Like many other bloggers, I display 125*125 pixels ads on my blog, and earn some money with it. Currently, I own 6 different ads, and most of them change every week. I became bored of editing my sidebar template everyday, so I asked my friend X-OR to write a cool widget to manage thoses ads. Let’s review it together.

What the Show125 widget can do for your blog

I always loved the concept of widgets: drap n’ drop, easy to edit, easy to place, easy to remove. Most of todays themes can handle widgets, so there’s many chances that the theme you use haven’t any problem with it.

In addition to the basic widgets advantages, Show125 gives you many option and a true control over your ads. Let’s see:

• Display from 1 to 8 ads
• Available in English (default) or French
• Display all your ads together, or in an eye-candy Mootools slideshow
• Optionally add the target=”_blank” attribute to links, if you want ads to open in a new tab.
• Show (or not) a title for your ads block
• Easy to install
• Clean code
• Add custom css class to links for styling it your way
• And more!

Installation

Nothing hard here: First, download the widget. If you want to see a “live demo”, just have a look at x-or’s blog, where you’ll be able to see the slideshow mode of the widget.

Once you unzipped the widget to your hard drive, upload the entire directory to your wp-content/plugins directory. Then, go to your Wordpress administration panel and activate the plugin.

In Design » Widgets, you’ll be able to drag n drop the Show125 widget to your sidebar (or any other widgetized part of your WP theme) and set the options.

Once you filled the fields and saved your changes, you’ll see your ads in your sidebar. Managing your ads with Show125 really makes money earning easier!

Have you ever found that you are looking for a WordPress plugin that does something specific, but you’ve tried the WordPress Codex or using Google search and nothing has come up?

There are a few choices you have, including our quickly growing WordPress plugins page, but one cool thing I ran across is I want a WordPress Plugin to… , which serves almost as sort of a WordPress plugin directory.   Here you’ll find plugins broken down into categories, allowing you to click on the type of plugin you are searching for, then see what options you have.

[via WordPress Garage]

Late last week I talked about an advanced alternative premium WordPress plugin to the free All-in-One SEO Pack called SEO Sniper. In what can only be described as a complete coincidence (or weird timing), I’ve read a couple reports today that the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin will no longer be supported by the author, Uberdose. No mention is made for the reason behind this.

This is a fairly new plugin (about a year old I believe), yet it is by far the most used WordPress plugin out there and I’m sure most of you use it. So, what will come of this free plugin? As of right now it works fine, but what about after WordPress 2.6? I was unable to find licensing information associated with the plugin, so it is unclear of it is available for someone else to take over and continue to develop and improve.

If your website offers a feed and you care about protecting your copyrighted content, one thing you should make sure to do is have some sort of copyright notice within your blog’s feed.

There are a variety of WordPress plugins out there that allow you to create a footer for your WordPress feed, including Feed Footer, which we have previously reviewed here.   Some offer rotated feeds, others allow you to use HTML to display whatever you want, but for the average person with a blog this is mostly fluff.

If you just want the ability to basically add a copyright notice or use a small amount of HTML to promote a product/service, then you will want to check out the RSS Footer WordPress plugin.    It allows you to easily plugin in a line of code and choose where in your code it should be displayed.

This guest post was written by Keith Dsouza of Techie-Buzz. Keith is a WordPress enthusiast who has contributed numerous WordPress plugins to the WordPress community. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a guest post for Hack WordPress, please contact me.

Tagging has become a integral part of our day to day life, may it be book marking, storing file information or for that matter blogging. Tags make it much more easier to find content and is also more easier to maintain.

WordPress came out with a tagging system called Taxonomy with the release of WordPress 2.3 and since its conception and release it has become a integral part for most of the bloggers.

WordPress allows you to convert your categories to tags using their inbuilt functionality but that leaves a lot to be desired. The conversion is not perfect and that is why there is need for something that helps you manage tags in a much better way.

Better Tags Manager (BTM) is a plugin that allows you to manage your tags with much more ease right from your manage posts admin section.

The usual way of managing tags is by clicking on the post and then editing it, BTM saves you both time and efforts while helping you easily edit your tags.

Once you have downloaded and activated Better Tags Manager you can visit your Manage section to start using the plugin.

In the manage posts section you will see a new icon next to your tags, clicking on it will show you a HTML textbox using which you can easily update your tags without even refreshing the page.

Once you have updated your tags click on the save button and your tags will be updated, clicking on the cancel button will restore you to normal.

In addition to editing single tags you can also edit bulk post tags at once, or add tags to all the selected posts without individually editing them. Adding tags to all posts can be useful when you want to search for a keyword and add tags to all the posts you feel are relevant to the keyword.

To add tags to bulk posts you will need to enter the tags and select the posts you want to update tags for, clicking on the Add Tags to All Posts button will add the tags to the selected posts.

You can also choose the Bulk Edit Mode where you can edit individual post tags and update them all at once. To use bulk edit mode click on the check box and click on Filter or Search button.

Once you do that you should be able to edit the tags for all the posts displayed in the results. After editing the tags click on the button in the top left hand corner called Update Bulk Post Tags to update all the tags you have updated.

And last but not the least with Better Tags Manager you can filter out posts which do not have any tags and add tags to them.

To filter out posts select All Post Which Do not Have Tags option from the Tag Options drop down and click on the Filter button.

There are many different ways in which you can put Better Tags Manager to use and I would love your feedback and opinion on whether BTM will be useful to you or not. You can also let me know additional features you would like to see and I will try my best to incorporate those.

Visit Better Tags Manager release page for other news and downloads.

A couple readers have commented on how they like the navigation menu that you’ll find at the top of each page on this blog and wanted to know how to do this on their WordPress blogs.

I really love the improved navigation it gives readers, and doing something like this on a WordPress blog is actually really easy, thanks to the incredible community WordPress has. All you need is the Breadcrumb Navigation XT WordPress plugin and some simple code to place where you want the navigation to display.

Once you’ve got your plugin uploaded and activated (activate the Core version), you can place the following code where you want the navigation to display:

<div class="breadcrumb"> <?php if (class_exists('bcn_breadcrumb')) { // New breadcrumb object $mybreadcrumb = new bcn_breadcrumb; // Assemble the breadcrumb $mybreadcrumb->assemble(); // Display the breadcrumb $mybreadcrumb->display(); } ?> </div>

You can style it to look how you want using .breadcrumb on your stylesheet.

Enjoy!