And the winner of the Grand Prize of the WordPress Plugin Competition 2009 is: Section Widget by Godfrey Chan Godfrey’s plugin provides a way to display section specific content on your WordPress sidebar with an easy to use interface. This new version comes with tabs support, so creating your tabbed section widget is just a few clicks away. Plus, with shortcode support, the possibilities are limitless! This plugin is well rounded, consistently preferred by all of our judges and reviewers and was well liked by the audience as well. Congratulations to the Grand Prize Winner! Thanks to Keith D’Souza, Ozh and Jeff Chandler for taking on the mammoth task of judging the competition and helping me put it all together. These people have done it all for the love of the community and their passion for WordPress, and I commend them for all of their efforts. Along with the judges, […]

New Plugins CDN Rewrites CDN Rewrites allows a WordPress user to specify two important variables: an orgin host (says http://www.yoursite.com) and a “destination host” (like http://www.static.yoursite.com). It will then find all the static contents from that orgin host and rewrite them into the destination so that they will be delivered from there. skaDoogle Integrate skaDoogle.com tools with WordPress, including skaDoogle Link Sense that dynamically links keywords in your blog to Top paying products from Clickbank and PayDotCom. Instantly turn static content and articles into a Cash Pulling Magnet. Updated Plugins SEO Ultimate This SEO plugin can handle titles, meta, noindex, canonical tags, 404 monitoring, linkboxes, and robots.txt. Version 1.0 fixes bugs, reduces database usage, and adds a new canonicalization feature. AVH Extended Categories The AVH Extended Categories Widget gives you two widgets for displaying categories. One is a replacement of the default category widget to allow for greater customization. Socialize […]

So after much deliberation by our judges, tallying of the votes from readers, after coming up with an algorithm for all of this to come together, we finally have the results for the Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition. The competition was very close with year with, and as one of the judges put it, quite a few gems were found in the rough. There are two runner ups in the competition this year with the exact same scores and a final Grand Prize winner who eked past their competition by a single point. The runner ups will win a cash prize of $500 each and the Grand Prize Winner will receive a cash prize of $2000! To break from tradition, we will release the runner ups today, followed by the release of the Grand Prize Winner on Monday. The following runner ups are in no particular order since they had […]

404 errors suggest that a user has landed on a page that does not exist. Most of the times it occurs due to a bad permalink, either while linking on your own site or by someone else linking to a non-existent link on your site. This may also occur when you make changes to the post slugs or permalinks on your site.

Elegante Two column, widget ready theme with sIFR support and highlighting of search keywords CopyBlogger Upgraded This is an updated version of the redundant, but very popular Copyblogger theme that was once originally used by Brian Clark of Copyblogger dot com. It now supports Threaded comments and other WordPress 2.8 features. The default look can be changed to a more modern layout with a few clicks of the mouse in the Custom CSS file  where most of the customizations are done. Still as SEO friendly as the original. Channel Three/four column, widget ready, gravatar ready theme with automatic thumbnail creation, Flickr and feedburner support and a theme control panel Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get listed in these release posts.

WordPress tips are available everywhere but we can’t get enough of it yet. One of my favorite tech writers and ardent programmer, Gina Trapani, has written a really comprehensive post of tips to get the best out of your WordPress blog.

Simple Organization A simple and elegant theme suitable for organizations. Supporting widgets and nested comments. Daily Minefield Multi-column fixed-width theme in brown, black and a touch of green includes 4 widgetized footer sections. Featuring an Author Info page and gravatars along with Custom Archives, Sitemap and Full-Width No Sidebars page templates. There is an options page for setting the text in the Info Text Box. Parchment Draft A very basic 2 column fixed-width theme in reminiscent of old parchment paper. Featuring an Author Info page and gravatars along with Custom Archives, Sitemap and Full-Width No Sidebars page templates. Wavefront WaveFront provides calm yet stylish layouts customized for basic CMS functionality with several custom page templates including a no-sidebar front page (Front Page template) with three bottom boxes. The theme also has a list of hidden features and extra content that can be turned on and off by editing the template […]

As in last year, following our own Plugin Competition (results are on the way), WPMU.org is holding their own plugin competition. But this time they are adding BuddyPress plugins into the mix as well. You can visit the WPMU Plugin Competition Homepage for more information. The rules for the competition remain the same as last year. Competitors need to post as announcement for their plugin(s) by registering at WPMU.org and submitting a post. The plugins must relate to WordPress MU or BuddyPress and be available freely for download. The plugins must also be released under a GPL compatible license. The prize pool is at $1000 and the organizers are looking for more donations to bolster the purse. So if you are a novice plugin author looking to wade in the WordPress MU pool or a seasoned veteran looking to flex your muscles, head over to the competition and post an […]