Are you good with PHP?  Following in the tremendous success of previous plugin competitions, it looks like Weblog Tools Collections is hosting another WordPress plugin competition, this time for WordPress 2.5. 

Here are the competition details:

• Running time for competition = 2 months starting the 10th of May till the 10th of July.
• True Wordpress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users.
• You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. New code only please.
• Plugins can only be submitted via email. We will make that email address public later on in the competition.
• Plugins cannot have opt-out links back to the authors’ pages (from the main blog pages, admin pages are fine). If you have links or donation forms, please make them opt-in.
• All plugins require documentation as in the Wordpress Extend pages. Documentation will be one of the judging criteria.
• Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
• We are looking for innovation, documentation and elegant code that is GPL.
• Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at our sole discretion.

I think these competitions are great ideas and really benefit the WordPress community, so I encourage anyone that has coding ability to participate.  I think if you look over the plugins created in the last few of these competitions, you’ll see a lot of great plugins that were created, including one of my favorites, WordPress Automatic Upgrade. 

One thing I am really excited about is that Gravatars are really starting to gain popularity now that Automattic has purchased and is supporting them.  And now that support is built right into WordPress, it opens up a lot of options for WordPress users.

The most common place you’ll find a Gravatar is usually with an individual comment to help comments stand out.  Another place you will sometimes see them is in the sidebar, like we have it setup here at Hack WordPress.   One thing, however, that people are slowly coming around to is using Gravatars with blog posts to identify the author of the post.    This is something that is a great idea for a multi-author blog and something I’ve considered doing on this website.

So, how would you go about setting up Gravatars to display with each individual post?   Over at ThemeShaper, Ian Stewart recently shared an easy way to do this.   You just need the following code:

<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), '64' ); ?>

When used, WordPress will match up the e-mail address associated with the post author to determine what Gravatar to use.   The 64 is the size (pixels) of the Gravatar.

Great find Ian!

This guest post was submitted by Joseph. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

This is the story of one man’s laziness and his quest to build a simple website that any client of his could edit. And leave him alone after the design was done.

I started doing this because I was tired of editing pages in Dreamweaver and uploading it each time a client wanted one word changed in the third sentence of the fourth paragraph on the About Us page. WordPress has a very convenient page functionality, and I decided to make the best of it. Here’s how you do it…

First off, you have to work on the design. You could always start with one of the many WP themes out there. Once you decide on one, though, you need to lose all the peripheral pages. Delete all the php files except for the header, footer, page, and the sidebar (if there is one). Keep the search file as well, for the time being. Then, rename page.php to index.php. Now you’ve gotten rid of the extra files, but many page templates have unnnecessary blogging-related stuff: trackbacks, comments and the meta bits. Delete them all. They usually come wrapped in little divs called “postmeta” or “postmetadata”, or something on those lines. Essentially, look for the divs that contain the tags the_time, the_author, the_tags, the_category, comments_popup_link and so on. You can find more of these template tags here. All you actually need from this page is probably the_post and the_title. Yes, really.

Now, lets get to the header and footer files. In the <head> section, delete the lines which contain links to the RSS feed (rss2_url) and the pingback URL (pingback_url). Similarly, in the footer file, delete any links to RSS feeds. That’s all there is to it.

When you get to the sidebar, you need to make some decisions, based on your requirements and on your theme. First off, is the sidebar widgetized? If it isn’t, get that widgetizing done. Did you delete functions.php a while back? Sorry. Restore it from your recycle bin… you’ll need that. Once your sidebar is widgetized, browse over to the widgets section and add widgets you want. Don’t throw everything in… you don’t need Akismet stats, for heaven’s sake.

Now we get to the search function. WordPress doesn’t search pages. Don’t ask me why. They just don’t. You’ll need a plugin like Search Pages. But first, figure out if you need a search page or not. If it’s a five page site, it’s highly unlikely anyone would need to use the search function. If your site runs into several dozen pages, keep the search function, unless your navigation is idiot-proof. Depending on whether you’re using search or not, keep or delete search.php. If you’re keeping it, don’t forget to remove the meta-stuff from the search results page.

You’ll need a contact form. What’s a static site without a good old contact form? Use one of the many plugins at the WordPress plugin directory.

Your theme is now ready, and you need to strip your CSS file a bit. No point in cluttering up your CSS with classes and ids you’ll never use.

Finally, if you’re doing it for clients who want to edit pages themselves, you don’t want them fooling around with the site settings and themes and plugins. There’s no telling what havoc they could wreak. Not to mention, create more work for you. This is where a very handy plugin comes in: Ryan’s Simple CMS. Set your client as a new user with Editor permissions, and they get a nice clean pages-only backend. They won’t keep writing new posts and wondering why the new page isn’t up. While you’re at Ryan’s you could try his Simple CMS theme as well, to help with your theme. It’s even got a nice Suckerfish menu built in.

Don’t forget the most important thing of all: setting a page as the front page for the site.

One of the first things most people notice when they visit Blog Perfume is the great blog design they have. I know it is something that got my attention. That is why when I noticed yesterday that they have released a premium WordPress theme, it immediately got my attention.

This theme is called Blubs, and it stays true to the Blog Perfume brand with a unique look to go with the unique name. Here are the features that they list with the theme:

• Clean and Elegant Design
• 2 columns flexible layout
• Navigation Dropdown Menu
• Widgets ready on sidebar
• Serach bar at the top
• Ready for125px and 250px ads integration
• Separated comments/trackbacks
• Built-in gravatars in comment section
• Print.css stylesheet
• Author Profiles & Archives
• Clean & valid codes - XHTML 1.0 Strict + CSS 2.1
• Cross browser compatible - tested on IE/Win, Opera, Firefox, Safari/Win.

A lot of this stuff has become standard with todays premium themes, but I really like the idea of a separate print.css stylesheet and archive/author profiles. You won’t find that on most of these themes. Separated trackbacks and comments is also another great feature.

So how does Blubs look? Here are a couple screenshots (though you really need to view the demo to fully appreciate it):

Homepage

Homepage Footer

Archives Page

Comments Section

So, looks great, but how much for Blubs? It is listed at a very competitive price of $49.95 for a single-use license. You can also get the multiple-use license for $99.00.

Check out the Blubs premium WordPress theme.