Jeff Star, founder and lead developer of Monzilla Media, has sent me a copy of Digging into WordPress v2 for review. He has written this book with co-author and master designer Chris Coyer of CSS-Tricks. The eleven chapter book, packed with 400+ pages of WordPress tutorials, techniques, tips and tricks was released after a year of production, design, planning and writing.

WordPress is currently the most popular publishing platform. It focuses on aesthetics, web standard and usability. It’s famous for its 5-minutes installation and comes with a complete user-contributed documentation. This is one of the reasons I like working with WordPress. Starting as just a blogging system, it has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more to the thousands of plugins, widgets and themes, WordPress is limited only by your imagination (and tech chops).

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If you’re an affiliate marketer that looks to increase his income than this product is definitely a choice to consider.

MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate is a WordPress Plugin that automatically converts keywords on your blog into money-making affiliate links. With this plugin, you can easily manage your affiliate links to increase your commission earnings with almost no effort on your part.

Besides the most important feature which is the conversion of the affiliate links into more user friendly readable links, Ninja Affiliate offers many advanced features such as:

• Easy Affiliate Link Management: Set an easy-to-remember name for each affiliate link
• Flexible Link Management: Every affiliate link format is accepted so you do not have to waste time with various affiliate marketing tools.
• Create Professional Redirect Links: Use professional looking redirect links that lets your prospects know you’re a pro marketer.
• Organize links into groups: Very useful if you have many affiliate links
• Cloaking: Improve conversions by cloaking links; useful to prevent link theft and affiliate sabotage
• Transform keywords into links: Transform keywords from your blog into affiliate links. You also have the option of settings a limit too, so your blog won’t look like a spam blog.

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SimpleModal Login is a Modal AJAX Login for WordPress that uses the jQuery library and the SimpleModal JQuery Plugin. This WP Plugin allows you to create your own custom themes. Currently, there are 2 themes available: default and osx.

From the plugin’s settings menu you can choose from one of the available themes as well as select where the user will be taken upon successful logon.

If you want to create a new theme, you need to add 2 files under the simplemodal-login plugin directory. css/THEME.css and js/THEME.js. Replace theme with the name you would like to use. Eric Martin, the author of this awesome plugin, suggests using one of the existing themes as a template.

More information – including installation guide, FAQ’s, screenshots – can be found on the WordPress SimpleModal Login Plugin page.

Login With Ajax is an awesome WordPress plugin useful to ajaxify the login process to the WP Admin Area. With this plugin you avoid screen refreshes and moreover you can choose where users depending on their role (either administrator, editor, author, contributor or subscriber) get redirected when they login / logout. You also have the option to set a global login/logout redirect so all the users will be redirected to the specified URLs.

Features include:

• Login without refreshing your screen using AJAX calls
• Password retrieval within the widgets
• Compatible with WordPress, WordPress MU and BuddyPress
• Will work with forced SSL logins
• Shortcode and template tags available
• Widget specific option to show link to profile page
• Degrades gracefully if JavaScript is disabled

Having the posts bookmarked by other people through Delicious is very important because not only you will get repeated traffic from the people who saved the articles you have written but you can also gain more traffic and RSS subscribers especially if some of the posts reach the Delicious front page. That’s why it’s important to ask people to save your articles. One important thing is to show how many times the post was saved on Delicious. If you have articles with quality content chances are you will get a lot of saves. Having a quite large number of saves may signify that the post is worth saving and this could determine other users to bookmark it too.

Whether you use WordPress or not I will show you how to add a “Save to Delicious” link for your articles that will also contain the total bookmarks of the post. To do this we’ll use the power of PHP and JQuery, the famous JavaScript library. Read more from this entry…

MeeNews is a WordPress Plugin useful if you need to send newsletters. It is compatible with WordPress 2.7+, has two different themes ready to use, a completely customizable design, a clean and user friendly interface and it is available in 2 languages: English and Spanish. You do not need any programming knowledge to use this plugin, as it is very easy to use. You can even add you existing posts to the newsletter.

MeeNews is the most complete all-in-one email marketing wordpress plugin, for newsletter creation. Looking for a good email marketing option to integrate into your website or blog? Look no further, MeeNews is what you are looking for!

‘Buy Sell Ads’ WordPress Plugin aims to help you with an easy method of ‘Buy Sell Ads’ zones integration into your WordPress Blog. The script includes an anti-AdBlock measure to help preventing AdBlock from blocking the advertisements. Some of the reasons Thaya Kareeson created this plugin are:

• AdBlock lowers your ad impression statistics tracked by Buy Sell Ads, which makes your advertisement spot lose value.
• Buy Sell Ads advertisers will have an extra incentive to advertise on your site because AdBlock will not be able to block their ads.

Please resist the urge to flame this plugin just because you are an AdBlock lover. I did not write this plugin because I hate AdBlock, but rather because I love publishers and their quality content. I truly believe that this is a useful plugin. If you are planning on rating this plugin, please give it a fair chance by downloading it and evaluating it before you rate.

Features include:

• Easily integration of the BSA advertisements (all you need is the zone ID)
• Anti-AdBlock capabilities
• Buy Sell Ads widget that support multiple zones
• Ability to specify pre/post zone HTML & pre/post widget HTML

Divine Free Edition is an application useful to convert Photoshop designs to WordPress themes. It’s enough to have a basic Photoshop knowledge and some web-technologies general notions. It takes just a few clicks to convert your graphics to a ready-made site. This software was developed as a tool for converting patterns (graphic templates) to HTML pages that any user (even unexperienced web developers) can work with. Therefore, the interface was optimized as much as possible for the user’s needs.

Features includes:

• Convert PSD to HTML
• Easy publishing from Photoshop® to your WordPress™ website
• Built in FTP-client
• Widget ready WordPress theme as output
• Supports all Photoshop® filters, layer blending options, layer effects, masks etc.
• Browser Compatibility: Resulting HTML/PHP code is div-based, Cross browser HTML / CSS code, Encoding support)

WP Greet Box is a WordPress Plugin written by Thaya Kareeson, that lets you show greeting messages to your visitors based on their referrer URL. For example, if a visitors visits you from Twitter, he will see a message suggesting him to tweet the post and follow you on Twitter. You have the option to add your own referrers list, besides the existing one. A list of referrers is installed by default. However, you have the option to create your own if some of your favorite referrers are not in the list.

Features include:

• Ability to add/edit/delete/disable the greeting messages
• Ability to auto insert the greeting box to the top or bottom of the post
• Beautiful set of icons shipped along with the different default referrers.
• Show a default greeting message even if the vistor does not match any of your configured referrer URL.
• AJAX administrative interface that uses nonce verification to discourage hackers.
• Ultra customizeable greeting message box (with CSS) allowing you to prepend/append HTML around the greeting message box.

Having these targeted suggestions will help your blog increase exposure, loyal readership, and reader interaction. Best of all, this plugin is compatible with WPMU and various WordPress cache plugins (so you do not have to sacrifice speed).