If you have started using that feature and are looking to import data from your old Posterous blog to your WordPress.com blog, you will now be able to do it using the Posterous importer. To import content from your Posterous blog to WordPress, login to your dashboard and go to Tools -> Import, click on the link for Posterous importer to being the process of importing data to your WordPress.com blog.

More info and details at the Official WordPress.com blog.

Commercial plugins are already seamlessly integrated with the plugin directory.

I don’t know exactly what that means but if we take a look at the page that lists the restrictions and qualifications to be hosted on the repository, there are no rules against commercialization. Since commercial plugins/authors ARE indeed part of the WordPress community, how should the plugin repository reflect that, if at all? All plugins within the repository are free of charge, so how do you make a business out of that? Although it’s not listed, up-selling appears to be an acceptable practice within the plugin but there are still no rules on how up-selling is considered acceptable. Unfortunately, this is subjective so I’m not sure there will ever be a concrete guideline. But users of the software can certainly be vocal about it to have it changed if they don’t like it. Other questions I have regarding the repository:

If plugins that were freely available on the repository switch to a paid model, can they link to the paid model from their repo page? Post Templates is a good example of this. *UPDATE* Apparently, this is not accepted as Post-Template has been removed from the repository.

Can a plugin author link to a specific place within the readme.txt file that tells users where they can get paid support?

Can a plugin author state that if the end user will be using the plugin on a commercial website, that they HAVE to buy it?

If there are enough signs that the plugin is commercial, will donation links be removed from that plugins repository page?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions and your guess is as good as mine since the answers are not clearly written down in the repository guidelines. What I’m anxiously awaiting for is a post by Matt himself weighing in on this sector of the WordPress contributor community and his thoughts on how resources of WordPress.org can be used or not used to support those efforts. He’s made it clear in the past that he loves to see people making a living from WordPress but he’s also been vocal about having a completely different opinion of paying for themes versus paying for plugins.

Two column revamped version of the Neoclassical theme with support for automatic thumbnail generation and 125×125 ads

ProSmooth Series

A professionally designed classy and clean design with a smooth and elegant accented color scheme. Designed to be light weight and fast loading, featuring a fixed width centered layout that’s compatible with the latest wordpress and widget ready.

Unfocus Green

Two column, fixed width theme in simple shades of green

Dark Forest

Dark Forest 02 is a simple free WordPress Theme with two Sidebars a 160px (Adsense) and Widget Support. There is an Option Page to populate the Footer. Page in German.

Simple Magazine Purple

Three column, fixed width, gravatar and widget ready theme with a theme options panel and support for thumbnail Images with auto-scaling

To do list

This plugin provides users with a to-do list feature. You can configure the plugin to have private to-do lists for each user or for all users to share a to-do list. The shared to-do list has a variety of settings available. You can assign tasks to a specific user and have only those tasks that were assigned viewable to a user. You can also assign different permission levels using capabilities.

Leave-a-Note Visual Commenting

Leave-a-Note is a plugin for Wordpress, that transforms your comment section into a visual representation, making each comment a little post-it notes.

PHP Browser Detection

This plugin provides a number of template tags to get browser info, including conditional statements to test for each browser, versions of Internet Explorer, mobile browsers, and iPhone visitors.

Technical Support

Technical Support for WordPress is a way to provide quality support to your clients. After setting up a WordPress powered website for your client, install the Technical Support plugin, which will enhance your client’s Dashboard with a new widget for submitting support tickets directly to your e-mail.

Geolocator

This is a plugin that displays a “worksheet” for verifying and researching addresses with Google Maps.

Updated Plugins

WP Table Reloaded

WP-Table Reloaded enables you to create and manage tables in your WP’s admin area. No HTML knowledge is needed. A comfortable backend allows to easily edit table data. Tables can contain any type of data and additional JavaScript libraries can be used to extend it with features like sorting, pagination, filtering, and more. You can include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML

Store Locator

Effectively manage and display your important stores, locations, or other points of interest on a website in an easily searchable manner using Google Maps.

Twitter Goodies

Twitter style Twitter Goodies Profile Widget + Twitter Goodies Search Widget + Twitter Integration (wp to twitter) plugin. All in One plugin for Twitter Goodies.

DG Auto Login

Auto-login as guest or any other user you wish in your wordpress blog from your friend, ally or network website.

WP htaccess Control

Provides an interface to add custom htaccess rules to the htaccess file generated by Wordpress. It also includes Custom Author Permalink.

OnlyWire for WordPress

OnlyWire syndicates your blog posts to over 30 social networking sites *simultaneously* with one button click. Increase your blog traffic overnight.

As a plugin author myself, I’m not surprised by this news. With the world economy still in the pits, more plugin authors are feeling the crunch. While they would like to release free plugins for all, at the end of the day, there are bills to pay and mouths to feed.

Within this article (rant?), I will go over the types of plugins I would pay for, an argument for paying for plugins, and go over several business models I see popping up.

Plugins I Would Pay For

Here are several categories that make a plugin something I would pay for (yours will undoubtedly be different).

• The plugin is a timesaver – Plugins such as Akismet and WP Spam Free save me from having to deal with SPAM.
• The plugin provides peace of mind – Plugins such as WordPress Database Backup and W3 Total Cache provide peace of mind. My data gets backed up, and my blog is protected from an influx of traffic.
• The plugin helps my readers – Plugins such as Subscribe to Comments, PageNavi, Related Posts, Popular Posts, and many others that improve the reader experience.
• The plugin makes something complicated simple – I’m thinking of creating XML Sitemaps, creating forms (cformsII or Gravity Forms), or listing podcasts (PodPress).
• The plugin fills a unique niche – An example includes the WP Touch plugin, which is for mobile users of your WordPress-powered site.

An Argument for Paying for Plugins

In 2009, we saw the premium theme market jump into the stratosphere.

Jeff predicts the same for plugins in 2010.

One thing that has always confused me is that a lot of the “free plugins forever” advocates have a different opinion towards paying for themes. Why is that so?

Unless you purchase the theme’s developer license, you only get to use the theme on one site. And if you’re like me, you probably go through three (sometimes four) themes a year (I’m never satisfied!).

A plugin, however, is there before, during, and after the theme switch. I can use it on more than one site (if the license permits), and upgrading it is much less of a hassle than themes.

On my personal site, I’ve pretty much had the same plugins for 3-4 years running. If I were to pay for those plugins, that’s a good return on investment in terms of mileage.

For those who would never consider purchasing a plugin, remember, as the economy gets worse, your favorite plugin may be the next to get abandoned by its author for financial reasons. It’s not at all uncommon, and I would argue that this is the rule, not the exception.

Plugin Business Models

Over the past year, I’ve observed several plugin business models crop up. I will go over these briefly and weigh in on each.

Donation Model Only

Some plugin authors still choose to rely on donations for plugins. For a minority of plugin authors, the amount of donations is sufficient.

However, I haven’t experienced success with the donation model, even after pushing it heavily. My most popular plugin received 1-3 donations every six months.

Free Plugin – Charge for Support

While some plugin authors have been successful in charging for support, for the most part, users download the plugin and move on.

An example is providing a download link for the plugin, and charging the user a subscription fee for support forums.

One thing I don’t like about this model is that it reinforces the fact that the time to take coding/updating the plugin is trivial. Sure, support takes up time, but maintaining the plugin takes up a lot of time also.

Free Plugin – Charge for Add-ons

Another model I’ve seen is a plugin being provided for free, but add-ons for the plugin are an extra fee.

If the plugin proves popular enough, and the add-on is a must-have, you’ll likely find great success with this model.

The time you spent coding the “base” plugin will be offset by the income you receive from the add-ons.

One-time Fee for Plugin – Extra for Support

Another model I’ve witnessed is the user being charged a set fee for the plugin. If the user wants support, the user must subscribe to a forum of some sort.

I personally disagree with this model as the user often pays more for support than what the actual plugin is worth.

It’s also my opinion that if you charge for a plugin, support must be included.

One-time Fee for Plugin – Support Included

A model I’m fond of is just outright charging a fee for the plugin with support included.

The downside of this model is that the user should expect a higher price. Since the user is paying only one time, the higher price compensates for all the support the user is expected to have over the lifetime of the plugin.

Typically the price goes higher for additional site licenses, as support is expected to increase.

Subscription Based Model

A subscription-based model allows you to spread costs across all of the subscribers. The goal here is to gain as many subscribers as possible by charging a low price.

As a result, support and upgrade costs will be spread amongst all subscribers, where each subscriber gets the overall benefit. And since some subscribers will stick around for the next billing period, there is constant revenue.

One thing to include is to have a “Buy Out” option, which will allow users a lifetime subscription for a set fee. This is the One-time Fee option, so the price will be dramatically higher than a subscription cost.

I personally chose this model for my first premium plugin and it has been fairly successful so far.

Conclusion

Within this post, I went over the types of plugins I would buy, my reasons for purchasing a plugin, and the various models I’ve seen crop up.

I would love to hear your thoughts on any of these topics.

[column width="47%" padding="6%"] Column 1 content goes here. [/column]
[column width="47%" padding="0"] Column 2 content goes here. [/column]
[end_columns]

There are shortcodes for up to four columns within the content. I’ve rarely come across a theme or a WordPress powered site displaying content in this fashion but I imagine it would work well for Magazine or Newpaper type sites. For more information on plugin usage, read the official plugin page.

As you all know, I have been doing WordPress plugins and supporting it for the past 6 years. These 6 years of my life, I have been through my polytechnic education, my national service as well as my university education. I just graduated from university in December 2009 and have been looking for full-time jobs. I am offered a full-time job and will be starting work on 1st February 2010.

I regret to say that I am NOT ABLE to provide support for my plugins anymore due to my full-time job commitment. I will leave this forum open and let the community help one another. However, I WILL still update my plugins whenever I can and you still can report bugs to me via email and I will try to fix it.

I’ve donated a chunk of change to Lester in the past, something he was very much appreciative for but there are quite a few vocal members of the community that argue Lester could have placed all the plugins behind a paid support model that might have negated the need for a full time job. I would not have paid for each individual plugin, but I would have paid a yearly fee that would cover the support costs of all of his current and future plugins. No one should be upset at Lester for pursuing other endeavors related to his career path. Also, it’s not as if he is completely abandoning development and support for his plugins so if his full time job doesn’t work out, we may very well see some sort of plugin club membership option from Lester in the future.

So I wonder, what type of business model would Lester have to set up in order for you to consider paying for both the plugin and support?

WordPress for Android 1.0 Release: The Open Source WordPress for Android application is now available for download. This is in addition to the WordPress for iPhone and WordPress for BlackBerry applications that are already available. It is built on top of the wpToGo application which has been taken over by the WordPress team and released as this Open Source Application. You can follow the development of the application at dev.android.wordpress.org and look for support on the support forums.

Paintbox-CMS is a grid based CMS theme layered on Tipografo’s Paintbox. It comes with a smooth 960 grid layout plus some creative jQuery effects for content loading. It outuputs some very light w3c valid xhtml\css code.

Rock Guitar

Two column theme with electric guitar graphics built to suit a blogger who writes about guitars, or just about rock music generally.

PointSixCity

Single column, fixed layout, gravatar and widget ready theme

Black Stone Theme

Fixed width, two column, widget and gravatar ready theme

5 Baby, Mom and Dad WordPress Themes

Two column, widget-ready and gravatar-enabled

When you have 70+ speakers and volunteers working for gratis, you start out $2,500 in the hole. And when attendees started registering like crazy, it really was a double-edged sword. While registration was beginning to reflect the fruits of our labor, and the hype was building, my little budget spreadsheet was blinking red with every registration. I was laying out money for shirts, bags and food, and the sponsors weren’t showing up

For those that are willing to go through all of the trouble of putting a WordCamp together, I salute you!

We use WordPress.com stats, Statcounter and Google Analytics on this blog. I know that is two too many, but what can I say, I am a stats junky!

Elegance Lite is a 2 Column light weight theme with right sidebar. This stylish theme has Admin Options to easily change the Header Logo and Background Color of Theme. Apart from all regular features, it also has support for Threaded Comments and Sticky Post. Comments have Gravatar Support.

Gunungkidul

Two column, widget ready grid based theme with 960.gs framework

Clear Blue Sky

A modern sky blue, two-columns theme with a clear, fresh look.

TweetPress

Two column theme to make your blog look exactly like your Twitter profile

After installation, users need to visit the Wats Options page within the Settings menu to configure the plugin. The top of the settings page has a donate button if you want to send a little coin to the plugin author which is not intrusive or bothersome. While configuring the plugin, you can click on each menu title to show detailed information about that settings group.

The only problems I met when configuring this plugin is the user interface. Like I mentioned above, you can click on the settings title to show a hidden message that gives more details for the settings group but it’s not obvious this can be done. Also, while adding and editing the ticket priorities, I noticed that there is an icon to edit existing priority levels but the icon did not have a tool tip so it was not obvious that it was used to edit entries. Last but not least, the first button I see under the listings is REMOVE. The ADD button is further down below a status indicator. I think things could be rearranged to make a little more sense. For example, place the ADD, REMOVE buttons next to each other with a text field only appearing after the ADD button has been clicked. Directions for how to use this area of the configuration page also need to be added before this group of settings.

If you want to use WATS in conjunction with your main WordPress install, you can add new categories that can be configured to be open to submission. WATS has a front end ticket creation tool but the information for how to add this to a site was no where to be found until I browsed the plugin authors page. You can use the following shortcode to add the form to a page or post: [WATS_TICKET_SUBMIT_FORM].

Once I approved the ticket, I was able to login and view its status.

Overall, the plugin performed as expected. My only complaints lie in the user interface but those could be addressed in an update. For those looking for a ticketing system that bolts on easily to WordPress, this plugin looks like it could be what you’re looking for.

NdB Currency

This plugin is used to exchange currency values online. Main use is for American weblogs to convert their Dollar amounts into Euro currency values. It’s an easy to install, activate and forget wordpress plugin.

WordPress Loop

The WordPress Loop widget was written to allow users that don’t know their way around PHP to easily show their content in any way they’d like. The widget has over 35 options to choose from. Customize your WordPress loop by one or more post types, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, authors, dates, custom fields, and a whole lot more!

Q2W3 Screen Options Hack Demo

This is a demo for WordPress plugin developers. It shows how to create your own form for Screen Options panel.

CMS

A collection of plugins to make WordPress feel more like a CMS. It has some small adjustments and some bigger ones. Also includes some other plugins like Multiple content blocks, Page manager and a FAQ plugin.

WP Post Footer

Easily create a library of code snippets that can be inserted at the end of blog posts. Perfect for adding ‘Call to Action’ content at the end of a blog post to ask readers to take further action.

Updated Plugins

Table of Contents Creator

Table of Contents Creator automatically generates a highly customizable dynamic site wide table of contents that is always up-to-date.

iRobots.txt SEO

iRobots.txt SEO is a fully customizable, optimized and secure robots.txt virtual file generator.

List Pages at Depth

A more powerful version of wp_list_pages() which allows you to specify a start depth.

Branded Login Screen

Replace the default login screen on your blog with a custom branded screen

Edit Author Slug

This plugin allows you to change the Author slug, without having to actually enter the database.

SEO Ultimate

This all-in-one SEO plugin can handle titles, meta, noindex, canonical tags, 404 monitoring, linkboxes, robots.txt, and more. Version 1.5 adds more built-in documentation.

Twitter Tools

This plugin that creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

Just enter BOWL2010 in the coupon form to see the discounted price of 99 cents along with the additional 18 cents ICANN fee. If any of you are aware of other coupons to lower the price, please post in the comments. Thanks SlickDeals

While we are on the subject, how did you name your blog? Was it based on the domain name you could register or did you think about it for a while?