As an accumulation of research over the past couple of weeks, I have come across 6 Wordpress Plugins each one totally different from the next that you might find helpful in a project of yours or maybe even on your own Wordpress blog.

1. Full Registration Form

With this plugin you add the fields ‘First Name’, ‘Last Name’, ‘Nickname’, ‘Description’, ‘Website’ to your registration form. By default, the wp-register.php file that allows your readers to register as a user to your blog only asks for Username and Email. You can of course use this to get a little more information about your users.

2. Side Content

This plugin provides similar functionality to the Drupal Side Content module. It enables you to define a set of widgets which are effectively placeholders. Each one is empty until you assign content to it when editing a page. This enables you to effectively extend the content of the page into the sidebar. Suppose, for example, you have a set of pages about people in your company. You could use a side content widget to add a biography for each of them, or a photo, or to list their favorite pizza toppings. You can use the plugin without any template changes at all, but it does provide a simple API so you can test for the presence of side content widgets and adjust your templates accordingly.

3. WP-LinkChanger

WP-LinkChanger is a small script for affiliate link masking. That means all of your affiliate links in a post will automatically be changed to an internal file. After installation all links of your new posts will look like http://your.domain.tld/exit.php instead of http://evil.affiliatelink.com/ref/id/123

4. Email Commenters

Sometimes you want an easy way to e-mail all the people who commented on a certain post. Up till now that took a bit of work, now it’s as easy as installing this plugin, and clicking the link you’ll get underneath each post labeled “Mail the commenters on this post”!

5. WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages

This plugin creates a new blog on your WordPress MU system for all the posts on your site, much like http://wordpress.com/tags/ For performance reasons the number of posts is limited to a user configurable amount, and the blog itself can be made indexable by search engines or not.

6. WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. However, because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment, the plugin will only serve static html files to:

1. Users who are not logged in.
2. Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
3. Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

This plugin should help your server cope with a front page appearance on digg.com or other social networking site.

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In case you didn’t know, let me be the one to tell you. The Official Wordpress Themes Directory is back live again and updated with all new free themes for your wordpress “crazies” like me. No more searching those random affiliate ad heavy websites for new themes. The official theme directory for Wordpress should be pretty well updated with everything from here on.

Tip: RSS Subscribe to the Newest Themes

A simple little tip that will help you stay up to date on all the latest new themes that come in through the directory. When you go to the themes directory, click on the “Newest Themes” link located on the right hand side of the page. You will notice now you have an option to subscribe to this page via RSS. That way, you can see all the new themes right as they are coming in and stay ahead of everyone else on the goods!

Contribute Through Voting

Help the community know which themes are the best by using the 5 star voting system and voting each theme you come across. This will help everyone as a Wordpress community sift through the bad and the good. This will only take you not even a second as you are browsing the different themes, so just do it and help the rest of us out!

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Here’s a new and interesting plugin. It’s called the FriendFeed Comments Wordpress Plugin and it displays your FriendFeed comments from your posts on your Wordpress blog. It’s kind of a difficult thing to describe easily, so i’ll let the creator explain it to you.

“This plugin will allow you to display on your own site the comments that people make on FriendFeed about your post. I keep trying to think of a more succinct way of writing that but I can’t. It always sounds more confusing than it is.” There we go that’s much better.

How it’s Used in your Template

The plugin ads a template tag called <?php wp_ffcomments(); ?>, which you can drop onto your template somewhere inside “the loop” so it can access the post’s details to match it up with the FriendFeed data.

How I plan to Use it

I personally have not been to motivated by the FriendFeed tool, despite all the attention that it has been getting. But now if I can integrate the comments between FriendFeed and my blog, then I don’t see any reason why I won’t promote my blog posts on FriendFeed and start building a network of friends. In my blogging efforts, I hope to be able to use this method to build more comments and conversation on my blog(s).

Why FriendFeed?

The interesting aspect of FriendFeed is its quick evolution from a lifestreaming service to lifestreaming plus discussion forum plus latest news plus search engine. It seems to be a way to add all of these different information sources into one. The way I see it, if you can tap into all of my informational resources, than you can know everything I know about the Internet. And that becomes mutual. I can learn everything you know about the Internet. Knowledge sharing increases at incremental rates if people use FriendFeed to it’s capacity.

You can download this plugin from the creator’s website. Don’t forget to inform him of any bugs that you may come across. And don’t forget to thank him for his contributions.

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Laconica is an open source Microblogging tool that you can use to build a microblogging website of your own. Websites such as identi.ca use Laconica as it’s platform. The dependencies for running Laconica are Pear, XMPPHP, php-openid, and OAuth.php. You can learn more about the dependencies and how to install and configure Laconica by going here.

What is Microblogging?

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. The most popular of this type of service is Twitter, which i’m sure you have heard of lately. People are still trying to figure out exactly how it is they can benefit from such a service, but I think right now the possibilities still stand as “endless”.

What would I do with a Microblogging Open Source Tool?

Now this one is up to you. But the ideas that microblogging brings to the table are literally endless. And chances are you will probably be introduced to a project of your own, or of someone elses that will require such technology. One thing that I have thought of is to have all developers on an open source project microblogging together to collaborate on that open source project. This would increase productivity and communication at a faster and more effective rate to help get projects done quicker.

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I “stumbled” across this plugin recently for the Wordpress blog cms. Its called the Wordpress Exploit Scanner. This plugin searches the files and database of your website for signs of suspicious activity. It will not stop someone hacking into your site, but it may help you find any uploaded or compromised files left by the hacker.

When a website is compromised, hackers leave behind scripts and modified content that can be found by manually searching through all the files on a site. Some of the methods used to hide their code or spam links are obvious, like using CSS to hide text, and this plugin can search for those strings.

The database can also be used to hide content or be used to run code. Spam links are sometimes added to blog posts and comments. They’re hidden by CSS so visitors don’t see them, but search engines do. Recently, hackers took advantage of the WP plugin system to run their own malicious code. They uploaded files with the extensions of image files and added them to the list of active plugins. So, despite the fact that the file didn’t have a .php file extension, the code in them was still able to run!

This plugin searches through your site and attempts to find those changed files and db records.

You can find the Scanner admin page linked off the Dashboard. This is the screen you’ll see. You can search in numerous ways:

1. Files and database.
2. Files only.
3. Database only
4. Search files by custom keyword.

Learn more about this free plugin for Wordpress and even download it for your blog if you are interested.

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There is a new extension available for the Magento open source ecommerce platform called the Lazzymonks Wordpress Integration extension. The basic idea is that it gives you Wordpress capabilities inside your Magento shopping cart!

This was something I always wished other open source cart systems would have done a better job at like Zen Cart and OScommerce. The extension is still in beta so it does still have some work that it needs done to it. The extension is also open source so you don’t need to worry about paying for it and you can of course contribute more to it yourself!

Magento?
If you don’t know too much about the open source Magento ecommerce platform you can read my article “What Open Source Shopping Cart Should I Use?” or you can of course go to www.magentocommerce.com

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