Display Specific Wordpress Category in Sidebar

Ever wanted to create a separate widget that only contained the most recent posts from a specific category? Perhaps you want to divide your most recent posts up into different areas of your sidebar. Sometimes placing less important posts in a less valuable (lower on page) position makes sense.

Meet the AVH Extended Categories Widget. It does anything you can image with recent posts. Show different categories in different widgets. Arrange the hierarchy any way you’d like, customize all possible display settings and more.

If you get some use out of this plugin, drop me a comment.

Elastic Theme Editor Plugin For Wordpress

The Elastic Theme Editor Plugin for WordPress was demonstrated during the lightning round at WordCamp in New York City this past week.

Watch as these guys layout a theme from scratch in one minute (no sound):

Elastic is free and can be installed like any normal WordPress plugin.

Free Wordpress Theme: Eximius

The Eximius 3 Column WordPress theme from http://DKSzone.net…(visit external link) is one of the best looking, cleanest templates I’ve seen over the past few months.

While I still recommend using an SEO plug-in or two, this theme is fairly well optimized (besides a few basic things, like titles for example??).

Have a few inactive domains registered but not generating any reputation for site age, etc? A free theme like this makes putting together a simple first version website a snap.

I’ve put it to use on a few blogs I’ve started to seed with posts recently . You can see it in use on Global Warming Siren (just added it 20 minutes ago). I hope someone else can find a use for it.

Are you already using some nice free templates? Post the url in them comments area so that we can check them out!

Wordpress 2.8 Upgrade Experience

Wordpress 2.8 offers 790 bug fixes from v2.7 provides  several cool new features. You can now upload new themes using the admin panel, edit plugins from the editor, standardized drog and drag widget activation and placement and many other things that speed up wordpress’s performance.

I chose to manually download and FTP the unzipped files into my hosting account. I pulled up the admin area as soon as the uplaod was finished and was greeted with a “Upgrade Database” button, that I pushed, then was promptly presented with a Success page. It couldn’t have been easier.

I updated a few out of date plugins (Wassup, All in One SEO Pack, Contact Form 7) and took care of a few other housekeeping items while I had my hands dirty.  Share your upgrading experiences by leaving a Reply below.

Wordpress 2.7.1 – My Upgrade Experience

Finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.7.1

The only problem I had was the “Visual / HTML” editor links at the top of the content input box would not let me switch between the two.  After reuploading all files a 2nd time in ASCII everything works fine.  Kudos to the folks at WP for killing most of the bugs here.    If anyone runs into problems trying to upgrade their Wordpress make sure to contact me.