But Alex King and his team have now released a plugin that creates a great Post formats UI. A must-use!

I have always be bothered that if I wanted to have a nice-looking link format for, I had to use custom fields. Luckily, this plugin creates new meta boxes for each custom field that is needed to make your post formats look good.

WordPress Post Formats Admin UI : alexking.org.

The code is hosted on GitHub, so you can fork and contribute if you want to.

After a few days of work, here is what I came up with: WP Facebook Applications.

This WordPress plugin is simple to use: download it, install it and activate it on your blog, and a new “FB Applications” menu will appear. There you can create a new page for your Facebook tab, and you are guided through the process in order to keep it as fast and as simple as possible.

A few options are available: you define an image non fans of your page will see, then the content they will see once they “Like” your page. And you can decide to ad a Facebook comments form below that content.

Of course, this plugin is a work in progress: I would be happy to receive all your comments, remarks, ideas and bug reports in order to improve it and add new functionality if need. I actually have a few ideas and a small to-do list for future improvements:

• Limit the size of the images that are displayed on the Facebook pages
• Translate the plugin in my mother tongue, I have been lazy and did not deal with i18n so far;
• Somehow make it easier to create the app on Facebook’s side
• Allow the choice between the landing page for the non-fans, or the content directly
• Add more possibilites for other Facebook elements (like the comments)

What do you think? Will you be using my plugin for your next Facebook tab?

Useful links :

• Help me out with patches : WP-Facebook-applications sur GIThub
• Download the plugin : WP Facebook Applications sur wordpress.org
• Details, more information and documentation: WP Facebook Applications plugin documentation

If you want to follow the evolutions and news about the plugin, follow me on Twitter, or subscribe to this blog!

In order to propose an iPad optimized version to all wordpress.com users, Automattic partenered up with Onswipe to create what must be the best iPad WordPress plugin today. All wordpress.com blogs now have access to this feature, and for those os us using the self hosted version, you can download the plugin here :

iPad® meet WordPress.

Introducing Debug Bar « westi on wordpress.

But what about a full project management system, with a calendar, task management, projects, all this tied up to your WordPress dashboard? Of course that’s possible with WordPress! :)

Check it on CollabPress site now:

CollabPress v1.0 Beta Available Now!.

But today, Woothemes changes the game (once again!)

Tumblr dashboard is very easy to use: a menu proposes you different types of content, and you simply have to click to the one you want to post, and you are rbought to an interface where you have the tools to upload a photo, a video, add a link… This simplicity has convinced many users, and allows tumbler users to blog and reblog very quickly.

However, for those of us used to all the functionnalities from WordPress, and familiar with theme development with our favorite software, have wanted to port such features to WordPress instead of starting all over with a new blogging platform.

And today, the Wooteam introduces us with two great tools to do just that: an iPhone app and a free Tumblr plugin.

Using Custom taxonomies to transform the admin panel and the Front-end of your blog

Jeffikus from the Wooteam has released a free plugin that does a few things to transform your blog into a full tumblog:

• It adds new custom taxonomies to your backend
• It creates a new dashboard widget allowing you to post easily from your dashboard
• Thanks to the addition of a few template tags, the front-end of your blog will display the additional elements, and add an icon to show to your readers in which taxonomy you’ve posted.

I like this approach to tumbling, since it is much less hassle than previous attempts I have seen and tried myself: instead of using custon post types, and consequently have to mess up with the loop and with your feed output, it uses custom taxonomies and consequently integrates quickly and easily with your posts.

See the video of the plugin in action on the announcement post: Tumbling along | WooThemes.

Blog from your mobile in a few steps

What about mobile will you say; and you’re right: those of you who have experimented with custom post types and custom taxonomies before know that it is not handled by the iPhone application developed by the Automattic team. No problem, the wooteam planned everything, and releases an iPhone app together with their plugin:

These two new products will surely bring more users to Woothemes in the future. And you, will you try this plugin? Do you use another similar tool to customize the way you blog?

While I am not a big fan of this feature, it seems the WordPress team has decided it was worth including into the core engine, maybe as a first step towards a front-end editor.

In my opinion, this should have been available as a plugin, or rather as a core plugin, since the dev team planned to develop several plugins themselves and insure their maintenance.

That’s why I will be looking for a way to disable this admin bar as soon as 3.1 will come out. Luckily , OZH has already provided us with a plugin to disable this bar.

How To Remove WordPress’ Admin Bar « planetOzh.

Of course, this code he provides us can be included into your functions.php directly.

And you, what do you think of that admin bar? Will you be using it?

Another great plugin from Justin tadlock, that will allow you to master your plugins better than ever!

What this plugin does is add an extra meta box on the post editor that allows you to input custom content. This content is then displayed using the Snippet widget in any widget area you choose.

However there are a few plugins that I always install at first. I believe them to be the core of WordPress. Who knows, maybe one day we will find them included in every WordPress installation!

So what is important for a website and for its webmaster? At first I’d say monitoring, don’t you think?

1. Monitoring

Knowing who comes, when and from which browser is something important to me. And of course, what feels better than seeing your number of visitors growing after an interesting post? For that reason I always install two monitoring plugins with every WordPress installation.

Feedburner

Yes, RSS feed is important. Even more if you have a blog. Of course you could let it as it is and check the amount of subscribers in Google reader, but FeedBurner will tell you so much more about your readers. So I always set up a Feedburner account, and then I install Feedburner Feedsmith, the plugin by Feedburner.

Google Analytics

For the rest of the monitoring, Google analytics does a great job for me! Clear, complete, it offers varieties of settings to know everything about your readers. The last update the google team offered us brings again more functionalities to a good web stat software.

Thus for your website you will need a Google account and a Google analytics plugin. There are many and I personally use a simple one, but you can have a look at the other possibilities, it looks like some of them have real advanced settings.

For stats fans there are other possibilities than Google analytics out there. For more information check the 8 super sexy Web statistic software presented by OutlawDesignBlog.

So you can now see who is coming to check your website, who is subscribing to check the updates. Nobody came yet? Why not spread the word about your new great website?

2. Spreading your website

Once your website is ready, you may want the whole world to know about it. A few plugins will help you to do that.

Google sitemaps

Creating a sitemap of your website will obviously help the search engines to crawl the whole website content. Google XML Sitemaps WordPress plugin does more: every time you create a post or edit an existing one your sitemap is changed and all major search engines are informed about it. That will definitely help your website to appear among Google results faster.

To finish with Google, there is one last thing I do on Google pages when I set up a blog: I sign it on Google Webmaster tools. There you can set all Google results preferences and see when and how Google bot crawls your website.

Sociable

Nowadays another way to look for information or to browse good articles is social bookmarking. Digg, Delicious, Technorati and many other social bookmarking websites allow every user to “vote” for articles and websites they like. If they appreciate browsing through your websites content, why not helping them to share it with the other members of their favourite social bookmarking network?

With Sociable you can choose between dozens of different bookmarking websites to display at the bottom of your posts or everywhere on your website. I personally install it on all blogs as it is a useful service to offer to your readers at the bottom of the posts. I also install WP related posts on some blogs, as it is again a useful tool to propose to your readers after they read a post entry. It is important to remember that a lot of your readers arrive to your blog on a post page and not on the welcome page. Consequently it is always better to propose them something else to do after they read your post; sharing it with others, go read another post or comment are three different choices for different readers. You can also add a link to your RSS feed as it can be a third opportunity!

All In One SEO

As you are at it, why not optimizing your website for all search engines? The first thing I do after setting up a WordPress installation is changing the permalink structure to something more “pretty”: I personally use the following structure: /%category%/%postname%/ You can check the codex for more information about permalinks.

Then I always install the very same SEO plugin, All In One SEO Pack. It helps you optimizing your titles, your META tags, …

So it is done, you are now ready to welcome visitors!

3. Security

It is great to be well known but it also has its consequences. If you don’t pay attention you will quickly find out that a successful website attracts all kinds of spammers, hackers, … Luckily WordPress can protect us (knock on wood!) with regular updates to avoid any possible hack.

But as you can never be too careful, a few plugins help you look after your website.

Akismet

Installed by default on every WordPress installation, it has worked great for me so far. You can find some others around but Akismet does the job I am sure. I always activate it with my WordPress installations.

Database Backup

You never know what can happen to your blog. Backup your database every day is a must i my opinion. It can avoid you many problems the day your website goes down.

WP-DB Backup does the job by proposing either an immediate backup or scheduled backup that can be sent by mail or stocked on the FTP.

WP Super Cache

On high traffic pages or in cases when there can be some high dugg pages, I always install WP super cache. It is in my opinion a good insurance that the reader will never suffer from low speed loading pages. After all, isn’t it the main reason for all of us to leave a page?

WP Security Scan

Another great tool to protect yourself from hackers is WP Security Scan. This great and indispensable plugin will scan your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions. That is another “Must” for every WordPress installation.

Now you know what are the mandatory plugins to me? Have I missed something? Let me know your opinion!

Then WordPress admin bar is made for you! Designed by Viper007Bond this simple plugin will make blogging easier and faster. You will have more time for real blogging!
See the screenshots below:

 Download WordPress admin bar plugin