Could This Be The Start?

Readers, prepare yourselves! Over the last couple of days I have been reading up on developing WordPress Plugins, And you know what? I think I’ve done it! It’s a pretty basic WordPress Plugin, at the moment – all it does is display a Search Box on the Admin Dashboard that let’s you search the web. I’m looking to expand this so that the users of the blog can also search the web, right from the sidebar, I probably won’t submit the plugin to WordPress, but keep it on MyTutorialz. More details to follow!

3 Essential Plugins To Mobilize Your Blog

In this post I will show you 3 of the best plugins and themes for use with your WordPress blog, to enable your visitors to view your blog in a stylish and mobile-friendly theme.

WPTouch

Download: Here

One of the things I love about WPTouch is the fact that it runs and looks just like a native iPhone app, just take a look at the styles and the AJAX coding in the plugin – you can’t fail to notice that it looks like a wep-app – on the plus side – it’s an awesome experience and admin interface!

WordPress Mobile Edition

Download: Here

WordPress Mobile Edition was a plugin that I previously used on this blog before WPTouch. The main reason I changed was because, well – it just wasn’t right for me – as much as the author’s try to make it look like an iPhone app, it does (sort of) but on the whole it just doesn’t – and as a result it looks terribly dull and a bit of an eyesore.

WordPress Mobile Pack

Download: Here

And my final choice of plugins to mobilize your blog is a plugin known as ‘WordPress Mobile Pack’ – it’s a nifty plugin, mainly because it comes with a fine selection of pre-installed themes, and a really comprehensive admin panel!

5 Unique And Different Plugins To Allow Post Sharing

Well, I’m excited about the new iPhone OS 4.0! (that’s besides the point of this post!) This will be my last post for a while (come on, I need a bit of time off too!) - So, I thought I would cover blog post sharing. There are now more bookmarking plugins than ever available from the WordPress plugin ‘store’, but only a few are extroadinary. Today, I will show you my top picks.

Drag To Share eXtended:

You wouldn’t know drag to share extended existed on your page, until you hover over an image! Highly inspired by Mashable social bookmarking – DTSX allows a visitor to drag an image, and then be presented with a number of social icons, on which the visitor can share the article. Very clever idea!

SexyBookmarks:

No, the name isn’t a dirty gag! It’s easy to see why the plugin is called ‘sexy’, instead of showing the visitor a long list of social networks available for sharing, you can customise which icons are displayed, and if they should all appear at once, or when hovered over (ideal for space-saving bloggers!)

Social Bookmarking RELOADED:

The Social Bookmarking RELOADED plugin for WordPress adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts and/or pages that allow your visitors to easily submit them in a number of social bookmarking sites. Furthermore, the plugin adds a page in the WordPress admin section that lets you customize it. Best of all – now supports Buzz!

Add To Any: Share / Bookmark / Email Button:

Help readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. The button comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing and usage history.

Top Social Bookmarking Buttons:

The plugins contais the top social bookmarking buttons on the net. Post your articles to the social bookmarking sites and get traffic. The plugin supports SociBook.com, Digg.com, Google.com, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz and FaceBook.

Enjoy messing with your new plugins, while I enjoy a short break!

30 Must-Have Plugins For WordPress

There are so many plugins for WordPress available out there! That’s why WordPress is my favourite blogging system. But, with all these plugins, it’s so hard to find which ones are truly awesome. In this guide, I will show you through 30 of the best plugins out there.

Note: = Plugin used on this blog.

1. Broken Link Checker, this plugin has the ultimate functionality of being able to search through your posts and pages to find links which lead to a non-existant page, and suggests alternatives.
2. WPTouch iPhone Theme Prehaps you have website visitors, who visit from their mobile device, such as an iPhone? Well, this nifty little plugin can help generate a theme which is pleasing for mobile visitors to visit.
3. Mingle Blogging may not be enough for you, so why not add social network capabilities – with Mingle? Mingle allows you to add social network features to your blog, with individual user pages, status updates, friend adding and more!
4. Watermark RELOADED Visitors to your website may be copying-and-pasting content from your site onto their own – and giving you no credit. This plugin allows you to add custom text to every image you upload.
5. Series If you are publishing many posts that fall into one series, e.g. Part 1, Part 2. It may be hard to link all of these posts together, look no futher, to create many posts in a series with this plugin – you only need to check a button – and the plugin does the rest.
6. Social Web Links If you have joined external social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter etc. You can just list links to these profiles. OR you can display beautiful favicons to 130+ different social profiles.
7. All In One SEO One of the best SEO plugins I have seen for WordPress, This plugin can allow you to customise how, when and where your blog posts and pages appear on many search engines, always updating your blog.
8. WordPress.com Stats There are many plugins out there for analysing website visits, you can use services such as Google, but these may be overwhelming. So, Automattic decided to create this useful stat plugin to simplify the stat counting, but increase the depth of analysis.
9. SexyBookmarks This bookmarking tool is used on a lot of blogs, it’s easy to see why – it’s so easy to personalise and incorporate into your theme, with loads of services to choose from!
10. Autocompleter This is quite a small plugin, which can add a whole lot of change to your search. We’ve all seen the Google search suggest, well this does exactly the same thing for your blog, should work with all ready-made Search Widgets.
11. Digg This O’Mine Very simply adds a ‘Digg This’ button to your blog posts and/or pages.
12. Mailpress Sends out mail notifications to all newsletter subscribers, and allows for much customisation.
13. TweetMeMeButton Very simply adds a ‘Tweet This’ button to your blog posts and/or pages.
14. User Messages Your blog users may be looking for more interactivity with each other, besides commenting. This private messaging widget can allow all or some of your users this functionality.
15. WP-Ban Has an IP been causing trouble on your blog? It’s time to stop this with WP-Ban!
16. WordTwit This plugin tweets your blog posts to your Twitter accout, and can be used in conjunction with the WordPress iPhone Theme.
17. WP Greet Box If your visitors are coming from different websites, why not show them a different greeting?
18. Maintenance Mode You may want to make some changes to your blog, but you can’t because it’s open to the whole world! Change this with Maintenance Mode!
19. Sabre D’oh! Spammers are constantly signing up to your blog with fake accounts. This plugin can detect whose real and whose not, with many more features such as custom passwords and re-CAPATCHA.
20. FormBuilder Include gorgeous forms in your blog.
21. Cleanup WordPress Searches through your WP databases to find content which is unused.
22. Ad Buttons Display ads on your blog without joining programmes such as Google AdSense, however this can be used.
23. WP-MalWatch Keep an eye on hacks to your blog!
24. UAM It’s a tricky task, who can access what pages, posts, files, comments and more. This plugin enables a secure environment for you to control these variables. With password protection.
25. WordPress Download Monitor Insert downloads into your blog and control and monitor who can download them.
26. Capability Manager Who can use what plugins? You decide!
27. Tweet Blender Better than Twitter’s own widgets – Tweet Blender is tag-aware and has support for multiple authors, lists, hashtags, and keywords all blended together. The plugin can show tweets from just one user or a list of users (as all other Twitter plugins do); however, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twitter hashtag or keyword. But there is more! It can also show tweets for multiple authors AND multiple lists AND multiple keywords AND multiple hashtags all blended together into a single stream.
28. Login With AJAX Login With Ajax is for sites that need user logins and would like to avoid the normal wordpress login, this plugin adds the capability of placing a login widget in the sidebar with smooth AJAX login effects.
29. Enable Media Replace Enables replacing attachment files by simply uploading a new file in the media library edit view.
30. WordPress Admin Bar This plugin replicates all of the menu links in your normal admin area at the top of your main site for logged in users (i.e. you). You can go right to the “Write Post” or manage options pages in one click from anywhere on your blog. No more having to go to your dashboard first. You can even have it replace your admin area menus if you want.