A couple days back, Weblog Tools Collection announced the start of the WordPress Plugin Competition 2009. For the third straight year, the folks over at Weblog Tools Collection is organizing a competition that aims to generate interest in WordPress and also the development of new plugins that can help WordPress users and contribute to the WordPress community.

Contest Rules and Important Details:

• All code must be GPL compatible
• All Plugins must be compatible with WordPress 2.7 and above
• All Plugins have to be secure and use secure coding methods. This is very important.
• Plugins must be made available through the WordPress Extend pages
• Plugins must be officially submitted through email and announced and discussed on the Plugin Competition Blog. More details on submissions will be added in the last month of the competition. Release of plugin after competition start does not mean submission. You can submit your plugin way after its release to work out bugs etc.
• Running time for competition = 3 months starting the 1st of May till the 31st of July
• True WordPress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users. No editing of core files allowed.
• You cannot submit plugins that have been released already. Modification or re-use of existing code to achieve completely new functionality allowed.
• All plugins require documentation as in the WordPress Extend pages.
• Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.
• Any and all prizes/controversies/issues will be judged and decided at my sole discretion.
• Past winners are not eligible for this competition.

Prizes from last year’s competition:

1. Weblog Tools Collection $1000 (p)
2. Automattic $1000
3. Matt Mullenweg $1000
4. James and Andrew from Incsub have offered up $250 for a plugin that is WPMU compatible. They add that WPMU plugins are not that dissimilar to regular plugins, but need to run automatically and efficiently via wp-content/mu-plugins and require users to make no hard code changes (just edits in Settings) and for global administration to be possible via the Site Admin menu.
5. Geof F. Morris $100
   
6. WindowsObserver.com Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas for the PC and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
7. OIOPublisher Four copies of their advertising plugin
8. billyboylindien.com has donated $50 towards prizes (p)
9. Blogalized has donated a 12 month blogclub subscription from our site worth $49.95
10. John Yunker has donated a copy of “Country Codes of the World” poster to the plugin contest winner (value: $30)
11. Clickfire.com has dontated $50 towards the competition prizes (p)
12. Kym Huynh is a songwriter and is writing a song about WordPress (just for fun I have been told) and has offered to write a song and record it professionally in a studio for the winner of the WordPress Plugin Compeitition (worth $400-$500)
13. IndieLab has donated $50 towards the competition (p)
14. Joshua has donated $200 towards the competition (p)
15. iWeb has donated a dedicated server for one year (Intel Core 2 Duo, HD 160GB Sata2, 1GB of RAM and 1500GB of bandwidth per month)

The 2009 WordPress Plugin Competition will last for 3 months, starting on May 1st until July 31st. Other additional notes include: Developers can only submit plugins that have been written/created for this competition and have not been previously released to the public before the start of this competition.

For those of you who have the skills to develop WordPress plugins, why don’t you give it a try and join the competition? Who knows, your idea/plugin might be the next winner or one of the finalists. Or if you’d like to help, you can also donate some money to the competition prizes.

Pinoy Blogosphere

• Attention all bloggers in Cebu, there will be a Bloggers Meetup this coming February 7, 6:00 pm at the iBrowse Internet Cafe near Cebu Doctor’s University. For more information, check out Max Limpag’s post. I’m sure McBilly is already excited about it.
• My friend Jhay Rocas shares how he backs up his blog’s database automatically using the WordPress Database Backup Plugin.
• Studies show that Internet users are starting to get more and more ad-blind. If you’re making money online via clickthroughs and are worried about this issue, Manuel Viloria explains how you can come up with an alternative source of income using only your blog.
• Andrew Dela Serna talks about the recent rumors of Google setting up a data center in Malaysia and points out some reasons why the Philippines should be or shouldn’t be considered.

Around the Web

• Are trackbacks still useful? Weblog Tools Collection asks it’s readers this question. If you ask me, I believe that it is still useful inspite of the growing number of spam trackbacks in recent years. I love getting trackbacks! Also, with trackbacks I can know who are linking to my posts and find out if people actually like my posts.
• Too many blog categories occupying too much space on your blog? Solution: drop down menu. Anthology of Ideas has this cool tutorial on how to display blog categories in a drop down menu.
• Learn how to combine featured posts with the standard loop with this excellent tutorial by Darren Hoyt author of the Mimbo 2.0 WordPress theme.
• I’ve always wanted a quick and easy way to take screenshots in Windows like I used to do in Ubuntu. Thanks to Daily Blog Tips, I found out about two Firefox extensions that lets you take screenshots with the latest version of Firefox.

Before I forget, join Pinoy United‘s online raffle for a chance to win $250. To join the raffle or find out more about the mechanics, visit this page.

On another note, I’d like to thank Blogging Mix for the 1,500 Entrecard credits and blog review that I won in his recently concluded Entrecard contest. I’m still deciding whether I should use it to advertise on popular blogs or should I give it away as a prize. What do you think?