We ran a Google Wave invite contest on our sister site; Joomla Views which gives away Google Wave invites to five lucky Joomla Views readers.

This led us to want to run the same contest (with five additional Google Wave invites) for our WordPress readers.

If you would like to get your greedy little hands on an invite to one of the slickest (albeit STILL in beta testing) applications that has come out of  Google labs – all you need to do are two things.

1. Subscribe to our Twitter account (it’s a new one) @wp_views

2. Simply retweet the following:
“@wp_views are giving away 5 Google Wave invites – Go to http://wp.tl/googlewave for more info #googlewave“

The contest runs through Midnight November 20 and each person who tweetered the required text AND is subscribed to our Twitter account will be assigned a number that will be put into a random number picker and winners will be announced on Saturday the 21st of November.

Good luck everyone!

The WordPress Views Team

Clever Plugins has been busy updating their latest flagship plugin; myVideoPoster to version 1.9.7.

And this is not just your everyday update either; it takes a giant leap forward by adding WordPress MU support; ability to add more videos from each Youtube feed and much more.

myVideoPoster 1.9.7 changelog

• Now WordPress MU compatible!
• Attemps to trim the default RSS output data, “From: * Views:* Ratings: More in *”.
• Clean up of the Settings Page and better explanations and examples.
• Seperation of “Niche Researcher” from the Settings.
• Now checks up the latest 50 videos from the RSS feed (Maximum setting from Youtube).

More Information

Click here to read our review of myVideoPoster or here for the full story of this release.

Related posts:

1. myVideoPoster 1.9.6
2. my Video Poster [Clever Plugins]

Netenberg.com has updated their Fantastico De Luxe 2.10.4 r32 to include WordPress 2.8.4 as well as Joomla 1.5.14.

Clever Plugins released a quick update to their premium video plugin myVideoPoster.

This version contains bugfixes introduced in an earlier version, as well as reduced memory usage.

myVideoPoster 1.9.6 changelog

• FIX: The problem with some blogs not automatically posting.
• FIX: Reduced memory usage.

Purchase myVideoPoster

Click here to read our review of myVideoPoster or here to purchase it.

disclaimer: The link above is an affiliate link, by purchasing through that link you will support WordPress Views. Thank you!

Related posts:

1. myVideoPoster 1.9.7
2. my Video Poster [Clever Plugins]

myWordPress released SEO Booster Lite 1.8.4, an update to the free version of SEO Booster Pro.

The description of the plugin has also changed with the latest version:

SEO Booster Lite detects and analyzes incomming visitors from search engines, and displays the mkost popular queries in a Widget or via the provided built-in function.

The list generated is dynamic, and changes according to the popularity of your blog, making it self-optimizing and totally hands-free.

By adding the provided widget in your WordPress blog, it will present site-wide links to these pages with the most popular search terms it has detected.

Only search traffic from page 2 and below from the Google SERP are presented, as these are the blogposts most likely to gain a major effect by displaying these searches.

SEO Booster Lite 1.8.4 changelog

• Memory decrease.
• The plugin will now ignore SITE:, CACHE:; and number only searches always, hence the settings panel has been disabled for now.

Download SEO Booster Lite

Click here for more information and to download SEO Booster Lite, or check out SEO Booster PRO that has a lot more features to bring your WordPress blog to the top of Google.

WordPress.com has launched a nice addition to their hosted blog installs; an automatic and free URL shortening service – WP.me.

Now, it is not a general purpose URL shortener or rival to Bit.ly or (our favorite) cli.gs; it just shortens those on WordPress.com.

Some interesting facts that WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg points out regarding the launch:

WP.me Facts

• WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain the world (how cool is that!?)
• Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now
• These are all exposed in the <head> using rel=shortlink
• It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones
• The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around
• WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com

The timing of this release coincides with the impending doom of tr.im (which was saved when someone stepped in and saved them); but it underscores the vulnerability of URL shortening services in that they are really are not economically viable and as such if they were to go under, it basically breaks the Internet in a way.

WP.me under cuts the need for an income based service as it simply is meant to re-direct their hosted blog service and just your wordpress.com links more Twitter friendly saving you six characters in your 140 character twitter post.

How can you use it?

There is now a “Get Shortlink” button next to your permalink when you dit or write a post, and when you click it you’ll get a popup with the beautiful link already highlighted for your copy and pasting pleasures.

If you’re logged in you can also get the shortlink for any page on WordPress.comm, there’s a link under the “Blog Info” menu in your admin bar.

Matt ends the announcement by thanking “our friends at GoDaddy and in Montenegro for help with the domain” – proving once and for all; it’s not what you know but in deed, who you know.

my Video Poster

Clever Plugins is a new professional WordPress software house by well known WordPress guru Lars Koudal of myWordPress.com.

Their latest release is my Video Poster which automates posting videos to your WordPress blog; which lends itself perfectly if you want a steady set of Youtube videos posted to your regular blog or if you want to set up an entire blog dedicated to videos.

my Video Poster (MVP) Features

Video posting

Post videos from an unlimited number of Youtube feeds; individual accounts, niche markets (comedy, movie trailers etc) or any of the several default Youtube feeds featuring their most popular videos to the most commented on etc.

These feeds will be randomly rotated when posting (either manually or automatically) and you have the option (highly suggested) to check if video allows for external embedding and if not, skip that video and go to the next one. This will prevent stale posts of unembeddible videos!

You define how often you want MVP to post new videos and how many each time (x videos every y minutes); this way, you have full control of the amount of automated videos added to your web site.

If you are running a video site, you might want to have a long list of RSS feeds to pull from and post maybe 5-10 posts every 30 or 60 minutes, on the flip-side; if you have a niche site, you might want to post one or two a day just to keep your site fresh with new content. It is up entirely to you.

When a video is posted it will automatically optimize the title for better Search Engine Optimization (SEO); import comments (optionally) from the Youtube video page and add tags (optionally) related to the video.

If you opted to add comments from the Youtube video page, those comments are checked for moderation via WordPress so you can automatically weed out those four letter words that most webmasters don’t want to appear on their sites.

in order to do this; you need to uncheck the comment author must have a previously approved comment in the WordPress settings, or they will all be put into moderation. my Video Poster will automatically check to see if option is checked or unchecked and will warn you as needed.

When a post is published, MVP will trigger post hooks, such as pinging, XML Sitemap creations etc. depending on what plugins are installed.

Video Embedding and Thumbnails

MVP will work with just about any WordPress theme, it allows you to embed the video directly into the post, or if your theme uses custom fields to add videos; MVP gives you the choice to pick what works with your theme.

Not only does it embed the video into the post or into a custom field, it will also grab the videos thumbnail (the large kind (320×240 pixels)) and it gives you the option to embed the thumbnail in the post or into a custom field; again, giving you the choice with what works with your theme.

It gets better than that; the thumbnail is not hot linked from Youtube (which is against their TOS), it actually downloads the thumbnail to your WordPress installation.

Additional Settings

Other options that you have in the settings are:

• Choose which user to post as
• Choose what category to post in – allowing you to set up a video only category
• Define video size (I use 560×340 pixels as that fits perfectly in the themes I use)
• Choose post status (Publish or Draft) – giving you the option to manually tweak each post before actually going live.

Screenshots

Plugin Review

That should give you an idea of what my Video Poster is capable of; now for the actual review; and I want to add a disclosure: I have been part of beta testing my Video Poster since its conception; however, this relationship with Clever Plugins does not affect this review.

I have used my Video Poster on several different web sites that I run; both to add that occasional fresh content related to the niche site and to the other extreme; running a Youtube video site which I used to update manually whenever (which was more never than ever).

In both scenarios; MVP has performed perfectly, once you have set it up according to how you want it (embed videos or thumbnails into the post or use custom fields and how often and how many videos to post are the main things) – your only thing to do is basically making sure that the RSS feeds that you use do not run out of videos to post.

If you use Youtube’s auto-updating (latest, most viewed, etc. or niche category) RSS feeds, you need not worry, those are updated constantly. However, if you decide to add specific user feeds; they might run out after a while if they are not updated often enough.

The solution? Add more RSS feeds, allowing MVP more to chew on and your site will never run out of fresh content.

You can check out one of my sites Different Videos – it is automatically adding new videos every hour; automatically, bringing new visitors to my site without my having to do much of anything. It is good for me, for my visitors and for the search engines that constantly gets new material to grab.

Another thing I really like about MVP is that this is not a black hat scraping script, it basically does what you would do manually for you – and the video posts look like a human posted video post.

There are a couple of things that I would like to see MVP add in the future such as the ability to post each feed into different categories; as it stands right now, all feeds go into the same category.

The other thing I would like to see updated, would be the ability to use smaller increments in posting intervals (currently, this is set in 30 minute increments) so if you want to post four videos every hour, you could post 4 videos every 60 minutes or 2 videos every 30 minutes; where as it would be more intuitive to post one video every 15 minutes.

Currently, my Video Poster only supports Youtube videos; to me, personally, that’s inconsequential as Youtube is my video site of choice – so I just wanted to point that out.

These are clearly nitpicking issues that I know that Clever Plugins will change in upcoming versions; I find this plugin very useful whenever you have a site that could be spruced up by some targeted videos and best of all, is that when you purchase my Video Poster, you are allowed to use it on all of your sites, one license fits all; and it is affordable with it’s introduction price of only $40usd.

For more information and to purchase go to Clever Plugins.

disclaimer: The link above is an affiliate link, by purchasing through that link you will support WordPress Views. Thank you!

Related posts:

1. myVideoPoster 1.9.7
2. myVideoPoster 1.9.6

WordPress rolled out WordPress 2.8.4 as a security release on August 11 just eight days after releasing 2.8.3 and 22 days since 2.8.2.

The latest security release included a vulnerability that when using a specially crafted URL, would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user request to do a password reset.

As a result; the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner.  While this wouldn’t allow remote access, it would be very annoying if your account was continously reset with a new password.

Check out this post from Theme Lab for more about this exploit.

You may download the full package here or update internally via WordPress’ version upgrade option in the admin section.

queue music…
fade to images of fair maidens and nerdy programmers… then cut to..

Horns blaring – Fireworks shooting high in the sky – Champagne flooding the streets as people from all over celebrate the launch of….

WordPress Views

yay!

OK – my imagination may have somewhat run wild and crazy but the fact is; WordPress Views (WP Views) – the pretty sister of its big brother Joomla Views (www.joomlaviews.com) has now officially launched!

There have been many false starts in the past and then a dormant stage swept over the site, but that is all history.

We intend to bring you the latest WordPress news, plugin and template reviews, articles and how-to’s and at times we will have contests and specials from the top names in the WordPress community.

So it will be not just fun and play, the Editors and writers of WordPress Views has either years of experience writing for the Joomla community or years of experience with WordPress… and some of us – have both!

Sign up for our conveniently located newsletter in the right column (or click here) or subscribe to our RSS feed in your upper right hand corner (that’s the orange square thingy there) to keep up to date with what matters.

So without further delay, I am cutting the proverbial (albeit virtual) ribbon and ask all contributing writers to report to work.

Kind Regards,

Tony Lindskog
Editor-in-Chief