New plugins EZWebPlayer Video Plugin allows you to post your videos, report on views, track which videos have been posted and where, and has a simple toolbar plugin that allows you to add videos quickly. Hikari Featured Comments is a simple plugin that adds 3 new custom fields to comments, allowing you to add special properties to each of them. Post Gallery Widget is a rotating gallery widget using a custom post type for gallery content. swfObject Reloaded allows easy embedding of swf files and better media management for swf files, allowing swf files to have a height, width, and their own minimum flash version. Updated plugins Disqus Comment System replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus. eShop is an accessible shopping cart plugin. Membership allows you to transform your WordPress site into a fully functional membership site. (Disclaimer: Incsub is a sponsor of […]

The WordPress.com team has now made it even easier to leave your WordPress.com blog for a self-hosted WordPress blog. The new offsite redirect upgrade allows you to easily redirect your blogname.wordpress.com blog and all of its permalinks to your new domain. The previous redirection method was a five-step process that had a tendency to cause some confusion during implementation. Now, all you need to do is export your blog, purchase the offsite redirect upgrade for $12/year (the same price as the previous redirection method), and enter your new domain name. Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s one and only Chief BBQ Taste Tester, highlighted the importance of the new offsite redirection upgrade, stating “the easier you make it for people to go, the more likely they are to stay.” The psychology certainly makes sense to me. I’d be less tempted to make a panic-influenced exit if I knew it was easy to leave […]

ClassRoom Blog is a free WordPress theme for Teachers and Educators to use for a class blog. Speed is a magazine style theme for a BuddyPress community powered site, based on a three column fluid layout enabled with custom fonts with a beautiful jQuery powered full width slider. Toolbox is an ultra-minimal set of super-clean, HTML5, starter templates for your own WordPress theme development. zBench is a simple WordPress theme with few images, support for various plugins, custom menus, widgets, and threaded comments.

A few days ago, Mark asked to hear about your “top 5 plugins that you WordPress geniuses use in every one of your WordPress installs.” With almost fifty responses, it’s great to see that so many people consider the same or similar plugins as their top five. Without further delay, here are the top ten of your top five plugins. Akismet: This plugin should be the front line of your blog’s anti-spam defenses. According to its directory listing, it’s been downloaded individually over 4,060,000 times, but it’s also bundled with WordPress. Just to give you an idea, the current version of WordPress has been downloaded over 15,800,000 times. Considering those numbers, it’s no wonder that this is the most popular WordPress plugin and the top of almost every commentator’s top five list. [directory listing] Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin was the first XML sitemap generator for WordPress. Though the concept […]

New plugins Admin Menu Tree Page View allows you to get a tree view of all your pages directly in the admin menu. Blue Screen of the Dead is a replacement for your WordPress 404 error page. Facebook Members is a WordPress social plugin that enables Facebook page owners to attract and gain Likes from their own website. Ultimate Taxonomy Manager is an easy to use taxonomy manager to customize taxonomies and custom fields with a great user interface. WP Pic Tagger allows you to tag people and objects in your images by selecting a region of the image and adding names, URLs and descriptions. Updated plugins AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. Facebook Like for Tags allows you to connect with […]

Voting has concluded for this year’s Blog Action Day topic, and the winner is water! Register your blog now and join the thousands (if not millions) of bloggers worldwide who will be posting about the world’s water problems on October 15th. If you need some inspiration for your post, the Blog Action Day crew has provided a few suggestions. Last year, over 31,000 posts were published across the globe on the topic of climate change. Will you be participating in this year’s Blog Action Day?

BreakingNewz is a powerful news/magazine style WordPress theme. Locket is a simple 2-column WordPress template with a paper-like background Portfolium is a clean and flexible WordPress grid-based portfolio theme designed in a modern and minimalist style. Purple Shadow is a clean, light, and mostly white WordPress theme.

If you’re a WordPress.com user, you may have noticed that your stats received a significant facelift today. The Flash-powered line chart has been replaced by an interactive Javascript-powered bar chart and the module layout is now fully customizable. The new design was a team effort, though some credit should definitely go to Nick Momrik for handling the new chart and a good majority of the extra work, Joen Asmussen for the overall design, and Matt Thomas for keeping everyone on track. Currently, the new stats interface is only for WordPress.com users, but the WordPress.com Stats Plugin for self-installed WordPress blogs will be updated once they have all the kinks worked out. Unfortunately, my WordPress.com blog is private, so I really don’t have enough stats to truly test the new interface. What do you think of the new WordPress.com Stats interface?