The WordPress Plugin Compeition 2009 was underway on the 1st of May. This precludes the fact that any plugins developed or released after the 1st of May (but before the 31st of July, inclusive) can be entered into the compeition. There has been a lot of interest in the competition but no entries on the Plugin Competition Blog yet. If you are interested in posting on the blog but do not have a registration, please register there and we will give you the proper permissions. Please use this forum topic on the WLTC Community to ask for or request ideas for plugin development as part of the competition. As for the prizes, over $2300 have been pledged towards prizes for the competition this year, which is awesome. We are looking for more corporate and personal sponsors for the comeptition to make the prize purse as attractive as possible. If you […]

Various tutorials on installing BuddyPress correctly and integrating bbPress with BuddyPress, make mention of a plugin called “WPMU Enable bbPress Cabpabilities” written by Michael Eagan. It simply adds a type of usermeta to the WPMU user tables for bbPress to pick up on. The plugin page says pretty clearly that this plugin is compatible with bbPress version upto 1.0-alpha-2. With the recent release of BuddyPress 1.0 and bbPress 1.0-alpha-6 (which has some very cool WordPress integration capabilities), this simple plugin developed a huge bug. Since it makes very little sense to release another version of this plugin, I wrote up a simple fix for it on our Community Forums. Speaking of our WLTC Community, we are up to 68 users who are actively making friends, posting on their blogs and writing up forum topics. I can’t say this often enough, but BuddyPress and WordPress have amazed me once more. It […]

Dreams Two column, widget ready, gravatar ready, totally blue theme. R755 R755 is a wordpress theme built from scratch with two basic principles: content comes first and the smallest possible size. Valid CSS and XHTML (Strict), threaded-comments, microformats, sticky-post, SEO. Imagination Completely customizable two column theme, preloaded with several styles with built-in support for twitter, Flickr, Feedburner etc. Wave Two column blue theme with a widgetized left sidebar.

Ian Stewart who is the creator of the Thematic theme framework is currently in the process of putting together a series which explains how to cut theme development time, easier theme modifications, and the power of child themes. The first two parts of this guide are already online and covers child theme basics and modular CSS in child themes. Ian plans on covering the following topics in the future: Using Filter Hooks in WordPress Child Themes Using Action Hooks in WordPress Child Themes Creating WordPress Child Themes Publicly Releasing WordPress Child Themes Although this guide ends up using Thematic as the prime example, you should be able to pick up a few tips and tricks to implement if you’re not using Thematic.

BuddyPress 1.0 Has Arrived.: Andy announced the release of BuddyPress 1.0 on the BuddyPress community Blog and there was much rejoicing. This was an excellent opportunity to get my WLTC Community project off the ground and I was an like installation fiend as soon as I finished work on my day job. So without further ado, especially if you want to play around with BuddyPress, please head over to the shiny new WLTC Community and register for either a username or a blog. I hope to meet you there!

Many of you might be confused by the title and the term “smart”. To me a “smart” blog is a blog that behaves differently depending on its visitors’ behavior and characteristics. A simple example of this is a blog that displays a list of today’s most popular posts on the sidebar. The list changes based on visitors’ behavior so to this is definitely a smart blog feature. There are plenty of WordPress plugins out there that do this for you automatically (e.g. Top 10), but that is not the point. The point here is that having the ability to morph your blog per visitor activity can assist you in meeting your conversion goals (whatever they may be). A list of popular posts is quite a simple feature, so let me take you to another level by showing you more ways to make your blog smart. List of “Smart” Features to […]

New Plugins Expandable Dashboard Recent Comments Adds the ability to do an in-place expansion of comment excerpts on the admin dashboard ‘Recent Comments’ widget. Ads for Old Posts The Ads For Old Posts plugin will automatically insert an ad block in your posts once they reach a certain age. The idea is to not bother your regular readers with ads, but display the ads for people who may find your posts months and years later. WP Cartoon This plugin lets you integrate the daily web cartoon from http://www.danscartoons.com/ for non-commercial websites. It adds a button to the TinyMCE Editor in your wordpress installation so that you can integrate the cartoon with one click on any page or post you like. Twounter Twounter is a WordPress Plugin that fetches the number of followers for a twitter profile and returns it in plain text format. Twounter uses Twitter API to ensure that […]

The other day, I was thinking about how easy it is to make a mess on the web. For example, purchasing a domain that you attach an email address to that is used for a year only to end up wanting to use a different domain. This means you have to go to every site you registered an account with and change the email address if you plan on letting the old domain retire. There are also a host of other issues as well which in the end, just seems like a giant mess. For this reason alone, I believe hosted blogging solutions will always have a market because you don’t have to worry about moving around or managing a domain. Typically, all you have to do is register an account and blog. However, users of WordPress.com have an awesome benefit that not many other blog hosting providers can match […]