• Italian (complete; even got two – by Gianni Diurno and by Giacomo Ross. Whoops, my fault.)
• Danish (complete; by Georg S. Adamsen)
• Chinese, Simplified (complete; by HankYang)
• Dutch (complete; by Gideon van Melle)
• German (complete; by Alex Frison)
• French (complete; by Whiler)

If you’d like to create your own localization, please notify me via a comment or an email first so that I can add you to the list above. Otherwise we might get (another) tricky situation with two users sending in two independent translations for the same language.

Here are some useful resources related to plugin translation :

• List of translation tools at WordPress Codex
• Translating WordPress Plugins & Themes
• PO file format
• PO file header format

Feature Highlights

• Automatically cloak links in any part of your site. This means you can also cloak links in the sidebar, footer, etc.
• Comes with multiple cloaking techniques, like the ability to display the cloaked link in a frame or hide the HTTP referer info.
• Improved click statistics + optional Google Analytics integration.
• Gives you more control over which links get cloaked – e.g. you can cloak a bunch of links based on their domain name.
• Backwards compatible with the free version – the settings will be imported automatically and any links you’ve cloaked using the <!–cloak–> tag or the “Cloak All” mode will continue to be cloaked with no additional effort on your part. The old “static” cloaked links can be imported with a few clicks.
• A new cool name – Eclipse Link Cloaker

You can find a more complete list of features (along with screenshots and tutorials) on the plugins website.

Wait, “Premium”?

Yes, that curious adjective means the plugin also comes with a price-tag. Not to worry though – during the initial release period you can grab the new plugin for a meagre sum of $25 and apply it’s awesome cloaking power to any number of sites. There’s even a 100% money-back guarantee, so you wouldn’t really be risking anything.

Miscellaneous Notes

Phew. I hope that didn’t sound too much like sales talk. Anyway, there are a few more minor points I’d like to mention :

• There will be an affiliate program with 50%-70% commissions. It’s already functional now (so if you have any special ideas, let me know), I just haven’t set up the public-facing affiliate how-to and such.
• The plugin will have free, automatic updates and can be updated using the same interface that is used to update plugins hosted on wordpress.org.
• Obviously, there’s a little bit of DRM involved.
• mod_rewrite/pretty permalinks are no longer required. The plugin automatically detects what kind permalink structure the user has and alters it’s cloaked URLs appropriately.

If you have any questions or doubts, feel free to leave a comment.

So I created Force Update Check, a small plugin that gives you the ability to make WP check for plugin, theme and core upgrades immediately. Just install it and go to Plugins -> Check Updates Now whenever you want to run the update check. Alternatively, you can also find it in the list of installed plugin in  the Plugins tab and click the “Run” action link.

Here’s a screenshot of the plugin in action :  

You can click the “Found XYZ updates!” links to go to the appropriate Dashboard tab and view/install the available updates.

Download

force-update-check.zip (2 KB)

Requirements

• WordPress 2.8+

This gave me the idea to write a PHP script that can generate a wordpress.org-compatible changelog from the revision log. It works for any plugin hosted in the official plugins directory and can be a handy starting point for adding a changelog to plugins that don’t have it yet :

• Run the changelog generator
• Download the source code (97 KB, requires PHP 5)

For those too lazy to click one of the above links, here’s a screenshot :

And I really do need to stop making these small hacks

Clik the image to go to the nomination screen with WordPress pre-selected

Hat tip to Ozh for the info.

Sidenote : An RSS feed is not the only thing WordPress Ideas is missing usability-wise : the site only shows a handful of latest ideas, there’s no way to browse older submissions, no way to sort the results, the search page also displays only the first 20 or so results (regardless of the query!) and so on. It seems I’m not the only one to notice this, but so far the situation is unchanged.

I did write a scraper script and dump the entire idea list into a local MySQL database for easy searching, but I don’t think it would be legal for me to post that here

Commercial plugins are a rare sight in the WordPress community, so I want to discuss the general idea of for-pay WP plugins in more detail and provide my take on the relevant issues that are often raised in this regard.

Licensing Woes

The first point of contention seems to be whether plugins have to be GPL-compatible. Since WordPress is GPL all “derivative work” must also use a compatible license, which would allow the user to freely modify and redistribute (or even resell) the source code – something that is certainly not conducive to plugin authors making a profit. This question basically boils down to deciding whether plugins qualify as “derivative work”. The short answer to that is “Yes, except for very complex plugins”. Otto explains it well in this comment (excerpt) :

Your simpler plugins are generally heavily derivative. They tend to be just a few functions, hooked directly into WordPress in specific places. The functions themselves derive their calling methods from the necessity of how WordPress expects them to hook in, and so they are derivatives of it.

Complex plugins, on the other hand, tend to be more independent. They have several files, their own mechanisms for operation, and sometimes there’s just one “plugin” file that hooks the WordPress bits up with the plugin’s bits. These have a better case for being separate works.

Otto also mentions Bad Behaviour as an example of a complex plugin that is largely independent of the WordPress core and even has versions for other blogging systems. The caching plugin PHP Speedy WP might qualify as another mostly independent plugin.

Still, the majority of plugins are deeply integrated with WP and thus need to be GPL-licensed. So I’m also going to release my commercial plugin with a GPL-compatible license.

The next question is whether you can legally sell GPL software. This is an easy one to answer. Here’s what the official GPL FAQ says about it :

Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?

Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)

The Very Model of a Businessman

Of course, just slapping a “GPL” label on a for-pay plugin is hardly the solution – as I mentioned before, the first person who buys it could just turn around and start giving it away for free! So if you want to make money by creating GPL software you need concoct a business model that takes the peculiarities of this licensing scheme into account.

There are two possible business models that I can think of :

• Paid support. Make the plugin itself free, but only charge for answering users’ questions. Alternatively, sell the plugin and include “unlimited” support in the price.
• Service-based. This mostly applies only to plugins that act as wrappers for an online service/API. The plugin can be fully GPL-compliant and but access to the remote service needn’t be. For example, you can limit the number of API requests non-paying users can make, or offer access to additional API features for a modest subscription fee. This is the business model of plugins like Akismet and After The Deadline.

I intend to use a combination of the two for my plugin.

But Wait, Is There a Market?

Finally, a perfectly legal business plan will be of no use if no-one wants to buy your software. I’ll readily admit that this problem isn’t limited to WP plugins, but it I must say it’s still especially pronounced in the WordPress community – people have grown used to getting free stuff. Premium themes are still a source of much contention and commercial plugins are extremely rare and, at least for the time being, confined to a few small niches.

The best solution I’ve seen suggested so far is creating an online store similar to the iPhone App Store. The main objection to this idea is that often users install a plugin just to see if it does what they want, and it would be wrong to force them to pay in advance for a product of unknown quality. However, this is a solvable problem. For example, you could just give the user a free 10-day trial and ask them to buy the plugin if they still want to use it afterwards. Make it so that unregistered users don’t get automatic updates, etc. This wouldn’t even be that hard to implement and enforce if done at the core level – the WordPress.org plugin repository already tracks what plugins you use.

Either way, it will probably be a while before we see anything like that implemented. Luckily my own commercial plugin falls under one of the few niches where paid plugins are relatively common and expected – Internet marketing. So I think I have a sufficiently good shot at selling a few copies and making an obscenely large sum of money

Comments and opinions are welcome.

Preface

The essence of “social proof” is simple : when people don’t have a lot of information about something, they will usually look at what other people think or do in a similar situation and act accordingly. This can happen both subconsciously (see e.g. the halo effect) and very explicitly, like when people check IMDB ratings before deciding which movie to see. You can use this behaviour to your advantage by presenting your visitors with positive social proof about your site or product.

And one last note before we go ahead with specific examples : obviously, social proof is only useful when it says something good about your offerings. If you don’t have much to show in the way of RSS subscribers (for example), just don’t display that number on your site.

Five Glorious (Yet Subtle) Techniques

1. “Popular posts”

This is one of the easiest approaches – simply put up a sidebar widget listing the most popular posts on your site. You can use a plugin like Popularity Contest or Popular Posts to generate it based on view count, or just write the list yourself. This is especially useful for converting first-time visitors into returning readers as they will be more likely to see your best content and become properly impressed. As an added benefit, it also subtly shows that your site is popular enough to have a “Popular posts” list.

2. Ratings

Ratings are a double-edged sword. They’re easy to set up with a plugin like WP-PostRatings and a 5-star rating on an article serves an obvious sign of quality for new visitors. However, you will need a sufficiently popular site to even get any ratings in the first place, and not all of them will be favorable. Also, the first few voters can have a huge influence on the eventual outcome because the later voters will take the current average rating into account when posting their own. There are, of course, ways to abuse this effect…

3. Download count

Do you offer downloads on your site? If yes, set up a download monitor and display the number of downloads to the visitors. Users are more likely to download something when they can see that a lot of other people have already done it. Basically, a download is also an indirect vote. You can use WordPress Download Monitor or WP-DownloadManager to add download monitoring to your site.

(Hmm, I really should take my own advice on this one.)

4. Comment count

Got an impressive number comments? Show it off with a stylish badge. This will show your visitors that discussion is welcomed on your site and encourage them to leave a comment of their own. As with visitor/download count, the amount of comments can also inform the user how obscenely popular your site is.

5. Social bookmarking badges

At least for the purposes of this post, social bookmarking is an off-site ratings system and should be treated appropriately. It’s also relatively niche, so, compared to on-site ratings, you will need considerably more visitors to get any number of votes. On the other hand, social bookmarking is the supreme example of social proof at work, so it would be unforgivenable not to include it in this post.

I won’t list any specific plugins for this one – you can find the relevant widget(s) on each particular site.

The Closing Rant

The above tips won’t make you an Internet celebrity overnight. However, little details like these can be what makes a potential reader/customer choose to trust your site over the myriad other sites in your niche. The success of social bookmarking, social marketing, and other “social-whatever” sites is a clear indication that people trust social proof works, often better than other types of advertising and PR.

It’s also an indication that we are sliding pleasantly towards the modes of communication popular with our honorable ancestors, the tribes-folk of the Hunter-Gatherer Town

What I found especially interesting is how AtD can detect misused words. For example, most spell checkers would blindly assume that the sentence “I don’t know if it’s wrong or rite” is correct because the word “rite” is in their dictionary. “After the Deadline” on the other hand uses contextual spell check and will flag “rite” as a mistake, suggesting you use “right” instead. Well, at least that’s the theory. I managed to get that particular example to work after a few tries, but apparently this feature still needs some work.

The plugin itself is actually a wrapper for the AfterTheDeadline.com API service. This means that like with Akismet, you will need to sign up for an account and get an API key before you can use the WP plugin. The service is free for casual users but large sites and prolific writers are encouraged to upgrade to a subscription-based service plan.

The only drawback is that AtD only supports English and the author isn’t planning to add other languages anytime soon. Nevertheless, the plugin will certainly be useful to the myriad English bloggers, and also to people who aren’t native English speakers yet still choose to write in the de-facto lingua franca.

Around 20 people downloaded the beta version. I haven’t received any death threats related to that release, so I’m just going to go ahead and presume there are no critical bugs in the new code. But if you do find anything that looks like a glitch feel free to report it in the comment section or via my contact page.

What’s New

• Check links in bookmarks (AKA the blogroll).
• Check links in custom fields (optional). You need to list the custom fields you want to be checked in Settings -> Link Checker. At the moment the plugin is only able to parse fields that contain a complete URL and nothing more. Note that when you add a new field to the configuration, it will take a while before the plugin re-parses your posts and detects the field values.
• Manage all links from one page. You can view, edit or remove broken links, redirects and any other link in any post, custom field or the blogroll, from one page.
• An all-new dashboard widget that displays status info about broken links. To save dashboard space you can close the widget and configure it to automatically pop open if problematic links are detected (this is actually on by default).
• Improved database efficiency. For example, information about URLs and places where they are used is now stored separately. This is more elegant and enables some neat features.
• Check each URL only once per the user-configured period (except broken links that are still double-checked). Previously, the plugin would check links that are used in X different posts X times in a row.
• Link modifications are applied to all posts automatically. You can edit or delete a link via the plugin’s tab and all the posts, custom fields and bookmarks will be automatically updated to reflect the change.
• Posts are only re-parsed when they change. Previously the plugin would periodically re-check each post for new links which was wasteful and hurt performance.
• All received HTTP headers are now included in the detailed log (previously only the last one was shown).
• Generally more informative logs.
• You can quickly add URLs to the exclusion list by clicking the “Exclude” button.
• Added paging support to the link list.
• Everything runs on jQuery instead of Prototype now.
• Everything is way more object-oriented now.
• Everything uses AJAX the “proper” way now by calling admin-ajax.php instead of a separate plugin file.
• Significantly improved database performance. Some queries are still slow since it’s not practical to put an index on a DATETIME column, but overall the plugin uses the WordPress DB much more efficiently.
• Sorting features are gone, for now. I’ll probably add a number of sorting options in a later version.
• Improved UI that’s more in line with WP 2.7 style. For example, most action links in the “Broken Links” tab only show up when you hover over the corresponding row.
• Links in custom fields or the blogroll get an appropriate icon in the broken link list.
• The URL editing feature is more elegant and there’s finally a “Cancel” button.
• More intuitive AJAX behaviour. For example, when an AJAX call completes it will flash the appropriate row green or do something else to indicate that it was successful.
• No more hidden debug output in HTML comments. I’ve switched to the excellent FirePHP + FireBug debugging combo and it works great.
• Only one instance of the link checker can be active at one time. Previously it would just plough on, blissfully unaware of race conditions and other related nastiness. This behaviour was probably what caused the mysterious slowdowns and inexplicable bugs that a few users encoutered. Now the worker function uses file locking and will abort if there’s already another worker running.
• The minimum required WordPress version is now 2.7. If you’re using something older, upgrade or get an older version of the plugin from the wordpress.org archives. Progress marches on, humans.

To-Do

These are the features that will probably be implemented in the relatively near future (i.e. before the winter ).

• Result sorting on the “Broken Links” page.
• Cron support.
• Some kind of pop-up tooltips for broken links in posts.
• More optimization, e.g. don’t load the entire plugin when it’s not required.
• An option to only check internal and/or external links.
• Localization support.
• Checking links in comments. Maybe. I’m still not convinced that would be all that useful.

1.0 ?

In conclusion, I’m quite pleased with how the update has turned out. I was really tempted to break away from the fractional versioning scheme I’ve used for this plugin since the beginning and label this the true and complete “1.0″ release, but the thought that there will almost certainly be a load of new bugs due to all the major changes made me reconsider. Maybe after all the to-do items are implemented…

By the time it gets to 1.0 this will probably the most powerful and robust plugin I’ve ever created. And then the robot uprising will happen.