The problem with short urls is that in order to know where the link points you have to click on it with the risk of being sent to a malware site or something else. Or you can use another web service to expand the URL and check the destination but you have to open another browser tab, copy the URL from the comment and paste it into the other tab.

If you have a site with a lot of comments it’s difficult to check every one and that’s why Keith proposed the idea of a plugin to handle this. I thought that it would be easy to create a plugin to do that and after a bit of research I found that LongURL.org has a jQuery plugin that does precisely what I needed for the plugin.

With that jQuery plugin it took me less than 30 minutes to create the first version of the Preview Comments Short URL plugin for wordpress.

After installing the plugin, in the comments administration page you get a link next to each short URL to expand it for preview.

It works with most of the short URL’s I tried, and LongURL is constantly adding support for URL shorteners.

Download the Preview comments short URL plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.

But if your site already has hundreds of posts, adding a thumbnail image for each one will be a lot of work even if you only want the same image for each old post.

This plugin allows you to specify a default post thumbnail for posts that doesn’t have a thumbnail set.

This plugin requires that you have enabled support for post thumbnails in your theme (you can enable it by adding these 2 lines in your theme functions.php file).

if ( function_exists(‘add_theme_support’) ) {
add_theme_support(‘post-thumbnails’); }

You can select the thumbnail from the images already uploaded to your media library.

You can see more screenshots of this plugin, how to use it and the download link in the Default Post Thumbnails page

This plugin allows you to define custom header and footer templates to be used in the login/logout, lost password and register pages to match the design of your site. In the custom templates you can include CSS styles to set a background image, the size and colors of the login form, etc…

How to use this plugin

After activation you will have a new settings page for “Custom Login pages”, in this page you add filenames of the header and footer templates to be used whenever a login screen is displayed.

Custom login pages option page

The templates have to be in the current theme directory, you can name the templates whatever you want and if the plugin does not find the templates it will use the default header.php and footer.php.

Custom login page

Custom register page

The plugin is compatible with Cimy user extra fields. You can see more screenshots of this plugin and the download link in the Custom login pages page

I wanted to have this plugin when I was beginning with WordPress and I did have to use multiple loops in one template.

This simple plugin adds some overlay tabs in the left side of the screen with information about the constants of the theme like (WP_CONTENT_DIR, WP_PLUGIN_DIR, TEMPLATEPATH, STYLESHEETPATH, etc..) and infomation useful to debug your loops like the of type you are currently viewing, the query results (post_count, found_posts), the query vars used and the query used (the raw SQL generated by WordPress.

How to use this plugin

After activating the plugin you can add the function call in your template to display information about the main query:

<?php if (function_exists(‘debuginfo’)) { debuginfo(“Main”); }?>

Add additional calls after creating a new WP_Query object, if you want to track a specific variable you can pass it to the function, example:

<?php $my_query = new WP_Query(“showposts=3&category_name=Featured&order=DESC”); ?>
<?php if (function_exists(‘debuginfo’)) { debuginfo(“Secondary”,2,$my_query); }?>

The information is only displayed if you are logged in as an administrator.

More screenshots of this plugin and the download link in the Query debug info page or you can download it from the Query debug info page in wordpress.org

I built this plugin because I see that all the links posted in twitter are shortened by bit.ly or a similar service. There are many plugins that insert at the bottom of the posts links to share the post in various services but the link sent is not shortened. By default a long URL sent to twitter is shortened using bit.ly but one of the useful features of bit.ly is that you can get statistics of how many clicks the shortened URL received, from where and when.

How to use it:

Once you have installed and activated the plugin you have to enter your login and bit.ly API key in the ‘Bit.ly Share Links Options’ page and select what short URL you want to use (bit.ly or j.mp) and if you want the links to open in a new window/tab.

Now when you publish a new post the plugin will send a request to bit.ly to generate the short URL and store it in the post meta. When a user goes to the post page at the bottom of the post the plugin will insert links to share your posts in the most popular social media sites (facebook, twitter, stumbleupon, etc..).

If you have the sociable plugin installed the plugin will not display a second set of links, instead it will hook into the sociable plugin and replace the long URL with the short url generated by bit.ly.

The plugin also retrieves the stats for the short URL, you can see the stats in the edit post page.

Download Bitly shared links

Lo unico que le agregue es el plugin de lastfm de danwebb, e integre las imagenes del top 10 de albums y los 10 tracks mas recientes en mi cuenta de last.fm.