I’ve always been a big fan of the WordPress plugin competition, which is run annually by the team over at Weblog Tools Collection.  The WordPress community has always been great, but running a competition and offering prizes is a great incentive for more useful plugins to be created.

I knew the plugin competition was close to being complete, but it wasn’t until recently that I saw an almost complete list of the plugins that have been submitted.  It looks like a total of 51 WordPress plugins ended up being submitted!  This list is courtesy of Lorelle over at Blog Herald:

• Role Scoper
• Dodo
• Broken Links Remover
• Yank Widget
• WP125: Easy 125×125 Ad Management For WordPress
• WordPress Image Browser Extender
• Vent - add events to your blog
• Tabbed Widgets Plugin
• Snazzy Archives
• Show Me Options
• PayPal API Subscriptions
• Idealien Category Enhancements
• Flickr Gallery
• Editor Extender
• Attachment Extender
• Snazzy Archives
• Media In Response
• Invite Friends
• FlareSmith
• Click Tracking Plugin
• AnyVar
• WP Sentry: Private Posting Plugin
• MultiSiteManager unleashed
• WPMU plugin: Vote2Publish
• WPMU plugin: rePost
• SlideShare Plugin
• Live Blogroll
• Dk Obama Slideshow Plugin
• WP Wall
• ComicPress Manager
• PhotoJAR: Base
• tWPtter ~ WordPress Microblogging
• New WP Comment Remix Version
• Sidebars
• PostGroups v1.1.0
• WP Easy Uploader
• One Click Upgrade and Backup All WordPress Blogs
• Current tags
• PostGroups
• Manageable
• ZdMultilang
• Post Tabs
• MailPress
• Great Real Estate
• WPMU Plugin Commander
• SEO Smart Links
• Adminimize
• DL-MENU Tab generation and dynamic colorschemes
• Content By Country
• Automatic Timezone Plugin
• Simple Flash Video WordPress Plugin
• Sermon Management WordPress Plugin for Churches
• Reflex Automatic Blogroll WordPress Plugin
• Fun with In-Context Comments WordPress Plugin

These plugins are all for WordPress 2.5+.   If you find some that you like, you can head over to their page and rate your favorites plugins.  You can also view the plugin prize list here.

Last year’s competition resulted in several plugins that have become must have plugins, so it will be interesting to see which of these plugins are picked up by the WordPress community.  Are there any plugins in here that have really caught your eye?

Here are a few WordPress-related links I’ve enjoyed over the past few weeks:

• How To Display Code in WordPress Posts - Leland of Theme Lab has posted some tips/plugins you can use to help you display code in your WordPress posts.
• 40+ WordPress Tricks and Hacks - Hongkiat has another good collection of WordPress hacks and other guides, including a few of ours.
• WordPress 2.6 Disabling XML-RPC By Default? - James Mowery of Performancing takes a look at the effects of WordPress 2.6 coming with XML-RPC disabled by default, which will hopefully reduce security risks.  Unfortunately, this will also pose a problem for people that write their posts in 3rd party blogging software such as Windows Live Writer and will have to be manually enabled.
• 20+ Must Have WordPress 2.5 Compatible Plugins - Mashable has posted over 20 WordPress plugins that are compatible with WordPress 2.5.

It seems like every day I’m discovering new WordPress plugins that I have a need or desire for.   Today was no exception!   If you are someone that has made a number of downloads available to the public on your WordPress blog (WordPress themes, WordPress plugins, eBooks, etc.), you will probably also find this plugin very useful.

The plugin I am referencing is the WordPress Download Manager plugin, which was designed to help you give you statistics and manage your downloads.  Once activated, this plugin gives you a download manager in your WordPress dashboard that supports the following extensions:  .zip, .pdf, .mp3, .rar.  You can upload multiple downloads, create download categories, and even make your own custom download URL’s.

This plugin also calculates your downloads for you and displays your download statistics on the front page of your dashboard.

This guest post was written by Josh Budde, who maintains a blog about his interests, including podcasting, being a junior developer, and web guru. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Ping.Fm is a cool service that allows you to essentially ping several different services at the same time. PingPressFM is a plugin that allows you to send a ping to Ping.Fm when you make a new blog post on your Wordpress blog.

I use this plugin on my blog and I love using it because when I go to make the post, I don’t have to worry about having to either going to every website like Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce to make a post telling followers that you have a new blog post or even going to Ping.Fm, it automatically pings the Ping.Fm website and then posts to the services that are setup in Ping.Fm. The only downside to this is if you schedule a blog post, it will not ping those services… I have suggested to the owner of the plugin to make it still Ping when a scheduled post goes out.

Ping.Fm automatically updates your status message for Facebook, Jaiku, LinkedIn and Pownce; making a blog post for you on Bebo, Blogger, Hi5, LiveJournal and MySpace and along with blogging, Ping.Fm posts a Micro-Blog post on MySpace and Twitter. By using this plugin for your selfhosted wordpress blog, it will also update these services.

Even if iPhone and iPod Touch are very good for displaying web pages, zooming again and again can be a little boring sometimes. Happilly, IWPhone plugin is here to help by allowing you to automatically detect iPhone and iPod user agent and display an optimized theme.

Why optimizing your blog for iPhone

Why should I optimize my theme for the iPhone? My current theme renders very good. This sentence was probably what you thought first when you saw my post title. iPhone uses Safari, so, if your theme looks good on your Mac’s Safari, it will look good through the iPhone.

But there’s a quite boring thing: Having to zoom over and over is a bit boring, especially when text width is wider than iPhone screen. Also, it could be a good idea to use a more minimalistic theme, with no or less Javascript, to enhance browsing speed.

I just purchased an iPod Touch and i use it often to read webpages. A comfortable navigation through my mobile device became a criteria of quality for me. And I’m quite sure that some of your readers thinks the same.

How does it work?

Once you downloaded and unzipped the IWPhone plugin, you’ll see a file named iwphone.php and a iwphone-by-contentrobot directory.
The iwphone.php file is the plugin itself, while the iwphone-by-contentrobot directory is the theme that will be displayed only when the plugin will detect iPhone or iPod Touch user agent.

To install IWPhone, simply upload the iwphone.php file to your wp-content/plugins directory and the iwphone-by-contentrobot directory to your wp-content/themes.
Then, simply activate the IWPhone plugin in your Wordpress admin panel.

That’s all. Now, when someone will visit your blog through an iPhone, the IWPhOne Theme will automaticly be displayed. If you own an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you should test it now and see how easy to read your blog is.

If you’re interested about customizing the IWPhOne Theme, you should read what I just posted on my blog.

Yesterday I got the heads up that I was tagged in a recent post by John Lamansky of The WordPress Expert.  I normally don’t partcipate in these types of “blog games”, but after reading John’s post, I really think it is a great idea and allows us to spotlight a few WordPress plugins that are underrated or somewhat unknown.

John choose to highlight the following 3 underrated plugins in his post (click over for a description):

1. Broken Link Checker
2. WP-Project
3. WP SEO Master

Here are 3 plugins I would like to add to the list that I think are useful, yet underrated:

1. Blog Metrics - This is a wonderful plugin by Joost De Valk that was designed for multi-author blogs like this one.   It tracks all sorts of unusual analytics by individual authors that I find extremely helpful.
2. Digg This - I think this plugin used to be fairly well known, but I don’t see it on many blogs anymore.   This plugin does nothing normally, but when it recognizes that a post has been Dugg, it will create a digg-style button and display it within the post to help encourage people to Digg your post.   They can Digg the post without leaving your website!
3. Math Comment Spam Protection - It adds an extra step for people leaving comment, but it stops spam cold in its tracks.  I use this on many of my blogs and haven’t really had any spam troubles since.

Hopefully some of you will find a use for some of these plugins.

I suppose now I should continue this by tagging three more people.  How about Michael at WPCandy, Leland of ThemeLab, and Jeff of Jeffro2pt0.  If you haven’t been tagged yet, but would like to participate, feel free to do so on your own blogs to help highlight some relatively unknown plugins.