A couple of weeks ago, I read a post on WPLift “Build A Plugin (Twitter Widget) into your WordPress Theme)“ which in turn was inspired by a post on WPCandy from a couple of months ago “How to create your own WordPress functionality plugin“.

The WPCandy post was advocating that theme designers should stop bundling WordPress plugins and other functionality which limits how easily users can switch themes, something which I feel is absolutely a good idea. But that’s not what I want to talk about in this post — I want to focus specifically on the issue raised in the WPLift post — building plugins directly into themes.

The post shows you how to add the DP Twitter Widget into your theme; it’s literally a case of copying a pasting the plugin’s code into your functions.php. In fact it’s so easy that there’s no reason not to build every single widget and plugin you can think of under the sun into your theme, right?

Unfortunately it’s a little more complicated than that and for the rest of this post I’ll set out exactly why that’s the case.

Firstly, the second you build a plugin into your theme, you’re assuming responsibility and are obliged to support the plugin, so if anything breaks in future updates, you’ll need to be able to fix it. Say the plugin used Ben’s timthumb and updating was an absolute necessity, the onus would then be on you to provide the update by offering an entire theme upgrade rather than just a simple plugin update independent of the theme.

Second, what’s the point? The functionality you’re providing already exists and unless you’re significantly changing the plugin, I’m struggling to see the point of just duplicating functionality. Sure, you get to brag about how your theme has thousands upon thousands of built in widgets and it makes everything really fun and it’ll do everything you’ve ever wanted, but by just adding a plugin that already exists into your theme, you’re just adding something I can do already by installing plugins. Plus, I’ll not lose everything in two years when I decide I need to overhaul the look of my site! And hey, there are sites like mine out there which show you how to do things like building a WordPress powered email newsletter without plugins anyway!

I’m not just wagging fingers from the rooftops — this was a mistake I made when I launched my ill fated theme site, WPShift nearly two years ago. At the time having a ton of functionality in a theme was the way to go and we made a decision that we would go down the route of essentially just bundling plugins with the theme.

I’m glad to say this isn’t all the range any more, so please don’t do it, it’s just making a mess in the long run.

Over the past couple years it has been impressive to see Facebook craftily grow its influence beyond the Facebook.com domain and expanding all throughout the internet.  For example, it seems just about every major website now allows you to login using Facebook.  With Facebook’s growing influence over the internet it isn’t surprising many WordPress developers have really stepped up, providing a number of great free and premium WordPress plugins to help improve WordPress and Facebook integration.

Once of my most recent Facebook plugin discoveries came from the developers at Premium Coding, a website which builds quite a few things, including a series of premium WordPress plugins.  The plugin I want to talk about today is called Facebook Page Themes, and the title pretty much sums up what this plugin does.  With this premium WordPress plugin users can generate a custom designed theme for your Facebook page, giving your business a professional look that promotes your product or service. [Continue Reading...]

As we transition to a new era of computing where people are getting their information via mobile phones, you are starting to see just about every high profile website or blog making their own iPhone app.  But what about the average WordPress user who doesn’t have the time and/or budget to make their own custom iPhone application?

Not long ago I covered a free WordPress plugin called WPTouch which creates a mobile-friendly version of your WordPress blog to display for mobile web browsers.  The unfortunate truth, however, is that outside of clicking on a link from Twitter on their phones, most iPhone, Android, or mobile users in general do not use the mobile web to view a webpage.  In order to maximize convenience for your readers you really need a custom iPhone application.  This is where an app I recently discovered, Wiziapp, comes to the rescue.

What is WiziApp?  Wiziapp is a WordPress plugin that automatically turns your WordPress blog into a native iPhone app in real time, giving easy access to the following within the application: Posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, links, images, videos, and audio files. And if that wasn’t enough, Wiziapp even offers a push notification service to notify iOS users when your website has new content available!

Here is a complete list of the features provided by the Wiziapp team:

• Create and personalize your iPhone application from your WordPress dashboard using the plugin’s wizard.
• Deliver all of your blog content directly to your App in real time.
• Notify your readers about new posts via push notification service.
• Your readers can easily read and post new comments directly from your App.
• Your App will display your images and galleries in native iPhone style.
• All the media you have posted will be collected to video or audio libraries.
• Your readers can easily search your blog directly from your App.
• Playing video and audio using Wiziapp’s advanced players.
• Enable your readers to navigate between posts by categories, tags or author name.
• Integrate with your login system.
• Your readers can easily share your posts and images via Facebook, Twitter, Email or SMS.
• Monetize your App by displaying ads using your own AdMob account.
• Your readers can easily save your posts to their ‘favorites’ list.
• We publish your App to the iTunes App Store and save you time & money dealing with an Apple developer account.
• See daily stats of your App visits and downloads.
• Stay up to date with all iOS and WordPress new features.
• Check out the Wiziapp tour here.

[Continue Reading...]

Thanks to the huge success of the iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, and other mobile devices, Apps have become all the rage.  The problem for many webmasters and WordPress users is that most smaller WordPress websites/blogs can’t afford to have a custom app developed for their WordPress site.  

Of course, thanks to beauty of the open source nature of WordPress, WordPress users have access to all sorts of great WordPress plugins.  I recently found myself debating whether or not to develop an app for WordPress Hacks and decided that first I would look into what free WordPress plugins were available.  My goal was simply to find one which would display a WordPress blog to mobile browsers in a mobile friendly format.  

Based upon roughly 2 million downloads plus great reviews, far and away the best plugin I’ve found to accomplish this is one called WP Touch.  For those that haven’t heard of WP Touch, this WordPress plugin automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, and will display this theme when your WordPress blog is viewed from an iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung  and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile device!

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your WordPress website to mobile visitors, all without modifying a single bit of code or making any changes to your standard WordPress theme.  The mobile theme also includes the ability for visitors to switch between WP Touch view and your site’s regular theme if that is what they prefer.

If you are looking for a more feature-rich product, I discovered that users can also purchase a Pro version of WP Touch which includes a slew of new features like more style, color and branding customizations, themes, 10 languages, more advertising options, web-app mode, and even iPad support.

This guest post was written by Jake Zarobsky, a blogger for Today’s iPhone, custom theme developer, and an amateur photographer. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

Ever notice how many features the standard installation of WordPress lacks? YouTube embedding, stats, and even a specialized Twitter widget? Well, if you have a self hosted blog at WordPress.com, these features are all given to you. In fact, many of these features are forced upon you by the sponsoring company, Automattic. Wanna learn how to get all of that “cloud-power” for your WordPress site?

If you are one of the people who would love to have these features at your disposal and already has a WordPress.com account, keep reading. Otherwise, you’re losing out on a great plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites!

Keep reading to find out more