Weblog Tools Collection

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Extended Categories Widget

A replacement of the category widget to allow for greater customization of the category widget.

Protected Post Password Hint

Traditionally all password protected posts contain a boiler-plate password form without any hints. Without any capability to change the string, one must provide the hint in another post, which is a bit clumsy. Not to mention, people viewing the single protected post only will be unable to see the hint at all. With this plugin protected posts are more usable.

Babel

It allows you to write your blog in multiple languages, and switch between these with a simple click on a flag.

No Href in Comment Author

Disable HREF URL linking in the comment author of your WordPress posts

Lijit Search

The Lijit search ‘wijit’ allows your visitors to search through not only your blog content, but also your extended social network.

WordPress Flag Comments

Allows readers to flag WordPress comments as inappropriate and then allow an administrator control on how to handle that.

Daily Top 10 Posts

Track the hits of each blog post for the current day and cumulatively at the same time.

Broken Links Remover

Automatically remove the bad and broken links from the view of human visitors and search engine robots.

@reply \w comment preview

This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments, including a preview of the comment replied to.

Transport

It’s dark, and stylish, with a static patterned background, it’s grey with a dash of blue. It has two columns, and is widget ready.

White 2 cols

it is plain, simple, and grey and white.

Blue

Simple two column, blue theme.

Green Island

Two column, green and blue theme. This theme uses the frontpage as a summery of the blog/site. Not only can you see the latest posts, you can also see the about-page, the categories and the tags.

Well there are two links that showcase 11 and 10 fixes and hacks respectively.

Most Desired WordPress Hacks: 11 Common Requests and Fixes: Noupe lists 11 commonly requested WordPress hacks and elegant fixes for them. They include avoiding duplicate content, having category specific menus, sidebar login boxes, most wanted categories etc.

10 WordPress Hacks to make Your Life Easy: Jai lists another 10 hacks to play with. His hack tutorials include adding gravatars to comments, Twitter, image gallery, author bio etc.

Some of these are just tutorials on how features work within WordPress and how to incorporate them into existing themes while others are all our modifications of code in themes and in various other places. None of them look too difficult and some of them can be accomplished with plugins. However, all of them are worth checking out.

I recently got a email from a plugin developer, with regards to him having compatibility issues with one of the plugins I had developed. It turned out that both our plugins used a popular library called PclZip for adding archiving features. Due to the compatibility issue, accessing his plugin would cause a fatal PHP error saying that the PclZip class cannot be re-declared, when both our plugins were activated.

The compatibility issue arose because of two things;

1. A mistake on his part while checking for existence of class objects in the code.
2. A mistake on my part of using custom libraries, instead of using those provided by WordPress core.

Here is a code snippet used to check for class existence.

if(! function_exists(’class_name’)) {
   require_once(’myclass.php’);
}
$object = new class_name();

The above code is wrong, since:

1. Class names cannot be accessed as functions.
2. The internal methods of a class are not available for checks, unless one decides to instantiate the class and use the method_exists instead.

The correct way to check if a class exists or not can be seen in the following code.

if(! class_exists(’class_name’)) {
   require_once(’myclass.php’);
}
$object = new class_name();

This change in code actually solved the compatibility issue, but I would like to discuss a bit further on why one should rely on libraries provided by WordPress core instead of using their own custom libraries. The fatal error could have been avoided, if my plugin made use of the the library files from core WordPress, instead of using custom libraries included with my plugin.

If both our plugins had relied on the library files provided by WordPress, the require_once directive would not have re-evaluated the “same file” again, thus avoiding the duplicate class issue. Earlier versions of WordPress did not include many popular libraries, and many plugins include those libraries to provide backward compatibility. If you have to provide backward compatibility for your plugins, be sure to add in a WordPress version check so that you can rely on your own libraries, only when a version of WordPress does not provide it, doing this will certainly do away with having to tackle the compatibility issues caused by plugins using different files for the same libraries.

Update: Including files for backward compatibility can be accomplished by using the following code.

if(!class_exists(’PclZip’)) {
  if(file_exists(ABSPATH.’wp-admin/includes/class-pclzip.php’)) {
    require_once(ABSPATH.’wp-admin/includes/class-pclzip.php’);
  }
  else {
    require_once(’/path/to/your/lib/class-pclzip.php’);
  }
}

It is also a good practice to include the classes only when you require them, and later destroy the object by using the unset() method. This is a non-exhaustive resource for tackling compatibility issues between plugins, and I will try and research more on other things that can help avoid these issues and keep informing you about them.

If you have your own advice about avoiding such issues, please do share them with us.

Further reading from PHP documentation:

• class_exists
• function_exists
• method_exists
• require_once

ScoreRenderer

This plugin renders inline sheet music fragments inside posts and comments into images. It supports ABC, GUIDO, Lilypond and Mup music notations.

Submit Your Blog

A new WordPress plugin has been created that will have direct links to 20 different places to submit your blog. These twenty blog submission directories are popular places to advertise your new WordPress blog. They appear as links inside the back office of your WordPress blog.

MarkItUp

WP MarkItUp! is the Wordpress plugin that replaces the old “quicktags” toolbar with MarkItUp!, a lightweight jQuery plugin that allows to turn any textarea into an highly customizable markup editor. XHTML, Textile, Wiki, Markdown and BBcode toolbars are already provided out-of-the-box, but even your own markup syntax can be easily implemented with this system.

Top Friends

Top Friends is a WordPress blogroll enhancement plugin. The plugin will fetch your friends’ feeds, and then display the feed’s name and status icon base on last update time and latest two posts of the feed.

Tabbed Widgets

Tabbed interfaces are the most common on newspaper type website where they can save a lot of vertical space and make it look less cluttered.

Liz Strauss Comment Count Badge

Liz Strauss Comment Counter is a highly configurable “internet badge” that shows the number of comments your WordPress blog has. Use it either to show off how social your blog is, as an incentive for commenters to be part of it, or just because it’s fun.

Fluency Admin

Gives your WordPress WP-Admin interface a complete overhaul!

WP Extra Template Tags

Provide Wordpress users with extra template tags.

WP Plasmashot

Two columns, widget ready, left side bar WordPress theme.

miniBlog

Simple two column white and grey theme

OneNews

Turn WordPress into your personalized news aggregator.

Teal

Simple two color theme made up of two colors, teal and white.

AcosminTECH

Three column, widget, gravatar and ad ready theme

mts Journey

A classic 3column, widgetready, gettexted and flexible width theme that supports print and PDAs.

Ocular Professor

Ocular Professor (OP) is a WordPress theme designed expressly for photobloggers. Designed to incorporate the new gallery features of WP 2.5+, OP also includes a widget-enabled footer; a “Featured Post” section that, when enabled, allows posts to sit outside the normal flow of blog posts; special formatting, such as drop-caps and image captions; and author comment highlighting.

Disclaimer: I am not a plugin author. This post is filled with my own opinions and is taken from an end user point of view. If you are a plugin author, be sure to add your point of view in the comments.

Traversing through my feed reader after a major version of WordPress is released is always interesting to me because I’ll never know what types of reactions I’ll find. Unfortunately, I’ve been noticing a trend that is unacceptable. The basis of this post will be focused around a line of thought which I find to be anger inducing.

The biggest problem lies in the fact that Wordpress is continually pushing updates too often without much in the way of testing with the most popular plugins. Podpress is huge! how could they have released 2.6 without seeing if one of the most popular plugins will work? To me the fault lies in Wordpress updating too soon. As I am on a hosted install of Wordpress, I can’t roll back, so now I am stuck. From now on, I will clearly be waiting at least two months before pushing any hosted updates of anything Wordpress related! - Comment Written By Jason Of Canonblogger.com

This is the type of comment I’ve been reading lately on blogs which discuss the PodPress incompatibility issue. Time to break this line of thought down. First off, lets take a look at this years timeline of WordPress releases thus far.

• Version 2.5 / March 29, 2008
• Version 2.5.1 / April 25, 2008
• Version 2.6 / July 15, 2008
• Version 2.6.1 / August 15, 2008
• Version 2.7 TENTATIVELY SCHEDULED FOR November 10, 2008

By looking at the release dates for actual versions used by the public, we can see that at one point, two full months went by without a release. Further that with the fact that a maintenance/security release follows a major release one month later. WordPress is publishing software which is extremely popular and this popularity has its pitfalls, mainly with security as the popularity of the platform makes for a nice target. Would you rather WordPress release updates twice a year? What happens if a major security vulnerability is discovered at the halfway point between releases? Would you want WordPress not to deviate from their release cycle? As far as I’m concerned, I’m pretty happy and relieved to see the WordPress development team up on their game, releasing updates to the software multiple times per year. With plugins such as Automatic Upgrade taking the pain out of upgrading through FTP, I don’t understand why the number of updates per year is such a hassle.

One of the statements in the comment above describes the fact that the WordPress team must test out the software with the most popular plugins before releasing it to the public. Since when did the responsibility of testing every plugin known to man for WordPress fall on the shoulders of the WordPress team? The answer, never! In a recent post written by Lloyd Budd he happened to write a statement which I whole heartedly agree with:

I see the Automattic team as the WordPress guide. WordPress is completely community created and supported. Automattic takes on the big (scalability) problems that the community doesn’t have the resources for like: providing the free WordPress.com service and funding usability testing of a new WordPress dashboard experience.

Based on what I’ve seen, what happens with plugins and their compatibility to WordPress is outside of the teams control. I hate to pick on PodPress in this post but it makes for a great example. Before WordPress 2.6 was released, it went through three different Beta releases with one release candidate. The first beta release happened on Monday June 23rd, 2008. The actual release of 2.6 occurred on July 15th. That makes for a total of 22 days which passed between the first beta and the actual release. In my opinion, 22 days is plenty of time to figure out if a plugin is compatible or not. Granted, there may be personal issues, lack of time, or some other reason why the plugin author has not updated a plugin. Suffice to say, a plugin not working lies on the shoulders of the plugin author, not the WordPress development team.

PodPress is a special case in that the WordPress team actually created a patch for the plugin and then sent it to the plugin author. This was reported by Matt himself on a post written by David Peralty. Apparently, the patch never made it to PodPress and to this day, the plugin is incompatible thanks to an issue with the post revision feature. Matt did comment on the fact that there is not much they could do except commit the code directly without Dan’s permission.

Conclusion:

The bottom line is this. WordPress has a good release cycle and in my opinion, provides plenty of time for plugin authors to test their plugins with the newest version of WordPress before the public gets a hold of it. My opinion is that, the WordPress team can not and probably will not take it upon themselves to insure that all major plugins work correctly with current/future versions of WordPress. So the next time you upgrade WordPress and realize your favorite plugin is broke, don’t blame the WordPress team, blame the source.

Plugin Manager

Plugin Manager lets you to view, download and install plugins from WordPress.org from an AJAX’ed interface, instead of manually downloading, extracting and uploading each plugin.

Yoast Breadcrumbs

This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.

Lijit Search

The Lijit search ‘wijit’ allows your visitors to search through not only your blog content, but also your extended social network.

Movie Quotes Widget

Wordpress Widget will take the latest, random or top rated quotes from this website, and display them on your blog

Share This

This plugin will allow your visitors to share your content via social bookmarking sites and/or e-mailing the post to a friend.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

FTP Plugin for WP Database Backup Plugin

With the FTP Plugin for the WP Database Backup Plugin you can perform manual or scheduled database backups and send the backup files via FTP to another server with more or maybe cheaper disk space.

Dust

A fluid three column outfit with a header image rotator built in: widgetized sidebar and footer columns, built in are recent comments with gravatars, related posts, social bookmarking enabled. Delicio bookmarks, Twitter and Flickr is enabled in the themes options panel.

Brown Stitch

2 columns theme with widget ready on right sidebar. The bottom 3 columns were fixed though.

Notepad Chaos

The theme has 2 columns, a quite vibrant design including “personal” design elements such as handwritten headings, stick-it-notes, clips and pins.

WhiteWash

A fast loading theme without distractions, images and cluttering. WhiteWash is easy to customize and it’s ideal for users who don’t want a blog with many colors or stuffed with features. Because of the wide spaces, this Theme is easy to read. Image-styling, when a picture is linked with a larger image or URL, there’s a nice hover-effect.

Hot in the heels of our own WordPress Plugin Competition (of which the results should be declared very soon), the folks at WPMU.org are running a WordPress MU plugin competition! The competition is already very much underway, with almost US$1500 worth of prizes already pledged and 8 great plugins submitted, ranging from XML-RPC add ons to simple domain mapping.

And there’s still a month to go (entries close September 24th), so get your MU hats on and submit your best and brightest! The process is much the same as at Weblog Tools Collection. Plugin authors can register at the site and write up their own plugins for publication, guidelines and more on that can be found here. Then there will be prizes (and some rather snazzy badges) for judged and peoples choice winners and ranking entries.

If you’re interested in adding to the prize pool, Andrew and James would love to hear from you too - just send them an email.

Archives by Selected Categories

This WordPress plugin allows you to generate a list of posts separated by category. You can choose to display all categories, or just those you select. Under each category heading, the posts are sorted by date, with the most recent first. Additionally, the date for each post is shown next to the link.

WordPress Theme Changer & Showcase Plugin

Plugin with a widget which enables us to change the theme of a blog without having to login to the administrator’s room first. This is just like allowing visitors to change the theme of the blog.

Gorsel Koru

If a site uses an image hosted on your site, a message you define, appears on it, i.e. prevents hotlinking of images. (Site in Turkish)

PhotoJAR: Post Thumbnail

PhotoJAR: Post Thumbnail displays a post thumbnail for posts with galleries. When paired with a JavaScript viewer, the full gallery can be displayed when the thumbnail is clicked. PhotoJAR: Post Thumbnail requires PhotoJAR: Base.

AVH Amazon

AVH Amazon plugin give you the ability to add multiple widgets which will display a random item from your Amazon wishlist, baby registry and/or wedding registry. In the plugin reference is made to Wishlist only but you can use your Baby Registry ID or Wedding Registry ID as well.

Liz Strauss Comment Counter

Liz Strauss Comment Counter is a highly configurable badge (very similar to the Feedburner one, except it’s more configurable) to show off the number of comments your blog has.

Most Popular Posts

This is a very simple widget that displays a link to the top commented posts on your blog.

Several plugins provide users with template tags like functions to include plugin output into themes, the most common way of including plugin code into themes looks like this:

<h2>Section Header</h2>

<?php plugin_template_tag_function(); ?>

Though the above code is absolutely right, PHP errors will occur if you disable the plugin and do not remove the template tag from the theme. There is a much better way of including template tags in your themes, which ensures that PHP errors do not occur when you disable plugins and do not remove them from your themes:

<?php if ( function_exists(’plugin_template_tag_function’) ) : ?>

<h2>Section Header</h2>

<?php plugin_template_tag_function(); ?>

<?php endif; ?>

The if condition in the above code ensures that the function you want to use is registered, before the code is executed. This extra check will ensure that your theme will load without PHP errors, even if the plugin has been disabled.

If you are new to conditional statements, you can read one of our earlier post about if, then and else conditions.

Yelloh

Yelloh is a simple, yellow and white, two column WordPress theme

Humble Dark

Dark, single column theme with a bottom bar and an elegant pin striped background

CrzyRedBinks

Three column theme comes widget ready. Custom sidebar ad widgets. Easy to manage ads from php file. No option page, not really necessary. Uses php files for ads so its easier to use google adsense codes in it.

Just three themes today for you folks. Are you a theme author, remember the faster way to get featured in our daily releases is by submitting your theme to our News forum.

TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker)

Scan all of your theme files for potentially malicious or unwanted code.

UserAgent-Spy

UserAgent-Spy is a WordPress plugin which displays the user’s Operative System and Web Browser in the comments. It uses the comment->agent property to access the UserAgent string, and through a series of regular expresions, detects the O.S. and browser. Then it shows a message with an icon of the browser and O.S.

List category posts

List Category Posts is a simple WordPress plugin which allows you to list some posts from a category into a post/page using [catlist=ID], where ID stands for the Category Id.

WP Developer Assistant

WP Developer Assistant is a WordPress plugin developed by a WordPress developer for WordPress developers.

Woopra

Immediate access to your Woopra analytics, traffic statistics and user visits from within the standard WordPress interface.

Online Games

This plugin adds a button in the sidebar which opens a DHTML layer with over 400 Online Games to keep your visitors entertained. The content is hosted remotely for less traffic and more topicality.