Section Widget by Godfrey Chan

Godfrey’s plugin provides a way to display section specific content on your WordPress sidebar with an easy to use interface. This new version comes with tabs support, so creating your tabbed section widget is just a few clicks away. Plus, with shortcode support, the possibilities are limitless! This plugin is well rounded, consistently preferred by all of our judges and reviewers and was well liked by the audience as well.

Congratulations to the Grand Prize Winner!

Thanks to Keith D’Souza, Ozh and Jeff Chandler for taking on the mammoth task of judging the competition and helping me put it all together. These people have done it all for the love of the community and their passion for WordPress, and I commend them for all of their efforts. Along with the judges, the competition sponsors played a major role in making all of this possible. WPMU, BuySellAds, WhiteShadow, WPWebHost, Ozh and Techtites were very generous with their donations and we hope to garner their support in future competitions as well. To all the well wishers, readers, reviewers and the plugin developers who participated in the contest, thank you for all your help. Please check back next year for another exciting Plugin Competition. The winner will receive their prize money by the end of the following week.

There are two runner ups in the competition this year with the exact same scores and a final Grand Prize winner who eked past their competition by a single point. The runner ups will win a cash prize of $500 each and the Grand Prize Winner will receive a cash prize of $2000!

To break from tradition, we will release the runner ups today, followed by the release of the Grand Prize Winner on Monday. The following runner ups are in no particular order since they had the same final score.

The first Runner up is, drum roll please:

Advanced Export for WP and WPMU by Ron Rennick

Ron’s plugin provides WordPress users (both WordPress and WordPress Mu) the ability to break up their exports into multiple files with each file containing different sections of their blog. Ron wins $500 in cash.

The second Runner up is:

Live Blogging by Chris Northwood

Chris’ plugin provides live micro blogging functionality to WordPress blogs using Meteor technology. Both comments and posts are automatically updated on viewers’ blogs with the plugin. Chris wins $500 in cash.

Congratulations to the runner ups for their fantastic work! Check back tomorrow for the Grand Prize Winner of the Plugin Competition. A heartfelt thank you goes out to all the sponsors, judges, well wishers, readers, reviewers and to the plugin developers who participated in the contest. The winners will receive their prize money by the end of the following week.

The rules for the competition remain the same as last year. Competitors need to post as announcement for their plugin(s) by registering at WPMU.org and submitting a post. The plugins must relate to WordPress MU or BuddyPress and be available freely for download. The plugins must also be released under a GPL compatible license. The prize pool is at $1000 and the organizers are looking for more donations to bolster the purse.

So if you are a novice plugin author looking to wade in the WordPress MU pool or a seasoned veteran looking to flex your muscles, head over to the competition and post an entry!

Disclosure: WPMU.org are past and present advertisers on this blog and have donated prizes to our own WordPress Plugin Competition.

• Frederick Townes : W3 Total Cache
  

  W3 Total Cache is a plugin designed to improve user experience via a suite of performance enhancements consisting of a database cache, page cache, minify support with content delivery network support, media library import and more.

• Marcel Bokhorst : One Time Password
  

  This simple to use plugin enables you to login to your WordPress weblog using passwords which are valid for one session only. One-time passwords prevent stealing of your main WordPress password in less trustworthy environments, like internet cafés, for example by keyloggers. For each login you can choose between using your main password or a one-time password. The one-time password system conforms to RFC 2289 of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

• John Lamansky : SEO Ultimate
  

  This all-in-one SEO plugin can handle titles, noindex, meta data, canonical tags, 404 error tracking, and more.

• Matt Martz : AJAX Plugin Helper
  

  An Ajax Plugin Helper for the WordPress admin plugin page. Adds Ajax activate, deactivate, delete and upgrade functionality. Allows a user to activate, deactive, delete and upgrade plugins from the admin plugins page without leaving the plugins page. Also provides an Ajax Upgrade All button for upgrading all plugins requiring upgrades using Ajax. This plugin was designed to meet the needs of bulk plugin upgrades and a more efficient upgrade process to decrease the amount of time required to update the plugins for your blog.

• Peter WestWood : WordPress Beta Tester
  

  WordPress Beta Tester allows you to get involved with the WordPress development process by making it easy for you to get early access to nightly builds and beta releases using the core upgrader.

• Godfrey Chan : Section Widget
  

  This plugin provides a way to display section-sepecific content on your sidebar with an easy to use interface. This new version comes with tabs support, so creating your tabbed section widget is just a few clicks away. Plus, with shortcode support, the possibilities are limit-less!

• Hassan Jahangiry : Fitr Theme Options
  

  Fitr Theme Options helps theme designers to make a diverse and rich option page for their themes. It makes template customizing easy and bring more fun to WordPress!

• Stephanie Leary : Recent Posts with Excerpts widgets
  

  Creates widgets that list your most recent posts with excerpts, optionally limited to a category. The number of posts and excerpts is configurable; for example, you could show five posts but include the excerpt for only the most recent. Supports the_excerpt Reloaded and Advanced Excerpt for excerpts with HTML formatting.

• Stephanie Leary : Import HTML Pages
  

  This plugin imports a directory of files as either pages or posts, according to configurable settings.

• George Spyros : Rich Related Posts
  

  The purpose of the plugin is to facilitate related posts functionality where posts can be enriched with groups of links to blog posts (or other sites), defined by headline and thumbnail.

• George Spyros : Get Shortlink
  

  Get Shortlink places a button in your theme which allows visitors to grab the short url of that page by copying the shortlink to their clipboard. Supports shortening services tinyurl, digg, is.gd, and also allows you to generate custom shortlinks based on your site’s domain name.

• Emmanuel GEORJON : EG-Delicious-Sync
  

  EG-Delicious-Sync is a set of tools, to backup Delicious, or synchronize links and tags between WordPress and Delicious.

• Anna-marie Redpath : amr-personalise
  

  “Amr personalise” allows one to personalise wordpress emails, or content for a logged in user. It offers shortcode type functionality in any email template or page or post. It extracts the user data of the logged in viewer or email address. A default text can be specified for situations where there are no stored name details (ie not logged in, or no names provided – eg: with the plugin subscribe2.

• Anna-marie Redpath : amr-users
  

  The amr-users plugin allows an administrator to design their own users lists or reports. It offers a basic set of lists to start with to get you going and almost unlimited ability to dig deep into user meta values and generate focused tailored listings.

• Takayuki Miyoshi : Acts as Group
  

  This plugin provides a simple way for inter-user communication to multi-user blogs.

• Sudar Muthu : WP IRC
  

  WP-IRC Plugin is a WordPress Plugin which can fetch the number of users online in any IRC channel and can be scheduled to auto refresh it every x minutes.

• Sudar Muthu : Tweetbacks Helper
  

  Tweetbacks Helper is a helper Plugin for Tweetbacks Plugin to help it detect more tweets. Tweetbacks is a great Plugin by Yoast which can be used to retrieve tweets about your blog posts from Twitter and import them as comments in your WordPress blog.

• Sudar Muthu : Posts by Tag
  

  Posts by Tag WordPress Plugin, provides sidebar widgets which can be used to display posts from a specific set of tags in the sidebar.The Plugin caches the posts of each widget separately, and issues database queries only when needed. This will reduce the amount of database queries involved for each page load and will therefore be light on your server.

• Sudar Muthu : Geo Mark
  

  Geo Mark is a WordPress Plugin which will automatically locate Geo information in your WordPress posts using Yahoo Placemaker and YQL API’s.

• Sudar Muthu : Easy Retweet
  

  Easy ReTweet is a WordPress Plugin, which let’s you add retweet or Tweet this buttons for your WordPress posts, together with the retweet count.

• Tobias Bäthge : WP-Table Reloaded
  

  WP-Table Reloaded enables you to create and manage tables in your WP’s admin area. No HTML knowledge is needed. A comfortable backend allows to easily edit table data. You can include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML.

• Ryan Hellyer : PixoPoint Menu
  

  Adds an SEO friendly, accessible regular or dropdown menu to your WordPress blog. You can style the menu by using our easy to use editor interface to create the perfect looking menu for your site.

• Dan Cole : Theme Options
  

  This plugin adds Theme Options to any theme and provides a way to add and manage code snippets.

• Keiko Rabe : WP Native Dashboard
  

  The main goal of this plugin is the definition of languages that WordPress backend can be used with. This definition can only be managed by administrators, any other user can’t change this settings.

• Robert Pfotenhauer & Oliver Schlöbe : WordPress Dashboard Twitter
  

  Twitter is everywhere. So why not in your WordPress Dashboard? WordPress Dashboard Twitter lets you update your status, send direct messages, follow your mentions, list direct messages, sent messages and your favorites in a simple tab interface. All in a single widget. WordPress Dashboard Twitter turns your Dashboard into a Twitter client.

• Kirby Witmer : User Count
  

  User Count is a WordPress plugin that simply displays the number of users who have an account on your blog to the WordPress admin dashboard. It also lists the number of users per role.

• Greg Mulhauser : Greg’s High Performance SEO
  

  Greg’s High Performance SEO configures over 100 characteristics important for on-page SEO, while loading only around 600 lines of code per ordinary page view and playing nicely with other plugins. No output buffer hacks, no unnecessary admin code overhead foisted on ordinary readers, just high performance SEO goodness.

• Brian Messenlehner : WP-Announcements
  

  The WP-Announcements plugin is ideal for websites or blogs that would like to display a site wide announcement, featured post, important message, community notice, advertisement, survey form, email subscription form, emergency alert or anything you can publish in a post as a marquee or popup window using ShadowBox-JS or ThickBox.

• Brad Williams : Post Google Map
  

  This plugin allows you to add multiple addresses to a post/page and have those addresses automatically plotted on a Google Map in a sidebar widget. This is a great plugin to help localize your stories, events, news, etc.

• Brad Williams : WP-Devel
  

  The WP-Devel plugin for WordPress features a ton of debug options to help developers. Debug information is easily turned on/off from the WP-Devel toolbar.

• Stephanie Leary : Next Page
  

  This plugin provides shortcodes and template tags for next, previous, and parent navigation in pages. It allows WordPress pages to emulate Drupal’s book navigation.

• Oliver Schlöbe : Changelogger
  

  For many many people a changelog is a very important thing; it is all about justifying to the users why they should upgrade to the latest version of a plugin. Changelogger shows the latest changelog right on the plugin listing page, whenever there’s a plugin ready to be updated.

• Anthony Montalbano : The WordPress Bar
  

  Seen the DiggBar on Digg.com? Add a similar feature to your WordPress blog. Use your blog as a short link service with Easy Link Creation. Feature any link on the internet with a custom URL such as http://www.internetriot.com/?bing. Also feature social network links such as Facebook, Twitter, and Digg.

• Scribu : ImageShack Offloader
  

  ImageShack Offloader is a plugin that allows you to seamlessly offload your images to ImageShack to save server resources.

• Frank Bültge : Debug Objects
  

  The Plugin Debug Objects (Blogpost) provides the user, which has the appropriate rights, normally the administrator, a large number of information. Values and content get displayed at the frontend of the blog, to analyze errors but also to better understand WordPress.

• Chris Northwood : Live Blogging
  

  Live Blogging is a plugin developed to support blogs that are doing live micro blogging of running events, such as major sport events or tech conferences.

• Vladimir Prelovac : Navbar
  

  Navbar is a WordPress admin plugin which adds a handy navigation bar to organize your WordPress blog shortcuts.

• Jens Törnell : WP Update Message
  

  Add a short note about the latest changes in the current post or page. Activate it and it work instantly. All the settings are optional.

• Hiroaki Miyashita : Max Image Size Control
  

  Max Image Size Control plugin adds the functionality to change the max image size each category and post.

• Matt Harzewski : Tweetable
  

  Tweetable is a WordPress Plugin intended to help integrate Twitter into your blog. It can tweet your blog posts as they are published. (URLs are shortened with the URL shortener of your choice, and Google Analytics campaign tags can be included.) You can display your latest tweet(s) in your blog sidebar with a customizable widget, which can also display your follower count.

• Matt Gibbs : Widget Block
  

  Create “Block” widgets that can be set up to only display on certain pages. This lightweight plugin is similar to Drupal Blocks. You can use this plugin to avoid having to create several different widget “regions”. Once activated, you’ll see a new type of widget: “Block”.

• Ron Rennick : Advanced Export for WP and WPMU
  

  Working with a single large export file can be difficult. Use this plugin to create multiple export files that contain sections of your blog. This plugin has been tested on WP& WPMU versions 2.7 – 2.8.2

• Mika A Epstein : Ban Hammer
  

  We’ve all had this problem. A group of spammers from mail.ru are registering to your blog, but you want to keep registration open. How do you kill the spammers without bothering your clientele? While you could edit your functions.php and block the domain, once you get past a few bad eggs, you have to escalate.

We need your votes to help us choose the winners of the competition. As soon as we stop receiving entries, they will be tallied and passed on to the judges. We like to give the judges a few weeks to get their work done. In the meantime, our readers need to help us rate each of the plugins. So if you have not done so already, please head over to the Pluginblog and look through the many plugins that have been submitted. Don’t forget to come back and provide some feedback for the plugin authors and then rate their work.

Thanks again to all the sponsors and well wishers who have made the competition a reality this year.

As promised, please send in your entries to the following email in the following format:

Plugin Competition Entry Submission Email: ******@****.net

Subject: WordPress Plugin Competition 2009 Entry: [Name of your Plugin]

Body: [Your Name] [Your Email Address] [Your Paypal Address] [Plugin Competition Blog Post about your plugin] [Plugin Description] [Blog/website Address]

Attachment: [a zip file containing the final version of your plugin to be considered for judging]

If you have not done so already, please register on the Plugin Blog and post your entry on the blog so our readers can vote on them (did you vote on the plugins yet?). Then once your have all your bugs worked out and features tweaked, send us the final copy. We will receive entries till 11:59 PM on the 1st of August.

Thank you to all the Plugin Authors for participating in the competition. If you know of a plugin author who should participate, please send them the required links. If you need ideas for a plugin to enter into the competition, check out our post “What would you like in a WordPress plugin?”

As I blog, I want to do certain things with my blog. When I first started with WordPress, my Sortable Nicer Archives plugin (Please do not use it, it has gone by the wayside. The plugin lives on in hacked form on our archives.) was a necessity for me because I wanted a cleaner form of archives. I scratched my itch and hacked together something that worked for me. I also needed a way to backup my WordPress database automatically and thus the WordPress DB Backup plugin was born. At one time there were plans of including it in the core but the functionality was better suited in plugin form. When I noticed that a lot of people were searching for similar content, I put together a plugin/hack that allowed me to keep track of searches and then provide a heat map of searched words. I frequent Amazon and I really liked their related purchases section and I ended up emulating that in a plugin (this one is updated, can be used). I recently hacked up a breadcrumbs plugin when I was inspired by a tutorial I found on the web to build Apple like breadcrumbs with CSS (you can see them on action on the blog in case you are reading this from a news reader).

Today as I blog, I still come up with plugin ideas. But I cannot hunker down with code as much as I would love to. I do however, have access to a wide array of wonderful resources with which I can provide the incentive and the platform for developers to get their hands into code that can enhance the blogging experience with WordPress. Thus the WordPress Plugin Competition was born.

Getting back to the original idea of the title. What would you, my readers, like to see in a plugin? Do you need the ability to paste pictures on the WYSIWYG interface? Would you like to arrange pages with a simple drag and drop? Would you like to synchronize your posts with your Flickr pictures and display them simultaneously? Would you like to display your Kindle reading list and be able to post reviews? How about a plugin to edit your blog from the Kindle 2? Would you like your blog to display a disclaimer to every visitor from Google? Would you like to display single ads on each post?

Approximately two weeks are left in the Plugin Competition and I am hoping to spark off some new ideas.

We have 18 plugins announced so far for the competition, with at least five posts in draft stage (so at least five other plugins waiting to be posted). If you have written a plugin since the start of the competition (1st of May) and are looking for some more exposure for you and/or your plugin, read through the rules, signup on the plugin competition blog and post your plugins.

• We will be posting the plugin submission email address on the last week of the competition. Please stay tuned. If you do not submit the final version of your code, it will not be considered as an entry into the competition
• If you are a user of any of these plugins, please do not forget to rate the plugins as they are posted. Your ratings take a major part in determining the winner
• If you know of a plugin author that might benefit from the competition, please provide them with the link. Help us get the word out to developers who might be up to the challenge and write us some fantastic code
• Don’t forget to check the competition blog often to find new plugins and encourage the authors

If you did not know this already, there is over $3000 in cold hard cash to be won in the competition! Generous donations made by WPMUDev, BuySellAds, WPWebHost, White Shadow, Ozh and Techtites have made the awesome prize pool for the competition a reality. Thank you to all the sponsors, developers and authors for helping us make this event a reality.

Now if you are a RockStar WordPress plugin developer, are looking for some attention for your plugins and think you can win some cash, what are you waiting for? Only two weeks left in the competition!!

• Tweetable: Another Twitter integration plugin for WordPress (we really need to consolidate these, but there is feature differentiation)
• Live Blogging Plugin: Setup a live blog within minutes, needs Meteor
• ImageShack Offloader: Move your image hosting to ImageShack
• Max Image Size Control: Finer granular control of image sizes in WordPress
• WP Devel: Add a whole bunch of debug options to your WordPress blog
• WP Update Message: Tweak and refine the update messages in your WordPress admin panel

In addition to these plugins, I know of at least 10 others that are being developed for the competition and I am hoping for many more. A couple of links and stats of interest:

• There is now a page for the Rules and Regulations for the WordPress Plugin Competition 2009
• Sponsors and well wishers have donated almost $3000 as prize money for the competition. They include: WPMU/WPMUDEV, BuySellAds, White Shadow, WPWebHost and Ozh
• Use the WLTC Community Plugin Groups page to post ideas for new plugins and offer to create new ones
• Send us tips and ideas through Twitter @weblogtooltips
• The Plugin Compeition Blog is checked by hundreds of visitors every day for new entries and to download the old ones

So if you are a plugin author and would like to get your name out or would like to win the prize purse for the best plugin, be sure to throw your hat into the competition and show us what you are made of. If you are a corporate sponsor and would like to help us reward the plugin development community, please drop us a line.

You don’t need to be shy. Come on in, the water is just fine.

1. Register on the Plugin Competition Blog, wait to be given author permissions (within 24 hours)
2. Make sure you check all the Plugin Competition Rules and adhere to them in order to be eligible
3. Introduce your plugin(s) or your plans for writing plugins on the Plugin Competition blog
4. Once your plugin is ready, publish it on the blog and make it available for download via WordPress Extend
5. Provide initial support for the plugins through the Competition blog, your own blog or other place of publication and through WordPress Support and Extend.
6. The last step, but the most important step, is to submit the final code for your plugin to us via email. We do not publish this email or the instructions on what to put in the email till the final few weeks of the competition. Check back with us or on the Plugin Competition blog for that email address about two weeks before the end of the competition.

Alternatively you could do the following if you need new ideas for Plugin development towards the competition. You could:

• You could post your questions and your needs on this WLTC Community Forum Topic
• You could post your question on the WordPress Forums
• You could look at the most popular WordPress Ideas and find one that has not been done in a plugin yet
• Adopt a Kvetch

As for the prizes, over $2300 have been pledged towards prizes for the competition this year, which is awesome. We are looking for more corporate and personal sponsors for the comeptition to make the prize purse as attractive as possible. If you would like to sponsor some prize money, please contact us using the contact form in the menu above. This is a good way to provide some reward to the WordPress Plugin community and to get some advertisement for your blog, service or website. Any Tweets or linkage back to the competition is also very appreciated.

Game on (or should I say Plug on) !

• WordPress Plugin Competition 2008 Winners
• WordPress Plugin Competition 2007 Winners
• WordPress Plugin Competition 2005 Winners
• WordPress Plugin Competition Blog
• List of prizes from last year

We are looking for donations (via Paypal) towards the final purse for this years’ competition. WeblogToolsCollection pledges $1000 towards the final prizes.

We will not be removing the past entries from the Plugin Competition blog. Much of the rules and expectations remain the same. They are listed below. The plugins will be judged by a panel of at least three judges.

Some relevant details:

• All code must be GPL compatible
• All Plugin must be compatible with the latest official release available when the competition ends
• All Plugins have to be secure and use secure coding methods. This is very important.
  
• Plugins must be made available through the WordPress Extend pages
• Plugins must be officially submitted through email and announced and discussed on the Plugin Competition Blog. More details on submissions will be added in the last month of the competition. Release of plugin after competition start does not mean submission. You can submit your plugin way after its release to work out bugs etc.
• Running time for competition = 3 months starting the 1st of May till the 31st of July
• True WordPress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users. No editing of core files allowed.
• You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. Modification or re-use of existing code to achieve completely new functionality allowed.
• 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.
• Past winners are not eligible for this competition.

Please let us know if we can help answer any questions or if you would like to donate some money to the competition prizes. Your help will go a long way.

May we have a drum roll please?

Thank you prizes:

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

$250 prize from WPMU

• First Prize for the best WPMU compatible plugin from Incsub goes to Vote2Publish
• Consolation prize for the best WPMU compatible plugin goes to WP Wall

Consolation Prize Winner is Prelovac

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

Third Prize Winner is WP Easy Uploader

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

Second Prize Winner is Manageable

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

The Grand Prize Winner is WP Comment Remix

• $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

Thank you to all the participants and congratulations to the winners! Please use the contact form above or send an email to wpplugincomp [at] wltc [dot] net with your Paypal email address.