Smitten Kitchen

Iowa Girl Eats

Dinner: A Love Story

Tasty Kitchen

La Tartine Gourmande

The Naptime Chef

Whipped

Dinner With Julie

Picky Palate

Cookin’ Canuck

Not Without Salt

One Hungry Mama

Cheeky Kitchen

Nourished Kitchen

Baked Bree

Big Red Kitchen

For the Love of Cooking

Devil and Egg

Mommy Hates Cooking

Kayotic Kitchen

Elana’s Pantry

Goodlife Eats

Piece of Cake

La Fuji Mama

Food For My Family

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Greatist

Tara Stiles

Tony Gentilcore

Sodium Girl

Time Healthland

Fit Bottomed Girls

Well + Good NYC

Kath Eats Real Food

Run Eat Repeat

Lululemon Blog

Daily Cup of Yoga

Just Roni

Blogilates

Nerd Fitness

Men’s Health News

Thrive Personal Fitness

The If Life

Zen to Fitness

Elephant Journal

Crude Fitness

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Green Wedding Shoes

Kiss the Groom

Style Me Pretty

Whimsical Wonderland Weddings

Bridesmaid

Polka Dot Bride

Ruffled

Brooklyn Bride

Once Wed

A Practical Wedding

The Sweetest Occasion

Grey Likes Weddings

Wedding Chicks

The Knotty Bride

One Fab Day

Borrowed and Bleu

Rock My Wedding

Every Last Detail

Wedding Wire Blog

Rock N’ Roll Bride

Sarah Gooding on Google+

You should of course visit Lorelle’s in-depth post for the full lowdown, but below is my own personal selection of the most fascinating numbers that she published.

WordPress and the World

25%

The estimated percentage of all websites that run on WordPress as of 2011.

14.7%

The percentage of the top million websites worldwide representing small, medium and big business that run on WordPress.

72.4 million

The number of websites that host a WordPress blog (including both WordPress.com and self-hosted).

50/50

The rough split between WordPress.com and self-hosted websites.

22%

The percentage of active domains created in the USA that run on WordPress.

Versions

98

The number of WordPress version releases since its inception.

12,836,225

The number of times that WordPress 3.3 has been downloaded (this is an increase of more than 600,000 since Lorelle’s post was published on 29th March).

2 days

The time it took for WordPress 3.3 to reach 1 million downloads after its launch.

65 million

The number of times that WordPress has been downloaded since the release of version 3 in June 2010.

WordPress.com

32 million

The estimated number of sites that run on WordPress.com’s single installation of WordPress MultiSite.

225,000

The number of theme switches on WordPress.com sites every week.

352 million

The number of people who view over 2.5 million pages on WordPress.com every month.

500,000

The number of new posts that are published on WordPress.com every day.

120

The number of different languages that WordPress.com sites are published in.

826,000+

The number of YouTube videos that were hosted on WordPress.com sites in March.

Working with WordPress

$30 Million

The estimated value of WordPress-related projects in 2012

200%

The anticipated growth of WordPress-related projects over the next 2 years.

90,000

The number of WordPress developers listed on freelancer.com alone.

$50

The median hourly rate of a WordPress project.

$45,000

The average salary for a WordPress “job”.

Next Up – World Domination

There you have it folks – WordPress truly is a force to be reckoned with, and its growth shows no sign of slowing down.

All credit goes to Lorelle for curating the above statistics – if you found this post interesting, you will find hers fascinating. Check it out here.

Tom Ewer on Google+

Foreign Policy Blogs

Wonkette

Greatawire

Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

Real Clear Politics Blog

Number10.gov.uk

National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC)

Animal Politico

Macleans.ca Blog Central

CNN Political Ticker

Eric Cantor

Reuters Blogs

Republican Governors Association

Crikey Blogs

Swampland

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Love This Tune

Love This Tune is a community for people who love music videos. At this site users can watch thousands of music videos online for free.

PlaceboEffect

This is a community for chocolate lovers. Their mission is to provide the information, inspiration, and products necessary for healthy, natural healing.

iPhone Blogger Community and Social Network

The iPhone social network is a community of people who share common interests and connect to other iPhone bloggers. Users can create profiles, groups, forums and exchange messages.

Little Sketchers

Little Sketchers is a place to document and share the art and ideas of children. Parents can join the community to create a studio for their children to explore the power of doodling, the power of visual note taking and discover a new way of learning.

PressCrew

PressCrew is the home of the Infinity Anti-Framework, a WordPress theme to free you from frameworks. The community areas are a great place to learn, discuss and contribute to the project.

HisNetworks

This is a Christian social network for expanding awareness and build support for ministries. It allows users to create a new network and start promoting ministries to their friends as well as others in the community who may be interested in getting involved.

Down Syndrome

Downsyndrome.com brings people together to help their communities be more informed and accommodating. It’s a site where users can make friends and share stories and information.

Beer Credits

Beer Credits is a social networking site dedicated to beer enthusiasts. Users can create, post, and read reviews of crafted beers.

Grow Academy

Grow Academy is a community dedicated to strengthening digital minds and preparing future web workers through boot camps led by an industry expert. Students have the opportunity to practice their skills on the internet under guidance.

Energy and Environmental Industries Forum

The Energy and Environmental Industries Forum is a community which helps businesses and individuals in the energy and environmental sector to meet, connect, trade and grow.

Coming of Age Now

I have to say this is one of my all-time favorite BuddyPress communities – I’ve read every story on the site. It’s an interactive way to explore Holocaust history through the stories of survivors.

Hip90 Fitness TV

Hip90 is a virtual fitness community for people who speak German. Users can participate in sessions with dynamic fitness videos such as body shaping, Pilates, Latin Dance and Fight Club, stretching and more every week.

Looking for more BuddyPress inspiration? Check out some of our other showcases:

• BuddyPress Showcase: 17 New Niche Social Networks
• 13 Fantastically Creative BuddyPress Site Designs
• BuddyPress Showcase: 11 Brilliant New Social Networks
• BuddyPress Showcase Site BP Inspire Gets an Awesome Redesign
• BuddyPress Showcase: 12 New Stellar Customizations

Sarah Gooding on Google+

We've struck website management gold.

I am pretty excited to be talking about this tool today, as it is one I use on a daily basis. One that has made the management and expansion of my WordPress portfolio dramatically easier, by saving me literally hours every single month.

It is a tool that we first covered back in March 2011, and it has come on leaps and bounds in terms of functionality since then. In fact, it has just enjoyed its official launch.

For those of you who haven’t guessed what it is yet, or have been hiding under a rock for the past year or so, I am talking about ManageWP.

Welcome To The Revolution, Baby

ManageWP comes with more handy features than you could shake a stick at, but the one that really sets the bar is one-click login. ManageWP allows you to access every single one of your WordPress sites from a single location. That’s all of your Dashboards from one place. No logging in and out and fiddling about.

When you login to ManageWP, you will see a list of your websites in the Navigation Bar:

Just click on a site, and its Dashboard will appear in front of you:

The above is a screenshot from my blog’s Dashboard. As you can see, I am free to manage my site as if I had logged into the Dashboard at source.

Switching between different Dashboards is just a case of clicking “< Dashboard” at the top of the screen and selecting another of your sites.

One-Click Upgrade

If you have more than two or three WordPress sites, upgrading the source code, themes and plugins is a chore. And if you have a larger portfolio, it becomes an absolute nightmare.

But the nightmares aren’t necessary. ManageWP allows you to upgrade all source codes, themes and plugins – from the same place.

This feature makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

The above screenshot isn’t a great example of the functionality of this feature (as I had only recently carried out a one-click upgrade), but ManageWP lists all available updates from your centralized Dashboard and allows you to upgrade everything with the click of a button. Not only that, as you can see, it does the same for post revisions, database overhead, and spam comments. In essence, you can handle the ongoing management and optimization of all your WordPress sites from one place.

You can probably imagine how much time this could save you, but just in case you’re not seeing it, imagine this. You have a portfolio of 10 WordPress sites, and you have a particular plugin installed on every single one. That plugin needs to be updated. Traditionally, you would have to log in and out of every single Dashboard and update each iteration of the plugin manually. It would probably take 7-10 minutes. With ManageWP, you can achieve the same thing with one click, in about 30 seconds.

And that’s just one of ManageWP’s many features. Forgive me for getting a bit excitable and geeky about a piece of software, but it has quickly become my favorite time-saving tool. Like, ever.

This kid just found out about ManageWP.

Cloning

I could go on all day about the multitude of features that ManageWP has to offer, but I’m sure you have other things to be doing than reading this article all day (like setting up your ManageWP account). So, I’ll mention just one more – site cloning.

If you’re anything like me, when it comes to WordPress sites you have a “base setup”. I have a preferred theme and several plugins that I like to install as standard. Furthermore, there are certain settings within WordPress that are always the same.

In the past, you would have to manually set up a WordPress site on every occasion you come to build one. But with ManageWP, you can set up a “template site” and simply clone that onto every single new project you begin. I would estimate that this saves me about 30 minutes every time I do it. Check this video out to see how easily it is done:

Now if you don’t find that plain sexy, I don’t know what does stir your loins.

But That’s Not All

Not even close actually. There are 101 more features I could cover, but I don’t need to. Why? Because ManageWP offers a free 14 day trial, during which you can add up to 10 websites. That is enough time to quickly realize how indispensable the tool is. So head over to ManageWP and give it a go!

For those of you who are already ManageWP users, what are your thoughts on the tool? Is there further functionality that you would like to see added in the future?

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Tator1982 and Rudoni Productions

Tom Ewer on Google+

Answer Garden

Answer Garden is a minimalistic feedback tool that you can embed in your blog or website. You can use it for feedback, brainstorming or even for creating a simple poll. You can choose whether to allow your visitors to only submit one answer (like I have below – useful for polls) or submit unlimited answers (useful for brainstorming).

What is your favourite embeddable web tool?… at AnswerGarden.ch.

Xtranormal

Xtranormal lets you create fun movies that you can upload to Youtube and embed in your site. You can sign up for an account for free or you can grab a Pro account. You can embed straight from Xtranormal or you can publish to Youtube and embed from there. The free account is fairly limited but it’s still possible to make a cool video, like this one I made just for you (includes swearing!):

The Trials of a WordPress Plugin Developer
by: spmckeown

Wallwisher

Wallwisher is a fun tool for brainstorming, making announcements, taking notes and asking for opinions. It’s really easy to get started with and embed in your blog or website.

ToonDoo

ToonDoo is a fun tool for making cartoons for your website or blog. If you’re like me then you have absolutely no talent when it comes to drawing. Long-term readers of wpmu.org will remember some of my crappy cartoons. Below is a cartoon I made of an actual exchange that happened between my husband and I.

360 Cities

You may have encountered 360 cities before – recently the images have been used on Google Maps. A free 360 cities lets you embed images in your personal blog – if you want to use them for commercial purposes you’ll have to upgrade to a Pro account. Here’s a 360 cities image of the Cathedral near my house.

Canterbury Cathedral, interior, door to Choir in England

Dipity

Dipity is a fun tool for making timelines. You can set the up yourself and then invite people to contribute to them. As well as having a standard timeline like the one below you can create flipbooks, lists and maps. I’ve made a WordPress timeline with all of the WordPress releases. Feel free to add any WordPress events that you want to it!

PhotoPeach

PhotoPeach is a useful tool for making slideshows. You can easily embed captions in them, and add quizzes. Below is one of the popular slideshows made on PhotoPeach.

Kwout

You can use Kwout for quoting websites. Just install the addon and then you can grab areas of websites and embed them in your blog. What makes Kwout so useful is that it creates an image map of the area you have taken the screengrab from. Check out the image below from our G+ account. If you roll your mouse over the image you can click on any of the links. It even works on video!

WPMU.org – Google via kwout

Voki

You can use Voki to add a talking avatar to your website. The one I’ve created below is pretty basic but there are all sorts of different ways you can put Voki to use. If you want tips on how to set it up you can check out this post on Edublogs.

I wanted to find plugins that will ACTUALLY increase your productivity. There are some tasks in WordPress that take time and that could be sped up. I want to tell you about plugins that solve a problem and make your WordPress life easier. I’ve found 10. Here they are.

EG Attachments

The Problem

You’ve got a whole list of files that you want to display on a page. Normally you’d have to upload the file, type the link out and insert the link. Recently I’ve been working on a site with a large amount of content that has exactly this problem.

The Plugin

EG Attachments is such a handy plugin for solving this problem. All you have to do is upload the files you want to display to the page you want to display them on. Then you can add a shortcode which will insert a list of files for you. And it even displays them in a pretty attractive way. You can show the file type icon, filter the files however you want and even tweak to add Nofollow. It’s a really simple plugin which solves an annoying problem in an elegant way.

Markdown Quicktags

The Problem

You write a lot of your posts and pages in HTML. All that HTML means a whole lot of extra keystrokes, and a whole lot of room for error.

The Plugin

Markdown Quicktags turns your HTML editor into a Markdown editor. Markdown is a lightweight markup language developed by John Gruber and Aaron Schwartz. It simplifies your markup process by letting you write in plain text format which is converted into valid HTML. Okay, so to get to grips with this you also need to learn Markdown but it’s probably the easiest programming language you could find. # produces a <h1> tag, ## a <h2> tag, **to make bold**,  for images… you get the idea. You can check out the syntax here. 

Search and Replace

The Problem

You want to replace a word or a piece of code or a string somewhere in your WordPress installation. You’re all prepared to start doing it manually even though you know it will take hours.

The Plugin

Search and Replace is a plugin from Frank Bültge of WP Engineer (you know, those guys who always have awesome technical tips). It’s a simple search plugin which searches your database for a string and then replaces it with whatever you want. You can search in ID, post-content, GUID, titel, excerpt, meta-data, comments, comment-author, comment-e-mail, comment-url, tags/categories and categories-description. It’s a great time saver that makes your database searchable in an instant.

Broken Link Checker

The Problem

You’ve got broken links, you know you’ve got them, they’re somewhere, lurking inside your WordPress website. You know it’s time to clean them up but you just cannot be bothered.

 The Plugin

Broken Link Checker looks for broken links. A friend of mine works at a well known English University. They have their own in-house CMS and she used to spend hours checking the website for broken links. With WordPress and a plugin like this you can avoid all of that tedium, leaving more time for you to do whatever it is that you do. The Broken Link Checker plugin searches for broken links and then tells you where they are, leaving you to be able to sort them quickly and efficiently.

WP-Smush.it

The Problem

You use a lot of images on your posts and pages, which means that you’ve got to spend a lot of time resizing images to optimize them for your website. Even if you use Photoshop’s batch automation this can still be annoying.

The Plugin

WP-Smush.it runs every image that you upload through Yahoo’s Smush.it service. It strips meta-data from JPEGs, optimizes JPEG compression, converting some GIFs to PNG and stripping unused colors from indexed images. This can be a real time saver if you have an image-heavy blog. The only caveat that comes with it is that you should make sure that you are comfortable with Yahoo’s TOS which gives Yahoo and its affiliates rights to use your images. I’m not 100% comfortable with it, which is why I don’t use it, but you might not care in which case it’s a great plugin.

Network Switch Button

The Problem

You’re a network admin on a WordPress Multisite installation and you’re a little bit frustrated that ever since WordPress 3.1 your network admin button has been hidden in a dropdown menu.

The Plugin

Sometimes an extra click isn’t a big deal, but there are time that an extra click can be a massive annoyance. If you’re a network admin on a big WordPress Multisite network you’re going to be hopping back and forward between screens all the time. That’s when that extra click wastes you time. We encountered the problem at Edublogs when the guys in charge there found that the new dropdown got in their way. That’s why we developed the network switch plugin. It’s a simple plugin but it saves you quite a bit of time.

Syntax Highlighter Evolved

The Problem

You put some HTML in <code> tags and it gets all screwed up when you publish it. One of the most super-annoying things about WordPress.

The Plugin

The Syntax Highligher Evolved Plugin might not be an obvious choice for a list of productivity plugins, but I’ve got my reasons. I have spent a long time getting frustrated because my code won’t display properly. Using a plugin like this saves a lot of annoyance and a lot of time. Last week I was ranting on Twitter about getting HTML to display properly but this plugin solved my problems. That left me to get back to the job in hand, the problem solved and completely forgotten.

Faster Image Insert

The Problem

You have 30+ images to insert into a post and there’s nothing that you hate more than loading that thickbox. It makes life so slloooowww.

The Plugin

Faster Image Insert gets rid of your reliance on the media uploader thickbox and inserts the uploader into a meta box beneath your text input area. It also gives you more control over your images themselves. You can mass edit them, adding titles, alt text and other information, and insert more than one image at once. It’s not a perfect solution to dealing with posts with a lot of images, but it’s certainly a big improvement.

CMS Page Tree View

The Problem

You’ve got loads of pages and clicking through them all of the time is getting you down. You want a quick and easy way to access your pages.

The Plugin

CMS Page Tree View takes all of your pages and displays them in an attractive tree view – much like you’d see in a traditional CMS. If you’re using a lot of posts, pages and custom post types a plugin like this is a must. And it’s not just about browsing your pages – you can drag and drop your pages to re-order them, view pages, edit pages and delete pages. It’s a great time saver for content heavy websites.

Scripts n Styles

The Problem

You’ve got CSS or  scripts that you want to add to various pages but you don’t want to put it in your theme functions  or style.css.

The Plugin

The Scripts n Styles plugin lets you add scripts and styles to WordPress posts and pages. You can add global pieces of code on the settings page or each individual page can have its own piece of code attached to it. The plugin only gives permission to admin users to insert pieces of code. CSS is inserted in your <head> tags, and you can choose whether to insert your scripts in the <head> tags or in the <body> tags. If you’ve got a script or a piece of CSS that you just want to attach to one page this is a great way to do it.

What plugins help to keep you productive? Is there anything that I’ve missed out?

Paper

Demo | Download

Silver

Demo | Download

Hum

Demo | Download

NomNom

Download

Colors

Download

Blue Splatter

Download

Twenty Eleven with Sidebar in Posts

Demo | Download

(header image CC license KayaL)