Weblog Tools Collection

Category Selector Back to the Sidebar

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

Deviant Thumbs

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

Movie Quotes

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

Snazzy Archives

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

Show Me Options

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

ZdMultilang

A Multilingual plugin for WordPress allowing you to blog in more than one language. You can define multiple languages and translate posts/tags/categories using the interface that will be added to your blog’s administration panel.

ZdStats

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

Broken Links Remover

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

Dk Obama

Imitates the gallery as on Barack Obama’s site.

WP125

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

McCain Widget

Place a Blogs for McCain widget in your side bar.

Overweight Calculator

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

Investment Calculator

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

Squared

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

Simple

A two column colorful theme

Rateka

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

Scruffy

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

Web 2.0 Blue

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

iF

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

FunkyZine

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

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

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

1. Post in the appropriate category

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

2. Writing your post

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Other methods to inform us about your release

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

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

Happy posting

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

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

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

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

Events Manager

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

General Stats

Counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages.

TimeZoneCalculator

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

Inline Google Docs

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

Cross References Plugin

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

Aleph

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

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

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

$250 prize:

• For the best WPMU compatible plugin from Incsub

Consolation Prize:

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

Third Prize:

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

Second Prize:

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

Grand Prize:

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

Good luck to all the participants!

Open Book Book Data

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

Fluency Admin

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

SuperLinks

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

JavaScript Pull Quotes

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

MultiSiteManager

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

Internal Link Building

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

Only two themes on the platter today.

WordPress Dating Theme

Simple, two column, widget ready theme for dating sites

SuperFresh

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

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

This is pretty exciting news and I am very enthusiastic about it. The new WordPress Theme Directory has just been announced. It is available through http://wordpress.org/extend/themes just like the plugin directory and has all the features and infrastructure support of the WordPress Extend umbrella. The look of the plugin area has also been maintained to provide a familiar feel.

That being said, there are only a few themes on the new directory. You can upload your themes by just logging into the Theme Directory using your WordPress.org username and password and following the instructions and meeting the requirements on the upload page. The theme upload process is mostly automated except for a manual review. When you upload your theme, you should expect to receive an email (soon after uploading your theme, email reception times may vary) saying that your theme is waiting to be reviewed. If you do not receive this email, your upload did not work.

A lot of usable and popularly expected features have been added to the system including some that I believe the theme authors will love and will really help highlight them and their designs. Thanks to Joseph for his hard work on the Theme Directory.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade

This is the latest version of the popular plugin that helps ease the upgrade of your WordPress blog.

Epic Theme Viewer

This plugin uses that native theme viewer in WordPress 2.6 to display a front end display of all the themes available on your blog.

Recommended Books

This is higly configurable widget to WordPress sidebar. It displays up to 10 books with liks to Eruditor.com bookshop and optionaly with jacket images, prices in dollars or pounds and/or discounts.

Servage Referral Widget

This widget allows customers of Servage to display a link containing their coupon code to Servage, customers that use this code get 25GB of extra web space and 2 months free hosting when a new customer that uses the code joins up, in return the new customer automatically receives 25GB of extra quota.

Paginated Comments

Paginated Comments is a WordPress Plugin that gives you the ability to break your comments into a number of search engine optimized pages.

MailPress

This plugin allows you to send beautiful and styled html and plain text mails based on dedicated themes and templates. If you are already comfortable with Worpress organisation and how it works, you will not be lost with MailPress. The MailPress theme and templates organisation is very similar to WordPress.

Side Content

This plugin allows you to create widgets that have different content on different pages.

WP JS

This plugin will GZIP and JSMIN your JavaScript files as well as allowing the ability to put JavaScript files into a single file at the client’s end. Cache expiry time can also be set in the admin page.

PositiveNoize

A simple, light-weight, fast-loading, widget-ready two column WordPress 2.5+ theme

Base

BASE is a very solid two column WordPress theme, covering all the basic features a standard WordPress theme should have…plus one or two extras.

simple.business

simple.business is a simple two column WordPress theme with a tabbed sidebar

WordPress 2.6 has been officially released today. Matt surprised many of us by releasing WordPress 2.6 almost a month ahead of schedule.

There are several new features in WordPress 2.6, few of which we had covered earlier. The WordPress team have also created a video that demonstrates the new features bundled with WordPress 2.6.

Download WordPress 2.6

Version Creator

This plugin have made to put your site’s version on it. You can give your version number, version name, version note whatever you want and the release date organize automatically.

PicasaView

With picasaView you can easily view your picasaweb-albums in your WordPress blog.

Tagline Rotator

The Tagline Rotator plugin does pretty much what it sounds like it would do: it randomly selects a tagline (that’s the description of your blog beneath the title) from a list of user-compiled taglines, then displays it within your blog.

WordPress Tabs and Slides

WP-TabsAndSlides (in post items) Plugin gives you the ability to easily add content tabs and/or content slides. The tabs emulate a multi-page structure, while the slides emulate an accordion-like structure, inside a single page.

RSSCake

RSSCake is evolution from QuickRSS, a plugin to show RSS into your post and page. You can insert one or more feed into your post, RSSCake is still use SimplePie as feed parser.

Header Image Rotator

Displays a new header image in your blog based on different time variables. Simply create a folder called wp-contents/header-images/ and add as many pictures as your heart desires. Supported time intervals are per minute, half hour, hourly, daily, and weekly.

Context Ad Wrapper

This plugin will mark the key parts of a blog post so that context based ad services can identify the post content and comments for the best ad matching (thus avoiding the static content that is irrelevant for context ad matching).

Ciker.com Clipart

Through a user friendly interface, search clker.com clip art library, select and add any image to your posts. No upload required. The plugin is very easy to use.

SuperLinks

SuperLinks replaces the standard WordPress 2.5 Links widget with a more customizable one. With SuperLinks you can add as many Links widgets as you want, and set the display options for each widget. For instance, you can set which Links category is displayed on each block.

A few days ago we had told you what you should know about WordPress 2.6. The post described new features that will be introduced shortly in WordPress 2.6. Though there are several new features that you may like in this new version, there might be many that have gone unnoticed that were introduced in the earlier versions of WordPress. To quell the anticipation that users might have for the latest version, we wanted to write a series of posts that will cover WordPress from its infancy to WordPress 2.5 (the latest major version) that many of you use.

The WordPress team has been naming their major releases after popular Jazz legends and we will take a look at code names for the past releases.

B2 / Cafelog

WordPress is the official successor of B2/Cafelog which is a blogging platform created in early 2001 by Michel Valdrighi using PHP and MySQL. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little took over the development to come up with (fork?) the WordPress platform as we officially know it now in early 2003, giving birth to one of the best blogging platforms ever developed.

WordPress 0.7 – 0.71

The first version to come out under the new name was WordPress 0.7 which was released in May 2003, marking several changes over the B2/Cafelog software. WordPress 0.7 introduced several new features such as allowing users to add links to their blogrolls, new administration interfaces, manual excerpts, default templates and more.

WordPress 0.71 was just a minor revision but it brought incorporated many changes that form an integral part of WordPress as we know it today. WordPress 0.71 “Gold” introduced cool new features such as post status where users could mark the post state as draft, publish or private. A blog owner would also have greater flexibility over the comments by disabling them on a per-post basis. 0.71 also combined trackbacks, pingbacks and user written comments into a single category. There were several other changes including better administration, security fixes and more.

WordPress 0.72 added password protected posts, new xmlrpc APIs, a Blogger import and many other improvements. This version also included a new theme from Dave Shea.

WordPress 1.0

There were several minor versions in between WordPress 0.71 and WordPress 1.2 beside WordPress 1.0, which included WordPress 1.0.1 code named “Miles”. This was followed by WordPress 1.0.2 code named “Blakey” which was a smaller release based on bug fixes.

The much anticipated WordPress 1.0 was finally released on January 3rd, 2004. This version included several new exciting features (as usual). The most noticeable feature was the introduction of better search engine friendly permalinks which allowed users to structure their URLs to get better search engine visibility using mod_rewrite. The version also lifted the limitation of allowing only one category per post. This meant that users could assign several categories to a single post.

For all those who were worried about comment spam, this version included comment moderation where blog authors could moderate comments, before they would be viewable on the blog. Users could also edit pages or comments with the newly provided links. WordPress 1.0 also included support for ATOM based feeds. 1.0 was a very popular release.

There were several other new releases which we will take a look in other parts of this series. In the mean time, we would love to hear from users who had used these versions. How did the earlier versions of WordPress change your outlook towards blogging? Did those earlier versions make you a fan?

[EDIT] Fixed minor error in versions and added 0.72. Thanks Carson and Geof

The guys and gal over at the WordCast Podcast is currently holding a Mugshot contest. The contest is all about taking a photo of your favorite mug.

Check out this awesome line up prizes:

4th Place: WordPress mug and WordPress T-shirt

3rd Place: WordPress mug, WordPress T-shirt and Lijit T-Shirt

2nd Place: WordPress mug, WordPress T-shirt, Lijit T-Shirt, signed copy of Blogging Tips: What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging, and one single-user Revolution theme license of the winners’ choice

1st Place: WordPress mug, WordPress T-shirt, Lijit T-Shirt, signed copy of Blogging Tips: What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging, one TV.Elements theme license, one single-user Revolution theme license of the winners’ choice, a free copy of The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog, and an (optional) free 30 minute consultation with Liz Strauss.

The contest is still going on with no clear indication as to when the final images will be accepted. Please check out their contest page to discover the rules of the contest as well as how to enter.

HelloBlogger

A simple two column blue and white WordPress theme

Typography

A fixed two column outfit and some modern typographic styles. The front page shows the latest post in excerpts with an article image pulled via the custom fields, while the sidebar features a custom built news slider.

Bullit

Bullit WordPress theme with a fixed two column outfit and some stylish black layout. The front page shows the latest post in excerpts with an article image pulled via the custom fields, while the sidebar features a special news slider.

The Enhancing Spring

The Enhancing Spring (TES) is a 2-column theme in green style. It’s autofit to your screen width and looks very clean, which makes your posts easy to read. The XHTML and CSS are well separated so it’s very easy to customize for your own needs.

Una

Una is a clean, minimalistic, steady and excellent theme. It has 2 columns divided with the guide of the divine proportion. The front page shows the latest post with it’s accompanying large graphic image which helps attract readers more than the usual large text titles. Below the latest post is a list of the 3 other recent posts with each post accompanied by a nice thumbnail image. Each section title is supported by a nice subtitle. The comments and trackbacks are organized to produce a clean and organized look.

Introspection

Introspection is a two column, widget ready ad-system ready

Apollo

Apollo is a free WordPress theme with a few added user options. You can customize most of the display: 1 or 2 sidebars, left or right layout, fonts, rss feeds, gravatars, show pingbacks etc. The design - fairly bland and shouldn’t distract from the content of your blog.

Hamasaki

Hamasaki is a two column, fixed width, widget and Gravatar ready WordPress theme.

Red Star

Red Star is a simple, two column WordPress theme with a big header.

Green Blood

Green Blood is a grey and green two column WordPress theme.

I have been asked this question quite a few times and I never have a perfect answer. It is obviously an important question to ask but it can be answered in many different ways based on preferences, need for plugins, optimization techniques used and a variety of other factors.

Weblog Tools Collection uses a lot of plugins and is very query heavy but the in spite of that, the front page uses 59 queries to generate itself. I think the default (on a vanilla WordPress install on the default theme) is 27 or something of that nature. The larger the number of queries, the slower the page is going to load and the more load you are going to put on your MySql server. All of the above is true if you do not use inline or regenerative caching mechanisms. The caveat on this blog is that its plugins and its MySql server are highly optimized (via inline caching mechanisms) to reduce load.

Larger number of queries on a WordPress blog are probably caused by plugins that have been installed. Plugin authors can have non-optimized and useless queries that either take a long time to execute or need a large(r) number of queries to acheive a simple(r) result. I suspect that one could follow the 80-20 rule with 80% of the queries on your blog being generated by 20% of the plugins. If you can identify the top hitters and either optimize or replace them, you will have a happier blog and a happier MySql server.

It is also important to remember that the number of queries might not be the only straw that is breaking the camel’s back. SQL queries can be poorly constructed and can put a tremendous drain on resources. I remember a certain recent comments plugin that made queries which scanned entire tables before producing a result. If you are concerned about the speed of you blog or the number of queries, start disabling plugins. You might be pleasantly surprised to find that a few plugins might be causing most of your headaches. Once you identify the suspect plugins, you can then either find replacements that are more oprtimized or find other ways of obtaining the same result.

How many queries does your font page generate? If you find efficiencies by disabling plugins, please tell us about the results.

AVH Extended Categories

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

AVH Amazon

The avh-amazon plugin gives you the ability to add a widget which will display a random item from your Amazon wish list, baby registry and/or wedding registry.

dilw

It lets you see displayed the Daily Dilbert. It uses the DilbertDailyStrip RSS feed.

Enhanced Recent Posts

Enhanced Recent Posts is a widget that comes as a replacement to the built-in widget. As the first enhancement, you can choose if you want to show posts from all categories, from some categories in particular or from all categories but some (exclude categories).