AJAX WordPress Plugins

The WordPress blog platform has thousands of plugins, and many of them now use ajax to improve usability. Here’s our pick of more than 30 goods ones: don’t install them all at once.

For the blogger

AjaxWP - Adds AJAX to all aspects of your WordPress site speeding up the load times.

Alexa Rank - Display your Alexa rank with pride.

Ajax Comment Preview - Allows readers to preview their comment before submitting.

asTunes - Retrieves data from your Audioscrobbler/last.fm profile and posts it as a list on your blog.

Codebox - Side scrolling box for displaying code snippets.

Crossroads - Adds thumbnails and comments from your Flickr Flickr account.

FireStats - Full featured statistics including referrers and popular pages.

Google PageRank - Allows you to display your Google Page rank on your blog.

Hardened-Trackback - Generates a single use trackback to help fight trackback spam.

imgViewJX - Refreshes an image on your main page from a selected directory.

Live Spell Checker - Adds a spell checker to the admin area to check your posts with.

Plug ‘n’ Play Google Map - Adds any post you make with longitude and latitude to a Google Map on a separate page. Very useful for blogs writing restaurant reviews or about events.

Wordpress Mailing List - Have a mailing list? Let readers subscribe and unsubscribe simply from the front page of your site.

WP e-Commerce - Adds a shopping cart to your WordPress powered site.

WP-Polls - Adds fully customizable polls for your readers to take.

WP-Post Ratings - Allows readers to rate your posts.

Zorpia That’s Hot Box - Allows visitors to send posts they like Zorpia.com and vote on their favorite articles.

30+ WordPress 3-Column Themes

———————05 Moon 1.0 - Not all themes have to be light colors to be pleasing so long as they are well organized. This is an excellent black theme, variable width and widget-ready.

Acid Green Pro - Fixed width, centered layout with widget ready sidebars. Tons of space in the sidebars for lots of goodies.

Alike Theme - Another darkish theme, but quite easy on the eyes, AdSense ready, fixed width and widget ready.

Ayumi - Mainly white with good highlights, easy to read and widget ready.

Bionic Jive - Compartmentalized well, clean read, variable width.

Blogging Simply - Fluid width, widget ready, loads of space in the sidebars for all the extras you want.

CitrusIsland - Variable width, widget ready, colors that pop.

Cordoba Green Park - Variable width, widget ready, easily changeable color schemes.

Creaker - Widget ready, understated and easy to ready, perfect for customizing.

Crunch - Available in multiple colors, easy to change header.

Daily Digest 3.0 - Fixed width, widget ready, newspaper style.

Fava Beans and a Nice Chianti - Very elegant looking, great for a foodie blog, variable width.

Fresh Apple - It’s based around a green apple, how can it not be soothing to the eye? Variable width and widget ready.

I Like Grey - Variable width with lots of boxes in each side column for customization.

i3Theme - For the Mac lovers in the crowd, now your WordPress blog can look like your favorite operating system.

Wordpress RSS Bot

WP-o-Matic makes autoblogging a snap by automatically creating posts from the RSS/Atom feeds you choose, which are organized into campaigns.

Supported features:

• Campaigs Feeds and all settings and options are now organized into campaigns for the perfect organization and comfort.
• Multiple feeds / categories: it’s possible to add as many feeds as you want, and add them to as many categories as you want. It’s not obstrusive, so you can also write your own posts to any of those categories.
• Every form of XML syndication supported. This includes RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 formats, the popular RSS 2.0 format, and the emerging Atom.
• Feed autodiscovery, which lets you add feeds without even knowing the exact URL. (Thanks Simplepie!)
• Unix cron and Wordpress cron jobs For maximum performance, you can make the RSS fetching process be called by a Unix cron job, or simply let Wordpress handle it.
• Comfortable interface. The admin is powered by a state of the art ajaxy interface that lets you handle your feeds with ease. Updated!
• Images caching for extreme performance and hotlinking bypassing.
• Words Rewriting. Regular expressions supported.
• Words Relinking. Define custom links for words you specify.
• Post templating. Define a global header and footer for the posts, or even for a specific feed. Add ads
• Campaigns import/export using OPML files. Easily import hundreds of feeds into new or existing campaigns!

Upcoming features:

• Improved export (to include campaign options, with an extended OPML)
• Image thumbnailing
• Improved importing with drag and drop
• Advanced templates
• Advanced filters

Download

Smart YouTube

Smart Youtube is a Wordpress Youtube Plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in your post, comments and in RSS feed.

The main purpose of the plugin is to correctly embed youtube videos into your blog post. The video will be shown in full in your RSS feed as well.

From version 2.0 Smart youtube also supports playback of high quality videos, works on iPhone and allows you to view videos in fullscreen.

The plugin is designed to be small and fast and not use any external resources. It has a number of customizable options.

Change Log: v2.1: - Smart Youtube videos are compatible with iPhone. - Fullscreen enabled

Download

WP-PostRatings Ajax

All the information (general, changelog, installation, upgrade, usage) you need about this plugin can be found here: WP-PostRatings Readme. It is the exact same readme.html is included in the zip package.

Download

WordPress Ajax Gallery Plugins

My last and hopefully best plugin for WordPress is a new Gallery plugin called NextGEN Gallery . It's named als "NextGeneration" according to the the development of the game consoles . More over it should indicate that I (try) to use all new possibilities of the great JQuery and the so called Web 2.0. Before I start writing the plugin I study all image and gallery plugins for WordPress, I figure out that some of them are really good and well designed, but I missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple galleries.

Features:

• Sortable Albums : Create your own sets of images
• Upload a Zip-File with pictures : Upload pictures in a zip-file (Not in Safe-mode)
• Watermark function : You can add a watermark image or text
• JavaScript Effect : Use any available popular image effect : Thickbox, Lightbox or Highslide
• Multiple CSS Stylesheet : Use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file
• Slideshow : Full integrated flash slideshow
• TinyMCE : Button integration for easy adding the gallery tags
• Sidebar Widget : Show a slideshow, random or recent picture at your sidebar
• Language support : Translated in more than 15 languages
• Upload tab integration : You have access to all pictures via the upload tab
• Tag support for images : Append related images to your posy

Download

WordPress.com Stats Plugins

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn't really highlight what's most interesting to me as a writer. That's why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic.

1. Upload stats.php to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
3. It will ask you to enter your WordPress.com API key, do so.
4. Sit back and wait a few minutes for your stats to come rolling in.

Download

W ordpress All in One SEO Pack Pluging

Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
• For Wordpress 2.3 you don't even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• You can fine-tune everything
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Install ;

1. Unzip into your /wp-content/plugins/ directory. If you're uploading it make sure to upload the top-level folder. Don't just upload all the php files and put them in /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress
3. Visit your SEO options (Options - All in One SEO) for Wordpress 2.3.x, (Settings - All in One SEO) for Wordpress 2.5.x
4. That's it!

Download

Ajax !

Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML), or AJAX, is a group of interrelated web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page.[1] Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object or through the use of Remote Scripting in browsers that do not support it. Despite the name, the use of JavaScript, XML, or asynchrony is not required.


While the term Ajax was coined in 2005,[4] techniques for the asynchronous loading of content date back to 1996, when Internet Explorer introduced the IFrame element.[5] Microsoft's Remote Scripting, introduced in 1998, acted as a more elegant replacement for these techniques, with data being pulled in by a Java applet with which the client side could communicate using JavaScript. In 1999, Microsoft created the XMLHttpRequest object as an ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, and developers of Mozilla and Safari followed soon after with native versions of the object.[6][5] On April 5, 2006 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first draft specification for the object in an attempt to create an official web standard.[7]

Thank you Wikipedia

jQuery Slider Gallery

Similar effect used to showcase the products on the Apple web site.

jQuery Slider Gallery

35mm Photo Viewer

This DHTML-driven browser-based app provides viewing of photos sorted by collection.

35mm Photo Viewer

prettyPhoto a jQuery lightbox

Here's my jQuery lightbox clone, I did it because those available are either not close enough to the real lightbox (lacking animations, not supporting galleries, etc ,etc) or were just not suiting my need.


DEMO ;

Browser support

This plugin has been tested and is known to work in the following browsers

• Firefox 3.0 (Mac/PC/Linux)
• Firefox 2.0 (Mac/PC)
• Safari 3.1.1 (Mac)
• Internet Explorer 6.0 (PC)
• Internet Explorer 7.0 (PC)

New unobtrusive dynamic flickr badge

A work colleague who runs Tobago Retreats asked me to create a gallery badge that automatically shows her latest flickr photos in her gallery and I started another flickr badge from scratch.

The outcome looks like this:

All you have to provide is a link to the flickr stream or the tagged images in your stream as a text link with a DIV with the class “flickrbadge” around it.

Check out the script and download it on its homepage: dynamic JavaScript flickr badge v2

Best flash web Site

Designers are always faced with trying to come up with an innovative website without design the same old grid based site. Designers have tried to take their work environment and bring it to the web by integrating navigation, and other web elements to create websites that make you feel you are navigating around your office. These few sites offer a good showcase of these elements.

Google AJAX Search Plugins

Google AJAX Search - Allows you to set search for just the contents of your site and the web, or another option allows for search of a second site such as your Flickr account.

30 AJAX WordPress Plugins

The WordPress blog platform has thousands of plugins, and many of them now use ajax to improve usability. Here’s our pick of more than 30 goods ones: don’t install them all at once.

For the blogger

AjaxWP - Adds AJAX to all aspects of your WordPress site speeding up the load times.

Alexa Rank - Display your Alexa rank with pride.

Ajax Comment Preview - Allows readers to preview their comment before submitting.

asTunes - Retrieves data from your Audioscrobbler/last.fm profile and posts it as a list on your blog.

Codebox - Side scrolling box for displaying code snippets.

Crossroads - Adds thumbnails and comments from your Flickr Flickr account.

FireStats - Full featured statistics including referrers and popular pages.

Google PageRank - Allows you to display your Google Page rank on your blog.

Hardened-Trackback - Generates a single use trackback to help fight trackback spam.

imgViewJX - Refreshes an image on your main page from a selected directory.

Live Spell Checker - Adds a spell checker to the admin area to check your posts with.

Plug ‘n’ Play Google Map - Adds any post you make with longitude and latitude to a Google Map on a separate page. Very useful for blogs writing restaurant reviews or about events.

Wordpress Mailing List - Have a mailing list? Let readers subscribe and unsubscribe simply from the front page of your site.

WP e-Commerce - Adds a shopping cart to your WordPress powered site.

WP-Polls - Adds fully customizable polls for your readers to take.

WP-Post Ratings - Allows readers to rate your posts.

Zorpia That’s Hot Box - Allows visitors to send posts they like Zorpia.com and vote on their favorite articles.

Wordpress Ajax comments

When working on a WordPress blog, posts often take center stage. However, the comments are often just as important - they create valuable discussion. And yet the default WordPress comment box is simplistic and uninspiring - here are Mashable’s favorite comment-focused WordPress plugins that can eliminate spam, improve the appearance of comments, and add more value to your posts.

Akismet - Antispam plugin from the creators of Wordpress that uses a central database of spam comments to flag spam. Requires a free API key from Wordpress.com

Spam Karma - Analyzes comments for spam based on a karma system.

Bad Behavior - Prevents spambots from even accessing your site by analyzing their HTTP requests.

Did You Pass Math? - Asks commenters a simple math question before their comments are posted.

Comment Timeout - Closes comments on old posts.