Weblog Tools Collection

One Column Themes

TJ-Clean

TJ Clean is a simple, clean cut yet feature-full WordPress theme which is great for sites where content is king. Ideal for personal blogs as it includes integration with Flickr (photo sharing), Last.FM (music sharing) and status updates from Facebook/Twitter (and others). This theme is also XHTML Strict 1.0 and Valid CSS 2.1.

Two Column Themes

30April

30April was created by the theme author to celebrate his birthday. This theme contains widget support, is fixed width, contains an extra footer, theme options to make changing and editing the theme easy and built in gravatar support.

Milky Conversations

Milky Conversations is a two column, widget ready theme that is based off of the White As Milk theme, written by Azeem Azeez. The theme has been released under GPL and is fully compliant with the license. As the name implies, this theme is pretty white with black text and a little bit of orange thrown in via the RSS icons.

Three Column Themes

Khaki Traveler

Khaki Traveler was developed by Jeremy Clarke. It has a tan color scheme and a travel themed header. It is also a three column widget ready theme. It has gravatar support as well as tagging support. It has a top navigation menu with an easy to access log-in form.

Hybrid Themes - Themes Where The Number Of Columns Can Be Configured

Choice

Choice is a highly configurable theme that supports either 2 or 3 columns, is widgetized, theme options to control the themes background color, theme text weight, theme heading color, number of sidebars and whether or not your slogan appears. The theme also has native tag support.

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.

When it comes to exporting, WordPress already does a wonderful job with it’s support to export posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. However, there is a problem. The WordPress exporter lacks granularity. What I mean by this is that, the exporter covers the entire blog instead of being able to select certain categories to export. I’ve searched the WordPress Plugin database high and low to look for a plugin that would specifically export categories and I could not find one. I did manage to come across two techniques though that get the job done.

There are two ways to export specific categories. The first is to read this forum post where HandySolo explains how to use the category RSS feed to export specific categories from a self hosted blog to a WordPress.com blog. The problem with this method is that, none of the meta data attached to the posts are carried over with the posts.

The second method is not pretty but it gets the job done. What I ended up doing was creating a new user account on my blog. I then used the post manager and filtered the posts by the category for which I wanted to export. I went through each individual post and quickly changed the post author from the original account, to the newly created user account. In my case, I had to do this to 25 individual posts. What is annoying about this method is that, when you save a post under a new author name, any blogs or posts that you have linked to within those posts will end up resending PINGs. However, I believe if you turn off this setting under the SETTINGS-DISCUSSION link in your administration panel this will prevent that from happening. Just remember to turn that back on after you’re finished.

After all of the posts within the category have been reassigned to a new author, you are ready to export. In your WordPress administration panel browse to MANAGE - EXPORT. Now here is the important step. Underneath where it says OPTIONS, you have a drop down box where you can restrict the export to a certain author.

In the drop down box, select the newly created author and click on the DOWNLOAD EXPORT FILE and a WordPress WXR file will be downloaded to your desktop. This file will contain all of the posts from the category you wanted to export because the new user you created was assigned to only those posts within that category. This method actually allows you to export specific categories while maintaining the meta data associated with those posts such as comments and tags.

This is probably not the best way to obtain these results but it’s the only method that I’ve found that allows me to export specific posts/categories while still having all of the other data attached to those posts. If you have a better solution or know of a plugin that can obtain the same results, I’d be very interested to know about it.

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.

One Column Themes

Integrati

Integrati is a single-column theme with the sidebar below the post. This theme has a built-in recent comments and previous posts section in the sidebar.

Fun with Minimalism

Fun with Minimalism is a one column theme without widget support . The theme provides an admin screen to make choices over the default colours, the colours used for each category, or post in that category, the feed link and the position of the feed icon.

Simple

Simple is a really simple theme with one column and good use of colors and fonts. The theme loads fast and has a tabbed footer at the bottom of the page.

Two Column Themes

PassionDuo

PassionDuo is a clean theme, with rounded corners and 2 columns. It is advertising ready and it comes in 3 different color versions: red, blue and green.

Nature Blog

Nature Blog is a two column theme with a widget ready sidebar and footer. The theme has space for 121×121 or similar sized square ads and comes built in with a styled calendar for use with widgets.

Mag on Wood

Mag on Wood is a magazine style widget ready two column theme. The themes background is based on wood. There is ample space for advertising in the theme.

Although there were over 80 security/bug fixes in WordPress 2.5.1, there was one thing that crept up immediately following the release. According to numerous reports by individuals and a ticket filed in the WordPress Trac when a user resets their password, the password reset link received in the email does not work. The error message that is received looks like this “Sorry, that key does not appear to be valid.”

This bug has already been fixed and will be included in WordPress 2.5.2. However, if you are having issues with the reset link right now, you can read this post by Ryan McCue on how to Reset your WP Password Manually through phpMyAdmin.

[EDIT] Ryan has included the files which contain the patch that you can download here

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!

I had this interesting thought which I am sure can be easily defeated but definitely points towards the success of WordPress.

I was searching the web for something inconspicuous as the “iWrap” and I came upon some interesting results. While browsing the results and then switching back to the search results page, I realized that the first page had at least three results that were either related to WordPress or were on a WordPress blog. I repeated the search for completely inane search terms and had at least one result show up on every search I performed from a blog that used WordPress as the blogging tool. I have had this happen in the past with various other queries but had not quite put two and two together. So my hypothesis is that a WordPress blog or a link that is somehow related to WordPress, shows up on the first page of results on every search performed on Google.

Do you have a search term or phrase that proves otherwise?

[EDIT] Since there seems to be some that do not, conversely, what percentage of search results do you think has WordPress in the first page of results?

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.

One Column Themes

Cranky Hemingway

A one column theme based on the Hemingway theme. This theme also sports a extended sidebar in the footer area to display additional content.

Two Column Themes

Libertine

Libertine is a minimalistic theme specifically made for WordPress 2.5. It contains support for Gravtar, new image classes and more.

WP Bats

WP Bats is a two column, fixed-width, widget ready theme. The theme comes build in with page links navigation.

Grayplicity

Grayplicity is a two column widget ready theme. The theme comes with a CSS file that is compressed and used by the site so if you try editing the style.css and nothing changes please make changes in the header to use style.css.

Codescheme Blue

Codescheme Blue is a fixed-width, 2 column widget ready theme. The pages have a horizontal tab menu, using the CSS ’sliding-doors’ method and are generated automatically.

Three Column Themes

Thoughtlog

Thoughtlog is a 3 column theme that features a Springtime header. The theme is widget ready and contains two headers one with text and one without it.

The results for the Webware 100 have been released. WordPress.org along with WordPress.com have taken home the award for best publisher. Congratulations to the team at Automattic, the core developers of WordPress.org and last but not least, thanks to all of you who voted and continue to use and support WordPress on a daily basis.

Those of you who have been wanting a Technology conference to visit the South Eastern United States are now in luck. The event is called South By Deep South and is a take on the familiar South by South West conference. The event will be held in Birmingham, Alabama on September 26th-28th. The final details of the event are still being worked out but Ike Pigott has already let us know some of what we can expect from this event:

• Social Media/PR/Marketing
• Web development
• A full-blown WordCamp

In case you missed it, that last one says WordCamp. Personally, I thought Atlanta, Georgia would of been the first city in the South Eastern United States to get a WordCamp event, but it looks like I was wrong. Ike also notes that there will be a SideWalk Festival that will be taking place during the same weekend.

I’m really glad to see these WordCamp events making there way east rather than being confined to silicon valley. As a matter of fact, WordCamps are starting to crop up everywhere, and that is a good thing!

So, who is looking forward to this event and will you be lucky enough to attend?

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.

Two Column Themes

Elegant Orange

Elegant Orange is a very simple WordPress theme with a nice elegant style. The sidebar is widget-ready.

Rainbow

Rainbow a clean, light-colored template with a rainbow strip at the top. There is a area in the header to add a note or announcement for your readers. The theme is widget ready.

FedBurned

FedBurned is a fixed-width, widget ready 2 column with right sidebar theme. The theme resembles designs from Feedburner.

Professor

Professor is a theme which seeks to put text and images first and foremost, and create a pleasurable reading experience. It also has a option to show a feature post on the top of the home page.

Underwater

A unique theme where the readers experience content as if they are reading it under water. The theme has a dolphin image in the header.

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.