Invision has decreased in popularity in recent years, but is still one of the big contendors. Meshing it with WordPress is pretty simple and the best option I could find was InvisionBridge Wordpress-IPB Bridge (http://forums.invisionize.com/lofiversion/index.php/t125596.html) which combines the login system for each and also offers some extra options in the paid version (which is $30), including posting topics and comments on WP as threads and replies in IPB and vice versa, avatars and PM integration and a few others.

Integrate SMF and WordPress

SMF is fast growing in popularity and is a personal favorite of mine. It’s fast, reliable and does everything that phpBB does but better. It also lends itself to other software very well and so hooking it up with WordPress is a sinch.

All you need to do is download the WordPress SMF Bridge plugin (available from http://www.earthorbit.com/opensource). It installs like any other plugin and means that when users sign into your forums they’ll also sign into WordPress and vice versa. You can also set it to post treads on SMF as topics on WordPress, display your SMF stats and a few other things.

Alternatively you can try the original upon which the above version was based at http://www.dmry.net/wordpress-smf-bridge-plugin-10/

Integrate vBulletin and WordPress

vBulletin is one of the more professional forum software packages and while phpBB is usually seen on sites which get 5 visitors per day, 4 of which are the web-masters friends and family, vBulletin is seen more on serious sites where SEO and design matter.

Since vBulletin costs money to buy and use, it has an excellent team behind it and support and great functionality. To bridge vBulletin with WordPress is an extremely simple process and can be done by downloading this vBulletin plugin (Complete Wordpress/Vbulletin Bridge – Share Users And Postings – http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=134521) and following the instructions.

Integrate WordPress with phpBB

phpBB is the big daddy, the long standing heavyweight of the forum packages. This is mainly due to the fact that it was the first major open source forum solution and was free from the get go. phpBB has more plugins, mods and extensions than just about any other piece of software, and so integrating it with WordPress is again, pretty straight forward.

The best options I could find are WP-PHPBB Wordpress plugin (http://www.avalon5.com/wordpress/themes-plugins/wp-phpbb-wordpress-plugin/) which installs just like any other WordPress plugin and works well. The only requirement is that your WordPress and phpBB installations are using the same database, though if you’re handly with PHP you could probably get around this.

Alternatively there’s the more up to date WP-United (http://www.wp-united.com) which has a bigger ranger of options and attributes including login integration, giving blogs to your forum members, easy setup, theme integration and more. For all the forums, this is the best package I’ve seen out there and both the forum system and plugin are absolutely free.

While some of these options may take a little playing around with before they’re functional, most work out of the box. One problem though is that when you update WordPress to a new version, you may be left with forums that don’t work or don’t integrate. If this is a problem for you I recommend checking out The Top 4 WordPress Forums Plugins

Recently I set up and launched a newsletter system on SeanBluestone.com using PHPList. Since I already have a number of people signing up for this site every day I wanted to add a checkbox to my WordPress registration page to allow them to simultaneously sign up for my newsletter.

You can download WordPress PHPList Dual Registration here. You can also check it out a demo of it in action on my registration page.

This is great because it’s optional, while checked at first, and if it turns out they don’t enjoy the newsletters they can unsubscribe at any time. I adapted this script from Jesse Heaps PHPList Comment Subscriber plugin which does the same thing with comments and may be useful to you.

AdSense for bbPress is my first bbPress plugin and it’s currently in use on my forums (link below). I originally hard coded AdSense into my theme but this meant I needed to update it each time a new version of bbPress or whenever I changed themes. This plugin does away with that requirement and allows you to show your AdSense ads as posts in each thread of your forums. Since the ads emulate forum posts people are more inclined to look at them and hence your CTR will increase as apposed to if you simply hard coded it somewhere into your theme.

An additional benefit is that AdSense for bbPress also allows you to select a post number you wish to have your different ads displayed at. For example you could have a half banner displayed as your first post, a leaderboard displayed as your third post and a link unit as a randomly selected post.

AdSense for bbPress is live and can be downloaded here.

Please note that bbPress for AdSense is currently restricted to the two default themes that come with bbPress until I can figure out how to manipulate themes properly. However, a savvy user may be able to alter the HTML output of the plugin to comply with their own theme.

Previously the only way to get around this was to use the_content(‘..Read More”); which would enable you to display your own custom ‘read more’ link. But this still doesn’t solve the other problems, and the link is always dofollow.

I finally found a way to edit this by editing wordpress/wp-includes/formatting.php (starting at line 1312):

[sourcecode language='php']

/**
* Generates an excerpt from the content, if needed.
*
* The excerpt word amount will be 55 words and if the amount is greater than
* that, then the string ‘[...]‘ will be appended to the excerpt. If the string
* is less than 55 words, then the content will be returned as is.
*
* @since 1.5.0
*
* @param string $text The exerpt. If set to empty an excerpt is generated.
* @return string The excerpt.
*/
function wp_trim_excerpt($text) {
if ( ” == $text ) {
$text = get_the_content(”);

$text = strip_shortcodes( $text );

$text = apply_filters(‘the_content’, $text);
$text = str_replace(‘]]>’, ‘]]>’, $text);
$text = strip_tags($text);
$excerpt_length = apply_filters(‘excerpt_length’, 55);
$words = explode(‘ ‘, $text, $excerpt_length + 1);
if (count($words) > $excerpt_length) {
array_pop($words);
array_push($words, ‘[...]‘);
$text = implode(‘ ‘, $words);
}
}
return $text;
}

[/sourcecode]

Where $excerpt_length = apply_filters(‘excerpt_length’, 55); and array_push($words, ‘[...]‘); control the length and read more text respectively.

Unfortunately this meant that each time a new version of WordPress was released I’d have to edit formatting.php again. Eventually I designed a plugin which solves all of these problems and means I don’t need to play around with any files or change anything after a new release.

The Custom Excerpts plugin is plug n play and allows you to set the excerpt length and link text as well as specifying HTML tags which should be allowed and whether or not the link should be nofollow or not. I actually created the plugin for myself to save me updating files with every new release, but I figured sharing it with the world wouldn’t hurt.

You can download Custom Excerpts here.

I wanted a way to put CPALead on specific WordPress pages and posts and so I created this simple plugin to do it. With this plugin you simply create a new CPALead for each post or page you wish to protect and that’s it! It’s quick, easy, and extremely fast.

You can download the WordPress CPALead Plugin here.

Please visit the WordPress Link Directory for more.

• Specify the number of donations and/or links to show
• Specify an expiry date whereby donations older than this date will not be shown
• Offer the ability to supply a link back to their own site if the user donates more than a specified amount.

WordPress PayPal Donations Plugin uses IPN to ensure the values are correct and you can also chose to display your total donations to date. You can download the plugin here from WordPress.org.

SocialVibe is a social media tool that helps people to spread the word about charitable causes online. SocialVibe keep in touch with a variety of charities like WWF and The World Food Programme. They offer tools to help you spread the word and attract more users to their site through you, which in turn earns more money for your Cause. Your Cause can also be sponsored by an advertisement group which gives you more points. The more collective points a cause has, the more donations it is likely to receive.
See http://www.socialvibe.com/#/faq/ for more information.

What is the SocialVibe WordPress plugin?

SocialVibe WordPress plugin provides a widget and some useful options for displaying your SocialVibe cause on your site. It allows a widget for quick and easy implementation. It also supports a [socialvibe] tag with flashid and userid attributes which can be posted in any page or post and will be converted to your SocialVibe Cause when viewed.

The plugin also offers a code interpreter so you can copy the code from SocialVibe.com, paste it into the box and it will extract your flash id and user id automatically.

Installing SocialVibe WordPress plugin

Until it is approved by WordPress you can download the plugin from this location.

1. Unzip & Upload the contents to your WordPress plugins folder: /wp-content/plugins/social-vibe/
2. Activate the plugin from the Plugins menu.
3. Browse to the Design page. From here you can:
* Click and edit the Widget -> named SocialVibe widget.
* Click SocialVibe Options and paste your code into the box, then click extract, then save.

What does it look like?

[socialvibe flashid="488750" userid="382172"]

Installation

1. Extract & upload the carbon-footprint folder to your ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.
2. Activate the plugin via the Plugins menu in WordPress.
3. Navigate to Design -> Theme Editor -> Sidebar.php (or whichever page you like) and insert this code wherever you want your carbon footprint displayed:

<?php carbonfootprint_display_footprint(); ?>

Thats it! Your carbon footprint details should show up wherever you pasted the code. The sidebar is a good place because it’s on every page. You can specify the detail to print out by calling carbonfootprint_display_footprint(‘Small’); carbonfootprint_display_footprint(‘Medium’); carbonfootprint_display_footprint(‘Large’); or carbonfootprint_display_footprint(‘Extended’);

Small will display something like this:
42.4g

While Medium will display something like this:
Words: 12323 (18.9g)
Images: 2 (0.70g)
Pages: 19.6
Carbon: 0.15g

And Large will display a table like this:

How are the figures worked out?

The script searches through every post and every page on your blog, counting the total number of words and images in each post.
It then works out how many pages the text would take up assuming a standard of 794 words per page. This was worked out by taking the most widely used fonts, font sizes, the word processor being used and other print options.
It also works out how many pages the images would take up, again based on DPI, margins and other factors.
The most widely used paper is around 120gsm (grams per square meter) and standard A4 paper is 210×297mm. This means that we can approximate that there is 0.0074844g of carbon per sheet of paper which we multiply by our number of pages to give the total amount carbon saved by the blog vs it being printed out on paper.

While it is by no means fully accurate, it does give a reasonable approximation as to how much carbon your blog would take up if you printed it onto standard printer paper.

Demo & Download

This plugin is active on SeanBluestone.com and you can view it in the sidebar to the right near the bottom.
You can download the WordPress Carbon Footprint plugin here.

The WordPress Referrers plugin is a fully automated, self running referral tracking script.
You set it up once and just let it run, the list is automatically cut after x days, you can block any domains from being included, includes spam protection and other features.

Features:
- Automated and self running
- URLs are kept for x days
- List is constantly updated
- Show x referrers on any of your pages
- View all referrers option
- Block urls from the list
- Show the referrers x per row
- Change an outgoing URL to a special URL (such as a top list referral id)
- Pick titles for your referrers instead of using the domain name
- Tracks hits in and hits out

Demo & Download

This plugin is active on SeanBluestone.com (simply look at the bottom of the sidebar on the right hand side).

The plugin is available for download at WordPress from this page.

Installation

1. Extract & upload the topref folder to your ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.
2. Activate the plugin via the Plugins menu in WordPress.
3. Navigate to Design -> Theme Editor -> Sidebar.php (or whichever page you like) and insert this code wherever you want your top referrers displayed:

4. Click Update to save your Sidebar.

Thats it! Your referrers should show up wherever you pasted the code. The sidebar is the best place because it’s on every page. However, if you wish to log referrals on every page but only display them on one specific page then put <?php topref_log_refs(); ?> in your Sidebar.php and <?php topref_display_refs(); ?> on your chosen page. <?php topref_log_refs(); ?> must be included on every page you want to collect referrals on.

By default the WordPress Referrers plugin displays the top X referring sites. You can display the last X referrals instead by calling like this: <?php topref_display_refs(‘Last’); ?>.