Weblog Tools Collection

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Last Tuesday, May 28, I released an update to the Sandbox theme, version 0.9. Since releasing the Sandbox back in August of 2006 Andy and I have received lots of good feedback. I called it “the theme for themers” and it has had a really positive influence on theme design within the WordPress community.

There have been more than a few themes/designs built on the Sandbox and released—and for good reason. Its highly semantic, dynamic structure make it immensely easy to design for, not to mention all the features built into its markup, like Microformats.

So I thought it was a good time for a new theme competition—or rather a “designs” competition. It has been around two years since the last successful WordPress theme competition (participants of the competitions in 2006 will roll their eyes and would include me). We’ve seen the launch of an official theme viewer, two major WordPress releases (2.1 and 2.2), two plugin competitions, and so on. So I think it’s time.

Now you probably have a thousand questions running through your brains. Let me try and answer at least a few of them.

Question: Why have a theme competition? The last two failed. Don’t you know anything?
Answer: Well, this isn’t really a “theme” competition. It’s a designs competition, similar to Alex King’s WordPress CSS Styles held back in February of 2004, that is only for style sheets (and images, of course). Folks won’t be competing to show off PHP know-how, or scripting abilities, etc., but how well they can design, use CSS, be creative, and so on.

Question: Uh, that’s boring. Every design will be pretty much the same, won’t they?
Answer: Not in the slightest. See, the Sandbox is special. It has these dynamic class-generating functions that sprinkle neat semantic classes throughout the markup, which means each page is the same, but it is also a little different. Using combinations of these classes means that style sheets can easily go beyond just arranging content into layouts by making the design relate to the content. There are so many classes that almost any layout, any design, etc., is achievable. For example, you could style posts by categories, .category-asides{…} vs. .category-important-news{…}, uniquely.

Question: Okay, that’s pretty slick. But why should I spend my time in this competition?
Answer: First, you could win more than a handful of cash. From the day one we have US$500 in cash to distribute to first, second, and third place winners (there will be a runner-up who will receive an honorarium). We’re getting sponsors to help us increase the total cash pot to US$1000. So the first-place winner will hopefully walk away US$500 richer (but at least US$250 richer). Secondly, you could be crowned a top blog designer in our little blogosphere. Not a bad title to parade around. And thirdly, you can solidify your designer creds just by participating and getting your bio tossed up on the website.

Question: Sweet, but didn’t I just read something about a plugin competition? And didn’t I read that right here on this blog?
Answer: Indeed you did. I was actually in the process of smoothing out the details for this competition, getting everything in order, when Mark announced the plugins competition 2.0. I emailed him immediately, somewhat frantically. But I feel like these two competitions differ from one another in all the right ways. Plugin developers are primarily concerned with PHP and scripting. This competition, as mentioned before, is purely about CSS and design. Put them together and you have everything that makes WordPress lovely.

Question: Word. But I blog on WordPress.com. Am I going to be left on the margins of the community yet again?
Answer: Not at all. The new version of the Sandbox will be available to blogs there soon (details to come). Furthermore, unless you like punching yourself in the face, you’ll probably want to install WordPress locally to do your designing. When the competition finishes and all the designs are available, you can rejoice in knowing you’ll be able to use the designs immediately (you’ll need the custom CSS upgrade, though).

Question: Good news indeed. Sign me up!
Answer: Sign yourself up, but not quite yet. All the details you could possibly wish for will be posted on www.plaintxt.org tomorrow, June 1, 2007. So go there tomorrow and you’ll find a lovely little post waiting to direct you to the competition blog.

Question: Well, I’m not going to submit a design, so perhaps there is something else I can do?
Answer: Indeed. If you have a design background or another appropriate qualification, you could possibly serve as a judge. Or you can simply purchase a sponsorship to show your support.

Question: Wait right there—purchase something? Uh, we’re talking about WordPress, right? So why would I do that?
Answer: First of all, you can support and encourage participation by helping raise the cash prize pot. If you’re active in the WordPress community or use WordPress, these designs can be of real benefit to you. Support our designers. Anyhow, there will be different levels of sponsorships, different prices, but basically you’ll be getting your link and/or image up on the competition blog for everyone to see. People will love and respect you.

Question: I could use some love and respect.
Answer: We all could, my friend. We all could.

So all the details will be posted tomorrow on www.plaintxt.org. Participants will have about two months create their designs and submit them. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Details, terms, etc., will all be available very soon. Until then. ;-D

Big news this evening is the launch of Google Gears which is an “Open Source Toolkit for offline web apps”. Pretty neat idea with lots of possibilities. TechCrunch has a nice writeup and so does Scoble. After some initial apprehension, I decided to download Google Gears and try the posterchild Google Reader app. After following a few steps of relatively simple instructions, I had downloaded all of the new items from Google Reader to my computer for offline viewing. This will be an awesome tool for travelling or to catch up on some extra reading during lunch at the local greasy spoon. I can see a lot of possibilities for Gears. A blog posting app that caches posts offline and then submits them when a connection is made is the first one that comes to mind. The new mashup editor has lots of possibilities as well. While we are on the topic of news readers, why don’t they come equipped with a search feature? Anyone know how to search for a news item/link/phrase etc. in Google Reader?

You can create free screencasts with this new web tool from Screencast-O-Matic. I created one of me writing this post. The only catch is that the screen casting tool is browser based and it looks like the limit is 1024 x 768. After saving the file as a Quicktime movie, it was 34.9 MB for 2 minutes of video saved at the original 1024 x 768 resolution. Very Web 1.0 but useful nonetheless.

Jason Calacanis launched Mahalo today with a whole bunch of hoopla and a lot of private funding. The intent is to create a search engine where the results are modified and tweaked by humans to help humans and the claim is that it will make for more poignant and useful results. My claim is that it will also bring a lot of ethics questions into play; not that machines cannot be fixed. It all comes down to trust. It looks like a mssive wiki that is for profit. The scale is baffling to me but it is crazy enough that it just might work until the VCs call in their warrants.

If you or someone you know is using the Vistered Little theme from Windy Road, a vulnerability has been found and you need to upgrade your theme to version 1.7.3 as soon as possible  (or revert back to the another theme for the time being and delete the vistered little theme folder). The latest version that fixes the bug/vulnerability is 1.7.3 while versions 1.6a through 1.7.2 are all vulnerable.

How Scoble reads 622 RSS feeds every morning: Vlog of how Scoble organizes his feeds using Google Feedreader and filter and sifts through them to find the relevant information he wants to track or read about. The number of feeds he follows is staggering to me. I read approximately 200 feeds and rotate them freuqently. In spite of the smaller number, I have a hard time keeping up with the rush of information from feeds and other sources. Although in my defense, my 24″ vertically rotated monitor really helps with the reading (I run two monitors, 1 x 20″, 1 x 24″ rotated, Ultramon) and blogging is not my day job. Also of interest, is the Better Google Reader Firefox extension that I find quite useful. I started using Google Reader a few months ago and have yet to switch back. The linked video was choppy for me but Scoble’s methods might be useful to compulsive feed readers.

Impact is a fixed-width, 2 column theme with right sidebar, compatible with WP 2.2

Dream in Infrared is a fluid width, light on dark theme with lots of CMS features.

“Soho” is a widget-ready Wordpress theme designed with a three column fluid layout. Demo. Two mini loops are retrieving their posts from different categories at the frontpage. One loop in the main post showing latest post, one loop beneath the main area showing one post.

“300” is a widget-ready Wordpress theme with three columnd fluid layout and an edgy footer from 300. Two mini loops are retrieving their posts from different categories at the frontpage. One loop in the main post showing latest post, one loop beneath the main area showing one post.

Deziner Folio is a two column, fixed width theme with support for several plugins.

Rocking is a very light colored 3 column theme. (Contains Sponsored Links)

FeatureMe is an easy way to manage and show a featured entries list.

DJ-Email-Publish will send the post to your other blogs (such as msn spaces) via email.

babel allows you to write your blog in multilanguage, and switch between these with a simple click on a flag.

MBLA is an acronym for gMyBlogLog Avatarsh and is a plugin for Wordpress. It can add avatars from MyBlogLog to posts and comments.

The Copyright Plugin automatically keeps your WordPress page copyright notices up to date.

1 Bit Audio Player is a very simple and lightweight Adobe Flash MP3 player with automatic JavaScript insertion. It’s main purpose is to act as a quick in-page preview for audio files you link to from your blog.

Add Script Hook finds all hooks in your themes and allows to add some javascript

IMM Meta Tags allows you to edit and manage your meta tags.

Comment Quictags Reloaded is a modified version of Comment Quicktags fixed for WordPress 2.2

Post Updated NG is a WordPress plugin that displays the last modified date and time for a post

WP Pingdom brings the power of Pingdom’s automatic site monitoring to your Wordpress blog, allowing you to include your uptime statistics on your blog in textual or graphical form.

Clean Archives is designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion that’s Search Engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar.

Spiritual Journal is a two Column, widget ready, sharp and clean theme with a notebook feel, designed to be a personal journal for pastors, ministers and other believers.

Soveryn is a three column, fixed width, widget ready theme.

Greed is a 3 to 5 columns hybrid theme with 10 widget-ready sidebars, fixed-fluid width, rotatable columns, switchable banner and colors (via theme options page). It’s compatible with WordPress 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 and is also compatible with over two dozen plugins.

Velle Elle is a 2 column theme with pink and white colour and talk bubble sidebar.

LoveTime is a pink layout, 2 column with right sidebar, header and footer theme. (Contains Sponsored Links)

Darkstripe is a three column, fluid theme. (Contains Sponsored Links)

One Night in Paris is a single column, fixed width theme. (Contains Sponsored Links)

Ygo Sea is a 3 column wordpress theme with cool see type look and feel, with a long content filled tail. (Contains Sponsored Links)

VisEstate a 2 column theme, loosely inspired by Windows Vista, and made under the advice of a professional real estate agent. (Contains Sponsored Links)

Writing Secure WordPress Plugins: This is an important topic and with the upcoming plugin competition, I would really like to highlight the importance of securing your Wordpress plugins. This article explains the security features built into Wordpress and its plugin framework and discusses the most commonly used items including attribute_escape and wp_nonce and how to use them in your plugins. This is an essential read for plugin developers if you are not building security into your plugins.

Web 2.0 free button maker: After the success of the Stripe Generator and the Ajax Loading Gif Generator, here is a Web 2.0 Button Maker that lets you upload your own icon and build gel buttons for your site or blog. I agree with Mashable that the script is not very Web 2.0 ish itself since you have to “Apply Changes” every time you make a change but it is fun nonetheless. I tried building a PNG with the flame logo of weblogtoolscollection.com but I was spending so much time on it, I just gave up and made something simple.

It turns out that we like “generators” on WeblogToolsCollection.com!

Plugin
Star Rating for Reviews

Description
Star Rating for Reviews is a plugin made for blog authors that post reviews on their blogs. This plugin can help the authors to insert pretty inline rating stars based on the score they assign using intuitive, inline [rating:] tags. This plugin can also calculate and output overall ratings for you based on all previous scores you have assigned, useful for reviews that have multiple categories or an album review where each track is assigned a score.

Features

• uses simple, intuitive tags to generate kawaii inline rating stars for your posts
• supports versatile rating systems
• supports text only output for RSS
• automatically calculates and displays overall ratings, if desired
• supports storing rating scores automatically into database
• supports outputting list of reviews sortable by date or by rating scores
• supports custom star images
• supports custom prefixes and suffixes for your own CSS class
• supports globally forced star count for consistency
• uses as many stars as you want!
• standards compliant i.e. XHTML valid

Future Plans:

• Weighted calculation for overall scores
• Restrict list of reviews returned to specific categories when calling sr_getreviews()
• hReview microformat friendly (not sure if this is doable)

Review

Star Rating for Review allows your visitors to rate, as well as allows you to rate category-wise and it then calculates the overall score.

One good feature is the flexibility of the number of stars that you would like the review to be rated against.

It also supposed the automatic calculation of overall ratings and then store the scores in the database. This has been kept optional by the author for those who aren’t interested.

If you would like to display something other than stars, then the plugin gives you that option as well.

The ability to list reviews by date or rating, allows your site visitors to find the highly rated reviews easily.

One thing I like about this is the optional insertion of the rating stars. Most other plugins force the rating across all posts. If you are running a blog where you optionally review certain items while the rest contain posts you don’t want ratings on, then this plugin fulfils that criteria. You can insert the [rating] tag within your post and insert the stars for rating purposes.

If you are rating an album, users can rate individual songs, and the rating across all songs are taken to calculate the rating of the album.

As usual, is anyone using this plugin? How does it compare to other rating plugins?

Ambient Glo is a Web 2.0 sleek, widget ready, three column theme with a modern, crisp look.

Com64 is a fixed-width, 2 column with right sidebar theme, enabled for widgets and compatible with WP 2 upwards.

Pretty Pink Celebrity is a two column, widget ready theme ideal for a girly blog.

Daleri Dark is a dark and wide, two column, fixed width, widget ready theme.

A Method of Life is a two column blue theme with adsense integration. (Contains Sponsored Links)

Blunge is a two column, fixed width theme with a changeable header. (Contains Sponsored Links)

YGo2.0 is a two column theme with neat and clean layout with big readable font with black and white as dominant color. (Contains Sponsored Links)

Empire is a fixed width, two column brown theme. (Contains Sponsored Links)

PicasaWebSho will show some or random or all of your PicasaWeb album.

WP CPanel Email Login lets you log in directly into your CPanel Email from WordPress.

Skypi a widget to show a Skype-Button for direct dialing in your sidebar.

Adsense Manager allows you to create, modify and position Adsense Ads from within the Wordpress admin panel.

TinyMCEComments turns the comment field from a primitive into a WYSIWYG editor, using the internal TinyMCE library bundled with WordPress 2.0 or up.

wpSEO rewrites your blog title, META description and META keywords so these are more user and search engine friendly. (Page in German)

Is everyone ready for another Wordpress Plugin Competition? I know I am, especially with all the cool stuff going on around Wordpress development, this would be a good time to get the ball rolling again. This time I have some help (thanks Ajay), more readers, maybe some more sponsors, more prizes and we hope to see lots of good code, fun projects, meet lots of nice people and help the Wordpress community along the way.
Prizes will be determined very soon. If you would like to sponsor a prize, 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 1st of June and will last till the end of July.

Rather than categories for prizes, this time we will do a multi level judging for a first second and third place. The plugins should be officially submitted through email and the Plugin Competition Blog 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 with Ajay and myself taking two of the spots. I hate herding judges and will probably hand pick one or two more people.

All code must be GPL and should be available for download through the Competition Blog. 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. Plugins can also be made available through the Wordpress Extend pages and linked back from the blog. In essence, the Plugin Competition Blog is the vehicle of communication for all contestants.

Some relevant details:

• Running time for competition = 2 months starting the 1st of June till the 31st of July.
• True Wordpress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users.
• You cannot submit plugins that have been released already.
• All plugins require documentation as in the Wordpress Extend pages.
• Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
• Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at my sole discretion.

More details to be added with time.

Stay tuned.

Victoria is a magazine-style Wordpress theme with a classic feel, based on the DP Shiny Theme by Frazier Media. Posts are separated into two main columns with blog entries on the left and feature articles in the main top window and right-hand column.

Copyblogger is a two column, fixed width, widget ready theme, SEO optimized theme based on the original CopyBlogger.com design

Kolorful is a three column, fixed width theme, with print stylesheet and options page.

YUI-Mainstream 750 is a two column, 750px wide version of YUI-Mainstream with widgetized sidebar and SEO Optimization.

TechDesigns is a two columns, grey, fixed width, widget ready theme.

TyreMonkey2 is a red & black 3 column theme with a mini cooper logo. (Contains Sponsored Links)

Nature is a two column, fixed width, widget ready theme. (Contains Sponsored Links)

Preview Frame adds the inline Preview window that was removed in WordPress 2.2

Buy Me a Beer - PayPal Donations Plugin allows your blog readers to donate money to you via PayPal.

wp-forecast shows the weather-data from accuweather.com (Page in German)

Spider Trap converts email address in your page header, title, content and comments into HTML conform ASCII values.

TinyMCE Advanced enables most of the advanced features of TinyMCE, the WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor and adds 12 plugins to TinyMCE.

FireFox Popup displays a link to IE users asking them to download Firefox. You can use also use you adsense referral buttons.

gWatchMyBack24h checks an incoming comment/trackback against the existing of a valid backlink (trackback) or against a very small list of keywords (Hooray-Jobs/BBCode). If it fails the comment/trackback will shown as spam to you in the admin management of your Wordpress installation.

WenderHost Subpages Widget is a widget for displaying a list of subpage links. The list remains consistent regardless of where you are in the hierarchy.

TruBar 3.0 (Lessen) is a plugin that asks anonymous users to click on a link before posting a comment or registerering on a weblog.

Downloads Suite lets you manage downloads on your wordpress site. Files can be uploaded and organized into groups, linked to specific pages. Their access can be restricted to registered users with a specific user level. Manages both uploaded files and external resources (link via URL).

Alternate Comments Form allows you to add an extra contact form to your websites.

EasyBan will allow you to ban people from your site temporarily or permanently.

Rank allows you to create a “ranking” system for your regular blog commenters.

7 Social Services Plus is really simple plugin that will add bookmark links of Digg.com Netscape.com Reddit.com Del.icio.us Stumbleupon.com Google.com Socialogs.com and Socialposter.com

Check out the refreshed Technorati: David Sifry unveiled a new version of Technorati today with improvements made in usability, design and scope of search. The greatest change is the look of the homepage and I cannot get over the difference. I completely failed to recognize the page and it looked like a MFA (EDIT: Made for Adsense) MySpace theme page at first glance and the ticker at the top is almost completely useless to me since it is almost unreadable.

I am sure the technological innovations will be welcomed and the elimination of the “search silos” will make them more competitive against Google Blogsearch, but I think that brand recognition should not be wiped away completely but much rather phased in an out to benefit the novelty and retain customer comfort in the brand. Techcrunch has a writeup on the news.

I am a frequent user of Technorati, especially since it is integerated into the Wordpress dashboard and is a good way, along with Google Blogsearch, to keep a finger on the pulse of the conversation surrounding my blogs and my topics. Just to make sure that my Technorati world will not change that much, I clicked on the “More >>” link in my Dashboard this morning and the speed and cleanliness of the resulting search page assured me.

Plugin:
Simple Forum

Description
A full-featured forum plugin for WP that does just about most stuff a forum ought to do.

Features
- Integrates into WordPress as a Page
- Most features that a forum should have
- Spam protection
- Recognizes WordPress User Roles and Permissions
- Available in several languages

Review
Let me begin by saying that this plugin is being featured today simply because of its functionality. I haven’t personally tried it out and most probably won’t be using it, only for one reason: I run my forum on a seperate domain and using SMF, with no plans of integrating the same into my blog.

However, I’ve been going through the documentation of the forum as well as seen the demo etc. to get a good feel for the same.

Simple Forum allows you to create a full featured forum which you can embed into your existing WordPress blog. This is perfect for those who want to create some kind of support forum. Or you want to add a forum to your blog, don’t want to import your current users to the new forum.

The plugin allows you to create subforums (both public and role-based), lock and pin posts / topics. It also supports Guests, Normal users and Moderators.

The author has provided very detailed documentation on his site which can be downloaded as a PDF file.

One additional feature I like is the ability to completely uninstall the forum in case you decide to discontinue it for whatever reason.

What I’d like is your feedback. Are you using this plugin? How useful has this been to you?
Why did you choose this instead of a seperate forum software like SMF or phpBB?

Any suggestions for the author?