Weblog Tools Collection

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Over the weekend, I caught word of a brand new WordPress theme generator that was written by Ryan Hellyer of Pixopoint.com. The generator lets you configure various aspects of a WordPress theme such as the sidebars, headings, footer, etc. Once you’re finished, you can export the files and use the theme on your own blog.

I got in touch with Ryan over the weekend and this is what he had to say.

What is the PixoPoint template generator and what is it capable of doing?

The PixoPoint template generator is an automated web based system for creating WordPress themes. By using the control bar on the left hand side of the template generator you are able to modify a wide range of features on the website. I’ve included some standard templates to start people off, but the sky is really the limit. By changing images, colours, widths, number of sidebars, menus etc. you can create an infinite number of WordPress themes.

This isn’t the first time the community has had access to a WordPress theme generator. What makes this one better than previous attempts?

I thought I’d created the first one initially. It wasn’t until I was trying to come up with a name that I thought of googling ‘template generator’ and found a few different generators for various pieces of software, including WordPress. The template generators I found had far less features than the PixoPoint template generator though. Not only are you able to modify more of the theme details, like text styling, colours etc. with the PixoPoint template generator, but it is also capable of creating a larger variety of basic layouts including flexible width and left, right or center aligned layouts. Our generator allows for the creation of one, two or three column designs.

Does this generator contain any premium features? If so, please clearly outline what is premium and what is not.

I’ve tried to keep as many features free as possible. In fact you can create any design you like for free, there are no premium ‘design’ features in the PixoPoint template generator.

However … I do need to make a living somehow. We currently have a premium subscription feature on our site which allows users access to a premium support forum. When logged into the site as a premium member, you are able to save and then upload your designs at a later date which is very useful for those who would like to modify their design after they’ve created it. Themes exported by premium members also include up to 11 widget areas, whereas regular themes only have two (left and right sidebars). The cost for premium membership is US$50 per month.

Our premium membership also includes access to our premium dropdown menu CSS generator which is very popular with users of our multi-level navigation plugin.

How detailed of a theme can one create through this particular theme generator?

Very. I’ve tried to add as many different features as possible and I intend to add more later. To see what the template generator can do, simply try the different standard templates which are available in the ‘template’ menu. If there are any features users would like added then they should post a request in our support forum. I’m using a theme created with PixoPoint template generator on my personal blog.

How does one create a theme that they can then use on their own blog?

Create your design in the template generator by changing the various options, then click ‘Upload/save’ and choose the ‘Export WordPress’ option. An option box will appear which lets you change a few options specific to your theme and when you click ’submit’ your design will be compiled with all of your theme files and any images you specified in a zip file which you will be prompted to download. From there you can treat the theme just like any other WordPress theme you may download. You can even submit your new design to the WordPress themes repository.

Are there any features that the generator doesn’t have now that you plan on adding in the future?

I intend to add support for other software, in particular I’d like to add support for bbPress and SilverStripe.

An image uploader is also in planning. Currently you can’t upload images directly to the template generator. If you want to use different images to the defaults, you need to link to an image elsewhere on the web (images uploaded to your WordPress installation are fine).

Other than those major features, I intend to add more options to choose from and hopefully allow for quite complicated designs including magazine style themes.

Considering this is a brand new project for you, where do you want end users to go in order to provide feedback and bug reports?

Our support forum is the best place to file bug reports and provide feedback. If you find a bug, please attach the XML file which comes with your theme. This XML file contains all of the information I need to track what your problem is. You can also save these XML files directly from the template generator.

The template generator has had almost no testing whatsoever, so I’m 100% certain I’m going to be flooded with bug reports. But rest assured I’ll try my best to fix them all as soon as possible.

I don’t intend to provide free support for customisations of the exported themes, but if users want to request new features to be added to the template generator then I’ll definitely consider each one.

WPContempo

An elegant 2 column, widget-ready WordPress theme featuring a clean design great for blogs of all kinds.

Scrapbook

Single column, fixed width widget and gravatar ready theme with threaded and paged comments.

Norther Lights

Two column theme with a beautiful background featuring the Northern Lights

Photo Bob

A two column simple WordPress theme with a nice big photo.

At approximately 19:38:33 on December 1, 2008 Ryan Boren became the owner of the 10,000th changeset to the WordPress code. This particular code set change was a re-ordering of font families for Windows font selection that was initially patched by Matt Thomas. There has been a discussion taking place within the WP-Testers mailing list that the Bitstream font is horrible and that it needed to be replaced by Verdana. Looks like they received their wish.

By the way, the first Changeset to appear since the WordPress team began using Trac happened on April 1, 2003 (6 years ago). The changeset involved a new respository initialized by cvs2svn and the author is anonymous.

cvs2svn is a program that can be used to migrate a CVS repository to Subversion (otherwise known as “SVN”) or git. Documentation:

A hearty congratulations goes out to not only the core development team, but to all those who have submitted patches that in turn were committed to the core.

New Plugins

WP-CopyProtect

A simple plugin that will disabled right-click and prevent selection of text on your blog.

Ciao Box

Allows the user to display a Ciao Box in the sidebar.

Autodownload

Autodownload is a WordPress plugin that enables your blog to provide downloadable files either in your posts or pages.

Show authors without posts

Shows the authors page even if the author has no post.

Updated Plugins

Cronjob Control

This plugin shows you all active WP cronjobs (scheduled tasks) of your weblog in the “Site Admin” area and if you want, you can stop the cronjob(s).

ProjectManager

This plugin is a data manager for any recurrent datasets. It can be used to manage and list a DVD collection,to to present portraits (e.g. athletes of a team) or anything you can think of.

Collapsing Archives

This plugin uses Javascript to dynamically expand or collapse the set of months for each year and posts for each month in the archive listing.

phpbb_recent_topics

This plugin grabs your recent phpBB forum topics for you to display in WordPress.

Send2Press

Displays news items from selectable Send2Press RSS feeds, inline, as a widget or in a theme. Multiple feeds allowed. Local caching.

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.

NoFollow Free

NoFollow Free removes the “nofollow” attribute from your WordPress blog’s comments (precisely from the author’s links) and/or from the comments text links and it inserts (if you want) an image band at the top of your pages with the phrase: “NOFOLLOW FREE”.

WP Wall

WP Wall is a “Wall” widget that appears in your blog’s side bar. Readers can add a quick comment about the blog as a whole, and the comment will appear in the sidebar immediately (without reloading the page).

Art Direction

This plugin allows you to have global archive and single page archive per post styles.

Lifestream

Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites.

For quite awhile now, I’ve been monitoring a specific blog post from May 15th, 2007 which is a tutorial on how to migrate from Drupal 5 to WordPress 2. Many things have changed since then between both pieces of software and thus, the scripts provided on the site will not work.

Every now and then, someone publishes a comment that contains a link to an updated version of the script to work with newer versions of Drupal and WordPress. DovDox is the latest blog to publish an updated portion of the script albeit with a caveat.

Taking my usual hacksaw-and-duct-tape approach, I simply deleted the portions that didn’t work. That means my version moved all of the posts and comments to the new blog, but didn’t preserve any of their categories. Drupal’s ridiculous “taxonomy” system just isn’t easy to map onto Wordpress’s much more rational categories and tags, and in any case the hard part of the move was getting the posts and comments over.

DovDox takes the script and makes it so that the content and comments are transfered between a Drupal 5.9 installation into a WordPress 2.6 install but due to the taxonomy system, categories are not migrated. If you choose to use the script provided by DovDox, be aware that it may cause a loss of data so be sure to back up everything before you do anything.

I wanted to put the call out to the community to see if anyone knew of a script or an individual that is consitently producing a migration script to move from Drupal to WordPress. If so, I’ll edit this post and add those resources to the bottom. I’ll also try to place those resources in the WordPress Codex.

New Plugins

Add to Feed

Add to Feed is a feed enhancement plugin that allows you to easily add a copyright notice and custom text/HTML to your WordPress blog feed. The custom text can be entered before and/or after the content of your blog post.

Amazon Plugin

Amazon shop plugin that allows a blogger to add products with Amazon associate ID embedded in it and earn revenue by showing Amazon products right into the blog posts.

Related Blog Links

This WordPress plugin will display the blog links related to your posts and pages.

Techytube XHTML

This plugin allows you to embed YouTube videos on your blog.

ZD YouTube FLV Player

Display FLV and YouTube Video in you blog in a Custom Player.

WordPress Gallery Slideshow

This plugin adds the JW Image Rotator to the WordPress Media.

Easy AdSenser

Easy AdSenser provides a very easy way to insert Google AdSense code into your existing blog posts.

Feed Comments Number

Add an image that displays the number of comments to your feed items.

Updated Plugins

Formbuilder

The FormBuilder plugin is a WordPress plugin that allows the blog or website owner to easily and quickly create forms for display on their sites.

SendFeed

The SendFeed Plugin for WordPress allows you to send your latest post from your RSS feed to an external Mailing List Manager in both text and HTML formats.

AmazonFeed

This plugin will allow you to turn your WordPress website or blog into a money making machine while at the same time offering valuable additional related materials to your visitors. It will automatically search for and display products from Amazon.com which are specifically related to the topics you write about.

Quiz

Authors can write a new Quiz question and answer for each post, fall back on a default question, or have no question at all. Commenters must correctly answer the question before their comment is submitted.

CaPa Protect

Protects Categories, Pages and Posts for specific users & anonymous visitor.

Side Content

Side Content enables you to create widgets which have different content on different pages.

Easy LaTeX

Easy LaTeX provides a very easy way to display math and equations in your posts.

WP-DONATORS

Wp-Donators offer a smart donation function to auto-leave the sponsor information in a container after payment. Sponsor can donate and submit name/URL or TextLink ad, the information of the latest donors are displayed in the cloud. The more a person donations, the bigger their link will be.

Useful 404’s

Create more useful 404 error pages, including email notifications for bad links.

Episode 31 of WordPress Weekly featured a special 1 hour 26 minute interview with none other than Lisa Sabin Wilson, the author of WordPress For Dummies. Keith and I grilled Lisa on the topics of:

• Writing a book for a piece of software which has an extremely fast development cycle
• How different versions affect the publishing of the book
• WordPress For Dummies The Second Edition
• Lisa’s thoughts on WordPress 2.7
• Lisa’s explanation on permalinks and slugs
• Lisa’s take on premium themes versus free themes
• much, much, more.

Keith and I really enjoyed our time with Lisa and wish her the best for the second edition of WordPress For Dummies.

Announcements: The two lucky recipients who will each receive a signed copy of WordPess For Dummies 2nd Edition are Chris Thompson and Lenire.

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Friday December 5th, 2008 8P.M. EST

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Length Of Episode: 1 Hour 26 Minutes

Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode31.mp3

Listen To Episode #31:

Journalized v2

Journalized is a one, two or three column theme available in six different themes, with threaded and paged comments with an administration interface.

Wasteland

It’s a 5 Column (main content, 2 sidebars and 2 top sections), widget-ready fixed width theme in soothing Creme and Brown colors featuring an author box, author info page, gravatars and with Custom Archives, Sitemap and full width No Sidebars page templates.

Underground

Fixed width, three columns, widget ready theme

Weblog Magazine Theme

Widget ready, three columns, fixed width theme with adsense / advert ready areas which are easily edited for ease of use and monetization. Available in 10 colors.

Here in the states, it is Thanksgiving. The time of year when most stop to think about what it is they are thankful for. In keeping with that tradition, I wanted to give my thanks to the WordPress development team but the thanks doesn’t end there. I also pass on my thanks to each and every one of you who have contributed code to the WordPress project. I’m no coder and I appreciate those who are to help guide me around the more interesting parts of WordPress. A very special thanks goes out to plugin and theme developers. You folks really enable end users to take WordPress up to the next level. I would also like to give thanks and recognize those who cover WordPress within the community. These are sites which keep users informed, provide great information, and increase the end users knowledge of what this piece of software is capable of doing. Each time I go to work on the weekend, I remind myself how thankful I am to those who produce podcasts centered around WordPress. Without these podcasts, my 9PM - 5AM shift would be extremely boring.

Despite everything that is going on within the world of content publishing, the fact remains that WordPress is still the easiest way to publish content onto the web. For that alone, I think is worthy of being thankful.

If you feel thankful for WordPress or any aspect of the project, join in the tradition of giving thanks by means of commenting. Tell us what it is your thankful for as it relates to WordPress.

New Plugins

WP-Niceforms

Niceforms is a script that will replace the most commonly used form elements with custom designed ones.

K2 Hook Up

K2 Hook Up exposes the seven hooks in K2 theme to the admin as friendly input boxes, where you place any HTML, CSS, JavaScript or PHP code (including template tags, other WordPress functions, or even code from other plugins) that you like.

Custom Post Template

Provides a drop-down to select different templates for posts from the post edit screen. The templates replace single.php for the specified post.

SuperSlider-Show

Animated Gallery slideshow uses Mootools 1.2 javascript replaces WordPress gallery with a slideshow.

Use Google Libraries

A number of the javascript libraries distributed with WordPress are also hosted on Google’s AJAX Libraries API. This plugin allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution network side of Google’s AJAX Library API, rather than serving these files from your WordPress install directly.

Chitika | Premium

This plugin will automate adding Chitika|Premium to your blog posts. Chitika|Premium is an AdSense Alternative/Compatible search targeted ad solution.

AmazonFeed

This plugin enables you to automatically advertise products from Amazon.com which are specifically related to the topic you are writing about.

Addynamo

Display Addynamo ads before, after or in the middle of a post without modify the theme. This plugin inserts and embeds the code into your website.

Simple Social Bookmarking Plugin

Will add bookmark icon for each post and page to share with popular social bookmarking sites.

Updated Plugins

Webcollage

Displays a collage or quilt of screen shots of the websites that you link or specify in your WordPress blogroll. After installing and activating the plugin, insert the tag “[webcollage]” (without quotes) in any post or page where you’d like to display the collage. Webcollage uses websnapr.com’s screen shot generation service.

FTP Plugin for WP Database Backup Plugin

This plugin adds a fourth way to save the database backup files from the WP DB Backup Plugin of Austin Matzko, Scott Merril and other authors. With the standard WP Database Backup plugin you can save the database tables of your weblog a file. This backup file can stored on the server of your weblog, send to an email account or saved (manually) to your local harddisk.

Viper’s Video Quicktags

Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more. Your site will even stay (X)HTML valid unlike with the code provided by most video sites.

JS AntiSpam

Simple antispam plugin without questions on Javascript-solution. Without JS-Solutions give it an textbox.

Breadcrumb NavXT

Adds breadcrumb navigation showing the visitor’s path to their current location.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

Stumble! for WordPress

Stumble! for WordPress extends WordPress to support a “random article” feature, similar to StumbleUpon’s StumbleThru and Wikipedia’s (Mediawiki’s) random article feature.

CompactRSS

This plug-in makes it possible to exclude certain parts of your posts in your feeds.

Sirup

Sirup is a magazine and blog layout for WordPress 2.5 and above. It has a fixed width, is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, supports Gravatars and Sidebar Widgets. You can customize the appearance of your site with an options page.

Quoting You!

A light two column design with sleek and clean lines and cool colors.

Olivia

Two column, gravatar and widget ready theme with seven different styles.

 Equilibrium

Clean and simple magazine styled widget ready theme.

CognoBlue

Three column, widget ready, with right and left sidebar SEO theme optimized for Google Adsense.

Floral Prints

A light three column design with an elegant topper with floral prints and cute little butterfly subjects.

Rainy Days

A rainy two column design full of the cool wet air of a fresh thunderstorm.

First on the list is a large collection of WordPress video tutorials, tips and tricks ranging from the very basic to the very advanced from SpeckyBoy. This list also includes our very own Weblog Tools Videos which lists various WordPress and blogging videos, tips, tutorials and reviews.

Noupe has listed 11 new “Most Wanted” hacks for WordPress in a nice illustrated list. The new hacks include protecting your pictures from hotlinking and Custom Google Search for WordPress.

WPMU has received 37 nominations for their WordPress MU awards for 2008 and are looking for people to help choose the winners. View the nominations and vote for them.

Michael Kubler has written up a tutorial to make WordPress captioned images work as expected on your WordPress theme. Captioned images were introduced in WordPress 2.6 (I believe). This blog had the same problem till we managed to wrangle the extra CSS code for it to work.

Download Squad is linking to a Firefox add-on that allows a blogger to post screenshots/screengrabs directly to a WordPress blog. This can be very useful if you do a lot of reviews and such where you post screengrabs. Be wary of bugs.

New Plugins

Strip

Strip! is a WordPress plugin that allows you hide links from a given comment. Unlike other plugins that do the same purpose, you can restore the links anytime you want.

JournalPress

A cross-poster supporting multiple LiveJournal Server journals.

Speed Test

This widget makes it possible that any visitor of your blog can test his bandwidth speed. The widget ist hosted on Amazon S3 storage and checks the speed from the nearest server worldwide. (Page in German)

Quizzin

Quizzin lets you add quizzes to your blog. This plugin is designed to be as easy to use as possible. Quizzes, questions and answers can be added from the admin side. This will appear in your post if you add a small HTML snippet in your post.

My Tag Cloud

My tag cloud provides you with a widget that actually gives you the ability to list the tags of your posts in a diiferent way than a tag cloud.

Exhibit to WP Gallery

Convert your ancient Exhibit 1.1b galleries to modern WordPress attachments / galleries

No Follow Tags In Posts [REMOVED DUE TO SPONSORED LINKS]

No Follow Tags In Posts Links searches for links to large websites that use the ‘nofollow’ tags for external links, and puts the same tag on your links to those sites.

Gravatar Shortcode

This is a simple plugin that just lets you use a shortcode in your WordPress Pages or Posts to quickly and easily insert a Gravatar.

Delete-Revision

Delete revision post from Database.

Krusty MSIE Body Classes

Once activated this plugin will use the ‘body_class’ filter to add Internet Explorer browser classes to the body tag of the sites front end, (public), pages. The reason this is needed is because Internet Explorer has a long history of incorrectly rendering css styles.

Updated Plugins

Hide Admin Icons

Hide Admin Icons hides the admin icons when the menu bar is expanded. The icons remain visible when the menu is in its collapsed state.

Featuring CountComments

Counts the number of comments by user IDs or author names (display name).

GD Star Rating

Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating system for pages and/or posts in your blog. Also includes the widget for displaying votes and rating statistics for all posts and pages with votes.

ZdMultilang

ZdMultilang is a Multilingual plugin for WordPress allowing you to blog in more than one language. You can define multiple languages and translate posts/tags/categories using the interface that will be added to your blog’s administration panel.

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.

WP Widget Cache

Cache the output of your blog widgets. Usually it will significantly reduce the SQL queries to your database and speed up your site.

Secure WordPress

Secure your WordPress Installation with small functions.

ProjectManager

This plugin can be used to manage any number of projects with recurrent datasets (e.g. portrait system, dvd collection)

This Friday at 8PM EST on WordPress Weekly, our special one hour guest will be Lisa Sabin Wilson who is the author of the book, WordPress For Dummies. During the show, we plan on discussing how hard it is to write about a piece of software that moves 100mph in print format, Lisa’s background in web design and what it is like to theme for WordPress, WordPress For Dummies The Second Edition and much more.

This Thursday is Thanksgiving here in the states. On Friday, I want to give my thanks to those of you who continue to show your support while telling your friends about the show and downloading it on a regular basis. On Friday, we will be giving away two signed copies of WordPress For Dummies 2nd Edition. Lisa will sign the copies and ship them once the new edition has been published. So how will we give these away?

One book will be given away to a lucky caller while the other copy will be given away to a lucky recipient in the chat room. So be sure to join us live this Friday, for a fun filled discussion related to the book as well as WordPress. (Special thanks to Lisa for donating the two signed copies.)

New Plugins

Quartz

Show random quotes/tips/links/pictures/something to visitors. These quotes can be added from the admin side. You can add the quotes one by one - or you can bulk import the stuff from a text file.

YouVersion

This plugin takes marked-up scripture references and pulls the verses from YouVersion.

CMS Navigation

Out-of-the-box support for full CMS navigation in your WordPress site including drop down menus, breadcrumbs trail and sidebar navigation.

Wordpress Politically Correct

Turns any blog into a haven of safe politically correct content.

Assign Missing Categories

Assigns the default category to all posts that have no category after you’ve converted your categories to tags.

Artists ilike

Displays the artists you have “ilike’d” from your ilike.com profile on your blog.

Updated Plugins

zeList

zeList is a plugin to run a directory on a WordPress power website.

Get Flickr Thumbnails

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

WordPress Link Directory

WordPress Link Directory is a link directory plugin for WordPress which allows you to keep a directory of links and allow other webmasters to add their link to your site.

Thumbnail For Excerpts

Thumbnail For Excerpts allow easily, without any further work, to add thumbnails wherever you show excerpts.

Snazzy Archives

Snazzy Archives is a visualization plugin for your WordPress site featuring an unique way to display all your posts.

Live Blogroll

Shows a number of ‘recent posts’ for each link in your Blogroll in a popup box, using Ajax.

AmazonSimpleAdmin

Lets you easily embed Amazon products into your posts by use of [asa]ASIN[/asa] tags. Supports the use of templates.

Collapsing Categories

This plugin uses JavaScript to dynamically expand or collapsible the set of posts for each category.

Smart YouTube

Smart Youtube plugin allows you to insert full featured YouTube videos into your post, comments and in RSS feed.