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.

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.