Weblog Tools Collection

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It has been only a couple of weeks since WordPress 2.6 has released and there is already talk about a much more feature rich version in the making. WordPress 2.7 has several exciting features planned/proposed as discussed in informal meetings on IRC and the feature votes being posted on the Codex. Though there are very few hints hint of a release date, I expect it to be released by the end of 2008.

[EDIT] Clarification: Mark Jaquith brings up a very good point that I believe requires re-iteration. The list of proposed features mentioned on weblogtoolscollection.com were just that, proposed features. All or none of them might actually show up in WordPress 2.7 Some things that have already started being worked on are the comments API and automated plugin installation. In hindsight, I realize that though they were represented as proposed, some of the other language in this post might have sounded a lot more definite. We apologize for any confusion that might have caused.

Here is a list of features that will be introduced into WordPress 2.7:

• Comments API – This according to me is the most exciting feature, it will allow developers to create offline integration of comments management, where users could use desktop clients to manage comments (moderate, edit, reply, delete, spam, unspam).
• Keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation – This feature will help users to quickly moderate comments using keyboard shortucts, so you can expect key combinations like Ctrl + S to spam a comment, Ctrl + A to approve and so on.
• Theme Update API – WordPress 2.5 and above have really made plugin management quite easy, you automatically receive notices when a new update to a plugin is available and can upgrade it without having to manually upload it to your FTP server. With this addition WordPress aims to bridge the gap between theme developers and the users for publishing updates to themes.
• One Click Plugin Installs – Installing a plugin will be much easier with One click plugin installs. A plugin with similar features called One Click Plugin was the winner of the Plugin Competition last year.
• WordPress core updates – This is a feature many users have been waiting for, with core updates you can easily upgrade your WordPress versions. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin performs the same task.
• Default Sitemaps – WordPress 2.7 will include a default sitemap creator, which will create Google XML sitemaps for your blog. Google Sitemaps Generator plugin is the best option available right now for creating XML sitemaps.
• Admin Panel Comment Replies - This plugin will help administrators to reply to comments using the admin panel. There are several plugins which allow you to do so right now, including WP AJax Edit Comments, Better Comments Manager and Absolute Comments.
• Comment Threading – This feature will allow users to reply to other commentators in a threaded manner, where replied comments will display below the actual comment, WordPress already has the ability to scale to accomodate threaded comments, without requiring database changes. Brian’s Threaded Comments is a does the job of allowing users to reply to comments.
• Subscribe to Comments – The WordPress team is also planning to include a option to allow commentators to subscribe to follow up comments, but this is marked as a question, so it may not actully make it into WordPress 2.7. The Subscribe to Comments plugin does the job to notify commentators on follow up comments.
• Widgets for Dashboard and Write Box – This feature will allow users to re-arrange the widgets on the dashboard and write page to suit their preferences.
• Batch Editing of Posts – This feature will allow users to batch edit their posts. Though there is not much information available about this right now, and I could not really find more from my research on the topic.

With WordPress 2.7, we may see many popular plugins retire because of direct integration into WordPress core but we should have better functionality and easier management of daily blogging tasks from within the vanilla WordPress install.

There are several other interesting features, you can take a look at them by visiting WordPress codex. Thanks to QuickOnlineTips for drawing my attention to the new features.

What features are you looking the WordPress team to integrate? Do let me know. It would be great to hear what your expectations are.

Dislaimer: WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin and Better Comments Manager plugin has been written by me.

Tremor

This theme is a 3 column widget ready theme. It is XHTML Strict and a CSS 2.1 compliant and uses the author’s comment highlight hack.

Birdie’s Blog

Two column, brown WordPress theme with a birdie calling out!

Crush

Crush is a simple three column theme with a single column sidebar and two columns for posts.

Grayplicity

Grayplicity is the public release version of the theme being used for SuperSatellite.com. The default setup is a one column, full width (split ~70%/30% content/sidebar) layout. Has support for several plugins as listed on the theme page.

HelloWest

A dark, simple two column theme based on HelloWiki’s latest theme release.

BlueSensation

Clean and minimalist theme with 2 columns, and ready to display 125×125 ad blocks

Unwakeable

A two column theme based on of K2 and Unsleepable.

1024px

A light and extremely simple theme with 2 columns. It is based on Andreas’ 1024px XHTML/CSS template. Updated to support tags, category descriptions, gravatars and more. Validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Public domain.

Alibi

Alibi is a 2 column fixed-width, free WordPress theme, with righthand sidebar, enabled for widgets.

Starlite Diva

3 column, with pinkie violet colors, widget-ready sidebar. Tested on WordPress 2.5.

Thord Daniel Hedengren over at Devlounge has published an extensive checklist based on his experience of things to consider when using WordPress as a CMS, especially when it will be used for a client. His post covers a number of different situations you should think about ahead of time before you step into your favorite code editor. According to Thord, there are three things you need to consider before committing to WordPress:

1. Is the functionality needed covered by the WordPress core functions, and/or with the addition of (not too many) plugins? This is usually managing information pages (using Pages), and publishing news/press releases (using Posts). If I need to add a lot of custom stuff, including the custom fields, then perhaps it gets too complicated for the client.

2. Is there a good translation of WordPress available, so that your client can get the backend in their own language? Why should my Swedish customers not have their CMS in Swedish? There is no reason, of course, and it is easy enough to install a language pack.

3. Will my client be able to upgrade WordPress themselves, or do I need to make plans for this as well? This is true for most platforms out there, but nevertheless you’ll need to have an upgrade strategy.

I’ve never dived into the realm of setting up WordPress for a client so this is all new to me. However, I know a lot of you install and configure WordPress for your own clients. With that in mind, I’d be interested in knowing your own checklist of things to consider before committing them to WordPress.

Breadcrumb Titles For Pages

This plugin modifies wp_title() (the function used to create the title of your website to output all parent Pages when viewing a Page.

Allow Numeric Stubs

Starting with WordPress 2.5, there is a bug where you cannot have a child Page that’s stub is a number. For example this will not work: /about/5/. That URL conflicts with paged content feature where you can posts and Pages with multiple pages of content by adding <!--nextpage--> within your content.

This plugin allows you to have children Pages with numbers as stubs by giving up the ability to have paged Pages which isn’t a big deal as most people don’t use paged Pages anyway.

p2pConverter

Converts either a static Page into a Post, or a Post into a static Page! Just click on the Manage tab in the Admin interface, and click the Posts or Pages sub-tab.

Status Press Widget

Adds a Facebook Status Widget to display your Facebook status in your sidebar. Based on Status Press plugin (not required!) by Adam Walker Cleaveland & C. Scott Andreas.

Customizable Search Widget

Adds a Customizable Search Widget to give you more control over how the search box looks on your sidebar.

List Drafts Widget

List Drafts is a simple sidebar widget which outputs a list of the titles of all posts currently saved as drafts. Users can set the title of the widget, and add a label to be used for all untitled drafts.

Post and Page Excerpt Widgets

Creates widgets that display excerpts from posts or pages in the sidebar. You may use ‘more’ links and/or link the widget title to the post or page.

And, while on the topic of plugins, take a look at Clever Carrot’s 10 WordPress Plugins to Grow Great Sites.

WineX

WineX is a lightweight script that will import the listing contents of your CellarTracker wine cellar into your Wordpress website.

Hidden Content

Some blocks of the text can be shown/hidden for bots, logged-in users or all visitors (in posts, pages and comments) (Page in Russian)

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.

GD LinkedIn Badge

This widget displays badge with a link to a LinkedIn profile page. It can also display some additional custom information above the picture and link.

GD Pages Navigator

Standard display of pages in Wordpress can be a problem if you have a lot of pages with subpages causing the widget with list of pages to take a lot of space on the page.

Silverlight Content

Add Silverlight objects (XAP-files) to the post and manage default values. Like location, width, height and necessary Silverlight version.

Show Active Category

With Worpress it is only possible to show the active category when you browsing the category archive. But when you are on a single post page you have a possibility to show to which category other categories the current blogpost belongs to. This small plugin adds the CSS class “active_category” to all categories the active post belongs to. (Page in German)

WP-Slimstat-Ex

Track your blog stats. Based on Mr. Coolmann’s Wp-SlimStat

Image alignment within a WordPress post: WordPress 2.5 introduced floating image alignment within text on a post. This feature does not work on certain themes. Thanks to Jason for asking the question and to Sadish for the solution. Final thought: it would also be nice if a few gallery formatting options were available through the default interface instead of having to modify the shortcode and/or introduce hacks.

WordPress Search as a custom Google Search without addition page or post: Add a custom Google Search to your WordPress blog (and make search advertising dollars?) without too much of a hassle. Complete instructions and examples are included in the post.

Create a Flash Arcade site using WordPress: This set of instructions will help you convert a simple WordPress blog into a Flash arcade site. Pretty cool with detailed instructions on the transition.

Here is a tip which I stumbled upon accidentally, that is somewhat unrelated to WordPress. Visit a NYTimes page such as a news item and double click on a single word. You will need a free registration to view that page or have to be logged in if you are registered already. The javascript file that adds the functionality in question is copyrighted to Answers.com and I wonder if a WordPress plugin exists for the same.

Matt has opened up the signup for the WordCamp San Francisco event which will be held on August 16th 2008.

The WordCamp SF ticket prizes has been reduced by $5, each ticket will only cost $20 for this event. The event is being hosted at a bigger venue this time around, so you can expect better and comfortable seating arrangements, one of things Matt has ensured us about.

Going by the success of past WordCamp’s, we believe this one will be even bigger and better. You can book your tickets for the WordCamp SF event by visiting this page. Don’t forget to read more about what is WordCamp, if you are new to it.

Listed here are the entries to the WordPress Plugin Competition 2.5.

Please help us choose the winners by visiting each of the plugins below and rating them on the linked page.

• Adminimize
• AnyVar
• Attachment Extender
• Automatic Timezone
• Broken links Remover
• Click
• ComicPress Manager
• Dk Obama Gallery
• DoDo
• Editor Extender
• Flaresmith
• Flickr Gallery
• Fun with in-context comments
• Great Real Estate
• Idealien Category Enhancements
• Image Browser Extender
• Invite friends
• Live Blogroll
• MailPress
• Manageable
• Maxref Widgets
• Media in response
• MultiSiteManager
• Nonce! Please
• PhotoJAR: Base
• Picture Increment Cron System
• Post Groups
• Post Tabs
• Repost
• Role Scoper
• SEO Smart Links
• Sermon Management
• Show Me Options
• Sidebars
• Simple Flash Video
• SlideShare Presentation List
• Snazzy Archives
• Paypal API Subscriptions
• Tabbed Widgets
• tWPtter
• Vent
• Vote2Publish
• WP125
• WP Comment Remix
• WP Easy Uploader
• WP Sentry
• WP Wall
• Yank Widget
• ZdMultiLang

Remember to test the plugin properly before giving your vote.

Vita

Three column, widget ready, fixed width, custom image header theme

Kitten in Pink

Two column, pink, widget ready theme

WP-Andreas01

Three column, widget ready theme with support for tags, gravatars and including 12 additional header images.

Daleri Sweet

Fixed width, two / three column, widget ready blue WordPress theme

Secondary

Consists of a fluid two column outfit with news slider built into the frontpage: widgetized sidebar and footer columns with typical WordPress action like calendar, built in are recent comments with gravatars, related posts, social bookmarking enabled, native WP tag system, flickr is enabled in its own options panel.

QuickPress

A 2/3-column, widget-ready, SEO-optimized, Ad-ready, WordPress 2.6 compatible wordpress theme which is useful for all types of bloggers.

TheGrunge

TheGrunge WordPress Theme is a widget and ad-ready WordPress 2.5 Grunge Theme re-developed by the PositiveNoize design team.

Category Selector Back to the Sidebar

A simple plugin which moves the category selector back to the sidebar of the Post New page. In return, it removes the Related section (just because that I’m new in PHP and this is my first plugin), except the Press This bookmarklet.

Deviant Thumbs

This plugin displays thumbs from deviantART in a configurable carousel. It has widget support and is licensed under the GPL.

Movie Quotes

The Movie Quotes widget will fetch the latest, random or top rated quotes from themoviequotes.com website, and display them on your blog.

Snazzy Archives

A visualization plugin for your WordPress site featuring an unique way to display all your posts. Your archive page will never be boring again!

Show Me Options

How many times have you activated a plugin and the searched hopelessly for it’s options page? When you activate a new plugin, Show Me Options will show you a link to the options page you can use immediately.

ZdMultilang

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.

ZdStats

A WordPress plugin allowing you to trace your visitors. This is not a simple statistics plugin, it’s very flexible and dynamic. This means you can update your filters by yourself and therefore be as realistic as possible.

Broken Links Remover

It helps you fix bad/broken links, both text links(anchor tags) and image links (img tags). It blocks the display of such links on your WordPress post/page, until you fix them. These are not made visible to search engine robots as well, until you correct them.

Dk Obama

Imitates the gallery as on Barack Obama’s site.

WP125

The WP125 plugin can help you manage your ads more efficiently, leaving you with more time to write new posts. Ads are automatically taken down when their time is up, and optional click counting is available.

McCain Widget

Place a Blogs for McCain widget in your side bar.

Overweight Calculator

This bmi calculator is intended to blogs who write about health, wellness, fitness, food and recipes and sport. The plugin helps your visitors calculate their body mass index and if they are overweight, to understand what is the weight range they should aim for.

Investment Calculator

This plugin will be most useful for personal finance, credit, loans, investment related or trading blogs.

Squared

Squared is a very simple theme, two columns, widget ready, and valid XHTML 1.0

Simple

A two column colorful theme

Rateka

Two column theme comes widget ready. Custom sidebar ad widgets. Also has 3 color schemes incorporated. Allows you to add subscription by email from admin panel. Easy to manage ads from php file.

Scruffy

Scruffy is a WordPress theme with a standard two column layout and all the basic WP features. What makes this theme special is it’s unique “grunge” design.

Web 2.0 Blue

Great web 2.0 looking, Great use of colors, Simple, Plain, Minimalist theme, Hemingway Style, Can be customized easily through detailed CSS. Support all plugins that Hemingway supports, Huge space for Widget lovers as it is 3 Column theme, Can customize images for blockquotes and so on…

iF

iF is a clean, simple theme with a left sidebar.

FunkyZine

2 Columns, Wood Design, Rounded Corners, Dark, Banner Ad Ready, Tested on WordPress 2.5, Fixed Width, PSD logo Attached.

Our aim here at Weblog Tools Collection is to provide a platform for authors of themes and plugins and at the same time provide WordPress users a single place to keep up-to-date with the WordPress world.

We try to keep abreast with both plugin and theme releases. The first place that we look for releases is the WLTC News Forum and in this post I’ll try to cover some of the points that you should keep in mind to facilitate your listing.

1. Post in the appropriate category

The forum has been divided into several categories for different content. The two primary categories that you should be looking at are the New Wordpress Plugins category and the New Wordpress Themes category for plugins and themes respectively. We also have a Premium WordPress Themes category for those themes which require payment to use.

2. Writing your post

This is the most important part of the process. Remember that the key to attracting a user to visit your plugin or theme page is a good detailed description. I, for one, would like to gather as much information about the plugin or theme from the post. Browsing to your site and then making a search for the right post / page is a big big no no!

Plugin Authors should ensure the following is present in the post.

1. Plugin Name: short forms are OK, however the full form of the name is ideal
2. Plugin URL: This should be the direct url to the plugin page and not your site. Ideally keep a separate page for each plugin. It provides for a single interface to interact with users, as well helps in SEO.
3. Description: Let me iterate; provide a detailed description. Mention what exactly your plugin does. Elaborate on some of the features that the plugin has. Ask for suggestions. State what plans you have for the future of the plugin. Optionally, add information on installing and using the plugin. This information should also be present on the plugin page on your site.
4. License

Theme Authors should ensure the following is present in the post.

1. Theme Name: same rule to follow as that of plugin authors above
2. Theme URL: Once again, link to the url of the theme page. Putting several themes on a single page only serves as a distraction to a person looking for that specific theme.
3. Description: A detailed description for the theme should come here. Mention if your theme is widget ready, or if supports gravatars. Does it have an options page? Is it a one, two or three column theme? What colors is it available in? Is the header customizable?
4. Demo URL: Every theme should have a demo for a user to see what their site will look like. It is a pain to download and install a theme to check if it looks good, only to find that this is not the case.
5. Screenshot: This is optional but again highly recommended. A screenshot is the first view that a potential user sees.
6. License

The points I have made above are not just pertaining to our News forum. In fact this should something that you should follow strictly whenever you are looking to get listed at any site announcing releases.

3. Other methods to inform us about your release

The News forum is the preferred method to bring your creation to our attention. Not only does it bring your theme / plugin to our attention but it also ensures that you reach out to our regular readers even before our daily release posts.

You could also use the contact form to inform us about the release. However, this is a much slower method to get listed. Remember to provide as many details as you would if you were to make a post in the News forum. Also, change the Subject line to Plugin Release: your theme/plugin name.

Happy posting

It’s official, the WordPress application for the iPhone has officially been released. Now you’ll be able to publish to WordPress powered blogs right from your Jesus phone. Here is what you can expect from this free app:

• Support for WP.com blogs and self-installed blogs version 2.5.1 and higher
• Embedded Safari for true previews of posts
• Full tag and category support
• Photo support for both camera pictures as well as library photos
• Support for multiple blogs
• Ability to password protect a post, save as a draft, or mark the post for later review
• Auto-recovery. This will recover posts which have been interrupted by phone calls

The app is at version 1.0, is a tiny 0.3MB download, and is compatible with the iPhone as well as the iPod touch. However, this application requires the iPhone 2.0 software update.

Be sure to let us know what your experience is like, browsing and publishing to WordPress from your iPhone.

Events Manager

A plugin to manage events such as music gigs, art expositions, or job meetings. Events Manager inserts an Events page in the Manage menu of WordPress Administration, to let you insert, modify and delete events. You can describe events specifying their date and location, and also add a few notes. You can then add events list, calendars and description to your blog using a sidebar widget; if you’re web designer you can simply employ the template tags provided by Events Manager.

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.

TimeZoneCalculator

Calculates different times and dates in timezones with respect to daylight saving on basis of utc.

Inline Google Docs

Many people maintain dynamic content on Google Documents or hold volatile data on Google Spreadsheets. These change when collaborators save an update or users submit a form. Occasionally, one may wish to embed the contents of one’s Google Documents or Spreadsheets in a post/page to reflect the latest updates on one’s blog. This plugin seeks to provide this functionality without using an iframe.

Cross References Plugin

With this plugin you can easily set a reference to another post or page in posts und pages and you get all back references automatically listed for every post and page.

Aleph

Aleph implements profiles, paginated and customizable user lists, and some characteristics of social networks, like friends and sets. It supports localization and pretty permalinks. Suggestions, bug reports and fixes (specially security & bug fixes) are welcomed. PHP 5 is required.

There were a total of 51 entries into the Plugin Competition this year. A list of all the entries with their respective voting and download pages will soon be published. The entries are being sent to the judges as we speak. In the meantime, here is the list of prizes for the participants and the winners of the plugin competition.
Thank you prizes:

• $10 to every participant as a thank you for their hard work and dedication

$250 prize:

• For the best WPMU compatible plugin from Incsub

Consolation Prize:

• 12 month blogclub subscription from Blogalized
• Copy of OIOPublisher Advertising Plugin

Third Prize:

• $200
• Country codes of the world poster
• Copy of OIOPublisher Advertising Plugin

Second Prize:

• $700
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas for the PC and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
• Copy of OIOPublisher Advertising Plugin

Grand Prize:

• $2000
• Production of a professionally recorded song for the winner.
• Dedicated server for one year from iWeb (Intel Core 2 Duo, HD 160GB Sata2, 1GB of RAM and 1500GB of bandwidth per month)
• Copy of OIOPublisher Advertising Plugin

Good luck to all the participants!

Open Book Book Data

Insert OpenBook tags and a book’s ISBN into a post, and OpenBook will replace it with a book cover, title, author and publisher. It links to more book details at its data source, Open Library (http://openlibrary.org).

Fluency Admin

A plugin that beautifies and enhances the default WordPress Admin interface.

SuperLinks

SuperLinks is a WordPress 2.5+ plugin that replaces the standard Links sidebar widget. SuperLinks gives the site owner greater control over how links in the sidebar are displayed. For example, one can choose to display all links categories or only a single links category. Additionally, a site owner may have any number of SuperLinks widgets in the sidebar.

JavaScript Pull Quotes

The JavaScript Pull-Quotes plugin is an add-on for WordPress that allows you to easily insert pull-quotes into your posts and pages.

MultiSiteManager

MultiSiteManager (MSM) is a WordPress plugin which will perform two of the most important tasks of an administrator: backups and upgrades. MSM can manage any number of WordPress installations from one “master” WP installation. (To manage a WordPress website with MSM, you need FTP access to the site.)

Internal Link Building

Allows people to define a keyword as always linking to a given URL. This allows you to link within your site like Wikipedia, and rank accordingly.

Only two themes on the platter today.

WordPress Dating Theme

Simple, two column, widget ready theme for dating sites

SuperFresh

SuperFresh is a 3 Column fresh theme base with natural green. It contain 2 widget-ready sidebar, custom templates, with a featured post section in the main page. It’s compatible with up to WordPress 2.6 and has been tested with in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Opera, and Safari.

Would you like to have your theme featured on WLTC? Then, head over to the News Forum and post a link to your theme. Remember to add a good description and preferably a link to the a demo of the theme.