After a few months of planning and work, I’ve finally released my new WordPress plugin. I’d had the idea sine around the time I started selling 125×125 ads on Webmaster-Source. I thought it was a bit of a pain to hard-code ads in and manually take them down after their run was over. And I don’t like figuring out end dates by counting ahead on a calendar either. That’s why I put together WP125, a WordPress plugin for easy 125×125 ad management.

I built the plugin to simplfy the management of 125×125 ads, and lower the barrier to get started selling them a little. Some of the features include

• Custom ad layout options.
• A widget to drop into your sidebar to make it easier to set the plugin up. Or you can use a template tag if you’re pro-code like me.
• Click tracking.
• Ads are automatically taken down on their end date.
• The plugin can figure out an ad’s expiration date automatically, based off how many days you say the ad should run for (no more counting forward on your calendar!). It took a bit of time and effort to get this feature working, but it was certainly worth it.

Try the plugin out, and tell me what you think. It’s a first release (1.0.0), and it’s barely been out tweleve hours, so it may have some bugs or interface oddities that need fixing. (It’s not on Wordpress plugin site quite yet either, but I’m working on that…) Tell me what you like, what needs fixing, etc.

I think WP125 is off to a good start, but I had to shave off a couple features I’d originally planned in order to get it out the door in time for the WLTC WordPress Plugin Competition. Sadly, that means I’m unable to use it on Webmaster-Source to manage my ads. I built the plugin to work the way I figured most people woud prefer, and pushed my preferences to the side for now. I handle my ads a little differently than other people, and it would have taken too much extra time and work to build support for that into the plugin. Hopefully I’ll have the time to include the settings I’d like at a later date.

Enjoy the plugin, and send your feedback along!

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301 redirects are useful for numerous things. If you change a post slug is Wordpress, then you can place a 301 redirect so anyone going to the old URL will be redirected to the new one. This had the added bonus of letting search engines know (when they re-crawl your site) that they need to update the URL they have stored. Others use 301 redirects when they use affiliate links, so no PageRank is passed on, and so if the affiliate URL changes, they can update their links by just changing the redirect target.

There are plenty of ways to do 301 redirects. You can use the PHP Header() command, you can edit your .htaccess files (using the mod_rewrite feature), etc. Mod_rewrite is generally the most versatile method, but it’s a big pain in the neck.

The Urban Giraffe blog has released a neat plugin that handles all of this for you. Their 301 redirection plugin makes it insanely easy to add custom redirects. I’d thought of writing a plugin like this before, but it looks like they beat me to it. Take a look.