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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Many of you i’m sure are accustomed to dealing with many of the open source ecommerce/shopping cart applications and might understand what i’m about to explain to you. It’s so hard to find any good free templates/themes for any of these ecommerce applications. Most of them, especially OScommerce and Zen Cart are absolutely hideous looking right out of the box.

Free Ecommerce Theme from CSS Creme

CSS creme has put together a free CSS ecommerce template that looks pretty nice. It’s simple and coded together well so that you can customize it and use your imagination on top of what is already put together. If you are using an open source application like me, you will need to apply this template to your theme and make your customizations. But I know with me that this will save me some serious time on a few projects of mine.

Instead of recreating the wheel everytime I make a shopping cart website, I can build off an already CSS/XHTML built template and make my customizations after that. The free template comes with 3 pages:

• Product Listing Template
• Product Detail Template
• Form Template (contact us)

That way you have enough to build off of with your Zen Cart theme or OScommerce theme or even Ubercart theme. This also could be a benefit if you are just putting together a quick shopping cart for a friend or relative for free, and you don’t have much time to put something elaborate together. Just throw this CSS template together with your theme and you are good to go.

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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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As many of you may know Wordpress has just released it’s version 2.6 which you and I will need to upgrade to (as soon as we can all find some time of course!). The new version of course comes with some new features as well as many improvements. Here’s the video of the brief tour for Wordpress 2.6:

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

This is basically a new feature that tracks content changes made to any posts or pages, similar to the way MediaWiki content management system works. This comes in extremely handy for those who run collaborative blogs with multiple writers.

Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

They developed a Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog

Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging

In this release Wordpress stuck to using what’s called a “Local Server” to cache or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds

Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing development.

And the rest of Wordpress 2.6 Features & Improvements

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

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Okay, so I spent some serious time this weekend researching, testing, and researching some more to find 10 really good Commerce/Advertising related Modules for Drupal. Needless to say I found some really fantastic stuff that I think will be extremely helpful for you!

A Referral Credit System for Users

1. User Referral
This module provides users with the ability to refer other users to a site they are registered at. When the new users registers, the referral is recorded. Users can see a list of users they referred, and the site admin can view more detailed reports. The module works by displaying a referral link (such as referral/123) in the user’s page. When a non-registered visitor clicks on this link, and then registers to the site, the referring user’s ID is recorded
in the database.

If the Adsense module is installed and Revenue sharing is enabled, then the referral is used to share the revenue between the referring user and the referred user.

Sell “TextLinkAds” on Your Website

2. TextLinkAds.com Integration
Simplified setup right on your site. All you need is your Website XML Key from Text-Link-Ads.com and you’re ready to start publishing ads. A built-in tool to customize the looks of the ads, including borders, background color, link color and font size. Access to your publisher statistics from within your website. See your site details, including how much money you’ve earned and how many links are being served. Cron-based updates of your ads. The ad links are kept up to date via Drupal’s cron functionality.

Tell a Friend Tool

3. Tell a Friend
Module creates a “Tell a Friend” page that allows page viewers to send form e-mails about the site to their friends.

Integrate Drupal with SugarCRM

4. SugarCRM Webform Integration
Adds capabilities to webform to facilitate submitting a form to SugarCRM to capture leads. The module adds configuration fields to editing the webform, and constrains the field keys on the form to parameters that the SugarCRM lead captures script (leadCapture.php) is able to process.

Paid Listings on your Drupal Website

5. Pay2Publish
Pay2Publish lets users publish basic versions of listings (nodes) for free, and later be able to pay to “upgrade” them to custom Levels (categories) to add more visibility (Views plays) and/or show more information (CCK fields). set up different “Levels” with different costs and properties (Silver, Gold, Platinum style). Each level will have its corresponding taxonomy (category) term. to upgrade a node, the user will have to buy the desired “Level” and assign it to one of his published nodes. The corresponding taxonomy term will be assigned to the desired node.

Sell Content Pages on Your Site

6. PayPal Node
Use PayPal to charge users to post a specified content-type. Costs are calculated based on combinations of taxonomy terms. Nodes can be set to expire (become unpublished) after a specified number of days. Use this module to create a custom classified advert system, or charge for hosting any content that users might categorise.

Click Thru Tracking & Reporting

7. Click Thru Tracking
This module provides the ability for site admins to track clicks on their site such as advertising campaigns and newsletter click throughs. The clicks are organized into groups, so ad campaigns can be tracked if they involve more than one node.

Your Own Affiliate Program

8. Affiliate
This module allows site owners to issue affiliate links to their partners. When anonymous users follow these links, the clicks are counted by affiliate, day, and optional keyword. When referred users sign up for an account, the account is associated with that affiliate.

Ad Management & Tracking

9. Advertisement
The ad module is a powerful advertising system for Drupal-powered websites. It supports the random display and tracking of graphical (banner) and text ads. Ads can easily be displayed in themes, blocks, or embedded in site content. The module records comprehensive statistics about when and how often ads are viewed and clicked, including a plug-in module for generating graphical time-based reports. Ads can be assigned to multiple owners, each of which can be assigned their own set of permissions. Installation is simple by design. An API is provided allowing the development of additional functionality and integration with other Drupal modules.

Product Feeds from Commission Junction/Linkshare

10. Affiliate Products Shop
This module targets the users who want to use affiliate products on their drupal sites. The module facilitates affiliate products feeds transfer from http://www.commissionjunction.com/ and http://www.linkshare.com/. You just have to fill information that the above sites provides and the system will bring the products links to your site in a fully categorized and alphabetically sorted fashion in terms of different merchants. The module also provides the facility to edit these feeds once in your database.

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