Better E-mail Notifications with Clean Notifications

As we all know, the default WordPress notification e-mails, sent out for things such as comments, trackbacks, and new users, aren’t the cleanest e-mails we’ve ever received. They’re complete with the author’s name, e-mail, website, and even IP address, all listed on their own lines. And when you’re running a popular blog with lots of comments and trackbacks, it can get quite annoying to sift through all the information, especially when reading these messages on a mobile device.

Thankfully, Mike Davidson, author of the handy text replacement tool, sIFR, has created a plugin to clean up these e-mails. The aptly named Clean Notifications plugin cleans up those notification e-mails into a cleaner, to-the-point notification in your inbox.

Before:

After:

Photos courtesy of MikeIndustries.com

The Clean Notifications plugin is a free download from Mike’s site.

Download Mike Davidson’s Clean Notifications plugin

COLOURlovers Admin CSS Designer Tool

A few weeks ago I posted a list of 30 improvements I’d like to see in WordPress 2.6. Item number one? Customizable color schemes - possibly with COLOURlovers integration. Two weeks later, I’ve found a plugin that hits the nail on the head. The Admin CSS Designer Tool is an amazing new plugin that introduces the ability to change your site’s admin colors with built-in COLOURlovers functionality. Looking at the video demo on Ozh’s blog, it looks like a pretty functional plugin. Here’s what we think. Read more…

Personalized Widgets With AdaptiveBlue

There are many different widgets available for you to use throughout the world of WordPress, but AdaptiveBlue makes their presence known by giving WordPress bloggers the opportunity to use a personalized widget on their blog. AdaptiveBlue is a company which is focused on helping to create the semantic web by using their own methodology:

We think that Semantic Web is really about leveraging existing information to create a better online experience for everyone today.

Out of the gate, AdaptiveBlue offers up to 50 different SmartLink Widgets for you to use. These widgets consist of displaying Amazon Best Sellers, your NetFlix Queue, the top artists on Last.fm and a host of other widgets which utilize a number of different TOP lists from various websites.

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Viddler Video Commenting Plugin 1.1 Beta 1

This is a guest post by Chris Thomson.

Viddler has just put out a new beta release (1.1 beta 1) of their video commenting plugin. The new version really extends the functionality to do much more than just video commenting.

Dashboard Widget

The new version of Viddler video commenting now includes a WordPress dashboard widget. That means that on the front page of your WordPress dashboard, you can view the most recent featured videos from Viddler. The handiest part of this new feature, is that there’s a little “Blog This” link below each of the featured videos. If you click the “Blog This” link, you’ll be presented with the write post page, with the Viddler video already embedded.

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Socialize Me! Plugin

Socialize Me is a new WordPress plugin created by Wayne Smallman that lets your readers connect to you easily. Socialize Me detects the referring page, and if it finds that the referring page is from a social network, such as Twitter, it’ll display a link to your profile on that network.

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Custom Smilies Plugin Review

Since I promised to post more about our submissions, I’ll begin with the Custom Smilies Plugin. It’s one of the only few plugins we have had submitted. We get a lot of themes and sites but hardly any plugins. Note: If you’re looking to catch my attention when you submit, try sending in some plugins!

Anyways, you’ve probably guessed by now that this plugin is all about smilies. Keep on reading to find out more.

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Exec-PHP WordPress Plugin

Now this is an interesting plugin. One, for its features and two, because of the way the author has documented the plugin. It’s amazing how much time they must have spent on documenting it all. Take a look for yourself Exec-PHP.

The idea of this plugin is that you can add and execute PHP code to static pages and even blog posts through your WordPress site. If you didn’t have this, you would have to enter to code by editing the files of your theme and it may not work the same way as you might possibly want it to.

Exce-PHP

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WPCandy Plugin

No we haven’t created a plugin. Although me and Mike would like to create some plugins to make to make it easier for you all. Whats that? Tell us your ideas? Hmmm maybe not at the moment, maybe sometime in the future. Maybe a project for me and Mike in the upcoming months?

Anyway back to the subject, there is a plugin that shares our name. The WPCandy plugin allows you to add snippets of text or as the plugin says “a candy” into a specific location on a page without having to add it into the theme manually all the time.

wpcandy plugin

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