WordPress has released a new set of Personas for Firefox themed around, well WordPress, which you can install and use on the browser. The personas were designed by Chad Pugh and are based on Vintage Press and Inkwell.

Interested? You will find the two personas for Firefox at this link. However, you will need to install the Personas add-on before you will be able to use these as your themes.

Personas are similar to skins, which Firefox users can add to the browser. They are somewhat similar to Firefox themes, however they can be installed quickly and easily and do not provide as much sophistication like regular themes. I will stop the banter and direct you to Wikipedia to read the rest of the dope.

WP-ZoomImage With CopyProtect

You can pop up an image or thumbnail by just clicking on it and it will disappear when you click it again

Titled Comments

Hikari Titled Comments enables each comment to have a title, so that commentators can give a subject meaning to their comments.

Scroll to Top Plugin

Integrate a jQuerry scroll to top control in WordPress manually

Tweet my Script

This plugin watches your Twitter RSS Feed for user-defined “launch codes” to trigger user-defined script URLs.

Dojo Skew Gallery plugin for Wordpress

This is a plugin to create a skew photo gallery utilising Dojo Toolkit Ajax.

Updated Plugins

AVH Extended Categories

The AVH Extended Categories Widgets gives you three widgets for displaying categories.

Smarter Navigation

A WordPress plugin that generates previous & next post links based on referrer. Version 1.2 adds a utility for posts in multiple categories.

SEO Automatic WP_CORE_TWEAKS

Extends built-in features of Wordpress and combines common plugins into one.

WP ImageTagger

This extensively configurable plugin comes packed with a bunch of features enabling image tagging, including search and image taxonomy.

WP Comments Notifier is a open source application written in QT/C++ for Linux and Windows, which will allow you to manage new comments and reply to them from your desktop. In addition to that, it will also allow you to edit, spam or delete the comments.

This app will also display comments summary when you hover over the system tray icon and alert you whenever a new comment is posted to your blog. The app also works for WPMU blogs.

You can download the installer for Windows by visiting the app homepage and also find instructions on how to build the app from source on Linux machines.

Download WP Comments Notifier

The Turquoise Theme is a simple free WordPress Theme 980px wide with 3 Sidebars and an Option Page to populate the Footer. One Sidebar is on the right side optimized for Adsense 250px Ads. Two Sidebars are on top of the postings and below the Posting. Good for 468px Ads.

Greener Side

Smell the fresh cut grass and feel the butterflies flutter past your face… It’s summer year round with this eye-catching fixed width two-column design.

Wordsmith Blog

Two column, brown theme. Choose background colors, sidebar placement, and an optional adsense ready sidebar.

5 Music WordPress Themes

Share your music and videos, connect with fans, and let everyone know about your upcoming gigs with one of these music WordPress themes. Whether you’re a musician, DJ, or producer, one thing’s for sure — these widget-ready and Gravatar-enabled themes rock.

So if you have been having problems with NUS, update to the latest version (1.3.0) and the issues should be solved. Do let me know if you have any problems with the latest update.

A few notes:

• Support for Old FeedBurner accounts has been dropped in v1.3.0, please upgrade your account to a Google account before using NUS.
• NUS will only work on sites with cUrl support.
• Support for additional languages coming in future versions.

Note: I have not used WP_Http as there are problems with fsock and other http methods, it only works for cUrl right now. However, the plugin does contain a file which uses WP_Http which will be used in future versions.

You will get a dashboard notice to update the plugin, if you don’t you can download Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers v1.3.0 from here.

Wordpress External Cron

Allows you to setup a cron to fetch any page on the server

PuSHPress

This plugin adds PubSubHubbub ( PuSH ) support to your WordPress powered site. The main difference between this plugin and others is that it includes the hub features of PuSH, built right in. This means the updates will be sent directly from WordPress to your PuSH subscribers.

Block Bad Queries

Protect WordPress Against Malicious URL Requests

Image Space Media

The ISM plugin optimizes your Wordpress blog for Image Space Media’s in-image advertising technology. With the ISM plugin, Wordpress users can seamlessly integrate Image Space Media’s in-image advertising solution into their website and generate ad revenue.

Easily navigate pages on dashboard

Display a folder tree of your pages that is easy to expand and contract on your Dashboard. Designed for people that use Wordpress as a content management system.

MySQL Profiler

WordPress is extremely flexible. However, flexibility generally brings about the issue of performance. WP MySQL Profiler is a simple plugin that assists in improving performance of themes and plugins.

Updated Plugins

Easy Review Builder for WordPress

Create attractive star ratings for reviews. Supports multiple rating categories and an optional auto-calculated summary

Dynamic “To Top”

Adds an automatic and dynamic “To Top” button to easily scroll long pages back to the top.

Light Folio is a clean clean and light theme with a combination black and white color.

CleanTech

CleanTech is a clean, two column and elegant theme with support for threaded comments designed to focus your content.

Ultima

This is a 2-column, soft-colored, rounded theme that totally aims at content and nothing else.

Now I also want to access another feature in the admin dashboard, so I go ahead and bookmark it. Bookmarking pages is definitely a good way to quickly jump to certain pages, however, it is not exactly productive.

That was until I came across an excellent bookmarklet, which will allow users to quickly access the the WordPress sidebar menu items with a single click. Once you drag and drop the bookmarklet to your browser bookmark bar, you can click on it to access the admin menu for a particular site. Take a look at the screenshot below to see it in action.

Once you click on the bookmarklet, a WordPress like menu will be displayed to you, you can hover over the menu to see the sub-menus and options available under the menu. Clicking on the link will take you directly to the admin page of the current site you are browsing.

I emphasized on the text above, as this is the only flaw I saw with the bookmarklet. It will only work for the site you are currently browsing and not a site you can choose it to work for. So technically you will have to browse to your own site before you can get this to work properly for you.

That aside, this is a really useful bookmarklet and will definitely come in pretty handy. Visit the link below to add the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark bar.

WordPress Admin Toolbar Bookmarklet [via @smashingmag]

123 Flash Chat

123 Flash Chat WordPress Plugin can be used to create your own chat room in WordPress. It allows you to insert chat room to your sidebar, with either a lite chat client or a link to standard chat client in popup mod. And you can define the width and height of 123 Flash Chat as well as its skin & language. The chat room displays a “hosted by 123flashchat.com free of charge” message.

Asynchronous Widgets

Allows you to have any registered widget on your WordPress.org-powered site be loaded asynchronously via an AJAX call.

WP-Tabbity

Allows authors to create one or more tab groups containing one or more tabs, animated by the WordPress-included version of jQuery.

WP Function Reference

Provides a box on the dashboard with a list of the functions that are available for you to use in your Wordpress installation

Disable WordPress Updates

Disables the theme, plugin and core update checking, the related cronjobs and notification system.

Updated Plugins

SEO Ultimate

This all-in-one SEO plugin can handle titles, meta, noindex, canonical tags, 404 monitoring, linkboxes, robots.txt, and more. Version 1.6 can import data from All in One SEO Pack.

Bulk Delete

Bulk Delete WordPress Plugin which lets you to delete posts in bulk from selected categories or tags has been updated to version 0.7. The new version supports moving to trash instead of deleting and batch updates.

Rico Tabbed Menu

This is a simple plugin to create a tabbed menu in a post using Rico Ajax.

WP Google-buzz

Automatically displays Google Buzz button for every post. Google Buzz is shaping up to be an interesting new way to share content with your Gmail friends, so why not have a button for sharing blog posts/pages to the service.

Ozh’ Who Sees Ads

Who Sees Ads is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, for instance Adsense, depending on user defined conditions. You can manage ads in your templates (eg sidebar.php) or within posts and pages.

Lightbox Plus

Lightbox Plus permits users to view larger versions of images from the current page and display simple slide shows, all in an overlay.

The DarkMood Theme is a free dark greenish theme 980px wide with two Sidebars and an Option Page to populate the Footer.

Expressivo

Expressivo is a three-column theme with two righthand sidebars – going to a single sidebar on single posts and pages. With Cufon embedded fonts for post titles, threaded and paged comments – you can also replace the header completely with your own image.

Bright Light

Bright Light is a two columns, fluid width WordPress theme with support for custom top navigation. It also has built-in support for social icons.

5 Grunge Wordpress Themes

Themes are a little bit dark, a little bit dirty, and very grungy. Widget-ready and gravatar-enabled

I have always been of the opinion that this blog, its content, its collection of authors and most of all, its community of readers, is a prime candidate for BuddyPress. Having a common signup between comments, ratings, forums and blog posts would be a fantastic feature. This news is the first step in making those features a reality. We will start working on our test version of this blog very soon.

Are you thinking about trying BuddyPress? What is your greatest concern in adding BuddyPress to your blog? What is the greatest benefit?

As a developer when you start out coding, you have a certain number of things a function will require in order for it to work, some may be optional too, so you set out to create a method signature similar to the one below.

function do_something($var1, $var2, $var3, $var4 = false, $var5 = '')  {

//process business logic here

}

Now, say you release your plugin or theme and get more feedback on features and other improvements. If the features or improvements suggested require you to change the method signature to incorporate new variables and you use default values, you are in a bit of a spot.

So what is the best way to avoid such situations? In my opinion, if you use a function which accepts variables, it could easily scale to accept more parameters without breaking anything by accepting an array as a single parameter. The array would have to be built up either internally in the code somewhere or externally through the user.

So you could rewrite the above logic as below:

function do_something($args = array()) {

$myvar = (array_key_exists('mykey', $args)) ? $args['mykey'] : get_default_value('mykey');

//process business logic here

}

Now, you would not expect a user to pass an array while using your non-widget based plugin in their themes, so you would have to provide users with an options page which will allow them to set the values they want to be passed to the function, and then build a Facade function internally which will then read all the option values and pass it on to the main function to be processed.

I hear people saying that they can fetch the options from WordPress inside the function itself and there is not need for this Facade, however, in my experience of over 11 years in the software industry, I have learnt one important thing, never mix anything with business logic.

If a function is supposed to perform a task, let it perform only that and nothing else, that way you can reuse the function elsewhere without having to constantly rewrite it to adapt to different things.

I have seen several plugins which make use of arrays and several which do not. I would definitely be interested to learn on how you approach this, the comments form is open.

Update: From the comments below, many users mistook me. I never said that users cannot use wp_parse_args. However, being an OOPS developer, I stick with my above post and say that you should keep business logic separate from processing logic, no matter whether it is WordPress or any other platform, that is the basic fundamental I learnt in OOPS, and I do believe OOPS is the best fundamental and way to go forward. I expect arguments on that.

Flickr Digest

A simple to use WordPress plugin based on Flickr API which digests all your photos posted in last X days in a single post periodically.

Feed Thumbnails

This plugin simply adds your post thumbnails to your RSS feed as enclosures. Nothing else to it.

Simple Twitter Connect

Simple Twitter Connect makes it easy to integrate your site with Twitter, in a wholly modular way.

Updated Plugins

Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator

Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator plugin obfuscates emails and URL links, to hide them from spam harvesters and Search Endigne crawlers. It uses ROT13 or cc8b to encode each link while PHP is building the page, then uses JavaScript to decode it and show it to the user. If JavaScript is not available, it uses CSS to hide them.

Rico Tabbed Menu

This is a simple plugin to create a tabbed menu in a post using Rico Ajax.

FAQ You

A simple FAQ plugin where you can create Categories and put Questions in them. You can easily insert them in a page with the WYSIWYG editor. Able to turn JavaScript on or off.

WP Google-buzz

Google Buzz. Beautiful Google buzz integration to wordpress + admin panel options (Settings -> WP Google-buzz) + 14 diff button images + mouse over effects.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

Simple:Press Forum

Simple:Press is a feature rich forum plugin for WordPress. It fully integrates into your WP based site utilising the same user records and database and displaying on a single WP page.

Presenter is a child theme for the Hybrid theme framework. Presenter gives you a quick way to show your portfolio or services with few elements and easy customization from the back-end.

Neat Theme

Two column, gravatar ready theme with a featured section and theme options. Widget Ready, with four position widget.

42k

All major components are user changeable, be that colors, sizes or layouts.The theme works perfectly out of the box, or you can change things around to suit your needs via the extremely easy to use huge admin control panel with its built in admin area inline previews. The theme comes loaded with 4 widget areas, dedicated Favicon, 4 different front page layouts, user defined error messages, dedicated tag cloud area, 2 advert areas and a free background PSD is available to download to allow you to change the look completely.

Acosmin5

Simple two column theme available in five colour schemes, with a simple control panel and jQuery tabs system.

Because I realized how much more I’ve been able to do with almost every site I’ve built in the last two years thanks to plugins, I decided to try to start a movement, not out of guilt or self interest, as I have never released a plugin, but rather out of gratitude to the plugin developers who give us their code and in most instances get nothing in return. They do so of their own free will and (in my opinion) should not “expect” anything in return when they do (and most of them don’t), but that doesn’t mean that our thanks aren’t appreciated and won’t go a log way toward keeping things going, to our benefit and theirs.

So I’m asking anyone that has ever gotten even the slightest benefit from a WordPress plugin to say thank you on March 1st by making a small donation, $5 (more if you like) to the plugin/developer of your choice.

I’ve personally committed to $100 to 20 different developers.  If you have little extra money in your Paypal account, or can simply find a way to reach out and say thank you I’m confident it will be appreciated.

Almost as importantly, we need your help spreading the word! Help us to do so by blogging about it, tweeting it or promoting the idea anyway you can think of.

This isn’t intended to make anyone rich. It’s simply intended to say thank you and celebrate the often unsung friends who enable our websites to do so much more than just be blogs.

Twitter Hastag: #wppdd

If you choose to make a donation on March 1st be sure to tweet it and let us know what plugin you donated to help spread the word, I’ve got some suggested language on my original post about WordPress Plugin Developer Day.

Hopefully this will make you feel as good as it does me, they deserve our gratitude.