As you may know already (and if you don't, dude, follow me) I was one of the judges in the WordPress Plugin Competition held by Weblogtoolscollections. The podium for this year's comp has been finally revealed so, as promised, I'm now publishing the 43 reviews of the 43 contestant plugins. Warning: this is going to be a long one.
Short intro for readers who don't follow me or this blog's feed: I've been a judge in the annual WordPress Plugin Competition, and as such I have reviewed a number of plugins. Read more about this. As promised, I'm going to share a list of the most common mistakes, errors, misunderstandings, bad habits or wrong design decisions I've encountered while…
This year once again, Weblogtoolscollection.com organized their annual WordPress Plugin Competition, which has had this time a special flavor for me: I was not authorized to compete (being one of the winners of a former edition) but I did take a role in it, as I've been one of the judges. Being a judge was quite a straightforward task: Mark…
The WordPress Plugin Competition is the best moment of the year, plugin wise. This year's edition is still running till the end of the month of July and as of writing, there are about 10 plugins (with some really interesting stuff). Still, new plugins are released every day. Why aren't these authors joining the competition? Participating in the competition is…
So, if I didn't forget to upload a zip archive or to press a "Commit" button, it should be all here for you: the GPL'd URL shortener I wrote about earlier that Lester Chan and I have been using for a while now. Our URL shortener service is called YOURLS, as in Your Own URL Shortener. It's all GPL, free,…
I've just read on TechCrunch the announcement about awe.sm, a service that sells custom URL shorteners (a la TinyURL) for your own domain. That's funny: I've been using my own private URL shortener for about a week now (notice the "shorter link" mention at the top of this post). The script I'm using is based on something created by Lester…
In the upcoming WordPress 2.8 there's an interesting function set meant to help authors manage their plugin custom options. In a nutshell: whitelist your options, define how you want them to be validated, and just lean back and rely on the API to handle everything for you. Your new best friend is function register_setting(), and I'm going to recapitulate how…
A few minutes ago, Mark from WebLog Tools Collection announced the 2009 Edition of the totally cool WordPress Plugin Competition. As I've written several times already, this is the best moment in the plugin year. Awesome ideas and awesome plugins popping, that's a truly exciting moment. This year, Mark introduced a new rule: winners from past edition can't compete. I…
Filed in the "I hate SEO plugins" category (why), and tagged as "but some are better than others", there's an article on Urban Giraffe that gives a comparison of WordPress SEO Plugins. The article is factual and tends to prove that HeadSpace is the most comprehensive and featured pack plugin, particularly compared with All In One SEO, more famous and…
If you're a Twitter user, got a WordPress blog, and would like to throw in some interactions between those two, don't miss this plugin: Twitter Connect. Using the brand new Twitter's OAuth API, this plugin lets you identify yourself using your Twitter account. I like it for several reasons: it's cool, it's quick, and it opens the door to getting…