When choosing WordPress plugins, you need to keep in mind that these are open source, therefore each plugin is maintained by someone for free, so some plugins are made by people that aren’t experienced coders (which may result in the plugin preventing your site from loading), or may not have time or resources to maintain the plugin to keep up with new WordPress releases.

This becomes especially important when considering the crucial and complex plugins that make your site work the way you need, as finding a replacement in the future may be prove to be much more laborious than doing a little due diligence beforehand. Imagine, for example, if your photo gallery stopped working when you upgrade to the latest version of WordPress!

Due to this, it’s important to take certain things into consideration when choosing a plugin, and if keep these in mind you’ll probably find that your selected plugins get updated with the new WP releases and are regularly improved. There’s lots of factors that you need to consider when choosing a plugin. Below are some of the major things to think about: (more…)

Matt posted a small bit regarding the recent alert NetworkSolutions put up claiming that there was a vulnerability (not giving a link either, undeserved). Turns out that the issue had nothing to do with wordpress, and more to do with their file permissions. His aptly titled post, Secure File Permissions Matter raises a good point about security in general…. your site is as secure as your server, which is actually as secure as where your server is kept. (more…)

I had a chance to install the recently released Wordpress 3 Beta 1 onto my PC and I thought I’d highlight some of the most notable (in my opinion at least) new features that you can expect. For a more comprehensive list of improvements, head on over the 3.0 features page on the  Wordpress Codex (more…)

Uses the twitter goodies widgets API to create offical twitter widgets (profiles, lists, faves and search) straight from your control panel. Same opti

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Requires At Least : 2.7
Test Up To : 2.8.5
Current Version : 1.1
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Developer plugin for those working off local server wordpress copies. Adds "local |" to your title if wordpress is running off a local serve

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Requires At Least : 2.7
Test Up To : 2.8.5
Current Version : 1.0
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Add smooth ajax login and registration effects to your blog and choose where users get redirected upon login/logout. Supports SSL, MU, and BuddyPress.

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Requires At Least : 2.8
Test Up To : 3.0
Current Version : 3.0b2
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Those that use BuddyPress along with their Wordpress MU installation may have found some limitations with the xprofiles. BuddyPress Devs have improvements listed as an upcoming feature, but in the meantime some things need to be fixed NOW!

One particular feature I needed to get round was the fact that you can’t change the default “Name” field. Whilst very common to have this as a field in most installations, we should at least be able to edit the field names the user sees, but unfortunately this is not so. (more…)

Adds the smarter digg button. Extended options like topics, prefilled descriptions, shortcodes etc. allow full control of your digg icons.

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Requires At Least : 2.7
Test Up To : 3.0
Current Version : 2.0.2
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Imagine you have a blog which is a supplement to your site, such as a platform for company news.

Now imagine you want to add your blog to your main site’s navigation menu. Easy enough, just add a static link.

Now imagine you want to create an unordered list of the categories in your blog, so that each category can be easily accessed from any page on your website…. oops, it just got tricky. (more…)

This plugin removes the admin bar completely from the public and admin areas of the website. Can be used either as a normal or MU plugin.

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Requires At Least : 2.7
Test Up To : 2.8.4
Current Version : 1.2
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