Weblog Tools Collection

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Good day. I am Ajay D’Souza. I blog at http://ajaydsouza.com/ and http://techtites.com/. Those of you who have been following this blog for more than a year may remember my daily release posts as well as the A-Plugin-A-Day series. MBA life has kept me busy since then, but that’s another story.

As part of my new assignment out here, I’ll be looking after the Plugin Competition. I’ll be maintaining the WordPress Plugin Competition Blog as well as making weekly posts both here and at the Competition Blog.

With the WordPress Plugin Competition 2.5 beginning today, I thought I’d just write in with a few tips on making your entry.

Firstly, read the rules to be followed are listed in the post. Please make sure that your entry does not break any of them.

Getting Inspired

One of the important rules that we have is that the plugins should be new, i.e. no updates to already existing plugins. One great place to get inspired is WordPress Ideas. WordPress Ideas is a place where the people from the WordPress Community, both users and developers vote for what they would like included in WordPress. Some have been implemented, while some may actually appear in future versions and still others that may not be. So, why not make a plugin to accommodate for the latter two?

You can also hunt for ideas in these posts or this posting in our News Forum.

Offering the plugin for download

Something that many authors forget in their zeal to develop a plugin (or a theme) is its documentation.

Firstly, make sure your plugin zip file contains a readme.txt. If needed, include a full fledged help section as well. You can also put this on the plugin release page on your site.

Next, create a separate page on your blog / site dedicated for the plugin. Posts are a no-no! They get lost in the crowd.

Make sure the page has the following:

• Overview
• Requirements
• Features
• Installation Instructions
• Download Link
• License
• Method to get support

When linking to the download file, one method I follow is to link to a file without any version etc. e.g. it reads simply pluginname.zip. The purpose of this is that I can always update the zip file with the latest version of the plugin without bothering to change the link.

Old versions of the plugin can be archived as pluginname_v1.0.zip, pluginname_v1.1.zip and so on.

Sending it to us

You’ll need to send your plugin to us via email. We will reveal the email address that you need to send the plugins to in the second month of the competition.

The competition is on for another two months, which gives you plenty of time to release a feature rich plugin.

Before that, release a well tested version to the public. Fix any bugs that come up, try to provide more features as requested.

The WordPress community is demanding and extremely helpful at guiding you down your path.

All the best for now.

To the WordPress Community

I’m sure you’ll love the competition and many of the plugins that stem from it. Authors are always hunting for ideas and who better to tell them than you. Please feel free to post your ideas in the comments section below.

Or, you can also post them in any of these two posts or this posting in our News Forum.

If you would like to sponsor a prize or donate some money to the competition, please contact us. Lots of eyes see these competitions and your encouragement goes a long way in helping provide incentives.

Stay tuned and please help spread the word.

While reading Lorelle’s awesome post over at the blog herald entitled WordPress Wednesday I noticed a blip she mentioned about Mark Jaquith’s Subscribe To Comments plugin. Apparently, Mark has changed the way in which subscriptions are dealt with by default. In earlier versions, Subscribe To Comments would leave the Subscribe Box check marked by default, causing anyone who commented to automatically be subscribed to that blog post. This in turn created an opt-out way of thinking which has been and continues to be a bad practice.

Mark has changed this around and now leaves the subscribe box blank by default, leaving it up to the end users to decide on whether they would like to subscribe to the post or not. A much needed and welcomed change. Mark even set the plugin up so that even those who want to be subscribed to every post they comment on can do so via cookies:

I appear to have misread into Marks’ post as has been pointed out by both Mark and Lloyd Budd in the comments. What really changed with the plugin is the fact that the site admin now no longer has the configurable option of making the plugin opt-in or opt-out by default. According to Mark,

Before: option of opt-in or opt-out with default of opt-in for new installs. After: opt-in only, but with per-user checkbox stickiness. And yes, the change is old — I just have been getting a lot of e-mail about it and realized I never explained the change publicly.

I realize the change is old and the post I linked to was written in April, but because of the way I read into the post, I thought this was something that needed to be brought up due to the ethical nature of the changes that were made.

Google Maps

The Google Maps plugin allows you to easily insert Google maps into your blog, making use of the new shortCode system in WordPress 2.5. The maps can be configured to offer directions to or from the location, show or hide the zoom/pan controls, show/hide map type, activate zoom using mouse wheel. This plugin requires a API key from Google Maps.

TW-Asides

Tw-asides is an asides widget for WordPress. It lets you publish short posts that appear in your sidebar rather than in the main content column. Asides posts won’t appear in your main content stream, whether it’s on the front page of your blog or when navigating via the next/previous post links.

WP-Crontrol

WP-Crontrol is a plugin that lets you manage the WP-Cron system and see what’s going on there. This includes adding/editing/deleting cron entries, as well as cron schedules.

Random Featured Post

The Random Featured Post plugin allows you to display a random post from one or more designated categories. The featured post will display the title “Featured Post” which is customizable along with the post’s title and content or an excerpt with link to full post.

WP-Offload

WP-Offload will boost the performance of your blog by seamlessly offloading static content like images, documents and movies. This will greatly reduce bandwidth consumption and the number of HTTP requests issued to your web server. Additional features such as remote image manipulation and thumbnail generation are provided.

Google XML Sitemaps with Multiple Domains

This plugin is a solution for those running both the Domain Mirror and the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator plugins together in WordPress.  The plugin extends Google (XML) Sitemaps so that it creates one sitemap for each mirror set up in Domain Mirror.  Sitemaps are created with the mirror URL prepended to the custom filename.

BT Active Discussions

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

Here at WeblogToolsCollection.com, we have already discussed how you can change the color scheme in the WordPress 2.5 administration panel from Classic to Fresh. We have also highlighted an awesome plugin that was written by Kaspars which gives users up to 8 different color schemes to choose from. However, what if you want to create your own color scheme? Thanks to a plugin written by James Dimick called Easy Admin Color Schemes, users can now create their own flavor of the WordPress 2.5 back end.

After downloading and installing the plugin, you can access it by browsing to SETTINGS-COLOR SCHEMES. There are three color schemes to start you off, Classic, Fresh and Washedout. The plugin does not allow you to delete nor edit the Classic and Fresh color schemes. This makes sense as you wouldn’t want to screw up a default skin only to have to reinstall WordPress to fix the issue. However, you can edit the Washedout color scheme which introduces you to the plugins functionality.

The plugin starts off by giving you the chance to name your color scheme. Next, give your color scheme four primary colors. If you don’t know of a six digit color code, there is a small arrow to the right of the text field that will open up a color picker. Opening the color picker and then selecting a color will automatically place the corresponding color code into the text field.

Once you have your four primary colors in order, the next step which is the longest of them all is to go through all of the CSS specific code and change the color code values to something else you prefer. There at least 10 different CSS files which make up the styling of the administration panel. There are more if you want to include support for RIGHT TO LEFT text. This plugin takes all of those CSS files and puts them in one place for you to edit, which makes things so much easier. Also, for those who have javascript enabled in their browser, you can view a live preview of what the changes will look like on an active WordPress administration page. Very handy as it cuts down on the browser refreshes.

One thing that I think this plugin is missing is an easy way for users to share their creations. If a download or save link could be added to the color schemes which would automatically package the necessary files together which could then be saved to my desktop for distribution, this would make the plugin a home run.

If you are looking at adding some spice to your WordPress back end, give this plugin a try. I don’t think it could be any easier than this plugin. The only problem with creating a color scheme is figuring out where each CSS class or DIV is defined. That’s where FireBug comes in.

Good luck and if you happen to create a color scheme using this plugin, be sure to say so in the comments.

Not too long ago, a new plugin was released called WP-Crontrol. WP-Crontrol allows you to take control over what is happening in the WP-Cron system.

WP-Cron is a tangle of black magic that allows a plugin developer or a user to schedule commands to be executed. WP-Crontrol is a plugin that lets a blog owner see through that magic and figure out what’s actually going on

If you want a detailed introduction to this plugin as well as an explanation as to how to use this plugin in conjunction with WP Database Backup to create backups when you want them, be sure to check out this article: Add a new WordPress backup schedule with WP-Crontrol

Also on the radar today is a quick fix for the WordPress 2.5.x image uploader. Awsom.org is reporting that there is a no-flash plugin that is available which returns the previous image upload function from earlier versions of WordPress.

It is time for another WordPress Plugin Competition. Plugin competitions of the past have seen fantastic code, extremely useful and fun plugins and have generated a lot of interest in WordPress and plugin development. Prizes have been very generously donated by readers and well wishers and we already have some donations towards this year’s competition and are looking for more. The final list of prizes will be determined very soon. If you would like to sponsor a prize or donate some money to the competition, please contact me. Lots of eyes see these competitions and your encouragement goes a long way in helping provide incentives. The plugin competition will begin on the 10th of May and will last till the 10th of July.

There will be prizes for first, second and third places and a consolation prize. The plugins should be officially submitted through email and the Plugin Competition Blog (which will be cleaned for the new competition) should be used as a launching ground for plugin ideas, updates, development news etc. The plugins will be judged by a panel of at least three judges and reader feedback will be an essential part of the judging process. At the end of the contest, we will put up posts for each submission and will open them up to our readers for two weeks. The contest results should be declared by the beginning of August.

All code must be GPL (or compatible) and should be available for download through the Competition Blog and preferably through WordPress Extend. The plugins can be modified and tweaked till the last day of the competition or until the author sends us an email with the final version of the code. In essence, the Plugin Competition Blog is the preferred vehicle of communication for all contestants.

Some relevant details:

• Running time for competition = 2 months starting the 10th of May till the 10th of July.
• True Wordpress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users.
• You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. New code only please.
• Plugins can only be submitted via email. We will make that email address public later on in the competition.
• Plugins cannot have opt-out links back to the authors’ pages (from the main blog pages, admin pages are fine). If you have links or donation forms, please make them opt-in.
• All plugins require documentation as in the Wordpress Extend pages. Documentation will be one of the judging criteria.
• Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
• We are looking for innovation, documentation and elegant code.
• Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at our sole discretion.

More details to be added with time.

Stay tuned and please help spread the word.

Clean WordPress Gallery Plugin

This plugin replaces the default gallery feature in WordPress 2.5 with a valid XHTML solution and offers Lightbox, Slimbox, and Thickbox support.

Theme Tester

The Theme Tester plugin allows you to change themes and view the results without the visitors to your blog seeing any changes. The visitors may notice some changes if your current theme uses blog options that a new theme overwrites.

Fresh Plus Visited

Fresh Plus Visited is a very simple plugin for WordPress 2.5 that adds a user color scheme to the admin interface.

Lameda

Lameda stands for List Attachment MEtaDAta. The plugin enables you to display any information from your attachments like photos, music files, pdf, etc within your posts or pages.

Movie2Blog

The plugin inserts short movie info in your posts (poster, title, directors, actors, runtime, short review, trailer). Uses Cinema Rx for serving data.

Fun with Random Comment Forms

The plugin replaces the form field names in the comment form with random names then uses sessions to name them correctly after submission before passing the values back for comment processing.

Easy Admin Color Schemes

The plugin allows you to manage the color schemes in your WordPress admin area. You can add new colors as well as edit current ones.

Facebook Dashboard Widget

Using the dashboard widgets available in WordPress 2.5, this plugin will process your Friends status updates RSS feed and/or your Facebook notifications feed, and add a widget for each to your WordPress admin dashboard.

Woopra was opened up to the world at the Dallas WordCamp where I met John for the first time. His talk was not on Woopra but he introduced it to the event in a very short, three minute spiel. Since then Woopra has generated a tremendous amount of buzz in blogging circles. In short, Woopra is a stats tool for websites that lives as an application on your desktop (among other places) and can provide live webstats on your visitors. I like it since it is fast and since the developers gave me an opportunity to look at the insides early on, I have developed quite a fondness for it. They are in growth mode and with the recent upgrade to their desktop client, they can support more locations and are in the process of approving a large number of new users for their service.

All of that being said, with my previous knowledge of Woopra and its capabilities, I was literally floored this afternoon by a flood of new “stuff” that I had either completely missed or capabilities that were added in this new release. So if you are a Woopra user (or if you are not, just sign up), pull up a chair, grab a cup of your favorite beverage and read on. This is pretty cool.

All of the following assumes that you have an active Woopra account, are using WordPress, have the WordPress plugin installed and have the Woopra application (1.1.1.0) installed on your machine.

• With Woopra, and the Woopra WordPress Plugin, you can monitor all your registered users and all your commenters. This sounds obvious/relatively mundane until you install the plugin on your WordPress blog and create an event notification on the application. Follow the bouncing ball.
  • Open up your Woorpa application, click on the manage tab on the left and then click on Create a new Event Notification.
  • Then type in “Known Visitors” into the label box, click Next.
  • On the next window, click and activate the checkbox next to “Visitor is tagged or is a member” and click next until you come to the “Edit Notification’s look and feel” screen.
  • Here click on the “Notification’s Icon” dropdown to click on “visitor’s Avatar” and then paste the following in the “Custom notification message” box: Visitor %NAME% is viewing %PAGETITLE% Then click on Apply Notification button

  Now you will receive a notification on your desktop whenever a registered user or a user who has left a comment, visits your blog. This gets even cooler when you notice their gravatar shows up on the notification and you are now able to track these known visitors are they traverse through your blog. You can even choose to initiate a web chat with these visitors through the Woopra application. The chat shows up on their browser. This is cool and scary at the same time.

• Another cool new tool I discovered today was the little map of the world on the top left corner of the “live” tab. Now I had noticed the map there but had not looked into it much. Look for a small arrow on the top right corner of that map. Once you click on that arrow, the map opens up to a full screen view and now you are able to use your mouses’ scroll wheel to zoom in on any part of the map and use your cursor to identify users. I could spend hours doing this on a busy day.
• I had noticed the small column of labels at the top right hand corner of the Woopra desktop application but had not paid much attention to it. The lowest item on that list is called “live” and once clicked it shows the number of  users on your blog on a moving bar graph, much like whos.amung.us
• The analytics tab has a bunch of hidden gems. Some newer features were also added to the items on this tab. Click on the Analytics tab on the Woopra application and look for the following:
  • The “referrers” tab now has a few new subtabs. They include regular stats stuff like webpages, domains and search engines. But now this tab also include Feed Readers, Emails, Social Bookmarks, Social Networks, Media, News and Communities. Each one of these intrigued me and the I was taken aback by the breakdowns of referrals from various applications. The Email tab gave me the most food for thought. If your blog has email readers or you publish regular newletters via email, this tab could help you identify reader populations from various email services. Clicking on the graph part of the display brings up a historical view.
  • The “pages” tab breaks up visitors by subdirectories. With WordPress’ permalinks, you can now determine how hard your yearly archives are working for you. Apparently, over a thousand people looked at my archives from 2003 this week. As your data grows, this tab could contain breakdowns by tag, by author and any other permalink features that you have enabled through your blog. I wonder why our WordPress tag is so popular?
  • The last tab to point out is “systems”. Now this data can be mundane and almost all stats programs offer some sort of systems breakdown. Woopra adds to this functionality by letting you find permutations of systems options. This blog receives more Chinese speaking, Internet Explorer 6 users on Windows XP than any other language. I will be using that information to my advantage, I am sure you can find your particular niche to help or enhance.

Woopra is a great tool. It is even better with these little tidbits. There are literally thousands of different ways to enhance your stats and understand your reader population better. I have just outlined a few that I had completely missed till today.

Have you found any cool new tricks for Woopra that you would like to share?

For those of you who have recently browsed to the website that the popular PodPress plugin calls home, you’ll notice that the site is gone and has been replaced by a parked GoDaddy domain page. This GoDaddy parked page has already sent many people into a frenzy. As I’ve monitored my Twitter stream, many folks were already started to think that PodPress may have up and folded for greener pastures. There have also been a forum post or two discussing the possible demise of the PodPress project.

I’ve recently got in contact with the author of PodPress and I have excellent news. The GoDaddy page is the result of a domain registration snafu. The site should be back online either as you read this, or within the next few hours.

While talking with Mightyseek, I learned that the new version of PodPress is almost ready for release. The next version of PodPress promises to be more customizable as in the way it looks on your blog. Mightyseek has also informed me that he plans on creating PodPress ports for Joomla and Drupal which should quickly follow the release.

Just the other day, I ran into a problem. I deleted a number of categories on my blog and since WordPress does not give you the option of reassigning the posts within those categories to another category, all of those posts were reassigned to Uncategorized. The answer to this problem? Batch Categories.

Batch Categories is a WordPress plugin written by Rob Miller that adds some powerful functionality into the default WordPress category editor. With Batch Categories, you can reassign a number of posts to a category, remove a number of posts from a category, edit the tagging structure, and so much more. Batch Categories also includes a number of enhanced post filters to make finding those posts much easier. This is what the plugin back end looks like.

There are two different versions of this plugin. One for WordPress 2.3.3 and one for WordPress 2.5. This is the type of functionality that really makes managing a number of posts easier and I thank Rob for creating this plugin as it solved my issue and I’m sure it will be of use to many of you. No more editing one post at a time!

New ‘AB Meta’ Markup Tools Could Create a Smarter Web: Wired has an interesting article on a new set of tools from Adaptive Blue called AB Meta which could be used to easily add metadata to your blog pages that can in turn, be used by search engines to correctly categorize and annotate content. Dougal’s HeadMeta WordPress plugin can be used to insert AB Meta into your posts. The Wired article and the Adaptive Blue blog post have some examples on how this works and what should be done.

Disclosure: Adaptive Blue is an advertiser on this blog.

If you cannot see the video, please visit this link: Organize Series - Video Plugin Review

Today’s WordPress Plugin video review is of Organize Series by Unfolding Neurons.

Video Summary: Organize Series is an extremely powerful plugin that makes organizing series rather simple. There are many options to customize the look. The show clincher for me is the ability to have series archives. I highly recommend this plugin for people who do post series.

Pros: It’s easy to add series and to organize them. Many options to customize the look and feel. The series permalinks are a nice feature.

Cons: Perhaps too many options, but power-users will love them. I only tested this plugin on 2.5, so I’m not sure how well this plugin fares on other versions.

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.

Kaspars from Konstruktors has released a WordPress 2.5 plugin called Baltic Amber Themes that allows you to change your default colour schemeadmin theme.

Update: This plugin does modify your admin layout as well as your color schemes, so please keep this in mind if trying the plugin out. Kaspars has mentioned that there is now an option to disable the layout changes.

What’s even cooler about this plugin is that the plugin provides a nice refresh to the Write Panel and several areas of the overall administration panel.

After activating the plugin, you can change the default colour schemetheme by viewing your profile options. From there, you have an option of 8 colour schemes, or an option for a custom or random colour.

This is a rather welcome addition to the WordPress 2.5 admin area.

Baltic Amber Themes

Baltic Amber Write Panel

Baltic Amber Settings

Download your own copy of Baltic Amber Admin Themes.

Speckyboy has created a list of the top 10 security plugins to use with WordPress. The plugins range from AskApache Password Protect to WP Security scan. When asked about security at WordCamp Dallas, Matt Mullenweg responded by saying “The best thing you could do to make sure your blog is secure is to stay up to date with the latest stable versions of WordPress.” Using strong passwords for your administrator account along with not using the default admin account that is created during a WordPress install are also good practices.

For more information in regards to securing your WordPress installation, be sure to check out the Hardening WordPress article on the Codex.

WP Page Numbers

WP Page Numbers uses numbers which makes it easier for users to choose what page to go to instead of the regular Next and Previous links. There are five themes to choose from and an option to create your own themes to display the page numbers.

WP Simple Sitemap

WP Simple Sitemap is a Wordpress plugin that automatically lists all your posts with a page number navigation.

Dashboard last news

Allows you to display the last items of several feeds in your dashboard. Aggregates as much feeds you want and displays the last items from it.

DivvaFlip

A plugin based on the WP2.5 media gallery DivvaFlip allows you to flip your pages using AJAX. It works in harmony with your native media WordPress galleries or with your Nextgen gallery.

SmartAds

SmartAds is a plugin that let’s you automatically, yet intelligently place Adsense ads into your posts. Some features include showing ads above and below post content automatically, limiting ad visibility by post word count and more.

If you cannot see, the video, please visit this link: Absolute Comments - Video Plugin Review

Today’s WordPress Plugin video review is of Absolute Comments by PlanetOzh.

Video Summary: Absolute Comments is a major improvement over the WordPress 2.5 Comments Panel. The plugin allows you to reply to comments easily without having to visit a post. The plugin also allows you to view all comments for a particular post. An immense timesaver.

Pros: Major improvement over the existing WordPress 2.5 comments panel. The plugin makes it easy to reply to comments.

Cons: None, although it would be nice if there was a way to change the default reply text (or have several options) in the admin-panel without having to edit the plugin’s code.

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 people over at Viddler have released a new plugin compatible with WordPress 2.5. The plugin is at version 1.1 Beta 1 and is still undergoing testing. Here are a few things you can expect from this new plugin:

• Dashboard widget You can now watch, and help promote, our daily featured videos right from within the Wordpress administration dashboard. There is a preference in the options panel to turn this off.
• Viddler videos in Add Media pop-up One of Wordpress 2.5’s flagship features is the new “Add media” pop-up window when writing posts and pages. Now, you can add Viddler videos in several ways.
• Featured videos Like on the dashboard widget, you are now able to embed featured videos quickly.
• Your videos One quick search for your username, and you can page through every public video you have on Viddler and embed them in your posts.
• SearchThe search features lets you find, and embed, any video on Viddler by searching by tag and/or username.
• Record Using your webcam, or any camera attached to your computer, you can use Viddler’s recorder to quickly record a brand-new video and embed it in your post, all without leaving your Wordpress admin.
• Fixed Wordpress 2.5 jQuery conflict Both our plugin and Wordpress use jQuery, the state-of-the-art Javascript framework, and version 1.0 of our plugin causes conflicts with Wordpress 2.5. Now that is fixed!

Last but not least, a video showcasing the new version in action.

You can download the latest version of the Viddler plugin from their Wiki Developers page.

Plugin Central

Plugin Central is a WordPress plugin management add-on to automatically install and update WordPress plugins. It works with WordPress 2.5+ only. Install plugin by typing the name of the plugin and allows you to install multiple plugins at once.

Release Page | Download

Login Error Cleanup

Returns the message “Error” when the username and password combination are invalid while logging into WordPress account. The message helps thwart attackers who are trying to guess username and passwords.

Release Page | Download

ReadySetFlickr

ReadySetFlickr will display a photo set from Flickr. Two options for layout display. Also supports a random and a most recent option.

Release Page | Download

Widgetized Admin Dashboard

Widgetized Admin Dashboard is a Wordpress Plugin for 2.5+ that lets you edit the Wordpress Dashboard in the Design > Widgets area.

Release Page | Download

KeywordLuv

KeywordLuv separates commentators name from their keywords in the link to their website, giving them improved anchor text.

Release Page | Download

Login-box

Login-box is a plugin that inserts a hidden login box into all the pages that can be opened with Ctrl + E.

Release Page | Download