WordPress Plugin Competition Blog

Seemed to me that embedding a microblog into your Wordpress blog could be a quick and easy way to add content without the need for a full post … shortly after tWPtter was born & named after a mashup of twitter and WordPress…

Full instructions are on my site and you can download from >> tWPtter on wordpress.org

Please give it a try - both WP admin panel and email based posting is available so there are no excuses … all feedback will be lovingly reviewed…

I’ve just released a new version of my plugin, PostGroups. I’ve improved a few things in the code and solved some minor bugs.

In short (for those who missed my previous entry on this plugin ), PostGroups allows you to place your posts in groups which can then be navigated individually, pretty much transforming your default single blog WordPress installation to a multi-blog site. For example, you can create a group of posts called “Quotations” where you’ll place various citations from authors you like. Another group may be called “My pics”, where users may see all your travel photos, and so on.

An additional explanation may be useful here. What my plugin does might sound similar with using categories. However, browsing all posts that belong to a category is in fact an archive-like browsing; depending on your blog theme, the posts will be shown differently from the normal posts page. For example, when clicking on a category name, the posts may have only their titles shown, while their content may not be displayed at all; the whole category listing may have a ‘whatever_category_name Archives’ heading, which is quite different from what a normal blog home page looks like.

This plugin really splits your blog in different blogs, where each such sub-blog looks the same. And you can still use the same category on posts belonging to different groups. For example, an entry placed in a “Musings” groups may show the world what were your thoughts from your last visit to London, and assign it a, well, “London” category (among others). At a later time you can have another post under the same category, but neatly placed in your “My travel pics” group, where you gather photos only.

As usual, you can download the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Support is available on the plugin support forum. You can also leave your comments here, on this blog.

My previous entry on this plugin (with screenshots) is here.

WP Easy Uploader was created to make the life of WordPress bloggers easier by allowing an Administrator to add plugins, themes, and any type of file to WordPress directly from inside WordPress. You no longer have to load up an FTP client just to try out that latest plugin, load a new theme, or to upload a text document into a specific folder for people to download.

Current Features

• Upload any type of file to either the standard Uploads directory (just as images do when you are creating posts and pages) or to a path of your choosing.
• Manual paths are automatically created if they don’t exist.
• Easily upload plugins directly to the plugins directory and theme files directly to the themes directory.
• You can select to have archives automatically extracted to their destination. This means that plugins and themes will be taken care of for you, but it also means that you can zip up a large set of files and upload them quickly into a folder on your site. Currently zip, tar, gz, tar.gz, tgz, and tar.bz2 archives are supported.
• Options for overwriting existing files, renaming the fle if a file with that name already exists (or if overwriting fails), removal of the archive after file extraction, and forcing extracted files to be contained in a folder.
• Now supports WordPress Mu.

More Information

• Download at the plugin’s WordPress.org Plugin Directory page
• Visit WP Easy Uploader’s home page for more information about the development and upcoming features

With a software that is developed as fast as WordPress, you have to update those blogs quite often. Luckily, there are plugins like InstantUpgrade, which allow to upgrade a WordPress blog within less than a minute. Another necessity is to do regular backups, in case something goes wrong. Therefore, other solutions exist, for example wp-db-backup.

But many of us have not only one, but a couple of blogs. For example, a business and a private one. Or you administrate blogs of your friends, and will have to backup/upgrade them, too. So I think it will be gret to hear for many of you that with MultiManage, you can backup and upgrade all blogs you are in charge for from one panel.

There are no downloads available so far, because important features aren’t ready yet. But here are some screenshots, so you can get a taste of what it will be like:

Do you like the idea? What are features you’d love to see for this one? Let me know.

This page will always be updated with the latest information on prizes for the WordPress Plugin Competition, but here are the prizes so far

. . . and growing! We have had a couple of really large (Thanks to Matt and Automattic for their generous contributions towards the competition) and some smaller donations towards the final set of prizes for the plugin competition with the total purse standing at over $3500 dollars. Thanks to everyone who has donated money and time towards the competition to help make it a success. The community really appreciates your involvement. We continue to look for donations and sponsors to make the pot sweeter.

This is your chance to not only showcase your work to the WordPress community but to also win fabulous cash prizes. If you are planning on releasing a plugin for the competition, head over to the plugin competition blog, register yourself and post about your plugin there. We have had a spat of registrations but the number of announcements on the blog has been much less. Please tell us about your cool new entry; our readers would love to know and help test and fine tune your plugins for you!

For those that are following the competition and looking for cool plugins to test, there already are a couple of posts on the Plugin Competition Blog to whet your appetite. Please provide your feeback for the authors. It will help them make their plugins better and your votes (on the final entries, not on the announcements) will help tremendously in the judging.

The email address to submit entries is wpplugincomp [at] wltc [dot] net Please use this email address towards the end of the competition to send in your entries into the plugin competition. You do not need to send in your entries till the last day and sending in your entries early will not give you any advantage. On the contrary, waiting till the last moment will give you more chances to tweak and modify your plugin to your benefit.

We’re one month into the plugin competition, so I thought I should write in and ask you how plugin development is going on?

Are you ready with a plugin?
If so, then it is time to create an entry on the Plugin Competition Blog. If you do not have author access then create an account and contact us to upgrade your account. Don’t forget to mention the plugin page on your site.

Are you still hunting for ideas?
Take a look at a post I made a while back.

Need some questions answered?
Ask away

Looking to sponsor the competition or donate some prize money?
Please contact us. Donating money is easy and quick and it helps out the WordPress community.

Remember we have just another month to go before the end of the plugin competition.

How do I start writing on the Plugin Blog and submit my ideas for feedback from readers?
After you have registered yourself on the Plugin Blog or if you already have a registration but do not have author permissions, please contact us with your details and a little information about the plugin(s) you are planning to enter into the competition and we will enable your account. This is a security precaution and we apologize for any inconvenience.

When should I submit my plugin?
We recommend that you submit your plugin to us at the end of the competition. This will give you enough time to test the plugin for any bugs and resolve them. You will have time to look into feature requests from your visitors. This will also ensure that you don’t need to submit multiple bugfixes to us. We prefer receiving a single final version for our records.

Won’t I be at a disadvantage if I submit it at the end?
No, of course not. Voting will begin only after the plugin competition ends. Also, our judges will take a look at the plugin only after the end of the competition.

Is okay to release it prior to submitting it for the contest?
Plugins released in these two months are eligible for the competition. In fact if you release it now, you have time to test it and receive feedback from the community so an early release to public is a good thing. Conversely, an early release to the public does not mean an automatic submission to the competition.

How do I know the plugin is new?
You can search to see if a similar plugin is available in WordPress Extend. You can also use any search engine to see if a similar plugin is available.

What about the plugins in last year’s competition
If you need an idea of the type of plugins that have been submitted in the past, here is a list of plugins from last year’s competition.

I am a WordPress user. I have an idea, where do I submit it?
You can also post them in this post or this posting in our News Forum.

How do I sponsor a prize?
If you would like to sponsor a prize or donate some money to the competition, please contact us. We are actively looking for prize money.

Do you have any other questions about the competition? Please post them in the comments section below.

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.

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 this blog which 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 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, this 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.

[EDIT] For those interested in getting an idea of plugins submitted for the previous competition, the incomplete list can be found here.