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Have you ever written a plugin for WordPress? Well, if you’re interested, there’s a guide on the WordPress Codex that should get your started. Bear in mind though, that this just scratches the surface of what you need to know to develop your own plugins. Before you even get started, you need to learn a bit of PHP, then learn about the ecosystem. It can be a bit like banging your head on ping pong tables sometimes .. you hit a bug and nothing seems to work. Then you find a solution and it’s all up in the air again.

If you think you might be interested in all this, check out this collection of 100+ Massive WordPress Tutorials

If you’re looking for a new theme, there are a number of theme directories that can help you find what you’re looking for. One interesting one is Top WP Themes, a collection of Wordpress themes that are great for any circumstance. There are themes you can use for plain blogs, themes you can use for ecommerce sites; themes you can use to sell ballet shoes and themes you can use can use to sell Baldwin hardware; themes to set up a college blog , or themes to set up a celebrity blog.

Check it out, you may find something exciting.

If you’re looking for a good place to learn about WordPress, there’s a great website called WpTavern that brings together a wealth of information about plugins, themes and other related products. There’s information about BuddyPress, BBPress and WPMU; three products that together make one awesome social network. There’s more about that in the future, but that’s a project I can’t speak about at the moment.

It doesn’t matter if you have a blog about jokes, or one about LCD HDTV; it’s always best to learn as much about the platform you’re using; just so that you can use it to the best of its ability.

Ever had the need to sell eBooks online? Well, there’s a great plugin that lets you do this: the WordPress eStore. So what does the plugin do? Here’s a short synopsis:

In a Nutshell… this sleek WordPress shopping cart plugin allows you to sell any form of digital products and services from your wordpress blog securely with complete automation. What I mean by complete automation is that once you set it up the whole process (The buying and the delivering of the product without revealing the real URL of the product) works on its own

That’s a pretty powerful product, and a plugin I probably wouldn’t mind paying for. You can use it to sell eBooks for example, about any topic you like, from web programming all the way to how to get the best auto insurance quote around. Check out WordPress eStore

I just got a question from a friend who asked me if it’s possible to customise a new theme while keeping her Wordpress site available to normal visitors on the old theme. I didn’t think this was possible, so my first instinct was to suggest using Maintenance Mode to put the site offline while she’s customising the theme. I’ve used this plugin extensively in the past, but it was always involved in the creation of a new site; and she didn’t really want to expose her user to any downtime.

That’s when I came across Theme Test Drive. It’s a plugin that lets Administrators see and customise one theme, while everyone else uses the standard theme. It’s particularly useful if your new theme has dirty tricks like hidden links or links to the “best colon cleanser” site that you really prefer search engines not to see. It’s a great addition to a Wordpress developer’s arsenal and comes very well recommended.

It’s great to see that the WordPress team has set up the WordPress Foundation with the express aim:

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come.

It’s a sure sign that the platform is maturing and it’s nice to see that care is being taken to protect the brand and the software. It doesn’t matter if you’re building healthcare job search engine, or a joke shop; the platform you run on is paramount to the longevity of your business.

There are a hundreds if not thousands of different plugins you can deploy to your Wordpress blog, but if you’re looking for the cream of the crop, there’s no better place to look than the Wordpress Most Popular Plugin Page, which shows the plugins that have been downloaded most often. This includes plugins such as All in One SEO Pack and Google XMl Sitemaps, two plugins I always deploy on any WordPress site I push out.

The list of available plugins is as long as the distance from here to the gulf shores alabama, but if you look at the most popular plugins, you can get a good idea of what other people out there are using. Check out the top ones.

With WordPress 2.9 downloaded almost 2.5 million times so far, you can easily imagine how many new WordPress sites get deployed every day. That number is probably just a subset of the number of WordPress sites out there, after all, many don’t get refreshed every time a new version of WordPress comes out. Just this week, I’ve pushed out SherrilynneStarkie.com and am working on jcc.im. I know that a friend of mine is working on the All Saints, Hove site too, and that’s just today.

I think part of the attraction is the fact that it’s so easy to do build something. Putting a site together is quite easy and I actually quite enjoy popping into a coffee shop, relaxing in one of their modern sofas, getting an Internet connection and tweaking one of my sites.

Are you using WordPress yourself yet?

I’ve just put a new Wordpress site live called: SherilynneStarkie.com which, as you probably guessed, is my friend Sherrilynne’s new website. She decided to go down the personal brand route and this site pulls together information about her, her new blogging platform and a platform for her lifestream. They’re all things that are easy to do with Wordpress regardless on if you have a personal website, or a site about the Outer Banks.

The site uses a free version of a theme called Arthemia which works really nicely and comes very much recommended. Next time I might even use the premium version.

Interesting post down on the Wordpress blog that talks about the plans that are being made for 2010. There are some interesting developments, from new mailing lists and new initiatives. The User Interface and User Experience is a pretty important part of a system, because it’s the part that users see every day. And focusing on this is a sign that the product is mature and handling the day-to-day really well.

In my mind, a User Interface is like one of these plasma mounts for your new TV. It’s not the reason you bought your TV, but living without it just makes it so much harder, doesn’t it?