Weblog Tools Collection

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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!

The WordPress Plugin Competition is in full swing. A lot of people have expressed interest in participating in the competition and some prizes have already been committed. As in the years past, the plugin competition prizes will be listed on the prize page. But here is a short list of what is in store for the winners.

• Weblog Tools Collection is offering up $1000 of prize money for the winners
• James and Andrew from Incsub have offered up $250 for a plugin that is WPMU compatible. They add that WPMU plugins are not that dissimilar to regular plugins, but need to run automatically and efficiently via wp-content/mu-plugins and require users to make no hard code changes (just edits in Settings) and for global administration to be possible via the Site Admin menu.
• Geof F. Morris has generously offered $100 towards the competition
  
• WindowsObserver.com has provided a copy of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas for the PC and a copy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
• OIOPublisher has provided four copies of their advertising plugin for the winners
• Will you help?

We are still looking for more donations to add to the plugin competition coffers. If you have benefited from the plugin competition in the past, want to promote WordPress plugin development and proliferation or would like to help us out in recognizing and celebrating WordPress plugin authors, please consider donating a few bucks. Your support will go a long way and every dollar will be used as prize money for the winners.

We are also looking for sponsors of the plugin competition. A lot of people view the competition, help choose the winners and then download and benefit from the plugins developed for the competition. The benefits of sponsoring the competition are two fold, especially if you are directly involved with WordPress. Not only will your company or product receive exposure from the sponsorship, you will also help in promoting plugin development and can help provide the extra incentive to plugin authors and help them develop fantastic plugins such as WordPress Automatic Upgrade and Who Sees Ads which were both winners in the last plugin competition.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Geoffrey Sneddon, one of the developers behind the popular syndication plugin called SimplePie has announced that he will be discontinuing his role as an active developer. In a blog post published on the official SimplePie dev blog , Geoffrey explains why it’s time for him to move on. Schoolwork, lack of available time for the project and what free time he has is spent on the HTML 5 specification and Tolerant HTTP Parsing specification. However, a couple of the modules that deal with the SimplePie API will be maintained.

Despite Geoffrey leaving his development duties, he has left himself open to take more of a consulting role with the 1.x SP code base.

The good news? Ryan, the other developer for SimplePie has responded by stating:

1) SimplePie is NOT stopping development. I have big plans for where I want to take SimplePie, and those can’t happen if SimplePie is dead. In posts over the past few months, I’ve talked about where I want SimplePie to go, and that is still the plan, although it may take a little longer.

2) Over the past 3.5 years, SimplePie and it’s community have grown larger than Geoffrey and I could properly handle. It’s certainly larger than I alone can handle. Geoffrey and I will be looking for people in the SimplePie community to get involved with development, support, and other various aspects of the project.

3) I’m expecting to release SimplePie 1.1 in a matter of days. We also have a MySQL-capable branch that was likely to be 1.2, and will now definitely be 1.2. SimplePie 1.5/2.0 are no longer on any kind of timeline, as we need to get new people involved and up to speed first before we really plan those releases out.

As soon Geoffrey and I have time to work out more of the details, we’ll be sure to let you know.

I currently use the SimplePie Plugin for WordPress which provides WordPress bloggers the ability to syndicate RSS and Atom feeds to your blog. It works wonderfully well and is the plugin that powers my link blog. I really hope development continues for SimplePie as it would be a real downer if the project were to disappear.

Do you use SimplePie? If so, be sure to let me know your thoughts on the plugin.

Writing Secure WordPress Plugins: This is an important topic and with the upcoming plugin competition, I would really like to highlight the importance of securing your Wordpress plugins. This article explains the security features built into Wordpress and its plugin framework and discusses the most commonly used items including attribute_escape and wp_nonce and how to use them in your plugins. This is an essential read for plugin developers if you are not building security into your plugins.

A few days ago, Project Honey Pot introduced a new service, http:BL, “a system that allows website administrators to take advantage of the data generated by Project Honey Pot in order to keep suspicious and malicious web robots off their sites”. A honeypot is a trap set to detect email havesters and spam robots : this should ring a bell to most bloggers, I guess.

The beauty of Project Honey Pot is that anyone can contribute : just register an account, download the script and put it somewhere on your blog. It’s been more effective than I would have thought and wished : the day I had my first honeypot installed, it detected a new and before unseen comment spammer.

Contributing to this project is an easy way of making the web a cleaner place, and it will also benefit to another Wordpress related spam-fighting project : the almighty Bad Behavior will soon implement the http:BL API.

Using the API itself is fairly easy. I’ve written a short tutorial, Honey Pot & http:BL Simple PHP Script, showing how to use the API to increase protection around your beloved blog. And for those who are not interested in writing their own script, there is already an http:BL WordPress Plugin waiting for you.

Google Toolbar Button Plugin: The Google Toolbar Button plugin gives you a link in your sidebar (or wherever you want it in your theme) that installs a button to the google toolbar. The button give the ability to monitor the RSS feed of your blog from the Google Toolbar. It also adds your blog to the list of possible places to search when running a search from the Google Toolbar.

Latest Comments With Avatar incorporates MyBlogLog Avatars while displaying a list of latest comments on your site.

WinLiveStatus is a plugin that lets you show your Windows Live Messenger status in you blog sidebar. WinLiveStatus is XHTML valid and includes 7 status images and 1 error image incase the bot decides to go moo.

Top Cat lets you assign the main category for a post when you select more than one category for it.

vlowe YouTube Gallery displays a users videos and favourites as a gallery with player. Including video information and comments.

Nice tooltip for links with href- or title-attribut on the complete website or one ID. You can change between two nice tooltips - Bubble Tooltip or Sweet Title.