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.

Back in Feburary, I stumbled upon some free templates from Template monster. I made some comments here on this blog about how ironic I found it that they were table based. The irony was that one of the tables based designs were based on Cameron Moll’s design. The same Cameron Moll who expounds on the virtues of CSS and XHTML. I summed up with a snide comment, “get with the program”. Little did I know, that they came across my comment, and have indeed attempted to step up to the plate and make their WP designs CSS and XHTML based. Before I get into the details and observations about that aspect of things, a little more about the themes, and how I came about them.
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