WordPress 3.0.3 is now available and is a security update for all previous WordPress versions.

This release fixes an issue with the remote publishing interface, which under certain circumstances allowed Author and Contributor level users to improperly edit, publish or delete posts. This issue only affect sites that have “remote publishing” enabled. Remote publishing is disabled by default so this update is only required if you have it enabled. However, it is no harm to upgrade your WordPress installation to this latest version as the Askimet spam blocker plugin also gets an update to version 2.5!

You can download WordPress 3.0.3 or update automatically from within your admin panel by visiting the Dashboard/Updates section in your website’s admin area.

Some of the new features include;

• 404 error monitoring – capturing a log of 404 errors
• Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don’t exist
• Redirection methods – redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrer!

Existing features of the Redirection plugin include:

• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
• Manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file
• Full regular expression support
• Apache .htaccess is not required – works entirely inside WordPress
• Strip or add www to all your WordPress pages
• Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
• Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL
• Fully localized

To download the Redirection plugin you can visit the wordress plugin page. For more information about this plugin and the extentive options available you visit the authors Redirection Plugin page.

The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Also, it automatically notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post on your blog. More information about what XML-Sitemaps are and how they can help you to get indexed by the major search engines can be found at Sitemaps.org and the searchenginewatch blog.

To download you can visit the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin WordPress page or visit the authors website here.

The FLV Embed’s main features are its ease of installation and a no bells and whistles approach to getting this plugin to display FLV files instantly on your blog!

Plugin Features

• uses simple, intuitive tags to generate Flash video (FLV) movies for your posts
• supports video sitemap generation
• standards compliant: valid XHTML
• many options are configurable, such as autostart, show/hide control bar, player colour, poster image, full screen button etc.
• highly interactive admin option panel for player configuration
• supports text only output for RSS that prompt readers to visit the original post for Flash content
• supports outputting poster image for RSS if desired
• accessibility: requires Javascript to display FLV player, but will prompt user to enable Javascript when disabled
• accessibility: prompt user to download latest Flash player if it is not installed or too old
• accessibility: no annoying “click to activate” for IE users

Installation

1. Download the plugin from FLV Embed
2. Extract to the “flv-embed” folder
3. Upload the “flv-embed” folder to your WordPress plugin directory, usually “wp-content/plugins”
4. Activate the plugin in your WordPress admin panel

Usage

The great thing about this plugin is it uses one universal, standard tag style, which is;

[ flv:url width height] (remove space before flv when using it yourself!)

• url – the URL of the FLV file you want to embed, the path can either be site relative or absolute
• width – width of the FLV movie
• height – height of the FLV movie

Jeroen’s FLV Player also supports the use of poster frames or clip preview frames so that you can use a single still image from anywhere in the FLV video and have it display automatically once the flash player is loaded. (For an example of this see the video at the start of this post.)

A great time-saver when using this plugin is that if you upload an FLV and JPG image and they both have the same name, e.g. demo.flv and demo.jpg, it means you can still use the short bit of code above and it will automatically display the JPG as the preview picture for the video clip. Very Nice!

Download

You can download the FLV Embed plugin 1.0 for WordPress and try it out for yourself here.

I love it!

Because this plugin has been updated so often, there has been a small bit of confusion about the exact download location for it. The latest version of the plugin can be downloaded from here, and it is well worth checking the creators blog page here; All In One SEO Pack for WordPress, which features the latest news about updated versions.

Video Tutorial

And now Tubetorial has just released a new All In One SEO Pack Video Tutorial about this great plugin. The video is Part 1 of a brand new 7-Part series called “7 Must Have Killer Plugins”. I would definitely agreed that the All In One SEO Pack should be first and the tutorial is sure to be of use to those that may be discovering this plugin for the first time, or even those that have been using it for a while and would just like to see what new features have been added recently. A great tutorial and I’m already looking forward to the other 6 videos in this series.

The Tubetorial All In SEO Pack Video Tutorial can be viewed here.

Plugin Download

To download the latest version of the All in One SEO Pack plugin please visit here.

This Plugin has many features built into it such as; support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and lots more.

Requirements

The updated Sitemap Generator Plugin plugin requires WordPress 2.1 or later.

Download

The Sitemap Generator Plugin V3.01 can be downloaded here.

The plugin does several things at once in order to do the Search Engine Optimization (‘SEO’ for short) for your WordPress blog;

The plugin optimizes all your blog titles for you. Post titles are hugely important for SEO and with this plugin these will be re-written on the fly, with the actual post title coming first, then your blog name. E.g. the post title for this post will become something like ‘All In One SEO Plugin | Blogcarta.com’ instead of the default method of having the blog title first and the post title second, ‘Blogcarta.com | All In One SEO Plugin‘. This also means there will be no more Archive, etc, in your title.

Secondly, categories for a post will get output as Meta keywords. Since posts are already tagged with categories they will be automatically added as Meta keywords. Additional keywords can be added in the Write Post page in the admin area. Also with this plugin post excerpts will become the Meta description for the post.

Thirdly, pages that are just fillers (category pages etc.) will automatically get a content=”noindex,follow” to avoid the duplicate content issue in the search engines.

This is a very effective plugin and well worth adding to your blog. It’s simply a matter of uploading the plugin and activating it to give your blog a great SEO boost.

Download

To download the All In One SEO Pack visit; http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

This new extend section of WordPress.org features a complete Plugins Directory where you can browse, download, rate and comment on all of your favorite plugins. The home page has a

• Featured Plugin section,
• Most Popular Plugin section,
• Newest Plugins section and also a
• Recently Added plugins section.

There is also a very cool Most Popular Tags section which shows the top plugins per section (tag) at this very moment. These tags are very revealing as it clearly illustrates the popularity of Skype and of the social networking aspect of WordPress blogging. Some of the current Popular Tags include; skype plugins, sociable plugins, digg buttons and interestingly, mobilerss plugins.

I highly recommend that you check out the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Note: The plugin requires that you have the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin or the Wasabi Related Posts plugin installed and activated.

This new plugin is being developed by Solo Technology, and looks set to be an instant hit. There are numerous advantages to having related posts appearing within your RSS feed. It will certainly help you to get your feed readers to visit your blog more often, and almost definitely increase your blog pageviews. Future versions of this plugin are sure to enhance your RSS feed further. It is well worth getting ahead of the pack on this one and checking out this plugin.

Download

The Add Related Posts To Your Feed plugin can be downloaded here.

Once installed there are several new options under the Manage/Backup menu in your WordPress admin panel. The top section of the Backup screen is for doing immediate backups while the bottom section is for scheduling automatic backups. The created backup will be in the form of a SQL script file that contains all the data of your blog as well as the proper commands to restore it. To restore the data you will need to execute the SQL on your MySQL database, using PHPMyAdmin, which will recreate the tables and repopulate the data into the proper fields.

The new automatic backup feature makes this a must-have plugin to have on your blog. Check it out.

Download: WordPress Database Backup Plugin