has a tabbed footer at the bottom of the page.

Two Column Themes

PassionDuo

PassionDuo is a clean theme, with rounded corners and 2 columns. It is advertising ready and it comes in 3 different color versions: red, blue and green.

Nature Blog

Nature Blog is a two column theme with a widget ready sidebar and footer. The theme has space for 121×121 or similar sized square ads and comes built in with a styled calendar for use with widgets.

Mag on Wood

Mag on Wood is a magazine style widget ready two column theme. The themes background is based on wood. There is ample space for advertising in the theme.

Although there were over 80 security/bug fixes in WordPress 2.5.1, there was one thing that crept up immediately following the release. According to numerous reports by individuals and a ticket filed in the WordPress Trac when a user resets their password, the password reset link received in the email does not work. The error message that is received looks like this “Sorry, that key does not appear to be valid.”

This bug has already been fixed and will be included in WordPress 2.5.2. However, if you are having issues with the reset link right now, you can read this post by Ryan McCue on how to Reset your WP Password Manually through phpMyAdmin.

[EDIT] Ryan has included the files which contain the patch that you can download here