Weblog Tools Collection

Thanks for visiting! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. This blog posts regular Wordpress news, updates of themes, plugins, ideas, hacks, quick fixes and everything about blogging, especially about Wordpress. Go ahead, subscribe to our feed! You can also receive updates from this blog via email.

Google AJAX Libraries API Plugin

The Google Ajax Libraries API Plugin is designed to make it easy to use the Google hosted libraries without the need to mess with your theme and plugin code.

Get The Image

This plugin will allow you to have full control over images displayed, or it takes the power of WordPress and uses its image cropping methods.

MW Adminimize

This plugin pares down the page-topping links interface that shows up on every WordPress administration page.

MW Latest Tweet

This one does what you’d probably guess: shows the latest tweet. Be sure to check out the release page as it offers more than just displaying the latest tweet.

BT Active Discussions

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

User Rank Plugin

The User Rank WordPress plugin ranks users based on their total number of comments, posts or a combination of both.

Enhanced Categories

This plugin allows you to get better control on how your categories are listed. It provides a widget which lets you get more options than the default WordPress category widget (show RSS, hide empty categories, etc.). Furthermore, it allows to hide the children categories and use clickable buttons to expand them.

As a side note, Lester Chan’s Gamerz has announced the second wave of updates for the rest of his plugins. These include:

• WP-DownloadManager
• WP-Ban
• WP-DBManager
• WP-PostViews

Lester makes a point in saying that all of his plugins now work with WordPress 2.5 and above. No version below 2.5 has officially been tested. Since the path to these plugins has been fixed, updating from the plugin upgrader in WordPress 2.5 should work flawlessly.

Ajax Edit Comments, the Digg like comment editor written by Ronald Huereca has undergone a significant rewrite. For those that are familiar with the older versions, you’re going to be in for quite the surprise as Ronald has rewritten the plugin from the ground up. The new version contains an updated interface, numerous backend improvements and a redesigned configuration page.

One of the biggest changes I noticed with the new version is that you no longer can double click on the comment text to edit it inline. Instead, you click on an Edit link. After clicking the edit link, you’re presented with a screen similar to this one:

Another visual change are the buttons/links that appear underneath every comment. The buttons give you access to edit the comment, moderate the comment, mark the comment as spam or deleting the comment. That comment interface looks little like this:

In my opinion, this makes handling comments much more streamlined, especially when you can do most of the administration functions from the comment form itself, rather than the administration panel. Interestingly enough, this same panel of options appear within the administration panel in the Akismet area as well as the comment moderation area.

Probably the biggest change in regards to version 2 is the back end configuration page. Ronald has done an excellent job using the WordPress 2.5 admin styles to allow the options page to blend in smoothly with the back end redesign. This is where the bread and butter of the plugin is located. Here is a short list of things you can configure:

• Amount of comment editing time
• Spam Notification Text (Displayed when comment is detected as spam)
• Options for Anonymous Users
• Options for Registered Users
• Whether or not to display the editing countdown timer
• The ability to edit emails
• Your choice of spam protection from either Akismet, Defensio or None.
• Styles ( Specifically button styles and editor styles)
• Character Encoding
• Individual Options that only affect you
• Ajax Edit Comments Cleanup (This will delete the security keys associated with the comments)

So far, I’ve upgraded Ajax Edit Comments on my personal site and the plugin has been working flawlessly so far. I actually prefer this version over the other, primarily because of the interface changes. Ronald has done an excellent job with the new version and I recommend everyone download and give this plugin a try. In my opinion, it is very frustrating to comment on someone’s WordPress powered site and discover that there is no way to edit your own comments. I believe that editing your own comments should be one of those features that should be added to the core of WordPress. But until that happens (if it does) this plugin makes an excellent addition to your blog.

As a side note, Ronald has told me that he coded the plugin in such a way that it would be pretty easy to implement it into the core.

Reader Vivien writes in:

Is there a way to prevent WordPress from inserting the width and the height for images in the new 2.5 media manager?

In short, yes, but it requires you to insert some code into your theme’s functions.php file.

Fortunately, there is a WordPress filter we can use called image_downsize, which takes in three arguments (a boolean, an attachment ID, and a size string).

add_filter('image_downsize', 'my_image_downsize',1,3);

All I’m doing in the above filter is setting the filter name, the function to call (my_image_downsize), what priority I want the filter, and how many arguments the function takes.

From there, I mimic the function image_downsize in the ‘wp-includes/media.php’ file, but do not return a width or a height. As a result, when the image is sent to the editor, no width or height is present.

function my_image_downsize($value = false,$id = 0, $size = "medium") {
	if ( !wp_attachment_is_image($id) )
		return false;
	$img_url = wp_get_attachment_url($id);
	//Mimic functionality in image_downsize function in wp-includes/media.php
	if ( $intermediate = image_get_intermediate_size($id, $size) ) {
		$img_url = str_replace(basename($img_url), $intermediate['file'], $img_url);
	}
	elseif ( $size == 'thumbnail' ) {
		// fall back to the old thumbnail
		if ( $thumb_file = wp_get_attachment_thumb_file() && $info = getimagesize($thumb_file) ) {
			$img_url = str_replace(basename($img_url), basename($thumb_file), $img_url);
		}
	}
	if ( $img_url)
		return array($img_url, 0, 0);
	return false;
}

Download the Code

Here is a sample functions.php file of the code presented in this article.

I also used Andrew’s plugin generator to quickly put together a plugin that I will creatively call No Image Width or Height (download link). It will accomplish the same thing for those not comfortable with code. Just unzip, place in your WordPress plugin’s folder, and activate.

Thanks Vivien for the interesting question.

One Column Theme

WPTouch

WPTouch is a complimentary theme installed as a plugin on your WordPress blog or website that will format your content with this Apple-inspired, full-featured theme when your visitors are using an iPhone or iPod touch.

Two Column Themes

Hanami

Hanami is a two-column widget-ready theme, inspired by the WP Admin palette and the Seed Conference font-stack. Simple and clean, the theme displays content in clear and concise manner.

Simple Blog

Simple Blog is a simple theme, 2 columns, widget-ready with Gravatar support for comments.

Lean and Clean

Lean and Clean is a two column widget-ready theme. The size of the content area and the sidebar is almost same.

K9

K9 is a two-column widget ready theme based upon the popular K2 theme. The theme works only on WordPress 2.5 and above only.

Three Column Themes

Midnite

Midnite is a 3 column, widget-ready, cross-browser friendly theme compatible with WordPress 2.5.1.

Matt Mullenweg and surprise special guest, Andy Peatling of the BuddyPress project stopped by for a one hour live interview on the WordPress Weekly Podcast. Within this interview, a number of questions were answered in regards to WordPress Trademark and logo usage, status updates on Akismet, Bbpress, TalkPress, BuddyPress, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Theme Repository, Gravatar, the role that Warwick will play within Automattic, an explanation as to how the 2.5 administration redesign became a reality, how much influence do the end users of WordPress have on the development of the project, and last but not least, we discussed the Google Gears implementation into WordPress 2.6. The interview was conducted by yours truly.

I apologize up front for the first 15 minutes of the show. While the interview was taking place, a chord on the speaker phone device was accidentally pulled out, causing it to reboot. Matt later called in with his cell phone which didn’t have the best connection. Shortly there after, the speaker phone device came back on and the rest of the show had good audio quality.

To listen to the interview without having to download the mp3 file, click on the play button within the widget.

Today is WordPress’ 5th birthday. Matt announced a WordPress Party along with others in the works around the world to celebrate the occassion. Oh, how our baby has grown!

Many happy returns of the day to WordPress and all WordPressers. May this year be as fulfilling and productive as the last.

akWpLightbox

akWpLightbox is a plugin that helps you create a simple lightbox to be used with the images on the post. You can add your images as you do now and the plugin will take care of rest of the things.

Related Posts

Related Posts is a plugin that provides multiple options to show the via tags related posts of a post. It contains a sidebar widget that is only visible when viewing a single post and displays a list of posts that are related with the current post via the tags.

Better Tags Manager

Better Tags Manager (BTM) allows you to edit tags from the manage post section without having to visit the post itself. You can add and edit tags for multiple post at once from within the admin manage panel itself without ever leaving the manage page. Disclaimer: This plugin has been written by me.

Enhanced Links

Enhanced Links is a  plugin that allows you to get better control on how your links are listed. It provides a widget which lets you get more options than the default WordPress links widget (show image, description, etc.).

Entrecard Popper

Entrecard Popper is a WordPress plugin that pops your Entrecard up to the top middle of the page when a user comes from a an Entrecard surfing site, other wise it stays where you put it.

Mortgage Loan Calculator

Mortgage Loan Calculator is a plugin for any loan officer or real estate agent looking to provide good-looking, functional, valuable content to readers.

One Column Themes

WP Silver

WP Silver is a one-column theme with three widget-ready sidebars in the footer. The theme makes use of CSS drop down menu and Social Bookmarking reloaded plugin.

Two Column Themes

Mystefied

Mystefied is a two widget-ready theme column theme. The theme is simple and has a extended header where you can add content such as latest posts, popular posts, etc.

Deserta

Deserta is a fixed-width, widget-ready 2 column theme with a right hand sidebar. The comments are gravatar-enabled and will work whether you’re using WP2.5 or lower. There’s also separation of user comments from pingbacks/trackbacks.

Structure

Structure is a two column, widget-ready theme which includes built-in video and image features that easily allow you to customize your site. There are content blocks that you can place virtually anywhere on the page.

Dark Room

Dark Room is a dark 2 column theme suitable for personal and photo blogging.

ScrewDriver

ScrewDriver is a two column widget ready theme. The theme has lots of nuts in it. Overall a decent theme which you can download and use.

If you cannot see, the video, please visit this link: Dashboard Widget Manager - Video Plugin Review

Today’s WordPress Plugin video review is of Dashboard Widget Manager by Viper007.

Video Summary: Dashboard Widget Manager is a great way to customize the WordPress 2.5 dashboard. The plugin is great for multi-author blogs where each author would like a customizable dashboard. Admin can also set a default dashboard setup.

The ability to re-order and customize certain dashboard widgets is a very nice feature. If possible, I’d like to see some extra widgets in the future.

Pros: Customizing the dashboard is very easy if you are familiar with widgets.

Cons: Minor style issues.

If you think your WordPress plugin will merit itself to a video review, please get in contact with me via e-mail (ronalfy+wltc @ gmail dot com). Please keep in mind I will not review premium plugins.

For more videos, please check out our brand new video website at Weblog Tools Videos.

The folks over at PerfectSurf.de have published a tutorial which goes into detail on how you can create your own personal slideshow to appear on the frontpage of your WordPress powered site. This slideshow feature has been seen in numerous premium themes as of late and now you can create one for yourself via this tutorial. A slideshow is great for showcasing images within a gallery or showing off images related to top news items on your blog. The tutorial is not meant for beginners, but those of you who understand terms such as The Loop, excerpt and permalink, you should be fine.

There are some caveats to this process which are outlined in the requirements:

There are many ways of embedding slideshows to your website. This tutorial is based on a Wordpress 2.5 installation (with some files customized and of course all files updated that were critical in WP2.5 concerning security issues!). Moreover you need to BUY a plugin that was originally developed for “Joomla!”, which is an open source Content Management System (CMS). The plugin is called “frontpage slideshow version 1.6? (FPSS) and it was transformed by its creators into a so called “static version” that fits into ALL websites that are PHP-based.

After going through the tutorial, you’ll notice that you need to change the slideshow file manually in order to update the content the links within the slideshow point to. This seems like a mundane approach. I believe this can be done via custom fields but I’d like to know what other ways this effect can be accomplished without having to purchase anything and without having to manually update the slideshow?

*NOTE* Tobi of the perfectsurf website left a note in the comments regarding this post:

No need to buy the FPSS anymore. I made a new plugin out of Jason Schuller’s FCG plugin, I called it FCS (Featured Category Slideshow) You find everythin at perfectsurf.de/category/fcs (by now, take the first post)

It’s recently been confirmed that the first WordCamp in the Philippines will be taking place on October 25, 2008 September 6, 2008 in Manila. The event is being put together by the same group of people who were responsible for the Mindanao Bloggers Summit. The WordCamp event plans on taking two tracks. One for technical sessions with the other concentrating on beginners. Asides from the social gathering of WordPress enthusiasts, WordCamp Philippines is also planning to hold an “Install-Fest” where everyone will be encouraged to bring their laptops or desktops to the event where a guided tour of installing to the latest version will done along with, installing the most important plugins, and for demonstrations on how to tweak WP themes.

Robillo has stated that :

“Beyond the technical know-how that we wish to impart to participants, doing WordCamp in the Philippines will mean deeper awareness of blogging as an effective medium of communication and advocacy,”

Wow, it sounds like WordCamp Philippines is going to be an awesome event.

To stay up to date on the latest information regarding this particular WordCamp, be sure to book mark the official Philippines WordCamp Page.

WP Lightform

WP-Lightform is an AJAX / PHP contact form with spam protection, form validation and custom form elements.

Plugins List

This plug-in lists all the plugins you are using. The plugin can inserts a simple html list of your blog plugins into any post/page.

Postlists

Postlists plugin provides placeholders for dynamic lists of posts you can configure in the admin panel! You can define the placeholders yourself and configure the list that should replace it.

Role Scoper

Role Scoper is a comprehensive drop-in replacement for capability enforcement and administration in WordPress. Assign reading, editing or administration roles to users or groups on a page-specific, category-specific or other content-specific basis.

SensitiveTagCloud

Sensitive Tag Cloud provides a configurable tagcloud that shows tags depending of the current context only.

WP Math Publisher

WP Math Publisher allows you and your visitors to create math equations without LaTEX or MathML.

User Rank Plugin

The User Rank WordPress plugin ranks users based on their total number of comments, posts or a combination of both.

How do I start writing on the Plugin Blog and submit my ideas for feedback from readers?
After you have registered yourself on the Plugin Blog or if you already have a registration but do not have author permissions, please contact us with your details and a little information about the plugin(s) you are planning to enter into the competition and we will enable your account. This is a security precaution and we apologize for any inconvenience.

When should I submit my plugin?
We recommend that you submit your plugin to us at the end of the competition. This will give you enough time to test the plugin for any bugs and resolve them. You will have time to look into feature requests from your visitors. This will also ensure that you don’t need to submit multiple bugfixes to us. We prefer receiving a single final version for our records.

Won’t I be at a disadvantage if I submit it at the end?
No, of course not. Voting will begin only after the plugin competition ends. Also, our judges will take a look at the plugin only after the end of the competition.

Is okay to release it prior to submitting it for the contest?
Plugins released in these two months are eligible for the competition. In fact if you release it now, you have time to test it and receive feedback from the community so an early release to public is a good thing. Conversely, an early release to the public does not mean an automatic submission to the competition.

How do I know the plugin is new?
You can search to see if a similar plugin is available in WordPress Extend. You can also use any search engine to see if a similar plugin is available.

What about the plugins in last year’s competition
If you need an idea of the type of plugins that have been submitted in the past, here is a list of plugins from last year’s competition.

I am a WordPress user. I have an idea, where do I submit it?
You can also post them in this post or this posting in our News Forum.

How do I sponsor a prize?
If you would like to sponsor a prize or donate some money to the competition, please contact us. We are actively looking for prize money.

Do you have any other questions about the competition? Please post them in the comments section below.

2 Column Themes

WPFreemium

WPFreemium is a two column theme widget-ready theme designed for multi-authored blogs. I integrated full gravatar support into all posts, author profiles and comments.

Greeny2.0

Greeny2.0 is a 2 column widget-ready theme. The theme has a web2.0 look and uses different flavors of the green color.

WP Garden

WP Garden is a beautiful two column widget ready theme which has a nice looking header and footer. The theme makes use of green colors for the links.

StudioPress

Update: Theme Link and Thumbnail removed for reported Copyright Issues with header Image

StudioPress is a two column WordPress theme crafted for photographers. StudioPress comes in two varieties - black and white.

Mini-wp

Mini-wp is a pownce look-a-like theme which is for people who don’t like to post long blog. The sidebar is empty and only contains a note about the author.

Andrea

Andrea is a beautiful 2 column theme which makes use of the blue color. The theme is simple and looks appealing to the eyes.

Three Column Themes

Aviation Journal

Aviation Journal is a simple, three column, widget-ready WordPress theme. Also includes a random header image script.

Serenity

Serenity is a three column WordPress theme. Widget ready, with a Site Map and no sidebar template, as well as custom 404 page.

WordPress is great, nothing new there. However, outside of creating themes or plugins, most people don’t believe they can help contribute to the development of WordPress. This notion is wrong and this post will describe at least 24 different ways in which anyone from joe schmoe to WP-Pro can contribute to the development of WordPress. Helping out the WordPress project comes in two flavors, direct and indirect. Hopefully, after reading this article, you’ll see one or two things in which you feel you can do to contribute to the project. Read the rest of this entry »

A reader writes in:

I’m developing a new theme and I’m having trouble getting duplicate posts from showing when running two loops (one standard loop and one from a specific category). Even when I copied the specific code from directly from the codex, it was not working.

The Codex article the reader mentioned was regarding the Loop. Although the example shows how to avoid a single duplicate post, it doesn’t show how to avoid duplicating multiple posts.

Here’s how to show two individual loops without duplicating posts in either loop.

Step 1: Add a ‘posts_where’ Function

A WordPress filter is needed to accomplish this, and we’re going to be tapping into the ‘posts_where‘ filter.

The reason being is we need to modify the query used for the loop and exclude some posts.

Here’s the function we’ll be using called post_strip:

function post_strip($where) {
	global $myPosts, $wpdb;
	$where .= " AND $wpdb->posts.ID not in($myPosts) ";
	return $where;
}

In the above code, I use a global variable called $myPosts, which is comma-separated string of post IDs to exclude.

Step 2: Start the First Loop

Within this first loop we’ll be keeping track of the post IDs being used. Nothing fancy is being done here. We’re just pulling the last five posts posted.

<?php
global $myPosts;
$myPosts = '';
?>
<div>
<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query();
$my_query->query('showposts=5');
if ($my_query->have_posts()) : while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
<?php $myPosts .= $post->ID . ","; ?>
<div><?php the_title(); ?></div>
<!-- Post Stuff -->
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
</div>

Pay special attention to the $myPosts variable, which is used to keep track of all of the post IDs.

Step 3: Add the Filter

We’ll now need to add a posts_where filter for the second loop. This filter will use the post_strip function we started in Step 1.

<?php add_filter('posts_where', 'post_strip'); ?>

Step 4: Start the Second Loop

The second loop is a repeat of the first loop to demonstrate that the posts are not being duplicated. The second loop uses a different loop technique since paging isn’t necessary.

<div>
<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query('showposts=5');
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();?>
<div><?php the_title(); ?></div>

<!-- Post Stuff -->

<?php endwhile; ?>
</div>

Step 5: Remove the Filter

The filter we added in Step 3 now needs to be removed.

<?php remove_filter('posts_where', 'post_strip'); ?>

Step 6: Admire the Results

Before - Duplicates Being Shown

After - Duplicates Removed

Downloadable Code

Here is a sample index.php for download.

2 Column Themes

Wallpaper

Wallpaper is a simple fixed-width, 2 column widget-ready theme with a right sidebar. The theme has a blue header and the rest of the body has a white background.

In the Rough

In The Rough is a two column widget-ready theme with a simple and grungy look. It’s comes with color options of Pink, Red, Green, Orange and Blue. There is also a print.css for better printing.

Unstandard Remix

Unstandard Remix is a two column widget-ready theme. The theme makes heavier use of transparencies and woodgrain finishes.

Rebel Magazine

Rebel Magazine is a widget-ready, 2 columns theme with banner ad integration. The theme sports the look of a magazine and can be used by news blogs.

3 Column Themes

Blue Blog

Blue Blog is a 3 Column which contains 2 widget-ready sidebar, custom templates, integrated pulgins and social networking integration for Digg, delicious and Stumbleupon for post submission.

Liberty

Theme removed due to violation of copyrights

Lester Chan’s GaMerZ has announced that he has unleashed the first wave of updates for 11 of his WordPress plugins. These include:

• WP-EMail 2.30
• WP-PageNavi 2.30
• WP-PluginsUsed 1.30
• WP-Polls 2.30
• WP-PostRatings 1.30
• WP-Print 2.30
• WP-RelativeDate 1.30
• WP-ServerInfo 1.30
• WP-Sticky 1.30
• WP-Stats 2.30
• WP-Useronline 2.30

The remaining four plugins, WP-Ban, WP-DBManager, WP-DownloadManager, and WP-PostViews will be updated in wave two. Lester has stated that all of these plugins should work in WordPress 2.5 only and they have not been tested in any version below 2.5. Also worthy of note is that the folder path of some of the plugins have been fixed. Previously, the path was nested in another folder which generated a ton of hate mail for Lester because it broke automatic updates. Now that the path has been fixed, the automatic plugin upgrade feature should work correctly.

*Note* I updated my GaMerZ plugins today on my personal blog through the plugin upgrader in 2.5 and all of them were upgraded successfully.

Lester has been developing plugins for WordPress for quite some time now. We have praised Lester’s work at various occasions and we use many of his plugins actively on this site (including the post rating system you see below). He is a meticulous coder, provides extensive documentation, download options and demos and even provides his own support forums. Please be patient with his server, it takes a while to load the linked page but the downloads are mirrored, so they should be quick.

On my own blog, I’m using at least seven of his plugins. If you are using one or more of Lester’s plugins, let us know in the comments.

Feed Wrangler

Feed Wrangler is a simple plugin that allows one to create custom feeds for their WordPress blog. You can customize the structure of that feed by creating a corresponding file in your blog theme, otherwise the custom feed will default to your RSS2 feed.

Gengo

Gengo is a full featured plugin that provides multi-language blogging for WordPress. It allows for an unlimited number of translations and summaries for any post and provides template tags to display language information.

Donations Cloud

The Donations Cloud plugin allows visitors to donate and leave a link with a link text. As soon as a donation is done, the blog is notified by PayPal, and the links will automatically appear on the receiver’s website (at a designated position)

Twitter Blaster

Twitter Blaster is a plugin that will allow your visitors to post to your Twitter account.

Branded Admin

The Branded Admin Plugin plugin allows for the application of custom header and footer graphics to the WordPress Admin Section. It also removes WordPress links to better distinguish the site as a custom work and reinforce the sites branding.

ImmerStats

ImmerStat gets rid of the WordPress.com Stats widget from the Dashboard and replaces it with an ever-present .PNG in the top-right corner of the admin screen.

Comment Info Tip

When you mouseover a commenter’s name you will see a tip appear displaying some information about that given commenter.

Magnify.net has released a media search and upload tool in the form of a plugin for WordPress (and for Movable Type). The plugin requires WordPress 2.5 or above and the plugin lets the user search and embed video and images from a variety of networks into their posts. The plugin also provides the ability to shoot and publish videoblog posts using a webcam from within the WordPress and Movable Type platform and users can search and embed video from YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, BlipTV, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Clipsyndicate, Google Video, Veoh, Red Lasso, and more.

Install is relatively simple, though it involves more than just uploading one file. The plugin adds a small button to the post page and provides a search and embed interface for the various multimedia elements including a tab for webcam capture and embed. I would imagine a natural extension of this plugin in the form of enabling video comments for blogs like Seesmic and a screencast capture tool would be a very nice addition for the future. Read more reviews and opinions on the new plugin on Techmeme.

Disclosure: Weblog Tools Videos is built on the Magnify.net service