Following up on my last post/rant on the official Wordpress Plugin directory, I thought I’d share a few places to find Wordpress plugins.

• Wp-Plugins.net - The biggest and best listing if you ask me.
• LearningWordpress.com - This one is newer and looks pretty nice so far.
  
• Wordpress.com - The official directory. Fewer plugins, but it’s growing.
• A Google or Yahoo search always works well too as there are many that are not listed in the directories above.
• Internal searches on blogging sites like ProBlogger.net or BloggingPro.com can also uncover some new and interesting plugins.

Where do you go when you want to find new or useful blog plugins?

When I first read last week that Wordpress had launched an official plugins directory I was excited. There are lots of good plugins out there that are not in any sort of searchable database other than a search engine. However, the Wordpress plugin directory isn’t living up to my excitations yet.

The directory holds less than 150 plugins out of the thousands out there. What is there seems to be organized well and has a nice star rating scale, installation information, screenshots, a FAQ and even download stats for the plugin.

I then tried to add the FB StandardStats plugin and that’s where my excitement died.

Signing up for an account and submitting the basic plugin info was easy. A couple hours later I got notification that a SVN area was setup for my plugin and the URL took me to a page with no GUI, no instructions and no clues as to what to do next. A quick email back to support and they said it was easy, just get a SVN client and they sent me here.

A client asked me today for more control in their Wordpress control panel. Specifically, when posting they wanted to control the font sizes, colors and do a bit more. As a designer I always freak at that question as I think the code is going to be filled with massive amounts of font tags and out of order strong tags and ohhh the madness. But, then again, maybe I’m overreacting.

So, I did some researching and came up with one possible idea, Xinha4WP. It’s a Wordpress plugin that replaces the default text editor with a much more advanced version. It also needs the Text Control plugin to work so you need to install that too.

Xinha4WP gives bloggers many features including all font control (sizes and colors), tables, additional smilies, special characters and few more items. The coolest thing is the maximize button that lets you make the editor the size if your browser window.

The downside is that it is a rather large plugin weighing in at 5.5mb. It is also showing up above the built in Wordpress editor widow. This is not ideal to have two editor windows especially since the default Wordpress one is ignored. This could be a conflict with the video pugin they using too. Not sure.

One of the annoyances of Wordpress is that when a new version comes out, you have to take the time to upgrade. Sure, it may be just re-uploading everything, but that still takes a few minutes per blog and I think that’s why a lot of people tend not to do it. To work around this, the InstantUpgrade plugin was created. Good idea, but is it ready for primetime yet?

The plugin explains that it can automatically update to the latest version of Wordpress for you, or you can tell it when to update the files for you. It does all the work and you get to sit back and relax.

The first red flag is how many files you need to make writable by the server. The privileges 777 mean that the files are writable by everyone. This sounds like a hackers dream to me but maybe I’m wrong.

It also concerns me that every time there is a Wordpress upgrade, some plugins must be updated too. Thus, if it upgrades when you aren’t around, and a plugin breaks, how long will it take you to find out and will your blog be down?

When I built the FB StandardStats plugin I built it to make it easy to add in the necessary code to get the new StandardStats up and running. People mentioned that it worked with FeedFlare but it didn’t hit me until today how cool this plugin really was!

“FeedFlare allows publishers to easily build ‘interactivity’ into the content they create, making it simple for subscribers to tag, email or share their content with others. Publishers can include a variety of services including a live display of the number of comments to each post, the ability to email the author directly and show the number of blogs that link to their item. Publishers can choose to include FeedFlare within the feed itself as well as on their blog or site.”

It first started to sink in the other day when I had to make the updates due to the FeedFlare confusion that may happen when a feed is burned though FeedBurner and this plugin was also installed. But it wasn’t until today that the light bulb when off. If you select FeedFlare items to show up in your blog, the FB StandardStats Plugin displays it!

The past few days have been great for the FB StandardsStats plugin. Not only have I been in communication with the FeedBurner folks, it also got mentioned on the FeedBurner buzz blog. That gave the plugin some great exposure and uncovered a few bugs. It’s since been updated and re-packaged and FB StandardStats 1.0b is now available.

The biggest update is how the plugin displays the FeedBurner code. It seems that I was showing it not only on blog posts, but also in the feed. This could cause issues and confusion with feeds burned at FeedBurner. So I added a few lines of extra code to ensure that it only adds the StandardStats code in the browser version of posts and not in the feeds.

Other than that, there were a few download issues that could have come from web server issues or other formatting oddities. I think those are all worked out now.

Ohh and one more, if you get a 404 error when trying to update the FB StandardStats options page, that means that you uploaded the entire directory. The only file that needs to be uploaded is fb_standardstats.php. No folders.

While working on a review of StandardStats from FeedBurner, the only real negative thing I could come up with was the fact that the install wasn’t simple for non-techies. Sure it’s easy for some, but I thought it could be easier. So I created the FeedBurner StandardStats Wordpress plugin.

FB StandardStats makes installing FeedBurner’s stats code simple. No files to edit and no wondering if you got the code in the right place. Simply put in your user ID and the plugin will do the rest.

As a bonus, the plugin can also be used to show FeedFlare links on each blog post.

To Install:

1. Download FB StandardStats 1.0b
2. Upload fb_standardstats.php to the /plugins/ directory of your blog.
3. Activate via the Plugins area in Wordpress’ admin.
4. Go to the FB StandardStats options page and enter your StandardStats ID. Instructions on finding this ID are on the FB StandardStats options page.

That’s it. The plugin automatically enters in the code to the template files and you’ll start getting stats as soon as you get visitors.

Let me know what issues you run across and any success stories too. I’ve got it running on three blogs including this one and it seems to work fine.

Wordpress 2.1 has been released and one of the biggest changes has to do with plugins. Reading 10 Things You should Know About WordPress 2.1 they said “many plugins will no longer work in 2.1“!

Ok, that freaked me out a little. I like to stay up to date, but I can’t live without some of my plugins.

The good news is that there is a plugin compatibility page where they are trying to list all the plugins that work, or don’t work, with Wordpress 2.1. The biggest red flag I saw was Ultimate Tag Warrior. Give it a few days though and it’ll be ready to go.

If you don’t see a certain plugin on the compatible page, and you can’t find updated information from the author, drop the plugin name below with a link to it and I’ll see if I can’t get it tested for you.

Overall Wordpress 2.1 looks nice, but I’ve only had it installed for 10 minutes on my test blog.

Where as the Wordpress admin isn’t bad, it could be much better. Check out this optimized and stylized version of the Wordpress admin.

And it’s all available via a plugin.

WP Tiger Administration v3.0 became available today and it adds quite a bit of style to the admin area of your blog. It was organizationally designed to be a Mac style, now it’s just style. It uses the power of CSS2 to add subtle colors, a right had nav, a few icons and less clutter all around.

It works great in Firefox and Safari but leaves out Internet Explorer as IE doesn’t support CSS2.

Check it out and start administrating your blog in style!

While at SES in Chicago, I got to hear Rick Klau of Feedburner talk a few times. While listening to him, I realized that Feedburner’s services are well worth the free account; not to mention the paid account.

Feedburner is a feed management service. It takes your blog generated feed and works with it to ensure maximum compatibility with all feed readers. It also help make sure that your podcast, images and video are all correctly embedded and then makes your feed user friendly by adding CSS and subscription buttons to your feed’s page.

Not only that, but you can put in your Amazon ID to ensure your Amazon links make you money, you can also tie your Flickr images into your feed, get click through counts, see how many subscribers you have, see how people are using your feed and that’s just a few features of the free account.

The Feedburner reader stats are one of the main reasons I’ve used Feedburner in the past. Unfortunately Wordpress doesn’t have that kind of information yet. (Unless you have a Wordpress.com account.) I’ve been a little wary of running all my feed traffic though Feedburner in the past and it turns out I was worried for nothing.