If you’re a WordPress theme developer or flash developer, then you’ll most probably like what I’m gonna share today. Most WordPress themes we see around the web are made with HTML/CSS. Flash-based WordPress themes are rare because it takes a lot more time and effort to make them. With SWFPress, WordPress theme developers and flash developers can now easily create flash-based WordPress themes.

What is SWFPress?

SWFPress is a framework that allows flash developers to very easily create flash-wordpress themes. The themes behave in the same manner as normal html wordpress themes, you upload the theme zip to the wordpress themes page, and activate… done!

How do you use/install SWFPress? The SWFPress package is basically a “blank flash WordPress theme“. After you download it, all you need to do to integrate the XML flash theme into SWFPress is copy over all template files, edit a config.php file and create the XML files. SWFPress takes care of the rest – admin pages, content and storage.

Screenshot:

How does it work?

SWFPress generates XML files for the flash theme using the information that the buyer puts into his / her settings, and the content of the blog. As XML files are generated, and are configured to the exact format that the flash theme uses, in most cases, flash will not have to be opened once for you to create a SWFPress theme from an existing flash XML theme. The one thing that your theme has to be able to do is read the location of the MAIN xml file from flashvars that will be dynamicaly created from swfpress, but a lot of themes already support parsing the location of the main xml file via flashvars, and for themes that don’t offer this, it takes only minutes to implement this in your theme.

SWFPress generates a tailored options page for your theme that can be accessed under the appearance menu, the options page includes a system for the user to setup their menu structure, and to change all the settings that you have made avaliable for your theme.

How easy is it to implement?

And for the author? … well the work is very easy… you only have to put your flash files in the dedicated content folder, edit a config.php file and create the xml.php files. SWFPress is designed to allow you to have complete control of the formatting of the xml files, this is so that already existing flash xml themes / website templates can be very easily adapted for use with the SWFPress framework and quickly distributed as WordPress-Flash themes.

SWFPress can be used FREE of charge for commercial and/or non-commercial web sites, themes, services, software, etc. as long as the end users are not charged a fee of any kind to use your site/product/service or gain access to any part of it. Otherwise, you’re required to purchase a Corporate Membership. Full licensing details here and membership details here.

To learn more about SWFPress and read a more comprehensive guide, check out the Screenshots & Features page. You can also try out the SWFPress Demo.

What do you think of SWFPress? Anyone here tried creating a flash-based WordPress theme using SWFPress? Please share your thoughts.

Many people like myself don’t completely trust the various WordPress spam filters and elect to moderate all comments before they show up on the actual site, which ends up flooding your email with moderation notices.

In my quest to keep a clean inbox, I’ve created a small application that notifies me directly on my desktop when new comments come in to the moderation queue. It accesses the WordPress XML-RPC API by means of a small WordPress plugin that I’ve created.

Screenshots:

Installation:

Unzip WordPressNotify_0.1.zip and place it in any folder/directory you want. The zip file contains several files so make sure you have all files in one place. If you want the WordPress Comment Notifier to run on startup, you’ll have to create a shortcut in the startup folder.

Once you have the files in place, just launch the application by double clicking on WordPress_Notify.exe. After which you’ll see the WordPress Comment Notifier icon at the system tray. Right click on the icon and click on Preferences to add your username and password. You can also specify how often the plugin should check for new comments.

NOTE: Make sure you upload the geek-wp-notifier.php file into your wp-content/plugins folder for the WordPress Comment Notifier to work.

System Requirements:

.NET 2.0 Framework

Btw, passwords used by the WordPress Comment Notifier are encrypted and stored in the xml file. However, this doesn’t make it 100% secure so install this plugin at your own risk. The plugin author doesn’t take responsibility for anything that could happen because of this issue. This app is based on the Google Reader Notifier application.

My Take:
I like the idea and purpose of this plugin plus installation and configuration was a no-brainer. It took me a couple minutes to install and configure everything and make the thing work. However, I don’t have the need for this application because I have Mozilla Thunderbird running all the time where I get notifications of new emails including comments awaiting moderation. But still, the WordPress Comment Notifier is a cool app and I’m sure many WordPress users would find it helpful and useful. Hats off to How-To Geek for coming up with this idea. I give the WordPress Comment Notifier a 4.5 out of 5.

Download the WordPress Comment Notifier plugin.