New Plugins Mass Custom Fields Manager Mass Custom Fields Manager (MCFM) is a plugin for people who use WordPress to manage their post’s custom fields with ease. Simple Video Embedder Easily embed video within your posts. Adds a widget to the posting screen that enables you to post videos by simply providing the URL to the video hosted on common video sharing websites. Simple Post Thumbnails This plugin adds a widget to the posting screen that allows you to add a post thumbnail by uploading an image from your computer or via a URL. The thumbnail is scaled and cropped to the correct size automatically. GD Simple Widgets This plugin contains several widgets with simple functionality. Some of them are based on standard WordPress widgets but with extended options and rendering. You can also disable default WordPress widgets if you choose to use Simple Widgets versions. Google Analytics Stats It […]

Our next “Five” entry is for plugins that you can use to highlight images on your website.  As always we look forward to your comments (51 responses on the last “five” entry – thanks!). With the advent of high speed Internet for so many in the world now images are an even bigger part of the presentation of your webpage.  WordPress is no exception with 285 image related plugins at the WordPress Plugin Directory. Lets take a look at five of these plugins and see what they can do for your WordPress based website: Dynamic Headers: This plugin was just made public in late April of this year and it is extremely popular having been downloaded 3,770 times in the last three weeks.  The Dynamic Headers plugin allows you to manage what media is shown in your header on each page and/or post.  This plugin allows the use of any […]

DynaBlue A truly dynamic theme that is constantly changing. This is a very current and stylish design for your WordPress blog. The header banner rotates through your latest 4 blog posts constantly until a user clicks on a story to pause and read more – a new feature in our themes. Galleria Child theme for the Hybrid theme based on Chris Wallace’s Gallery theme. Natural Gloom A gloomy and artistic two-column theme supporting widgets and nested comments.

DarkoOo It has a dark header and background (from which comes the name DarkoOo). The theme comes with 125×125 advertising space, a small “About me” space, and a place in the header to put your rss, twitter etc… links (easy configurable or removable). It has one Widgetized Sidebar. Vanilla Cart Clean, minimal, vanilla-style WordPress Shopping Cart Theme, made specifically for the free WP e-Commerce plugin. Quietly Simple 2-column simple “back to basics” fixed-width theme in calming khaki and brown colors. Featuring an author info page, related posts and gravatars along with Custom Archives, Sitemap and full width No Sidebars page templates. Wall Magazine [removed, encrypted footer] Two column, widget and gravatar ready, advertisement ready theme with support for Feedburner, auto-resizing images with thumbnails. Arras Arras Theme is a WordPress theme designed for news or review sites with lots of customizable features. It comes with 5 different news layouts to customise […]

Next up on the “Five” series is a sampling of 5 comment related plugins from the WordPress Plugin Directory.  There are 395 plugins as of today that are tagged with the term comment to choose from. Comments are the lifeblood of any website.  That is where the true interaction happens not only between the creator of the website and visitors but also between the visitors themselves of a website. So I dug through the WordPress plugin directory and came up with what I believe are five plugins to help increase the interaction on your website: SI CAPTCHA for WordPress: This plugin gives you an anti-spam measure on your comment form to help reduce the number of SPAM comments your website receives.  Now don’t get me wrong – ASKIMET does a terrific job of stopping SPAM comments (according to their website 82% of all comments are SPAM).  Well this plugin requires […]

On a thread within the WPTavern forum, there is an interesting discussion taking place among some prominent theme authors on creating a theme standards system. The initial idea is to create a standards system which would give theme authors a goal to shoot for. However, as the discussion has progressed, it’s easy to see that this entire idea of rating themes or putting together a set of standards is a complex problem. So after reading through that thread, I thought it would be a good idea to tap into the WordPress community to figure out what is most important to you when it comes to using a theme? Is it price, license, design, usability, functionality, or something else?

WordPress 2.8 Beta 1 has been released. For all those of you that are adventurous, this is your cue. Codex lists all the changes in 2.8 that have been implemented before the feature freeze. A “Get ready for WordCamp San Francisco 2009” post from Lloyd. I almost completely forgot about the WordPress’ Sixth Anniversary celebrations. 572 attendees as of this post! WordCamp Columbus was great with some spirited feedback! Looking forward to WordCamp Chicago.

New Plugins Adshare Adshare allows you to rotate Google Adsense ads based on the author of the current post. It works by replaceing a default adsense publisher id with that of the author of the current post. Tab Override Tab Override makes the post/page HTML editor (not visual) handle tabs similar to how a desktop text-editor would. After activating this plugin, pressing the tab key will insert a tab character rather than move focus to the next field. Tweetable Tweetable is a WordPress Plugin intended to help integrate Twitter into your blog. Show Template Prints an html comment in the footer of every page letting you know which template file of your theme was used for the display. WordPress Logger Display log messages from PHP in the browser console in Safari and Firefox (with firebug). Essential debugging tool for plugin and theme developers. You no longer have to use ‘print_r’ […]