Weblog Tools Collection

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New Plugins

Blibahblubah

This plugin allows the blog owner to customize the tag cloud so that any reader mousing over the tag cloud will see the words in the tag cloud flicker with a customizable effect. This is just a fancy bell and whistle to add to your blog.

Wordpress Popular Posts

Adds a widget to show the most popular posts in your WordPress blog.

Comments Count Filter

Makes the comments from post author not to be counted. The post author must login before giving a comment.

Surveys

Add surveys to you blog. You can let the visitors take surveys and see the result from the admin side.

Pollin

Create and add polls to your blog. It can be shown to your visitors who will be able to vote in the poll.

wpSLEEP

Create posts in advance have them automatically publish when you’d like. You can then set when different parts of a post are viewable.

.html on PAGES

Appends .html to the URL of PAGES when using permalinks

Comment Move

Adds the ability to move comments between posts / pages to the comment edit page.

Peter’s Blog URL Shortcodes

Use shortcodes for blog URLs and post URLs, so that your posts always have the correct internal links.

Updated Plugins

Countdown Timer

This plugin allows you to setup a series of dates to countdown to in terms of years, days, hours, minutes, and/or seconds.

WordPress Exploit Scanner

Search the files and database of your WordPress install for malicious code or spammy links left by a hacker.

SmoothGallery

Embed JonDesign’s SmoothGallery into your posts and pages.

WP Tuner

Easily, powerfully, discover why your blog or plugin is slow or cranky. Comprehensive time and database access analyzer.

MobilePress

MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that will render your WordPress blog on mobile handsets, with the ability to use customized themes.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Returns a list of the related entries based on a unique algorithm using titles, post bodies, tags, and categories.

Clean Press

Clean Press is a 2 column WordPress theme that’s designed to focus on the content, rather than the design, and it’s the theme that powers this site.

iQ2

iQ2 is a fixed width, widget ready, photoblog theme that fully integrates with the PhotoQ Photoblog Plugin.

Night Light

Fixed width, two column, widget ready theme with a left sidebar

Carrington

Three column, widget and gravatar ready theme

Over the past few weeks, I’ve witnessed many discussions throughout the WordPress community pertaining to the version number of WordPress. Many think that because of the reworked user interface and the large number of features that this version (2.7) will contain, this should allow the software to be bumped up to version 3.0

I asked the WP-Testers mailing list to see if I could get a word from either Ryan or Matt to tell me if 2.7 would remain or if it would be bumped up to 3.0.  Jane Wells chimed in saying that Matt doesn’t want to skip version numbers anymore, and that there will be ten increments between integers, so 2.9 > 3.0, not 2.9 > 2.10. Yes, 2.7 is a major change, but the numbers are based on timing, not volume or significance of change.

So there you have it. WordPress 2.7 will be, WordPress 2.7. 2.8 will arrive then 2.9 then 3.0 etc. The feature set has no context when giving it a version number label.

While were on the topic of version numbers, it’s important to note that typically, version such as 2.7, 2.8 are major releases that usually contain new features or UI improvements. The incremental releases e.g. 2.7.1, 2.7.2 usually contain bug fixes as well as security patches. One last thing to note regarding version numbers. Each major release of WordPress is named after jazz musicians the team admires.

I hope this clears up some of the confusion regarding WordPress versioning.

New Plugins

WP-Honeypot

Add Project HoneyPot traps to your blog to help catch these spammers and comment spammers.

Eventr

Use your blog as an event management tool. You can create an event - the plugin will let people sign up for the event - it can also show a list of all the attendees. Once the event is done, you can deactivate the event and no more sign ups will be allowed.

Shared Items Post

Shared Items Post is a WordPress plugin that automagically creates a blog post from your Google Reader Shared Items feed. You can schedule the post to go out daily, weekly, or monthly and even set the time of day.

Author Avatars

This plugin provides a widget which allows you to show avatars of blog users.

Resize At Upload

The plugin affects the uploaded image while it is uploaded. Straight after it is uploaded, it will be resized physically to the given width. There is no original image or backup left.

mmyYouTubeHQ

This plugin allows you to insert high quality and YouTube videos and also video in normal quality.

Autofields

AutoFields will auto fill the Excerpt and add an Image custom field based on the data you entered into the contents editor.

Bayesian top title learner

Display links to your most ‘interesting’ posts, where interestingness is determined automatically by a Bayesian learning algorithm.

Embed Iframe

Allows the insertion of code to display an external webpage within an iframe.

Twitter Status

Get the current Twitter message for your blog authors.

Updated Plugins

GoCodes

GoCodes lets you create shortcut URLs to anywhere on the internet, right from your WordPress Admin.

AllWebMenus WordPress Menu

The AllWebMenus WordPress Menu add-in & plugin combination is designed to retrieve information from your blog (such as posts, pages, etc.) and import it into the AllWebMenus application to create stylish menus based on the structure of your blog.

Email Users

A plugin for WordPress which allows you to send an email to the registered blog users.

Post Templates

A plugin that allows you to create and use templates in order to facilitate writing of similar posts/pages.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

Add Post Footer

Add Post Footer automatically add any custom paragraph, html code, ad code, Technorati tags and/or related links list to the end of every posts.

Last Viewed Posts

This plugin displays the posts (and pages - if you want) that have been recently viewed by the visitor (single view).

Glamour

Fixed width, three columns, widget ready theme

Blue Blog

Fixed width, widget ready, two column, right sidebar theme

Think Me

Two column, fixed width, widget ready theme with pingbacks and trackbacks separated from comments.

Simply Great

This is a free, simple WordPress theme with a smooth clean layout, however the true beauty of this template lies in the Admin panel. This template has a built in options page where you can control just about every aspect of the themes colors, fonts and even layout without touching any code!

Are you a theme author? Read how you can submit your themes to us.

New Plugins

Content Finder

Quickly Add - Free Keyword Targeted Content to your Word Press Blog.

Advanced Code Editor

Integrates the EditArea advanced code editor into WordPress. This adds real time syntax highlighting, line numbering, full screen editing, and more to the code editor in the “Add New Post” and “Add New Page” screens. Makes editing posts in HTML much easier!

WordPlurk

Integrate WordPress with Plurk.

WP-WOMM

Automatically inserts a link to share and tell a friend about the post or page as well as provide a link for visitors to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Get Picasa Albums

Gets a listing of Picasa Web Albums and displays album thumbnails on your page.

Automatic SEO Links

Forget to put manually your links, just choose a word and a URL and this plugin will replace all matches in the posts of your blog.

Get Flickr Thumbnails

Get Flickr Thumbnails plugin can get thumbnails for photos on your site that from flickr.com

WP-Stats-Dashboard

Displays the WordPress.com STATS graph directly in your Dashboard. No more tiresomely opening the Blog Stats tab and manually logging in.

Comment Validation

This plugin adds client-side validation to the Wordpress comment form, using the jQuery validation plugin.

Updated Plugins

WP Greet Box

This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url.

WP-Cumulus

WP-Cumulus displays your tags and/or categories in 3D by placing them on a rotating sphere.

WP-Codebox

WP-CodeBox provides clean syntax highlighting and AJAX advanced features for embedding source code within pages or posts.

Different Posts Per Page

Show different number of posts in home, category, search or archive page.

Psychic Search

Secretly discover what your readers want to read in your blog.

Multi Author Comment Notification

Get email notifications for comments made at other author’s posts as well.

MaxBlogPress Favicon

Easily add favicon to your blog without editing any wordpress files.

Are you a plugin author? Read how to submit your plugin to us.

Help test the new version of WordPress for iPhone using the iPhone simulator by downloading the latest 1.2beta1 code from the WordPress trac. Details about the features of the new version and the download links are available from the WordPress for iPhone blog. Thank TUAW and The Blog Herald.

A nice roundup of photoblogging themes and plugins available for WordPress was published by WPCandy. Many of the links are collections themselves. Definitely worth a looksee if you are looking for a nice photoblog.

Nathan Rice posted a Definitive guide to Sticky posts in WordPress 2.7 complete with screenshots, style suggestions, code examples and custom loop suggestions. He even outlines a method to ignore stickies completely.

Intense Debate, recently acquired by Automattic, is back with a stronger product and a much more integerated and user friendly WordPress plugin that makes the task of switching back and forth from ID easier and less painful. Let us know if you switched and how it went. Thanks to RWW and a bunch of other sources.

To round off this news round up, we have 8 Common Sense Tips for Writing Clean WordPress Blog Posts. Lots of well illustrated tips on cleaning up your blog posts and making them more presentable for both humans and machines. I think this would be one of those must have bookmarks for people just starting off in blogging with WordPress.

Keith, Andrew, Mark and I discussed the news of the week. With guest contributions to the show, we went in-depth on a number of topics including the icon survey and much more. Don’t forget to tune in to hear our plugin picks of the week. Come back next week for more action packed WordPress discussions!

Ad Copy:

WordPress Weekly is brought to you by the fine advertisers on WeblogToolsCollection.com. Without their continued support, this show would not be possible. If you are interested in advertising on WordPress Weekly, please contact me at wpweekly at gmail dot com..

Stories Discussed:

Project Icon

IntenseDebate Reopens

Drag And Drop Tutorial

Guide To Sticky Posts

10 Tip Optimization Guide

Cool Way To Display Archived Posts

Feedback:

We encourage you to leave a comment whether it be feedback, questions, rants, or corrections then tune in and see if your comment made it on the air! To send us feedback via email, conect us at wpweekly at gmail dot com. In this weeks episode, we covered a comment that was submitted to the blog on a previous episode. We also answer a listener question regarding how to let visitors submit stories to a website without being a registered user.

Plugin Of The Week:

Jeff - WP Advanced Code Editor – Integrates the EasyArea advanced code editor into WordPress. This adds real time syntax highlighting, line numbering, full screen editing, and more to the code editor to the “Add New Post” and “Add New Page” screens. After installation, make sure that the WYSIWYG editor is disabled. WP Advanced Code Editor is not compatible with the WYSIWYG editor. The entire syntax code editor (called EasyArea) was written entirely by Christophe Dolivet.

Keith - Ultimage Google Analytics - Automatically enables the use of GoogleAnalytics’ urchin tracking technology to pull together web stats

WordPress Job Of The Week:

Job published on November 12th 2008. The job description is as follows:

Hello, My name is Dave and I write a pop culture blog called NineDaves.com, out of the NYC area (Flatiron District). My server is Yahoo, and I’ve been with WordPress since I started the blog in July 2008. Since then, I’ve had the same WordPress version. I’m interested in upgrading to a more current version, but I’m nervous. Despite the fact that WordPRess offers detailed “how to’s,” I’m still worried that I don’t understand things properly. Rather than have someone just do it for me, I would like a WordPress expert to teach me to fish.

So - would you be interested in showing me how to upgrade my WordPress before I mess something up and lose all my work? I’d prefer someone to meet me in person and show me how to do it, so if you live in the NYC area, that’s perfect! If not, I can set up a WebEx and phone call.

Visit the job posting for contact information.

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Friday November 21st, 2008 8P.M. EST

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Length Of Episode: 1 Hour 23 Minutes

Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode29.mp3

Listen To Episode #29:

Black Magic

The theme has 2 columns and is based on grungy wooden textures and has a cool top menu which includes RSS. The psd source file of the logo has also been included in the package.

Journalized

Three column theme with six built-in skins, administration interface with support for widgets, tags and gravatars and custom header.

Snailbird Themes

Includes three themes Purple Prose [Demo], Evening Stars [Demo] and Paper Trail [Demo].

John Kolbert of Techlyzer has produced a great screencast explaining how to create the collapsible and movable option boxes within the WordPress 2.7 write new page/post screens. The tutorial starts off by creating a dummy plugin which you then add functions to which give it the draggable/collapsible options within the Administration panel. John provides a sample plugin to use as well as a link to the article on the Codex that explains the add_meta_box function.

This tutorial is mainly for those aspiring plugin authors as well as for those who would like to add this type of functionality to their own plugin. John should rename this video to add_meta_boxes explained in plain English because even I understood and learned a thing or two. Final though is that I would absolutely love to see more screencasts like these in the future and have them embedded into their respective Codex articles. How cool would that be?

New Plugins

Albumize

By organizing your galleries as multiple child pages of one parent page, you can use this plugin to see a preview thumbnail and description of each gallery.

IntenseDebate Comments

IntenseDebate comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog. Build your reader community, increase your comments, & boost pageviews.

WP Cache Inspect

Enables you to inspect how the builtin cache is working.

WP Simple Adsense Insertion

Easy to use Wordpress plugin to insert Google Adsense to your posts, pages and sidebar.

WP Digg This

Selectively adds Digg button to your posts. Use ‘digg’ = ‘1′ custom field in the post to promote.

Draw Comments

This plugin allows your visitors to draw an image as extra comment.

Referrer Detector

Helps your blog detect where the user comes from and automatically displays the corresponding greetings.

Paranoid911

Checks WordPress installation (database and files) for changes and emails admin if any changes took place.

Updated Plugins

All in one Video Pack

This plugin allows you to add an interactive video player that includes an upload/import tool and a web-based video mixer. You can also allow your readers and subscribers to add video comments to your blog posts. (Requires registration to download)

Interactive Video

The plugin enables you to enhance your blog with both basic and advanced video capabilities. Upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix video content, enable video responses, manage and track your video content and much more… (Requires registration to download)

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

PhotoQ Photoblog Plugin

Turns WordPress into a photoblog. Allows queue based photo management, batch uploads and automatic posting of photos at regular intervals.

Theme Switch

With this plugin you can switch to a totally different blog template when you are logged in to your WordPress dashboard.

Digital Statement

Three column, fixed width, feature rich theme with support for Twitter and Flickr. The theme requires the user to follow some setup steps for optimum use.

Pink

Pink and white, two column, fixed width theme with rounded corners.

Circuit

Circuit is a high-contrast, two column, typographically-driven theme for WordPress that is based on the Sandbox theme (so you need both of them).

Ark

Ark is an olive colored 2 column widget-ready WordPress theme

Positie 1

Four column theme with three sidebars - 1 widget-ready and 1 for Google Adsense.

Even though WordPress works pretty well out of the box, there is still a number of optimization tips that can be accomplished to make WordPress function that much better. Vladimir Prelovac has done an excellent job describing ten optimization tips that you can use on your own WordPress installation. The tips and techniques range from optimizing database tables to implementing caching. There should be at least one or two tips within this article that everyone can implement on their own blog.

Here is a sample for you to chew on:

Tip #1: If you are expecting a Digg Front Page you are likely to exceed your current limit of maximum concurrent MySQL connections which is among the prime reasons a site failing a Digg traffic spike.

You can prepare by increasing this number to about 250 using this line in the config file.

max_connections = 250

Check out the full list here (10 Best Tips For WordPress Optimization)

New Plugins

osCommerce

This pulgin/widget enable you to pull the category and product listing from you osCommerce site.

WP-HoneyPot

WP-HoneyPot enables you to add a hidden link on your blog in one of several locations that will change randomly to ensure that spammers are less able to adapt to the solution.

Shollu

This plugin will show information about pray (shollu) times in your place.

Author Birthdays

The Author Birthdays plugin will display in the sidebar or footer a list of authors born on the current day. There is also a feature which allows you to see all authors born in a given month.

CatFeed

Adds category, tag and comment feed auto-discovery links. Category feed links are added only to category views, tag feed links to tag views and commen

Scriblio

Scriblio enables faceted searching/browsing features and metadata tools that turn WordPress into a library catalog or digital archive.

Eventr

Eventr Plugin lets you create events and provide your visitors with a form that lets them register for the event.

WP RSS Images

Include images in your WordPress RSS.

OfflineMode

Display a splash page to tell your visitor that your site is currently under maintenance.

Comment Approval Notification

Sends an email to the comment author when their comment gets approved (only if it’s held for moderation).

Updated Plugins

Custom Admin Branding

Custom Admin Branding Plugin allows you to seamlessly re-brand the WordPress login screen as well as the admin header and footer with your own custom logos or images.

WP Development Utilities

Plugin that extends WordPress by providing a set of functions. (Page in Italian)

General Stats

Counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages.

Global Translator

Global Translator is a free and open source WordPress Plugin which is able to automatically translate your blog in 34 different languages

Are PayPal

This plugin is used to monetize WordPress blog content using PayPal. It is designed to sell your knowledge.