WordPress Station

I’ve already covered themes, so now to wrap up any plugins that I saved links for over the last month or so.

First is AdIcons, an interesting little take on selling some link love. Basically it seems you use a sites favicon and have a small grid to fill. A fairly unobtrusive way to monetize your site, or just an interesting way to link to friends/community.

Next up is a simple, but interestingly well conceived plugin. WordPress VCard, which basically allows you to add your info via an admin panel, and then have a downloadable VCard in your sidebar (I imagine you could also have it on an about page as well). Works both as a widget and a standard plugin.

The next plugin I haven’t tested, but need to, as many will know that there’s been a bug in WP for quite some time that if switching from VRE to HTML view, any tables with added styling, the code is stripped, the table is borked, and back to square one. So the Spreadsheet to Table plugin may very well be the answer in the short term. If anyone gets a chance to test this before I, please leave a comment on your experience.

The last plugin I’m going to mention, to me, is more invaluable than ever, considering the fact that “widgets” went into the core of WP 2.2. This plugin allows for the execution of PHP in a widget, so basically you can customize template tags, older plugins, etc from within the admin panel. This will be especially helpful, IMO, to those who help manage blogs for others.

And finally, Devlounge has written a series How to Write a WordPress Plugin. Everything from why to write one, to creating an admin panel has been covered so far (as of today, the latest installment is interaction with the database). Anyone curious about stepping into the realm should definitely take a look.

That about covers the top items I had bookmarked over the past month, so posting should return to the normal one item per post routine I’ve normally followed.

Rather than a series of posts, I’m going to simply do a wrap up post covering any links I’ve saved over the past month theme related, and then return to my normal posting methods.

First up is Grid Lock, a magazine style theme, which was recently updated. If you aren’t familiar with it, as I said it has a magazine style approach to the home page content. This means a featured category gets top billing, and sub categories have smaller sections below. There’s an options page to configure the categories. While looking at that, check out Gridlock-K2, a K2 style based on the original.

Next up, a very stylish 2 column theme from Justin Shattuck, Salmon. Beautifully designed with a darker, modern feel, a great example of a quality theme.

AboutMyDot.Net has several nice looking themes. Unfortunately, the previews aren’t working, so can only go by the screenshots, but the theme, A Nice Touch seems particularly well done.

And to wrap up, Smashing Magazine has done it again, rounding up 10, Fresh, Elegant and Clean WordPress Themes.

Well, things behind the scenes here at the Station have been less than ideal, and thus no time to keep up with the constant growth of WordPress. However the dust is settling, so with the release of Getz, I figured now was as good a time as any to pick back up. I have a few bookmarks to follow up on, and then will try to get back into a regular posting schedule. I’m still struggling with how to track the many minor updates as well as new releases, not to mention the issues with the dozens of “new” themes released daily.

I had intended to weigh in on the issues of this most recent release, for those not aware, tagging was going to go into the core of WP, but due to strong disagreement from the community in the approach that was being taken, it was shelved in this release, and instead, “widgets” became the major new feature. Personally, I’m not a fan of widgets, as it minimizes the ability to customize the output in many of the core widgets (though I haven’t tested the newest versions - specifically the list page widget I’m referring to).

Look for new posts wrapping up some of the releases I’ve come across recently, as well as a potential new format. Thanks to those who’ve kept the Station in their feed readers.