Core Control is a plugin that lets you monitor and adjust several parts of WordPress for diagnostic and development purposes. It makes it easy to view registered WP-Cron events, and trigger them with a click. It can also force WordPress to check for ore, plugin or theme updates, log any HTTP requests WordPress makes to external servers and determine which filesystem access method WordPress is using.

Alex King and his company Crowd Favorite have a proposed solution. Their plugin adds a really nice UI to the New Post screen, with tabs that appear depending on which Post Formats your theme enables and different input fields that change depending on which tab is selected.

In addition to the way cool plugin, they have a sensible naming convention for custom fields to go along with it. I think it would great if the Core team adopted that as a recommendation for theme developers, and incorporated the UI plugin into WordPress proper.

Alex King did say, back in November, that he planned to suggest it to the Core developers once WordPress 3.3 shipped, so keep your fingers crossed.

WordPress Post Formats Admin UI [Alex King]

The Star Wars wiki (starwars.wikia.com) is every bit as bad as TV Tropes. Send help!

— Matt Harzewski (@redwall_hp) December 19, 2011

The latest version of my Tweetable plugin, version 1.2.4, includes support for Twitter’s new embedding API, which enables you to do that with minimal effort. If you have the plugin installed (and “Auto-embeds” is turned on in the Media page of your Settings), you can just paste a properly-formatted URL from Twitter onto a new line in your post. After you hit Publish, it will appear in your post, thanks to the magic of oEmbed.

The best part? This is going to be built-in to WordPress 3.4, so you have ensured forward-compatibility. Otto, one of the major contributors to the WordPress core, has already worked up a patch and it is currently slated to be included in version 3.4. Beat me to it.

This is one of our biggest release to date and it’s absolutely free. WooCommerce is an all-new plugin application and library of integrated themes for WordPress that help individuals and businesses turn their sites into professional, e-commerce stores. Our aim for WooCommerce is to be an e-commerce toolkit that allows anyone to sell anything online. View the WooCommerce page to see all the powerful features packed into the plugin.

WooCommerce is a fork of the lesser-known Jigoshop plugin, with a bunch of nice additions. This has been the cause of some controversy about the “ethics” behind the decision, despite it being 100% legal under the GPL. Personally, I can see merits to both sides of the argument, but I think it should encourage competition. The Jigoshop team should be able to absorb some of the improvements WooThemes made to their fork back into Jigoshop as well.

How do you make one of those?

If you don’t mind making your own from scratch, Michael from Pro Blog Design has a great tutorial. His floating box looks nice, moves smoothly and is very customizable, since you’re adding it directly to your theme.

If you need a plugin, Sharebar and Digg Digg both create a similar result with much less effort, but they don’t look quite as nice.

With the theme you can have a look at all of the globals, see any errors generated, and keep tabs on the MySQL queries (including their execution times) behind the page generation. It even includes a profiler.

You can choose which of the services are displayed, as well as hide the chart if you wish to have the widget be a bit more compact.

StatDash is my first item to be released on Code Canyon. It’s priced at $8, and is GPL compliant of course.

Using WordPress short codes, this plugin will allow you to easily insert message boxes and buttons into your WordPress posts and pages. With easy to use options, there are over 1,000 possible display configurations. All buttons and message boxes include multiple color and size options.

I haven’t tried it out myself, but it seems like a good plugin. The code is very straightforward, too. It shouldn’t be too difficult to override the default stylesheet in favor of your own box styling, if you’re not a fan of the default.

Once a user has submitted a post, it’s saved as a “Draft” by default, but may optionally be set to “Publish Immediately” or even to publish if the author has “x” number of approved submissions. The plugin also displays a User Submitted Posts button at the top of the Posts Page that lets you filter all user-submitted posts/drafts with the click of a button.

This seems like a great option for community-oriented blogs looking for a way to open up to guest submissions. I do wonder whether spam submissions might get to be a problem, though. It could be handy if the plugin could hook into the Akismet API or at least offer a CAPTCHA option.

There’s now a convenient MediaElement.js WordPress plugin that gives you easy-to-use shortcodes for use in the post editor. To embed a video when you have the plugin installed, all you have to do is put this in your post:

[video src="http://example.org/video.mp4" width="640" height="480"]

The MPEG 4 video will be served-up to supporting browsers, and others get the Flash backup. Supported formats also include WebM, MP3 and Ogg Theora. Multiple formats can be specified in one shortcode, if you have encoded multiple versions. You can serve Safari and Mobile Safari an MP4 version, Firefox an Ogg Theora, and Chrome the little-supported WebM.