Just wanted to let everyone know about WinningWP and some of the great tips, tricks, and resources that they’ve been sharing for the past year. Definitely worth checking out if you’re into WordPress and that sort of thing :)

Congrats go to Susi Schuele, Anmol Makkar, and Hardee Asrani for winning free copies of the PDF and full accounts at DigWP.com — your books are on the way! :)

After months of development, the premium version of my free User Submitted Posts plugin is finally available. It’s got hundreds of features and makes it easy to create unlimited front-end forms. Create customized forms for front-end post-submission, user-registration, contact forms, forum topics, and even art-directed content. On one site, I use USP Pro to replace FIVE other plugins. Learn more at Plugin Planet.

Search and filter through thousands of WP themes, both free and premium. If you’re in the market for a new theme, this free tool at wpbyexample.com could be a huge time-saver.

Congratulations to our five lucky contest winners! Mike, Shea Bunge, Konstantinos Kouratoras, Stephanie Stiavetti, and Gretchen Louise will each receive a free copy of Digging Into WordPress plus all bonus material, exclusive themes, and lifetime updates. Thank you to everyone who participated!

Ever wonder how WP compares against the competition? Check out this infographic/chart comparing eight of the top blogging platforms, including details about features such as plugins, themes, hosting, user-friendliness and more. Spoiler alert: WordPress wins :)

I found this infographic from WPtemplate.com very useful while writing my latest book. The infographic rounds up a collection of popular premium themes along with their various features and informations. Very interesting to see what’s popular in the premium WP theme market. Update: 404 link removed.

Quick link: Check out GenerateWP.com to automatically generate code for custom taxonomies, post types, the config file, and other useful bits of WordPress functionality. Very user-friendly interface with squeaky clean code output :)

To celebrate the Spring season, we’re holding a Spring Sale on Print & PDF copies of Digging into WordPress! Save $15 on the Print version (includes free PDF) and $7 on the PDF version. Both versions include all extras, exclusive themes, and lifetime updates. Sweet bundled deals also available for Digging into WordPress and .htaccess made easy when purchased together. Contact us for details!

Thanks to Devesh over at WPKube for putting together this super-useful list of resources for those first getting into WordPress. From books to blogs and blogs to themes and plugins, you’ll find plenty of awesome WP resources. Check it out!

Congratulations to the three lucky winners of our recent WebHostingBuzz Giveaway! John David Hunt, Rodney Weis, and Ji each will receive an entire year of free hosting at WebHostingBuzz. Thank you to everyone who participated!

There are two main routes for detecting browser identity: client-side or server-side. You can do feature-detection for client-side detection, or use PHP and the user-agent server-variable for server-side detection. That said, if you’re using WordPress, this plugin makes server-side detection SO easy.

If you’re looking for an alternative to MAMP/LAMP/WAMP/etc., check out BitNami’s WordPress Stack. It’s basically a free, pre-configured version of WordPress that includes all of the required software (Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.). WordPress is just one of the many BitNami Stacks that make it easier to deploy your favorite open source software. Also available in the Mac App Store.

Interesting and useful infographic showing the top 30 WordPress plugins available from the WP Plugin Directory, which amazingly contains over 22,000 plugins! (Probably over 30,000 by the time you read this). Update: 404 link removed.