Developers are always releasing new plugins for Wordpress.  As the blogging platform is “alive”, it’s always interesting to see what is hitting the community.  Here are some of the newest, most promising, plugins I’ve found in the last few days.

AutoSuggest Searches

You know how you go to Google and start typing in the search box and suggestions drop down, allowing you to pick from a list of potential results?  Bingo. That is exactly what you have here for your site.  

WordPress Video Solution Framework

Developed by Automattic, the group behind Wordpress, this is a solid release.  This plugin provides a video framework, including a transcoder and  and administration screen.  Note that a significant amount of configuration is required, so if you are not a “technical” person you may want to stay way

Google Custom Search Plugin for Wordpress

Now this is promising (and MUCH needed).  One reason I do not have a search function on the site is due to the poor performance of the built-in search feature.  Wordpress is a blog platform, not a search platform, so why would the development team spend huge amounts of time developing search functionality? Well, this plugin removes the old search and utilizes Google to provide search results to your readers!

I haven’t tested any of these extensions as of yet, so be warned, you may be getting a product that is less than perfect.  From what I’ve see and read, however, they really look to have promise.

Much like the Wordpress templates and plugins sites there a large number of Wordpress News websites available.  Frankly, most of them are spam sites simply attempting to capitalize on the brand name.  People throw up a blog, include AdSense, and link to a bunch of other sites that simply mentioned the term Wordpress in the hopes of having search engine traffic blindly clicking on their ads.

Let’s cut through the junk – here are the Top 4 Wordpress News Sources I utilize.

Planet Wordpress

This is the defacto source of news for all things Wordpress, but it’s not a blog – it’s a blog aggregator.  It collects feeds from publishers around the web and centralize all the information into one giant feed of nothing but the highest quality information.

Weblog Tools Collection

Original content, dedicated writing staff, and additional blogging information makes Weblog Tools Collection a must see on a daily basis.  They usually have some of the freshest news available.   

Wordpress Publishers Blog

Another site run by the Automattic crew – their focus is on making sure publishers get the most out of the Wordpress experience.  One cool thing they do is highlight unique sites that utilize Wordpress.  

WordCast PodCast

Let’s face it, sometimes you are just lazy.  You don’t want to read.  There is nothing wrong if it, I get you, I get the same way.  A weekly podcast informs you of the latest plugins, themes and news related to Wordpress.

Add the sites to your reader, check them daily and enjoy.

In business, if one puts out a great product I think it is safe to say the chances for success go up.  That is not to say an organization will be successful simply because they put out the best of the best, and there are a number of pure crap products that have hit the market and managed to be successful, but having a great product is a solid differentiator.

Another catalyst for success is the community that supports the product.  

I am not strictly talking about the “consumer” but the hardcore support and believer in what is being marketed.  These are the people who create communities around a product.  Think about Apple and how dedicated the core user base is – there are forums discussing the products and developers create applications that are distributed to improve performance, all of which helps create a sense of excitement for what apple is putting out.

Then there are exceptional organizations that take it one step further – direct community involvement in development and wordpress.org is one such organization.

During the Wordpress 2.7 development process a contest was held, Project Icon, that asked designers to submit custom icons for the 2.7 admin interface, and then the user community was then asked to vote for the icon set that they felt most suitable for Wordpress 2.7.  

How cool is that? 

While having a superior product is one thing, the organizations that allow the “consumers” to impact future of the product – developers, artists, testing, users feedback that is listened to – only strengthens the image and future of the brand.

Nice job Wordpress!

I’ve noted a few times in the past that my current blog isn’t meeting my grand ambitions, not that my current theme is bad, I need something bigger.

So. over the next few weeks, you, my highly valued reader, will see a new site template that will all for a clean look that is broken down to content areas.  The whole idea is to focus the content and user experience.

Just giving you a heads up that things are a changing.

Wordpress 2.7 has officially been in the wild for about 5 days now, and I have to say I LOVE IT. 

If you are wondering, “hey, should I upgrade”, here are some of the features now available:

• Whole new, AJAX based user interface – very sweet
• Quickpress
• Comment Threading (and replying to comments right from your dashboard)
• Sticky Posts 
• Built-in Upgrade Feature

While pulling together information on another article I am writing, I started think about the need for bloggers to pick betweed free hosting vs. self hosting, and which is right for users. 

As with most things in life, the answer depends on your goals.

Do you want complete control?

If you use a blogging service, such as Blogger or Wordpress, your options for being creative – in terms of design and functionality – is quite limited.  For example, Wordpress does not allow the utilization plugins, and both services provide a set number site templates a publisher can pick from.  

Basically, they tell you “here are your nine options, you can play within our sandbox, have fun.”

A blogger that decided to implement their choice of software, with the hosting provider of their choice, essentially is only limited by their imagination.  Unhappy with your site layout – redesign it.  Want to create your own plugin, go for it.  

Cost

Blogging services like Wordpress.com are free, and as the saying goes “if it’s free, it’s for me”.  As pointed out above, the downside to free is the limited options available to you as a publisher.

Now, if you decided to implement your own choice of blogging platform, chances arem the software will cost you nothing.  Your capital outlay will be to your hosting provider and registration fees for your domain. Sure, this all said and done it may be only $100 for a year, but that may be $100 you need for something else.

Monetization

Do you hope to place an ad network on your blog?  If so, most free blogging services are not for you as they do not allow the addition of services like Google Adsense.  Why, you would be taking away from their revenue!  

While, technically, you may be able to implement the service, you risk having your blog shut down if the provider catches you.

So, in the end..

As noted before, it all depends on what your goal is… if you want to design the site as you wish, like me, a free service may not be the best long-term option.  If you simply want to post, get your thoughts out, free may be better suited for you.

One last thing to mention… I did not discuss the concept of “branding”.  Why?  I truly believe if you produce something of quality, your reader will remember who and where you are.  Doesn’t matter if the name is yoursite.com or yoursite.wordpress.com…

You a twitter addict?  

A self-proclaimed “microblogger” maybe?

Here are the top 3 Twitter tools I have/do use in order to integrate Wordpress and Twitter.  Why only three? Well, with so many plugins out there doing the same thing I focused on the “best of the best”.  I could have simply listed a number to Twitter/Wordpress plugins but what good would that do for you?

So, here we go..

Twitter Tools

This plugin alerts Twitter every time you update your Wordpress blog.  It’s a great tool if you only use Twitter for your microblogging.  If you use other networks I would suggest you look at the PingPressFM plugin.

TwitThis

Nice little plugin that allows your readers to create a Tweet of your posts and sends it off to their contact list.  Even takes care of creating the shorter URL.

Twitt-Twoo

An Ajax based plugin (Yay!  No page reloading) that shows your latest Twitter status right in your blog’s sidebar.  It’s nice to see someone developing in AJAX when it comes to Wordpress.

Please let me know if there are other Twitter related plugins I should be looking at… I’m always open to new things that could improve the blog.

Here is a word for you: Oxite

This is Microsoft’s “open source” blogging platform, supposedly aimed at developer – NOT aimed at other blogging platforms such as Wordpress or MovableType.  Not sure I believe that claim, but hey…

According to Microsoft, Oxite is a:

standards-compliant, extensible content-management system designed to support either blogs or larger Web sites, Microsoft said. The platform includes support for features such as pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, gravatars (globally recognized avatars), and RSS feeds at any page level

Why would Microsoft attempt to get into the blogging platform space at this point?  While I know nothing, to me this would be an easy way of introducing Sharepoint to a whole new world of developers.  

It turns out that Oxite was written in ASP.NET, much like Microsoft’s other “portal and blogging” offering – Sharepoint.  What better way of creating a demand than giving users a “teaser” product then saying “oh, you want to implement this on a large scale… it’s funny because we have this other product that will meet your needs”.

While executive management will not be aware of the both products, necessarily, the hardcore developer of an organization will.  This will have the ability to create a “demand” from within.

Smart move by Microsoft if that is their intent…

I had previously written an article, “4 most useful Wordpress plugins I use”, to help those new to the world of blogging get a bit of a head start with their wordpress configuration.  I mean, if you don’t know what is out there, it’s nice to have a place that you can turn to for a little direction.  

After roughly a month of usage and testing I now have 3 more highly useful Wordpress plugins I can recommend to fellow bloggers, and this crop of plugins ranges from simple site maintenance to social bookmarking.  

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress

Not sure what a sitemap is?  How can this help you, you ask? 

Sitemaps allow you, as a site owner, an easy way to inform search engine spiders about the pages on your site that are available for crawling. Basically, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs and corresponding metadata  (when the URL was last updated, how often it usually changes) allowing search engine spider the ability to crawl your site with ease.

The Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress plugin takes care of the creation of the XML file and notifies Google, MSN, Ask.com and Yahoo.com that your site has recently changed.  If you want an easier way of placing data into search engines, this is worth your time.

Sociable

This is intended for the social networking site lovers out there.  This plugin adds social media buttons to your posts, which means your readers have the ability to update their choice of networking sites (Digg, Reddit, what have you) with your latest posts.  

As of this writing roughly 96 social networking sites are included with this plugin.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

This is a great plugin for site maintenance.

I have always had a problem upgrading wordpress for some reason – something would end up missing or a plugin would be uninstalled during the process – but the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin does it all for you, and does so with ease.

During the upgrade, the plugin will back up your files and databases, download the latest version of wordpress, and take care of the upgrade for you.

If you do not have this plugin, I strongly suggest you look into it.

So…

Are there some plugins I should be looking at?  Please feel free to send me an email or leave me a comment and I will take a look…

If you are looking for wordpress themes, chances are, one of the first places you head off to is wordpress.org (that and you do a Google search).  While wordpress.org has a huge database of themes and templates, you really have to search through a bunch of junk in order to find the quality themes.

As I had mentioned previously, I am looking for a new theme to fit my needs as my current theme – while there is nothing wrong with it – do not seem to be fitting my needs. During my search I happened to find a number of sites that link to some amazing templates that you may not have seen before.

Here we go.

100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

The 100 excellent themes cover a wide range of styles, a number of which you may have run across, however, there are a number of clean and highly appealing options to pick from.

10 Unique Wordpress Theme

There is only one on this list that I had previously seen, the rest are new to me.   Visually appealing and practical, nothing here is too “artistic”.

18 Minimalist Designs

We have touched on professional, clean and unique thus far – time for some minimal wordpress themes.   Nice stuff.

The above links will help you on your way, no doubt.  As the above provide you with a number of options, I just want to point out one specific theme.  While not my style, it will work for some.  Check out “Bus Full of Hippies” – a beautiful theme.