I’ve tried a number of different WordPress plugins that display a list of related posts and couldn’t really find one I liked. A lot of them provided “results” that weren’t related, or even in the same ballpark, as the post they were being display on.

Luckily, I discovered Similar Posts by Rob Marsh.

Rob’s plugin is a little bit more technical than most (it even has an extensive help page) but the quality of its results can not be beat. I had to run a simple SQL query to get the plugin to work initially. That’s a pretty big barrier to entry for a lot of novice programmer types but if you can figure it out, or get help, Similar Posts is well worth the effort.

This week’s WordPress plugin, RSS Footer by Joost de Valk, has become very popular recently. I normally try to focus on lesser known plugins but as I’m pushing out more posts on this blog the problem of people scraping my content is becoming more prevalent. That’s where RSS Footer comes into play.

With RSS Footer you can turn the tables on the scrapers and add text and links to your posts that only appear on the RSS feed. Now when your feed gets scraped and the content is posted on an auto-blog you can get an instant backlink to your site. Pretty clever.

Small Potato, of WPDesigner fame, launched a brand new WordPress themes club this week that is either sheer brilliance or total lunacy.

This isn’t going to be your ordinary theme subscription service. This club will offer its members at least 12 brand new WordPress themes every year for the annual price of… $5.

You read that right. Members get at least 12 WordPress themes for $5. One of the best WordPress designers on the scene is going to offer everyone crazy value through this themes club.

The Deal of the Year?

Small Potato could have probably released a new premium theme once a month (read my interview with him about premium themes) and made a financial killing. So why not?

Here’s a quote from his press pack:

A large part of the $5 idea is making money off of users that would never pay for a theme in the first place by providing high quality at a low price and then invest that money in creating even better, top notch themes that were never available to the average blogger at a price like $5.

The Doors Are Already Open

The first theme released to the club is called Gossip. If you’d like to learn more about the WPDesigner Themes Club then visit the announcement page, check out the press PDF or, quite frankly, just go straight to the order page and give up the $5 for 12 themes in one year.

I wish Small Potato the best of luck with his new venture.

I’ve released a new free WordPress theme today. It’s called Green Piece and there’s a preview available for those of you interested in checking it out before downloading. Green Piece is widget ready and uses a fixed width (that’s probably wider than most) and uses some of the excellent Silk icons from famfamfam.

I’ve submitted the theme to a handful of the more popular WordPress theme sites but that process was proving to be so frustrating that I had to stop. I’ll definitely be writing about that later on this week.

This was a project that was, quite literally, months in the making for me. It was my first serious foray into outsourcing a design project from start to finish although that wasn’t the intention from the start. I’ll be writing more about the whole process later as well. It should prove to be interesting for anyone looking to outsource their extra work.

Anyway, hop on over to WordPressings and check out the new theme and, if you haven’t seen it yet, my first release Bruise.

I don’t think it’s a really big secret that the default WordPress admin is ugly. I’ve been trying to find alternates to the default interface by using plugins for awhile now. Until recently the best admin plugin I had ever found was Steve Smith’s WP Tiger. I think I’ve found one even better this week though. It’s called NiceAdmin by Douglas Karr.

NiceAdmin doesn’t totally reinvent the layout or functionality of the default admin. instead it simply cleans the look up and improves upon it. The color scheme closely resembles that of WordPress.com so it’s much, much easier on the eyes. And unlike most of the other admin plugins, NiceAdmin doesn’t rearrange everything so you can’t find the features you’re looking for.