Have you ever wanted to run one of those review websites?  They’ve been sprouting up all over the place over the past year and you may be wondering how people are building these sites so easily.   WordPress users now have that option with a single premium WordPress plugin and premium theme called WP Review Site.

With this premium theme and plugin combination (you get both), you can easily create a bunch of small niche review sites by simply uploading and activating the plugin/theme combination!  The theme has everything setup upon activation, so there is no need to do anything.

WP Review Site Plugin Features:

• JavaScript star rating system added to comment forms
• Posts sorted by weighted average
• Works for posts or pages
• Powers an entire website, or just selected parts of it
• Horizontal/List or Vertical/Table displays
• WordPress Affiliate Link Management
• Complete Premium WordPress Theme
• Admin panel integration (Ratings show up in comment moderation screens, and only approved comments influence the average ratings displayed on any post or page.)
• Free Upgrades for Life

Here is a sample of how WP Review Site will look using the default theme:

In order to get a copy of this premium WordPress plugin (and theme), you can now purchase a copy.

Single Use Package: $97, Multi Use Package: $199, & Developer Package: $299

Over the past year the WordPress blogging niche has really grown and there has been a number of great people contributing to the WordPress community with their blog.  Unfortunately, the popularity of the niche has resulted in every decent “WP” domain to get registered, leaving someone who wants to launch a WordPress blog without many options for quality domain names to use.

While digging through my domain portfolio yesterday, I discovered that I actually have a quality “WP” domain which I will not end up needing, so I’ve decided to sell it.   The domain is WPTavern.com which stands for WordPress Tavern.   Taverns are known for being great places for discussions, so I originally registered the name with the idea of either building a forum or some sort of place to discuss WordPress thoughts and ideas.  In the time since that domain was registered, I actually acquired WPForums.com and a couple weeks ago launched a WordPress Forums with that domain name.  I also think that this domain would also make for a great domain for a WordPress niche blog.

Long story short, if you’d like to own and develop WPTavern.com, please contact me with your offer.   It is registered with GoDaddy and is trademark free.  I will collect offers for 48 hours and then sell the domain.

If you have any questions about the domain or about how to acquire a domain name, please let me know.

As we get closer to the eventual release of WordPress 2.7 (due by the end of the month at last check), it is only natural that we start to focus on the exciting new changes in WordPress 2.7 and figure out how to exactly it will change things for bloggers.

In looking back over the last few releases, I think WordPress 2.7 will be similar to WordPress 2.3 and WordPress 2.5 in how it is a major change.   There will be a new admin design to get used to, new features available to WordPress bloggers, many themes will need updated, etc.

If you are wondering what exactly you need to know to be ready for WordPress 2.7, you’ll want to check out a new post by Technosailor: 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.7.   I think this post does a great job of showing just how drastically different WordPress 2.7 will be, but also shows how much better it will be than its predecessors.

Because WPHacks.com is a multi-author blog, it seems like at least once every week I get an email from our readers asking for more information about how to set up a multi-author blog.   How do you set one up?  How do you find people to write for you?

Over the past year I’ve written about a variety of tools, hacks, and plugins which anyone can use to build their WordPress installation into a WordPress blog, but they are scattered around a little bit.   If you’re looking for a consolidated post which provides a lot of this information in one place, I’m going to recommend a recent post over at Hongkiat which provides 35 tips and tricks to manage your multi-author blog.

A few notable plugins which I have not covered here yet:

• Co-Authors Plugin - Gives you the ability to assign multiple authors to a post.
• List Author Widget - Displays a list of authors in your WordPress Sidebar Widgets linking to the authors.php page.
• Draft Notification - Emails the admin whenever a new draft is saved or post is pending approval.
• Author Advertising - Allows revenue sharing among blog administrators.   Works with a number of advertising programs, including AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, etc.

Click here to read the other multi-author tools provided by Hongkiat!

If you are a theme author, there is a lot of work to do to prepare for WordPress 2.7.   The comments.php will need to be revamped to take advantage of the new features, but there are also a lot of other things which are changing as well.  These changes are for the better, but are kind of a hassle for the time being.

In case you missed it, both Justin Tadlock and Nathan Rice have been working hard at posting tutorials for theme authors to use to get their themes updated.  Justin Tadlock recently wrote a great post about the new page menu function in WordPress 2.7 and explains how to save some time when coding the wp_list_pages() function.   Here is the code Justin recommends:

<?php wp_page_menu('show_home=Home&menu_class=page-nav'); ?>

Gone are the days when you have to manually code a home button, which is now done automatically with this code.    This code will also wrap the menu in a page-nav div class, making styling your menu easy.

Justin also explains how to change the output from a child theme or plugin and how to make the page menu of your theme backwards compatible so theme designers can release themes which will be compatible with both WordPress 2.7+ and earlier versions, so I recommend you check it out!

At the same time, Nathan Rice has published the Definitive Guide to Sticky Posts in WordPress 2.7.  This is good information to have, as WordPress 2.7 will include a new “sticky post” feature, meaning you won’t need to use a plugin (or edit the timestamp) to easily feature posts at the top of your WordPress blog.

Great work Justin and Nathan!