If you haven’t tried the beta versions of WordPress 2.8 yet, here is a hands-on review that talks about the key features made available in this version of WordPress.

WordCamp San Francisco was a total hoot! I met up with a bunch of old friends, made a few new ones, had some good food, drank a few brews, hung out with a whole lot of cool people and all the while, I was surrounded by WordPress goodness. Thank you to all the organizers, volunteers and participants! A few bits of interesting statistics and news from WordCamp San Francisco “State of the Word”: WordPress.org downloads were nearly twice as many as last year There are twice as many WordPress.org blogs on the web this as compared to last year Akismet caught just as many spam comments this year as last (count grew very little) There is a Blackberry version of the WordPress management app coming soon, iPhone version will see an upgrade There will be a GPL paid themes page on the WordPress Extend to encourage the business model At some point in the future, […]

New Plugins scbFramework A set of useful classes for faster plugin development. Twitter Tools Twitter Tools is an excellent plugin for posting notifications of new blog posts to Twitter. However Twitter Tools just sends the URL to the new post normally which is then shortened by Twitter itself to a bit.ly short link. FriendFeed API Core This Plugin loads the core FriendFeed API PHP wrapper library so that all other plugins that utilize this library can share the same up-to-date version. It also helps minimize potential conflicts between FriendFeed powered Plugins. After the Deadline An advanced spell checker plugin for WordPress. In addition to the standard spell check and suggestions features, it also includes style and grammar checking. Updated Plugins Shorten2Ping Sends status updates to Ping.fm or Twitter everytime you publish a post. Using Bit.ly or Tr.im for the permalinks (accounts on these services required). So this way you can […]

Vista84 3 column, widget ready, adsense friendly template with space for a 468×60 banner targeted at technology blogs Garland Revisited A flexible, three-column theme with customizable colors. WPBlue 3 column, gravatar ready theme with two widget ready sidebars, RedTime The theme is in magazine style and features an absolutely massive “Twitter FollowMe” icon, which is not only extremely attractive but quite useful too. Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get featured here.

Next up in the “Five” series for plugins is a snapshot of five advertisement related plugins for your WordPress site. Once you have done the work to build your site, create the content and get the visitors streaming in it may then be time to monetize your site and maybe create a little income stream.  Now I am not talking get rich schemes here – just simple and easy ways to place ads in and around your site.  They may never make you a ton of money but they might create just enough of an income stream to make you a few bucks in the process.  I have a day job for paying the bills so the trickle I get from my site is mad money for tech stuff. How do you spend yours? So on to the “five”. WP125 – This is a great plugin that can be used […]

New Plugins Grooveshark for WordPress Made to make music easy to add to any post, Grooveshark for WordPress takes the trouble out of mixing music with your blog. Just install, then enjoy instant access to literally millions of tunes you can use to make your blog posts even cooler. Create playlists of one song — or hundreds — and add them to any part of your WordPress blog as a Grooveshark Widget. Linkubaitor Search engines determine a website or blogs popularity according to the amount and quality of backlinks pointing to a website. The Linkubaitor WordPress Plugin displays HTML code for website visitors to copy and paste to their site. Updated Plugins Easy Adsenser Easy AdSenser manages all aspects of Google AdSense for a blog: insert ads into posts and sidebar, and add a Google Search box. Easy and complete! It is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Belarusian, Indonesian, […]

New Plugins BookLinker A WordPress plug-in that converts existing affiliate links into a list of book resources: Amazon, Powells, and IndieBound affiliate links, WorldCat library searches, and LibraryThing book pages. Link Harvest This plugin will go through all of your posts and pages and compile a list of all external links. Then it will create a linkroll for you based on your actual linking activity. Best Post Page Best Post Page is a WordPress plugin, that utilizes optimization algorithms to chose the best posts based on criteria such as views and comments. This plugin automatically generates a page called ‘Best of Posts’ that displays the top 10 posts from your blog. The list of the best posts is automatically recalculated. All you have to do is download and activate the plugin. Google Analytics Stats Deluxe Link removed due to it being paid A big step up from the Standard Version […]

I receive questions about WordPress from various sources and I love answering them. I serve on the technical advisory board for our local University and recently ran into one of the other board members who had been using WordPress for some time. He wanted his WordPress site to do a few things that he could not get to work and his email to me ended with “I think I have hit the end of WordPress’ capabilities.” I respectfully disagreed and proceeded to give him links to solutions that I had found. He found them really useful and is going to use them in his re-design. This perception of “reaching the end of WordPress” is somewhat common. At a recent WordCamp, I had the distinct feeling (after talking with a bunch of the attendees and from feedback) that they were looking for cool things to do with their WordPress blog to […]