WordPress Snippets

Our humble website, WPSnippets, is hardly the first stop WordPress fans will visit when they look up information regarding their beloved WordPress (I recommend visiting WP Tavern and WLTC for that!)  but I do still feel it is important to get the word out as a much as possible about this year’s:

WordPress Plugin Competition 2009

This is an annual competition which, I believe, began last year and has both directly and indirectly resulted in some of the most useful plugins for 2008 – I believe the concept behind one may even have been somewhat ‘integrated’ into WordPress core – it was that good!

The incentive for plugin authors across the world is firstly, a place to publicise their plugin in a forum outside of the WordPress Plugin Directory – particularly to non developers (including myself). Secondly, as WPEngineer pointed out (with thanks to WPTavern for the Retweet), your plugin will receive a lot of feedback. I think he sums it up nicely:

… your Plugin surely gets more attention and more feedback, as I have experienced in the past year. This year should be at least the same amount of feedback as last year, where each plugin was inspect by OZH. Also this year, you can expect to get some feedback from Ozh as you can see at contribution to the Plugin Competition. Sure, the opinion of Ozh can be different then yours, but his feedback is crucial. As a developer, I have learned a lot from last year, my knowledge expanded.

Just to recap on last year’s plugins, the personal highlights for me from 2008 were (in no particular order):

• WP Comment Remix by Jason DeVelvis
• Role Scoper by Kevin Behrens
• Snazzy Archives & WP Wall by Vladimir Prelovac
• Tabbed Widgets Plugin by Kaspas Dambis
• WP Sentry by Pete Holiday
• postTabs by Leo Germani

for the simple reason that they were really quite innovative and ones I personally found very useful (or potentially useful) for my own sites (fan and private club ones) and these were to name but a few of the multiple plugins that were submitted.

2009 has yet to receive the same level of submissions, which is surprising, given the incentives listed above and some lovely prizes to boot. Hopefully this is because all this year’s potential competition participants are furiously writing up a changelog before posting their entry. :p

As a non developer, some of the new submissions that have caught my eye to date are:

• Twitter Friendly Links by Konstantin Kovshenin
• Max Image Size Control by  Hiroaki Miyashita
• Changelogger by Oliver Schlöbe
• Advanced Export for WP and WPmu by Ron Rennick

where Changelogger is a plugin that I believe really offers something that should be in WordPress core, and Advanced Export for WP and WPmu will be such an essential tool when moving or even revamping a site as you can select specific content.

The deadline for submissions is the end of July 2009, so – as a WordPress fan who loves plugin developers and their plugins – please can I humbly implore you to send in your plugin for the WordPress Plugin Competition 2009!

Having been overwhelmed with Olympic fever, it’s been awhile since I’ve made a post relating to WordPress, but the community is as active as ever, especially with the release of WordPress 2.6.1 and the final round of voting for the WordPress Plugin Competition.

This will, fortunately for you all, be a short post with what maybe a catchy title! The good book ‘how to write a good blog post’ sites teach us that a catchy title is very helpful in attracting the attention of browsers. Whether this will be one of the popular posts as a result remains to be seen, but there is a point to this post and the title: it turns out I have been spelling that special word wrong.

That word, of course, is:

WordPress

I’ve always spelt it as Wordpress, and never thought more of it, so I was utterly mortified when I started reading Lorelle’s excellent article Tips on Writing Good WordPress Tips. The first point she made (as convincingly as always) was that:

WordPress is a trademark and thus must be spelled appropriately.

That sentence came like a bolt from the heavens (or stepping on a garden rake) and I was left with a sinking feeling in my stomach – just hours before I had chided someone on the WordPress Forums about getting the name of a plugin wrong, and yet I was already making an even more fundamental mistake about something I read about almost everyday - WordPress!

That feeling of guilt happened to coincide with me reading a new post by Mark Ghosh on WLTC called Be Kind, Educate, (which is just as inspirational as Matt Mullenweg’s Price of Freedom) where he analyses why there are so many fans of WordPress, and nature of the WP community. His last point, and the title of his article, credits Lorelle as an inspiration for his new pledge:

to be as kind as I can be … to educate everyone that cares to listen

So at the end of this post, not only am I going to spell WordPress correctly from now on, I am also going to endeavour to be a lot more patient and polite when I reply on the forums!

p/s: Apologies to anyone I’ve offended on the forums from before.

p/s2: I think I’ve patched up this site for WordPress, but if you spot any omissions, please let me know!