WordPress 2.9 has many new features. Some of the noticeable features are image editing, theme search, theme upload right from your dashboard, oembed etc.

WordPress 2.9 Beta 1

(WordPress 2.9 – Image Editor)

Download WordPress 2.9 Beta 1.

• WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 Released
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• WordPress 2.8 Beta 1 Released
• Screenshots of WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 New Dashboard Design

First of all we would like to thank Ajay Dsouza for allowing to use his WordPress plugin Contextual Related Posts. Entire Wp-Thumbie Plugin is based on Contextual Related Post plugin.  So what is Wp-Thumbie? Wp-Thumbie is WordPress Plugin to Display Thumbnail Related Posts on WordPress blog.

Currently there is only one WordPress plugin Linkwithin which provides such functionality. Unfortunately that plugin doesn’t allow any customization and that’s what leads us to develop Wp-Thumbie. Check out below list of Wp-Thumbie Features.

Features of Wp-Thumbie WordPress Plugin

1. Display Related Posts with thumbnail image automatically in content / feed, no need to edit template files

2. Doesn’t use any custom field to generate thumbnail images

3. You can manually add code to your template where you want the Wp-thumbie to be displayed

4. Exclude posts from categories

5. Exclude display of thumbnail related posts on Pages

6. Exclude pages in thumbnail related Posts list

7. Related posts based on content and post title

8. Set Thumbnail image size

9. Turn on/off Post excerpt

10. Set length of Post excerpt

11. Different Styling for displaying thumbnail related posts

You can use Wp-Thumbie plugin on any self-hosted WordPress blog without need of modifying your existing posts.  Wp-Thumbie automatically extracts first image from posts and on fly resizes to defined thumbnail size.

You can set number of thumbnail related posts to be displayed with horizontal (will be made available in next plugin update) and vertical list style or raw output format and set your own styling.

Wp-Thumbie

Wp-Thumbie Option Page

(Click on Image to Enlarge)

Requirements

1. WordPress version above 2.5

2. Your Webhost must support Php Gb Library

How to Install Wp-Thumbie

1. Download Wp-Thumbie

2. Extract contents of wp-thumbie.zip  in Wp-content/plugins folder

3. Activate Wp-Thumbie from WordPress Admin dashboard

4. If you uncheck “Add related posts to the post content on single posts” option on Wp-Thumbie settings page then you must add below code in your WordPress Theme Template file

<?php if(function_exists (’ wp_thumbie ‘)) wp_thumbie(); ?>

Make sure wp-thumbie &  wp-thumbie/cache folder permissions are set to 777. Cache folder will be created automatically once you activate and start using wp-thumbie.

CSS Info

Main CSS ID “wp-thumbie”

List CSS ID “wp_thumbie_li”

Thumbnail Image CSS ID “wp_thumbie_thumb”

Title URL CSS ID “wp_thumbie_title”

Post Excerpt CSS ID “description”

We would like to thank Davinder of Tothepc for helping us in developing CSS for displaying thumbnail related posts and providing us default image for Wp-Thumbie.

Download Wp-Thumbie

Download Wp-Thumbie Thumbnail Related Post Plugin for WordPress.

Upcoming Features

1. Horizontal Style listing

2. Support for Custom field & Attachements

3. Ability to set open links in new windows

FAQ

Thumbnails are not displayed ?

Ans. If thumbnails are not appearing then checkout permission of wp-thumbie & wp-thumbie/cache folder permissions it should be 755.

if you see message “Php GD library is not supported” message then contact your hosting provider and ask for Php GD library.

You can see Wp-Thumbie in action on this blog

If you have any question, suggestions for new features or issues then please comment here.

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Online Bookmarking websites like Delicious and Google bookmarks are quite popular now. Most of the users prefer to bookmark online since you can access your bookmarks from anywhere. If you save a lot of bookmarks and you continuously publish bookmark postings in your blog then Bookmarks2LiveWriter is for you.

Bookmarks2LiveWriter is plugin for Windows Live Writer generates blog entry with your Delicious bookmarks automatically. You can set date filter for your bookmarks and using result preview you can format your links before inserting them to your blog.

Features of Bookmarks2LiveWriter for Windows Live Writer

1. Download bookmarks from Delicious.

2. Filter by Date range

3. Add- Remove Bookmarks before Publishing

4. Group bookmarks by first tag or publishing date, Show bookmark descriptions in list.

5. Show bookmarks as unformatted linked list, bullet list, numbered List

6. HTML output

Bookmarks2LiveWriter Plugin For Windows Live Writer

Download Bookmarks2LiveWriter Plugin for Windows Live Writer.

• Bookmark Blog Post on Delicious from Windows Live Writer with Delicious Notify
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• Post on Unsupported Blogging Platform from Windows Live Writer with vCrosspost Plugin
• Windows Live Writer Backup Utility (WLWBackup)
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Last week we had informed you 10^th June as probable release date of WordPress 2.8 if no bugs are uncovered in WordPress 2.8 Release Candidate 1. As Expected WordPress 2.8 final release is here today. WordPress 2.8 represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed.

You might be surprised to know WordPress 2.8 has total 750 bug fixes and has been named in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker.

WordPress 2.8 Overview Video

Quick list of WordPress 2.8 New Features

1. Improved widget management

2. Browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard

3. New CodePress editor with syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor.

4. Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module

5. Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

Download WordPress 2.8

• WordPress 2.8 Beta 1 Released
• WordPress 2.8 Beta 2 Released
• WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 Released
• WordPress 2.8 Development Journey Started
• Download WordPress 2.9 Beta 1

You may download WordPress 2.8 Beta 2 for testing purpose and should not be deployed on your live blog. WordPress 2.8 has not major changes in Dashboard design as well as no new features apart from updates to Widget API and new theme installer.

Screenshot of WordPress 2.8 Beta 2 Dashboard

Download WordPress 2.8 Beta 2

• WordPress 2.8 Beta 1 Released
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• WordPress 2.7.1 RC 1 Released to WordPress Testers (Release Candidate 1)
• WordPress 2.8 Baker Released
• Download WordPress 2.9 Beta 1

However WordPress 2.8  Beta 1 is suggest for testing purpose only and should not be deployed on your live blogs. Due to time constraint many features was left out of WordPress 2.7 and it was decided to get them in WordPress 2.8. Hence we may expect big changes as well as several new features in WordPress 2.8.

List of Big Changes in WordPress 2.8

1. New Theme Installer (You can now search Themes from your Admin Dashboard)

2. Introduction of New Widget API

3. Ability to install Plugins in .zip format

4. Js Script Loader Improvements

5. TinyMCE 3.2.3

6. Several Bug Fixes

Check out rest of WordPres 2.8 Features

Download WordPress 2.8 Beta 1

• WordPress 2.8 Beta 2 Released
• WordPress 2.8 Baker Released
• WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 Released
• Screenshots of WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 New Dashboard Design
• WordPress 2.8 Development Journey Started

Normally on every blog and website there is certain area like above fold, near left side, top area, where users mostly clicks or just hover their mouse referred as website heatmap. This heatmap helps you to find places where your blog & Website receives maximum clicks and user attention.

Now by using this heatmap you can optimize your blog to show Adsense ads, banners or place navigation links in those areas and increase likelihood of conversion and earnings. Here is free wordpress plugin, Heatmap plugin to generate heatmap for your wordpress.

WordPress Heatmap Plugin Generates png image showing hot and cold click zones to represent user clicks.

Screenshot of WordPress Heatmap Plugin

In order to use WordPress Heatmap plugin you need to have graphic library GD2 (PNG support needed) on your server and it can only track clicks from user browser’s with JavaScript.

Download WordPress Heatmap Plugin and Find high Click Thru Area of your blog.

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You might be surprised to know even after wordpress 2.7.1 is out fixing many bugs, security issues and several enhancements, we were using WordPress 2.5.1 until last week and some obvious reasons like hack attempts and malicious link injection has forced us to upgrade wordpress version to latest release along with upgrading all outdated plugins.

After upgrading WordPress from version 2.5.1 to 2.7.1, the one feature which I didn’t like is post revisions which was introduced in WordPress 2.6. Basically Post Revision is wiki like edit tracking system for pages and posts useful feature for multi authored wordpress blog.

You can instantly compare different versions of post and revert back to old versions. WordPress stores each versions of post revision in WordPress Database wp-posts over time, the database may grows bigger and becomes bloated.

Fortunately its very easy to disable and turn off Post Revision feature from WordPress 2.6 and above

Disable and Turn off Post Revision from WordPress

1. Open wp-config.php file from your root directory of WordPress

2. Now add following line in wp-config.php file immediately after <?php tag

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

3. Now save wp-config.php file in your wordpress root directory

That’s it, WordPress Post Revision feature is disabled now.

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The popularity of WordPress blogging platform is unknown to us. Most of the blogger prefer to use WordPress as blogging platform. WordPress being an open source project it has many developers contributing towards project apart from official WordPress Team.

If you want to have WordPress like blogging platform in your .Net based Web project then here is WordPress .Net, a .Net version of PHP based WordPress. WordPress .NET is a direct port of the PHP Wordpress.

Sean Lin a freelance software developer has taken the initiative of developing .Net version of WordPress. Currently .Net WordPress is in stable release and equivalent of WordPress 2.7.1.If you want to contribute to WordPress .Net then you may contact Sean Lin at codeplex.com.

Download WordPress .Net Source code.

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Every blogger is ware of importance of having good wordpress theme for blog. A WordPress theme which best fits your blog niche, provides good content exposure, easy to navigate, web 2.0 styles and its free are difficult to find. You need to spend hours in searching on google, various wordpress theme directory to get such WordPress theme.

If you don’t get WordPress theme of your choice then situation can become very frustrating. Here is Free WordPress theme selector which will simplify your task of searching WordPress theme. WordPress theme selector is free utility which provides 230 high quality premium themes absolutely free.

Using WordPress Theme Selector you can browse and save any WordPress theme which you like absolutely free.

Screenshot of WordPress Theme Selector

Download WordPress Theme Selector (size 10 MB) and enjoy Free Premium WordPress themes.

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