This image is a special dedication to my colleague, mbogdan. This is your dream isn’t it? A nice comfty chair+ a huge desk with lots of lamps, and most significantly 7 monitors where you can code in peace and quiet listening to some rammstein, ;o

I heard this song quite a few times on the radio while @ work, or going to college or to work. The lyrics are really really catchy, but the music video is simply brilliant! I watched it like 10 times and listened to it like 50 times(today).

An other thing i like about T.I. that he doesn’t rap about crap. For example: 50 cent raps about bitchez, cocaine, guns, violence, while T.I. raps about learning from your mistakes and not doing the things you see on tv and in movies. This song is about the morale of life. (the video was made just before T.I. went to jail for 1 year and 1 day)

Along with the selection i will post a screencap of the website and i will comment upon the overall concept, the elements, and what makes the design unique and outstanding. This way you will get to see my design preferences.

After 12 months i will make a public poll, and you, the audience will vote the design you like the most. The winner will get a prize(a badge to put on website + some solid cold cash).

As you can notice it got a whole new look, but i kept the overall brown color, and added some very very nifty features. More than 9 cool addons were created specially for this new theme and to make my life a lot easier. Don’t believe me? Check the new features:

1. Author management. Admins can choose which author’s name and description appears on the front page(bottom right corner) and the author can set his own picture, name and description.
2. Dynamic image resizing. That the small thumbs you see are automatically grabbed from the images inserted in the post and for every size a new thumb is generated.(uber sexy stuff).
3. Ad management platform. This platform contains top header ad, box ad, sidebar ads. I can choose to set an image or use code(adsense for example as an ad.
4. Sexy featured category display. You already saw this didn’t you? It’s a small custom javascript written by my colleague, mbogdan.
5. Latest releases display. The part under the menu shows the latest theme and plugin releases. A thumb of each post is displayed and if you hover it title appears “pushing” the intro title up.
6. Category order. Admins can set which categories appear on main page and in what order. They can also exclude categories from appearing on main page.
7. YouTube video display. I just have to enter the YouTube URL and the video will be replaced with the video i desire.
8. Flickr stream management tool which allows me to display my flickr stream.
9. Super cool admin panel made for the theme (<3 mbogdan).

There are other smaller addons, but there’s nothing special about them worth to point them out.

I did the design about a month ago on a friday night when inspiration hit me on the head. I gave the design to mbogdan the next day and since than till last-last sunday he’s been working a little and stalling it. But eh, we finally got it done.

As you can see in the bottom part we will create a poll plugin(which btw will be released for free), and there are still some minor changes we have to do.

The sexiest part of the whole design is the comment page. I really like how it turned out, and as you can notice i moved the comment post box above all comments and sepparated comment from trackbacks(mixed up they were annoying). To see the comments page at glance check out the Custom widgets v1.0 release post (it has lots of comments).

As usual, if you have any suggestions or feedback please post them and they WILL be considered.

I will get back to the regular-basis blogging soon, but before i do i still have otehr work to finish + exams.

What does it do?

The main purpose of this plugin is to help you monetize your blog, in a smart way i mean. Ad Integration is an all-in-one ad managing platform which lets you create, manage and assign ads to your posts and sidebar as widgets (new feature).

Just as at Custom Widgets 2.0 the management and options panels were tuned up to fit the Wordpress 2.7 design, and along with the tune-up we removed useless elements which used up the space. By this way everything got more organized and cleaner.

Assign Ads as sidebar widgets

Did i mention that you can now add your ads as sidebar widgets? I think i did, but eh here’s a quick in-depth look:

After setting the ad location as Sidebar Widget the plugin will automatically create a widget which you will be able to add to your widgetized sidebar from the good old widgets page. And there you have it, you can manage the ads from your sidebar also

How do i use it?

After you’ve installed and activated the plugin a stand alone meu item will appear right below the main menu. This provides quick access to the Custom Widgets management section.

Main Management panel

There are 3 main segments in the management panel: The ads display box, The Options box and the Donation box.

The Ads display box will show all the Ads you’ve setup. Those ads which are written in light grey aren’t public, and those which are written in black are live and running.

The Options box is meant to give you more flexibility and it allows you to define a custom css for the ads and even add html code to appear before or after the ad. The max ad count per page defines  the maximum number of  ads that should appear in the same time on a page.(category pages, tag pages, etc).

Adding a new Ad

Things can’t get simpler than this! Adding a new ad takes just seconds(after a bit of practice of course) and you will easily realize that Ad Integration is a very powerful ad management plugin and it will save you a lot of time and earn you a lot of money(hopefully).

To distingush one ad from an other give a title to your ad(will be visible only to you via the management panel) and insert the html code. The exciting new feature in this release is thge much requested show in sidebar option which if delected will create a widget that will addable to your sidebar from the widget managemenet section.

If you choose to inser the ad into posts you can choose it’s location and it’s alignment. The final step of the new ad setup is the publish function where you can select to publish the ad or not.

Editing An Ad

You can easily edit an ad by clicking the Edit button in the right part of your ad management panel. This will take you to a page where you can edit your ad: rename it,change the code and it contains all the settings which were present on the Add new ad page + EXTRAS.

The extras consist in two handy features:

1) You can choose wether to load the ad automatically or manually. Loading the ad manually means that you will have to inser the generated code() into your post for the ad to show up.
2) By default after adding a new ad it will be automatically activated. You can deactivate it by selecting the No tickbox and saving the changes.

Download Ad Integration 2.0

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Click here to start TS Ad Integration v2.0 download

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Installation

***To upgrade from Ad Integration 1.0 to v2.0 simply overwrite the old files with the new ones.

1) Download the .zip file to your computer and log into your wordpress admin panel.

2) In your admin panel head over to the plugins section and select the Add new segment. Browse to the custom widgets.zip file and click the Install button. Wordpress will unzip the plugin and install it for you after which press the Activate Plugin button.

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Support us by donating

We work our asses off to release new plugins and themes for free. Working for free isn’t very motivating as you might know. If you wish to make a small contribution(you will be redirected to a paypal secure page) feel free to use the widget below.Once the donation meter fills up we will release a new theme and a new exciting plugin!

Say what?

A lucky reader(maybe you?) will win a custom made wordpress theme based on their requirements, which will be ready to upload & use on your blog.

You will be treated just like other customers: you will describe your blog, the niche of your blog, and you will tell me your vision of the desired wordpress theme(color combinations, number of columns, structuring, and anything else you find important for me to know).

After getting all the details i will open up Photoshop and i will make a detailed draft and this will represent the starting point.

We will talk things over again after which i will modify the placeholders to fit your requirements. From this point everything goes straight forward: i work my ass off and finish your design as soon as possible. Also i will offer support via instant messenger (MSN LIVE or Yahoo! messenger).

After the design is complete you will make the final revisions and once you are satsified with the outcome i will forward the design to my colleague mbogdan who will code it(XHTML/CSS valid, tableless coding, widgetized sidebars).

Contest Duration

The contest will run from March 5th(tomorrow) till May 5th(in 2months), and the draw will be made using random.org .

This means that the more entry credits you have the bigger your chances will be of winning your very own custom made wordpress theme!

How to enter?

There are 5 ways you can earn entry points, it’s really simple earning them in fact:

1) Get 3 Entry points by posting a comment to this post with a link to your blog and why you want a custom theme (REQUIRED)

Your name:
Your blog’s tite:
Your blog’s url:
Why do you want a custom theme?

2) Get 10 Entry points by Subscribing to my RSS feed using the form below(use the name you used in the comment form)

3)  Get 20 Entry points by blogging about this contest( link to this post so i can track it)

4) Get 50 Entry points by signing up at Bluehost hosting , or referring someone to sign up under my referral id.Before you sign-up read my review of Bluehost.

5) Get 100 Entry points by referring a customer to order a custom wordpress theme(the entry points will be given only after the customer has made the payment)

What’s next?

Go ahead, post your comment and start earning entry points. You can earn 8 entry points in just 2 minutes of work!

Good Luck!

The most significant change you will notice will be the overall design of the Custom widgets options pannel.  We’ve updated the old Wordpress 2.6 styled design to suit the new and sleek design of Wordpress 2.7. Along with the new design we’ve fixed several compatibility bugs and implemented two much requested features: Widget name display, and more organized management. Click image below for preview.

Your text widgets will now have their title displayed in the widget management section, and finding posts you want to assign a specific widget to just got a lot easier. We got a suggestion from mufasa in which he suggested we add scroll bars to all the widget categories.

As you can see on the management preview we did implement his suggestion to the widgets that are assigned.

I talked to mbogdan and he suggested we don’t implement this feature for posts and tags, because displaying 1000+ posts at a time would put a huge load on the server and database, so to make everything simpler we added pagination to almost all sections.

All  posts/tags/pages, etc are organized alphabetically and by this way using the pagination you will easily find the post or item you want to assign a widget to. Cool huh? Also lets not forget mentioning that using the master tick box you can select multiple posts at once. Click image below for preview.

Basically the bottom line is that you will find the new version of custom widgets more flexible and more simple to use. Even a newbie wordpress user can manage it!

Download Custom Widgets 2.0

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Click here to start TS Custom widgets v2.0 download

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Installation & Usage

***To upgrade from CW 1.2 to v2.0 simply overwrite the old files with the new ones.

1) Download the .zip file to your computer and log into your wordpress admin panel.

2) In your admin panel head over to the plugins section and select the Add new segment. Browse to the custom widgets.zip file and click the Install button. Wordpress will unzip the plugin and install it for you.

3) Click the Activate Plugin link, after which you will notice the TS Custom Widgets segment in the bottom of the menu. Clicking it will take you to the management panel.

4) Before you can assign  “custom widget” you will have to head over to the good ‘ol widgets section in  the Apperance section and add or create new widgets. Once you’re done head over to TS Custom widgets section and assign your widget(s) to the desired sections.

5) That’s it, repeat the second part of step 4 with all the widgets you wish to turn into “custom widgets”

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Blog about Custom Widgets

You are more then welcome to write blog post about custom widgets in which you may share your opinion and personal point of view about the plugin. To ensure that we also read it please use the following trackback link in your post:

Support us by donating

We work our asses off to release new plugins and themes for free. Working for free isn’t very motivating as you might know. If you wish to make a small contribution(you will be redirected to a paypal secure page) feel free to use the widget below.Once the donation meter fills up we will release a new theme and a new exciting plugin!

Me and mbogdan(he’s betng4u and yes yes he finally bought himself a domain, suggested by me of course ) decided to take a challenge and release 10 goodies every day for the next 10 days, it will be hard, but hopefully we’ll manage it next to college and other projects.

Here’s what we’ve prepared for you:

The order of the releases might change without prior notice, we’ll try our best to keep the order though.

Custom Widgets v 2.0 – fully upgraded to flawlessly work with Wordpress 2.7 and packed with all the requested features including naming for the text widgets and the possibility to assign widgets to static pages set as homepage(can’t guarantee anything!)

Ad integration v2.0 – The release of the first version of this ad-management plugin was in august last year. We decided to upgrade it to 2.0 and to make it fully compatible with the wp 2.7 legacy along with some very very nice tweaks.

Post Quote v1.0 – This will be a brand new plugin, something you’ve never seen before! Basically you will be able to include as many posts you want to refer to in your current post. A bar will be shown which will be expandable. After expansion the post you referred to will be grabbed(ajax baby!) and displayed. The best thing is that we already started working on this. Sweet huh?

Siggie 1.0 – TS Siggie will generate an image which will contain your blog title, the latest post and 3 statistics(for example: total posts, comments and tags). The image will auto-update and by this way you will be able to show off your blog stats in your signature on forums you use.

Folio – The theme is already done, we need to make a few revisions on it. It’s a theme specially made for freelancers to showcase their work. It features ajax sliding for recent work, custom lightbox, automatic thumbnail generation and a very very sleek look. The best thing is that its load time is lightning fast! Ehh what the hell, you can preview it at http://mbogdan.com/playground/wp1/?p=29

Comment Ranks – This plugin will make your blog readers want to comment even more. Basically as the number of their comments will rise they will gain rewards like different color name, rel=”nofollow” removal from links and many other features.

7. All of the old themes will be updated to be fully compatible with Wordpress 2.7 legacy.

Clouds theme - this will be a fast loadingsleek looking theme. It will have a right sidebar and the main colors will be grey/light brown/white.

Royale theme - a magazine alike theme packed with lots of amazing features and loaded with ajax features. Fluid width, featured posts, featured post switch and many many other features(curreently the index page has to be done, the comments page is ready)

Install scripts without fantastico - ebook will contain all the tutorials i’ve published on my blog. This way anyone will be able to access it anywhere and share the tutorials with friends.

Contribute to new theme & plugin releases

We work our asses off to release new plugins and themes for free. Working for free isn’t very motivating as you might know. If you wish to make a small contribution(you will be redirected to a paypal secure page) please use the widget below(greatly appreciated).

Thanks!