The grand prize was awarded to Godfrey Chan for his “Section Widget” plugin. The plugin provides a way to display widgets on specific pages with an easy to use interface. It also comes with a feature that lets users create tabbed section widgets, as well as shortcode support for easy code placement.
Taking up the runner-up positions are Ron Rennick with the “Advanced Export for WP and WPMU” plugin, which provides Wordpress users the ability to break up their exports into multiple files, and Chris Northwood with his entry, “Live Blogging”, a plugin that provides a live “micro-blogging” functionality for Wordpress blogs.
Winners of the contest were chosen through a panel of judges and by votes from the readers of WeblogTools Collection.
The grand prize winner receives a cash prize of $2000, while each runner-up gets $500.
Congratulations to the winners! Looking forward another batch of cool plugins next year!
Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, has just acquired a new grammar and spell checker tool called “After the Deadline“, last September 8, as a replacement for the old one used by Wordpress.com blogs.
After the Deadline helps you write better and spend less time editing. It basically works like your typical grammar and spell checker tools in word processing software, like words or phrases being underlined if the program suspects an error, as well as giving out suggested corrections that the user can choose from.
“When I first tried After the Deadline I was blown away; it was so much better than other checkers I’d used,” said Matt Mullenwag, founder of Automattic.
For more information about After the Deadline, check out the video below.
The new After the Deadline spell checker tool is now enabled on Wordpress blogs. Those who have self-hosted blogs can get the plugin here.
I’ve never been happy with how WordPress deals with user permissions and roles. I’ve always wanted to customize it further, and while it is supposedly possible to do without a plugin, having a nice user interface makes the world of difference.
Justin Tadlock is currently working on a new Role Management Plugin that might add important features for those running multi-author sites.
Currently in beta, he is looking for testers for this plugin. What can it do?
Edit Roles: Edit your user roles and their capabilities.
New Roles: Create new roles for use on your site.
Content Permissions: Adds a meta box on your write post/page editor that allows you to restrict content to specific roles.
Widgets: Adds a login form widget and user-listing widget that you can use in any widget area on your site.
Shortcodes: Creates shortcodes that you can use to restrict or allow access to certain parts of your posts and pages (or any other shortcode-capable area).
Template Tags: New functions for use within your WordPress theme for various things.
Private Blog: Allows you to create a private blog that can only be accessed by users that are logged in (redirects them to the login page).
Today, Gravity Forms version 1.0 was released to the general public, and for $39, $99 or $199 you can purchase your own licensed version of Gravity Forms, the ultimate plugin for getting data from your users.
I’ve done a reasonable write-up on my own blog Branding David about Gravity Forms and what it can do for you.
Want to do a visitor survey? Want to do a “send this post to a friend”? Want to have user guest post submissions? Gravity Forms can do all of that and more. I’ve even used it for a basic product inventory system, as well as a tool to sign players up for an online RPG. The uses for the plugin are wide, and according to the Rocket Genius team, they’ll continue to expand.
An older Gravity Forms Screencast Demo I did to show its features.
This is one of those plugins that everyone should pick up, as the uses are nearly limitless. Check out my full post on Branding David and let me know what you think of Gravity Forms.
With Gravity Forms, a plugin I’ll probably be talking a lot about in the coming weeks, months and maybe even years, coming closer to being released, the team at Rocket Genius have released a plugin to test if your hosting environment will support the plugin.
Gravity Forms requires WordPress 2.8+, MySQL 5+ and PHP 5+ in order to function.
With the complexity of Gravity Forms, and its fairly strict requirements, this is of no big surprise to me. What is surprising is that they took the time to develop a test system. Is this just the tip of the iceberg with regards to the future of WordPress plugin systems?
If complex plugins like this are the future for WordPress, then I don’t see any way around this. I have a feeling that this type of functionality will be built into many plugins going forward, but having a separate plugin for Premium plugins makes sense.
Maybe a test library should be created so that we can have one plugin that manages the requirements testing for all complex plugins. Something to think about…
Will Anderson, @itsananderson on Twitter, saw me ask if there was a Minimum Password Length plugin for WordPress, and if there wasn’t, would someone code something, and Will, being more than helpful, went ahead and whipped one together.
One of the issues I’ve had in business settings is that the people running the blogs don’t necessarily understand the security concerns relating to having blogging software running on their business domain. WordPress does include an indicator of how secure or insecure a password is, but there wasn’t before today, as far as I know, an easy way to force a minimum password limit.
A feature I’ve been wondering about for a while is the built-in export tool in WordPress. I’ve always found it really limited in nature and use. It was always designed more as a migration tool or a backup tool than something that you could use to export in various ways, but thankfully, that hasn’t limited others, and now Advanced Exporter could be a plugin that will become part of my standard toolbox for WordPress.
I found out about it from WPTavern and this is what Jeff had to say:
With it, you can easily export a single category of a blog to import into another. That is something many people have wanted an easy way to do for a long time. You can also use the restrictions to create multiple WXR files in case you can’t import a single large file. Also worthy of note as that this plugin was entered into the WeblogToolsCollection plugin competition for 2009.
I’ve had many issues with large export files not being able to import in the past, and while they’ve worked hard on rectifying this issue, it does still happen. I am very excited to see how this plugin does, and I hope it is ready for prime-time use.
The Contextual Partnership Plugin For WordPress Provides Free Advertising To Help Promote Your Blog & Get You Noticed…
If you’re looking for an effective solution to help get your blog noticed then the Contextual Partnership Plugin for WordPress bloggers could be well worth consideration. Perhaps the most attractive aspect is that there is no cost involved.
According to the developers the plugin is designed to;
Drive more targeted visitors to your blog (or blogs) by strategically linking your blog to and from other bloggers participating in the network. The exact method used to achieve this remains confidential but apparently it’s not a basic reciprocal link exchange – nor the more common 3 way linking arrangement often seen between bloggers.
Enhance the user experience for your blog visitors by providing them with links to other high quality blogs for further information on subjects of interest (and it can do this without you actually loosing the visitor which is a great feature).
Indirectly increase your search engine rankings by building highly relevant incoming links to your blog for keyword terms you define, related to your own niche market.
Not a bad indirect benefit at all.
To better understand how the network works, first you need to know what a “contextual link” actually is. A contextual link is simply a link “within content” of a blog post and “within context” of specific keyword terms in that post. For example the term “dog training” found within a blog post becomes a link out to another blog (related to “dog training”) within the network. Contextual Links are found all over the internet – bloggers interlink their own pages contextually, there are paid advertising programs that allow you to place contextual advertising links and earn per click, and bloggers naturally link out to other websites they find useful “contextually” as well.
This is the key to the “Contextual Partnership”. When you install and setup the WordPress Plugin, you’re asked to provide the URL’s you wish to advertise on other partners blogs, and the keyword terms you want those blogs to use to link back to your own. When a match is found within the network for the keyword terms you provide (and assuming it meets with the Contextual Partnership’s strategic linking methodology), a link back to your blog is assigned, and your account has a credit removed.
The amount of credits your account holds appears to be directly related to the number of links you’re providing to other partners in the network for the keyword terms they themselves are looking to use to advertise. Apparently for every link you provide for another partner, you earn 1 credit. That 1 credit is then “cashed in” to assign a link back to your own blog from other partners whenever a match is found for your own keyword terms. So if you already have 100 posts in your blog, and each of those pages finds a match to provide a link to another partner, then technically you could receive 100 incoming links to your blog as soon as you’ve been approved to participate in the partnership. You also continually earn more points and incoming links as you continue to blog and add more posts just like you usually do.
That’s the basic overview and you’ll find more specific information on the plugin website including details of many features not mentioned here (like the ability to select specifically which blog posts you want to include – or nor include in the network)…
Uptake by the blogger community seems to have been extremely good and this new service looks to become very popular. In the first two weeks of launch the partnership already had over 54,000 individual places to place links throughout the network, and within the first 4 weeks over 10,000 advertising links had been allocated between network partners. This is most likely a result to how easy it is to actually setup the plugin and participate – it literally takes 5 minutes to install and setup – although approval can take anywhere from 24-72 hours depending on the moderation queue as only high quality blogs are accepted to participate to keep out the splogs and spammers.
This seems to be one of those services worth giving a shot for a few months, and by the looks of things the developers have some exciting new features in the pipeline to make things even more effective for partners in the future.
You can find out full details and download the plugin below…
Hate those bars that so many sites are now putting at the top of your screen when you click a link, then this will make you fuming. Seems like some enterprising person has created a plugin to create your own top bar, so you can remind people to come back to your blog.
Seen the DiggBar on Digg.com? Adds a similar feature to your Wordpress blog. Use your blog as a short link service with Easy Link Creation. Feature any link on the internet with a custom URL such as http://www.internetriot.com/?bing. Also feature social network links such as Facebook, Twitter, and Digg.
If you want to get your copy of this plugin, head on over to Anthony Montalbano’s site and grab your copy today. You can now annoy the world with your own top bar. Yippee!
Need a way to automatically shorten urls on your WordPress blog? Srikanth, over on http://www.quickonlinetips.com, has you covered with their list of 5 great WordPress plugins that do just that (and more).
Here’s the first one off the list…
1. Short URL Plug-in – This WordPress plug-in allows you to shorten the long URL’s easily and it even enables you to keep track of the short URL’s so that you can know how many times each short URL has been clicked. This feature is really useful to track downloads and other links in your blog. If you wish to reset the counter you can click on the ‘clear all’ button to zero the counter. It includes pagination of links, easier setup of htaccess (permalinks) and allows administrators to pass variables to their redirects.
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