My way to warn about broken links would be to check at publish time, and add something like an ugly popup over the “Write” screen telling that, dude, you’ve link to 404s, wtf. But definitely not at render time, especially on old outdated forgotten posts.

It is a good suggestion to add this option, namely checking for links at publish time, in the plugin. But broken links typically arise only in older posts.In newer posts either the webmaster himself detects it or a loyal reader alerts him of such broken link…

but in links on older posts, the chances of they getting broken is more…

Eg: 1) sites you linked to a long ago, might move those posts or pages to newer locations.
2) sometimes even the entire site may cease to exist.
3) It is also possible that a hacker targets such links on older posts and redirects it to somewhere else..

To be honest, my two submissions, Wordpress Editor Extender and Image Browser Extender, were done in a few hours each and was for the competition and for my wife who kept asking me to build them for her. So the code may not be the cleanest and efficient.

It did not seem like you had too much critiquing of the WEE plugin, but thank you for the kind words about my site.

For the IBE plugin I actually second your thoughts. There are plans for creating a non-editor dependent version but the time has just not been there and is ever so slightly trickier because WP uses jQuery 1.2.3 and most of the jQuery UI stuff that I would use to make it easier will only work well with jQuery 1.2.6. I am working on some work arounds for my PhotoXhibit plugin that is giving me ideas so we may see an updated version soon.

As for the wp-config problem, that is why it is hard to develop plugins for WP and keep them maintained. Each version the seem to make little changes that cause huge issues for plugins. It get frustrating and I wish they would just add some depreciation code for a few versions so we don’t have to change out plugins every 6 months.

Anyway, I am ranting, I appreciate that you took the time to look thru all the above plugins and I appreciate your feedback.

AnyVar doesn’t use the shortcode API because he wanted to also be able to replace the text if it’s in a theme file or anywhere else. The shortcode API only applies to the post content. To replace text in a theme, output buffering is required.

I actually like the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress now. It works fairly well.

Manageable is super awesome. I’ve been using it ever since it popped up on the competition site.

And yes, if I find some free time soon, I’ll convert Automatic Timezone into a core patch. :)