The deadline is in two months, giving us enough time to create a plugin or two, and enter it into the competition. If you have a plugin idea and would like to enter it into the competition but don’t know how to develop it, leave a comment and we’ll vote on the best ones.

If your plugin gets chosen, we’ll give you credit inside the code and with a post here linking back to your blog. Remember though, your idea can’t be something that already exist! It has to be totally new and of course, it’s going to be GPL.

In the next few weeks, I’ll post another update covering which plugin(s) we’ll be entering in the competition.

At first glance, the Admin CSS Designer Tool is an awesome plugin. Installation is quick and simple with hardly any customization needed. Each user can choose his or her own color scheme on their edit profile page.

Packaged with this plugin are ten pre-defined palettes from ColourLovers.com. You can instantly preview what the admin will look like with the new color scheme or delete ugly ones off the list.

The best part about this plugin is its custom color scheme feature. After selecting the ‘Random CSS’ option and saving your settings, you’re presented with a little pop-up window with the current color scheme. From here you can drag and drop the palette’s colors to reorder them. If you don’t like a particular set you can load a new one. Individual swatches can also be manually replaced with a color picker or hexadecimal value. All of this snazzy re-decorating is done with the help of COLOURlover’s new developer API. If you find a combination of colors you like, you can save the palette as a CSS stylesheet for later or current use.

Overall, it’s a pretty impressive plugin. It’s extremely simple to use and has plenty of features to suit most users.

Pros:
-Easy Installation, no configuration required
-Feature-rich
-COLOURlovers integration
-Ability to create your own color sets
-Drag-and-drop swatch reordering
-Lets you save a particular palette as a stylesheet for later use

Cons:
-Hard to find good color combinations, better off creating your own
-Unable to set colors for specific areas of the admin (eg. links, header background)

Ozh’s Admin CSS Designer Tool is a free download available from his blog.

Astheria

Backstage

Alexander Radsby

TwitterMadness

WordPress is often praised for its inherent SEO capabilities. The option to use post slugs, clean and valid xHTML (mostly) etc. are some of the reasons for the praise.

However, anyone who inspects a WordPress theme closely will notice that there are several dozen weak points in WordPress themes (in the default theme, freely available themes and even paid themes). Some of these are caused by WordPress core functions (which were developed 5 years ago, since when SEO has evolved), while others are due to designers not willing to brave the choppy waters of SEO experimentation.

Modifying the core functions require extensive hacking (which can be done with proper tutorials), but the changes will be erased during WordPress upgrades. So, the subject of this post shall be mostly about those mistakes caused by faulty theme coding.

In this series of posts, you can read on what the SEO mistakes are, and how to solve them.

Note: The technical aspects of the solution (like code required for various modifications) is beyond the scope of this post. Michael tells me that WPCandy readers are mostly capable of doing such tweaks by themselves, but I will be glad to troubleshoot your problems (if you run into any) at the support forum at my blog.

Sidebar widgets

Some background information: Google gives less weightage to links that appear site-wide, and also links which are separated from the bulk of content. However, the links still pass on invaluable link juice to other pages.

WordPress themes have a static sidebar (in terms of what content appears in which pages). This means that your list of recent posts, categories, archives etc. will appear across every page on your blog.

With a sidebar that appears across every page of your theme, you are passing link juice to archive and category pages, which are used to highlight your older content to visitors. Note that when a blog gets older, the number of categories and archive links will increase, and end up somewhere between 20 to 30 links (this is a conservative estimate).

This reduces the link equity of your post pages and may result in lower search rankings (search engines consider pages with too many links to be spammy).

The solution: Disable sidebar widgets and use PHP conditionals to display contents selectively. For example, you can display all your normal widgets in the front page, and display only recent posts in post pages (since our objective is to reduce static, site-wide links).

Sidebar headers

WordPress widgets use <h2> tags to mark up sidebar headers. To ensure compatibility with widgets, most themes use h2 tags even if widgets are not used.

In terms of SEO, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6 tags are arranged in a hierarchy, and important keywords should go into these tags in decreasing order of relevance. These tags help search bots identify the page properly.

In sidebar widgets, headings are usually ‘Subscribe’, ‘About’, ‘Categories’, ‘Popular Posts’ etc. To a search engine, these headings do not make any sense about the blog. To make matters worse, thousands of other blogs will also have similar headings.

The solution: Disable widgets (yes, again) and edit your theme to use <span> or <h6> tags for sidebar headings. Widget system can be hacked to use custom tags, but it is for advanced users only. Since the previous point requires disabling widgets, it is better to do so than hack the widget system.

Navigation links

Blogs have navigation links to pages like About, Contact, Advertise and Archives. With the exception of About page, these pages do not hold relevance for search engines, and hence do not require dofollow links from every page.

The solution: Going by our rule of thumb to decrease the number of site-wide links, use PHP conditionals to serve dofollow links to those pages from the blog homepage, and nofollow links to those pages from every other page.

These tweaks help you optimize your site-wide links and content. In the next post of this series, we shall look at other ways to improve a blog’s SEO.

The Quommunication team has just released the feature-packed WordPress theme called Video. And boy oh boy, is it sexy.

“Once Video is added to your WordPress you only have to find or upload any video you like, go to it’s page and search the embed function and copy the code in WordPress to the body of your new post. To add some description, simply write it below the embedded video. That’s it!” - Quommunication

Video includes some really sweet features such as:

• Sexy & Clean Design
• Clean & Well Commented Code
• Valid & Cross-Browser Compatible
• Browse Without Reloading
• AJAX Comment System
• Gravatar Support
• Category Support
• Widget Ready
• Customization Support

The following packages are available to purchase Video:

• 1 Site License for $95
• 5 Sites License for $175
• Developer Pack (Unlimited Licenses) for $295

If you’d like to check out more about Video, please visit the following pages:

• Video Live Demo
• Video Home Page

While browsing through some of the clips, I noticed some tags I have never even seen before! Here’s a few that are worth mentioning:

Anyways, if you use Coda, make sure to check out this sweet resource. Oh and if you have a few of your own snippets, make sure to submit them!

The following suggestions are in random order. Some things may be able to be accomplished by plugins, but I believe these things should be built in. This list was created on April 28, 2008. If you see something outdated, let me know in the comments.

Admin

1. Customizable Color Schemes
WordPress 2.5 allowed users to change the color scheme of the admin area. This was a great change, except it gave you two options: the old colors, and the new ones. Give us a way to set the four main colors with a cool little AJAX color picker. What would be even better is if it supported PNG files from ColourLovers.com, where it automatically detects the colors in order and puts them into the scheme.

2. Cleaner Admin Source Code
The admin source code is disgusting, with its table-based structure and un-semanticness. Please clean it up and make it easier for us code ninjas to customize.

3. Login Form Tabbing
This will probably change soon, but something is screwed up with the admin login form tabbing - at least in Safari. You can easily tab from username to password, but the next thing it goes to is the address bar. Looking at the source the tab indexes are 10, 20, and…90?! Both “Remember Me” and “Login” are completely missed.

4. Add Hovers to Admin Tabs
I hate having to load a new page to access the subpages in the admin area. Just make them appear below on hover.

5. Plugin Installation and Options
When I install a plugin that has an options page, take me directly to it. Make the plugin options pages third-level so they don’t clog up my settings screen.

6. That ****ing WYSIWIG Editor
I’ve had enough. That WYSIWIG editor WordPress comes with has to go. It screws up my HTML, de-paragraphs my paragraphs, and twenty other things I don’t care to name. Believe it or not, some WordPress users are actually HTML ninjas, so let us talk in geek when we want to. For some reason, turning off the visual editor doesn’t seem to do much for anyone.

7. The < code > Tag
While on the topic of the WYSIWYG, let’s make the < code > tags tell WP to ignore the code inside them so they work like they should.

8. Better Theme Editor
When I am forced by a client, friend, or my brain’s password memorization sector to use the theme editor instead of FTP, at least try and make it a somewhat pleasing experience for me. I guess making the tab key usable for semantic gurus isn’t a reality, but maybe make the text slightly smaller and add a quick-save option or something.

9. Customizable Login
This is somewhat related to issue number one, which suggests color palette functionality. Much like 37Signal’s Basecamp software, it’d be nice to have a way to edit the login screen to add your own logo and customize colors.

10. Dashboard Customization
The Wordpress Dashboard still sucks. I don’t care about the latest comments, community news, or what theme I’m running. I’d love to see the Dashboard become more useful, with additions such as a quick post form and a bulletin board available for higher-level logged-in users.

11. Admin Bulletin Board and Private Messaging
I think the bulletin board is such a good idea it deserves its own number. It’d rock to have a way to post notes and stuff to other users. A private messaging system would also be sweet to have so you could easily communicate with other admins.

12. Admin Options When Logged In
There’s a few plugins to do this, but the “admin bar” should be standard with the next version of WordPress. This bar is located at the top of the page that, when logged in, gives the user admin-related options such as posting, managing comments, etc. right from the page.

13. Quick Posting from Mobile Phone
It’d be nice to see a mobile-friendly page for WordPress that lets you write and edit posts, approve or delete comments, and perform other administrative options over your site. Matt Mullenweg’s mentioned it, so let’s see it come into reality.

14. Where’d the IDs Go?!
What happened to the IDs in the manage panel?? They used to be there, now they’re gone. Let’s catch the ID monster…

Themes

15. Theme Library API
This larger feature suggestion is 100% my original on-the-spot idea. Develop an API for the theme library. The current theme respiratory for WordPress is full of crap templates that are great for blogging about your 2001 expedition to a remote area somewhere in Asia and sharing it with your grandparents. With an API, “premium” theme websites, such as WPDesigner’s Theme Club, PremiumThemes.net, and iThemes.com can let subscribers add their site to the WordPress admin for quick browsing of awesome themes. Granted, these themes obviously won’t be able to be modified since they aren’t on your server, but hey, for five bucks over at WPDesigner, what do you expect?

16. New Default Theme
This is something I’ve heard a lot of users comment on. Kubrick - the default theme shipped with every copy of WordPress - has been around for a while and by now it’s outdated. Replace it with a sandbox-type theme, with admin options for less experienced users. ThemeShaper.com has gathered some nice ideas for a new sandbox theme.

17. Easy Plugin Integration
There are hundreds of great plugins out there for WordPress. There are also thousands of themes, and I’ve seen some that are made to work with certain plugins. Why not add a way for theme developers to package free plugins with their themes?

18. Theme Live Preview
It’s sad we’re taking this example from MySpace - and their version of this feature really sucks for advanced customizers - but the ability to preview your site with a new theme before activating it would surely be welcome.

General Suggestions

19. More Flexible Post Display Options
One of my favorite things about Expression Engine is how much flexibility you have when listing posts on a page. The query_posts function isn’t a very good option because it ruins pagination. Things I’d like to see include post count (number of posts per page), category and particular post exclusion (including its date, category, etc.), and filtering options. The less PHP needed to do these, the better.

20. Multiple Weblogs
WordPress doesn’t do it at all, and the multi-user version doesn’t do it well enough. Just the simple ability to manage multiple weblogs would make WordPress an excellent option as a CMS for a simple website.

21. Fix the Freaking Blogroll
The typical WordPress sidebar includes a list of categories, archives, latest posts, and a list of links, which with WordPress is known as the Blogroll. Why in the world is the Blogroll always formatted differently? The categories and archives always list so nicely, but with the< ?php wp_list_bookmarks(); ? >function, you can’t seem to get rid of that title list item (which incidentally is wrapped in an < h2 > instead of < h3 >) and the formatting of unordered lists is different than the rest. The widgets seem messed up too - please make all of the sidebar functions a bit more uniform.

22. Universal Date/Time I am not a PHP guru, and therefore, I do not have all the date functions memorized. Instead of making us look up the PHP date/time functions each time we're displaying a date on the page, just make the option in the admin set the default date and time format, so every time is used, it’ll be the same every time. The date formatting option is there, it just doesn’t expand into that particular tag.