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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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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Slideshow 2 is an open source Mootools slideshow class for streaming and animating the presentation of images. It’s definitely one of the better looking slideshow’s out there. A very impressive look is given to your images in a much more professional manner. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like (without mootools of course)

You can choose from a variety of different effects of course which gives you some good flexibility on how you want it to end up looking. The cool thing is that you can input your slideshow via HTML with one simple line of code. The example they give is this:

new Slideshow('show', ['1.jpg', '2.jpg', '3.jpg'], { controller: true, hu: ‘images/’ });

Here are the features as listed in the blog article that featured this tool from webresourcesdepot.com:

• Dynamic resizing - Slideshow can accommodate any size presentation.
• Thumbnails - intelligent, auto-scrolling, tracking, etc.
• Full-featured controller - completely style-able with CSS.
• Animated captions - plain text or formatted with HTML.
• Fully accessible - Slideshow can be controlled with access keys.
• Automagic slideshows - create slideshows from existing HTML images.
• Varied hyperlinking options - allows for mashups with Lightbox, Slimbox, etc.
• CSS slide transitions - designed in stylesheets, not javascript,
  allow for an infinite combination of effects (plus support for all
  Robert Penner transitions).
• Unobtrusive and degradable - Slideshow even functions with Javascript turned off!

So if you are looking for a cool javascript slideshow to add some spice to your website then try this one out. There is some good documentation to help you along the way in customizing it to fit your needs. Enjoy!

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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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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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Oh boy have I been looking for something like this for a long long time! And I am just thrilled that it is Open Source! The Open Source world delivers again. This time with a flash Product Color Changer. Click on the link to see a demo of what it actually does. Basically this tool enables you to present the color variations of your product in simple and nifty way.

An Ecommerce Solution like None Other
I can’t tell you how many people over the years have asked me to build them functionality inn their ecommerce store similar to Nike and their shoe store. I’m not sure if they still have it, but in the past Nike would allow you to customize your shoe by color and a few other things. A very neat function that helps give the customer a better ability to “Shop” on your shopping cart website.

Below is just a screenshot of what this script does. Oh by the way, the script uses XML so that you can easily embed it into any CMS or Ecommerce solution.

Download the Open Source Product Color Changer!

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