The long awaited WordPress 3.1 was released yesterday, marking the fourteenth release of WordPress.

WordPress 3.1 includes new features such as a lightning fast redesigned linking workflow which makes it easy to link to your existing posts and pages, a new admin bar making it easier to start a new post or page, or go to your comments or upload something from wherever you are in your dashboard.

WordPress 3.1 also has a new streamlined writing interface that hides many of the seldom-used panels by default to create a simpler and less intimidating writing experience for new bloggers, clicking the Screen Option button at the top right will show you option regarding hiding and showing certain panels. There is also a new refreshed blue theme for the WordPress admin side that is available under personal options in your Profile.

The new features doesn’t just extend out to Writers, there are also a bucket load of new features added for developers like the new Post Formats support, enabling you to create TumBlog style WordPress themes easily by allowing you to apply different styles to different post formats. WordPress 3.1 also includes new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries.

WordPress is no longer just a Blogging platform anymore, but more a CMS now. You can create just about anything with WordPress nowadays, the only limit is your imagination.

Let’s be honest, you know something has gone mainstream when there is a WordPress plugin to do it, and that has exactly happened with Group Buying.

A new WordPress plugin has been developed by Group Buying Site that allows you to turn any WordPress blog into a fully fledged Groupon clone, allowing you to run your own group buy flash sales and daily deals.

Collecting money is also easy as all you need to be able to receive money from visitors is a PayPal account, but could be a bit of an obstacle specially in countries like South Africa where PayPal is not such a widely used service.

Setting up a Group Buying site sure does involve having the correct software to drive your sales, but that is only part of the business. This WordPress plugin will help you solve the first part of setting up a Group Buying site, and it won’t cost you an arm and a leg also. The Group Buying WordPress plugin is available from as little as $199 depending on the version you want, that is lest than R1500 for functionality that could cost you easily R20 000+ if you get someone to develop a Group Buying website for you.

The WordPress Group Buying plugin give you access to easily create deals allowing you to set minimum deal purchases required, max deal purchases allowed, deal expiration date/time, voucher expiration date just to mention a few features. It also integrates with Google Maps to easily allow you to add deal location, and also offer the site owner full deal statistics.

The code to the WordPress Group Buying plugin is also 100% unencrypted meaning that if you buy it you can easily make changes to the code to add certain functionality you need that isn’t built in already.

With allot of companies cashing in on the whole Group Buying concept you are now also given the power to be the next local Groupon competitor in your area, and who know maybe just maybe you could get Acquired for the odd $1 million.

Just a word of warning, having a Group Buying site is only part of the solution, without good quality deals nobody will buy from you so come prepared and negotiate to offer your visitors good deals they just can’t say no to.

If you want to start your own Group Buying site check out http://groupbuyingsite.com for the Group Buying WordPress plugin that will turn any WordPress site into a Group Buying site.

Since WordPress launched its first mobile application for the iPhone in 2008, the popular blogging platform has also released apps for Blackberry and the Android platforms. Now two years in WordPress has officially reached 1 Million users making use of their mobile applications.

With cellphones becoming the new personal computer this is not just for huge landmark for WordPress but for blogging also. The WordPress mobile apps allows you to express yourself no matter where you are, saw something worth sharing with the world just snap a picture with your phone and blog it right there and then.

To celebrate this huge milestone WordPress has released an app for one of two new platforms in its scope, WordPress for Nokia is the latest platform to get the WordPress mobile app.

You can, of course, write and edit posts and pages, manage your comments queue and keep an eye on your blog’s statistics while on the move. If a seagull just snatched your hot dog and is making a run for it, you can snap a picture of the commotion or even record a video describing how it felt and how much you’re suing for. All from within the app.

There are two version available for WordPress for Nokia, one for new Symbian^3 devices like the Nokia N8 and then another version for older phones like the X6-00, C6-00, N97, and 5800 XpressMusic.

You can grab your copy of WordPress for Nokia here or from the Nokia OVI Store.

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform on the planet, in fact it is not just popular for blogging but many developers use it for so much more than a blogging platform.

One nice thing about WordPress is the fact that there are mobile applications available for it, but up until now it was limited to Android, iPhone and Blackberry users.

A while ago I helped the guys over at RLabs set up a WordPress blog to enable the authors to blog from their mobile phones, unfortunately I had to go the email route and later on the MXit to WordPress application was born due to the fact that the authors was not holders of smartphones but mostly low end Nokia phones.

WordPress has now released the beta version of WordPress for Nokia. WordPress for Nokia allows you to post new posts and pages, edit existing content on your blog, manage comments, check stats and more on the go for your WordPress.com or self hosted WordPress 2.7 or higher blogs.

WordPress for Nokia is currently supported by S60 or Maemo powered Nokia devices and is Open Source allowing developers to be able to modify the application.

For more information or to download WordPress for Nokia head over to the OVI Store or visit the WordPress for Nokia page.

Last week I had a request for help from the guys at RLabs about blogging from mobile phones to a WordPress blog. Now I knew about the WordPress apps available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry, but the problem is these people that wanted to blog did not have access to smartphones.

I eventually helped them set up an Email to WordPress system, but then the idea came to me. Wouldn’t it be nice if these people would be able to blog from MXit. MXit supports almost any mobile phone on the market and in a country like South Africa where the only way most people are able to access the Internet is through their cellphones, this could be the cheapest way for them publish to the web for all to see.

I mentioned the idea on Twitter and then Paul Scott replied that he already has most of the basic code for this seeing as he helped developed the MXit bot RLabs uses for councelling.

Paul quickly put some code together over the weekend and that is how MXitPress was born. MXitPress makes use of the MetaWebLog API to publish posts to WordPress and Chisimba blogs through the use of the XMPP Jabber protocol.

Using MXitPress is real easy, all you need is a XMPP client like MXit or GTalk, add the jabber contact chisimba.mxitpress@gmail.com and that’s it, you are now ready to publish blog posts straight from MXit.

To make posts you will need to enable Remote Publishing on your blog at Settings > Writing and ticking XML-RPC, then you need to register your blog with the bot by issuing the register command like so: register:www.yourdomain.com /xmlrpc.php user pass replacing www.yourdomain.com with your blog url and user and pass with your username and password you use to log into WordPress.

Once you have register your blog you can go ahead and start making posts by using the following command: Blog Post Title#Blog content goes after the #

This new method for blogging from MXit opens up a whole new market to blogging, and with the new MXit API to be released on 29th of October 2010 this could make blogging in Africa accessible to just about everybody. Imaging live blogging from an event from your mobile phone, take a snap with phone of the presentation, add some text and send it straight to your blog.

Forrst is a new online community where developers and designers can share inspiring code, links and screenshots. Think of it as a social network for developers and designers out there.

Forrst is currently only available on invite and I am lucky enough to be part of this great community, checking in daily to see what interesting things like-minded peers are up to.

Forrst recently released a, lets call it API, with limited functionality where you can look up user info and posts for specific users. It got me thinking seeing as I am such a big fan of WordPress, why not have a nice widget where you can showcase your latest Forrest Post and this is where Forrst WP was born.

Forrst WP is a WordPress plugin that enables you to place a WordPress Widget on your site showing your the latest Forrst Posts for the user you specified. Forrst WP currently has limited functionality seeing that the Forrst API is very restricted at the moment only allowing you to look up posts and user information for specific users.

To use Forrst WP, simply download the file below, extract and upload it to your WordPress plugins directory. In you WordPress dashboard under the Plugins menu, activate Forrst WP and then head over to your Widgets and simply drag the Forrst Widget to where you’d like it and enter the options as desired.

Download Forrst WP v1.0

With WordPress 3.0 that got released only a few months back, the open source CMS platform is winning large amounts of developers over when it comes to choosing a CMS platform for their projects.

What makes WordPress so spectacular is the way the core functionality is coded, allowing for developer to create plugins and themes that can do just about anything without modifying any of the WordPress core functionality.

WordPress is steadily on the increase in South Africa, with a few local companies already primarily developing on the CMS

Here is a list of 10 WordPress plugins developed by South Africans:

AnyFont
AnyFont is a WordPress plugin by Ryan Peel that enables you to use any custom TrueType or OpenType font to replace standard fonts anywhere on your site.

Admin Custom Styles
Admin Custom Styles is a WordPress plugin by Nick Soper that allows you to customize the WordPress admin login screen to suite your own personal brand.

International SMS Subscription Manager
International SMS Subscription Manager is a plugin by myself that allows you to add SMS subscription and notifications to your WordPress blog through a sidebar widget.

Remind Me
Remind Me is a WordPress plugin by Christopher Mills that makes the task of deeplinking to other posts on your blog breeze by automatically finding posts related to your content and allowing you to deeplink on keyword with a simple click.

Mobile Press
Mobile Press is a WordPress plugin by Tyler Reed that turns your WordPress powered website into a full blown mobile friendly site with ad support when viewed from a mobile phone.

WP Section Index
WP Section Index is a WordPress plugin by Matty Cohen that enables you to create a widgetised table of contents for the current page or blog post, based on headings within the content.

Copy Compass
Copy Compass is a WordPress plugin by Nicholas Duncan that automatically analyses your posts or pages to SEO best practices and then giving you a score and recommendation on where you can improve the SEO.

Community Cloud
Comminity Cloud by Miguel dos Santos is a WordPress plugin that displays a “tag cloud” of all the people in your community who have contributed to your WordPress powered site by commenting. The more someone has commented, the bigger and bolder their link.

Please Link 2 Me
Please Link 2 Me is a WordPress plugin by James that adds a text box containing all the code necessary for visitors to easily create links back to your article from their website.

AStickyPostOrderER
AStickyPostOrderER by Andre S Clements is a WordPress plugin that lets you manipulate the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all on your WordPress powered site.

Maybe you have been using one of these plugins and didn’t even notice they were developed by local developers, well now you know. If you are a South African and have developed a plugin feel free to post it in the comments.

There are a few WordPress plugins on the market that can allow your blog to rank better in Search Engines by improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the latest of these SEO plugins is Copycompass, a plugin developed by South African online marketing, design and development company Talooma.

Copycompas is a WordPress SEO plugin that analyzes your post’s copywrite and then giving you a score of how well your post is written in accordance to best SEO practices.

Using Copycompass is a real breeze, once you have written your post simply click the Analyze Content button and Copycompass will analyze the content, work out a overall SEO score and then give you a detailed breakdown of where you can improve your post.

If you see your SEO score is not very good, you can simply return to editing the post following the guidelines as set out by Copycompass.

To get your hand on this great WordPress SEO Copywriting plugin, simply visit Copycompass and download the plugin for free.

When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) WordPress comes standard SEO ready, but if you are looking for that extra exposure on search engines, and lets be honest who doesn’t? Here is what I think are 5 of the best SEO plugins for WordPress that can help you get that better page rank.

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Platinum SEO Pack

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Platinum SEO Pack for WordPress is an all in one solution for managing all aspects of SEO on your WordPress blog. This is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress with features such as automatic 301 redirects for any permalink changes, Optimized Post and Page Titles for search engines, helps you avoid duplicate content and add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noodp, noydir, noarchive, nosnippet meta tags to any post/page.

Download Platinum SEO Pack

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Google XML Sitemaps

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One of the most essential tools in getting your content on search engines is this plugin, lets face it the quicker search engines know about your content and index it the better for you. Google XML Sitemaps generates a sitemap for your site and then pings major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to notify them of new content on your blog.

Download Google XML Sitemaps

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Remind Me

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Remind Me is a SEO plugin for WordPress developed by local blogger Chris M. Remind Me makes deep linking on your site a breeze by showing all relevant links related to the article you are writing and then allows you to easily link to another post with a simple click.

Download Remind Me

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PubSubHubbub

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This plugin has got a weird name, but apart from that it does a wonderful job at notifying the web that you have new content. Everything nowadays strive to be real-time, and PubSubHubbub makes your WordPress blog real-time by announcing to the web that you have new content on your blog, blog aggregators like MyScoop and Afrigator can then now when you have new content and then immediately publish it.

Download PubSubHubbub

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SEO Smart Links

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One of the ways of getting more content on your WordPress blog indexed by search engines is by deep linking to other posts on your blog. Doing this by hand can be tedious so this is where SEO Smart Links comes in. It automatically links keywords and phrases to URLs you would like it to link to.

Download SEO Smart Links

If you have any suggestions to SEO WordPress plugins you use or recommend, feel free to post them in the comments.

Okay let me start by saying if you are looking for sending free SMS messages you are looking at the wrong place. This plugin came to life due to an email I received from a friend over at WebAddiCT(s);, Rafiq Phillips.

The plugin allows users to subscribe their cellphone number via a widget (check my sidebar) and then allows the blog owner to send SMS messages to the subscribed numbers when he/she sees fit.

The plugin is called International SMS Subscription Manager and as the name says this WordPress plugin will allow you to send SMS message to over 819 cellphone networks in 221 countries and territories.

International SMS Subscription Manager for WordPress currently allows users to subscribe and unsubscribe their cellphone numbers in international format (eg. 27730000000). Once the user has subscribed, the blog owner can send SMS messages to the subscribed numbers through the WordPress dashboard.

International SMS Subscription Manager makes use of a widget, making it easy for non tech savvy blog owners to easily get it up and running on their blog.

Future features will include the ability to send SMS updates each time a new post has been made, and also an Ajaxified widget.

You can download your copy of International SMS Subscription Manager here until I get it onto the WordPress Plugin directory, this is the first release so please report bugs as you find them in the comments.